Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  “It’s winter.”

  “The ground’s not really frozen yet.”

  “Oh, Harry. What has possessed you?”

  “I’ve already cleared it with Mrs. Dackworth. She’ll pay for half the materials used on her side.”

  “Why didn’t you clear it with me?” Gladys twisted the espresso lever out and hammered the old grounds into the steel compost container on the counter. “You don’t think this is something I should have a say in?” She ground some beans and yelled over the sound of the grinder. “I’m guessing the Manson family isn’t on board,” she said, her head gesturing toward Phil’s. “How much is this going to cost?”

  “I’m doing the labour myself. It will add $15,000 to the value of our home.”

  “Only if we sell it,” Gladys pointed out. “Is that your plan?”

  “It’s an option.”

  She gave him a bleak, angry look.

  Harry went down to the basement to find his power saw, which he hadn’t used in almost a decade. He looked in the furnace room, taking out plastic bins and opening them to find old photo albums, baby clothes, ski boots, ancient bills. And finally the orange power saw. After another ten minutes he emerged with a hammer, a crowbar, a plastic level and an extension cord. He dragged it all outside, then went inside to find an old sheet, which he draped over their outdoor table to use as a work surface.

  “Harry, do you know how to build a fence?” Gladys asked.

  “It’s like riding a bike. It all comes back.”

  Harry examined the fence, its grey pickets like uneven teeth. He suspected he could pull half of it down by hand. He pulled a post toward him, and it moved more than a foot. It was warm for the season, though still cold, edging below zero. The sky was clear to the south but overcast with deep blue clouds above him. Once he got moving, he’d warm up. He began pulling the boards off, using the crowbar to pull the top of the board out, then using his weight to push down. The nails were rusted, some of them almost disintegrated, and most of the boards came away easily. An hour later, one side was exposed. He did the south side, then pulled the posts. Some of them weren’t cemented. The ones that were had rotted above the cement and simply broke off. He stacked all the wood in the lane and went in and told Gladys that he was calling a junk guy to come and collect it, and if they had anything else that needed throwing out, now was the time.

  Gladys looked out the back window to the newly naked yard. “We’re so exposed,” she said. “How long will it take you to build the new one?”

  “The wood is supposed to be here at two.”

  “Isn’t it an awfully big job?”

  “Not really.”

  Harry hammered in stakes and tied a string and marked the post holes along the line, then began the hard work of digging the holes. He was quickly sweating with the effort. It was almost dark by the time he had them all done and realized that the wood hadn’t arrived yet. He called the lumberyard to find that there were problems with the flatbed truck and they’d have to drop the wood off tomorrow.

  “In the morning? I’m waiting on that wood.”

  “I’ll make a note,” the lumber guy said.

  The next morning, Harry was up early, wandering the desolate backyard. Sparrows bickered in the forsythia bush. A black squirrel raced along the electrical wire. It was bitter, and the air had a metallic tang. Gladys came out with her coffee, a parka over her pyjamas.

  “There is a point in every job,” Harry said, “when it looks worse than it did at the beginning. It’s like adolescence—those pimples and braces and gawkiness. But it will be a thing of beauty.”

  “You seem to be deliberately trying to make us more vulnerable.”

  “I should have consulted you. I just wanted to replace the squalor with beauty. You’ll see.”

  “We can’t afford it. You know we can’t afford it. You just keep pushing. What is it you’re after? This race to the bottom.”

  Harry observed the forsythia and imagined its bright yellow bloom in spring. “You’ll be happy when it’s up.”

  “Fuck you,” Gladys said and went inside.

  Harry couldn’t recall Gladys ever uttering those two words, this most common of epithets, uttered a million times an hour globally—vehemently, ironically, from cars, in tavern parking lots, in bed. And now in their backyard. Harry looked at the house and then back at the barren mess and went back to work.

  The truck with the wood arrived at noon, and Harry helped the man unload it. The flatbed was too big for the alley, so they unloaded at the front and Harry had to carry everything around to the back. By the time he was finished, his arms and legs were leaden. He needed to sit for a few minutes, remembering when he’d built fences one summer as a student, working for a contractor his father knew. He built fences, then painted them, shirtless in the summer air, dreaming of bored housewives who invited him in and revelled in his youth.

  Now the yard no longer looked barren—it looked daunting. All that wood. The unbuilt form mocking him. A truck pulled up in the alley, a dilapidated blue one-ton Ford with a homemade box on the back, the sides built up with plywood. On the truck door, it read, mad jack’s junk—you make it, i’ll take it.

  A man got out of the truck and walked toward Harry with his hand extended. “Mad Jack,” he said, smiling and revealing surprisingly perfect teeth. His hair was long and grey. He was wearing a Jack Daniels sweatshirt in this cold. He looked at the old boards.

  “This it?” he said.

  Harry nodded.

  “You wouldn’t believe the stuff I’ve hauled away,” Jack said.

  Harry knew he was supposed to say, “Really, like what?” Then Jack would tell him about dead spouses, chopped-up pianos, epic Playboy collections, life-size statues of Elvis. But Harry wasn’t in the mood. He only nodded and asked Jack if he needed a hand loading. Jack shook his head and started throwing the boards into his already pretty full truck. Harry placed a few of the posts in their holes experimentally.

  “This one broad,” Jack said over his shoulder, “calls me up, says she’s got some junk, I say, ‘I’m your man.’ She says, ‘You take anything, right?’ ‘Within reason,’ I say. So I show up, this broad, built like a brick shithouse, got a set, you can tell she’s a tough cookie. She’s got a bunch of stuff, it’s sitting out in the yard. Usual shit. I load it up. Then she says, ‘Oh you know, I may as well get rid of this carpet, since you’re here.’ Says she needs a hand. It’s in the basement. Go down, there it is, rolled up. She says she’ll help me carry it out. We pick this thing up, weighs a ton. You don’t have to be Agatha fucking Christie, I mean, there’s something in there. I figure it’s her husband. Guy’s an asshole, one day she finally sticks a fork in his eye, you know? I put my end down. ‘Lady,’ I say, ‘it’s none of my business what you do in your spare time, but once it’s in the back of my truck, it is my business.’ She gives me this look. I open it up. There’s a dog inside, Doberman. There’s a lot of blood. This isn’t natural causes. ‘It’s my ex-husband’s,’ she says. ‘I got it in the divorce.’ ”

  Jack put both his hands up. “Live and let live, that’s my motto.”

  Harry ruefully shook his head, hoping this would be enough response for Mad Jack, but he started in on another story.

  When Jack was finished loading and finished his gothic junk tales, Harry reluctantly gave him $240 in twenties, then went back to his posts. He staked them when he got them perfectly vertical, then put some crushed limestone in to anchor them and tamped it down gently. He put plastic around the post holes to form a small tent, then mixed and poured the quick-drying cement and put candles in and closed the plastic, hoping this small source of heat would be sufficient. He was worried that the cement might not cure properly and his masterpiece would come tumbling down. Its inception had already angered Gladys. It needed to be perfect. He went in and got more candles and arranged the small pots around the post, then resealed the plastic. It had the look of a demented vigil. All he needed was ten degrees
Celsius.

  It had taken longer than he anticipated and was getting dark. He went back inside and poured himself a glass of wine.

  Gladys was hovering over a pot on the stove.

  “It’s cold,” Harry volunteered. “But it’s not bad when you’re working. It warms you up.” He sipped his wine.

  Gladys lifted a lid and steam escaped. Harry thought of walking up behind her and embracing her. But her body would stiffen in response.

  “I’m just going to get a start on those boards.” He finished his wine and went outside.

  The yard flooded with light when he moved past the door and triggered the motion lights. It felt colder. As he stood contemplating the stack of cedar boards, the lights went off. He did an exaggerated dance step and they came back on.

  He cut two-by-fours and strung them along the top and a foot off the bottom. Harry remembered that the key to fencing was to have a solid, level beginning, because if you were off even slightly, that mistake was magnified over the course of the fence, each incremental error adding up until the finished product was a crooked mess. He took a strip of cedar, so light and easy to manoeuvre, and held it up against the first two posts. He took a few nails and almost put them in his mouth the way he had as a teenager, but it occurred to him that it might be getting cold enough to freeze them to his lips. As kids, they had put their tongues on metal posts on a dare on cold days. Jimmy Carson had his tongue freeze to the steel fence at school, and their teacher had to come out with a teacup filled with hot water to free him. Harry held the cedar and put a single nail in one end, then went to the second post and tacked it in, holding up the level with his left hand to get a reading, then marking it with a pencil. He retacked that end and rechecked the level, adjusting twice until it was dead-on.

  He began the repetitive task of putting on the successive boards below it, using a shim as spacer. The boards were too long, but he would cut them on the post with the power saw. Gladys opened the door and uttered the word “Dinner.”

  “In a minute.”

  A light snow started to fall. Harry stopped to look at the boards that were up. The motion lights went off, and he did a sixties dance and they came back on. Carpentry was enviably linear; you cut and hammered and lo, it was built. It must be a satisfying profession: to build something palpable and useful. Harry suspected he was building the opposite in his classroom.

  Harry watched his breath come out in small puffs that dissipated upward. He was breathing hard with the effort of his work. He stood in the chaotic yard and wondered how Press could have cheated his father, what combination of debt, desperation and moral blindness could have brought him to that moment. They were friends. Harry remembered a boxing match he had gone to with Dale and Press as a child, a rare outing and the single most vivid event from his childhood. He remembered the slap of leather on flesh, like beating a wet shirt against a rock. Muhammad Ali approaching slowly and letting go two long jabs that snaked out and seemed to snap at the point of impact. Then he danced sideways around the ring and stopped and reset and snaked two more jabs. Ali dazzled, hauling his celebrity behind him like a grudge. The rumour was the Muslims wouldn’t let him drive his Cadillac.

  The seven-year-old Harry was sitting in Maple Leaf Gardens with his father and Press and thirteen thousand people. This was the big time. A heavyweight fight between the former Cassius Marcellus Clay—the name the media had still held to—and the hometown boy, George Chuvalo. Chuvalo’s face was a muscular spheroid that you could hit all day before you got his attention. He was a brawler: forty-seven fights, thirty-four wins, most of them knockouts. Harry still recalled the stats. Chuvalo had a chin like an anvil and a hard right hand. He loved the left hook. But he was a ham-and-egger. Clay was Zeus; he had beat Sonny Liston, the big, ugly bear. He had destroyed poor Floyd Patterson, toyed with him, bled him over twelve rounds. Clay had never been beaten.

  “Clay’s going to dismantle our boy,” Press said.

  “He’s a gasbag,” his father said. “Chuvalo lands a clean one, that boy’s gone.”

  “He won’t land a clean one. Clay’s never been hit. Shiftier than a politician.”

  Harry sat between them, his head swivelling.

  “Exactly. That’s why if he catches one in the old snot locker, he’s down. He’s out.”

  Around certain men, his father’s diction strayed. This was a prerogative of businessmen, to masculinize their grammar, to slap Aqua Velva onto their smooth cheeks every morning and then drop their g’s over afternoon drinks. Press and Dale were what were once termed “men of the world,” a breezy amorality suffusing every action. To a seven-year-old Harry, they were gods.

  The arena held a soft haze of cigar smoke. Harry could barely see the ring. The crowd was enough, pulsing with blood. Men who leaned to one another and murmured certainties. When Chuvalo was introduced, they went wild. No one had ever knocked him down; this was his claim. He hung around. And you hang around to the fifteenth, anything can happen.

  But Clay was snaking those jabs, each one snapping on Chuvalo’s face like a wet towel. Chuvalo kept moving in, one half-step at a time, head lowered and weaving slowly, taking those shots like he was walking into a headwind. Clay taunted him, called him the Washer Woman. He held up his arms and invited Chuvalo to hit him. He pointed to his body—and stood there and let Chuvalo unload. Chuvalo took a few shots, then went low, below the belt. He went low again and the referee, a clothing salesman named Jackie Silvers, let it all go. Clay’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, frothed in his corner, spittle flying into the ring.

  A blond woman paraded the number fifteen, wearing heels and a bathing suit. Harry still remembered the way she walked, her feet pointed slightly outward, an exaggerated roll of her hips. Her outsized smile was genuine; she was happy to be at the centre of this.

  The fifteenth round really brought out the bloodlust in the crowd. Three minutes left and Chuvalo was still hanging around. He was behind on points, but if he connected with that right it would be lights out. Chuvalo shuffled forward like a hospital patient, one foot then the other, moving slowly, dragging his feet along the canvas. Clay danced sideways and moved in, then magically appeared two steps back as Chuvalo let a tentative jab float into the smoke. Clay waltzed back in, and maybe he was tired, but Chuvalo landed a left to Clay’s jaw, then three more in quick succession, then a right to the head. “Chuvalo may have hurt Clay! Chuvalo may have hurt Clay!” the announcer screamed. This was what was on the news the next day, that moment when the impossible was suddenly within reach. Clay reeled back, then collected himself. He shone with contempt. He snaked those jabs and watched them snap at Chuvalo’s impassive Croatian head, a head genetically formed to receive the abuse of historic enemies, a face that could take a rifle butt. Clay jabbed and danced.

  Chuvalo’s face looked like it was growing golf balls, but Clay couldn’t knock him down. No one could knock down George Chuvalo. He kept coming, walking into those punches like penance. When it ended, the crowd leapt to its feet, cheering the champion and the hometown boy, cheering their place in history. “They leadeth me into Toronto, Canada,” Clay said afterward. “They leadeth me down the path of bad publicity. The sports fan shall follow me all the days of my life.” His hands were sore, and he didn’t feel like talking anymore.

  After the fight, Press drifted off—perhaps to visit a mistress. Harry and his father walked down to Fran’s and had grilled cheese sandwiches. In the diner glare, Harry examined his father, his unwavering hairline, the muscular forearms and capable hands. His nose was a subtle pattern of overworked capillaries. His shirt had his initials on the cuffs, and the cufflinks were small gold tennis racquets. One hand was draped over the seat of the leather banquette, as if it was around someone. He usually drove with his elbow resting out the open window, one hand lightly guiding the power steering. He had a physical jauntiness that was at odds with his naturally taciturn demeanour.

  “You saw how Chuvalo kept coming,” Dale said to his son. “He
was outclassed, but he showed he had heart. That’s what’s important. Chuvalo’s never going to be world champion, but he can live with himself. And that is worth a lot, believe me. Listen, this world isn’t run by the smartest and the fastest. Sometimes it’s the guy who hangs in there.”

  If he said anything else that night, Harry couldn’t remember it. They sat and ate their grilled cheese sandwiches. Every table talked about the fight. George was a hero, but Clay was a god. Someone was going to shut that man’s mouth, but Christ he was beautiful. It had rained while they were watching the fight, and the streets were black and slick and reflected the car tail lights in bleeding trails. The neon along Yonge Street beamed. The city was poised. You could feel it. The money was beginning to flow toward it, and this grey mass would bloom.

  It had gotten much colder. His backyard project seemed suddenly quixotic. Stars were visible, and Harry searched for the Big Dipper and Orion’s belt, the only two constellations he could identify. There was the sudden visceral shriek of raccoons fighting, perhaps with an unfortunate cat or dog, or with one another. The shrieking escalated, the pitch high and desperate and deathly, and for a moment Harry wondered if it was his debt he was hearing. The snow fell harder, small, bitter pellets coming from the northwest.

  Gladys poked her head out the door, as if she was going to call him in for dinner again. “Do you want a divorce, Harry?” she asked.

  Harry looked at her, searching for context. Snow pellets bounced off his face. She had asked in such a perfunctory tone. Do you want fries with that? But Gladys wasn’t given to idle threats, nor was she ruled by emotion—this hadn’t been delivered in a rage, to be regretted the next day. Perhaps this was what Harry’s mother had asked his father that night on the lawn.

  “No.”

  Gladys closed the door.

  Harry ran a chalk line down the centre of a post and carefully ran the saw up, cutting the overhanging boards. He spent more than an hour putting up the next section. When he was done, he stood back and observed his fence, two panels covering eighteen feet. He looked at his watch and saw that it was almost eleven o’clock. The lights went off again and Harry started his dance, a series of steps taught to him in middle school as preparation for the first school dance. It was a pastiche of loony movement that involved hitchhiking and shooting imaginary pistols, physically misremembered by the flailing Harry, who now summoned the light, gyrating and twisting in the illuminated snow.