Crabbe
Page 14
I said nothing. After a bit she calmed down again. She blew her nose.
My Father shifted unseeing eyes from the window to the tattered arm of the sofa. He began to pick at a rip in the covering. I was shocked to see his chin trembling. A single tear rolled down his broad cheek and plopped onto his lapel, unnoticed.
“What was it?” he said in a cracked whisper. “Where did I go wrong? What did I do wrong?”
He turned toward me. I had never seen my Father show grief before.
“Aw, Dad, don’t,” I pleaded. “What’s the point? There’s no use going back. Can’t we just put it behind us?”
“What’s the point? I’ll tell you what’s the point, Franklin.” His voice was rising. “I want to know. I want to know what was so goddam terrible about the way you were brought up. You had everything! Brains — the smartest kid in the school — the best of everything — home, family, a promising career, a future….”
He sort of wound himself down, like my Mother did. His anger subsided.
“Dad,” I said as gently as I could, “I was a rich, spoiled, mixed up, semi-alcoholic teenager who couldn’t find his ass with both hands.”
“You can’t blame that on us!” hissed my Mother. “And you weren’t an alcoholic.”
“I’m not blaming it on you,” I continued as calmly as I could. “Can’t you see that? I’m not blaming anything on anybody.”
“Franklin,” said my Father, “you haven’t answered my question. I have to know. I’m sorry I jumped on you a minute ago. I understand you’re not blaming us, but I have to know what went wrong. It’s driving me crazy.”
“Don’t you know, Dad? Deep down inside, don’t you know?” He turned to the window again. “I want to be taken seriously, Dad, to run my own life. I’m not invisible. All my life I’ve been locked into other people’s expectations — yours, Mom’s, my teachers’. Everybody wants me to live their lives. Where do I come in? Being wealthy, being smart, that doesn’t make it easier, Dad, it makes it harder. People expect more from you and when you don’t measure up, if you’re just a normal kid, they figure you’re letting down the side. Lots of kids at school hate me because my parents are rich and I don’t need to study. You know,” I was really rolling, but very calm, not angry. I just wanted them to understand. “If I did something well, it was considered natural because I was wealthy, but if I screwed up, then I got the credit for the screw up! And the craziest part was, all my life, people acted like I was king of the world, like I had life by the short hairs. But I was just a goddam slave.”
I looked at my parents, and I said quietly and with feeling, “Well that’s over now. My life belongs to me. If you can’t accept that…well, it doesn’t matter if you accept it or not.”
I sat back, exhausted. I had a coughing fit; my chest still hurt a bit.
My Father turned to my Mother and said, “I guess that’s that.” She nodded.
Silence again. They both studied the carpet. They must have been warned not to ask about what I was doing during my absence or where I was, because they said nothing.
After awhile, they left. As I walked back to the ward, I felt like you do when you tidy up a room that has been so messy it’s been bugging you for a long time, and you look it over. It makes you feel a little better, putting your house in some sort of order.
Crabbe’s Journal: End
I signed myself out a few days later; once I was sure the pneumonia had cleared up, and went home. I had nowhere else to go. Besides, I didn’t like the way I had left things with my parents.
We all sort of co-existed in a tense atmosphere for a few weeks. After all, there were quite a few taboos between us, a lot of old shadows from the past to dodge. But they really tried, and because they did, I did.
One thing that was hard to get used to was living and sleeping in a building. It almost drove me nuts. I felt so closed in all the time. After months of living outside with no walls between your skin and the horizon, a ceiling a few feet from your head takes getting used to. I spent long hours lying on my bed in the weak winter sunshine reliving those work-filled days of summer and early fall. It’s strange how the tang of wood smoke hanging in the air or the glint of sunlight on waves can glide into your mind almost as real as the real thing.
I had some bad moments too, remembering Mary, with no one to share the sadness. I owed her a lot. Not only my life, but the way I was trying to live it. And I knew that in a way she was part of my self, and she would be long after I stopped remembering her. My Mother brought me into this world but Mary got me ready to live in it.
Don’t think I spent that whole winter moping around, though. Not on your life. After a month or so of doing nothing, the inactivity was starting to get to me, so I took up jogging to get some exercise and stay in shape. I also answered an ad in the newspaper and got a job at a sheet metal plant across town that manufactures office equipment, shelves, and certain auto body parts. It’s a small factory. The interview for the job was interesting. The foreman, a muscular, middle-aged guy named Brighton, had a blown-up photo framed on his desk of a canoeist shooting white-water rapids. He was the canoeist. Before our interview really got rolling I asked him about the picture and we got talking about canoe trips and camping. Brighton job-shares with another man who skis, so each can take a few months off work during the .season he likes. I think I got the job because of the photo.
I sweep floors, mop up the cafeteria, clean the washrooms — fascinating stuff like that. My parents aren’t too happy about Crabbe the Scholar doing unskilled labour but I wanted money for clothes and so on. I also wanted to pay them something for room and board. It’s not a thrilling job, but the money’s good, so it’ll do for now.
As soon as spring chased the snow away I put a pack together and hitch-hiked up to the Ithaca Camp neighbourhood. It took a new battery that I bought in that little one horse town up there and a lot of coaxing (and some swearing) but I got the station wagon going. You-know, the one I hid in the bush. It coughed and sputtered at first, and it sort of waddled into town on almost flat tires, but soon it was purring along. I pumped up the tires, filled the gas tank, and drove around for awhile.
Ithaca Camp was a buzz of activity so I stayed away from there. But I did take a walk along the route I had travelled in the snowstorm. I wanted to find the pack and canoe I had abandoned but both were gone. It was a nice day so I pushed through to the lake at the beginning of the portage and spent the night there for old time’s sake. Next day I headed back to the city.
When I rolled into our driveway my parents almost croaked. They had been pretty good about badgering me with questions about where I had run off to last spring but when I turned up with the car it was too much for them.
That night, at the dinner table, I noticed something strange. My Father had removed that silly brass candelabra. So I took that as a favourable omen — and gave my parents a heavily edited version of what I’ve written in this journal. They weren’t completely satisfied with what I told them because they knew I was leaving out a lot and they asked me quite a few questions that I glossed over or avoided altogether. And there was still some bitterness, theirs and mine, cooking away under the surface of our conversation, but nobody was lecturing anybody, and for the first time I was able to talk to them without the feeling that someone else had written our lines for us.
Not long after that, an interesting thing happened at work. I started jogging on my lunch hours and discovered that Brighton, the foreman, and I have something else in common: running for fitness. He does it to keep in shape for canoeing. So on days when he isn’t too busy in the office, we run together.
You’d expect a guy like Brighton to be super-macho. But he isn’t; he’s actually a very gentle person. One day as we slogged through the grimy streets near the plant, he told me about an outfit he and his wife run in the summer. It’s called Project Adventure and it’s connected with Family Court. He and his wife take kids who have been in trouble with the law, and would
ordinarily go to some kind of reform school, on wilderness canoe trips for two or three weeks at a time. The idea is to get them away from bad influences and, more important, help them grow some self-respect and co-operation with other people. “What the psychologists call ‘social skills,’” he said.
I asked him if I could come along on one of the trips. I was dying to get back into the bush and I thought I’d like to work at something like that, where you do something good, or at least try to. Brighton says these kids don’t like themselves too much. Maybe I could do for someone what Mary did for me, on a smaller scale of course.
So, in a couple of weeks I’m going on a canoe trip with the Brightons, and they’re going to test me out and see if I can handle myself outdoors.
I’m pretty sure I can satisfy them.
Copyright by © 1986 by William Bell
First published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside in 2006
Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside
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Published in the United States by Fitzhenry & Whiteside
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bell, William, 1945–
Crabbe / William Bell.
First published: Toronto : Irwin, 1986.
eISBN, 978-1-55455-933-6, print 1-55055-051-6
I. Title.
PS8553.E4568C73 2006 jC813'.54 C2005-907261-X
U.S. Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Library of Congress Standards)
Bell, William, 1945–
Crabbe / William Bell.
Original U.S. ed: Boston : Little, Brown, 1986. [160] p. : cm.
Summary: The night before his final exams, a semi-alcoholic teenager packs up his gear and disappears into the woods. Totally unprepared for bush life, he nearly dies until he meets someone else who has her own reasons to hide.
eISBN 978-1-55455-933-6, 1-55005-051-6 (pbk.)
1. Runaways — Fiction. 2. Survival — Fiction. 3. Canoes and canoeing — Fiction. 4. Coming of age — Fiction. 5. Canada — Fiction. I. Title: Crabbe's journey. II. Title.
[Fic] dc22 PZ7.B411 87Cr 2006
Fitzhenry & Whiteside acknowledges with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknoweldge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
Design by Fortunato Design Inc., Toronto
Cover art by James Bentley