by Nōnen Títi
Mum sent over a bunch of clothes and other stuff, including the gumboots I now put on to step into the dam with. We’re well into the term break and so far Stuart, Jerome and I have cleaned the cellar, sorted the tool shed, painted the attic, turned over the compost heap, weeded the herb garden and polished the leathers in the barn, and today we’re assigned to mucking out the dam since it’s finally dry and sunny out. Apart from that I’m on daily kitchen duty while Stuart is to cut and carry fire wood and Jerome does the cleaning. Rowan has no jobs. He goes to the shops with Grandpa Will sometimes and he spends the afternoons with Uncle Charl.
We haven’t had any more lectures, but that one evening was enough. We talk, the three of us, because there’s no justifying animosity like ours in the face of what our grandparents suffered. I told Jerome I’m sorry for being so miserable when he was staying with us and he said sorry for the worms, so I guess we’re okay together.
I catch up with the boys near the water’s edge. They’re already busy dredging, using a long hook and pitchfork. I get the rake to pull the muck up from the edge onto the bank and from there into the wheelbarrow.
“I hate this job,” Stuart says after a while.
“It smells?”
“No, I keep imagining there’ll be a body at the end of my fork.”
I catch a look from Jerome and, on impulse, take the sludge that still sits on my rake and fling it onto Stuart’s back. It throws him off-balance and he lands face-first in the water. When he scrambles back up his expression is one of utter surprise.
“I figured if you’re so desperate to fish up a body, it might as well be your own since there aren’t any others.”
I’m not sure if I expect him to get angry or take it as a joke, but I don’t expect him to burst into tears, yet that’s what he does. I look to Jerome for help. He sits down beside Stuart on the bank. “That’s good,” he says.
Not sure what to do next, I stand around until Grandpa Will startles me, having come up behind me to see what’s going on. He must have been watching us and seen what I did. I haven’t got any illusions left about keeping things from my grandparents so I tell him what caused this.
“Maybe that’s good,” he says. “Go get him a blanket from the barn. It’s too cold.”
Panting from the run, I’m already inside the barn before I notice Uncle Charl sitting there. He stares at me like he did that night, like I caught him at something.
“Just getting a blanket, Stuart fell in the water.”
He waves his hand to where the horse blankets are.
It’s almost dinnertime before I remember this. Looking out the window while peeling the potatoes for Granannie’s stew, I see my uncle coming out of the barn. He wasn’t in there all this time, so he must have gone back. Why? I know the answer in an instant: He’d been holding a bottle, like he was that night. He’s secretly drinking. “Shit.”
“What happened?” Granannie asks.
“Nothing. I almost dropped it.”
Where was Rowan? What about Grandpa Will; does he know? Does Jerome? A hundred questions go through my mind while I watch him come toward the house. I listen to his footsteps going up the stairs, slow and heavy. What should I do? Tell someone. But what if it’s okay? After all, he’s not a patient anymore – but then, why do it in secret?
“Mariette, we’ll never have dinner if you don’t get on with it.”
“Sorry.”
I watch my uncle during the meal. He jokes around with Rowan but he hardly eats. “What is it with you going swimming every time you’re near that dam?” he asks Stuart. His attempt at humour fails as Stuart barely responds, on the verge of getting emotional again. “What did I say wrong now?” Uncle Charl asks.
Grandpa Will tells him it has to do with “the kids’ problem” and to not worry about it. Uncle Charl looks at me then, and I know he wonders if I’ve seen him. I take my dilemma to bed that night.
“Is Uncle Charl totally better now, Granannie?”
“That’s what the doctor says. It’ll take him a while before he’s ready for a new job and it will be a year before he gets off the medication, which means he can’t drive a car, but until then he’ll stay here with the boys.”
I don’t know anything about mental diseases, but it can’t be right to combine those pills with whatever he’s drinking, yet I can’t bring myself to tell Granannie why I asked. I wouldn’t want to accuse him wrongfully.
After a few more days of watching him my doubts get worse. He stays in the barn longer every day, cutting his time with Rowan short. What if he has another fit and beats up one of his kids because I didn’t tell anyone? He only pretends to be cheerful – or rather, he is cheerful in the afternoon and evening, but in the morning I see in his eyes what he really feels.
“I think you should spend more time with your dad, Jerome.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he’s lonely.”
“Dad’s fine; he’s with Rowan.”
“I didn’t mean right now, but he goes to the barn and drinks, alone. I’ve seen him.”
“You’re lying. I talk to him every day. He tells me everything.”
“He’s drinking, Jerome.”
“He can’t be. He never goes out. He can’t be buying any or Grandpa Will would know.”
“He is anyway.”
“We would smell it if he was.”
Jerome is right about that. “Talk to him.”
“You’re just jealous because I have Dad and Stuart now.”
“Jesus, Jerome, this has nothing to do with you or Stuart. It has to do with your dad being depressed. I can feel that he is and if you won’t talk to him, I’ll go to Grandpa Will.”
“If you go ruining it all for me now, I’ll never talk to you again,” Jerome says and walks away.
Great. I don’t want to ruin it for him this time, but I have to do something.
On Sunday I hide at the back of the barn when I see Uncle Charl and Rowan return from their walk. I mean to watch to make sure he isn’t working on something after all, like he tells Rowan he is, before I involve someone. The barn has plenty of hiding spaces but I have a good view from behind the saddles. I crouch down when I hear Rowan’s running footsteps take off, followed by Uncle Charl coming into the barn. He sits down on the stool near the old sideboard, never even looking around. From inside it he pulls a bottle. This isn’t wine; it’s a clear liquid in a bottle with a screw top. He takes a slug and carefully unfolds a piece of paper he’s taken from his pocket.
“Isn’t it the truth?” he says, as if asking someone about its contents, but there’s no one there. Maybe he sees imaginary people. For a while he reads it, turns it over, then reads it again, taking the occasional sip. He’s certainly not working, but he seems to have little interest in drinking. Maybe he just needs some time alone.
Nothing much happens for so long that I’m starting to feel stiff. Besides, I’m expected in the kitchen soon, but I can’t get to the door without being seen.
Uncle Charl stands up to get something from one of the drawers. I expect a pen or more paper, but it’s a small container: his tablets. Why would he keep them in here?
The answer hits me before he’s swallowed the second one. All the hairs on my skin stand up. I have to stop him! But he’ll kill me. This is wrong.
In the meantime he’s eaten four of his pills and washed them away with close to a quarter of the liquid. All his concentration is on that now, and I catch myself staring. Oh God, why now? What can I do? I need help; it isn’t fair, not to Jerome. Five pills down.
One of the bits still has a leather lead attached. I manage to silently unhook it but my hands are shaking. Six. Once it’s free I knock over a stack of metal boxes on purpose. He jumps up and turns to face me. “You asshole!” I shout at him. “If you want to kill yourself pick a time and place away from your kids at least.”
He just stares at me. I shout again, repeating myself just for the noise, I think. I need someone t
o hear me, but the house is too far. When he suddenly moves my heart jumps, but he’s going for his pills and empties the entire container into his mouth.
“No!” I swing the leather at him as he must have done Jerome. I intend to hit him the same way. I shout and yell as I go. I’m not sure why. When the lead hits his arm it knocks the paper he was holding out of his hands. It floats on the air a moment and then swoops down and disappears under the sideboard. As he tries to reach for it he drops the bottle. The look in his eyes when he turns to me…
I scream and raise the lead as protection, but I need something louder. The nearest heavy item is an old-fashioned clothes iron. I take it and hurl it through the window, which shatters and the iron hits something with a bang.
Uncle Charl is on the floor, scrambling for the pieces of bottle. I have a fair idea what he’ll do with those, so I start kicking at him. I jump away when he grabs for my leg. Then help arrives. Grandpa Will pulls me backward, takes the lead, and puts his foot on top of Uncle Charl’s arm before looking at me.
“He ate all the pills and that,” I answer, pointing at the bottle.
“Stuart, get that glass out of here. Rowan, go tell your gran to call an ambulance. Jerome, I need the rubber hose from the tool shed door, the red one. Mariette, go get a tub of water, clean water.”
I hesitate. Uncle Charl is strong and a lot younger than his father. “I didn’t think-”
“Hurry up, get water.”
“Can’t I help here first?”
“Now, Mariette.”
He drags his son away from the disaster area with one hand and his foot. I catch myself watching until Stuart pushes me in the back. I step aside to let him through. A moment later Grandpa Will slaps the back of my head with his free hand. “Get me water, this instant.”
The injustice of that hits my eyes first. Through the mist I notice the piece of paper sticking out from under the sideboard, so I pick it up and go. He kicked me out; he didn’t even ask what happened. Jerome will kill me. He’ll think it’s my fault. I told him my being here would ruin his visit. Damn them all. Stuart comes running by me. “Where’s the water?”
I curse. He runs into the house and comes back out before I reach it, carrying a bucket. I go to the bedroom and sit in Granannie’s armchair. They’re all helping, but nobody needs me. He can die for all I care. Serves him right.
I do hear the car pull up eventually, many voices, the car leaving again, then silence.
JEROME
I leave the bathroom because I just can’t throw up. I don’t want to go to my room, but I also don’t want to go to the kitchen where the others are. I don’t want to ever see him again; weak, stupid, effing drunk. Just when it was all so good.
I can’t even cry. I’d like to break things – break Mariette’s neck for mentioning it. If she hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have said anything to him this morning and he wouldn’t… I don’t want to be a burden again. I don’t want to beg for help.
I sense the person behind me just before her arms wrap around me. I know it’s Granannie, so I stop myself pulling loose in case she falls. She’s shorter than me by quite a bit, which makes this a very awkward embrace. “Come with me,” she says.
I let her take me into the living room. The little wood fire casts a glow over the carpet. Grandpa Will’s armchair sits on one side in front of it, Granannie’s on the other. Further back is a third one and under the window is the sofa, which is where we sit down.
“Tell me what’s going through your head. It doesn’t have to be sensible. Any word will do, whatever you can think of,” Granannie says.
I can only think of how everything has fallen apart and I can’t do this again. I shouldn’t have told him that I knew he was drinking again, that I wanted him to quit or I’d go back to Uncle Gerard’s, that he should do it for Rowan if nothing else, that we’d help him. We’d live here and he wouldn’t have any responsibility.
“I bet there are a thousand words a minute going through your mind, but you’re not saying any of them,” Granannie says.
She has her arm behind my back and her fingers tap on my side, just hard enough so it doesn’t tickle. Mariette always ruins everything. If she’d not tried to stop him… Stupid excuses, always. He was like this before Nikos. Why blame it all on him – why not on her, the deserter? Why couldn’t she have taken us along? That’s what mothers are supposed to do; they’re not supposed to leave it up to me.
“You’re not alone, Jerome. This is a setback, not the loss of all hope. We’ll start over, at the beginning,” Granannie says.
We’ve started over way too often already.
Granannie suddenly pulls at the arm I’m leaning on so I slip sideways against her. “There, that’s better,” she says.
I let her stroke my hair and indulge for a bit in the safety of her arms. “Why didn’t Grandpa Will stop him drinking all this time? Couldn’t he have put Dad to work, like he makes us?”
“He did, Jerome. He had Charl work until you kids came. He wanted to give you all some time together.”
“But that medic said he must have been saving his pills for weeks already. Why didn’t we notice? I should have smelled the drink. I always did at home. It was the first thing I’d notice.”
“Did Charl ever hit any of you when he was drunk before, Jerome?”
“Never.”
“Did he ever try to take his life before?”
“No, he’d just sit in silence all night and I’d talk to him – forever. Until he fell asleep, and then I’d get Rowan to school and make dinner so Dad could get sober. After two days he’d go back to work and I thought my talking had helped. I believed his promises until the next time.”
“So you’ve been playing parent to Charl and Rowan, for how long?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t always. He stopped two years ago and he was good until last Christmas.”
“What happened at Christmas?”
“He started again.”
“Why did you never call us, Jerome? We’re family. What made you believe you had to solve this alone if Charl still had his father?”
“I didn’t want anybody to know. I didn’t want to lose him.” She kisses me.
“Why didn’t I see it, Granannie? Why did Mariette see it but not me?”
“People have a habit of only seeing the things they want to see, Jerome. You couldn’t see because you were so desperate for it to be right this time, because you wanted to be here. Maybe Will and I also wanted Charl to be better than he really was.”
“I told Mariette she was lying. I didn’t want to hear.”
“She should have come to us, not to you, and she shouldn’t have confronted him alone.”
“Sometimes I think… if he can’t get over it anyway… I think…”
“You think it might be better he was actually dead, so you could relax?” She kisses me again and puts both arms around my middle. She won’t let me get out of this embrace. “Forget about being the oldest for a bit. I promise you, you won’t ever have to go back to living with only Rowan and Charl again. From now on there will be others to take care of all of you.”
Her words make my eyes burn. “Here.” She hands me a tissue. “It’s okay to cry, you know. Stuart does it too, sometimes.”
“I’m just so tired, Granannie. I’m so sick of being old enough to manage. That’s what Dad says, but when was he ever old enough? That’s why I liked Uncle Gerard and Aunt Karen’s. I was a kid there. If only Mariette wasn’t so ungrateful to them. She has no idea how lucky she is.”
“I know, sweetie. She is spoiled, in a way, like your dad. I don’t think Charl would have been like this if he hadn’t been the youngest. We let him get away with too much and you’re now suffering for that, but it’s over, you hear?”
That makes the tears I didn’t want to show come out anyway. She waits until I can talk again. “What about Dad? Will he ever get better?”
“Maybe it isn’t a question of being ill. Maybe it�
�s a question of growing up. Remember what I said to Karen about people being naturally responsible, naturally born adults, and how they get belittled in the wrong circumstances? In your case it went the other way. You were expected to play the adult way too early. For Charl, the opposite happened. He was never expected to be anything but a child until suddenly you came along and he had to be a full-time adult. Maybe he wasn’t ready for it yet and that’s catching up with him now. Maybe we should allow him to start over and you as well.”
“Maybe.”
“Let’s have a bite first. We won’t solve this tonight.”
Stuart has made some sandwiches and offers to warm up a can of soup. Grandpa Will has gone out walking with Rowan. Mariette hasn’t come down at all. I do manage to eat a bit now; it’s not just my problem anymore. My grandmother, small as she is, has lifted a greater weight off my shoulders than I ever realized I was carrying.
When Grandpa Will comes back in he says what Granannie did. “It’s a step back, not a standstill.”
Rowan doesn’t seem as upset as I thought he’d be. “Grandpa Will thinks I should go back to Marc,” he says to me.
“Is that what you want?”
“I think so. It’s so lonely here.”
I like that aloneness, but I’m not Rowan. “If you want to go back, that’s okay.”
MARIETTE
Grandpa Will knocks on the door, which stands wide open. “Can I come in?”
It’s evening by now. In a way I’m relieved that I don’t have to go down myself first. He motions for me to get out of the chair so he can sit in it. I sit on the edge of the bed instead, ready for a telling-off that doesn’t come.
“Tell me what happened, Mariette; everything.”
I do what he asks. I tell him how I first ran into Uncle Charl in the barn a week ago. I tell him what I told Jerome and that I was only there today to make sure and then suddenly it seemed he had enough. “He pulled out the tablets and started swallowing them. That’s when I panicked.”