Barnacle Love (19 page)

“Are you still up?” I hadn’t heard my mother come into my room. She sat on my bed and tilted her head as if sorry for everything, as if it was her fault.

“Ma, he’s driving me crazy!” My sister charged into my room. I sat up.

“He’s going to bed soon,
paciência filha.
” My mother patted the edge of my bed, an invitation for her to come and lie down with us.

“
Putas!
Get out a here! This is my house! I no want fuckersh
putas
in my house!”

My mother instinctually drew my sister close to her. My blood raced as I saw Terri turn and, with exaggerated steps, as if to announce she was approaching, stomp down the stairs and through the long corridor. My mother raised her hand to her forehead and sighed deeply before hanging her head low. We waited.

“I want to sleep!” my sister yelled.

“This is my house!” he replied.

“Just go to bed and shut up, for God’s sake, just shut the fuck up!”

My stomach hit my throat.

“And it’s not
fuckersh.
There’s no
shhh
in that fucken word. You’ve been in Canada all these years and—”

“I Canadian!” I could imagine him puffing out his chest and pounding it hard.

“You’re a fucken pork chop! That’s what they call us dad … pork chops!”

My mother sprang from my bed and ran down the stairs. A heat pricked at my brain as I followed. My sister had spat the words out like darts. I was glad she had said them, and I hoped the words had made him topple or cower in a corner.

Instead, my father stood in the kitchen with drenched boxers hanging on his frail body. His blotched face and head bobbed on his pasty torso. His eyelids were half closed and he tried to steady himself along the counter as my mother caught hold of my sister’s shoulders, pulled her back, urged her to return to her room. I felt the guilt of wanting my sister to finish what she had begun.

My father knocked over the porcelain soap dish that sat next to the sink, and the swell of tension was broken by its
smashing on the floor. My mother let go and I saw the flash of concern in my sister as she crouched down to pick up the pieces before his long white feet stepped on anything. It is what I would have done and I wanted her to stop. I wanted him to walk over the broken glass, to have the jagged pieces dig into the soles of his feet. My father bent over and grabbed her fisted hand in his and pulled her up until she stood next to him. I could see his white knuckled hand over hers. A trickle of blood appeared on the inside of her wrist, then made its way down her arm in a crooked line.

He let go. Slowly, my sister unfurled her fingers—opened her hand flat. A small piece of the soap dish lay buried in her palm. She picked the shard out of her hand and the blood spilled from the font. She closed her hand into a fist again.

“Get out! You no good,
puta.
”

“Terri, let’s go to bed,” I said.

She didn’t hear me. She looked at my father, who seemed incapable of understanding what he had done. Her petite frame stood facing him. Something inside my sister took over. She lunged at my father and pushed him to the floor. She kicked him with her bare feet, first his chest, then his bald head.

He lay there, curled in the fetal position, absorbing each blow, helpless. My sister’s rage had made her oblivious to the shards of china that lay scattered about, and she continued to pound his frame. Her bare feet slid through pee—I don’t know if it was hers or his. She wobbled for only a second, regained her balance, and before she could continue her assault my mother caught her arms and tried to hold her back. The floor was covered in bloody scuff
marks. She tried to tear herself from my mother’s hold. I grabbed one of her wild legs, but she overpowered us, or we let her. Perhaps every blow to the head, every kick to his shins was
ours.

Then Terri just stopped.

I lowered my eyes and turned sideways to allow her to pass. She left, as if all she had come down for was a glass of water. She exited into the dim corridor on her way back to bed; my mother followed behind.

I stayed to clean up the mess. I tried not to look at him lying there; his breath gurgled and rasped when he inhaled. He attempted to lift himself into a sitting position and look around the kitchen. One eye was swollen shut and there was blood smeared across his puffy cheeks. He saw me and raised his head, an invitation to help him. I didn’t move. Only last week, at two o’clock in the morning, I had had to collect him from Wanda’s front garden, up our street. He was completely naked in the cold night, peeing, her dog Poncho barking madly in the yard, snapping at the arc of urine. He hadn’t asked for help then. Tonight he did. I bent down and threw his arm around my shoulder and dragged his clammy body to bed. As I tucked him in I saw my mother’s silhouette move past the bedroom door, heard the click of the basement lights.

I followed her shadow into the wine cellar. My mother straddled one of the large oak barrels that sat in its wedged wooden bracket. She hung on to a leg of cured ham that dangled from the basement rafter, as she struggled to open the sliding window. The fresh autumn air poured into the room. She bent over the face of the barrel and plucked the cork free. The unfermented wine
growled deep within its oaken belly before sputtering and spewing in a steady stream across the concrete floor. Barefooted, she moved to the next barrel and struggled to pull that cork out. And again, till all four barrels emptied themselves in rhythmic gulps.

She stood in her cotton nightgown that always smelled of sweet talcum powder. Her figure, with its maroon-stained hem, moved toward me. She took my hands then swung her shoulders in an invitation to dance. We danced through the streams of ruby red, splattering each other, twirling and spinning. My feet began to stick and I grew dizzy with her laughter.

“Stop,
Mãe
… I said stop!”

She had shut herself off from my voice but sensed my reluctance as I slowed down. Lacking a willing partner, she dropped my hands. She danced and twirled a few times more in a solitary and unconvincing flourish. For a moment she looked uncertain of where she was. She squatted over the puddle of wine and covered her face with her hands. There she sat, where the four streams of wine met, in the sweet smell of grape juice, amid the sounds of her sobs and the thin trickle dropping down the drainage hole.

“Go to bed now,
filho.
” She swept her forearm across her face, moving the wisps of hair that stuck to her glowing forehead. “To bed,
filho.
I’ll clean up.”

Usually, on a Saturday morning I awoke to the smell of Lemon Pledge paste and the steady hum of my mother buffing the kitchen floor. This morning the house was
silent. I faintly remember my mother peeking into my room; she used words like
hospital
and
stitches.
On my way down to the kitchen I thought I was alone, but saw my father’s lump under the covers of his bed.

I grabbed a Joe Louis from the pantry and headed to the basement.
How had she left things?
The concrete floor was spotless, scoured and bleached. The stoppers had been placed back in the now hollow barrels. Only the sweet smell of unfermented wine lingered. The frosted window remained open. I climbed on top of a barrel and breathed in cold blowing wind that seared my lungs, then shut the window.

My father barely got out of bed that day. He left his room to pee or to pour himself a glass of milk mixed with a raw egg. I’m sure he thought that might cure what ailed him, his sore head and bruised back. The events of the previous evening were forgotten. I knew this because he had forced a painful smile when we met in the hallway and asked, “Where’s your mother?” through a yawn.

I went to bed early, five o’clock. I made a sort of ritual of the event. I threw my flannel pajamas in the oven at two hundred degrees for only a couple of minutes, then quickly jumped into them and ran up to my bed and under my covers. I was fifteen and it was the sort of thing my mother used to do for us every Saturday night after our weekly baths. Usually, I’d be embarrassed, catching myself smiling with the warmth and pure joy that enveloped me. Tonight the joy was missing.

I was content to just sleep, but that eluded me also. I could hear my mother come up the stairs and move
around the house. She entered my room then left, a trail of herbal smoke swirling after her.

I waited until I knew she had covered the whole house with her burnt offering, then followed her upstairs to the attic. She hunched over her workspace, her knees cramped next to the iron sewing machine that hung under the table. Aware of my presence, she motioned with her elbow to take a seat on the old chair that was once my grandmother Theresa’s. I had found my mother on many a morning sleeping in this very chair. There had been a time when I felt I could swim in it. Now, I could barely cross my legs, the adult way—a habit I had only recently forced myself to pick up. I sat with my knees curled under my chin.

On the windowsill sat the fisherman my mother had been working on, his little tin hat tilted on the side of his head, his arms dangling over the edge of the small boat with
Avé
painted on its side. He held on to a long wire of dangling fish made from the simple twist of pop can tabs. Beside him, leaning against the windowpane, the blue-eyed boy seemed eager to ride his bicycle. The knees of his thinly wired legs would move with the slightest breath of air. My mother had made other whirligigs before; they were scattered across our vegetable garden, different colored birds whose wings turned freely on a simple rod, their beaks pointing into the wind.

“God sees everything,” she said.

“How do you know?” I challenged. She stopped painting a dress on a small cutout of a girl, whose only completed feature was her hair.

“The wind tells me so,” she said, “and time.”

She turned to continue painting. God had loomed over our home and in our neighborhood; our lives and culture were controlled by what He represented, and I had believed.

On Monday my mother left early for work. I was home alone with my father, who hadn’t worked in nine months. He had lost his license for driving drunk. He had been dumping some clean fill at the Leslie Spit and had almost run his dump truck into the lake. According to the police officer, when they towed the truck back onto the road, he lay in the front seat snoring, the cab filled to his waist with lake water.

I scrambled to get ready for school, but the sounds that came from his room frightened me. He was pleading with someone. Reluctantly, I stepped into his room and crept up beside him. He was huddled in his sheets, shaking uncontrollably.

He turned to face me, his eyes now bruised; his cut lip was healing, a dark scab had slowly formed. His head was dotted with small beads of sweat. His teeth rattled. His cool blue eyes darted across my face, searching for something recognizable. I could smell stale pee in his damp sheets, and when he opened his mouth traces of metal and sulfur rose from deep inside him. He grasped my arm, dug his nails in.

“She want to kill me … the black lady has a knife,
filho.
Run! Call the police. She want to kill me.” He covered his head with the sheets and howled the same warnings from beneath his pillow.

“There’s no one here.”

“You fucken crazy. You kill me, you sonofabitch.” Every muscle in his neck strained, his eyes bulged out of their sockets as his body squirmed in awkward spasms.

I ran to the phone in the hallway.
What happens in this house, stays in this house.
I dialed my mother at St. Michael’s Hospital, and at the first ring placed the receiver back in its cradle. His groans boomed through the corridor. I lifted the receiver again, the blood swooshing across my ears, and dialed.

“Hello—” I paused for only a second. “I need an ambulance—55 Palmerston Avenue … It’s my father … My name is Antonio … his son.”

I sat on the chair beside the telephone in the hallway. They said they’d take him to Toronto Western. I could hear their exchanges, caught words like
hallucinations, stink, withdrawal, alcoholic.
Things were happening so fast.

“
Filho
, no let me go. They killing me,
filho.
”

They tucked the sheets taut under him, his arms stiff by his sides, and strapped him down with leather belts before wheeling him outside.

“Would you like to ride in the ambulance with us?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want the neighbors to see me.

“They had no room for him in the hospital. They moved him. These are his blankets. Bring them to your father,
filho.
” A stuffed knapsack lay in the corner of the entrance hallway. Before I could say anything, she handed me an
address—16 Ossington Avenue—clearly printed on a torn piece of paper. She kissed my forehead and opened the door for me.

“I’ll take my bike.”

It was mid-November and the air was beginning to sting. I pedaled my ten-speed along Queen Street, careful to avoid the streetcar tracks and sewer grates. I sped by Trinity Bellwoods Park and then the Candy Factory before crossing Shaw and the ominous gloom of the mental hospital.
Is this where he was? They said they’d be taking him to the hospital, Toronto Western.
I stopped and unraveled the piece of paper crushed between my hand and the handlebar. I moved toward Ossington Avenue then turned north, relieved I wouldn’t have to go into the mental hospital. I came to a large blue door that matched the address on the paper. I knocked and a voice came through an intercom grate.

“I … I’m here to give something to my … Manuel.”

The door opened with a buzz and I entered a dimly lit space; a mismatch of sofas and chairs with a large console television at the far end, its grainy glare washing over the furniture. A sign hung on the wall behind a counter:
TORONTO WEST DETOX CENTRE
. A large black man came around the counter and took the bag.

“Your father’s there.”

How does he know I’m his son
, I thought. He pointed to a reclining chair wedged between two larger sofas. A small figure sat alone. I could see they were all watching Monday Night at the Movies—
Charly.
I approached slowly.
They’re drunks
, I thought; the kind I saw on the street with their long beards and tattered clothes who laughed and smoked
and drank Aqua Velva while others slept over heating vents or panhandled in store doorways. With every step toward my father the smell of stale cigarettes pushed against my nostrils.
He should be in a hospital … not here with these drunks.
A toothless woman came toward me and the black man at the door redirected her gently back to the sofa.