The Evolution of Alice

by David Alexander Robertson

  “Grandpa,” the boy said, “why do you make all those shoes?”

  The old man, for the first time, stopped whittling the wood. He placed it down at his feet and looked up at his grandson. The boy wondered if he even knew why he made them, or if he’d ever thought of it. He could relate to that. He did a bunch of things without thinking.

  “You know,” the old man said, “when you’re born, you’re like a piece of wood. As you get older and older you get carved at and carved at until you’re made into something. I guess making all these shoes reminds me of that.”

  The boy looked down at his body and back at his grandpa with confusion. The old man laughed.

  “That’s what you call being figurative, Grandson,” the old man said.

  “Figurative?” the boy said.

  “I mean, I know you’re not a piece of wood, but you get cut just like I cut this piece of wood right here. You get hurt over and over again, and what you need to keep in mind is that, when those things happen, it’s making you into something else. And, if you learn from all those hurts, it’s something better.”

  The boy looked at the piece of wood he was holding, then rotated it in his hands. He couldn’t imagine making a shoe out of it. What would he make, if he could? A little boat, maybe. He’d put a field mouse in it and sail it out across the lake. A short while later he went inside his grandpa’s house. He walked into the kitchen, pulled out the cutlery drawer, and tried to find a nice, sharp knife.

  HILROY

  GIDEON PULLED UP in front of Innis General Hospital, put his truck in park, but remained in the vehicle with the engine on to ensure he had the option of leaving at a moment’s notice. This had become routine recently, and each time he’d come here, he stayed in his truck a little longer than the time before. The decision to go inside or leave had become more difficult the worse things had become. It was hard to see his grandpa the way he was now, when he had been so strong for as long as Gideon had known him. Warriors like his grandpa didn’t get weak. And today Gideon wasn’t sure if he would end up going inside, even though, in all honesty, the threat of leaving was never that real, as much as he debated it. But the news he’d received this morning made staying in his truck for the foreseeable future a viable third option.

  He shouldn’t have been there in the first place. He was supposed to go to his grandpa’s home and finish packing up the old man’s things. Half of his stuff was sitting in boxes while the other half was in its right place: the cutlery in a kitchen drawer, the wooden carvings on shelves, and the bed sheets still unmade from the last time his grandpa had slept there. Those would be the hardest to pack. Those might never leave the house. So there was still some packing to be done. Gideon thought of it all, perhaps as a distraction, to keep himself from going inside the hospital. There was still the cutlery and the carvings and the bed sheets, but there were other things, too, like the scribblers his grandpa had used to write on. And each box, once packed, had its own destination, instructions given explicitly to Gideon by his grandpa. The clothes, all of them, were to go to the Salvation Army in the city, the carvings distributed to whomever Gideon wished (and he could keep whichever ones he wanted), and the scribblers were to be thrown out. His grandpa hated them, and so did Gideon.

  It was getting harder to remember his grandpa’s voice, how confident it sounded when the old man imparted his wisdom, how comforting it was to Gideon, the low, melodic hum of it. It was only last fall when he’d gone out to his grandpa’s house and found the old man panicking, unable to control his tongue, unable to swallow his breakfast without choking on each bite, unable to speak properly. “I thound ike a damn wee-thard,” he’d struggled to say. And so the old man’s voice, how it really was, was distorted by the memory of those first months, and how he struggled with the simplest words.

  His grandpa’s symptoms didn’t get much worse in the early stages, when the sickness was still a mystery, and that was counted as a blessing. But, even still, there were changes. He lost a lot of weight because he couldn’t eat any solid foods. Gideon had gone to Walmart and picked his grandpa up a bunch of Boost, pudding, and soup so that he’d get as much nutrients as he could, but it was impossible not to notice changes: how his clothes got baggier, and how his pot belly, which Gideon had used as a pillow when he was a kid, got smaller. And the old man talked less and less because he pronounced words like somebody was holding his tongue, and this embarrassed him. Gideon had made him laugh one day when he held his own tongue and said apples like his grandpa did. “Assholes, assholes, assholes,” he kept saying until the old man cracked up. Those were rare moments of levity.

  His grandpa was referred to an ENT at first, but the specialist wasn’t able to figure out what was wrong, so he was referred again to a neurologist. After a series of tests, followed by days of anxiety for Gideon and his grandpa as they waited for the results, the news came, and the mystery was solved. The old man had ALS. Gideon didn’t know what the hell that meant until the doctor told him it was more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease—everybody knew baseball facts around the rez. Once that news had been given, once they were told how hopeless the situation was, that there was no cure, it was as though the old man gave up, and the decline became rapid. He soon couldn’t eat anything through his mouth, not even pudding or Boost, and he had to have his stomach hooked up to a machine that fed him what looked like baby food. His voice left entirely and he had to write in those damn scribblers. Gideon had got them for his grandpa. He’d gone to the school and they’d given him a bunch of them. They were all the colours of the rainbow.

  It wasn’t long before his grandpa had to be moved to the hospital, because doing things alone had become too difficult, and Gideon couldn’t be there all the time. He’d be working the odd job, like helping to build the new arena, or, more recently, sandbagging, or he’d be over at Alice’s place. He wasn’t prepared to spend less time with the girls; they were as much his family as his grandpa was. And, besides, he wasn’t trained to do the things that needed to be done to care properly for the old man. Rock bottom seemed to be redefined on a daily basis, but nothing could’ve been worse than the news he’d gotten this morning. The doctor had called to tell Gideon that his grandpa lost the use of his legs, just like that. Now the old man was in the hospital, unable to speak, eat, or walk. So Gideon stayed in his truck, his forehead pressed against the steering wheel, his thoughts leading him to any number of places, but no place he wanted to be. He wanted his grandpa back how he was, not like this. He already had images of his mother lying on her bed, looking like a sheet of skin placed over a sack of bones, so ravaged was she by the cancer and chemo. He didn’t want the memories of his grandpa to be ruined as well.

  You’re selfish, though, god damn it, he thought to himself. What would his grandpa want? Would he want his grandson, the man he’d raised, sitting outside in his truck like a coward? What if it was Gideon in the room, alone, unable to speak, to walk, and scared? Gideon lifted his head, took a deep breath, and shut off the truck’s engine. He thought of his grandpa’s place, where there was a box full of photo albums. There were pictures of the old man in them. When the time came, he would look at them, he would memorize his grandpa’s face how it used to look, he would stare at it until everything he’d come to know over the past several months was washed away. But what about the old man’s voice? How would he remember that? Gideon shook his head. He’d never been one to videotape or record anything. His grandpa’s voice would be lost. There was no way around it.

  Gideon opened the door and stepped outside. He stood there for a moment, looking over the building, thinking how he never expected his grandpa to be there, never expected it to be a place he’d have to visit. The Elders’ residence, sure. People got old. But he couldn’t remember his grandpa ever being sick, and so the thought of him being in the hospital had never crossed his mind. He walked to the front entrance. Visitors were coming and going, people with sadness on their faces, their features loose and sunk
en, sadness in how they walked, their feet dragging across the gravel parking lot. He went inside.

  Gideon walked past the reception desk and turned down the hallway to his grandpa’s room. Innis General Hospital never felt much like a small-town hospital. In fact, he’d heard it was nicer than most of the hospitals in the city. It’d just been built in the past few years, and it was clean, bright, and comfortable. He was glad that his grandpa was there. As terrible as things had been, being where he was made things more manageable. And the staff, mostly people from the rez due to a nursing shortage, took good care of him. They’d even given him a room with a window—which, in there, was like getting the penthouse suite in a hotel—and seeing the sun was something the old man likely cherished.

  Gideon saw Roxie, a short, stocky woman from the rez, leaving a room at the end of the hallway, probably his grandpa’s. When he’d found out she was going to be his grandpa’s primary caregiver, he didn’t like the idea. He wanted the best for his grandpa, and all he knew about Roxie was that she was Gunner’s “booty call” after late shifts at the Health Centre back home. Anybody who would go to bed with Gunner wasn’t somebody Gideon wanted caring for his grandpa, even if he and Gunner had recently, more or less, patched things up. Patching things up with Gunner didn’t mean he’d spend time with him, or that he thought much of people who did. But, after Gideon saw Roxie with his grandpa, how gentle and attentive she was (and gentle wasn’t something he’d expected from somebody so husky looking), he gradually changed his mind. Now Gideon didn’t want anybody but Roxie looking after his old man, and she could sleep with whomever she damn well pleased. He greeted her warmly as she passed.

  “Hey, Roxie,” he said.

  “Hey, Gideon,” she said.

  “How’s he doing?” he said.

  She stopped walking, looked behind her, back to the room she’d just left, and kept her eyes there for a long while before turning back toward Gideon.

  “He’ll be happy you’re here,” she said.

  Gideon thanked her, and she continued on her way. He walked to the end of the hallway and turned into his grandpa’s room. The first thing he noticed was the white sheet, and how his grandpa’s skin, once a strong, earthy brown, seemed to blend in with the bedding. For a moment he thought back to the shape of Grace underneath the white sheet in Alice’s driveway, and then forced the image from his mind. When this was over, he never wanted to see another white sheet for the rest of his life. He used to have one over his futon back at his place, but after Grace died he threw it away, and since then he’d been sleeping in his clothes without anything covering him. His grandpa turned toward him and managed a weak smile, then turned back to face the window. The sun was in a perfect spot. The old man had put a dream catcher in front of the window the first night he stayed there. Its shadow now fell across his face, and it looked as though he was caught in a web. Gideon walked across the room and stood beside his grandpa’s bed. He followed the old man’s gaze out the window, where the sun hovered over the golf course.

  Seeing the course reminded him of when he was a teenager and how he’d go down to Innis with his grandpa to golf. Gideon used to be a hot-tempered golfer. He’d broken more than one golf club in his day, and some of his clubs were probably still resting in the thick bush around the course. That all changed one day after Gideon had sent an approach shot about 50 yards right of the green following a perfect drive. He slammed his club into his golf bag so hard it broke his eight-iron. While he was stewing over his shot and his broken club, his grandpa calmly walked over to him. He looked into the bush, where, somewhere, Gideon’s ball had landed.

  “Now, lookit,” he’d said. “There you are with a broken club, and you still have to find your ball wherever you hit it.”

  “So what?” Gideon said.

  “So can you change the shot you just hit?”

  “No,” Gideon said.

  “Okay then,” the old man said. “Go find your ball and hit a good one. We can’t change what’s happened, we can only control what we do next.”

  Gideon waited a long time before his grandpa turned away from the window to his direction. When the old man did, Gideon smiled at him and tried his best not to look full of pity, but he failed. Truth was, there was plenty of it to go around. He felt bad for his grandpa; how, after all the years he’d been alive and how hard he’d worked, this was the hand he’d been dealt. It was plain shitty, and there was no other way to put it. But Gideon also felt bad for himself, and he wasn’t sure if that was selfish or not, but it sure seemed that a lot of bad things had happened to him over the past year, and there weren’t a lot of good things to balance things out. Grace had been killed, whoever ran her over had never been caught, and now his grandpa was dying. But he did feel bad for smiling like he did, because his grandpa didn’t need that. Grandpa was the type of man to hate that kind of attention.

  “How you doin’?” Gideon said.

  His grandpa reached to the side of the bed and pulled out a yellow scribbler with a Bic pen stuck within the pages like a bookmark. He opened the scribbler, picked up the pen, and wrote down a few words. When he was finished, he passed the scribbler to Gideon and pointed at the words. Gideon was familiar with the routine. He’d been passed scribblers of all colours for a while now. He read the words.

  “Pack any boxes this morn?” they spelled.

  Gideon shook his head.

  “I was kind of preoccupied,” he said, and motioned to his grandpa’s legs.

  The old man grunted and grabbed the scribbler from Gideon. He aggressively wrote down more words then passed the scribbler back to his grandson.

  “I want to know the work’s done.”

  Gideon nodded.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said.

  After the exchange, a silence fell between them, and, even after the time they’d spent together with the old man sick like he was, the quiet hadn’t become less frustrating. Gideon had found ways to cope with it the best way he could; he would imagine things they might say to each other if they could talk like they used to. And so he imagined what his grandpa would say to him now.

  “How’s Alice doing?” he would ask.

  “Oh, Alice, she’s doing about as good as you could expect. You know, it’s been about seven or eight months, but sometimes it feels like yesterday,” Gideon would say.

  “And the girls?” his grandpa would say.

  “The girls, they’re managing. Sometimes I think they go on like they always did, because kids are tough. But then, sometimes, you can tell how much they miss Grace,” Gideon would say.

  “You getting work?” his grandpa would ask.

  He was always concerned that Gideon was working hard. He always expected people to work as hard as he’d worked all his life. How could they not? Working hard was all he knew.

  “I’ve been sandbaggin’, yeah,” Gideon would say.

  “That’s good, Grandson, that’s real good,” his grandpa would say.

  But his grandpa had not said anything, and the silence was still there, and it was torture. Gideon got a chair from the corner of the room and pulled it over to the side of the bed, and on its way it scraped against the floor, making the kind of nails-against-chalkboard sound that was typically unwanted but today welcomed. He wished the floor was longer and that the chair was louder. When he got to the side of his grandpa’s bed, he sat down and leaned forward against it, resting his chin against his crossed arms, now at eye level with the old man. They shared a look, and perhaps it was just the moment, but for the first time Gideon saw sadness. With so much quiet between them for so long, Gideon had seen an array of emotions from his grandpa—frustration, anger, regret, even fear—but never sadness. And of all the emotions that had painted themselves against the old man’s face, that was the most difficult to bear.

  Gideon’s body began to shake as he tried to hold back tears, but they wouldn’t stay inside. He tried to hide them, even with his trembling body, as though his grandpa was bli
nd, not speechless. He buried his head into his arms and let the tears dampen his forearms and the damn white sheets on which they rested. Then he felt a cool, thin hand rest against his, and the touch was familiar. He remembered it from the first time there was silence. Gideon was 11, and had been living with his grandpa for about a year. A violent storm had come and left their house without power. For a long time, Gideon stayed in his bedroom, hidden deep under the covers, trying to escape from flashes of lightning, the cracks of thunder, the wind pushing up against his window, howling like an angry ghost. But he couldn’t take it anymore. He got out of bed, crept across the house, went into his grandpa’s room, and sat down on the floor beside the old man’s bed. He pulled his legs into his chest, crossed his arms across his knees, and buried his head into his forearms. There was another flash of lighting and, instantly, a crack of thunder that sounded like it split the sky in two. The storm was right above them, bearing down on them. Gideon closed his eyes tighter, buried his face deeper, but his heart raced faster. Then he felt his grandpa’s hand rest against his, and the storm seemed to subside, the lightning was not as bright, nor the thunder as loud, nor the wind as strong. He felt safe.

  Gideon lifted his head to find his grandpa looking at him. He wiped the tears away and sat up straight.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  His grandpa nodded.

  “You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this,” he said.

  The old man took his hand away. He opened the scribbler, picked up his pen, and started to write a message. Gideon watched the old man’s face as he wrote. His eyes, thoughtful and intense, looked the same whether he was writing or speaking, and his brow was the slightest bit furrowed. Whenever the old man was thinking, his brow would be furrowed. Gideon smiled. His grandpa had done so much thinking in his life that even when his brow was relaxed there was a deep line between his two eyebrows that never went away, and faint lines across his forehead like roads on a map. His grandpa stopped writing and pushed the scribbler across the bed. Gideon picked it up and read the words.