Near Canaan

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  Jack had set himself apart all those years ago, on purpose; and he had stepped back into the ring as deliberately, two weeks ago. Why? To play with Buddy? For a change of pace?

  No, I thought. None of these.

  He’d stepped in to protect me. Suddenly, as though a lens had dropped in front of my eyes, it all came into focus—Jack took his responsibilities seriously, and I was one of them. As I had always been my mother’s baby, I would always be Jack’s younger brother, and like it or not, he had to take care of me.

  Half a century after its inception, I released myself from my bondage of suspicion. Jack at nine was not Jack now; and what boy at nine did not want to dispose of his younger brother? The barrel had meant nothing; perhaps it had not even happened at all.

  An enormous relief welled up in me, and I laughed aloud, waking Joan.

  “What is it?” she murmured.

  “Nothing,” I said. “We’re home.”

  After dinner that night, I went into my study, pleading paperwork. I shut the door and went to the bookcase, where I pulled down a tattered volume. It fell open naturally, where I had slipped something thick between the pages, damaging the spine.

  Her very last communication had come three years ago, a bulky envelope. I had brought it in here to open in private while Joan was busy elsewhere. Ripping open the top and shaking had disgorged the same heavy paper-wrapped square that slid out of the book now. I picked it up, now as I had then, and unfolded the paper. Within was a small piece of carpet. I turned it over in my hands, then examined the paper. Ha ha, it said. I finally got it.

  I forced back the page, yellow now, and read the passage I had marked.

  … The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning … Man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment … There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence … Happiness mattered as little as pain.

  I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf.

  The next morning, I found myself driving in the opposite direction from work. I drew up to the yawning entrance of the garage and tapped the horn lightly. A minute or so later, Jack appeared. He hesitated fractionally, and started toward me.

  For the first time, I appreciated his age. Nearly sixty now, with grey all through his hair. Only I, and only with effort, could see the springy boy he had been, once upon a time. His loneliness, I mused, was greater than mine—he lived alone most of the time, the stream of casual girlfriends having slowed to a trickle in the past few years. His wife had left him, taking their infant son, more than thirty years ago. Somewhere, he had a child. Did that knowledge prey on him? He had lost everything, or had never had it. As he made his way across the asphalt, I looked upon him with a kind of pity, the last of my hatred going cold and sinking away. My brother. I knew too much, and too little, about him.

  “Car’s making noises,” I said, when he approached.

  “Pings?” Jack said, delivering the syllable casually, as though it were an appropriate sound to end twenty years of silence.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Or knocks?”

  “Those, too.”

  “Pings and knocks,” said Jack. “Now, that’s trouble.” I popped the hood and he propped it up, bending over the engine. I went to stand next to him.

  “Where’s Buddy?” I asked.

  “Wandering,” said Jack. He grunted at some mysterious anomaly he’d found. “Walking off his disappointment.”

  “He didn’t get what he wanted?”

  “He doesn’t think so.”

  We stared into the black insides of the car for a minute.

  “See that?” he asked, pointing to an evil-looking hose. “That’s your trouble. Good thing you brought it in when you did.”

  “Yes,” I said, appreciating the charade. There was nothing wrong with my car, and Jack knew it.

  “You might not a seen it, you looked yourself,” he said. “Takes a trained eye.”

  “I’m glad I brought it to you,” I said, playing along.

  He grunted, and wiped his hands, going back into the garage. He came out with a piece of tubing. Squinting down the length of it, he said, “This’ll do.”

  I watched my brother work, his large sure hands manipulating the rubber, removing the old hose, installing the new.

  “It’s all tore up here,” said Jack, indicating a place on the rubber which looked perfectly sound to me. “It don’t show unless you bend it,” he said, without doing so.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Things just wear out quietly like that,” he said. “You got to know where to look.” He stuck the old hose into a pocket and pulled out a rag, wiping his hands on it over and over, unconsciously. “How’s Joan?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Good woman, like a good car,” he said. “Both have their peculiarities, but nothing you can’t live with.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Both of ’em, you have to love and look after,” he said.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, severely. “You better love that woman twice as hard.” His eyes crinkled up. “Because your car’s a piece of shit.” He cut off the smile which had never left his eyes, and turned back to the Ford, unhooking the hood brace. He stood there for a few seconds, holding the hood up with the deltas of one hand. “Looks real complicated in there, don’t it,” he said, gesturing at the engine. “But just as simple as can be.” He let the hood slam shut. “Too bad life ain’t as easy as engines.”

  We looked at one another directly. Dark and stocky, thin and fair, regarding one another like foreigners, past enemies, meeting at a carnival in peacetime. Facing off, uncertain.

  “Dollar for the hose,” said Jack.

  Always the last laugh, I thought, fishing it out. “Thanks,” I said, passing it to him, our fingertips touching for an instant.

  “Some things just ain’t worth talking about,” he said, and stood back, watching me get into the car. As I closed the door, he darted forward suddenly, and put his head in the open window.

  “Bring her back,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “She needs new shocks,” he said. “Shocks and struts. I can tell by the way she rides.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sure. Thanks.”

  “See you later,” he said, his words nearly swallowed by the roar as the ignition caught. I nodded, and he gave a little salute before turning away.

  “By the way,” I called.

  “What?” he said, half turning.

  “I wanted to tell you—Beth—”

  “What?” he repeated, walking back a little way toward the car.

  “Beth told me to say good-bye to you.”

  Jack digested this information, a kind of storm sweeping over his normally impassive face. Curiosity and jealousy and grieving struggled there for a minute before he squared his shoulders, bringing up a hand to tease the hair of his forelock.

  “She told me before she left,” I said, as though making an offering. Saying it, I felt contrite, and lightened, a long-overdue bargain kept.

  “She never needed to,” Jack said, finally. “Good-bye was always in her, from the first.” And he turned his back on me again, and moved slowly away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Farewell

  HE FOUND THE boy on a hillside, filming the setting sun.

  “Pretty,” he said, shutting the car door.

  “I needed some scenery shots,” said the boy.

  “Some say they can’t tell the difference between sunrise and sunset from a photograph,” he said. “I just don’t believe it.”

  “What’s the difference?” said Buddy, still filming.

  “One says, Get on up. The other says, Take a seat, you’ve earned it. Rising sun makes me want to go places. Sett
ing sun makes me glad of where I am, no need to go anywhere else.”

  “I’ve never felt that way,” confessed the boy.

  I know.

  “It’s been a strange two weeks,” said Buddy.

  “You get your movie made?”

  “I still have to synch it, and edit it. I’m not sure what angle I want to take.”

  “I thought it was just people talking.”

  “It is, but different editing makes a different movie. They might end up sounding like they’re agreeing with each other, or disagreeing. Or like they have a message.”

  “Do they?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, shortly.

  They were silent for a minute, just the hum of the camera between them.

  “I think my professor will like it, though,” he said. “There’s a lot of good stuff in it.”

  “How can you tell good from bad? I thought you were after pretty specific stuff.”

  “I was,” admitted Buddy. “But it didn’t turn out that way.”

  “Are you glad you came?” asked the other.

  “It’s not what I thought it would be,” said Buddy. “Hearing about it my whole life.”

  “Hearing and living are different,” he said.

  “I guess,” said Buddy. “No one wanted to talk about my mother,” he said. “Like there was something secret about her.”

  “Maybe they just don’t remember all that well,” said the other. “It was a long time ago.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Buddy, scornfully. “I’ve learned that much. I could live here my whole life, starting now, and die a stranger. And I could have been born here, and moved away for thirty years, and come back and be home.”

  “You figured that out.”

  “You know she had a kid before me?” asked Buddy. “A little girl, who died?”

  “Sad story,” said the other, nodding.

  They looked off together toward the horizon, one squinting through the black eye of the camera, the other barefaced. It was the last of the pageant, a marvelous and various glow of pinks and oranges, the shirred clouds stained and spreading toward where they stood on the hill. A bird called. They watched for minutes, the dusk falling around them like snow.

  “Put down the camera, son,” urged the older man. “Sun’s gone now.”

  The boy lowered the camera, slowly, and turned to face the other.

  “My name’s not Buddy,” he said.

  “Oh?” said the other, politely.

  “My mother named me after my father,” he said. “I never met him. I think he was just somebody she met up north. Not that she was loose or anything,” he added quickly. “I think she was in love with him.”

  “I thought your father was called Whyte.”

  “That’s my stepfather,” said Buddy. “They married when I was four.” He was thoughtful. “She must have cared about my real father a lot,” he said, “to have named me for him.”

  “That how you think of him?” asked the other. “Your real father?”

  “No, not really,” said the boy, surprised by his own words. “Dad’s the only father I’ve known.” He thought a little. “He’s all right.”

  The other nodded.

  “I’m really Grahame,” said the boy. “With an e.”

  “How bout that,” said the other.

  They were silent again. The dark was truly upon them now, and the moon was beginning to shine.

  “She killed herself,” said Grahame, a small boy’s voice squeaking out of him.

  Ah, Beth.

  “You came here looking to find out why she done it?”

  “I guess so,” said the boy. “But I failed.”

  “You were bound to fail, son,” said the man. “Bound to. Hacking your way in here, like going after a cancer with a chain saw. People are subtler than that; their darknesses and sorrows are their own. You can’t always understand them.”

  “I miss her so much,” said the boy, in a rush of misery. “I thought she loved me.”

  “She did, son,” said the man. “It was the hardest thing in the world to leave you. She was just the leaving kind.”

  “You loved her, too,” said the boy, sensing something.

  “Once,” he admitted.

  “How can I live?” cried the boy suddenly, a man’s voice now, strong and clear. Taking his lament up to the sky, where the birds wheeled and settled. To the ears of what might be listening, or might not. The same cry so many had sent up before him, the pure essence of a torment contained. Filled with pain and disbelief, it went up into the clouds and spread there, until it was thin and forgotten, only the echo remaining behind, in the ears of the man and the boy who stood together on the hill.

  “You got to,” said the man, after a respectful silence. “There ain’t nothing else to do.”

  “I guess not,” said the boy, crumpled now by release.

  “And you can’t go on blaming yourself,” he continued. “Some people are sad, for no reason you can ever see. And some fight their friends, make enemies of them. Some roam all over the world, looking for a home they never had. Some spend their whole lives at home, and never know it.” He paused. “Whole lives get taken up with foolishness.”

  “Huh,” said the boy, not really listening anymore. “Hey,” he said, seeming to realize something. “You’re talking all right.”

  Gil smiled.

  “Comes and goes,” he said. “Like everything.”

  ALSO BY LIESE O’HALLORAN SCHWARZ

  THE POSSIBLE WORLD

  Three strangers. Generations apart. What links them together is stronger than fate.

  Ben is the sole survivor of a crime that claims his mother and countless others. He is just six years old, and already he must find a new place for himself in the world.

  Lucy, the doctor who tends to Ben, feels a profound connection to the little boy. Will recovering his memory heal him, or damage him further?

  Clare has long believed that the lifetime of secrets she’s been keeping don’t matter to anyone anymore, until an unexpected encounter prompts her to tell her story.

  As they each struggle to confront the events – past and present – that have defined their lives, something stronger than fate is working to bring them together …

  ‘A gorgeously wrought exploration of who gets to tell the story of our lives, and who gets to inhabit that story with us’

  Jodi Picoult

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781473539280

  Version 1.0

  Published by Arrow Books 2018

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  Copyright © Liese O’Halloran Schwarz 1990

  Picture references for front cover illustrations supplied courtesy of Getty Images and Colourbox

  Cover design by Glenn O’Neill

  Liese O’Halloran Schwarz has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in paperback by Arrow Books in 2018

  First published in the US by Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc. in 1990

  Arrow Books

  The Penguin Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Arrow Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781784757311

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