He had asked Ronald: “What is it with you? Why do you stare up at those planes?” And Ronald had said: “I like to pretend I’m up there, high enough to look down on something or somebody for once in my life.”
Gil had laughed as if it were a joke, but it was an uneasy laugh.
Suddenly the old man was seized by a strange panic. Making a great effort, he sat himself up. It was as if he hoped the force of gravity would pull everything he just now thought and saw down out of his head, drain it away. What he saw was Ronald’s lashless eyes, singed hair, red burning face. What he thought was that such a face belonged to a man who wished to look down from a great height on fire, on ruin, on devastation, on dismay.
When the old man collapsed back into the wire he saw that face hovering above, looking down on him.
“You’ve got no right to look down on me,” he said to the burning sky. “I came to fix your fences. I gave you the home place and showed you how to keep it.”
His vehement voice filled the clearing and argued away the afternoon. It became harsher and louder when the sun passed out of Gil’s vision and he could not raise himself to follow its course. The horse grew so accustomed to this steady shouting and calling out that only when it suddenly stopped did the gelding prick its ears, swing its head, and stare.
Loneliness Has Its Claims
WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, shortly after my mother was diagnosed as tubercular and admitted to the provincial sanatorium for treatment, my dad delivered me for the summer into the care of a virtual stranger, my Grandma Bradley. An only child, mother’s darling, and (if I may say so myself) precociously resourceful in the manipulation of adults, I found Grandma Bradley a hard nut to crack, a dangerous customer. None of the tactics so successful with my mother had any effect on her. She scoffed at feigned illness, shed flattery the way a duck sheds water, and made it a policy to assume the worst when it came to children. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think she cared for me much.
That she didn’t came as no big shock to me – I was not exactly my father’s favourite either. I won’t say that he actively disliked me because that would be putting the case too strongly. It was just that he was so smitten with my mother, so head over heels in love with her, that she monopolized all his consideration. My father’s memory, which never failed him when it came to my mother’s birthday and red-letter days such as wedding anniversaries, went all fuzzy when it came to particulars concerning his son and heir.
“Charlie turned eleven, May 7,” he’d inform polite inquirers after my age.
“Twelve,” I’d correct.
“That’s right, twelve,” he’d say. “He’s going into grade six.”
“Seven,” I’d say. “They accelerated me last year.”
“That’s right, grade seven,” he’d amend. “He’s going into grade seven come September.”
After one summer chez Grandma Bradley, I made it clear to my father that the experiment of 1959 had been a failure and that I would prefer hard time in Bible Camp to another June and July passed under her roof. Of course, my father didn’t listen then, just like he didn’t listen any other time I opened my mouth.
Almost a year later, we got word that Mother was slated soon to be discharged from hospital. Immediately my father concluded that an extended vacation in the bracing, pure, tonic mountain air of Banff would be just what was needed to cap her recovery. Thrilled by the idea of holidays in the blue Canadian Rockies, I encouraged my father in his plans. Don’t think I didn’t throw a spectacular shit conniption when I discovered I wasn’t part of them. However, lacking a mother at home to wheedle and whine at, I didn’t have a sniff at getting Pop’s mind changed. “You’re twelve now, Charlie,” he said. “It’s about time you learned that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Your parents are people with wishes too. After such a long separation your mother and I need to get re-acquainted with one another – in private.”
Where was I going? Back to the farm for a rerun of the summer of 1959.
The driver of the STC bus did as my father had requested, he pulled over to the shoulder of the highway and let me off with my bag at the access road to Grandmother’s farm. The air brakes gasped wheezily, the tires churned in popping gravel, the roar of the motor faded into the distance and reluctantly I set off, heavy suitcase bucking against my thigh as I lurched toward the farmhouse screened behind the windbreak of evergreens. It was hotter that day than the hubs of hell, and the blowsy, yellowing spruce which lined the road held the air trapped and so deathly still that after fifty yards I was panting like a done dog.
At intervals, whenever my arm threatened to tear loose from my shoulder socket, I would fling the suitcase down in the dust, thump a few kicks into its guts, and curse my father, prompting a drab fireworks of sparrows to explode out of the spruce. For several frantic moments the dizzy, desperate birds would wheel headlong to and fro across the bleached, empty sky and then sweep back into the trees, showering me with plaintive cries and bobbing the spruce boughs as they fussily resettled themselves.
Once I’d exhausted myself victimizing the luggage, I slumped down on it to recover my breath and feel sorry for myself. But in a few minutes that became uncomfortable too, what with the sun drumming up a sick headache behind my eyes and clouds of insects rising out of the ditches to swarm me. Driven to distraction, I’d hoist my bag and stagger forward, telling myself that just around the turn in the road waited a cooling beverage, shade, and, if I was lucky, maybe even an electric fan.
This was the best I could expect up the road. The year before, my father had been able to whip up my enthusiasm, con me with his blather about how I was going to a “real farm.” Back then, when I was eleven, innocent and naive, the words “real farm” had conjured up visions of a dog gambolling loyally at my heels, a fishing hole, maybe a pony to ride. Best of all, a gun to shoot and wildlife to massacre. What I discovered on arriving was a dust-bowl-Okie nightmare, junked machinery, unpainted out-buildings patched with flattened tin cans and defunct licence plates, ziggurats of rotten manure, the only farm livestock idiot chickens living an outlaw life, gobbling bugs and flamboyantly strutting about the property. In charge of this god-forsaken garden spot was the most frightening adult I had ever encountered: Matilda Bradley, six feet and 180 pounds of chain-smoking, out-of-the-bottle-auburn-hair, seventy-year-old, hard-ass grandmother.
At last the farmyard hove into view, looking even sorrier than I had remembered it. There was the row of derelict DeSotos Grandpa Bradley had once cannibalized for parts, which were now nesting sites for Grandma’s scrawny range chickens, the bright orange of their rusting hoods and roofs decorated with spatters and curlicues of white chicken shit. A number of hens gave me a glassy stare as I trudged toward them, then stretched their necks and scuttled away stiff-legged to seek cover in the weeds which overran the farm, rank plantations of pigweed and ragweed, stinging nettle nearly as tall as I was, buttons of bright yellow dandelion, purple-tipped candelabras of Scotch thistle. Off in the distance I could see that the roof of the nag-backed barn had sunk a little lower in the kidneys and that the sun stared more boldly through chinks in its planking. The house was in slightly better shape – still solid but exhibiting symptoms of senility. Its paint scabby, peeling, and the wooden shingles above the eaves showing a suspicious green stain – maybe lichen. The porch also appeared to be tipping forward, straining to tear itself free from the main building.
Just as I was heaving my suitcase up the worn, splintered steps of the house, Grandma stepped out to greet me, dressed fit to kill in a navy-blue skirt with matching jacket, a jet necklace and jet earrings. Around the house her uniform was a baggy dress and a battered pair of unlaced men’s sneakers, but for any public appearance, even grocery shopping, she never failed to deck herself out in all her finery. Naturally I assumed her costume signalled she was off to town.
Taking a ferocious drag on her cigarette she looked me up and down and commented, “So you made it.”
I gazed
up at her. Her auburn hair was aglow from a fresh retinting and she loomed larger than life and twice as bold, a forbidding billboard of a woman. “Could be I hurt myself carrying this suitcase all that way,” I said, clutching my side and grimacing dramatically. “I sort of felt something pop inside me a ways back.”
“I’m not your mother,” she said coolly. “Don’t try any of your cute tricks on me or you just might feel something pop on your outside.” She squinted her eyes against the glare of the sun and flapped her hand at a cloud of midges. “So what’s the dope on the honeymooners?” she asked. “How long do they intend to gallivant around and leave you parked on my doorstep?”
“Dad took leave,” I said. “Five weeks, maybe six.”
“What your father took leave of is his senses,” said Grandma Bradley. “I haven’t got a clue what all this kafuffle is supposed to accomplish.”
“He and Mom are getting re-acquainted,” I said.
“What he ought to re-acquaint himself with is an honest day’s work,” she remarked. “Six weeks’ leave. I’ve heard everything now.”
I attempted to change the subject – not that I was averse to hearing criticism of my parents – but once Grandma Bradley started lashing out she had a tendency to swing in all directions. I might be the next target. “Were you going out?” I asked hopefully.
“No,” she said. “I’m expecting company. So get in the house, wash your face, change your shirt, and keep that famous lip of yours buttoned.”
Company was Mr. Cecil Foster, a retired elementary school principal, unknown to anyone in this neck of the woods before he had mysteriously appeared a year before and bought the most modern house in town, a split-level built by the town’s former doctor. It was a head-scratcher to everyone why a sixty-eight-year-old bachelor would choose to move to the back of beyond where he had no apparent relations and connections, but there he was.
The moment I laid eyes on him I had no doubts I was face to face with a former educator. Although retired, he looked every inch the teacher in his drip-dry, short-sleeved white shirt stained with old pen leaks, and his cheap electroplate tie-clip flaking shiny metallic dandruff onto his necktie. He also wore the standard black leather shoes with rubber soles for sneaking up on you.
Right off I identified Mr. Cecil Foster as a disguiser. Buying his clothes too small for his full-figure frame and opting for the camouflage-do – hair swept from a part just above his right ear and plastered in a Brylcreem-soggy grey wing across the steppes of his bald scalp – were proof of that.
Mr. Foster shook my hand, squeezing it between thumb, index and middle fingers like he was testing a peach for ripeness. “So tell me, Charlie,” he asked, sending a gale of Sen Sen into my face, “what’s your favourite subject in school?”
I sized him up, trying to determine the right answer. The right answer being whatever subject Mr. Foster had himself taught. His pucker-lipped, precise manner of pro-nunciating and e-nunciating smelled of English teacher. I confessed that English was number one in my books.
This delighted him. “Oh, I’m so glad!” he exclaimed. “And what do you like best – literature or composition?”
I admitted to preferring literature.
“So many boys I’ve encountered over the years won’t admit to an interest in literature – they think it’s unmanly to like poetry and stories.” He smiled at me. “Always follow your heart, Charlie. It’s the first rule of life. If you like poetry – well just like it, despite whatever your friends might say!” He turned to my grandmother. “I believe we have an imaginative young man here. Very imaginative.”
“That’s the word for him,” drawled my grandmother.
It never dawned on me until the tail end of his visit what he was doing at my grandmother’s house – you’d have had to have the imagination of an Edgar Allan Poe to even suspect such a thing. So for two boring hours, in ignorance I drooped around the hot living room, pushing dead flies into piles on the window sashes and trying to ignite them into funeral pyres with a book of Grandma’s matches. Nothing would burn but the wings. When I got tired of that I’d wander over to where the senior citizens were playing rummy for twenty-five cents a game and Mr. Cecil Foster was riding a winning streak. Every time I paid a visit he’d point to his growing stack of quarters and give me the conspiratorial wink. Grandmother, touchy loser that she was, just kept ordering me in a short-tempered voice to push off.
It was only after Grandma had retired the deck of cards in disgust that the grotesque, unexpected part happened. As he was preparing to leave, Mr. Foster gathered Grandma’s hands between his palms and began to stroke them with the tips of his chubby fingers. She offered her cheek for him to smooch, which he did, loudly and wetly.
He was her boyfriend. I was gripped by the willies.
My grandmother referred to him as her “gentleman friend,” with more stress on the word gentleman than friend. Grandma Bradley, like Mr. Cecil Foster, was an unsuccessful disguiser too. She made a big show of not being taken in by him, but I could see that all six feet and 180 pounds of her was tickled pink by his attentions, despite frequent disclaimers. “The problem with these old bachelors is that when they get to a certain age they start to worry about their health. What’s going to happen to me if I get sick? they ask. Who’s going to look after me? Remind me to take my medicine, drive me to the doctor? Cook those special diabetes and high blood pressure meals? Men are such big babies. Nothing scares them half as much as the idea of croaking alone. All of a sudden they figure a wife is not such an inconvenience.”
“So what’s in it for you?” I asked.
“What’s in it for me? You think I want to spend what’s left of my life watching this dump collapse around my ears?” Grandma Bradley struck a match and sucked the flame into the end of her cigarette, drizzled smoke from her nostrils. “Mr. Foster owns a three-bedroom house, wall-to-wall carpeting throughout, fireplace, developed basement. Hallelujah. Sure, he’s not the man your Grandfather was – and thank God for that.” Her eyes narrowed. “He’s got potential,” she said. “Be nice to him. Or else.”
Several days later Mr. Foster appeared at the farm and offered to take me on a drive, an outing. Grandma Bradley was overjoyed to get rid of me and my complaints about the quality of the one available television channel, lima beans, and flannel sheets in July. “Don’t be in a hurry to get him back,” she said, “take your time.”
Under normal circumstances I would have considered going for a drive with a man like Mr. Foster a horrible ordeal. But things being relative, it beat the hell out of another afternoon spent watching a cooking show and “Take Thirty” on CBC.
Mr. Foster’s car had air-conditioning – a definite plus – and he kept tinkering with the controls until I conceded I was “comfy.” What’s more, he allowed me to tune the radio to my favourite station and crank it up full bore, something that would have got my wrists broken if I tried it in my grandmother’s DeSoto. Nor did he object when I began singing along to the radio to test the limits of his tolerance. In fact, he joined Patti Page and me in a rendition of “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” giggling and woof-woofing his way through the song like a maniac. I concluded he was nutty as a fruitcake, but fun.
Radio blaring, we rolled along. Fields, herds of red cattle, clumps of poplars with their leaves blinking green to silver, silver to green in the breeze, sped by. The sky was banked high with mountains of cumulous.
Mr. Foster confided there was something he just had to show me. For the next half hour we jolted over a succession of deteriorating roads, climaxing in a bumpy rutted track that wound its way across the brown face of a vacant pasture. When the track finally ran itself out amid skimpy grass, sand, and cactus, we got out of the car and walked on until the plateau suddenly dissolved in a dizzying rush of sky and wind and left us hanging perched on a lip of eroding earth, the wind pummelling us and tugging at our clothes like dozens of pairs of children’s hands. More interesting, the wind also popped Mr.
Foster’s hair up and down at his side part like the lid on a jack-in-the-box. I was studying this intriguing phenomenon with close attention when my companion suddenly made a lofty sweep of the arm and cried, “Isn’t it grand!”
The quick movement, the abrupt exclamation startled me. A small avalanche of dirt trickled out from under my sneakers and spilled down the sheer slope.
“Do you know what this reminds me of?” he asked, putting his hand on my shoulder, steadying me.
It reminded me of a valley. Far below my feet was a sleepy river winking a semaphore of sun, a concrete bridge which looked like part of a model railroad set, a yellow road that switchbacked up blue and distant hills, a red Tinker Toy tractor raising smoky dust in a black field.
I told Mr. Foster I had no idea what this reminded him of.
“Scotland,” said Mr. Foster.
As far as I was concerned this was stretching it. What I was looking at didn’t resemble any pictures of Scotland I’d seen. When I asked him why what we were looking at was like Scotland, he ignored me. Likewise, when I asked him if he’d ever been there.
“Oh Scotland!” he murmured. “When I was your age, Charlie, how I was in love with Scotland!” He turned to me eagerly. “Have you read Robert Louis Stevenson?”
I shook my head.
“Long John Silver and Jim,” he said. “The man wrote the most beautiful books. Kidnapped. I adored that book. When I was a boy there was nothing I wanted more than a friend like Alan Breck, someone older to look up to. I thought David Balfour the luckiest boy in the world because he had Alan Breck to share his adventures with. Have you ever wanted an older friend the way I did, Charlie?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t thought much about it. But on consideration I wouldn’t have minded having Ernie Tastin for a best buddy. Nobody would fuck with me then. Ernie was in grade nine and older than a lot of high-school seniors. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said.
Things As They Are? Page 17