Algoma (8 page)

One day, several weeks into the school year, while the other kids ran off to recess, Chantal asked Ferd to stay behind. Ferd sat perfectly still and waited to be reprimanded for something he couldn’t remember doing, but Ms. Prevost was smiling. A soft, sad smile. She set a pen and piece of paper on his desk and encouraged him to write a letter to his brother. “It will feel good to let him know how you feel.” He looked up at her questioningly at first. Her bangs had grown out some and now partially shaded her eyes. He couldn’t tell if they were blue or green. Ferd looked at the paper and then at her again. She nodded. He wrote.

After he finished writing his first letter to his brother, Ferd thought of the perfect place to “mail” it. The ditch in front of the school. Somehow he knew it was not what Ms. Prevost had intended and did not tell her about his plans.

For years, parents had complained to the school administration that the ditch was dangerous. They’d argued about its depth, the culvert’s ragged edge. Someone, maybe their child, could fall in and split their head open; however, nothing was ever done about it, and Ferd was glad for it. After school, as students left the building, he pretended he was waiting for someone. When the father of one of his friends asked if he was okay, Ferd said that he was waiting for his mom. “She’s just going to be another minute. I swear.”

Once the schoolyard was clear, he walked over to the ditch. He lay down on his stomach and punched a hole through the thin skin of ice. With a bare hand, he stuffed his letter into the cold water below. Ferd had no doubt the message would reach Leo. He imagined the submerged blades of grass standing upright like soldiers escorting his message along. A top priority mission. He left the ditch feeling calmer than he had in months.

The first major spring melt would reveal a dozen notes plastered to the yellow grass that lined the ditch. The messages pulped, unreadable, undelivered.

Newly inspired, Ferd filled the back of the wedding invitation with his hurried scrawl, the same electric red wire that linked each of his letters, like houses in the same village. He flipped the card open and made stick figures out of the letters, something he did to his textbooks to pass the time during class. He transformed the letters of the word “announcement” into eight boys and four girls. The pair of Ns now fingerless twins holding hands. Beside his alphabet people he drew a crude interpretation of the school, the surrounding woods, the creek where he sat, and beyond that, the closest major cities, so that Leo would know where to find him when he was ready or able to come back.

Ferd walked out of the woods in time to hear the final bell and see a rush of students making a frenzied exodus from the front doors. He stood by and waited until the stream became a trickle of stragglers before he joined the slow procession home. Even then, he stopped at every interesting stone or malformed stick. He kicked at leftover clumps of snow, garbage, puddles. He wasn’t ready to go home.

The sky was filled with ominous-looking clouds, peaked tufts of black and white meringue. Snow clouds. He wondered what the sky looked like from beneath water, if it distorted the images above, if the sun made it through at all. The last thing he wanted was for Leo to be cold. Ferd pictured his brother sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the river, his hair slick with algae and spiked with twigs. He saw his last note, the wedding invitation, floating closer and closer to his brother until, in slow motion, Leo plucked it from the current, like a chocolate bar wrapper caught in the wind.

But there was no current to buoy Ferd. He did not know how long he could live with his side of the conversation alone. The yards of the houses he passed were the colour of old teeth. Each step he took felt heavy and laboured, his body weighted down by his brother’s decision to chase the bear. He was tired and he had math homework he already knew he wouldn’t do. But it didn’t matter. The teachers at school still looked at him with sad eyes. Ms. Prevost excused his poor assignments and forgotten homework. She didn’t question him about the things that went missing from her desk.

A red-tailed hawk fell out of the sky like a meteor. Startled, Ferd stumbled backward, almost falling. With agile claws, the bird picked up something that had been hiding behind an overturned tricycle. The hawk swooped back and up and perched on the lowest bow of the tree closest to Ferd, who watched as it ripped apart a mouse with its sharp beak. The long, sinewy strips of the rodent snapped like rubber bands. Ferd rooted through his bag. He had to tell Leo about this.

______________

5:47 p.m. -11°C. Wind N, calm.
Greasy thumb prints on the lower half of the window.

Gaetan was uneasy serving only himself. He appreciated the direction and structure that other people’s drink orders gave him. Time parcelled out in highball glasses.

A drink in one hand—two fingers of rye with three ice cubes—he stared out the window into the already dark early evening. Cold radiated from the glass. Only two months ago, he would have been able to see past the football field at the end of the street, but now it was a black void with a twinkling of house lights on the other side.

Every June, the town held a massive bonfire in the centre of the field to commemorate Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. In the fall, football teams from other towns shared locker room theories about the burned patch, the ritual sacrifices of the hometown team. What they would do to win.

Gaetan wiped his forehead. He was sweating and the window was beginning to fog up. In the kitchen, the vegetables and bones of dinner jumped and rattled in a steady roll of boiling water, the element red hot. Judging by the size of the pot, he guessed he’d be eating the same dinner for days. He’d complained about boiled dinners for his entire married life, but Algoma ignored him. She was convinced his taste buds would alter, become more sophisticated with age. He just thought that it was her way of nicely telling him to go to hell.

“It’s healthy,” she called out from the kitchen as if she’d read his mind. “Full of vitamins for what ails you and you’ve been looking grey.” She stirred the bubbling pot of fat and cellulose with such vigor he thought she’d knock it over.

Gaetan turned back to his window.

“Five more minutes,” she said. Water splashed and sizzled on the burner.

Defeated, he picked up his weather journal from the window ledge and ran his fingers along the smooth leather.

He fisted away a circle of condensation from the window, so he could see outside. His thermometer was nailed to the middle porch beam. It was cheap and simple, but accurate, and the numbers were large enough that he could read them without going outside.

-11°C.

The forever-green AstroTurf that lined the porch mocked the cold. It looked like a putting green.

“Minus twelve,” he said, and shook his head.

If it had been him, a man weighing 180 pounds, he would have lived. He would have survived the plunge into cold water. He would have found a way to get out. He was sure of it. Maybe he would have lost some fingers, or a toe, but he would have survived. A boy like Leo—thin and hairless as a skinned hare—would have never stood a chance. He shook his head and tried to focus on his weather journal, its familiar weight in his hands. Its religion of wind, sun, and precipitation.

Gaetan had recorded the weather every day since his thirteenth birthday when Simon had given him the red leather journal, which Gaetan assumed he’d shoplifted. Simon likely thought his brother would keep a diary that he could read; instead, Gaetan recorded the weather. By fifteen, he was able to match his best hunts and fishing outings with certain weather patterns. And by twenty he could track his life, how he was feeling, through the way he wrote down the details of the rain or snow, his own secret code. The habit had formed as easily and seamlessly as drink would later on.

The formula was simple: time, temperature, wind, and a short note. His formula, from which he allowed himself no deviations, meant that he’d never had to purchase a new journal, even though friends and family bought him new ones every birthday and Christmas. They always hoped theirs would be the next one he’d cling to. One line a day for over two decades and he’d still only used half the pages. He noted with some satisfaction that his penmanship had changed and improved over the years. It had become neater, more precise. At least something had changed.

“Dinner,” Algoma said, the white sleeves of an oversized men’s dress shirt rolled up sloppily to reveal her knobby elbows. Gaetan turned around to see his wife holding up a BBQ fork with a sopping ham on the end, fat gobs of oily water dripping onto the floor.

She smiled. “Protein. You like protein, right?” It wasn’t a question.

And you like to save a buck or ten, he thought, and took his seat.

“What did you say?” Algoma asked.

“I said great.”

On cue, Ferd walked through the side door, took off his boots, and sat down at the table with his coat still on. His cheeks were bright red and a clear stream of snot dripped from nose to lip.

“Where’ve you been?” Algoma asked. “Take off your coat and wipe your nose.”

“I’m cold,” he said. Ferd wiped his nose with his coat sleeve.

Gaetan turned to his son. “Listen to your mother. Take off your coat.” The one area where he and Algoma were a united front was in parenting their remaining child. He was all they had. A thin blood tether.

Ferd ignored them both and pushed the salt and pepper shakers in front of the empty seat at the table, so it looked purposeful. Occupied.

Seated with his back to the living room, Gaetan was convinced he could feel the weather changing behind him, the barometer dropping. His fingers itched with the urge to update his journal, but Algoma’s eyes were on him. She’d never stand for it. He shifted uncomfortably under her stare. She chewed aggressively on a piece of gristly pork fat. He needed a drink.

“A toast is in order,” he said, jumping up from his seat. His chair screeched as it scraped across the floor.

Algoma stopped chewing. “For what?”

Ferd held up his empty water glass in hopes of scoring a sip.

“To… us!” Gaetan ran over to the liquor cabinet “Civilized people have drinks with dinner. Kings have drinks with dinner. Vikings!”

Algoma rolled her eyes. “Your food is going to get cold. Sit down.” She tried to fork an overcooked potato onto her plate, but it crumbled as soon as she stabbed it.

Gaetan surveyed his collection of half-filled bottles, every one of them a “donation” from the Club. He settled on a fat glass bottle of amber-coloured rum. Something warm and sunny to battle the bland dinner and the cold outside. He walked back into the kitchen and held up his glass to the swing lamp’s light bulb.

“It’s like sun, right?”

Algoma swallowed a forkful of grainy potato. “Aloha.”

Ferd giggled. He stared at the pot of water-softened roots and meat on the stove and resisted the temptation to drop a note into the simmering mash. Maybe later, he thought, when his parents were watching television, which is about all they could stand to do together these days. Stalagmites of empty wine glasses rising from the coffee table.

Before Leo’s accident, it had been normal for his parents to invite friends and family over for dinner, the sound of glasses clinking and card-game insults filling the house with a comfortable and familial din. But now no one came over, unsure of which version of Algoma or Gaetan they might find. How red-eyed from sadness or drink.

The phone rang. Neither Ferd nor Gaetan made a move to answer it. They knew better. Algoma hated phones—the uninvited noise, the intrusion. She wouldn’t tolerate interruptions during dinner. One of her few rules. Dinner was for family.

The phone bleated out its final ring. Gaetan wondered if Bay was on the other end. In between bites of ham and limp onion he tried to imagine what a life with her would have looked like. Would things have turned out differently? Would she have had twin sons like her youngest sister? He was sure hers would have floated, not sunk like Algoma’s.

While he tried not to, and while he knew it was wrong, Gaetan found himself at times blaming Algoma, at least in part, for Leo’s death. She had not raised him hardy enough. She hadn’t eaten the right things when she was pregnant. Things would have been different with Bay, but maybe not better. It could have been a parallel hell. Twin girls. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose a daughter. A tornado of ribbon and silk spiraling down toward the silt.

Throughout dinner, while Algoma and Ferd ate in relative silence, Gaetan cycled through all of Algoma’s sisters in his mind. He pictured a wedding with each, the honeymoon night, the different combinations of children, what jobs he could have pursued with a different woman behind him.

With Cen, he was a carpenter, and they had a boy and a girl. With Steel, he was the proud father of three perfect black-haired girls that looked like him, and he worked as a teacher. Math maybe. But his imagination stalled on Bay like a flooded engine. He conveniently forgot the part where she hadn’t wanted him.

Gaetan looked at Algoma. She was carefully rearranging the food on her plate so that it appeared she’d eaten more than she actually had. An old trick he’d given up trying to get her to stop. By the end of the meal she would just toss her napkin over the entire mess and announce that she was full and make a big show out of it. Her shoulders looked narrower than he remembered, sharp, as if the bone might slip through and relieve her of her skin at any moment.

After dinner, the family splintered off. Algoma to her sewing, Ferd to his room in the basement, and Gaetan to the living room to watch television. If someone stood in the centre of the house and listened—the television crackling, the sewing machine humming its way through repairs, and the muffled thumps of someone moving around downstairs—it sounded like a family. All the parts were there, but the web had been cut. One essential thread removed that had left them all speaking different languages.

Out of habit, Gaetan leaned over and picked up his weather journal again. He flipped through the pages and penned another entry for the evening. Sometimes, he took the journal with him to work or out for short walks to the end of the street, so he could report the weather in real time. His coworkers had nicknamed him “The Weatherman.” He worried constantly that someone would steal his journal, his weather—twenty years of highs and lows—but he couldn’t bear to leave it behind either. The back pocket of his jeans bore the distinct outline of his journal like a pack of cigarettes.