The supper siren wailed from Connaught’s town hall, the dim light was failing. It was time to give up. He could no longer spot the last tiny shreds of refuse and his hands trembled so violently that the only way he could control them was to stuff them in his trouser pockets. The garden was as clean as he could make it. He went into the house and closed the door.
22
It was a little past noon when Daniel let himself into his grandfather’s house, unannounced, without bothering to knock. Having once lived there, he was inclined to treat it as his own and never give a second thought to the old man’s privacy. Making amends was uppermost in the boy’s mind, not respecting his privacy. He had come to tell his grandfather he was sorry for what had happened and how he had treated him. For a week he had avoided him because he knew, no matter what excuses he made to himself, that he had been afraid and disloyal. Over and over he had asked himself how Montgomery Clift or James Dean would have behaved in his place. The answers always came out the same. Montgomery Clift would have driven the old man wherever he wanted to go, to the ends of the earth. If need be, James Dean would have stolen a car to transport him.
He was a coward.
Because the television wasn’t blaring, at first Daniel assumed the old man must be out. Alec never missed the farm report and markets which were broadcast over the noon hour. Yet despite the utter quiet and stillness of the house Daniel had the sense it wasn’t empty. An unsettling feeling arose in him that he was being watched or listened to.
“Anybody home?” He paused, shouted again. “Anybody home?” He felt a mixture of uneasiness and relief that no one answered and he was free to leave. But as he turned to do so he got his answer, a vague confusion of sounds that came from the direction of the living room, muffled, deliberate thumps; a gritty scrabbling which sounded like a dog’s nails slithering on a polished floor. Then as abruptly as they had begun the sounds ceased. Either that or they had been overwhelmed by the loud, frantic drumming of his heart. Daniel strained to catch them again, face drawn and rigid.
“Who’s there?” he called out.
No reply. The rooms thrummed vacantly. “Alec?”
Nothing.
With reluctance Daniel stole to the entrance of the living room and eased his way through the door for a look. It came as a great relief to him when he saw it was only the old man after all, the old man standing in the middle of the living room with his back to him, leaning on one of the kitchen chairs.
“Alec?”
He did not answer, did not move a muscle.
The boy wondered if this was a display of sulking, a bit of the cold shoulder because he hadn’t got his way last Saturday. Daniel decided to ignore it. “You gave me a scare,” he said brightly to the hunched, brooding shoulders. “Didn’t you hear me call?”
No reply. And there was something in the manner his grandfather held himself, a stubborn, secretive dignity, which rooted Daniel just inside the doorway, which prevented him as surely as a hand thrust in his chest from taking one more step into the living room and trespassing. He was convinced his grandfather had heard him, knew he was there. The awkwardness of the situation kept him nervously talking.
“I suppose you’re pissed off at me about last Saturday. Okay, I get the message then – I know you’re pissed off. I’m sorry. But I’ve been pissed off at you, too, lots of times – about baseball, about all kinds of things. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t talk to you. So what do you say? You going to talk to me?”
His grandfather stood leaning on the back of the kitchen chair, monumental in his silence. A doubt crossed Daniel’s mind. What’s wrong with this picture? Something was. The doubt carried him two steps further into the room. “Alec, what’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was louder than he had intended.
The bowed shoulders heaved, the chair scraped and shifted on the floor. His grandfather used the chair to support himself as he fought to turn around; it was his prop, a four-legged crutch which he savagely jerked and shoved so that its abrupt, violent hopping on the floor made it seem alive, something struggling to tear itself free from his grip. Between the sudden, desperate leaps of the chair on the floor the old man adjusted his balance, scuffling his feet into a new position while the chair that kept him upright trembled and quivered under the burden of his weight, threatening to tip. A brief pause, the room swelling with the rasp of his laboured breathing, and then once again the dull, heavy load of flesh tried to turn itself to the boy. The chair rocked, its feet scratched, it gave a startled jump. A few inches closer. And with each painful step, with each convulsion, the understanding grew in Daniel that something terrible was striving to show itself to him.
At last he was face to face with it and only wanted to look away. His grandfather was not right. One side of his face had melted and run like hot wax, the muscles were all loose and hanging. His mouth sagged open and his left eyelid drooped, obscuring half the staring blue of the pupil.
“What happened?” Daniel whispered. “Why are you like this?”
The old man’s right hand rose slowly from where it rested on the back of the chair. Up, up it came and laid a forefinger like a bar across the slack lips and fallen mouth. The child’s sign for secrecy. He tried to shush but the sound he made bubbled instead, loose, sloppy, full of spit.
“Oh God, oh God,” Daniel muttered, stepping from foot to foot in his apprehension. “Oh God, oh God. Somebody. Please.”
A word was floundering in his grandfather’s mouth. His tongue could be glimpsed fluttering rapidly between the barricade of false teeth. “Fro’en!” he blurted suddenly.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. I don’t know what to do for you. Tell me what to do,” whispered Daniel, hopping lightly from foot to foot like a small boy needing a pee.
“Fro’en!” cried the old man, banging the chair on the floor, shaking it, shaking his head violently from side to side. “Fro’en! Fro’en! Fro’en!”
Daniel started to cry. “Don’t you see?” he asked. “I can’t understand you. I can’t understand you, Alec. Don’t you see?”
Maybe he did. The rage died. The old man stood staring and panting. Then once more his right hand lifted to his face; awkwardly he stabbed three of his fingers into the cheekbone beneath the partially veiled eye and drew them deliberately and brutally down to his jaw. The white pressure marks showed on his skin like frost.
“Fro’en,” he said, speaking softly now but with urgency. “Fro’en.”
At last Daniel understood. His grandfather was telling him he was frozen.
Panicked by the emergency, Daniel turned to his mother, spilling into the telephone the story of how he had discovered the old man clinging to a chair back for dear life. “He’s sick or something,” he kept repeating. “Real sick.”
“All right, Daniel,” said Vera calmly, once she had judged the seriousness of the situation. “I want you to stay there with him. Don’t leave him and see that he doesn’t fall. Don’t try and move him yourself, he’s too heavy for you. Just wait. Someone will be there right away. It won’t be long. Just stay calm and collected. I know you can. I know you can be brave for me. Will you do that for me, dear?”
Daniel promised he would.
Vera made a quick decision not to call for the ambulance. It was stationed at the mine site twenty-four hours a day in readiness for serious accidents and in the time it would take the ambulance to cover the distance to town, Stutz could be at her father’s with minutes to spare. When she rang Stutz at the garage she was cool and terse. “Listen, Daniel just called to say something has happened to Dad at the house. The kid says he’s sick and he’s plenty upset so I think he must be. You better get over there, fast. By the sounds of it he probably needs the hospital.”
Mr. Stutz burst into the house and upon Monkman swaying behind a chair in the living room, his face scarcely recognizable. Daniel stood beside him, his grandfather’s sleeve knotted in his fist to help anchor him. Wh
en the boy saw Stutz he began to clumsily pat the old man on the back. “Here’s Mr. Stutz,” he said encouragingly. “You’re okay now. Mr. Stutz is here.”
Mr. Stutz came very close and peered into Monkman’s collapsed face with disconcerting directness. Then he took a step backward and asked, “What’s the trouble, Alec?”
Daniel hastened to answer for his grandfather. “He can’t talk very well. He’s hard to understand.”
Stutz nodded, absorbing this news. “All right then,” he said, addressing Daniel, “we better see he gets to the hospital.” He turned to Monkman and spoke very slowly and deliberately. “Not to worry. We’re going to see Doctor now.”
He hadn’t expected to prompt a rebellion. Shaking his head vehemently no, Monkman tightened his grip on the chair. Mr. Stutz was a practical man not given to hopeless coaxing and cajoling. After several attempts at persuasion failed, he simply pried Monkman’s fingers one by one from the chair back. Daniel supported the unsteady old man from behind while he did this, his arms wrapped around his waist. Then as Monkman frantically pawed and dog-paddled the air, straining to reattach himself to the chair, Stutz kicked it out of his reach and slung one of the old man’s arms over his shoulder. “Now,” he said grimly to Daniel, “if you take his other arm maybe we can get this show on the road.”
They half-led, half-carried the old man to the truck, and as they did Daniel lapsed into tears again, tears which Mr. Stutz discreetly overlooked and allowed to pass unremarked. Daniel was crying again because this felt like a second act of treachery, helping to compel Alec to go to the hospital against his wishes. It didn’t matter that Daniel recognized the necessity of what they were doing; what they were doing seemed to be adding to the old man’s suffering. He moaned and twisted fitfully in their grip, flapping his hands and slurring protests. It upset Daniel dreadfully when Stutz made him hold his grandfather back against the seat as they drove to St. Anthony’s Hospital and the old man struck feebly at him with his hands. But all of this was nothing beside the moment before the door to his grandfather’s room was swung shut and Daniel saw him sitting blank-faced and defeated on the edge of his bed while a chattering nurse eased him out of his shirt. At that moment a wilderness of loneliness opened up before the boy.
The doctor told them that Monkman had had a stroke. He said it was too early to make predictions about an outcome. Sometimes elderly gentlemen recovered from such blows, sometimes they didn’t. For the time being, it was important to get the patient settled and quiet. Perhaps it was better that he have no visitors until tomorrow.
After Stutz phoned Vera with this news, he and Daniel returned to the house to collect the personal effects Alec would require – razor, underwear, slippers. Going from room to room, hunting up these articles, something came to Mr. Stutz’s attention. It was in the living room that he first noticed deep scratches in the floor. Monkman’s standards of housekeeping had declined badly since Vera had left last Christmas and he seldom bothered sweeping up the dirt and even sand he was constantly tracking into the house from the garden. Daniel had once told him that walking across his floor sounded like scrunching your way over spilled sugar. When a chair bearing all of Monkman’s two hundred and twenty pounds had been skidded over this dirt it had acted like sandpaper, producing deep scratches and gouges in the surface of the linoleum. What surprised Stutz was that this damage was not confined to the living room where the old man had been found, but was spread throughout the house – in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the downstairs bedroom. He studied the intersecting trails of many laborious journeys in a doorway, a welter of cuts and tears, one overlapping another. They resembled the angry scribbles of a child and had come close to obliterating the pattern of flowers on the linoleum.
How many trips back and forth? Stutz asked himself. How many days?
“Daniel, when did you last see your grandfather?”
“Last Saturday.”
Stutz had briefly talked to him Tuesday. Today was Friday. One thing was certain. All this hadn’t happened today. All these marks hadn’t been made in a single day. He had a vision of Alec alone, staggering from room to room behind the chair, blundering desperately through a vacant house.
They were leaving when Daniel spotted the straw fedora on the hook by the door. He took it down and set it on top of the bundle of his grandfather’s things.
“You better leave that here,” suggested Mr. Stutz quietly. “He isn’t going to have any call for a hat in a hospital.”
“But he’ll want it to come home in,” said Daniel.
Stutz left it at that. Daniel and he went out together. Halfway to the truck Stutz remembered. He turned back and locked the door on the puzzle of scars. Nobody would be coming back to the house tonight.
23
Four hours after he was admitted to St. Anthony’s Hospital, Alec Monkman was stricken by another, much more severe stroke. From that moment on he swung between coma and brief explosions of agitation when he tried to escape his bed and clawed, whimpering and bewildered, at the I.V. tube inserted in a vein in the back of his hand.
Circumstances, it seemed to Vera, dictated she take charge. Despite the differences which existed between her and her father, she was not going to have it said his daughter let him die like a dog in a ditch. To see he did not harm himself during one of his “spells” – Stutz’s description – she decreed he would be watched around the clock and she drew up a schedule of shifts. From eight A.M. to four P.M. Mr. Stutz would keep him company. After school let out, Daniel would sit with him until his mother closed up The Bluebird at eleven. Vera’s shift was what the shaft sinkers called the graveyard shift, midnight to morning.
Vera only desired to get through her father’s last days as people would expect her to, without giving rise to comment, or worse, scandal. She purchased an expensive winter coat, matching scarf and gloves, matching shoes and handbag so when she paid her visits to the hospital she would be presentable, respectably dressed. It had been a long time since she had bought herself any good clothes. The importance of dressing well was linked to a feeling of anticipation, a feeling that she was standing on the brink of an important event for which it was necessary to prepare – like running away to join the Army, or choosing Stanley – an event the consequences of which it was impossible to foresee.
Because of the hours of his shift it was Mr. Stutz who most often received visitors as Monkman’s proxy. He took deep satisfaction in their numbers. Old customers and neighbours paid their respects, employees dropped by to inquire as to his condition and left, shaking their heads, quiet, subdued. Mr. Stutz accepted their offerings – the get-well cards, the home-made squares, the boxes of Black Magic chocolate – with ceremonious dignity. “Alec thanks you,” he said to each.
Among the first visitors to make an appearance at St. Anthony’s were the old men who played cards at Alec’s house and borrowed money from him before Vera put the run on them. On their arrival they displayed a reluctance to be drawn too far into the sickroom despite Stutz peremptorily beckoning them from his chair beside the bed. They remained huddled a step or two inside the door, milling about, craning their necks at the patient and blinking owlishly.
“It’s a shame,” someone in the back of the group volunteered. “Life’s a bugger,” observed another. There seemed to be nothing further to venture on that topic. The old men uneasily eyed the medical rigmarole, the bottle of I.V. fluid, the transparent plastic tubing, the oxygen tank. They appeared on the verge of stampeding at any moment. Huff Driesen, who led the delegation, said, “If he comes around… you’ll tell him we came to ask after him?”
Mr. Stutz solemnly nodded.
“He was a prince of a fellow,” declared one of them with fervour. That seemed to sum up, exhaust all that there was to say.
Murmuring agreement they filed out, stumbling hard upon one another’s heels in their haste to quit the room.
Mr. Stutz was sadly, dutifully resigned to this business of dying. When Alec was
both conscious and quiet, Stutz would draw back the blankets on his bed, hike up his hospital gown, take his penis delicately between thumb and forefinger, aim it into the neck of a plastic flask, and patiently wait for the trickle. If he wasn’t given the opportunity to frequently relieve himself, the old man would wet the bed. During his “spells,” when he tore at the I.V. tube, jerked his head from side to side, kicked and tangled the sheets about his legs, and cried out unintelligibly, Mr. Stutz pinned him to the mattress, leaned his face close to the old man’s ear, and advised him in a whisper, “Don’t you fight it now, Alec. Let it be. Let it come,” until he grew quiet again.
In the course of Vera’s and Daniel’s vigils these upsets were uncommon, and, if they did occur, were much milder. Stutz told them they were lucky the old man kept banking hours. Daniel dreaded having to sit with the old man, feared his “spells,” feared even more that it would be his bad luck to have him die when they were alone together. He had never seen anyone die and didn’t intend to if he could help it. Once, when he was offering lame excuses as to why he couldn’t take his shift – something about decorating the gym for a dance – Vera nearly told him he needn’t worry, most people didn’t die in the evening. She had read that somewhere, or heard it, she couldn’t recall. Something made people hold out through the dark hours. It was in the morning they gave up the ghost, in the light, at the end of their strength. But Vera caught herself in time and didn’t make the observation.
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