Advocate

by Darren Greer

  My grandmother didn’t like Byron. She called him a busybody and a gossip — a sterling case of the pot and the kettle — and she said he was from the “Other McNeils,” Scottish Protestants of the United Church who had been living in town almost as long as the Catholics. It bothered my grandmother that Byron would lead the Lemon Day parade and not the Orange, as he was not Catholic. It diluted, she said, the spiritual message, and turned the whole event into a fiasco.

  No one listened to her.

  Whatever spiritual significance my grandmother drew from the parades had long been bled out of the rest of us. You could be any religion you wanted, short of a devil worshipper, and take part. My grandmother bewailed this, but couldn’t change it. The best she could do was carry a placard with a religious message, and hope someone noticed. Neither could she do anything about Byron and his silly costumes and heretical beliefs at the head of the parade. She could make sure we all took part and marched in a group and spent the majority of our money on the Catholic side.

  My mother always gave me ten dollars to spend on games of chance and hotdogs and potato chips, and she let me run freely about the streets once the parade was over. Early in August Deanny and I did extra work in the yard so my mother would have a reason to top up her pockets, too. Deanny didn’t like to take anything she did not earn. My mother had learned to create projects for Deanny to balance the disparity of cash in our pockets.

  On Thursday my grandmother began planning where we would march — front, middle, or end — and she managed to inveigle her way into an auxiliary meeting and take over the running of one of the booths. She wasn’t being informed of proper times and locations of meetings, and she had to keep her ear pretty close to the ground to find out, but once she was there, no one had the guts to say anything to her. My mother thought perhaps things were starting to settle down. No one besides my uncle had gotten sick. Whatever fears they had that aids was floating magically around in the air had perhaps started to abate. Jeanette noticed the lines in front of her at the grocery store were getting longer again, and people were saying hello to her on the street. Mr. Byrd had even discussed giving my mother and Jeanette their jobs back.

  “They’ve finally come to their senses,” my mother said. “Thank goodness.”

  “For now,” said Aunt Jeanette. “I still don’t understand what came over them in the first place.”

  My grandmother, who had never acknowledged the crisis to begin with, didn’t say anything about it. She was only happy the auxiliary had allowed her to run the quilting booth on parade day.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  if it seemed the rest of the town settled down about the issue of my uncle, Cameron and his family did not. I did not receive a call from him, nor an invitation to visit. When I encountered him on the street, he would cross to the other side and ignore me. He didn’t do it haughtily, or with arrogance. He seemed almost ashamed of himself, and refused at all times to meet my eye. He acted as if I didn’t exist, probably because it would be easier for him if I didn’t.

  My mother said she didn’t know what garbage Mr. and Mrs. Simms were feeding their son, but for smart people they were being unbelievably stupid. Although she didn’t know it, it pained me to hear her run Cameron and his family down. Before I met Deanny, they were like a second family to me. I spent nights and ate meals at their house. Went on family days to the museums in Halifax with them. Twice had gone camping in Digby and had even met Cameron’s aunt and his grandmother. Mr. Simms helped me with homework, and talked to me seriously about my future as if I was his son. He was, though often distant and remote, as close to a father as I had ever had. I missed him as much as Cameron.

  Mrs. Simms I didn’t miss as much. She was harsh, and too stringent for my taste. I was certain it was she and not Mr. Simms who had forbid Cameron from playing with me. “Just for a time,” she might have said. “Until all this aids business is over with.”

  But the “aids business” would never be over with. Not with people like Mrs. Simms in the world, who were both smart and ignorant at the same time. It is no crime to be either, but an unpardonable sin to be both.

  2

  aunt jeanette wanted to take my uncle in the wheelchair out into the Lemon Day parade. “It would likely be his last,” she said. “He should be able to enjoy the day as much as anyone else.”

  My mother was set against it. “Look at what had happened when we took him for a walk,” she said. “The street shut up tighter than a drum! If we took him into the parade there would be sheer panic.”

  This was years before the aids marches began, when we pinned on our red ribbons and took to the streets in defiance and protest. It occurs to me now that Jeanette, ever the rebel, had, by wanting my uncle to be wheeled into the fray, suggested the first aids march years before anyone else thought of it.

  She had a history with marches, having organized many.

  I remember her march of one on the Protestant side of the river, against the Americans. It was during the Gulf of Sidra incident in Libya in July of 1981, when everyone thought it would end up in a war. Her sign read Sidra Is a Sin: No Violence! A few people honked their horns. A few more told her to get out of the way.

  “Have you asked David about this?” said my mother. “Perhaps he doesn’t want to be treated as a signpost or a cause? Maybe he just wants to rest.”

  I rarely heard my mother get angry at Jeanette, but over this she did. And it turned out Jeanette had not asked my uncle what he wanted. She only assumed David was as incensed over the situation as she was.

  He wasn’t.

  “I’ve always hated those parades,” he said. “Even as a boy, I never understood them. What’s the point of going out there to march for two different Gods? I’d rather stay home and read.”

  When Jeanette asked who would stay home with him, as we all planned on marching in the parade, he seemed to get angry. “I’m not a child,” he said from his bed. “Or an invalid. Yet. I can take care of myself for a few hours.”

  Neither my mother nor Jeanette said anything, but they looked worried. When he was in bed it was possible to fool yourself into thinking — aside from the purple splotches and the body mass wasting — he was okay. But when he got out of bed and used the walker, he looked so fragile and moved so slowly he made us worry for him. It looked as if he wouldn’t be able to get up on his own if he fell. My mother and Jeanette made him promise, if they brought to him everything he needed before they left, that he would not get up.

  David agreed, sighing. But when one of them volunteered to stay at home with him — after all, they said, it was only a parade — he wouldn’t hear of it. “If I disrupt this family any more than I have,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to live with it. Go. Have a good time. I’ll be fine.”

  By then, my uncle had admitted to my mother and aunt he had lied about his job in Toronto, proving my grandmother’s instinct correct. He had not quit. He had been fired in early 1984. It was done subtly, on some pretext or another. Somehow, they had discovered the nature of his illness.

  It did not occur to me then that practically every plan my uncle laid had collapsed. Forced to leave his job. Coming home to find his own place and die in peace, only to be stuck in his mother’s house with his sisters looking after him, which was the last thing he wanted. Yet I never once during this period saw my uncle cry, or fall into an unshakeable despair. He just accepted. He negotiated each day as it came and if he thought about the future and what it might hold he didn’t talk about it.

  My respect for him growing, I began to slip into his room when my mother wasn’t around. I was still not allowed in there, but I remembered Dr. Fred’s words that I was in no danger, and Uncle David didn’t seem to think I was either. I sat near his bed, but not too close, on a chair, while Uncle David told me of his travels. He talked about riding an elephant in India and swimming with a school of tiger sharks in Thailand. He inspired in me a desire to travel to these places, though I never would because of my work
. I talked to him about the town. He seemed interested in a child’s secret places. The mill. The river. The museum. Once I brought my tv to his room and hooked up my Atari and taught him to play video games. He was amazed.

  “This is the way the world is going, Jacob,” he said. “Into this incredibly detailed, stunningly visual electronic world. One day we will live here, and the real world, the world of flesh and blood, will be left behind.”

  That my uncle could think of the crude graphics of an Atari console as “stunningly visual” strikes me as quaint and antiquated now. But it didn’t then. If he had lived long enough to see the Internet, and the changes it has brought upon us, he might have realized, as early as that, he had been right.

  My uncle also had something besides intelligence. I saw in my uncle, despite his fragile condition and the deteriorating circumstances of his life, something I saw in none of the adults around me and in my town, not even my Aunt Jeanette and my mother. It was genuine integrity. I’ve since learned how rare a quality that is. When I encounter it now it is not at the board meetings of our agency or the round tables of politicians and government bureaucrats. I see it mostly among the clients, who have earned it through hardship and suffering. It is no wonder I ended up doing what I do. I was attracted to this quality in men at the impossibly young age of twelve, even if I could not articulate it.

  I began to spend more and more time with my uncle when the others weren’t around. He seemed always glad to see me, no matter how tired he was. A couple of times, when my mother walked by and saw me in there, she looked like she might step in and object. But when she saw my uncle chatting, perhaps she decided whatever comfort and fleeting happiness he could wrest by having me beside his bed was worth whatever risk there may have been to me.

  My grandmother never caught me, though. If she had, she would have had no compunction about chasing me out. My grandmother’s ignorance persisted long beyond the point where it should have dissipated in the face of fact. The same would be true for Advocate. In the larger world, however, this fear and ignorance would melt away after a few years, once more was learned about aids — its means of transmission, its causes, its treatments.

  A few short years seems nothing in the span of a lifetime, but for us, who lived in the middle of it — in the blitz, so to speak — it seemed an eternity. My uncle would be long dead before attitudes began to change. He lived in the most suspicious, superstitious and reactionary years of the disease.

  My grandmother was the personification of these attitudes. She led the trials, even though they were against her only son.

  It is for this, more than anything else, that I cannot forgive her.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  our milkman’s name was Charlie. I never knew his last name. I only knew he was one of the last people to keep a job antiquated by modern grocery and convenience stores. He bought his milk from wholesalers in Trenton and delivered to people like my grandmother, who preferred her milk in glass bottles.

  There are no milkmen now.

  It is a dead trade, and even when it was available some people would rather pick up their milk at the store than pay the few cents extra it cost for delivery. My grandmother was not one of these. Milk from a bottle, she said, tasted better. The wax-lined interior of a carton spoiled the taste. She ordered three bottles a week, some of which she used for baking, and the rest I drank.

  I was a lover of milk.

  I loved the taste, the luscious, silky feel of it in my throat. I often drank it straight from the bottle though I never let my grandmother catch me. If she did, she’d make me drink the entire thing and then take the cost out of my allowance. She had methods for boys like me, she said. If I continued to drink so much I would turn into a cow. My mother thought it was healthy. Vitamin A and Vitamin D. She offered to buy extra bottles so I could drink freely, but my grandmother, perversely, refused. “What on earth would Charlie think if I bought five bottles a week? That we were taking baths in it?”

  I had to be content with what milk I could steal from the fridge when my grandmother wasn’t looking. I offered Deanny some, but she hated the stuff.

  “You’ll get rickets,” I said. “Everyone has to drink milk.”

  But Deanny refused. She preferred water. She knew nothing about the milkman, because he didn’t deliver to her house. No one on Meadow Pond Lane had milk delivered. Deanny said her mother liked milk in her coffee, but couldn’t afford it, so used whitener instead. Then she asked why, if Charlie delivered milk, they didn’t deliver pop, too?

  “They do,” I told her. “From the Poppe Shop.”

  Deanny had never heard of the Poppe Shop. So my mother ordered a case each of root beer and cream soda for Deanny to try. She loved it. “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “This stuff will give you rickets!”

  I don’t think Deanny actually knew what rickets was. My grandmother knew, and agreed with Deanny. “All that sugar and carbonate isn’t good for anyone,” she said, “let alone a growing girl. You’ll stunt your growth.”

  Deanny didn’t care. She drank it all in two days.

  My grandmother was horrified. “You’ll be peeing red all week.”

  “I’ll be seeing red all week,” Deanny told me later, “if your grandmother doesn’t leave me alone.”

  That my grandmother was starting to take an interest in Deanny was encouraging, and a sign her mood had begun to improve. She stopped cleaning the house, and began shopping for sweaters for us to wear to the parade that were exactly the right shade of yellow. The colours we had been wearing before were mismatched, she said, and not truly lemon at all, but amber and maize. “We should all coordinate and wear the proper lemon. There are more shades of yellow than any other colour, and it wouldn’t hurt us to do things right for a change.”

  “Sweaters?” said my mother. “It’s August, for God’s sakes!”

  “Makes no never mind. A little discomfort is worth the spectacle.”

  My grandmother had this habit of occasionally getting stuck on some incidental in our lives. One year she decided, irrationally and without notice, the ornaments on the Christmas tree should not be factory-made glass balls, like everyone else had, but home-made, so we spent most of December stringing popcorn on thread and building angels and snowmen out of pipe cleaners. Another time, she decided the house should be photographed more, and in every season, and in every light, and from every angle, for a special album to be kept for future generations. It was a useless enthusiasm, and Jeanette complained it was like living with Leni Riefenstahl. “I’m sure the house will be here for future generations to see if they want to,” she said.

  “Unless it burns down,” said my grandmother. “Or one of you, after I’m dead, decides to paint the eves and shutters some godawful hippy colour like that dreadful purple you always wear, Jeanette. I want it preserved as it is now, as your grandfather left it.”

  This time, my mother and Jeanette didn’t mind the lemon obsession. It meant my grandmother was no longer moping about the house. Uncle David was still sick and, as Dr. Fred pointed out, dying. But now at least he could do it in peace.

  3

  years later, my grandmother would say that what happened next was the devil playing tricks. I do not believe in the devil, unless it is the small mean part that exists inside every one of us. My grandmother was right, however. The next thing did appear, from the outside at least, to be a nasty intervention — some kind of dark cosmic joke. Charlie the milkman delivered early in the morning, before dawn. I never met him, though I sometimes woke and heard him pull up to the curb, heard the clink and rattle of bottles as he removed them from his truck. It never occurred to me that during all that was going on with the town, and their fear of us, Charlie didn’t stop delivering. Either he didn’t know what was going on at our house, or he didn’t care

  When his eleven-year-old daughter first got sick, the day before the Lemon parade, it was uncertain if Charlie made the phantom connection.

 
The rest of the town did.

  That Friday morning, when we got up, there was no milk. My grandmother was annoyed. I had drunk the last of it the night before and she wanted some for her tea. She wondered aloud what had had happened to Charlie, who had not missed a delivery for a decade. She sent Jeanette down to the grocery store for some, and called Charlie’s wife, who told her Rebecca, their daughter, was sick.

  “What kind of sick?” my grandmother asked.

  “We don’t know,” said Mrs. Charlie. “She woke up with fever, and she threw up. She acts like she got the flu, but it was so bad Charlie took her to the hospital. We’re scared half to death.”

  My grandmother hung up the phone thoughtfully. She told my mother about the conversation, and looked nervous about it. There was no milk for my cereal, so I was forced to have butter and toast. My grandmother always burned her toast, and it was dry and hard to eat without milk to wash it down.

  My mother said she was sure it was nothing, and that Rebecca would be fine.

  My grandmother didn’t look so certain. “You don’t think …” she said.

  “Think what?” said my mother.

  “Your brother,” said my grandmother. “Perhaps what he has …” She stared ahead, hoping my mother would take up the line of her reasoning.

  My mother refused. “Don’t tell me you believe that load of nonsense everyone else is taking on about. You know what Dr. Fred told us.”