I pointed the thing and hit the back of it hard like you’re supposed to. Nothing happened. Tried it a second time. Nothing happened again. So I took out the other one. It took off all right—I was going to say like a rocket but that’s what it was, a rocket, right? High up over the hill it busted open, sending out big blooms of yellow smoke in all directions. I know they had to see that, whoever they were. I bet the bear saw it too. The bear! I was already unarmed. Now I was unarmed with a fucken bear looking to have me for breakfast. A weird situation for a city kid to be in.
I hustled myself over the hill. I wouldn’t be gone very long before I’d find em or they’d find me. By now I know they wasn’t cops, though I don’t think I would have cared so much if they had been. Three guys, middle-aged, outdoorsy clothes, work clothes, no Day-Glo hunter ponchos or anything like that. Only two of em had rifles. They saw me and one of them got all excited and started saying something about Sasquatch Guy which naturally I didn’t understand. One of them pointed his rifle at me! I guess he thought he might get a reward, that’s how I read it now. At least the cops’d look the other way at hunting bear out of season. It was way too early for deer too. Later, when the Mounties had me, the first thing I said to em was “In ceremonies of the Horseman even the pawn must hold a grudge.” They didn’t get it. They’re not music lovers, not educated people in the Civ department of life, not folks who appreciate the olden days, even their own.
six
INITIALLY I DID NOT COMPREHEND the full enormity of my project when I decided to author a book about my life helping others adapt to the challenge of their situational environments. I had been guest-starring on various talk shows both regional and nationwide and was in demand in person also. I found I possess natural abilities for such more public forms of discourse than that to which I had accustomed myself already. Too, I made a determination that I actually responded favourably to it on a personal enjoyment level. I discovered that speaking my writing into a tape recorder—different microphones for different followings, I was beginning to learn—was not contrarian to talking for the cameras, but of course I was wrong (I admit this freely). I located an agent to represent my enterprise and she counselled me on selecting the most advantage-filled offer. A writer was engaged to copy out the contents of the tapes and put the words in grammatical order, but he quit in the middle, indicating he could not rein in his jealousies despite my free assistance as to how he might attain growth in this area. The next one quit also, but she was not a mature individual, so I was not surprised. Eventually, after numerous months, the work was realized and you see the results. Despite the publisher, who argued with me at every step, I was seven weeks on the best-sellers’ list in Maclean’s and the better-quality newspaper formats. The publisher has termed that I am a substantial phenomenon. I cannot disagree though the words are his and not my own.
By this time Mother and my sister Annie had long since been sharing an apartment in Calgary where Annie had a pretty good job in the health care field. She and I never discussed it, but I figure she didn’t tell Mother about the Vancouver boyfriend she’d broken up with. I’d been out of touch with her—this isn’t like me—because I was humiliated and feeling guilty on account of having been so stupid, but when the excitement was over I went home for a visit. (I thought of it as home because that’s where they were.) Annie was at work at the hospital when my bus arrived and I went straight to their building, an old high-rise, so I knew I’d be seeing Mother by herself. I was worried, not knowing how she’d reacted to the publicity and everything. No matter how old you are you never stop feeling like a kid around your mother and probably never stop thinking you’re an orphan after she’s gone. None of this, though, prepared me for what happened.
She didn’t look a day older than she did the last time I saw her, though a few years had passed already. I hope I have those genes, though the results so far say I don’t! When I was younger I was obsessed with my genes, not knowing anything about my father; I’d let myself get carried away imagining all the defects I’d inherited and wondering when they’d start showing up. Later I remember thinking that I’d turn into a tall slim blonde, the way that those icky things turn into monarch butterflies. This goes to show you that we get more optimistic as we go along, thinking we’re only becoming more realistic. Maybe I thought this is what was happening to Mother. She was obviously glad to see me, but she seemed worried about something, I couldn’t tell what. It was as if she was avoiding what was really on her mind, even while she let me know, though not in so many words, that she was all right with what I’d done and sorry for what I’d been through. She kept asking about this and that in my life. She listened to the answers, but I could tell that the asking and the listening were distracting her from something she wanted to say, or hear me say.
She wanted to know about Steenrod’s, for example, and I told her how lucky I was that Mr. Steenrod had decided to take me back. He didn’t have to, you know. I told her how, when he asked me to come with him down to the basement, I thought we were going to the prep room. Instead he invited me into the place next door where he kept all his model trains set up. I felt honoured because I knew this was where he went to be alone and relax when he had worries, which it turned out he was having right about then. He went in ahead of me so he could turn on the lights. I remember that they took a few seconds to finish flickering, so that I got a view of the big table—it was the size of my whole bedroom—for just a mini-instant, then darkness, then another quick peek, until the room was fully lit. He had the tracks running all over the whole place, around the outside and kitty-corner too. Right in the middle was a town. When I got closer I saw it had streets with tiny people in them and houses and churches, a city hall or courthouse. He’d even built a mountain, which had a tunnel going through it for the trains—they entered on the one side where there was nothing very much and came out at the place where the factories were. He turned on the power and showed me how the thing worked, including his tape of realistic railway sounds and the way the trains were timed so they wouldn’t collide even though they passed pretty close to one another on a figure eight. The trains just went around and around. (I mean where else could they go? They were just trains.) The town was the part that looked alive, even though it stood still. There were so many things to look at in the tiny city he’d made. Lights on in the houses, people barely visible inside. Shops with displays in the windows.
“You know I don’t have anyone to pass this business on to,” he said.
I felt myself nodding.
He’d put on his little train-driver’s hat with the stiff beak. It looked like a tall muffin with stripes.
“Over the years I’ve often thought about succession,” he said. “You worry about whether what you’ve built can be carried on after you’re gone—whether it will. You’ll understand in a few years. Of course, you’ll have a family, I imagine. I never did.” He sounded sad. He watched his toy trains go hooting around the table. The noise seemed, well, trivial, I guess you’d say, compared to his voice. “There’s never any urgency until it’s almost too late.”
He paused again, pretending to do something to one of the switches. “I always wanted to find a young person I could teach and then turn the business over to, getting some money for my old age.”
He was going to ask me if I wanted to take over the Steenrod Funeral Home! He heard his own voice played back to him and saw what I was thinking. He didn’t change his tone, though. “I always thought I’d find some young fellow who was fresh from graduating in mortuary science and was looking to get practical experience for a few years and learn about the area.”
Well, this let me out at least a couple of ways: I’m not a fellow and I don’t have a degree or a certificate in anything at all except esthetics.
“You have to know the people you’re serving,” he said. “That’s essential.”
I don’t know what I said back. I can’t remember.
“I’ve seen this neighbourhood cha
nge,” he said. “When I was a young man this was an honest middle-class part of town. It wasn’t exactly the finest place to live, but it was home. It was very self-contained and independent. I’m talking about the fifties here. You’d feel safe walking anywhere. Now …” He trailed off. The little trains whistled. They looked like electric mice scurrying into their tunnel. “It’s sad what’s happened,” he said softly. “There’s no other word for it. It breaks my heart.”
For a moment I thought he was going to bring up how I’d let him down: leaving him to go back to craft jewellery, then getting mixed up with Bishop and becoming a media disgrace. But he didn’t refer to any of this except by not even hinting at it. For now, looking back, I see that this was his way of telling me he forgave me, that he was right to welcome me back, that he thought I was growing up at last.
These days I’ve long since discovered my talent for putting people at ease and making everything go along smoothly. At the time, though, the silences between his words were getting kind of awkward. Finally he came to the point. “I’m thinking of selling to the chain.”
The chain, or Chain with a capital C, was what people in the industry called it. It was a big company, one of several of them actually, that was buying up family-run and independent funeral homes in a lot of smaller cities, but in places like Vancouver too. The Chain had them all over the country, I believe, and even some in the western States. I think I remember hearing that. They always kept the old name, because people become familiar with the names over time; when somebody passes, the survivors naturally call the funeral directors that the deceased herself probably called when she was in the same position, in an earlier generation. I always say that if we’re doing it right, people should think of us, maybe not as friends exactly, because people are still pretty uncomfortable with what it is we do for them, but at least as faces they’re relieved and comforted to see again whenever a relative is gone; someone they can trust to be respectful and professional and a source of guidance in an awful time. So the Chain knew what not to fool with. But they increased the profits in a major way, partly by being able to use their buying power to get the best deals on everything from coaches to caskets to supplies.
“They’ve made a fair offer,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot of back and forth. It’s time for me to take my trains and go someplace warm.”
I suppose I must have looked as though I was taking in all the implications of what he’d said.
“Of course you’re wondering how this affects you, and the reason I asked you down here for a chat is to assure you that you’ll still have an actual position here under the new arrangement. I’ve made certain of that. A permanent job, if you want it.”
He took off his silly play-hat that made him look like a young boy. I thought there were a few beads of sweat in the thin white hair that barely covered his head like a piece of old fishing net; they glistened in the lights for a moment.
I was touched by what he said.
The conversation made me feel better about myself than I had in a long while, and I was excited about having this news to tell Mother when I went to visit her. But when I got to her apartment after the long bus trip, she dropped a bombshell before I could get to the end of the story and tell her about the permanent job.
“I didn’t want to tell you when you were having your ordeal, because I didn’t want to see you more upset than you already were, but I had a visit from your father.”
She was trying to be matter-of-fact, but it didn’t come out right, and I thought her eyes were distressed and angry. At first I must have looked shocked, but I recovered enough to ask for the details. I said something like: I want to hear the story if you’re up to telling me.
“There’s not much to tell except to say how I feel about it, and I’m not quite sure how that is. He phoned. It was in the middle of the morning. I didn’t recognize his voice at all; that’s the first thing some people forget. Finally he had to come out and say who he was. I can’t tell you how much I was flabbergasted. At the same time, though, I was calm inside. It’s like when you have an accident or some really other serious emergency and you can’t allow things to register right away. He said, ‘Don’t misunderstand, but I’ve been thinking about you for years. Off and on, I mean. But lately, the last few years, on. Wondering about where you are.’ I told him you were a grown young woman. ‘I figured,’ he said back. He wanted to meet you, and Annie too when he found out about her. I didn’t say what I felt: ‘Why did you run out on your daughter, you bastard, and run out on me too?’ But I was too stunned. Anyway I knew what the answer was. He didn’t need a reason: he was a man. Yet it was such a long time ago, I wasn’t sure I even hated what he’d done any more. When I was actually talking to him again, suddenly I wasn’t so sure. What he said to me was: ‘I guess we have to talk.’”
She told me they agreed to meet a couple of days later at a coffee place in a strip mall not far from here. She knew he would turn up but right to the last minute, she said, she wasn’t sure if she was going to. “But what could I do? He’d got the phone number and everything.” She didn’t tell my sister about it at first but kept everything to herself, protecting her, I guess, the way she always used to protect us. She finally decided to go, of course. “It’s not easy going back to visit the past that way when you’ve spent so many years trying not to remember,” she said. “I had to do it, though, so I could … I don’t know.” She didn’t have the right words.
“I understand,” I said. “You needed closure.”
“Is that what it is? I guess so.”
“We see that all the time in the funeral profession. It’s something we try to help people do. We know how important it is.”
“Yes, you’re right, sweetie.” She touched the top of my hand. “It’s like going backwards in time to see if something had died or not. No, not that. My anger. That’s what I mean. I guess.”
Suddenly she looked older than she did the last time I saw her and just generally not the same. But I could still see how beautiful she was when she was young, which is the way I remember her when we were little girls. The two things I remember were that she had this beautiful skin and she was brave. I didn’t know how brave. Working at different jobs, more than one at a time, in a kind of crazy quilt while trying to raise two girls without any help to speak of. My mother’s a saint.
We must have talked two or three hours. Our emotions came up pretty close to the surface. She told me about the conversation with him. It sounded like she was telling me word for word but that they didn’t have quite as much to say to one another as maybe they thought they did—not her, anyway. She said that Peter, that’s what she called him, told her the story of his life after the oil field, moving around, ups and downs, though it sounded as though he’d done all right in the end. I’m obviously not telling all this in anything like the same detail she told it to me, because she said something that I had to stop and think about, that I’m still thinking about today. She said: “He didn’t come to see me. He wanted to see what happened to you. Then he asked to see Annie but she refused. She said he could drop dead. That was what she meant anyway. ‘After all, dead’s what he basically left you for.’ We had an argument about it, and that’s not like me, you know.”
“You’re not taking his side?”
“No, not exactly.”
“He must be a persuasive man to get you to do that.”
“You decide for yourself. I hope you will anyway. When I told him you were going to be here in a week or so, he said he’d wait around till you came.”
And that’s where the situation stood on the morning I went to his hotel and met him—my father!—for the first time. (“Father.” How odd that sounds, even to me.)
I was of two minds and I’m sure it showed. I only wanted to stare at this man in his mid- or late seventies who’d treated a younger woman the way he had all those years ago. On the other hand, I was so curious that I couldn’t stop asking him questions; I genuinely wante
d to know about his life so I could at least try to understand.
It’s funny: I picked him out the second I walked into the coffee shop. He looked absolutely nothing in the least like me. In fact, if he looked like anyone it seemed to me that it was Annie, who isn’t related to him at all: wavy hair (his was all white), big shoulders like hers, a darker complexion than mine. He had a suntan and he looked like he took care of himself for a man his age and probably had some money. (You can tell so much about the living just by looking at them.) He turned out to be shorter than I expected when he stood up as I went over to the table. Very old-fashioned of him, but I didn’t mind.
Gee it was awkward going, for the first while especially. He kept asking me about myself, but I didn’t want to say much. That’s not like me: everyone tells me I’m so open etc. I guess I was uncomfortable because I didn’t know how much he knew about the troubles I’d been in and also of course because I didn’t think I owed him any information anyway. But I didn’t feel any permanent hatred, only anger that had come to the surface after being buried for so long. This wasn’t a position I liked finding myself in (maybe that made me angry too).
For the first hour at least, he did most of the talking. He told me that his family name wasn’t really Smith, it was Lucarelli. He had to spell it for me. His father was born in Naples, Italy, he said, and he and his brother decided to change it because there was a lot of prejudice against Italian people and other Catholics in Windsor, Ontario, where they grew up. When he said Windsor, I thought of Bishop ranting and raving about the place. I think I might have smiled a bit. I hope this strange man, this stranger across from me, didn’t misunderstand the smile. I hope he knew I wasn’t laughing at him, though I sort of have the feeling that he did but didn’t let on. He kept asking how Annie and I got along, and I said, Oh fine! Which is true.
Jericho Page 21