The Matter With Morris (17 page)

“How did you know my size? Oh, Daddy, thank you, they’re beautiful.” She bent to kiss him on the cheek and he, like a charlatan almost on the verge of no longer pretending, ducked his head, considered, and then lifted it again and said, “You’re welcome.”

And why not? Why shouldn’t his beautiful daughter benefit from his passions, his mistakes, his stubborn fantasies? To stumble and then correct oneself, this was a necessary and exquisite thing. She didn’t need to know why he bought the shoes. She ought not to know anything about Leah. Ought-not, what a lovely little combination, so fresh it should have a flower named after it. I would like a bouquet of ought-nots for my sweet
bohémienne.

And yet, the following day, when the FedEx man knocked at the door, Morris experienced a moment of regret as he explained that there was only one package, and as he spilled cash into the outstretched palm, he wondered if he should run down to the consignment shop and find Leah something equally desirous. Instead, he mailed his letters. One to Ursula, and the other to the prime minister, which was the column he had written in a fit of anger. It was important to send it, he had decided. The envelope was addressed: “Prime Minister of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.” There was a third letter, and it was addressed to the president and CEO of Colt Canada. Morris had written it in the early morning, when sleep would not come.

Dear Sir,

Last year, when my son was still alive and fighting in Afghanistan, he killed a member of the Taliban. He used one of your guns, a C7 assault rifle. I thought you should know that your weapons of war are working fabulously. So fabulously that several days later he himself was killed by one of your rifles. Accidents do happen, don’t they? I noted that your company is located in Kitchener, Ontario. Wow. Right next to Waterloo, where a lot of my people live. The Mennonites. We like to think of ourselves as pacifists, but this is mostly lip service. We can be hypocrites. Are you a hypocrite, sir? Do you understand that evil is voluntary and this makes man intimately responsible? In any case, my two points were these: my son managed to kill someone else with one of your guns, and he himself was killed by one of your instruments. Congratulations. You’re doing a fine job. One hundred percent.

Morris Schutt

This letter he sent as well. Why not? Though the devastation of the world was not the CEO’s fault alone, he needed to take some responsibility. His
Weltanschauung
had to be challenged. Where would we be if we all abjured accountability, if we all laid the evils of the world on the foundation of contingency?

Excited and agitated, he dropped the letters into the
mailbox, and then walked over to the local cyber café and logged on and read the
New York Times,
the
Guardian,
the
Washington Post,
and the
Independent
on-line. Then, hesitantly, he perused a few of the newspapers that had syndicated his column, looking for his replacement, or some indication that he was missed, or that he would be back. There was a small note in a midwestern paper that stated Morris Schutt was on holiday and would return. A prick of pleasure, then a rueful dismissal. He wouldn’t return. Not ever. In the national paper, where his column had appeared every Monday, was a guest columnist by the name of Otto Hyperion. What nonsense the man wrote, pop psychology, all about externals, poorly composed and self-serving; though the column was funny, and Morris had to convince himself that it wasn’t. He felt rebuffed. He logged off. Then logged back on to check his stocks, forgetting that he no longer had stocks. He Googled himself and found the usual entries and several new ones, small articles declaring that Morris Schutt the columnist was on paid leave from his job. Garbage, thought Morris, I am not being paid. He went to Wikipedia and looked up “Morris Schutt.” The usual facts—where he’d studied, his work as a journalist, a list of publications with links (who writes this stuff? he wondered)—nothing new, no mention of his most recent life. The entry was quite minor compared to rock singers, movie stars. Even certain other journalists had more said about them. Perhaps they regulated their own sites, made their own entries. These days, fame was all about shameless whoring. Morris clicked on “edit” and after his name, where
it read “born 1956,” he changed it to “1956–?,” and farther down the page, aware that the good denizens of this space accepted only what was verifiable and not necessarily true, he wrote, “Morris Schutt has a wife, Lucille, two daughters, and a grandson. At times he can be an out-and-out cur. He was predeceased by his son, Martin, in 2006.” He logged off again, paid, and stepped outside into a cold north wind. He thought, If man’s purpose is to flourish, to stand stalwart against the buffeting storm and find a tiny local corner in which he can thrive, then he, Morris Schutt, was failing. There were moments in his days when he was brought up short by his failure to remember Martin properly, to keep him in the forefront, to hold him in his mind and heart, and when he did fail, when he realized that he had been, for a brief moment, happily absent-minded, he felt guilty and pushed the happiness aside.

And why not, Morris thought now as he bent against the cold wind, who else was to be held accountable for Martin’s death? Why he, Morris, of course. But this was not a thought that he wanted to think. He just couldn’t stop thinking. One night, full of anguish and unable to sleep, he had risen and sat at his kitchen table and written down what he believed, at that time in his life, to be fact. He wrote: “Justice is the most important thing. Justice means not harming others. Perfect justice is perfectly impossible, but that does not mean we should not know what perfect justice looks like. Evil is voluntary. War is voluntary. War is caused by humans. Martin’s death was an accident. Accidents imply chance. I do not believe in chance.”

He stood, retrieved a few of his books, and sat again. Man, he discovered, should be by nature
a rememberer, a good learner, magnificent, charming, and a friend and kinsman of truth, justice, courage, and moderation.
This from Socrates. But to find moderation was not easy. He knew that. Morris wrote, “The most just person is the one precisely aware of his failures.” The danger, of course, was that this kind of thinking might lead to piety, which then led to fanaticism and the kind of behaviour that drove him, so long ago now, it felt, to ask people on the street the question “Are you free?”

One time, half a year after Martin died, in Toronto on a trip to visit his editor, Morris had taken a taxi from Chinatown to the harbour, and he began to talk to the driver who was quite dark and quite certainly Middle Eastern. He learned that his name was Hasim and that he came from Afghanistan and this produced a singular pang. What a strange symmetry. He had talked to the man’s eyes which studied him in the rear-view mirror, and the man had talked back. They spoke of the weather, too humid, and of the price of gasoline, too high. And then he aimed the conversation in a certain direction. “I was at a party the other night and I fell to talking with a woman.”

“Fell?” Hasim said.

“Began. I began to talk to her, and you know, I have this question that I ask. Are you free?”

“Ahh yes,” Hasim said. “Free.”

“Well,” said Morris, “in this case the woman thought I was flirting with her, until I explained that it was a philosophical question. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, I understand. Say on.”

Aha, he thought, a thinking man. And then, perhaps because of the coziness of the car, or perhaps because of the openness in Hasim’s eyes reflected in the mirror and the sense he had that those eyes could be trusted, or perhaps because he could not truly see Hasim’s face or the doubt and disbelief he might be expressing, he said that he had had a son named Martin who had been in the Canadian army, and that his son had been killed in Afghanistan. He told him the whole story, from beginning to end, which included his anger at his son for his defiant ways, how he had, in a moment of antagonism, told him to join the army, and his son had, and then how his son had written letters home detailing his fears, and how Morris had not really responded, at least not in good faith, and then his son had died, and there had been a knock at the door one day when he had been upstairs, writing. “I am a journalist,” Morris explained. He said that when he saw two people in uniform at the door, he had not wanted to answer because he knew what the message would be. He talked on, even after they had reached their destination and the taxi sat idling in the heat, and beautiful people passed by on the sidewalk, and on several occasions some of those same beautiful people tried to open the door to the taxi, but Hasim shooed them off, saying, “I am on my break.” And so Morris talked, and at some point he confessed that his son had been shot by one of his own men. And that was when Morris began to cry. He felt no embarrassment, no shame, and it was as if he knew that Hasim would not judge him, that it was almost as if Hasim had been dropped down into
his life in order to be the recipient of this news. No disapproval, just a nodding of his head as he said, “This is a grave affair.” When he had finally stopped talking, Hasim said, “I have a sister in Kandahar, and my sister has a daughter who goes to school. This could not happen if your son had not gone there to fight. Do you see? My sister’s daughter is free. And my sister, she is free as well.” He tsked and shook his head and Morris thought, Has this man heard me? Is he a spokesperson for the government? Is this what I want to hear? But Hasim continued, generously. “There is madness there. Morris, please, I would like you to be a guest in my house. Would you come to my house? To meet my wife and my two sons?” Then Morris saw that there was only goodwill, and he nodded and said he would like that very much, but perhaps the next time he was in Toronto. He would phone. Hasim gave him his phone number, written on a taxi chit, which he took and folded into his shirt pocket. Hasim got out of the taxi and came around to open the door for him, and when he tried to pay, Hasim said, “No, it is me who should pay you.” They shook hands and Morris said, “You have a good soul, Hasim.”

He misplaced the taxi chit. Or perhaps it got lost in the laundry. He hunted for it but could not find it. He called Beck Taxi in Toronto and asked for information regarding one of their drivers, Hasim, but it turned out there were seven men named Hasim working for the company. And besides, that kind of personal information was never divulged.

3

O
n the day he learned of Martin’s death, Morris had been working at home, alone in the house. He was writing his weekly column, putting on the finishing touches, when the doorbell rang. He saved his file, backed it up to a memory stick, climbed reluctantly down the stairs—he disliked being interrupted while writing—and as he approached the front door, he saw, through the glass, two men in army uniform. He knew instantly and with absolute certainty the reason for their visit. He stood, several feet from the door that remained closed. He had the thought that if he turned away and walked back upstairs and returned an hour later, the men in uniform would have disappeared and that this moment would pass into eternity. His body began to shake and he heard a voice crying, “No, no, no.” It was his own voice, he heard the timbre of it, the bass tone, and he stopped himself. There would be no scene, no indignity. He stepped forward and opened the door.

It had been an accident. Martin had died when another soldier’s rifle unintentionally went off while they were on
foot patrol. It had happened in the Panjwayi District the day before. The bullet had passed through Martin’s jaw, into his brain, and exited the top of his skull. He had died while en route to the field hospital. The man who told Morris this was the padre. He appeared to be the spokesperson. He introduced himself at the door. He said, “Mr. Schutt, my name is John Fellows and I’m a captain and a padre with the seventeenth Wing here in Winnipeg.” And then he had given Morris the news. Only later, standing in the living room, had he introduced the other man, a commanding officer who had been a part of Martin’s training. But Morris, oddly, was focused on the padre, curious that he should first call himself a padre rather than a chaplain, as if he were some sort of “father,” and curious also about the padre’s demeanour: he seemed so calm and prepared. While he spoke, he leaned forward and studied Morris carefully, as if to ascertain some sort of possible damage. Morris had many questions, but he thought later that he had asked the wrong ones. He asked if Lucille knew. She didn’t. They had come here first. Then he asked what that meant, “unintentionally.” The colonel said that the soldier whose gun it was had fired accidentally while the unit was on foot patrol. He said that Martin had been well loved by the other men. He was a hero. Morris asked how this could be, how could his son be shot by one of his own men? Were they careless, stupid? His hands began to shake and he pressed them against his face, and then looked up.

“He’s dead?”

The commanding officer nodded and said, “There will be an investigation, of course.”

“And to what end? The culprit will be charged? Why? You say it was an accident. What’s the soldier’s name?”

He looked at the men standing before him. They were good people. They were doing their jobs, but they also had to deliver information that was more difficult than death due to an improvised explosive device, or death during a firefight with the Taliban. Without waiting for answers to his questions, he said, “I don’t like the army, and I didn’t want my son to sign up, but he did so to punish me. Look at me now. I’d say he’s succeeded.”

The padre made a clicking noise with his mouth. He reached out to take Morris’s hand and he let him. He realized that these men had done this before; that whatever madness and grief and anger he threw their way, they had seen worse. And he also saw that his hatred of the army was nothing new. They had experienced this as well, were inured to this kind of reaction, almost dismissive, and this dismissal angered him. He turned to the commanding officer, a man about his own age, fifty perhaps, and asked him if he had a son. Then, not waiting for a response, he said that the people in power, the ministers, the prime minister, the generals, the colonels, all of them, they were the ones to blame for this. “Little war games,” he said. “Plucking boys, innocent, gullible boys, who’ll jump when you tell them, who’ll leap into a den of lions if you order it, who’ll bark and dance and beg and fetch, plucking them from the world of love and desire and goodness, and throwing them to the wolves.” And he said no more. Only much later would he realize that his anger and his rage at his son’s death had erupted at that moment in the living room,
and that he had then dismissed and buried it; put it away.