by Ed Kavanagh
Then he told me to go in and get Mom. She was washing up the breakfast dishes and didn’t want to come.
“What’s he up to now?” she said. “What does he want?”
“It’s sort of a . . . surprise,” I said, and then I beat it for a couple of hours.
It wasn’t long after that when she died. I don’t know why she died. People never tell kids anything. She just got sick and died like people do. Like the old man did. Anyway, I think she would have liked the Red Merc. Once the old man said that red had been her favourite colour. You take most women, half the time all they cares about a car is the colour.
We had the Red Merc all summer. Whenever he was home, the old man would take us for drives or take us fishing. Once when we were fishing, all of a sudden, right out of the blue, he told me to always keep all my money in my pocket. I thought it was a strange thing to say, but I figured I’d take him up on it. “Okay,” I said, “how about giving me a buck so I can start practising?” The old man just laughed. He always used to laugh.
And then he bought a hat—one of those ones with a feather stuck in it, like the guys in the gangster movies. He never used to wear a hat, not even in the winter. But the only time he wore the hat was when he was driving. He’d get into the car, turn on the ignition, and put on his hat. When he was getting out, he’d turn off the ignition and take the hat off. Even when it was raining he’d take it off. Aunt Joan thought he was nuts, and she asked him about it one morning when we were driving to mass. The old man said he just happened to like wearing a hat when he was driving.
“You never used to before,” she said.
“Yes, but this is my car,” the old man said.
Aunt Joan turned to me and laughed. “Now, Tommy, you explain that line of reasoning to me and I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Sometimes I think your father hasn’t got both oars in the water.” The old man just grinned at her, tipped his hat, and shoved the Red Merc into fourth.
Things went pretty good. Every now and then the old man would go away for a while, but the day always came when the Red Merc would turn into the driveway. The old man would take off his hat and get out. Lots of times he looked awfully tired.
Winter came. One day he says, “Tommy, if there’s ever a real bad storm, don’t you and Petey try to walk home in it. You just call me and I’ll come and get you, okay?” You could tell it made him feel good to know he could come and get us. Made me feel good, too—even though it was no big deal for us to walk home in a storm.
A few weeks later we had the first snowstorm of the year. It was wicked. They gave us a half holiday. We bundled up and got set to walk home the way we always did. But Petey says, “Didn’t the old man say we should call him?” I’d sort of forgotten about it. I went into the office to use the phone.
“Dad said to call him and he’ll come get us in the car,” I told Mrs. Dickerson, the school secretary.
“Oh, good for you,” she said.
I called and he said he’d come. We went outside and waited. The other kids headed home or got picked up by their parents. Breen’s old man pulled up in the green Chev.
“You need a lift up the road?” he called.
“No, that’s okay. Dad’s coming.”
“All right,” he said, and they drove off.
Mrs. Dickerson came over to us. “He’s not here yet?”
“Oh, he’s coming,” Petey said.
“Well, go inside and wait,” she said. “You’ll freeze to death out here.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’re all right.”
Finally me and Petey were the only ones left in the schoolyard. The snow swirled around us so we could hardly see. Petey looked like a little snowman standing next to me. I didn’t know where the old man was. I thought maybe the car had broke down.
And then I saw him coming through the snow. On foot. He was wearing his old grey coat with the collar turned up. But no scarf or hat or gloves. He was covered with snow; the rims of his glasses looked all white instead of black. His gaiters were open and the buckles were flapping around—exactly the way he was always telling us not to wear ours. We walked over to meet him.
“Jeez, Pop, where’s the car?” Petey said. “You break down?”
“No,” the old man said. “I didn’t break down.”
I knew all along but I asked anyway. “Then where is she?”
The old man took off his glasses and wiped the snow from the lenses with his bare finger. “I sold her,” he said. “Sold her this morning. I had to, Tommy,” he said quickly. “She was dyin’, b’y. She was on the way out. Fella made me a good offer and . . . and I let her go.”
We went through the school gates and headed up the road. The old man reached down and took Petey’s bookbag.
“You must be frozen,” I said. The old man didn’t say anything. “Listen, Pop, why did you come all the way down here if you didn’t have the car no more? We could’ve walked home on our own. We’ve done it tons of times.”
The old man looked at me through his snowy glasses. “Well, you called,” he said. “You called, didn’t you? I just thought I better come get you.”
“That’s crazy,” Petey said. He was walking a little ahead of us. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard. What did you sell the car for? There wasn’t nothin’ wrong with that car.”
The old man didn’t say anything. He didn’t say anything all the way home.
You know, I sort of thought it was crazy, too. But now whenever someone asks me what I remember about him, that’s what comes to mind. Not us spinnin’ down the road in the Red Merc, but the old man walking through the snow to get us, with no car, no hat, no gloves, no nothin’. Him carrying Petey’s bookbag up the road, his hands and ears gone all red with the cold.
Wind
Sunday would mark the end of her first week, and the nagging feeling persisted. It wasn’t homesickness. Not yet. Homesickness would come—Jeannie was sure of that—but for now things were still too new. In her September phone call, the line popping and breaking across the miles, she assured her parents that she was fine.
“What’s it like?” her mother asked. “Have you seen the Parliament Buildings?”
Before she could answer, her uncle Joe broke in on the party line. “Jeannie,” he said, his raspy voice meshing with the long distance crackle, “seen Trudeau yet?” Joe. It was just like him to think that as soon as you pitched down in Ottawa you’d see the prime minister speeding along Bank Street in his sports car, or sipping a latte at some sidewalk café. Not that Joe would have the first clue what a latte was. Not that Jeannie herself had known before Wednesday. But, yes, she had seen the Parliament Buildings; and the Rideau Canal—hard to miss since her residence windows opened right onto it; and the no-traffic shopping area, where people promenaded down the flagstoned streets with nothing to watch out for except the beeches and maples snug in their concrete boxes. And there seemed to be a lot of readers: everywhere people were splayed out under trees or on park benches, their noses nuzzling some newspaper or book or magazine. Nobody read in Bay de Vent—well, hardly anyone. And if she read outdoors in Bay de Vent she made sure it was just some cheap paperback, because the wind would probably rip it right out of her hands. But all the while Jeannie was exploring those foreign Ottawa streets, taking it all in, the nagging feeling was like some tune she just couldn’t shake.
Jeannie had completed a year at Memorial in St. John’s, but Ottawa was her first big city. And while she knew it wasn’t Boston or Montreal or Paris, after St. John’s and the mere 250 souls of Bay de Vent, she found Ottawa huge and intimidating: the insistent hum of traffic, the clattering jack hammers, the soaring glass towers. But it also had its soft side: the oak-lined residential streets with people lounging on their verandas; the languid September air, heavy with the fragrance of flowers; the spicy scent of foreign foods floating through the Byward Market.
All week it had been sunny and hot, the sky clear except for the faintest trace of horsetail c
louds, their wispy strands dissolving miles and miles above her. And then there were the rabbits and squirrels prancing around the residence buildings or scampering along the canal, surprising her with their chatter. She’d found it odd that no one took any notice. Even now she still paused to stare. She thought of Bobby Mercer back home. If he were here, he’d have his .22 up to his shoulder in about two seconds. Of course she’d never seen a squirrel or a chipmunk before. And these rabbits weren’t like the ones she used to snare with her father in the woods behind Bay de Vent. He’d told her once that those weren’t rabbits at all, really: hares, those were. These Canadian rabbits reminded her of the plush toys you might win on a ticket spin at the St. John’s Regatta. No, she couldn’t picture these hanging in the woodshed, frozen, with dead marble eyes. These were like the ones you might buy in a fancy pet store and install in a paper-lined cage and christen with some precious Beatrix Potter name.
Jeannie’s roommate, Camille, was a little like those rabbits—dark, soft, petite. And she smiled with brown, moist, animal eyes. But, no, perhaps not like a rabbit. Her dancer’s grace put Jeannie in mind of the gazelles she’d seen in a National Geographic film at school. And then Jeannie remembered the poem by Yeats. She had discovered early that one of the benefits of being the daughter of two teachers was that there were books in the house, a library that contained almost as many volumes as the paltry school library. True, there was a lot of dull stuff—textbooks and religious books and the like—but if you rooted around enough, blew enough dust from the wrinkled, water-stained covers, there were treasures. Like the Yeats book. She liked Yeats even though she didn’t understand most of the poems. But she liked their sounds, the word pictures he painted. And some were easy enough, just simple love poems. Now she thought of the opening lines of one of the difficult poems she couldn’t remember the name of:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
beautiful, one a gazelle.
Jeannie had never worn a kimono, and God knew she wasn’t beautiful or would ever be compared to a gazelle, but she wouldn’t have been surprised if Camille had a kimono, or something as exotic, tucked away in her small dresser. And she certainly had that gazelle delicacy. She was from a small town in northern Quebec—it didn’t sound much bigger than Bay de Vent—but nevertheless she radiated French style and elegance: chic. Everything, Jeannie knew, that she herself lacked.
Two roommates could not have been more different. Jeannie was tall and big-boned, her pleasant face overly sculpted, her nose and lips prominent, her greenish eyes, in particular, smaller than she would have liked. Why couldn’t God have just reversed things and given her bigger eyes and a smaller nose? She had asked her father about that one evening when they were setting snares, but he just shrugged and said God had more important things to worry about than the size of someone’s nose. Well, at least her teeth, despite a stubborn yellow veneer, were straight enough. She thought of her uncles on her mother’s side—now there was a dentist’s nightmare. If you mined all five of their mouths you might come up with just enough teeth to put together one broken, nicotine-stained set. No, good looks did not run in her family, and even at eighteen Jeannie knew that her face would not age well, that it would wrinkle and run with crevasses like her grandmother’s, like her mother’s and aunts’ were already beginning to do. Her hair was another problem. Why was it that everything about her was thick and heavy except for her hair—the one thing she actually wanted to be that way? It took ages to fix, and then the wind would immediately unravel all her work. Baby-fine her hair was, and she envied her cousins’ thick curls that swelled and breathed in the wind but never seriously rebelled, while her own locks constantly whipped and snapped like a flag.
Jeannie had complained about the wind in Bay de Vent ever since she was five when, one morning, it had picked her up and nearly tossed her over the wharf. Bay de Vent’s wind was ever-present: sometimes a low, dark whine, pitching flat or sharp according to its whim; sometimes a heavy, sonorous weight, laced with biting rain or snow; sometimes a thin banshee shriek, laden with the cries of centuries of drowned sailors.
But the wind didn’t seem to bother Uncle Joe. Joe was the silly uncle: the one whose stories you always had to take with a couple of pounds of salt. She remembered once when her mother was washing up the supper dishes, her father closeted away in his office marking exams, her ten-year-old self hugging her knees at her uncle’s feet, listening to Joe’s stories—“old lies” her mother called them.
“Wind,” he said. “Don’t be talkin’. Sure this is nudding, the wind around here. This is nudding but a tickle.”
“Some tickle,” Jeannie said. “It nearly tickled me right over the wharf that time.”
“She’s right, you know,” her mother said. “Sure the French crowd who came here first didn’t call it Bay de Calm, now, did they? And remember what Mom used to say? ‘God knows Bay de Vent is no paradise, but it’s a grand place to dry a bit o’ clothes.’”
Joe fixed his sister with a grin. “Go on. Sure one time I was fishin’ down on the Labrador. Now that’s where you gets wind. We had to put in to a cove for two days before we got clear of it. One morning I climbed this hill—you know, just for a change of scenery—and I hiked all the way up to the top . . .”
Jeannie waited.
“And windy? My girl . . .”
Jeannie nodded.
“Yes, I tell you, my duck—that was some wind . . .”
Jeannie parked her fist beneath her chin and stared at her uncle.
“What’s wrong with you?” Joe said, scowling. “Don’t you want to know how windy it was?”
Jeannie sighed. “How windy, Uncle Joe?”
Joe leaned forward and rubbed the end of his pocked nose. “My dear, it was so windy it blew away all my sins.” He leaned back and winked at her.
“G’way,” Jeannie said.
Jeannie’s mother snorted. “That must have been some gale, Joe—to blow way all your sins. Hurricane, was it?”
“You can say what you like,” Joe said. “But it blew ’em all away. Mortal and venial, as the Catholics say. You know, I felt right light after that . . . calm—like I was gonna float up to heaven.”
Jeannie’s mother plunged her hands into the soapy water and glanced at Joe over her shoulder. “So what are you tellin’ us, Joe? That now you got a clean, spotless soul? Like Our Lord’s? I find that hard to believe.”
Joe leaned back in his chair. “Naw,” he said, disgusted. “No such luck. When I was comin’ down the hill the wind turned around and blew ’em all back again.”
“Oh, that was the way of it,” Jeannie’s mother said.
“Yes. I wasn’t clean for more than a couple of minutes.” Joe scratched his head. “But you know the real funny thing about that?”
“What?” Jeannie said.
“I think someone else’s sins were blowin’ around up there too, and a few of ’em must’ve got mixed in with mine.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because now there’s times when I feels right guilty about things I don’t even remember doin’!”
Jeannie’s mother rolled her eyes. “Well, don’t you worry, Joe,” she said. “I imagine you’ll get around to doin’ them things one of these days. And then you’ll be all that much further ahead in the guilt department.”
Jeannie had been thrilled to discover that her roommate was from Quebec.
“I was hoping to pick up some French while I was here,” she said to Camille, dumping the contents of her suitcase on her small bed. “I’m going to do an elective in French. I always liked French in school—not that I ever had a teacher who had the first clue about it. And the name of our town is French—but nobody pronounces it that way. Everyone says Bay de Vant—you know, with a hard ‘T’. ”
But Camille had pouted—had Jeannie ever seen anyone other than a child actually pout?
&
nbsp; “But that’s why I came here,” Camille said. “To improve my English. I don’t want to speak French. I want to be emeshed.”
“Immersed,” Jeannie said.
Camille looked at her triumphantly. “Exactly.” And then she’d tilted her head, appraising Jeannie, her glistening black hair swaying. Jeannie could see her delicate breastbones above her red silk top. “But you don’t speak like the other English girls. You have an accent.”
“I do?”
“Yes.”
“Well . . . so do you.”
“But I’m from Quebec—it’s to be expected.” And Jeannie thought, This beautiful French girl has just told me, sounding for all the world like Jean Béliveau being interviewed on Hockey Night in Canada, that I have an accent? But she supposed she did. It was something she was becoming more aware of. The woman at the cashier’s desk where she’d paid the first installment on her fall fees had mentioned it, asked where she was from. And so had Katie, the chatty girl from Manitoba two doors down, with whom she sometimes sat in the dining hall, and who had taken her to the Black Cat Café where she’d had her first latte. And she remembered her second day when she’d been walking by the canal. An older lady had smiled and said, “Nice day.” Jeannie had smiled back and said, “Yes, the finest kind. A lovely, soft day.” The lady had wrinkled her brow and peered at Jeannie. “Soft,” she’d said. “How pretty. Are you Irish, dear?”
That evening in Katie’s room Jeannie brought up the subject.
“Why are you so worried?” Katie asked, puffing her pillows and stretching out on her rumpled bed. “I think you sound nice—different. Kind of like music. Anyway, there’s a million accents around campus. People from all over the world. Even I’ve got an accent. Too bad it’s a boring Canadian one.”