by Darren Greer
“Don’t talk that way,” my mother said. “No one here is dying.”
The silence was awkward, and prolonged. My mother and Jeanette seemed determined to keep up this pretense of hope. They fussed over him, and talked to him, and tried to keep up a facade of normality. They thought they were helping him, but even I, at twelve and not skilled in the ways of the world, could see they were not. My uncle was defeated, and he wanted to talk about that defeat. Perhaps needed to. He knew the reality, even if his sisters didn’t, and he wanted to stop pretending and just give in to it. But he was unable to, in the face of his sisters’ denial. It made for an atmosphere even more depressing than the situation would normally be.
I asked if I could be excused. I had said nothing except hello to my uncle since I came into the room. When I got up to leave he smiled and thanked me for visiting.
My grandmother accosted me at the entrance to my room. “What are they doing in there?” she said.
“Just talking,” I said.
She looked me up and down anxiously. “You didn’t touch him, did you?”
“No Grandnan,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“Good,” said my grandmother. “I’m making some cocoa. Would you like some?”
I declined. It was the dead of summer, and though it was nine o’clock at night, it was still warm enough in the house that I suspected I would have trouble sleeping even with the fan in my room.
My grandmother only made cocoa when she was upset about something. She was waiting, I suspected, for my aunt and my mother to come out of David’s room so she could talk about the events of the day. The posse at the door. The sickness in town. The cancellation of the parade. My grandmother had an iron constitution. Nothing ever phased her. She met adversity with strength, conflict with resolve, contradiction with bullheadedness. But tonight I noticed how pale and strained she looked, her face lined with care and wrinkles, her hair grey and wispy. She looked old to me then, of immeasurable years. I felt, for the first time since my uncle had come home, and maybe for the first time in my life, slightly sorry for her. It must have seemed everyone was against her, in the house and in the town. If grandfather had been alive he would have taken her side. Together the two of them would have dealt with this. But she was only one old woman, with two full-grown and headstrong daughters and a son who was dying.
I said nothing to her.
There was nothing to say.
My grandmother went downstairs to make her cocoa and I went into my room to get ready for bed.
▪ ▪ ▪
the one visitor my uncle had, and who came regularly to the house despite the warnings of the town, was Henry Hennsey. I don’t remember him entering my grandmother’s house before then. I would have recalled that, for even after he started visiting a lot, and my grandmother no longer stood on ceremony with him, his presence still seemed strange to me. I wondered if Henry had been the only black man to ever see the inside of my grandmother’s house. Likely he was, for as I’ve said there were very few black people in Advocate over the years.
My grandmother did not complain. She was glad of any visitor in those days when no one came to see her. She fussed over him. She offered him tea and cakes and told him there was no need to remove his shoes. The rest of us were still shouted at if we happened to take two steps across the marble tiles without taking off our shoes and placing them on the mat.
Henry was more than civil with my grandmother, and he usually accepted the tea and sweets, and sat down at the table in the kitchen to talk with her before going to see my uncle. But it was my uncle Henry came to see, and his visits with my grandmother were kept short. I don’t know what Uncle David and Henry talked about. My mother never said, if she ever knew. Knowing Henry and my uncle, it would not be inanities. Maybe they talked about literature. Maybe they talked about War and Peace.
More likely, they talked about the town. I could almost hear my uncle complaining about his sisters’ well-meaning, but frustrating, efforts to shield him from what the townspeople were up to. I could almost hear Henry cautioning my uncle against judgment, defending my mother and Aunt Jeanette for their good intentions, while at the same time giving my uncle a blow-by-blow of what was really going on in Advocate. It was Henry Hennsey who told my uncle, when he came to visit early Saturday morning, what my Aunt Jeanette had planned. She had called him the night before and asked if he would march in the new parade with her and anyone else she could convince to come along.
From the beginning, mother disagreed with Jeanette’s approach. She did not doubt her dedication to my uncle. She did not question her intentions. But marches, of which Jeanette was very fond, were not an effective way, in her opinion, to deal with the problem at hand. “What good will it accomplish?” she argued. “A couple of people with signs and placards annoying them. I just don’t see the point.”
“There’s plenty of point,” said my aunt. “Someone has to start telling the truth. To speak up. We have to make ourselves heard.”
My mother was suspicious this was just another cause for my aunt. “David probably won’t like it,” she said. “You know how he feels about a fuss.”
David did not like it. When Henry told him what Aunt Jeanette had planned, he called her into his room with them. I stood outside the door in the hallway, out of sight, able to hear clearly.
“What’s all this nonsense,” said my uncle, “about you having a march?”
“It’s a protest parade,” said Aunt Jeanette. “In your honour.”
“I don’t want anything in my honour, Jeanette,” said Uncle David. “I didn’t come home to make this kind of trouble.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Jeanette. “But we’ve got to stand up to these people, David. We can’t let them walk all over us.”
“Yes we can,” David said. “Who cares what they think? Let them fly to the moon and back if it makes them happy.”
“I’m marching,” said Jeanette. “I’ll keep your name out of it.”
“It’s silly,” said David. “What do you think Henry?”
Henry didn’t answer right away. Then, finally, he said, “I agree they could use a good swift kick in the pants. Though I’m not sure this is the way to go about it.”
“It’s one way,” said my aunt. “You should come, David. We’ll wheel you. Don’t you want to be a part of this?”
“Not really,” he said. “I’m a part of it enough already.”
“But don’t you want to show them who it is they’re doing this to? Don’t you want to stand up for yourself?”
“Jeanette,” said my uncle, not unkindly, “I can’t stand up for myself. I can’t go anywhere without that damn walker or that damn wheelchair. I can barely breathe, for Christ’s sake. And you want me to take part in some kind of an aids march, or whatever you want to call it?”
It was the first time, to my knowledge, the word had been spoken in our house. It had been thought and deliberated over no end, but no one had had the guts to say it. Even our detractors in town and on the school board, in the little ad hoc committees of denial and prejudice, had not said it to us directly, though it must have been bandied around endlessly behind closed doors.
The use of the forbidden word did not deter my aunt. Instead she embraced it. “That’s what we’ll call it. The aids march! Perhaps we’ll hold it annually.”
My uncle did something unexpected then. He laughed. It was a dry, weak laugh, more of a quick bark than anything, but I was certain it was a sign of merriment. He was making fun of my aunt. “Go ahead,” he said. “Have your little march, if it makes you feel better. It won’t change anything.”
“It might,” said Jeanette. “Henry? Are you still coming?”
“I suppose,” said Henry. “Though I’m inclined to agree with your brother it won’t change any minds. People think what they want to think, and neither dynamite nor thunderstorms can change that.”
“We’ll see,” said Jeanette. “David? You’ll think about coming wit
h us? You could use the air.”
“No. What time are you going?”
“We start at two. From here on Tenerife Street, then down Main Street. I’ll get Jacob to help me make up the signs.”
At the mention of my name I scooted off into my room. Jeanette had already laid out pieces of white Bristol board and markers on my bed. I was bewildered by what we were supposed to do with them. After a few minutes, I went downstairs and called Deanny. She knew about the Lemon Day parade being cancelled. She was disappointed because she wanted to carry her sign that read suck a lemon.
I told her she could still get to carry a sign.
“Really?” she said.
“Really. Jeanette’s having a protest march. For my uncle.”
“I’ll be right over,” Deanny said.
She hadn’t asked what the march was about, specifically, or what were the events that spawned it. Like Jeanette, she was spoiling for a good fight.
▪ ▪ ▪
in all the excitement, neither my aunt nor grandmother had thought to ask what had become of the parade on the Protestant side of the river. We’d heard only of the Lemon parade being cancelled. We all assumed the Orange one was too.
Around noon we heard of the roadblocks being set up at either entrance to the town diplomatically informing tourists of the sickness, the fact that its cause was thus far unknown, and that travel into Advocate was ill-advised. This did not stop the organizers of the Orange Day parade from holding theirs. It was not a joke parade organized in satirical response. It was a legitimate socio-religious event. They did not inform my grandmother of this, though she thought they should have, and the radio station in Trenton carried no news of it. While Jeanette was busy with Deanny downstairs in the living room making up protest signs on bristol board, the participants in the parade on the other side of the river were marshalling.
Dr. Fred told us no one had died overnight at the hospital. A few people had been released, including Rebecca, the milkman’s daughter. To test the theory of the contaminated water main, the experts from Halifax were analyzing samples from the water tower that stands on giant iron stilts overlooking the town just beyond Mechanicsville and from the aquifer on the protestant side.
In a few hours, they would prove Dr. Fred right. The cause of the outbreak of illness was E. coli, not aids. But my mother and Jeanette would refrain from saying “I told you so.” The mood of the town did not change at all. It may have been E. coli this time, they said, but next time it could be aids. It was still a crime that my uncle be allowed to die in the town, among them. It was still possible his disease would spread.
As months and years passed, following my uncle’s death, the town did grow ashamed of its behaviour. Some justified it by claiming that they just didn’t know. “We were all a little crazy then,” Mayor Thompson said. “A little fearful. You can’t blame us for that, can you?”
My mother and Jeanette could, and would. A long time would pass before they resumed their pre-Uncle David social positions in town. Jeanette at one point talked of moving, but my mother did not want to uproot me from school and Jeanette wouldn’t leave without my mother. I blame the fact that neither my mother or Jeanette ever married on those days, a mute form of protest that went on for their rest of their lives, though they both might have been unaware of it.
As soon as it was all over, my grandmother blended back into the town as if nothing had happened. They welcomed her gratefully. It was understood that Jeanette and my mother did not matter. As long as my grandmother was able to put the summer of 1984 behind her, all was well. At home, we never spoke about that year.
I went back to school, and though I was still teased mercilessly up to grade eleven, I was never teased about Uncle David. It was as if the entire town had swum through the river of Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness. By the time I had left Advocate to study in Toronto, and had been in that city for a number of years, enough time had passed. Even my mother and Jeanette had seemed to soften somewhat, if not entirely. They had become involved in the life of the town again.
I was the only one who couldn’t let it go. It is no wonder I became a counsellor, an advocate for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. My mother was touched, she said, that I would choose a career in memory of my uncle. I don’t think she realized how damaged by those times I really am.
▪ ▪ ▪
my mother had no intention of going on any aids march with Jeanette. She told her so at breakfast and again, after lunch, when Jeanette had made all the signs and was waiting for two o’clock, when they could begin. Jeanette would not say who, if anyone, she had convinced to come with us.
“A few select people,” she said. “Who aren’t blind and stupid and have their heads up their asses.”
“Language!” my grandmother said. “This isn’t a saloon!”
“No one uses the word saloon anymore, Mother,” Jeanette said. “It’s tavern or bar.”
“Whatever,” said my grandmother. “No swearing in this house. And I should forbid this marching business too. Caroline is right. It’s ridiculous.”
“I never said it was ridiculous,” said my mother. “Just ineffectual.”
“We have to stand together,” Jeanette said. “If I go and you don’t the town will think we’re divided. It won’t look good.”
“I don’t care how it looks,” said my mother. “I plan on going to the next town council meeting and giving them a piece of my mind. I think that will work better.”
“Why don’t you do that?” said my grandmother. She could understand going to town council meetings and giving them a piece of her mind. She’d done it often enough. And though it was also a public display, it was a lot less public than a parade down the middle of town.
But Jeanette was determined. She would go it alone if she had to, she said. But she never thought her own sister would shy away from a little controversy.
“I’m not shying away from anything,” said my mother. “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine. You can get Deanny and Jacob to march with you.”
“I plan on it,” said Jeanette. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
That might have been the end of it, if my mother hadn’t received a phone call a half hour later from Mr. Byrd, the man who owned the diner.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Byrd said. He told my mother he’d had the same posse at his door. They said they suspected the sickness came from the diner, and they were willing to pass a town ordinance to shut him down unless he removed my mother and Jeanette permanently from the payroll.
“They can’t do that,” my mother said. “Only the health department can shut you down.”
“They can,” said Mr. Byrd. “Under an emergency town ordinance. And they say they’ll do it unless I let you go. I can fight them, but that will take time. Until then, if I want to keep the place open, I’ll have to do as they ask.”
“But you don’t believe them?” said my mother. “You don’t believe Jeanette and I could actually make anyone sick?”
Mr. Byrd answered, but too slowly for my mother. She could tell by the delay he did believe it, or was at least entertaining the possibility. She hung up. She had been stunned into silence.
She went upstairs and told my aunt, who was in Uncle David’s bedroom, what had happened. Deanny and I were in the room with them. Jeanette had made us bring the bristol board signs up to show him.
“I’m sorry,” David said.
My mother told my uncle not to apologize. It wasn’t his fault.
“It is,” he said. “I should never have come home.”
“Thank God you did,” said Jeanette.
In the end, my mother agreed to march in the parade. She said we would accomplish little. We’d be a ragtag band of dissenters lost amidst the cries and howls of the mob. But any stand is better than no stand. Any action is better than no action.
I sometimes wish my mother could see the aids marches that take place in Toronto. Tens of thousands strong with b
anners and pride and inexhaustible determination. She would be proud, I think, that we may have had the first one in the country. Everything large begins as something small; the most mighty rivers start off as a trickling stream.
▪ ▪ ▪
i don’t think Jeanette, more than my mother, could ever entirely forgive my grandmother for not marching in the parade with us that day. It was entirely Jeanette’s enterprise, her brainchild, and she thought my grandmother should at least make an effort. My grandmother thought Jeanette was being “silly as a goose” and in some ways I agreed with her. I’m not sure what Jeanette expected to accomplish. She knew the minds of those in town and how they felt about things. Surely she didn’t expect to change them. To my mother she said she just wanted to “rub their noses in it,” which was originally the source of my mother’s complaint. When you rub someone’s nose in it, she said, your hands tend to get dirty, too.
Jeanette had waited a long time for a real cause which she could get behind, and she felt she had found it in my Uncle David. I don’t know how many people she called that day, people she felt would be sympathetic to our cause and willing to stand up for it. She must have known she would be largely unsuccessful. Even those who agreed with her were unlikely to want to march with placards through the streets and stir up trouble. Most begged off, and in the end only three other people showed up: Henry Hennsey, a young man Jeanette knew from the Indian reserve, and to our utter and complete surprise, Deacon Harry. By the time he arrived at the door, my grandmother had already retreated to her room. She was not a retreater by nature, but she was overwhelmed by the small, seething cauldron of civil disobedience in her living room.