Come Back (5 page)

In another room. Gabriel is not in it. Not lying flat on a stainless steel table and his eyes now shut. Only three polished desks with not a wisp of paper on them, one small computer not switched on. So he tells them exactly:

“He told me in August. We were wrapping poplars along the creek because of the beaver and he told me: ‘I
know nobody’s ever done this in our family but if I’m ever dead, cremate me.’ ”

Their family is all together, alone, walking away through the funeral home lobby, when he breaks. He would have crumpled if Dennis had not been holding his arm, and Miriam quickly as well. He can only stagger, gesture. And they turn back, lurch back into the frozen steel room.

The glass of milk in his hand, Hal noticed, was half empty. The cheese-fried-over lingered in his mouth, it seemed to have tasted as good as always, golden and quietly salty. But nausea was nudging, bumping inside him again and he could not swallow anymore; let the pan cool for the fridge, there’s always tomorrow. April evening sun blazed through the kitchen window, off the melting snow on the garage roof. There would be light till nine.

The Orange Downfill had ripped open what he locked down so carefully every day, every minute—Leo would call it a
barranca
. That was it, exactly, a violent chasm torn through the eroded mountains of his life. It had to be filled in again, fast, rammed solid with whatever concretion he could find to keep himself blank: fake TV virtuality, books, drugged sleep,
Globe and Mail
and
Journal
and
Herald
Sudoku and the world’s endless, violent, banal facticity, movies, books, pretend to write stories page after page on the futile precision of computer screens that he never even printed on his ancient Lexmark and certainly no one would ever read
Deo juvante
, books, dig gulps of snow into barely unfrozen flowerbeds, listen again to Schubert’s
String
Quintet in C major
, the adagio’s lifting delight plucking away any possible thought, books by the thousand piled everywhere in the house and the public library just down the street …

Too vicious, too deep, that collar turn of orange
barranca
. The colour, the indelible walk, that fling of profile and shoulder disappearing.

He knew of course the only way he could fill it. Where he would find the hardest earthly stuff, more than enough, it was always there and had been for years, waiting, he needed to remember nothing to find it; if he dared. That secret day and a half in Winnipeg when he could not be found—when their son was dead—had twisted itself in and out of their larger pain; but his intentions for that disappearing, barely a second in any normal lifetime, had been so good! A marvellous surprise for the whole family, especially for Gabe whom he would phone the minute he got back home—the minute he walked in—to meet him immediately and tell him, tell him first, the others would wait, happily, if he told them it would make Gabe happy to know first—of the Winnipeg Film Board producer who had found Hal’s short story “George Stewart” in a Manitoba school reader, about the ragged old bachelor on his boreal homestead who, simply because of his name, knew he was actually the true and rightful living King of England and the only way to get the world out of this stupid war with Hitler, real quick and easy, was just talk straight with him man to man, lay it on the line, praise the Lord and pass the conversation and we’ll all be free! A short-short movie about the bushed old man and the boy who believes him
and the producer would get Gabe on the film crew. Two weeks or three of Best Boy again and he would get more experience and make other connections, find more film jobs and get him working with something he loved already and could learn more and get him away from Edmonton and all the endless usual …

Hal was in his basement. Two, three stacked boxes in the shelves along one basement wall. HP 170, The University of Alberta Central Stores, 8 1/2 × 11–10 M, Paper for Use in Copy Machines. Labelled by Yolanda’s thick black felt pen: GABRIEL.

She finally said, It has to be done. And she did it.

All he had done was heave them into place, here.

The boxes had no grips. He had to clutch the top one with both hands, and lift, and pull; he felt the muscle in his back tweak, almost heard it come apart. There were more boxes and also a full trunk in the cabin at Aspen Creek, clothes, bedding, not books, he had vanished them among his own—not the blue truck bedding … but here were the personal papers, piled envelopes and spiral notebooks and diaries—no, not the diaries yet—a small green-bordered book bound with plaited cord and “Gabriel” written above three tiny children:
Bible Lessons for Kindergarten Children, Year II
. Across the top of the book lay four yellow pages of black handwritten words. Labelled by Yo: “Rec’d Oct 6/85.”

Oleg, the one university friend Gabriel had still met for the occasional coffee after three years, who studied graduate philosophy very hard while Gabriel avoided his university lit classes by repeating movies afternoon and evening. One of six pallbearers.

Under “Dreaming of Gabriel” was a single folded sheet lined with large looped handwriting: William’s, superb organist William.

O “Suffer God,” “Suffer little children to come …” suffer indeed my soul, suffer O sufferer!—a multitudinous word worthy to be included in Gabriel’s long notebook columns of definitions, necessary, he must surely have written it out there, somewhere in his re-appearing lists of words with his particular, selected and augmented meanings, ignoring all others, lists he continued to extend as month by week by day his handwriting twisted into steady illegibility—indeed, here was one—

Hal hunched down in the crowded basement with Yo’s first large box uncovered. Suffer … peace … river so deep below that high … romantic … beyond reality. He had simply picked up the top papers, held them, and already ominous Gabe definitions glared at him—and on the instant another spike of memory leaped from a sheet lying there, nothing on it but a blue date:

He hadn’t so much as brushed a notebook and already that date stared at him, a birth date, like its incarnate “definition” written out again and again, he knew it would be, everywhere inside that opened box; he remembered it the instant Gabe’s blue handwriting hit his eyes:

Working good or ill. Dearest God.

The definitions softly hummed the agonies of the funereal organ, suffer good or suffer ill, it is well with my
soul, which is imaginary and consecrated to suffer God to guide me, O Ailsa. Suffer Ailsa.

But to bear, endure, God’s pain? Pain God endures, or the pain/punishment that God hands out in “guiding”?

The song sang easy as chimes in his memory. Seventy years ago, when Hal was a child, their Mennonite congregation in Wapiti, Saskatchewan, sang the “Suffer God” hymn often, always in its original German. Ancient Singer-Heinrich’s rising wail guided them so steadily into their insatiable longing for reassurance:

For refugee families from Russia in Depression Saskatchewan no seventeenth century prayer could ever be obsolete. But the word was not really obsolete for Gabriel, either. In the King James English he first heard, Jesus repeats
and repeats, “Suffer little children to come … come …” And had he … had he not … suffered, endured “the dear God” to do as He pleased—as he pleased? With Ailsa as good-or-ill fairy, with Ailsa as “Elizabeth” and consecrated to … what? Dearest Father in Heaven, in the top pages of this box there already were so many intersections of pain. How would he ever be able to endure all that was still piled below?

Okay okay, leave this one, lift the second box from the shelf, heavier, waiting—and don’t think of those others stacked in the cabin above Aspen Creek—Yolanda O Yolanda, all this labelling, all this never throwing anything out and gone despite everything we agreed over and over about the past. Always this gathering and filing and piling into neat boxes and stacking one on top of the other to sit waiting forever and ever after devil damn it!

Have mercy on me.

A booklet: the Manitoba Golden Boy as if running with torch and wheat sheaf: