Tommy held his hands together tightly on his desk.
“My question is too theoretical,” he said. “While the question itself is not hypothetical, it can be argued the possible use of its potential answer is largely hypothetical.”
We all heard him, too, though he spoke, as always, softly. His hair was damp from sweat at the top of his forehead and he smiled weakly around at his classmates, finally letting his gaze rest on Mindy and Sue. They didn’t look up, they just continued comforting and consoling each other.
What kind of chart can a man draw in such an instance? What kind of Department of Education Powerpoint presentation can teach these children when I can’t? In the end of the story I accidentally cut one of Tommy’s toes off. I only want to illustrate a point. I’m tired of the ritual obfuscation. I’m afraid.
I wanted everyone to see the boy’s foot, and he took his pale shoe off to show me. It smelled like the hospital my mother died in. When he peeled his sticky sock off, I put my fingers around his ankle. Children, I said, Tommy’s foot is diseased. It’s awful, I said. This poor boy will have his foot amputated. The smell didn’t bother me anymore and I held the bottom of his foot with my other hand. It was as rough as my crying father’s cheek that day in the hospital. He tried to comfort me, too tightly. He said, let’s go to the river. I couldn’t leave my mother’s room.
I held Tommy’s foot and the five-minute bell went. We call it a bell, still, though many children have never heard a bell. I held the boy’s foot and I said it would be cut off and he was to ask a simple question.
Mindy and the others saw the knife, and I said this is not hypothetical. I said, Children, this is the real question, while Mindy and her friend cried. Tommy squinted above his tight mouth, waiting for the phone call.
One of the children, God bless her, had made a decision — this was either an emergency or she had forgotten the rules. She stood on a chair with the phone in her hand, talking. Oh, children, even the flesh, in this weak light, offers no clarity.
The Way It Looked
THERE WAS A SMALL MAN STOPPING to pray on the sidewalk as they drove west toward the edge of the city. The car windows were open and they had the heat at their feet. The dirty wet streets were all covered with leaves. The man in the brown coat might not have been praying but he stood there silently, not looking around, not asking directions, and just as they drove by he looked to the sky.
In the old days some of the trees would have had fruit on them this time of year. Adam told that to his wife. He didn’t know what she was thinking.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What?” he asked. He couldn’t hear from the sound of the heater on their feet. She liked the cool air to breathe, but his feet got so sore from the cold. His feet cramped and curled as he aged. There would be fewer and fewer good days.
“Sorry, Judy. I didn’t hear.”
“I don’t think so,” his wife repeated. “I think the apples would be gone by now, anyway.”
“Oh,” he said. “When do they pick them?”
She turned to him from the window and the sudden movement of her head caught his eye, so he looked at her. She was smiling, reaching down to take her socks off. Her feet were too hot. Her straight hair was white and short; no hint of the dark brown of her youth, or the dyed reddish black of her more recent past.
“When they’re ripe,” she said.
They were barely moving. She was looking at him and he pulled over to the curb to look back. It was the wrong thing to do.
“Let’s just go,” she said. “Let’s get going.”
“Hang on there, Jude. I’m sorry, but that’s a long drive coming up. I’ve got to get out and stand a bit. I’ve got to walk a little. Let’s just take a walk.”
She stared at him, smiling a straight smile. When he was angry at her, when they had been having a fight for some reason when they were home, he hated that smile. It was smug and it hurt him. When they were in the city and met someone they knew, someone who was cruel, he liked that smile.
“I’m sorry to hear about David,” someone would say on the street.
“Oh, what did you hear?” Judy would ask, smiling.
“Oh, you know. I’m just sorry for his trouble.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Judy would say, and reach out to rub the person’s arm. “He’s fine. He’ll be all right.”
Adam loved her then, and they would continue down the sidewalk, away from the person who was asking questions but who wouldn’t come right out and say it, but he knew not to speak to her.
During the funeral he’d held Judy’s hand. He could read her through this, he thought. He could know whatever she felt. At the time he was only watching the preacher. He was never one for hymns but he loved the preacher’s voice; it wasn’t deeper than usual, or louder, but it was calmer; its authority came from somewhere within, as a preacher’s should, but rarely did. It wasn’t the words; Adam quickly stopped hearing the words.
The preacher’s angular body moved correctly, like a clock — its arms with set tasks, its ability unquestioned — his long fingers hung down the sides of the dark podium, or stretched out at the ends of his reaching arms and pointed to the ceiling, or curled slightly inward to make the hands small baskets when he spread wide his arms in a shrug of supplication.
Adam sat in the middle of the right front pew, with Judy on his right and David’s widow, Aspen, on his left. Almost immediately he had stopped watching the preacher’s face and instead followed his hands. A man like that is used to speaking to the dying and the dead, he knew, but still, Adam was impressed by how surely his body behaved, and how strong the hands looked, even though they were just holding air.
Then, near the end of the preacher’s unheard words, Aspen had taken Adam’s left hand and he held it as firmly as he could. He gently squeezed Judy’s hand on his other side as the preacher’s body suddenly broke its pattern of symmetry and the right arm alone reached above the preacher’s head. The palm was up and the fingers closed to a point then tugged down in a rough gesture that brought them all back to the words in the air.
“We cannot know when it is our time,” the preacher said, letting his hand hang empty at his side.
Now, at the side of the road, he wanted his wife to put on her socks and come with him.
“My feet get too sore, Judy. You know that. I just want to loosen up.”
“You go,” she said. “I’ll just wait here.”
He undid his seatbelt and looked out the windshield. The day was still grey and nobody was on the street ahead of them. It must be too cold. Or was it a school day? He couldn’t tell anymore. Since he’d stopped working he sometimes had to be reminded of the day of the week. The sidewalks were empty under big trees. No children, and, with the car no longer moving, no breeze.
“Let’s walk back there a bit, Judy. Just a block or two, so I can loosen up. Then I won’t need the heat on so high on my feet.”
She reached over and rubbed his knee.
“You go,” she said. “I just want to stay here.”
“I saw a man back there. He was stopped all alone. I think he was praying.”
“A man with a face like that, anything he did would look like praying,” she said. “You can’t see his eyes without thinking he’s begging.”
“I didn’t see his face,” he said.
“Or worse, that he pities you because for this one second, on this particular day, you’re taking the time to look at the world around you, and just one time, just one day off, that’s it. One day without praying. Today, you’re not going to pray.”
He could see she was crying now, though she looked out the window away from him. He knew by the way her thumb moved around inside the curled fingers of her hand. And he knew by the way their son had died and he was too young. He knew by the way they had both loved him. He knew by the way they wanted to help Aspen though she didn’t like them and never had. He knew by the way his wife had been looking anywhere as
they drove, anywhere that was cold and grey, anywhere there were no people.
Everything he needed to know he knew by his wife getting too hot and by him getting too cold. He knew by just believing what she said, that the old man they’d passed was the kind of man who always looked like he was praying, or begging.
He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and drew her to him. He felt her wet cheek on his neck and it was hot. She was cooking in here. Neither of them mumbled anything and when they left each other on the opposite sides of the car, Adam’s eyes were crying too. He cleared his throat and said, “You’re right,” and put the car into drive and drove.
He knew she was right by thinking back. He knew she was right because the old man probably spent days there, with his arms open wide, waiting for something bitter to fall from the tree, something shaped like an apple, something that never does fall, but used to. Or something that never had. But the old man wears the jacket with big pockets, and waits.
Build a Small Fire
THIS IS THE THIRD FUNERAL IN the last two years. The first time, flying home in the early fall, Doug stopped to buy a black jacket on his way to the airport as the cab waited on the street. That funeral was not a surprise; he should have had his clothes already. The second funeral was virtually the same, though it was a shock, and it was the heart of summer. He stood in the sun with his black clothes on, in Saskatchewan again, glad for the ceremony, glad to have someone tell him where to go.
Beginning the drive alone back to the coast after the second funeral, he tried to see what others saw of his home. They talk about its flatness. They get lost, they say, because it’s all the same. But it’s not; there are changes all around. That quarter he would snowmobile on as a child is fenced now. Someone’s drilling a well in the southwest. They’re letting that small stand of poplar grow. He used to sit there with Lena some Sunday afternoons. They would build a small fire. They had a shelter there and nobody came looking. They weren’t big drinkers so the vodka she stole at Christmas lasted forever. Nobody could see. Nobody was looking.
There had been a cow at the edge of a dugout on the right side of the highway, to its chest in water. He saw it trying to get out, slipping, stumbling, and then standing again. He drove into the yard and steered the car around the gravelled circle to stop by the door. The heat was singeing when he stepped from his car. When he knocked on the door some teenage son looked at him unimpressed. We know. We’ll get it out. You’re like the hundredth person who’s stopped.
Then he was in Saskatoon again. He let his car run on the street. He took off his tie and waited a minute before going in. It was so much hotter there than where he lived by the ocean and it was cool in the rental car. He remembered the perfect temperature at the viewing. He’d pressed his hand on his dead nephew’s chest, trying to be sure. He wanted to be cool, but a neighbour came by and knocked on his window, motioned to turn off the car but he pretended not to understand. The neighbour had quite a vocabulary but eventually went back into his house.
With the other mourners he ate a Nanaimo bar and walked around looking at all the pictures in the house. And the pictures were all over, as if it had been planned. Not just the death and the reception in this room after the service, but the life itself in its photographed stages.
But this third funeral is what makes him recall the others. The first and second passed more easily, though he was closer to both those people — one a grandmother, one a nephew — than to this third dead person, who he doesn’t know at all.
He drives his parents to the viewing, because it is winter and he has rented a car again. His mother has to run back and turn on their Christmas lights before he can back out the driveway. His father, in the front passenger seat, looks next door, where their neighbour is pulling his tree down the small slope to the street. His silence is atypical, yet he holds it even when his wife returns to the car. He looks out the side window all the way to the funeral home, while Doug’s mother talks loudly about the man whose funeral it is.
Doug’s wife and his children are not with him, and when they arrive at the viewing, he looks around for a familiar face as a reflex, and, despite himself, reaches briefly for a hand to hold sometimes, though no one is beside him. He has no friends in the small room where they have the coffee urn and stacks of white cups.
It is his parents’ pastor lying in the coffin, and he walks with his mother into the room with the coffin, ready to help her across a thick edge of a carpet, if there is one, or any obstacle. He doesn’t know. It is all flat, it turns out, if you follow the plastic carpet there for the snow being tracked in and lying like a path in a garden. She does almost catch a foot on the edge where it meets the soft carpet that covers the whole room, as she steps back from the coffin.
“Easy, Mom,” he says, as he steps toward her. He puts a hand on her back and holds her elbow with the other.
Her wet face looks up at him, teary.
“He was such a good man, eh Doug?”
Though he doesn’t know, he says yes.
“And he looks so kind,” she says, still peering up at Doug. “Just like in life.”
And because Doug doesn’t know how a corpse might be kind, and because his mother looks at him defenseless and open-eyed, he looks into the coffin and sees the old man. At the top of a dull long-suited slim body, the head lies above a sharp white collar and solid brown tie, and the closed eyes have the look of dreaming and momentarily Doug thinks the closed-mouth smile on the face had been planted there deliberately, post-mortem, though he cannot say so to his mother, but then he recalls having seen this man twice, after all, and yes, he did look kind.
The first time was at a Tim Horton’s in Fredericton, and he wouldn’t have remembered him except for the second time, when he’d seen him in the Omaha airport. He tries to remember this man now, with his dead body in the room, because of the grief all around him. It is hard, though, because of the remorse he feels recalling their first meeting, when he had worked at the doughnut store. He doesn’t want to think of it. The old man had come to the counter, smiling, and moving slowly.
He’d ordered a slice of pie with his coffee.
“I’m giving myself a treat today,” he said. “I did something really good today.”
But Doug had looked away and never looked again at the old guy’s face. He took his money and said to the hurried people behind him: “Who’s next?”
He’d forgotten his rudeness that day until he’d seen him in Omaha, and it hurts him more today because he would never know what the man had done that day long ago. When years later he saw the same man, alone, in the airport in Omaha, he’d tried to imagine the man’s life, tried to imagine what good he’d done. If you see a guy staring out the window at the airport, how do you describe him? If you know for sure his life stretches years back and also years ahead what is your obligation? And what if, at other times, their paths had crossed, and a man without a face, acting private in a public place, was indeed this dead preacher. Seeing a dead man three times makes you think. Maybe it was more.
Does it go on beyond the wet twinkle in his eye? Because if this is an airport it changes. And it could be any day, but it could not be anywhere. A man looking out the window to his garden would not want the same things, Doug knows, and the only reason anything registers is because of his sudden recollection of the time at the doughnut store.
Maybe, though, the man wants for nothing. This is a man alone. This is what? The postmodern man — without beginning, without end — which you see in books but do not believe in.
His eyes will narrow. He will find himself suddenly looking at empty space — the glass is transparent. The wall is glass. The place appears and is it coming or going?
It’s both. It is both, if it makes no difference, and this is where his eyes get wide. What decisions did he make to get here? He must be here. Is he here? Where is here?
Doug imagined the old man his own age, doing things he has done, or seen people do. The time he saw a ma
n throw his keys on the ground in the grass, as the man’s wife told him this is over, this is it. The couple were on the lawn below their balcony. The old blind lady they’d mailed things for was on her balcony beside theirs. She leaned out.
“She can’t see,” the man’s wife hissed.
“She heard that,” he said, his anxiety public now, as if it wasn’t when he threw the keys.
No, that was a different man, Doug was sure, though he hadn’t seen the face. It was nothing to do with this man, who probably never had such a fight with his wife.
Doug had imagined the man in his youth, and now, recalling the memory he’d constructed watching that man stare out the window, he doesn’t know if he’d been unkind. He’s not sure, and he doesn’t want both of the two insignificant times he’d met this man whom his family now mourned at Christmas to have been less than generous. That he’d been a stranger to Doug makes it more horrible to imagine, not less.
In Omaha, he’d imagined this: Lying in bed when they were kids, naked for the first time together, hearing the sound of her parents up the drive, hearing them home early. This is the movies, the preacher as a young man said. Don’t joke around, she said.
He stood naked in her bedroom in front of the mirror and watched, for a moment, himself. With the thin string hanging from his used penis, with the flushed face and scrawny body, how could he feel so strong?
Stop it, get something on, she said.
But he kissed her. She kissed him.
Then the moment on the lawn: sure the blind woman knew all — the minor indiscretion at the office, etc. His wife’s mother and her poison. His wife’s reticence and the new email account she’d started after her vacation.
Oh. And now the staring out the window. Is it coming or going?
He’s sure now the story is unkind. He should be more generous. The indiscretions and the new email account just don’t fit. That couldn’t have been him.
It is impossible to know what he has imagined and what is real. He remembers the old man’s expression across the counter at the doughnut store, then in that cold viewing room he feels he can see his eyes, though the lids are closed.
We Don't Listen to Them Page 10