Advocate

by Darren Greer

  THREE

  ■

  bernadette mcleod, or “Deanny” as I came to know her, was from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Not just the middle class neighbourhood called Mechanicsville, down by the second bridge, but the area behind Mechanicsville, near the old gravel pit called Meadow Pond Lane.

  There was more than just a lane at Meadow Pond. There were several deeply rutted dirt roads that criss-crossed each other and around which a shantytown had sprung up like a collection of toadstools after the Second World War. There were no businesses to speak of, except a rundown bottle depot at one end. The houses in between were small, unkempt structures with no paint, or paint that had faded to the colour of old crepe paper. Yards were overgrown and marred with the rusting hulks of cars and bicycles and overturned tricycles. Ragged curtains and sheets hung in windows. No one knew what, if anything, Deanny’s father did. It was assumed they lived on welfare — the worst sin, according to my grandmother, next to apostasy.

  At the end of May, my friend Cameron’s mother decided he had to “buckle down” and focus on his homework, and that I should stay away from the house while he studied. Cameron and I were only in grade six. We didn’t have final exams. But Mrs. Simms believed that work habits, especially when it came to academics, should be formed early. She was preparing Cameron for his certain future as a student in university. I was a blatant distraction.

  Cameron did not complain. He followed his parents’ direction with an almost cult-like obedience, and I was forced to wander the neighbourhood by myself each night after supper without him. My own mother did not enforce rules around homework. She barely ever asked if I had finished it. She was permissive and laissez-faire about child-rearing. If I had homework, I would do it, and if I didn’t, I would reap the consequences.

  There were no kids my age in our neighbourhood, and even if there were I suspected they would not want to play with me. I could have stayed at home, but since my uncle arrived I no longer liked being inside. I would rather be outside alone than listen to the adults in my house reminisce and ignore me entirely. If the evening was nice I would walk up Tenerife Street, then up and back across Primrose Street. Often neighbours were out clipping hedges, preparing gardens, and mowing lawns. They usually waved to me. I did not wave back. I had money in my pocket, but no desire to go to the stores on Main Street to see what I could buy. I was usually full from supper.

  On Thursday night, June 16, I decided to go to the old mill. This was the only place in town besides the Indian reserve that was off-limits to me. It was dangerous, I was told. Twenty years before, it was a chipping and lumber mill that had employed about a hundred men from the town. Then, my mother said, a newer, more efficient mill opened near Trenton, with better equipment, higher wages, and faster production. The old mill had trouble keeping men, and lost contracts to the new mill. They shut it down, sold what equipment they could, and left the rest. My grandmother never liked that the old mill was there, derelict and less than a mile and a half behind her neighbourhood. She said the town should buy the property, level it, and turn it into a park.

  So far no one had listened to her.

  There were two log ponds at the mill: one in front of the old planer mill, and the other where the lumberyard used to be. You’d have to be crazy to swim in them. They were dark and turbid, with the bark of old logs and bits of plastic and unidentifiable jetsam floating in them. You could imagine that if the light struck them just right, new life would arise — that some sickening, amoebic thing might sidle out of the water and try to absorb you.

  It was a fair barometer of my mood that this was the place I chose to go. When I came here before it was with Cameron, whose parents never forbid him from going there. They had a child-rearing policy — I had heard them expound it — of never forbidding anything, and letting Cameron find out on his own what was and what was not safe to do. In Cameron’s case this worked. He was, if anything, more physically timid than I was. He would no more have ventured into the old buildings or gone near the ponds than he would wear a dress. He was tempted by the planer mill, however, and he kept looking inside to see if he could figure out what the old equipment was for.

  Several times I suggested we go inside and look, but he always turned me down. “Those danger signs aren’t there for fun,” he said. “A kid could get seriously hurt in there.” And because I was a follower, and had no temerity of my own, I had not ventured in.

  The mill was deserted, or so I thought. I’d already checked out both ponds and the chip silo. I wasn’t aware there was anyone in the mill with me that night until I heard a voice — distinctly female, but hoarse and almost ageless. I stood at the mouth of the planer mill, staring into its dark interior and the hunched brooding shoulders of machinery shrouded in shadow and dust, trying to work up the courage to enter. I didn’t like darkness. I thought of the possibility of enormous spiders spinning webs, or snakes. I was beginning to think maybe I wouldn’t go in; that I had proved myself enough just by walking up here.

  I was startled when I heard the voice again.

  “Hey asshole,” she said, shocking me out of my deliberation. “What the fuck ya up to?”

  I spun around and was presented with the strangest looking creature I’d ever seen. She wore red and black checkered pants, a bright sky-blue top, and sneakers that may once have been white but were now almost black. Besides the colourful, clownish clothes — I was wearing clean jeans and a white button-down Chaps shirt, another reason not to go into the mill — she had the thickest mop of curly black hair I’d ever seen, and utterly filthy face and hands. Whatever Deanny had been doing before she met me, she had been doing it well. I was very particular about dirt. I didn’t like any on me. She just stood there, legs apart, hands at her sides and curled into fists — though not, I thought, threateningly — looking at me with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. I found out later she’d been watching from behind an old log, to gauge whether or not I was safe. Her head was cocked slightly to one side, and her eyes, as black as her hair, were taking me in, sizing me up, evaluating me. Finally, she said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to speak to me? You asshole.”

  I was not used to swearing. There was no swearing in our household, and none in Cameron’s. Neither of us were used to it. Unfortunately, I told Deanny this.

  She smiled. It was not a friendly smile. In no way could it be called nice. It was more carnivorous than anything. Then she let off a string that took my breath away. She achieved a certain poetic intensity, and by the time she was done I was in awe. She smiled again, and this time it was graceful and genuine. “You gonna play with me or what?”

  “I guess,” I stammered.

  “Come on then,” she said. “I haven’t got all goddamned fucking day.”

  “What are we gonna do?”

  “I got ideas,” Deanny said. “If you can keep up.”

  I didn’t know if I could. Deanny ran us all over the mill, and objections I had to any activities were quickly brushed aside in favour of her primary motivation: to do things because we could. We tried things to figure out if they were fun. Just because something was dangerous or illegal did not count as a bona fide excuse, not in Deanny’s world. She smoked, and derided me when I wouldn’t take one from her pack. I had never smoked, nor did my mother. Jeanette did, occasionally, but only outdoors. My grandmother wouldn’t allow lit cigarettes inside her home.

  We crawled our way up the conveyer belt to the mill silo, me in a half-terror of falling, until we got inside. It was full of chips and smelled of pine, urine, and old rot. Deanny pushed me down into the chips immediately, before I’d even had a chance to recover from the ordeal of the climb.

  “What did you do that for?” I asked, still lying on my back.

  “Because,” Deanny said. “I’m the king of the mountain, and you’re the dirty rascal.”

  Each time I got up, Deanny would push me down again. She was strong, an
d I was not a fighter. I could hardly believe I crawled all the way up there to be beaten by a girl.

  “Quit it,” I said. “I want to look around.”

  “Forget it,” said Deanny. “There’s nothing in here. Let’s go someplace else.”

  By the time she was done with me I was dirty and exhausted. She’d forced me into the chip silo, and the planer mill, and my clothes and face ended up as smeared with grease as hers.

  A rusted, rundown “pettybone,” or forklift, sat unclaimed in the old lumberyard. Deanny insisted we try starting it. The key was in the ignition, but the battery was dead. She wanted to smash the glass in the cab with rocks.

  “Why?” I said. “That’s destruction of property.”

  Deanny looked at me with ill-concealed contempt. “Are you that pansy-assed?” she said. “No one uses it. It’s a hunk of junk. Who cares if we break a few windows? And even if they do, who’s to say it was us?”

  And so we broke windows — on all four sides of the cab. They were thick and took many attempts to do so. There was a certain satisfaction in destroying something just for fun. I had never done anything like it before. Cameron and I had a thoughtful, logical, constructive relationship. Deanny was wild and unpredictable; there was a certain crazed anima about her I’d never experienced before. I had to admit it was exhilarating.

  After two hours, when it was starting to get dark, I told Deanny I had to go home.

  “Mama’s boy,” she said. “Have to be in before the sun goes down.”

  “Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  Deanny — filthy and glistening, her hands still balled into fists — looked at me and said, “Go the fuck home then.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  Neither of us moved.

  “So you want to meet up again tomorrow?” Deanny said first. I had forced her to, by nature of my diffident and restrained personality. I don’t know how much it cost her, if it came naturally or not. It was the only concession she made to me all evening. If she hadn’t, who knows when we would have seen each other again?

  “Where?” I said.

  “Here. Where else, fuckwad?”

  I went home happy.

  When my grandmother saw me she had a fit. “My heavens! Look at you! Your clothes are ruined! Where have you been?”

  I lied to her. I told her I’d fallen down into a slough hole by the river. She complained to my mother I was going through clothes like a common labourer and I’d ruined the shirt she had bought me for Christmas. My mother forgave me, and said it was an accident. What could she do? She told me if I was going out at night maybe I should wear older clothes so it wouldn’t matter if I got dirty. I agreed. I figured if I was going out again with Deanny I’d better wear coveralls and a hardhat. I wanted to tell my mother about the girl I had met, but something stopped me. I didn’t know anything about her or her family or where she lived or what her father did. My mother wouldn’t have cared about any of this, of course. She would just be happy I’d made a new friend.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  my grandmother could never be accused of being an aesthete; her tastes ran from the banal to the outright clichéd or hideous. But in the kitchen she came closest to operating with some kind of grace. She believed in slicing carrots because it added not only to the function of the food but its presentation. The way a food lay in a dish was just as important as how it tasted. The smell of sliced meat determined the quality of its taste. The right seasoning to a soup, and whether it was folded or stirred, could make the difference between a triumph and a disaster. The rules were both subtle and complex, and my mother and Jeanette failed miserably at mastering them. They were content to let my grandmother make most of the food, and simply eat what was allotted to them — and not without effusive praise. To my grandmother compliments could be as delicious as a delicately spiced slice of ham.

  In some ways, though, she was a typical old-fashioned cook. She had a horror of exotic spices and any dish that smacked of ethnicity. I don’t think my grandmother was as racist in her culinary habits as she was in real life. She just never learned to cook outside a certain framework, and many of the spices and exotic recipes common later on were not available when she learned to cook as a girl. She was simply out of her element when it came to them and so, as many people do when confronted by the strange or unfamiliar, she denigrated. Curry was not allowed in the house. It stank, and excreted through one’s pores. Chinese food was all right from a restaurant, but it had no place in a woman’s kitchen. And Thai? Whoever heard of cooking with coconut milk?

  As for me, I thrive on making these dishes. They have become my specialty. Whether this is natural for a man who lives in a multicultural city, or I am simply rebelling against my grandmother’s narrow habits in the kitchen, I do not know. Deanny, for one, appreciates my cooking. When she comes to Toronto I often have her over for Indian or Thai. Unlike Cameron, we have stayed in touch over the years. She is a lawyer. The fact a girl from her background would end up being a lawyer, and a good one too, is either a testament to inherent equality within the system or a paean to Deanny’s tenacity. I tend to think the latter. In high school she worked hard and earned scholarships. She attended Dalhousie and earned more. My grandmother even gave her some money for tuition when she was accepted into law school. Deanny McLeod was my grandmother’s favourite example of what a poor person can do when they “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

  Deanny likes my grandmother, now that she is an adult. She’s never understood my resentment towards her.

  “You didn’t have to live with her,” I say.

  “Your grandmother’s old,” Deanny says. “You should make allowances.”

  It is always amazing to me how Deanny has completely reinvented herself. Out of that foul-mouthed little waif I met all those years ago at the mill, she has become a smart, educated, sophisticated woman. I sometimes tell Deanny this. She shrugs.

  “We’re all two people,” she said to me once. “The people we are, and the people we want to be. It’s a matter of will and perseverance to turn one into the other.”

  “Very few people can do it,” I said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

  Deanny handles most of the pro bono work for her firm, which frees up the other lawyers for billable hours. She loves it, and would not, she says, have it any other way. The majority of her clients are the working poor. It’s no coincidence that Deanny handles cases that suit her own background. She hunted around, she told me, for a firm with a pro bono policy that pleased her.

  Occasionally, Deanny will get a case that, in accordance with the policy of her firm, helps someone living with hiv. I told her once it was strange we should both end up doing the same work.

  “Not strange,” Deanny told me. “Destined.”

  “I don’t believe in destiny,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t,” she said. “Mr. Mathematics. Mr. Logical.”

  “I just mean it’s strange how our past affects our future.”

  “Only if we let it,” Deanny said. “My past has affected my work, but it doesn’t cripple my life. I don’t allow it. When the day is done I go home to my apartment and cook dinner and watch tv.”

  I have been home less than a week when Deanny drives down from Halifax to see me. The first thing she does is go and pay her respects to my grandmother. She is in there a half hour or more. I consider going and asking what is taking her so long. My grandmother is comatose. It’s not like they can have a conversation. I am surprised to see when Deanny comes downstairs that she has been crying. She dabs the corners of her eyes with a Kleenex and takes a seat beside me on the sofa. When we were kids this is the only room we were allowed in besides my bedroom. We can sit anywhere we want in the house now, with my grandmother incapacitated. Old habits die hard.

  “So,” Deanny says. “Tell me about your life.”

  I start to tell her all about the outreach centre, and she stops me. “I said your life, not you
r work.”

  “My work is my life,” I say.

  “Sad,” said Deanny. “Still no boyfriend?”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “When are you gonna get out there and start meeting some people? Your mother is worried. She thinks you’re alone too much.”

  “Mothers worry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “Your grandmother is going to die,” Deanny said. “Soon, you know. You should be prepared.”

  “I am,” I said. “I’m home for the funeral, aren’t I?”

  “Not just about that,” Deanny said. “About other things.”

  “What other things?”

  But she enjoys being cryptic. It’s possible she knows something I don’t; she came down to visit my grandmother a lot. And my mother said that unlike me and her and even Aunt Jeanette, my grandmother always recognized Deanny.

  “I must be stored in some accessible neuron in an active part of her brain,” Deanny said of it. “She still calls me her little urchin, sometimes. Her little waif.”

  I offer to take her out to dinner, but Mom comes into the room just as I am asking and insists we have dinner at the house. She cooks, and the four of us crowd around the table in the kitchen and have roast chicken and corn on the cob. Deanny, by her very presence, elevates the mood somehow and we are all laughing and talking and entirely forgetting there is an old woman in a coma upstairs. Deanny quit smoking years ago, but my Aunt Jeanette has not. The three of us go outside to the stoop and Aunt Jeanette lights up.

  Deanny says she has to go. “I’ll be back down in a couple of days,” she says. “I want to see as much of Mrs. McNeil as I can before she goes.”

  I feel this is directed at me — a criticism, a wake-up call.

  It doesn’t work.

  Deanny can afford to be magnanimous towards my grandmother. She has been here for it all, but she is not related. She has made forgiveness an art, and I suppose if she can forgive her own father — a drunk, a reprobate, and a man who kept their entire family insolvent throughout Deanny’s childhood — before he died, she can forgive anyone.