Advocate

by Darren Greer

  This optimism would be short-lived. The town, and my grandmother’s phone call, would make sure of it. Later, when my mother asked her why she had done it, she said it was because “people had a right to know. To be safe in their own yards.”

  “Safe!” my mother had cried. “What on earth is going to put them in danger?”

  My grandmother didn’t answer. We all knew what she thought, and my mother knew how ridiculous it was. We were trying to give David some sunshine and hope, and my grandmother was acting like we were bringing Typhoid Mary to town.

  “I hope you know what you’ve done,” my mother said finally. “You’ve ruined a perfectly good day for him.”

  “I can’t help it,” my grandmother said. “I’m only doing what I think is right, Caroline.”

  My grandmother was so often doing what she thought was right, only to discover days and years down the road it was wrong. But she never admitted this. One of the chief characteristics of my grandmother’s personality is she could never admit to a mistake. She could act it, by being contrite in certain situations or mellowing for a time. But she’d never admit to one directly.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  the strangest thing about Tenerife Street was its name. It was, for a hundred years, called Maple Street, until the nineteen sixties, when the town went on a spate of renaming streets and parks to make itself seem more exotic. The experiment was doomed. Advocate has never been alluring. It is practical. Prosaic, and utilitarian to the extreme. Set fifteen miles inland, it is a mill town with nothing to offer tourists except a small museum and a picnic park by the river. But the municipal council thought that by simply changing a few names, they could make it a destination.

  When it came to my grandmother’s street, it was because a man on the council had just returned from a trip to the Canary Islands and thought “Tenerife” sounded suitably romantic. He proposed the name change at one of their meetings, and residents of the street were given a chance to speak on the subject.

  Both my grandmother and grandfather spoke against. Yes, Maple Street was a misnomer. There were no maples — it was lined with oak and chestnut trees. But my grandmother did not think this justified naming her street after some city on some island she had ever heard of. “You might as well name it German Street. Or Egypt Avenue,” she said. “All of them make about as much sense.”

  Despite the impassioned pleas, the name was changed, though for years my grandmother refused to acknowledge it. Eventually, though, because of mailing addresses and giving directions, she was forced to capitulate. She still complained. “Naming a street after a foreign town makes about as much sense as naming a pig after a barn.” She called it Maple Street in her conversations with old friends, and she never forgave the family of the man who first proposed changing it. Several times Grandnan’s friends suggested she run for council, but she always turned them down. She was content with criticizing rather than affecting any change. It was safer that way.

  The rest of us never thought of Tenerife Street as anything else, even though my mother, Jeanette, and David were old enough to mark the change. Jeanette liked it. She said though it didn’t add any spice, at least it wasn’t xenophobic. “Nigeria Street would have been better, I think.”

  Uncle David had been to the actual Tenerife. He told my mother and Jeanette this as we walked on the afternoon of my birthday.

  Deanny was silent, but kept stealing looks at my uncle, as if surprised such a rational, semi-normal voice could come out of so sick of a man. Because we were wrapped up in my uncle’s story it took us a few minutes to notice something was not quite right. My mother saw it first.

  “It’s quiet as a ghost town,” she said. Indeed, whereas on any other fine Saturday men and women would be on their lawns and in their gardens, there was nothing. The lawns were immaculate and empty — as devoid of life as the tundra. No children. No husbands puttering and waving. Nobody in windows. No dogs. No cats.

  We all noticed it.

  “Seems like there’s something good on tv,” said my uncle.

  “Or something bad outside,” said my aunt.

  My uncle reacted — his head moved slightly back and to the side, as if trying to see Jeanette — but then he stopped and focused forward. He must have known what my aunt was thinking. He must have been thinking it himself. His shoulders didn’t slump, though. There was no sign of capitulation or defeat.

  “Who cares?” my mother said. “Let’s just enjoy our walk.”

  But Jeanette wasn’t listening. “What do they think? They’re gonna get it just by being outside?”

  “That’s exactly what they think,” said my uncle. “As hard as it is to believe.”

  “Damn ignorance,” said my mother. “I wish they’d all go to hell!”

  My mother rarely said things like this, and it took us all by surprise. She was to the left of my uncle, and didn’t see what I saw. He reached out to take her hand, then thought better of it, and pulled it quickly back into his lap.

  “Don’t worry about it, Caroline,” he said. “It’s not their fault. They just don’t know.”

  “But getting it from the air? Can they be that stupid?”

  Deanny and I were both confused by this sudden turn in the conversation. I kept silent, but Deanny spoke up. “Get what?” she said. “Your cooties?”

  Our trip that day could have been ruined — would have, I think — if it wasn’t for Deanny. My uncle broke into great peals of convulsive laughter. He laughed so hard he had to lean forward to recover. He began coughing. Jeanette stopped pushing the wheelchair and she and mother grew concerned. He waved them away. “Cooties?” he said to Deanny. “That’s what you call this?”

  Deanny just shrugged. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Deanny,” he said, and though I was behind him I could sense the smile on his face. “It’s cooties. A bad set, I’m afraid. But I like that word the best of all I’ve heard. Thank you for telling me.”

  “No prob,” she said. “And if anyone says anything to you about them, I’ll take care of them, Dave. Leave it to me.”

  “I’m sure you will, Deanny,” my Uncle David said. “I don’t doubt that for a second.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  tenerife street runs straight for six blocks and then curves off before it ends on Fartham Avenue. Our plan was to go to Fartham and then see how my uncle felt. We no longer discussed the absence of neighbours, or Tenerife.

  Aunt Jeanette and my mother and David started the remember game, which they often did, about various incidents from their childhood. They recalled the time when they were little more than toddlers, and David had got hold of a pair of scissors and cut all their hair. Unfortunately this happened the day before my grandmother had scheduled a family portrait to be taken, and she had to take them all to the hairdressers to have it fixed.

  “They did the best they could,” Aunt Jeanette said, “but we still looked awful. In those photographs we look like Larry, Curly, and Moe.” My mother and uncle laughed. Deanny didn’t laugh, but she did start to skip alongside my uncle in the wheelchair. This was the only feminine trait she had, and one I did not dare make fun of.

  When we came around the corner, Deanny’s skip died, as did the laughter. There, in front of John Collins’ house, not twenty yards from us, was gathered a small knot of people. Most of them men, and all of them from the neighbourhood. The two women with them stood behind, and when we turned the corner one of them pointed. The men, who had been talking together, turned to face us. So surprised were we by this impromptu gathering of people on the sidewalk that we stopped.

  “What’s going on?” said Jeanette. “A fire?”

  Her supposition was understandable. Usually gatherings like this only took place on the street when there was something wrong in one of the houses. We assumed there was something amiss in John Collins’ house, but before we could ask, Collins himself stepped forward. He was a short, bald, stocky man of about fifty who had lived in the neig
hbourhood fifteen years — still a new neighbour, in my grandmother’s eyes. “Hello!” he called out, even though we were close enough to hear if he talked normally.

  “Hello,” called my Aunt Jeanette back. “What’s wrong? Is there a fire?”

  Collins smiled, but it seemed forced. My Aunt Jeanette must have thought so too, for she just stood there, her head cocked to one side, puzzled.

  “No fire,” said John. “I was wondering if I could talk to one of you for a minute?”

  My aunt shrugged, and began to push my uncle forward. He, for his part, said nothing. I think he knew what this was about long before Jeanette and my mother figured it out.

  Collins raised his hand. “Not all of you,” he said. “Just you Jeanette, if you don’t mind. Please leave David behind.”

  The first clue. My aunt looked at my mother.

  “Go on,” my mother said. “Go see what they want.”

  “You come with me,” Aunt Jeanette said.

  It was the strangest thing. We had known these people for years. They had been to my grandmother’s house and we to theirs. They had eaten our food, sat beside us at church, driven past us a thousand times and waved. And now suddenly they felt, if not dangerous, then at least worthy of caution. I knew nothing of lynch mobs then. If I had, I would have realized this is what they felt like. Not that they were going to hang my uncle from a tree. Not exactly. But when my mother and Jeanette said they would be right back and went over to talk, and the crowd gathered close around them, I felt a sudden, seemingly irrational fear in the pit of my stomach. Surely I had nothing to fear from people I knew as well as this, but the sensation persisted.

  I started to step forward, but my uncle reached out and grabbed my arm to stop me. I forgot at that moment I was not supposed to touch him, and I guess he forgot he was not supposed to touch me.

  “Easy Jacob,” he said. “Let’s just see what all of this is about.”

  It started calmly enough. At first my mother and Jeanette were just talking. No one touched them. There were no reassuring hands laid on unreasoning shoulders. Then Jeanette, who was fully obscured by those surrounding her, could be heard over the low voices of the others. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she said. I could not hear my mother, but I could see her. Her expression was one of supreme annoyance melding to anger. I had seen her wear it only when in the throes on an unwinnable argument with my grandmother. Someone was standing beside her, and I could tell, far from being angry with her, they were only trying to reason with her. But my mother wouldn’t listen.

  The scene being played out was obvious, even to me. Jeanette and my mother were getting a talking to for bringing my uncle out into the street. They told my mother and Jeanette all kinds of nonsense. That aids was transmitted through the air, and through mosquitoes, and even that it crawled over grass. That bringing my uncle out in daylight and in fresh air put the entire neighbourhood at risk. That no one knew anything about this disease, and that our family had no right, no right at all, to play with the lives of others.

  “It’s a judgment from God,” said one.

  My aunt screamed, “If it was a judgment from God, you’d all have it!”

  “Oh Christ,” my uncle moaned from his chair.

  Eventually my mother stormed back over to us. She was enraged. “You’ll never guess …” she began, but my uncle interrupted her.

  “I know,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

  “Go home!” cried my mother. “How long do you think it’ll be before they ask us to move! How can we let them get away with this?”

  “I’m tired,” said Uncle David. “I don’t have the energy or the will to fight them, Caroline. Let’s just leave.”

  Jeanette gave another screech and started walking towards us. The knot of people had drawn even closer together now, more unified. She turned halfway and shouted back at them. “I don’t know how you live with yourselves! You’re superstitious, uneducated, mindless fools! Every single one of you.”

  She too tried to tell my uncle what had happened, and once more he asked to be taken home instead.

  “But if we do that,” Jeanette said, and I could see she was nearly in tears, “they win.”

  “It’s not about winning or losing,” Uncle David said. He was not near tears. He was too sick, and too used to such displays, to be much moved by them. “It’s just about maintaining a little dignity. And the only way I can do that now is to get back to bed. I’m very tired.”

  There was nothing more anyone could say. They agreed to go back.

  No one had noticed Deanny. She had been standing beside my uncle’s chair, clenching and unclenching her fists, watching the scene play out before her. Of all of us, I think now, she was the most affected by it. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because of her family, of having to deal with little knots of opposition all her life. Or perhaps she had some empathy for my uncle. She knew what it was like to have cooties, and to have no one want to play with you because of them.

  The men and women on the other side of invisible line were talking together and looking furtively over at us. Deanny stood still, staring violently back at them. Then she took two steps forward and let out a stream of invective so powerful that it took my breath away. Deanny was always a master at swearing, but nothing I had seen in her to date matched this. She called them everything she could think of, including some words and phrases I’m sure had never been heard on Tenerife Street. Before she was halfway done, she had the mesmerized attention of every man and woman in the opposing camp. My mother, Jeanette, and my uncle tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She kept shouting until the band of people, under such an onslaught, began to disperse.

  Under any other circumstances she would never have gotten away with it. They would have spoken back. Taken her in hand. Tried to teach her a lesson. A dozen other clichés on how to discipline a child. But they didn’t.

  When Deanny was done, there wasn’t a single person left. They had all gone back to their homes. She cursed the last one in the door. After she finished, she turned to us. Her expression was vague. No one knew what to say to her. She had done what we could not. She had chased them away, and because they had gone without so much as a word of protest, she had proven to us, and to them, that they knew they were wrong.

  My aunt only told her to come along. My mother put a hand on her shoulder. My uncle asked her mildly where she had learned the word cooties.

  SIX

  ■

  when i was a boy, my favourite festival in Advocate was the Orange Day parade. It was held each year to celebrate the victory of William of Orange over James II in the Battle of Boyne in 1690.

  As a boy I did not know the etiology.

  I only knew in our town the day was considered special, as much of a holiday as Easter or Thanksgiving. On the Catholic side of the river, booths were set up on Main Street to serve food and host games of chance and a band was hired to play. The same happened on the Protestant side, on Orange Street — also named after the indefatigable Protestant pretender to the crown — parallel to the river. Visitors to the town for the festival would go back and forth across the Main Street Bridge to partake of the festivities on both sides.

  Aunt Jeanette and practically everyone else on the Catholic side went to the Protestant celebration as well, but my grandmother kept her feet planted firmly on our side of the river. Catholics did not celebrate Orange Day. Orange was Protestant. What the Catholics did celebrate was Lemon Day.

  Lemon Day and Orange Day drew visitors to our town. No one had ever heard of a town so neatly divided along religious lines that one mocked the rituals and festivals of the other, hundreds of years after such antipathy was considered unusual. No one had ever heard of a Lemon Day parade.

  When it was first held, a hundred years ago, in sardonic answer to those marching across the river, it was in deadly earnest. The Catholics were both taunting and professing; they wanted to let the Protestants know they weren’t the only ones proud of thei
r faith. The lemons were an afterthought, to show how silly it was to march down a street on a hot summer day in honour of a man named after a tropical fruit. There was never any violence on parade day in Advocate, though. Perhaps this was owing to the geographical separation by the river.

  In the 1980s, when I was old enough to witness, the divide was more a joke than anything. A large painted papier-mâché lemon, the size of a kitchen table, was drawn on a wooden cart down Main Street with lines of people walking behind bearing fresh lemons in their hands. On the Protestant side they bore oranges, signs of their faith, and pictures of William III. Occasionally someone on the Catholic side would carry a picture of Pope John Paul II.

  Now, I’m told, the parades are dying out. Religious schism is no longer the curiosity it once was. Either it is taken very seriously, as it is in the Middle East, or no one pays any attention at all. The latter is the case in Advocate. Fewer and fewer people march in the parades each year, and fewer tourists come to see them.

  But when I was boy, it was still an event. Both parades were an accepted part of Advocate culture — and an important one too. They drew hundreds, from around the province and even the Boston States, who wanted to see such a display of religious antagonism, even if it was now only for show. Thus the booths and the food and the games. Local shopkeepers made a lot of money on that day, and it brought much needed revenue for the town.

  I was four before I was allowed to march in the parade, with my mother and Aunt Jeanette and my grandmother. The lemon my grandmother gave me was too big for my hand and I kept dropping it. I was fascinated by the papier-mâché lemon drawn on the wagon by old Colin Meizner. I thought it was real — the great grandmother to the itty-bitty baby lemons we held in our hands. I thought when the parade was over, we would cut it and each get a piece. I didn’t realize that lemons are sour; my only experience with them was lemonade, which was sweet.