The Longest Year

by Daniel Grenier

  Thomas’s father was a man of principle. Sometimes he’d hold his son by the shoulder, kneeling, his big hands exerting pressure, while he explained the complex movements of the planets and the stars, which were responsible for magnificent natural phenomena like the Northern Lights, and for injustice as well. Injustice, Thomas’s father explained, was almost as old as the mountain ranges, and sometimes concealed great opportunities. The man of principle would lean down in front of Thomas, three years out of four, and squeeze him on the shoulder and tell him, again and again, Don’t worry, you just have to wait, be patient, the sun will come out before you know it. Patience was a virtue, something you could learn, along the lines of generosity and honesty. If only he could have known how long his father had had to wait in this life, how long history’s great men had had to wait, Thomas wouldn’t cry, he’d find a way to turn his anxiousness into patience. Sometimes he stopped listening and focused instead on the difference between the shape of his father’s words and those he heard outside his home. How could they be the same yet sound so different? When his father spoke, it was hard to force himself to stop thinking about the sound and instead locate the meaning, what they were meant to express.

  This was a rather old form of education, learning through trial and error, deductive and empirical logic, a far cry from the Board of Education’s books of lies. Can’t you see it’s March 1 today? Sorry, you’re still not two. Maybe next year. His father cultivated patience the hard way, and it took. Now he sat Thomas on his lap, on the rocking chair. Aren’t you proud to be part of a group of special people? And he showed it to him one more time, the famous letter addressed to Thomas, mailed all the way from Kansas. There aren’t many kids who know how to read at one, don’t you think that makes you special? Do you know where Kansas is? On the other side of the Missouri, on the other side of the big river, over the state line. It’s real far away. There’s a Pittsburg there too. There’s Pittsburghs all over. And they read the letter together one more time. It had been mailed to Thomas when he was born, from other people just like him, on the other side of the river that crossed the country, the river that had borne the famous adventurers who had first met the Indians and founded the nation. A fly was patiently, noiselessly, eating away at the screen near the bottom of the door. From the corner of his eye, as he read along with his father, he tried to guess whether it was inside or out.

  Perhaps one day he’d talk it over with other people. They’d explain that it was nothing more than a joke, a bad joke to play on a kid, but no big deal. They might say Thomas was unlucky, that his father had acted badly, cruelly even — had he really done that, all those years? Where was the mother? What did she say? But for Thomas there would be no sudden illumination, no revelation of his father’s personality. Nothing would be added to his understanding of the man who had left without looking back one day near the end of November.

  As far as Thomas knew his dad had never killed a fly. But then Thomas also knew that flies never bothered him. They didn’t even come close, mosquitoes neither, as if they had an understanding. His father had almost gotten up to kill the fly on that day, as he insisted that Thomas read the words from the conclave of well-intentioned strangers who gathered in a circle with their hands joined. Thomas had felt the muscles in his father’s thighs tense, felt him begin to turn ever so slightly. It was enough to scare the fly away.

  Dear new Leaper,

  It is our pleasure to welcome you to Chapter No. 1, Order of Twentyniners, one of the world’s most exclusive organizations.

  You are hereby enrolled in the elite fraternity whose membership is limited to those who have birthdays only every four years. There are no initiation fees, no membership dues, and no meetings, other than the “grand conclave” each February twenty-ninth (29), when members from all over the world gather “in spirit.”

  An attractive membership scroll is enclosed. I am sure you will want to keep it in order to identify yourself with pride as a member of World Chapter No. 1. The scroll is designed to permit the member to put his name at the bottom, and is suitable for framing.

  The charge for this scroll is $1 to cover costs of engraving and mailing. Please send $1 so your organization can continue operations on behalf of the Order of Twentyniners — those persons born on February 29.

  Fraternally yours,

  Kenneth B. Simons

  Executive Secretary, Order of Twentyniners

  Editor-in-Chief, Headlight Sun

  Pittsburg, KS 66872

  Then they closed their eyes and shared one of their final moments together as father and son, imagining a faraway Pittsburg that may not have a baseball team but still had a newspaper with an editor-in-chief. His father breathed through his nose and held the letter in his hand on the rocking chair armrest. A vein was throbbing in his forearm. Thomas wondered whether his father had actually mailed the dollar bill, but was afraid to ask. That would have been insulting. Of course he had.

  A little later, climbing off his father’s lap, he felt the wood creak and the knots on the old floorboards shift, but no anger was forthcoming. His father simply opened his eyes, like someone waking from a short nap. He folded the letter and slowly repositioned himself, shifting to the back of the chair. With a neutral facial expression, his sentence was delivered in what he called his “accent.” Mixed with words in another language. It was a warning, a reminder for Thomas: You aren’t to wake your mother, she’s had a long day. She’s busier than us. Her shifts are long, her work is hard, let her sleep, don’t ever disturb her. He said this patiently, while looking at the wall, as if he’d forgotten that Thomas already knew, that he was probably the least disruptive person in the world.

  The house had thin walls. There was a fist-sized hole in one. Thomas almost never made a sound.

  After the freight train had come and gone, carrying many different things but surely not his father, Thomas walked home through the tree-lined backstreets of the north side of town. It was cold that year, they had been talking about it on TV, and a thin layer of snow blanketed the lawns and certain cars and trucks that hadn’t been started for a while. Though he was far from home he walked in the middle of the road, as if he owned the place. He walked along the yellow line until he heard a car, then got out of the way.

  His mother was waiting for him. She wasn’t on the doorstep, but it felt as if she were. Somewhere he’d picked up an image of a mother that stuck with him: In a long dress and matching scarf she waited for her kid on the doorstep, wiping flour off her hands with her apron. Maybe she’d called out his name, Thomas, all over town: Thomas, come home, your father’s gone for good, come home, come eat, come back.

  His mother was waiting for him with a meal laid out on a table set for two. She watched him eat, her chin resting in her hand, and then suddenly got up, disappeared behind the open fridge door, and came back with a white box tied with a golden ribbon. She held out a pair of scissors, handle first, as she sat down at the table. Without getting his hopes too high, and with a certain trepidation, he cut the ribbon and opened the box to find his name in cursive chocolate script on the vanilla icing of a cake. A birthday cake. His hands were sweaty and he set the carton down so he wouldn’t dirty it.

  He looked up at his mother, a pretty woman with circles under her eyes, younger than most of the mothers he knew and saw around Chattanooga or at the public library. She wore jeans, she had black friends. Or at least she had one black friend, Mary, who lived in Avondale where he had never set foot alone. Often when he got back from school, especially since his father left, she would play some music on the living room stereo, as if to welcome him home with The Beach Boys or R.E.M. She smiled at Thomas and gestured to show him how to pull the box apart, take the cake out, lay it on the table.

  She got up again to find a sparkler in a kitchen drawer. Lit her lighter and smiled, and Thomas admired her profile. He thought about his cake, and his mother, and how without his
mother there would be no cake, and the ways they were connected, and he had a strange feeling in his chest, his heartbeat sped up as she approached with the burning, hissing sparkler. Something important was happening. A new alliance had been forged between them in the absence of his father, who wasn’t coming back, who might never come back.

  Thomas looked at his mother and she started singing. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Thomas. Happy birthday to you. Birthday. Birth day. The day of his birth. He didn’t understand. His birthday was tomorrow. But it wasn’t tomorrow, there was no tomorrow. He wanted to contradict her, with all the powers of reason he possessed, everything he had been painstakingly taught. Tomorrow was March 1, his father had explained it hundreds of times. His heart beat fast. He felt like crying and smiling and letting go of his fear, all at once. His mother winked at him as she sang. She was smiling, and her voice was sweet, almost quiet as a whisper. He didn’t understand. It wasn’t his birthday, his birthday wasn’t until next year: February 29, 1988. And the one after that would be February 29, 1992, and so on until he would be at once eighteen and seventy-two, twenty-nine and one hundred and sixteen.

  She waited until the sparkler went out to say it again: Happy birthday, sweetie. Before she cut the cake she stuck her finger in the icing and tasted it. “Mmmmmm.” That brought a smile to his face. He couldn’t stop looking at her, admiring this woman unafraid to question the calendar and the consecrated teachings of the popes and the scientists in Rome and London. She cut a slice, nearly a quarter of the cake, and slid it onto a saucer. It was so big it hung over the edges. She laughed, and then he was laughing with her. She licked her fingers one more time, held out the saucer overflowing with cake and looked at him with eyes full of love and said it one last time:

  “Happy birthday, sweetie. We’re done with this nonsense. From now on your birthday is February 28.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARCH 1994

  HIGHLAND PARK—WOODMORE, CHATTANOOGA, TS

  Thomas lost an entire family pantheon in one fell swoop the day his mother died. She’d talked so much about her family and had given such detailed descriptions of people and characters, he felt he knew them personally. Not long after his father slung his bag over his shoulder and packed his funny accent up for good to head North, she’d started telling Thomas stories, dramatizing her memories, bringing them to life for his amusement and edification. She was a good storyteller. Especially in the kitchen, after work, when she would sigh and rub her tired eyes at length, palms over their lids, then serve Thomas and herself each a tall glass of milk, which they would take into the living room where she sank into the couch, legs folded under her. From age seven to fourteen Thomas listened to his mother’s stories so carefully it chased away all absence and loneliness. Sometimes they made a fire and the story of her grandparents — Confederate sons and daughters of worthy Methodist pastors and preachers — crackled like the logs over the bed of grey ash seamed with red.

  Overnight he found himself totally alone, his father across the ancestral mountains, his mother crushed under debris, burned up and lying somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Much later he received his mother’s passport in the mail with other U.S. government documents and official letters from the airline. The passport had been drifting amid millions of shards of metal and plastic, and had been sent to him as proof and testament. In Thomas’s adolescent mind, which was eternally occupied with constructing worlds through objects and placing them in context, he pictured an aseptic white table in a sterile white room with fluorescent lighting, where his mother’s passport had been laid out to dry. Men in rubber gloves and masks would have handled it, if not with respect, at least with professional care. The corners of the passport photo were turned up and warped, but you could still make out a young woman’s face looking candidly into the camera, back when smiles were still permitted. His mother was present in this photo and nowhere else, it contained all that had come with her and all that had left with her as well.

  Thomas got it. No matter how many times he turned it around in his head it was over and done with. From the day his mother ceased to exist, all interest in the story of her family had been lost, lost with her vanished body, abstract and unreachable as if separated from him by an abyss. He almost felt it physically, this break she had described and her estrangement from a family she may have loved telling stories about but had not actually seen since she married a penniless foreigner who barely spoke English. A man who bucked convention, a zealot proud to admit that he didn’t believe in anything, let alone angels. Who said that? What kind of man said such a thing while eating and sleeping under a stranger’s roof? He had barely suppressed his laughter on their second visit and left the table without properly excusing himself, still clutching a napkin in his hand. He would never set foot in her parent’s home again. After that incident it was clear that he was no longer welcome.

  Thomas’s mother cut ties with her family a few weeks later. They got married, but at City Hall, not the Methodist church. Nothing was asked of them beyond consent and proof of identity. No one had talked to them since, though money had changed hands across enemy lines. The arrangement suited everyone. A photo had been passed on when Thomas was born, nothing more. Living in the same town complicated movements somewhat but, as Thomas’s father liked to say, Chattanooga was big enough for everyone.

  From now on we’ll use their first names, for clarity’s sake and also to attenuate the distance Thomas’s perceptions put between us and them. Even after they were gone Thomas heard “Mom” and “Dad” in his head when he thought of his parents, but we’d rather give them their own personalities. This story belongs to them as well. They’re rooted in it, like their son, and are motive forces as well as dead ends. Their similar experiences provide depth of field. It’s the kind of thing that gets passed down.

  Like when Thomas’s mother Laura Howells climbed Mount Lookout as a teenager and reached the top not far from the state line, and she thought about where the mountain range began, in another country several thousand miles north. And in these thoughts she projected a fairly detailed image — a young man crossing an ageless mountain range, over hiking trail and mining road and tourist track, water in his bottle, walking stick in hand. He’d have started in the Chic-Chocs. She’d heard that range they had up there was as eroded as the mountains around Chattanooga. Then Laura put her pack and canteen down and took a seat on the summit of Mount Lookout. As she gazed north, the sunbeams piercing the clouds made her believe in something and sense the foolishness of believing in anything at all. She imagined leaving Tennessee with some water and a sturdy pair of shoes, setting out and crossing right through the middle of this world bursting with fall colours, walking until, after a hundred days of walking, she would cross paths with him, a young man with a beard and plans as lofty as her own.

  Laura hadn’t understood that meeting this ambitious young man from up North, the one she’d dreamed of, would mean turning around and following him back to where she had begun, so that he might answer his own calling, what he referred to (always under his breath) as his “destiny.” She didn’t foresee that this man’s contagious enthusiasm would turn her around.

  On May 17, 1979, Albert Langlois got off the train in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and started looking for a cheap place to stay. He asked around while he had a cup of coffee in the diner where Laura worked. Though he hadn’t shaved in two weeks he had managed to find a shower almost every night. He smelled good, a fragrant mix of pine, spruce, and lavender, and so did his clothes and the big Canadian army duffle he set down next to the swivelling stool at the counter. His entrance hadn’t gone unnoticed. It was past noon, when the place was always slow, and Albert had stumbled, despite the giant sign that read “Watch Your Step,” black letters on yellow, and said “Câlisse!” and then sorry. It was straight out of a French movie, or something similar that the people in Chattanooga couldn’t quite put a finge
r on.

  With her thumb in her mouth, about to turn the page in her pad to note the order of a couple regulars in the corner booth, Laura looked up.

  He came up to the counter, pretending to limp a few more steps. He must have stubbed his toe, mouthed the word “ouch” as he looked toward the back of the restaurant, and his gaze came to rest just beside Laura’s head on a framed print of the Statue of Liberty proudly standing guard over Manhattan. Her reflex was to back up an inch, and for the first six years of their marriage she thought she had done the right thing. As her son grew up she often thought she had done well to take the initiative that fateful day. By standing in front of the photo of Manhattan, with the Flame of Liberty seeming to rise from her head, she had given him the chance to notice her before he sat down on the stool.

  Laura was wearing new glasses. She didn’t especially like them, but felt blessed to see without squinting and scrunching up her nose, everyone said she wasn’t pretty when she did that. Her stockings were free of runs and she felt confident, sure-footed in her white Nikes, ready to go behind the counter and show him her smile, in profile, nose in the order pad. She tore out the page and placed it next to the others on the metal rack for Richard the cook, and stood in front of him with cup, saucer, paper placemat, and coffee pot. She poured him a burning hot cup of coffee and told him to hold on, she’d be back in a jiffy, to give her time to bring a warmup to the couple at the rear of the restaurant. She was hopping in her runners, ponytail bobbing behind her. Though no one in the restaurant noticed she was, in fact, hopping.

  When she came back and stopped in front of him there were six empty sugar packets next to his cup. He was stirring the black liquid with his teaspoon and didn’t seem overwhelmed by her presence. He didn’t wear glasses, could probably see as far as he wanted, every detail and shade and colour, without even trying. She lay her palms on the counter and rested her waist on it, her head almost directly over the coffee cup.