The Matter With Morris (18 page)

The padre asked if he wanted to call his wife, or if he would prefer that they speak to her. He said that he would call. He went into the kitchen and dialled her direct line rather than going through her secretary, Joan. Her machine kicked in immediately and he knew that she was seeing a patient. He left a message. He said, “Lucille, it’s me. Morris. Please call.”

He didn’t want to worry her, though he made his tone serious enough to warrant some suspicion on her part. He never called her at work and so she would be curious. But he certainly didn’t want to give her any grim warning and have her thinking the worst. But what was worse than this? He thought of going through Joan, having her interrupt the session, or of leaving another message and saying that it was the worst thing possible, and she would know and come quickly, with utmost haste. He knew that Martin’s death would destroy her.

They’d made love that morning, before she went to work. Now, facing these two men, he wanted to step back through the day to that moment when their eyes had met and she had clasped his buttocks with her heels. Back through time. Erase the day. Though Martin must have been dead already while they were having sex. For how long?

The padre was talking. He said that he would stay with Morris until Lucille came home. He thought it best that he be here when she heard the news. “In our experience, it’s important to have someone else present.”

What a terrible job, Morris thought, and he nodded.

The commanding officer spoke then. He said that the common practice was for someone to be with the family
during the day. At least for the first while. To be a support, to talk to the press, to field questions. A family wasn’t necessarily equipped for the hard questions at this time, for the snooping and prying. “Journalists are looking for a story, I’m sorry to say, and in our experience we are able to provide a buffer for the family. Is that okay? If we are here for you?”

Morris nodded again. He wanted to say that he was a journalist, that he knew the methods and the people, but he said nothing.

Lucille had been amazing. When she walked in and saw the three of them in the living room, she said, “It’s Martin,” and Morris had gone to her and held her for the longest time, and then she’d pulled away and sat down and said, “Tell me,” and the padre told her. After, she cried. Morris sat beside her and held her hand as she cried, and then she looked up and said that she would make tea. Her hands were shaking.

The padre said that they didn’t need tea, they were fine, but Lucille insisted. Morris watched her rise and walk towards the kitchen, and the commanding officer, softer in tone than his uniform and rank would imply, followed her. He heard them talking as the water boiled. Muffled voices, the occasional question. He felt proud of his wife. How solid she was, so fine in this moment.

Later that night, after the phone calls to family and friends and to his brother in Idaho, after Libby had come home and been given the news and cried and cried and then been put to bed with a hot-water bottle and two sleeping pills, only then did Lucille show her rage. “Why didn’t you tell
Joan that it was an emergency? My God, Morris, you treat me like a child, like I’m breakable, and then you act surprised when I break. I should have been here. It was my right.”

“That’s ridiculous, Lucille. You’re being unreasonable. I knew what they were about to tell me the minute I saw them.”

“Did you? Truly? Oh, my. Oh, my.” Then she asked why Sheila had to come back the next day. Sheila had arrived at the house after dinner, been introduced as the assisting officer, and stayed till midnight. She would return in the morning.

“It’s how it works,” he said. “They’ve done this before.”

“He was shot by one of his own,” Lucille said.

“Shh. Don’t.”

“How could it be an accident? Do you think they’re lying? Do you think he wasn’t liked by this unknown killer? What was the soldier’s name? Maybe they’re covering it up. Maybe an enemy soldier broke into the compound and killed him. I don’t trust them, Morris. They want everything to be clear and certain and I’m not getting this story. Did you see the padre’s eyes? He wasn’t being straight with us.”

“That man has a terrible job to do,” he said, but he was thinking of other things. He believed that everything in the world, even the loss of his son, was necessary. Because, if it had been an accident, then it was unnecessary, and if it was unnecessary, then it became pointless, an event that did not fit into the larger design of the world. Which was nonsense. Because, for him, nothing could be accidental. Not the colour of Lucille’s hair, nor the socks he had chosen to wear that morning, nor the shape of his son’s ears, nor the coffee he
had spilled at breakfast, the black stain spreading over the white tablecloth. An error perhaps, but not an accident.

Lucille’s voice floated through the darkness of their bedroom. “Why did you tell him to go? Why, Morris? Why do you always have to be right? Did you ever think of the consequences? Oh, God. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?” She began to weep. She sat up and wept and beat her hands against her thighs and he held her and shushed and said that Libby would hear. She didn’t want to upset Libby, did she?

Then he said, “I loved him, Lucille. I loved him terribly. I just didn’t know how to tell him. He wouldn’t let me.”

“He was twenty. That’s all. He was twenty years old and he’ll always be twenty. How does that work, Morris? Tell me. Please tell me.”

“Come. Come here.” And he pushed her back onto the bed and rubbed her back, felt the fine bones of her rib cage, the sharp shoulders, the elasticity of her skin. He talked to her, told her what a beautiful boy Martin was. He said, “Remember the day he walked into the house and announced he was going to Afghanistan. He was happy, Lucille. I’ve never seen him happier, as if he had found a calling, and no matter what we said we couldn’t convince him otherwise. He was brave, Lucille. He had to be brave. Now it’s us, our turn. Okay?” He kissed her forehead, her face, and tasted the salt from her tears. He held her head to his chest as she wept and then she stopped, and eventually she fell asleep, and he did not let her go because he feared she would wake.

In the morning, Sheila had reappeared. She kept a constant pot of coffee on the go, and whenever the phone rang, she
made it clear that she was willing to take it, to screen the calls. Morris said that he could handle it. He had friends who were journalists, and if they wanted to call, he would speak to them, and if there were any unwanted calls, he would hang up.

“I understand that you’re upset, Mr. Schutt,” Sheila said. “And so is your wife. You’re vulnerable to suggestion, and it might just slip out that you’re angry with the Canadian Forces. You might end up saying something you’ll regret later. We want to be united.”

“Do we? And why? Because you are concerned about appearances? Well, I’m not, and I’ll say whatever is necessary.”

That evening Lucille told Sheila that she should leave and not return the following day. There was no point. “We ‘re quite capable of talking to the press,” Lucille said. “We know how to think. We stand side by side, and if our heads wobble a little, that’s normal. But we know what we believe. We’re not here to protect the army or to justify some war or even to claim our son was a hero. He might not have been.”

Sheila said Lucille was wrong, that their son was a hero, and she found it sad that they couldn’t accept that. Her cheeks were round and ruddy and her dress shirt was too small so that the button holes were stretched. She made a little popping sound with her mouth as she exhaled in exasperation. Lucille saw her to the door and swept her outside into the night. “Am I cruel?” Lucille asked when she returned to Morris, who sat like a puritan on a straight-backed wooden chair in the living room. But she did not sound sorry, and she did not want an answer to her question, this he knew.

The ramp ceremony took place on a cold and windy Tuesday at the airport. Morris was flanked by Libby and Lucille. Glen stood beside Meredith. She held Jake, who was restless and wanted to see the airplanes. The casket was closed; Morris and Lucille did not want a public viewing. They were given Martin’s uniform and a flag. Morris had been surprised to see one of the pallbearers weeping. The drive from the airport to the funeral home was silent. He had read of the Highway of Heroes near Toronto, where the public gathered on overpasses and paid respects to the fallen war heroes, and as they drove down Sargent Avenue towards the downtown, he wondered how it was that he had come to live in a place where a fallen soldier was driven ignominiously past warehouses and big box stores and empty sidewalks.

Martin was cremated. Lucille demanded this. Bizarrely, she spoke of an article she’d read recently, about the discovery in ice of a prehistoric man, killed violently five thousand years earlier during a battle. An arrowhead had been found lodged in his shoulder. She said, “I want my son’s ashes.” And they had done exactly this. But first, after arriving at the funeral home from the ramp ceremony, they opened the casket and looked at Martin for the last time. His body had been prepared in Afghanistan and then been shipped to Winnipeg. He was in uniform. His face was flattened slightly, and at first Morris didn’t recognize him. Then he leaned forward and kissed his son’s forehead, his cheek, and laid his head against his chest. “Martin,” he whispered. The rest of the family held hands after they’d all said goodbye. Lucille told Morris later that she had looked for the hole in Martin’s
jaw but couldn’t find it. She said that she had wanted to crawl into the casket and lie with him. “But Meredith would have gone nuts. And Jake. He wouldn’t have understood.” And so they remained, resolute, said their goodbyes, and reluctantly turned away.

Martin had both a military funeral and a smaller memorial service. The military funeral was attended by close to one thousand people and Morris was astounded by the tributes and the respect Martin was paid. The padre who led the service spoke of honouring the fallen, and at some point during the service, as Morris held Lucille’s hand, he became aware that the army had become Martin’s family. What a good boy he had been. He was aware too of the sameness—the cohesion, the hardware, the perfection—of these men and women, which contrasted so greatly with his dead son, no longer able to wear the uniform of his country.

The memorial service, held two days later, was small, intended for family and close friends. Samuel flew up from Idaho. A few members of the Canadian Forces attended. They sat near the back and approached the family after the service, out on the parking lot. One of the men introduced himself as a soldier from Martin’s company. He shook hands with Morris. Lucille, much to Morris’s surprise, hugged him. Libby was the only family member to speak at the service. She was graceful, both in how she carried herself and in the manner she spoke, as if she were wearing Martin’s death lightly. Her tone was even and calm and she told stories about Martin. She said that no sister could ask for a better big brother than Martin. “Once, when I was going out on my first date, at
fifteen, he came into my room and told me that I should trust myself, that I was a beautiful strong girl, and that I should know what I wanted before I acted.” Libby laughed and said, “I knew what he was trying to talk about.” She blushed and paused, moved aside a strand of hair that had fallen over her eyes. “Then he said, ‘Boys can be greedy, Libby. They want to have sex. I should know. I’m a boy.’ And then he hugged me. He was wise. And carefree. He didn’t know that certain conversations might be difficult, that there were rules.” Here, Libby made little quotation marks with her fingers as she said “rules” and she smiled. “I would like to be as honest and forthright as Martin was. He was so spirited, so fervent, so curious. If only I could be half of what he was.”

Libby’s mouth, when she spoke, twisted slightly, as if she were suffering, but she did not cry. She looked at Morris and Lucille and Meredith and Jake, and she said that they had all been well loved by their brother and son and uncle. “Aren’t we lucky?”

Morris wondered if Libby’s strength came from her naiveté, the fact that she might be too young to truly understand the severity of the moment. But no, this was not true. Over the next week, Libby broke down and was inconsolable. Too much had been asked of her.

In the weeks that followed, Morris became clinically obsessed with bullets and rounds and M16s and C7s. When he could not sleep nights, he carried out research. He read that the
C7 gas-powered rifle has a 51-cm (20-inch) cold hammer-forged barrel with a flash suppressor, a bayonet lug, a TRIAD 1TM MIL-STD-1913 accessory mount, and “coloured furniture to break up the weapon outline.”
Coloured furniture?
As if the rifle were something one bought at Urban Barn and then plunked down in front of the fireplace? As well, he researched the bullet that had killed Martin. He thought it might be a 5.56 x 45 mm, manufactured in the States, though he couldn’t be sure. He read: “When the bullet impacts at high velocity and yaws in tissue, fragmentation creates a rapid transfer of energy which can result in massive wounding and hydrostatic shock effects.”

At this point, he went upstairs and climbed into bed and prayed that Lucille and his daughters would never know these facts. He wondered what “hydrostatic shock” was. And that word “yaw.” In the morning, when he was alone again, almost against his will, he looked up “hydrostatic shock” and discovered that it referred to remote neural damage. The bullet was “light and fast” and so effective that it immediately shut down the organs of the animal.

Morris went outside and stood on the front porch in his bathrobe and slippers and watched the sparrows flit from bush to bush, clinging to the bare branches, singing crazily, the happy little brainless fuckers.

The next day he phoned the recruiting centre in Winnipeg and asked to speak to someone who could help him with some research on a book he was writing on Afghanistan. He said that he was Arnold Thompson, and he was an American from the Midwest. He was passed off to various people and had
finally gotten some answers from an officer who appeared to be impressed that an American writer would be calling. He said that he was researching elements of the Canadian Forces, specifically types of weapons, and comparing this to the United States military.