Come Back (24 page)

there is a sound not like a child or other small animal

alone a sound like people holding each other anyone

whoever may be somehow at hand heads perhaps

bumping knocking please please but there is no

answer a sound groping with fingertips or

sudden fistfuls of clutching and finding

only alone an indestructible sound

like rain like snow like bullets

striking air or some

thing more sensitive

than air a sound

like

like

The telephone shrilled, an explosion in his paralyzed mind. Hal bumbled to his feet, grabbed at the basement receiver, dropped it but saw the number and collapsed, rolled onto his back again while clutching it, jabbed the right button.

“Dad … hello Dad?”

“Miriam … how, how … hey … are you!”

“What’s wrong, Dad, what—?”

“Sorry—no—I’m okay, good good, I just swallowed—arrgggh—some coffee wrong …” (Why was he lying?) “I’m fine … especially now, you, how are you all, you four darlings?”

“A bit late, decaf I hope—please be careful, sweet Dad … well, we’re all usual here, like usual.”

“So. So Michelle’s through her friend disaster?”

Miriam’s easy laugh rang in his ear, “C’mon, it’s two days! You know their ‘Forever’! They’re in her room studying … at least that’s what they said, Grade Eight math.”

“Good … you heard from Emilia, she all right?”

“Just talked on Skype. Has she called you, she didn’t say?”

“Not since last week.”

“She looks relieved, even on the blurry computer, she’s glad she moved to Santiago, such a beautiful city, the Andes she says, and the ESL students are better than in Buenos Aires. Not in English but eager, they want to learn so badly.”

“She has friends, in Santiago?”

“Not yet, but she will, soon. I think that’s what she’s happy about: no one she
has
to be friends with like Leo’s family in BA, all their heavy—”

“Yeah, their disappearances, politics—heavy stuff.”

“Emilia loves them, you know her, so understanding. But it’s too heavy sometimes, and there’s nothing to do but listen, especially with the aunts for a year now so she’s sort of happy to get away, six months, I can’t blame her …”

“Good, see something else.”

“Chile’s as bad as Argentina for memories, it won’t last.”

“See, better like me to know only one word of Spanish,
‘adios’
and that’s it!”

“German’s not such a happy language.”

“True—and Low German’s hardly better. But I think there’s some of you in your lovely daughter —if necessary, she can be a sort of avoider, eh what?”

Miriam’s superb laughter again. “Hey! I think she’s more an ‘evader,’ like you!”

“No no, get it right, I’m not so much underhanded as slippery, I
elude
things I want to avoid.”

They were both laughing, able as always to feel quickly happy together, momentarily.

“I should never play word games with you!”

“No no, you should, words play real good, especially on the phone.”

“I know, and you always know more than enough for a comeback.”

“Yeah,” said Hal, suddenly heavy as guilt.

“Dad? Something wrong?”

The Orange Downfill, he had to … “Nothing’s wrong,” he lied quickly. “Still alive, it’s enough.”

“Da-ad!”

“Sorry.”

They were both silent; waiting. Finally Miriam said, “I saw in the
Sun
today Edmonton got its standard end-of-April snow.”

“Yeah … today it’s melting.”

“It’s not even raining here. Why don’t you get in your fast Celica and come out, walk around English Bay, Stanley
Park a few days? Michelle would love it, evenings getting longer and everything’s lush green, there’s no snow in Jasper or the Coquihalla.”

“Well …”

“You promise, but you haven’t come … it’s months.”

Confess something. “I went into the basement, I opened two Gabe boxes.”

Silence.

“I haven’t touched those boxes since Yo and I took them down …”

Silence lengthened, then Miriam murmured, “ ‘85. Everything stops.”

“And starts—you and Leo, soon your lovely kids.”

“That’s not why you opened them.”

“No. I only got into two, all the paper—not his things—his two diaries and the notebooks and I suddenly thought—”

“Before Frankfurt or after?”

“Both, ’84 and ’85, and his number three notebook, that’s the same time, longer thoughts and everything dated, a pocket notebook too and there’s quite a few loose pages and—” Hal stopped himself, then continued quickly before Miriam could ask the obvious question, “Yeah, he writes quite a lot, daily stuff, also lists of definitions and has discussions with himself about God the Father, the Creator, and his problems with him, and word prayers and anger—but nothing about Jesus. Not a word. And I can’t remember ever talking with Gabe about Jesus either, no memory at all. All the times we talked, isn’t that strange?”

“Of course you talked about Jesus, you even taught his Sunday School class a whole year. You certainly talked about Jesus.”

“That was when he was little, six or seven …”

“Sure, but you did after too—”

“Yes, I know we did, but I can’t remember! Not one exact thing I could say, now. And then I thought of Norman, he was in Gabe’s Sunday School class too, how he … how he was gone … he was even younger, twenty … remember?”

“Yes,” Miriam said faintly. “In his locked room. Right above his parents’ bedroom.”

“Gabe and I were doing fall cleanup at the cabin when Yo phoned and told us, and then we went down to the creek, we looked at the beaver dams, they weren’t very high that autumn. We talked, I remember, we sat on a log …”

“It must have been something okay, Gabe was so strong at Norman’s funeral. He was even a pallbearer.”

“I know I know, we sat on the log-jam above the beaver pond, that one in the bend where you see the cabin on the cliff, but I can’t remember … not one word.”

“Why,” Miriam’s voice so gentle, “why does it matter?”

“Oh I guess we must have talked about life and death—we’d all been through both grandpas and one grandma dying, open coffins, good Mennonite face-to-face funerals, older people okay, but his friend and age, from his church Young People, I just … I hope I didn’t talk about God too much, that we talked about Jesus …”

“Dad, you would have.”

“I just hope to hell I—excuse me!—I didn’t say Norm’s death was God’s will.”

“You would never!”

“I don’t know … then … I remember once arguing at a funeral there was no such thing as ‘accident.’ After a car crash.”

“Did you call the crash ‘God’s will’?”

“No no, I think I said, ‘a law of nature,’ like Thomas Hardy’s ‘convergence of the twain.’ ”

“Didn’t Hardy mean something different? Like ‘inevitable destiny’—‘fate’? You never talked like that to us kids.”

“I guess … I hope not,” Hal said, hopelessly.

“No! You talked about laws of nature and our decisions, us deciding what we did, not
fate
.”

“You remember it that way?”

“I do, Dad.”

“Good. But in Gabe’s last years of desperate writing—it really is … reading it now it’s sometimes more than desperate—heavy heavy Holy God is there a lot, a Creator who made us whatever we are, he calls himself a ‘fool’ so often, or ‘shy,’ ‘sick’—‘So here I am, God, the sensitive fool you made, me! I never asked to be …’ But he never mentions Jesus, not once.”

“Listen,” Miriam’s voice changed quick and strong, “Gabe talked about Jesus to me that last summer, I remember it, about Jesus and the two thieves.”

“What?”

“On the cross, the two thieves.”

Hal can only grunt, his surprise staggering him. He stretched out completely on the floor, away from the
rustling paper and with his eyes closed: seeing his tall daughter’s beautiful face leaning into the telephone, her voice murmuring gradually into happiness,

“It must have been August because we were in Leo’s apartment, 80th Avenue, drinking coffee, Leo was out working and Gabe told me he was reading the Gospels and he noticed—”

“August ’85? Gabe was reading the Gospels?”

“Yes! And he said all three Synoptics say there are two thieves crucified with Jesus, and Matthew and Mark say both reviled Jesus when they were nailed there but Luke says one thief did not revile. He defended Jesus and that’s a big difference, Gabe said, but it’s two against one, no, actually
three
against one because John’s Gospel mentions the two thieves too but no defense either, three to one, so why, he said, do we believe Luke?”

Hal sang quietly, “ ‘Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom, Jesus, remember …’ ”

“Yes!” Miriam exclaimed, “our communion song! The thief’s prayer on the cross, in Luke, yes.”

“That last August?”

“In Leo’s apartment, it had to be right at the end … August.”

“I just read his two diaries and the third notebook, and you know before July ’85 there’s all these names of movies—he went sometimes to two a day—sometimes a quick fact, ‘lunch with Oleg,’ ‘drink with …’ stuff like that, and about every week notes of weeping and anger and ‘God, please have some mercy’ … and then there’s nothing at all in the notebook and nothing daily in the diaries, no movies and
all the dates ignored, it’s all just overwritten down and sideways with rage, despair, his mind seems made up, no debate or discussion, and he’s just sorry for the person who finds him but everything seems deci—”

“Dad, I’ve never read them.”

“Sweetheart,” Hal said.

They were silent. Breathing as they could; good he was lying flat, stretched out. He had never even thought that Miriam might not … okay, young Dennis not, nor Leo, but Yo had packed them away after he had seen her reading them, again, and until now he’d simply assumed that Miriam long ago had … why? We all live alone, Hal thought, beyond comprehension alone within whatever secrets we cannot forget. Years of talk, so much secret. This small plastic in my hand and our words—they mirror some thoughts if we dare to speak a few out loud—our words pass each other somewhere, like spirits flung from space satellites and there was a time when I was so happy to simply believe heaven was up on high, Jesus seated at God’s right hand singing “in the sky, Lord, in the sky,” where the circle would forever be unbroken in that better land awaitin’ and all the dead who had been saved from everlasting hell by accepting Jesus Christ as their personal Saviour and Lord forever and ever were with him watching me. And I was so scared at them seeing me every single minute and also so happy at never ever being alone, not even on the Wapiti road allowance walking home in the dark and Deacon Block’s farm dogs came roaring out of the black trees at their corner but they knew me instantly and I could pat them on the head, especially Felix jumping
so huge and black, his long tongue almost knocked me over there in the wagon track soft as dust.

“Dad?”

“I’m here.”

“At the phone in the kitchen … did you bring them up, the diaries?”

“I’m in the basement,” and then, before he thought, “You do know about Ailsa.”

“Yes,” Miriam said quickly. Then, “Is there much about her?”

“Enough.”

After some time she said, “I will read them.”

Hal’s mind leaped sideways, ‘No rush, it’s only twenty-five years,’ but luckily that stuck in his throat. He offered, more sensibly,

“He expected us to read them. Once he writes ‘Hi’ on a blank date that August—like he’s greeting a reader, and other times he seems really angry, ‘Quit reading this trying to find clues who I am!’ But … really they’re … his words, to us.”

“He wanted us to read them.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Miriam said, barely audible. “He could have destroyed them.”

“Who knows what all he destroyed, he planned everything so … but this he didn’t destroy, no.”

“All the papers he left, I will.”

“Okay,” Hal said, steady again. He took a long breath, but Miriam was silent. “So-o,” he said finally. “Three to one, what did you say: Why believe Luke?”

“Oh … I remember I was surprised, then. Gabe never talked Bible with me, not really, not after his year in Bible College. That’s probably why I remember, it’s so different.”

“From your usual Edmonton talk?”

“Yes … that last August he was so … silent … heavy … but sometimes he seemed really happy too and we’d get into it like we used to in college when I’d go visit him in his room full of books and posters, and his guitar he was always strumming—”

“I know I know, that beautiful picture Yo took of you together stretched out on his dorm bed and laughing—”

“Yes! Like that! In college, like we all always argued at home around the supper table, and we got into the textual arguments again about the Gospels, the ‘oral witness’ argument, and the ‘date of composition’ problem.”

“That they were written long after, from stories people told about Jesus?”

“Yeah, at least thirty, fifty years after he died, but Gabe said Luke has that careful introduction about writing an ‘orderly account from eyewitnesses,’ like a classic Greek historian’s investigation. And all four Gospels do agree, there were two thieves—”