1979

by Ray Robertson

  The thought of my dad and my own orange hockey ball in the garage alongside my sticks and net suddenly made me feel lonely and then, for the first time, scared. It was when I decided to give up and go back that I realized I was lost. From that point on I can’t recall much. Yelling as loud as I could for help, somebody help me, I’m down here, down in the sewer, somebody help. Looking for a light above that could be around every corner but never was. Hearing something—hearing someone else!—then realizing it was only myself, softly sobbing. Noticing I had the hockey ball clamped tight in one of my hands and it being very important that I not let go. I nearly tripped on a cement block and decided to sit down and lean against the cold, slimy wall, staying in one place for a moment maybe a better way to get my bearings. I’d been down there for probably no more than a couple of hours, but it felt as if I’d been walking through the dark forever.

  I didn’t decide to pray. I’d never prayed before in my life. I didn’t put my hands together or kneel or bow my head or clear my mind of anything except God or whatever else you were supposed to do when you prayed. After sloshing through the water a few feet that way and getting scared and coming back to my cement block, then walking a few feet the other way and getting scared and coming back to my cement block, I started to cry—not gentle sobbing this time, but full-on tears and a snotty, runny nose—and I heard myself talking to God. It was easier than I thought it would be. It was like speaking on the phone to a friend who didn’t answer back but who you knew was listening.

  “Dear God. I’m sorry I came down here. I know I shouldn’t have. I wanted my ball that Mom gave me but I know I shouldn’t have come down here, I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, God, help me get back. I’ll never come down here again. I promise I’ll never go anywhere I know I’m not supposed to go anymore. I promise. Please help me find my way back even though I know I don’t deserve it, God. I just want things to be like they were before. I know I don’t deserve it, but please let things be like they were before.”

  Maybe I said more, maybe it was less, I might have said it differently, but that’s what I said when I spoke to God. The next thing I remember was being found.

  Mother of Two Is Saved, Didn’t Walk Away from Her Children

  “I Walked Toward the Light”

  TREES CAN BE dead and still stand for years. Trees don’t realize it when they’re dead, though. Lucky trees. People have been blessed with consciousness, so know when they’re alive as well as when they’re not. Unlucky people.

  She was born there, her parents were them, she grew up wanting to be, and none of it counted for much because her real life began when she was returning from the grocery store with two screaming children in the back seat of the station wagon and she wondered if she’d remembered to buy ketchup and mustard—they’d been on her list for weeks now, but every time she went shopping she somehow managed to forget them—and realized that if, when they got home, she hadn’t, she’d burn down the house with all of them in it.

  She put the groceries away (she’d remembered the ketchup and mustard after all), made the children lunch, let them watch TV even though it was a warm, cloudless day and ordinarily she would have sent them outside to play and went into the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the edge of the tub and, first, screamed, then cried into a towel. Why now? All she knew was that it was suddenly very clear that her entire life she’d been jaywalking in rush hour with the sun in her eyes. She did the lunch dishes and put a load of laundry in the wash and sat at the kitchen table and wrote out a new, non-grocery store list. Among other things, she needed to pick up food for Julie’s goldfish.

  Why Cornerstone? Why Pastor Bob? Because. Because because because. Better than a brain rush of good uncut speed, better than a toe-cramping orgasm, to everything—finally—there is an answer. The Answer. She felt as if the world and her place in it finally made sense. She felt as if for the first time in her life she could breathe.

  But even the blessed are bothered; they don’t call this world a vale of tears for nothing. How could she not want her husband and her children—her children!—to be saved as well? What kind of mother would she be if she didn’t do everything in her power to open their eyes and their hearts and their souls? Isn’t an eternity of bliss worth a little understandable confusion and a few tears now?

  Apparently not—at least according to their father. Their biological father. As Pastor Bob said, “No amount of praying and preaching can soften a hardened heart intent upon denying what it wants and needs.” The best she could do was keep the children in her own heart and her prayers and know that there’s a reason for everything. Everything. Because.

  ~

  When the firemen rescued me—a policeman in the search party finally spotted the opened manhole cover—I’d been underground the rest of that day and most of the night, the sewer gas eventually rendering me unconscious. The rotten-egg smell, the firemen told my dad, was hydrogen sulfide gas, which is produced by the breakdown of waste materials. Even though they said there was a high enough concentration of gas in the section of the sewer where I ended up to be fatal—high enough that it should have been fatal—there I was, lying on a stretcher and breathing pure oxygen through a mask yet undoubtedly alive. My eyes were itchy and I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach and there was concern about respiratory damage, but other than a few nightmares and a cough that lasted several weeks, I was fine. The firemen, the ambulance attendants, the front-page newspaper story, the reports on the radio—everybody—said it was miracle. Said that, since I was supposed to be dead, I must have come back to life. It didn’t feel like a miracle to me, but that didn’t matter, that’s what everyone else decided it was.

  When the firemen brought me to the surface it was nighttime, but the flashing coloured lights of the fire engine and the ambulance and the police cars were like liquid firecrackers exploding across the dark sky. I remember being put on a stretcher and my father holding my hand while the medics wheeled me to the ambulance. Along the way, somewhere on our crowded front yard—half the neighbourhod seemed to be there, along with a reporter from the Chatham Daily News and someone from the local radio station—I heard the voice of my mother say several times in a loud voice that it was a miracle, praise the Lord, God had mercifully given me back, I was blessed.

  “Stupid bitch,” my father said, quietly enough that I wasn’t supposed to hear it, but loud enough that I did.

  I knew right then that I’d never tell him I had prayed. Or that I’d gotten what I asked for.

  Chapter Two

  When it was time for me to have my own stereo—until then, making do with the dial on my white plastic handheld transistor radio faithfully glued to AM 800, CKLW out of Windsor—of course I got Julie’s hand-me-down. She was five years older so I was always getting stuck with her stuff that was either out of date or didn’t work properly anymore. I’d even been forced to wear a pair of her discarded tights when I was too young to know that boys didn’t wear tights. Only years later, when I noticed a picture in the family photo album of three-year-old me happily romping around the living-room floor in my T-shirt and inherited red tights, did I feel the indignation to which I believed I was entitled.

  But I was thirteen now and too old to be fooled into wearing girl’s clothes and I needed my own music. Julie was eighteen and in grade twelve and not even a chin-dripping face full of tears would have allowed me access to her room and her record collection. We were fellow guests in the same two-star hotel who vied for the shared bathroom and who didn’t feel obliged to make small talk if we happened to run into one another in the hallway.

  “Julie got her own stereo when she was my age.”

  My father didn’t look up from the arm he was working on, the tattooing needle in his right hand making slow but steady progress burning flesh and leaving behind ink. We lived above the tattoo parlor now and it was a rule that I had to check in after school, even
before I went upstairs and dropped off my red Adidas bag full of fusty gym clothes and the occasional book. My mother had moved to Toronto with Pastor Bob after the Cornerstone closed down just like the pet store before it, so it was just Dad and Julie and me. In lieu of an extra set of parental eyes, Dad had rules.

  “You’ve already got a stereo,” he said, eyes never leaving his work. My father and the man sitting in the chair with his extended bare arm looked alike—both had beards and shoulder-length hair pulled back into tight ponytails and with ink covering most of their exposed skin—but unlike his short and scrawny customer, Dad was tall and still muscular, with only the beginning of a potbelly, and whereas most of the little man’s tattoos were just words spelt out in thin, shaky lines of pale blue ink, my father’s were like the end of the cardboard kaleidoscope tube I used to have, every colour imaginable and all of them swooping and soaring in and out of each other with perfect symmetrical sense.

  “My own stereo. Not that old piece of junk. Sometimes an eight-track won’t even play right and you can only get it to sound normal by sticking a butter knife in there.”

  Instead of immediately recognizing the severity of his son’s audio equipment quandary, my dad bore down even more intensely with his needle. The little man in the chair continued to stare at the wall. I waited for my father to say something—even No would have been preferable to being ignored—before picking up my Adidas bag.

  “There are muffins on the counter,” my dad said. “They just came out of the oven so the pan might still be hot. Be careful.” At this, the man snuck a peek at my father as if to confirm that the muffin-baking man completing his tattoo was the same one who’d started it.

  There was a door beside the tiny bathroom that opened on a dark stairwell to our apartment, but my father only allowed it to be used when there weren’t any customers in the shop. Another of Dad’s rules: you could talk like they weren’t there, but you had to pretend you didn’t live in a crappy little second- and third-floor downtown apartment on top of a tattoo parlor. I hoisted my bag over my shoulder and went to leave the same way I came in.

  “You should get yourself a paper route,” a voice, not my father’s, said. The only reason I didn’t just keep going was because you couldn’t be rude to a customer. “Young buck like you, you could buy yourself whatever you wanted in no time at all. I bet your dad here had a folding-money job when he was your age.”

  My father had grown up as an only child in the country; liked to say he never saw cement until he came to Chatham to go to high-school. His mother had died long before either Julie or I was born, while his father was just a misty memory of silver hair and the smell of cherry pipe tobacco. When she was still living with us and I asked Mom why we never saw our grandparents on her side of the family or any aunts or uncles or cousins, she said that her parents had kicked her out of the house when she was a teenager and she swore she’d never talk to anyone in her family again. When I asked her why they’d kicked her out, she said it was a long time ago, she couldn’t remember.

  “Sure,” I heard him answer the man.

  “Okay,” I said. “See you.”

  Hitting the snow-dusted sidewalk, Yeah, right, I thought. A paper route. What a jerk. What a spaz. When I got home, I couldn’t find the phonebook with the number of the Chatham Daily News, Dad must have left it downstairs.

  The day my mother came home and declared she’d been saved was the same week my sister called a family meeting to announce that henceforth she was to be referred to as Cher. Mom’s was obviously the more significant news, but since at the time I had a much clearer idea of who Cher was than Jesus, Julie’s announcement made the bigger impression. I’d never attended a family meeting before—had only seen one on the Brady Bunch, where I suspected my sister got the idea—and it was exciting, like we weren’t just the Buzbys anymore, but a real family, like on TV.

  These days, Julie’s idea of a feminist role model had shifted from a wise-cracking variety-show co-host and occasional AM radio rebel (“Half-Breed,” Cher’s top-of-the-charts condemnation of hypocrisy and racism, the soundtrack to Julie’s PRIVATE! KEEP OUT! closed bedroom door the fall of 1973) to girls I had never heard of—that no one had ever heard of except Julie and her new best friend, Angie, who’d moved to Chatham from Toronto with her parents the summer before the start of her and Julie’s grade twelve year. And it turned out that her new heroes weren’t girls, either. Julie made sure I understood at least that much.

  A Buzby sit-down breakfast for three, Julie’s fat biology textbook and a copy of Patti Smith’s Easter album occupying the empty chair at the table. Julie was at the kitchen counter topping up her cup from the busily brewing Mr. Coffee Maker—eighteen now, she could ingest as much caffeine as she wanted and could even write her own absentee notes for school—and I leaned over and picked up the album with the hand not being utilized to munch a piece of strawberry-jam-laden toast.

  Spinning around, “What do you think you’re doing?” she shouted.

  “Let’s take it down a notch, okay?” Dad said, blasted from the sanctity of his sports page.

  Before I was on the second sneering syllable of “Nothing” Julie had snatched the record from my hand. “What’s your problem?” I said.

  “My problem is people touching things that aren’t theirs without asking.” She studied the album front and back, as if expecting to find cigarette burns or obscene graffiti. Dad vanished again behind his newspaper.

  I took another bite of toast and looked at the album cover while Julie continued to scrutinize the back. “Gross,” I said. Because neither my sister nor my father asked me to elaborate, “That girl is gross.”

  “You wouldn’t call a hockey player a boy, would you? Would you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “I might. You don’t know.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. This is a woman,” Julie said, pointing at the cover photo of Patti Smith, bare arms raised to reveal her au natural underarms. “When you call a woman a girl you denigrate her. You equate her mind to that of a child’s.”

  “You’re just saying that because Angie talks like that.” The first time Julie brought Angie over to our house she’d been wearing a T-shirt that read A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE. The shirt was made of thin yellow cotton and I could see the straps of her blue bra underneath. All my sister’s bras were white.

  “I’m out of here,” Julie said, grabbing her book and record.

  Without either speaking or ceasing to peruse the sports section, Dad extended an arm in the direction of the breakfast mess that was the kitchen counter. I set the table and did the dinner dishes; Julie was in charge of cleaning up after breakfast, mornings dubbed her domestic domain by our father mainly because he said the coffee she made tasted better than his. Mom had been the family coffee maker before the Lord’s call had beckoned her away to distant kitchens.

  “I’m going to be late,” she said. “And I’ve got a test.”

  “You should have thought of that before you decided to argue with your brother.”

  “I wasn’t arguing—I was trying to educate him. Obviously somebody around here has to.”

  Eyes on his newspaper, Dad replied by lifting his arm again.

  “Whatever,” she said, slamming both the book and the record on the countertop even though the latter belonged to Angie, toward whose frequently borrowed music and books she was usually so fastidious. “I can’t wait until I’m really out of here.” Julie was one year away from having to worry about university applications, but, being a straight-A student, her first choice, the University of Toronto, seemed a foregone conclusion to everyone but her.

  Dad kept reading. I picked up my spoon and scooped and slurped my Cheerios. Julie got on with the job at hand as noisily as possible. I wondered what it was that made a woman a woman and a girl a girl.
It couldn’t just be underarm hair. There had to be more to it than that.

  For the first few years after she left for Toronto, Mom and the Reverend Bob would come back to Chatham so she could visit Julie and me, the Reverend Bob dropping her off and waiting at Tim Horton’s. She’d call ahead so we’d know she was coming and Julie and I would meet her at the door so that Dad wouldn’t have to see her. We’d usually head to the Satellite Restaurant where Julie would sit on one side of the booth and Mom and I on the other. She didn’t call me her “Little Miracle Boy” anymore and she didn’t talk about God quite as much. He still came up, but He wasn’t something she needed to prove to anybody now, especially herself, because He was as real as the courier business, Silver Wings, that she and the Reverend Bob had started when he discovered it was just as difficult finding a full flock of true believers in Toronto as in Chatham. Sitting with Mom at the Satellite, sometimes I wondered about God. After all, the single time I prayed and asked for help, I’d gotten it. But I didn’t tell her that. And when she’d return to Toronto my theological curiosity tended to hit the road too. Street hockey games, math tests, monster movies on TV: there always seemed to be something more important to think about.

  Mom would ask us about school, if we had any new friends, if we were saying our prayers at night, and we’d answer Okay, No, Yes. I don’t think she really believed we got down on our knees and talked to Jesus, I think she just believed it was important for us to know that she thought we should. Julie was older and would fidget on her side of the table and act irritated with the conversational stop-and-start, but I was happy to just sit beside my mom, to have her hold my hand while we looked over the menu together, to smell her mom smell of Charlie perfume and hairspray.