by Exile
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THE COMPASS
Joe Davies
When I picture the two of us crashing our way through the tall grass, I see it from the outside, as witness rather than participant. With some effort I can squeeze myself back in the shoes where I belong – following Arthur under the full gaze of the sun as he parts the way, compass in one hand, bending the grass to the side with the other – though seeing it this way feels strangely inauthentic.
In a way, Arthur was my first love, a boy so hopelessly lost in his own sorrows, heartsick at the dissolution of his family. We shared the kind of unwitting connection that can flare up between two eleven-year-old boys. Everyone I’ve become close with since has been a girl or a woman, but always more complicated than it feels it ought to have been. I had no idea at the time how rare it was, my friendship with Arthur. If I had, I might never have been so cruel to him.
He lived two blocks away, one block closer than me to the school where we met. When he’d joined our class partway through November he was given the seat next to mine and I was asked to help him settle in. To say I was “asked” means I was “told,” but it was no trouble. Quite the opposite. Some connections you feel right away. Something about his open expression, the directness of his eyes when they fixed on mine. To this day I don’t know how to describe it. Without uttering a word, he was saying, “Here I am.” I looked into those eyes and was dragged in. We became inseparable. Skating, playing Stratego, watching television, going to the corner store, having sleepovers at my place – always it was my place. For a little over six months our companionship was scarcely interrupted.
The day Arthur lost the compass we were at a conservation area north of the city. It was something my family did at the time – go for a Sunday drive – and Arthur had come with us. There was always room in the station wagon for him, though it meant squishing four of us into the back seat – me, Arthur, my two older sisters, Bianca and Carmen. This was before anyone cared much about seat belts. I think my father enjoyed seeing the back seat so full, and my mother could never have left Arthur behind. I imagine she felt badly for him, a single child, his mother having run off, his father unable to play the roles of both parents.
Arthur was teased at school about his mother having left. He shrugged it off where he could, but I think it cut him deeply. He had pictures of her. She wasn’t what I’d call pretty, but there was the same directness about her expression, and a kind of cheerfulness.
At Christmas that year there’d been a package for him. It had come from the west coast, from his mother. Inside was a spy kit, poorly made. The binoculars fell apart within a week. The decoder and magic ears soon followed. The only piece that endured was the compass, and it went everywhere with Arthur in his shirt pocket. He had it with us when our family drive stopped at the conservation area that Sunday in May.
My mother hadn’t packed a picnic exactly but knew never to leave the house without food if my father was behind the wheel. Depending on how he was feeling and how much gas was in the tank, a Sunday drive could last anywhere from three-quarters of an hour to five.
We’d been to the conservation area before. I have no idea what it was called or if it was even meant to be used the way it was. There were no picnic tables and no proper place to park, just a few spaces carved out at the side of the road. The main attraction was the view. It was in the bottom of a small, flat valley, with trees to either side, but opened out at one end to offer a narrow view of the city to the south.
When we got there that day it was clear my father wanted to stay a while. He promptly sat himself against the trunk of a maple, pulled his hat over his eyes and fell asleep.
“Piece of kielbasa?” said my mother, who had reached into her bag of food and produced a short coil of meat.
The blanket was spread out and we took our places. There was meat and cheese and hunks of bread, a couple of oranges and a bottle of tap water that we passed around. When my father woke from his nap he had some coffee from a thermos and asked why there were no cookies. My mother was famous for her gingersnaps and oatmeal squares, both of which disappeared in quantity if my father ever figured out where they were being hidden. My mother dropped a box of Girl Guide cookies on the blanket and said, “There,” as if it was partial proof he wasn’t good enough for her either.
“See what I get?” he asked, looking around at all of us with a smile. “Cookies baked by little girls who don’t know what a grown man is capable of eating or not eating.”
“No little girl ever touched those cookies except to bring them to our door,” said my mother.
“Then why do they sell them?” asked my father.
My mother shrugged.
“I’ll tell you why,” offered my father. “They sell them to get rid of them.” He reached down and opened the box, saying, “Who wants one?” and offered them around. We all took a couple and my father saw that Arthur held something in his hand.
“What’s that you got there?” he asked.
Arthur showed him.
“Here,” said my father, and held out his hand.
Arthur passed it to him.
“A compass.”
“Of course it’s a compass,” said my mother. “You can see it’s a compass. We can all see it’s a compass.”
“What? Do you use it to find your way around that dark and mysterious neighbourhood of ours?”
“No,” said Arthur, looking away, as if embarrassed. But I could see he was enjoying the attention. I doubted he was ever teased this way at home. I doubted he was noticed much at all.
“But you know how to use it, yeah?”
Arthur pulled at the grass beside him and nodded.
“You boys want a little challenge? You want me to send you off on a little adventure?” As my father said this he was reaching into his own shirt pocket where he always kept a little pad and the stump of a pencil. “Let’s see how close you can get to landing right back on this spot.”
He scribbled on his pad for a minute, then handed it across to us.
“And no cheating.”
We looked at the paper, then back at him.
“What is it?” asked my mother, and she and my sisters crowded in to see what my father had done.
It was a diagram with numbers scratched in and around it.
“Pass it back,” said my father. “Here. This is your heading. See, you start by going south by southeast. That direction.” He pointed over his shoulder. “And this, this is the number of paces. You have to count them to make sure you get it right. When you’ve done that, you take your bearings again and look, see? You go off to the west, again counting your paces. If you follow it all exactly, follow your heading while keeping the needle pointing north, you should end up right back here.”
Arthur was looking at my father like there was a spark inside him that had suddenly been ignited.
“But you already know how to use it, don’t you?”
“Don’t get them lost,” said my mother, wrapping up the cheese.
“I know how to use it,” said Arthur.
“Good boy,” said my dad. “Now off you go and count your paces. Have fun. We’ll see you in half an hour.”
“Can I see the compass?” asked my mother. When she had it in her hand she held it flat and looked down at it, then jiggled it. “It’s just a toy,” she said, glancing at my father. “The needle’s sticky. It doesn’t…”
“So they get lost. So what? Who wants ’em back, anyway?”
“I get his room,” said my sister Carmen.
“I get his baseball cards,” said my sister Bianca.
“You get nothing,” said my father, “ei
ther of you. It’s all mine,” and he tousled my hair. “Now go! Here, I’ll help you with the first step. You see? You sight something along that line, along your bearing, and you head for that. It’s easy. When you get there you take another sighting and head for the next thing. See that big tree there? That one next to it, to the left, that’s on the line you want to follow. So go, the both of you. Get out of here. Scram.”
Like most of my memories from that far back, that day now seems as if it happened to someone else, as if I’m in possession of someone else’s memory. If it’s because of the fifty years that have fallen between, then they are fifty years that have spun me out of my own shoes.
I’m a grandfather now. Only just. My first-born had a daughter eight weeks ago. They’re in Europe, in Spain, and I have no appetite for travel these days, not even to meet my first grandchild. And there’s a feeling I haven’t shared with anyone, a feeling that I’d only be in the way and not really wanted. And yet, had I gone when I first felt I should, I would never have seen Arthur again.
It happened by e-mail. I didn’t recognize the sender, and the subject line, “Is it you?” was suspect enough that I nearly deleted the message unopened. It turned out to be from Arthur’s partner, a man named Nelson, and it informed me that Arthur was dying. Among other things, he was suffering from a bone disease that made him so brittle he could no longer stand. Nelson understood it had been a long time, so long that perhaps I had no interest in coming to Arthur’s bedside, especially when we’d known each other for only a relatively short while and such a long time ago. Still, I had been asked for specifically. It had taken weeks to find me and Arthur’s remaining time was expected to be short, perhaps days.
I e-mailed to say I would come. It was halfway across the province, but I set out as soon as I could, climbing into my car the following morning and patting my shirt pocket to be sure of the compass.
My first girlfriend came as a bit of a surprise to me. One minute we were walking home through town together, the next we were kissing in the alleyway next to her apartment building. I thought I knew how being with someone else was supposed to work, the kinds of things you were supposed to do, and it was good for a while, but didn’t turn out how I expected. In the end we fell out.
I’ve felt an ache over the years. It’s followed me through all the partners I’ve had. I’ve felt a love that seems to come closer to compassion than anything resembling the romantic ideal of connecting with a soulmate, something closer to a mutual recognition that we are both in the unenviable position of wanting to be loved, without having actually found it. My first marriage lasted a little over a year, the second almost eight. The compromising necessary to make anything work only seems to get harder the older I get. And for the longest time I had no idea how difficult I could be to get along with. In the past week I have thought back a great deal to the uncomplicated days of being eleven, and the closeness I felt to Arthur.
The first leg of our short excursion that Sunday in May was to be five hundred paces. After about two hundred we reached the tree my father had pointed out. Beneath it, in the shade, Arthur put the compass in the palm of his hand and shook it a little, then shook it again. The needle did not want to cooperate.
“Does it always do that?” I asked.
Arthur shook his head.
I looked back in the direction we’d come and said, “Well, if we just keep going in a straight line we should be okay.”
Arthur squinted at me. It was a look that was probably only meant to say, “Okay. Let’s do that.” But because of the years in between I stand now looking over my own shoulder at him, a spectator to my own experiences, and it has now come to mean all sorts of other things, unquestionably idealized. In his look, he says, “You and me. This is the moment, beautiful precisely because it could just as easily be forgotten. And honestly, when will there ever be another chance to feel this comfortable in our own skins?”
Young me, I pointed across the field. “See the break in the trees over there?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Let’s head for there.”
We started out. At first the grass was short enough we walked next to one another. Arthur put a hand on my shoulder. I put mine on his. As the grass got taller and thicker we moved closer to each other and were side by side.
As I remember this I hover slightly above and to one side, looking down. I see the moment when we break apart and Arthur moves ahead. I see him turning over his shoulder to say to me, “It’s working again,” and he holds it flat in one hand while parting the grass in front with the other.
We stalked across that field in full sun, and in my memory of it, it goes on much longer than it ever could have. We picked as direct a path as we could, all the time counting our paces. Getting across would only have been a matter of minutes, but I have it as an almost static event, an occurrence that goes on and on. The air so still it’s like being in the silence of a vacuum. First, Arthur steps though the parted grass, then I do, following on his heels. And this is repeated over and over, the same steps taken then retaken as our small frames negotiate the unending path we are making towards the gap in the trees, repeated as if it is impossible for me to imagine a moment more unaffected. But however much I slow it down, we always reach the line of trees. Once through, and a few paces the other side, up a slight rise, we reached our five hundred paces.
We halted. The view of the city was particularly good, and would have shown a much simpler, more modest skyline than today’s.
“It’s stuck again,” said Arthur, and he shook it.
“Maybe it’s not going to work so well if you always carry it around.”
He shook it again. “There,” he said, pointing down the rise. “That’s west.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “We’re not going to get lost.”
“Yeah, but it’s working now.”
“Okay,” I said. We sighted a bit of open field on the other side of the little valley and headed for that. Halfway across we realized we’d forgotten to count steps, but we both knew it didn’t matter. “Should we go back and start counting?”
“Nah,” said Arthur. We were, by then, simply out for a hike.
We had just crossed a pile of stones when out of the blue Arthur said over his shoulder, “I’m going to live with Mother.”
“What?” I said, not sure I’d heard correctly.
“She asked me to come out west, my mother. She wants me to go live with her.”
“Oh,” I said. It was all I could think to say. But immediately I was thinking about what it was going to be like for me, him going away. I thought about recess, about being out in the playground on my own. There’d been a few times, a handful at least, where I’d stood up for Arthur when others had taunted him about the situation with his mother. His need had made me strong, and I wondered who I’d be with him gone. I thought of us on my living room carpet, watching hockey, or sitting on my back steps eating popcorn, and a long list of other things we’d done together.
He turned to me and said, “I should go, shouldn’t I?”
When I said nothing in return, it was as if I’d said what he didn’t need to hear: No, he should stay. I would miss him.
Almost as if in answer to that, he said, “Life is very strange, isn’t it?”
Again, I found nothing to say.
“Want to see something really weird?” he asked, and he held out his compass where I could see it, then drew back his arm as far as he could and launched the compass into the sky, south towards the city.
I watched it fly in a long slow arc out into the depths of the grass, thinking how final a move it was, since even if we looked for an hour we’d likely never find it.
When it had fallen I turned to him and laughed at the suddenness and rashness of the thing.
He shook his head and said, “Now, do you want to see the strangest thing?”
“What?” I said.
He stuck his hand into his shirt pocket and pulled out w
hat looked to be an identical compass.
“You had two?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s the same one.”
“What? You threw something else? I saw it go.”
“I can’t lose it,” he said. “No matter what I do, no matter what happens to it, I can stomp it to pieces, but as soon as I do, and as soon as I look away, it comes back to me.” And he patted his shirt pocket.
He threw it again. And again. Each time it came back to his shirt pocket.
It was a trick. I knew it must be a trick. Because there was no such thing as real magic. I was old enough by then to be certain of that. But each time I watched as he drew his arm back and the thing flew off into the air and came down somewhere far off in the grass, and each time there was Arthur pulling the thing out of his pocket.
After about the sixth or seventh time Arthur put a hand on my shoulder and said it was okay, he’d had a hard time believing it at first too, but there it was. What could you do? The thing just always came back to him.