Come Back (6 page)

A catalogue of 140 numbered pictures, oil, pen and ink, oil on canvas, on wood, on paper, pencil, charcoal (washed),
watercolour, black chalk (washed), charcoal heightened with white, pencil and brush, reed-pen, black crayon on … The Hague, Nuenen, Arles, Saint-Rémy, Arles, Antwerp, Paris, Auvers-sur-Oise … Yolanda and he gazed in stunned amazement, at one after the other. Vincent van Gogh ablaze in the deepest Canadian prairie winter.

They had tried to consider, however impossible, each image very carefully, trying in one concentrated moment—there were so many viewers pressing them forward—to catch at least some flicker, comprehend some … it was the exhibit’s last weekend, Friday, January 27, 1961. The strangely small pictures, like a thin line of flame seared at eye level around the blank walls of a government administration building. Yo gasped aloud, her hands clasped low around her abdomen. She was staring at—what?
Café Terrace at Night
?
The Peach Tree in Bloom
?
Road with Cypress and Star
? Several of the last magnificent 1890 paintings were there,
Fields and Blue Sky
and
Wheatfield with Crows
—no, not facing the crows. Where she gasped would have been #67,
Old Man in Sorrow
. The ancient body bent forward into the agony of a question mark, seated in an orange—
Orange
—chair, worn ragged in blue and thick fingers clawed into eyes. Also named
On the Threshold of Eternity
. Painted between seizures two weeks before Van Gogh killed himself. Yes, there, on the orange threshold.

Gabriel was born next morning. 5:27 a.m. in the Winnipeg General Hospital Women’s Pavilion, ten days early.

Hal lay in their wide bed, the night table light on and two pillows, one doubled, under his head. He would read himself as always into sleep, he had two Van Gogh biographies and four massive picture albums beside him, if necessary he could insulate himself all night in desperate genius facticity, and against his knees his random hands opened one album not to any dazzling image but to words: theological, perhaps reasonable, words. Young Vincent as a Dutch Reformed Church lay pastor among the poorest coal miners of south Belgium writing his brother Theo:

O yeah Vincent, Hal thought, at age twenty-five you are able to write this, but within twelve years your own long-suffering masterpieces will lead you to the God of a botched bullet in your head—stay away from that! At twenty-five years of age, in January, 1961, Hal himself was studying theology at Winnipeg Mennonite College in order to become, perhaps, a Mennonite pastor, but also cuddling his second child in his arms while beautiful Yo and small Miriam talked to the crocuses blooming on her bedside table, and within twenty-five years that tiny sleeper—Gabe wasn’t even twenty-five—don’t go there, no, he will not allow that streak of Orange Downfill to break down—read something, anything—the funeral program that lay just below the Van Gogh catalogue in the second GABRIEL box, the folded paper he could not face
in the basement, not standing, not endure the scrolled “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is …” But also incapable of letting it go, of dropping it once he had stupidly picked it up, he held it in his fingertips climbing two flights of stairs and managed to drop it on the bed so he need think of nothing in the bathroom, concentrate on doing: count the seconds to electric-brush each rock-solid tooth that remains in your head, fold and hang the towel exactly square above the toilet, seat yourself on the toilet and Kegel push to drain, you feel nothing but there’s the tinkle clear as summer rain, drain every two hours, never more than two: twenty, so minimize the thin leakage that will now be there until the day you—

Blessed … Blessed
 … eight pale sandy Jesus blesseds. And inside, black words on greying white:

He was reading words he himself had once written and which Herbert, their pastor then, had spoken from the pulpit after the congregation sang “Children of the Heavenly Father”; reading very deliberately now, alone at night in
their house on the last bed he and Yo had shared, seeing word after word distinctly and then he began to hear them, they were gradually growing louder between his ears, his mouth and face were contorting themselves into every necessary passage of his living breath, speaking aloud:

The words were gone. As if his voice, his mind had crashed black … Hal realized his eyes were grimaced shut. When he forced them open, for an instant a new sentence uttered itself:

But the words on the sandpaper would not hold; his eyes leaped to:

and the words were there but his voice staggered, broke completely on “love” … another … another … far beyond music as the “great love in his life,” more like “love possessed,” no no, “obssessed,” his sudden sobs crumpled aloud into a rage of “desecrated, terminally infected by that little snit of a …” those words were not in the eulogy, they never would or could be. Only those other words that were possible to utter before family and friends. Spoken by a minister at a funeral, the rigid, controlled words that glared at him from the paper unchangeable as rock; his rage had laboured them together into control, weeping then too through that September night:

Hal was blind, washed beyond words. A vehicle passed on the street, and another close behind, their lights arcing around the ceiling together like collisions waiting … a pickup and a long body, it couldn’t really have been related to that thin child of a girl, let it go let it all go for tonight, how could you fault someone so young then, so unaware … could you ever wipe away—let it go, he would never be able to sleep. He had to stop this stupid, more than stu … he must go back to the street. Tomorrow. Sleep now, search tomorrow, tomorrow avoid the certain police and the certain consequences of his—no, not what he had started—no he had to watch and wait for something he could not now dare think he had to find to see … sleep now, avoid and search tomorrow, he was in the bathroom sitting on the toilet again, his urine seeping out. He felt only a kind of gentle aura radiating from the soothing trickle he could hear, he could clench it off without effort and start it again; all the exercises he had practiced for months after the operation where the blank hospital wall stared at him day and night while its enormous electric clock twitched at each, interminable, second. Yolanda force-rescued him after four days: longer time than his seventy years, those jerked seconds, Yo Yo sweetest love of my limp un-prostated life. Two more sleeping pills, not three more, no, that could over-reach into dream, nightmare. Two, temporary blank at least. Was death blank?

English had two words: dead and death, German only one: tod/Tod. The German meaning distinguishable only by the capital when written, but not when spoken. What did Rilke write—no, it was Nietzsche
—Gott ist tod
or
Gott ist Tod
?

Say it aloud: both.

The piano was playing. He could hear it with his better right ear snuggled in the pillow, Yo touching the keys gentle as dust:

T
he sun stood high over the square brick buildings, heating the north sidewalk of Whyte Avenue. Owl sat on his heels against the wall beside the Le Café door, one of his several places. The last clumps of shaded snow were melting over the curb into the gutters. Hal stopped in front of him.

“Hey. Have you eaten?”

“Not today.”

Hal reached out; Owl took his hand and in one light motion was on his feet.

“May be good, frog legs today?” Owl asked deadpan. “Coming up to Frog Moon.”

They were walking through the shop door. “That’s Cree,” Hal said.

“It’s their land. All Edmonton.”

“Okay. But just sad White stuff in here.”

The glass food display counter they both knew, guitar/sax jazz quietly muttering; Breakfast Bagel Bacon Egg Gouda; Cheese Croissant; Breakfast Sandwich. The corner armchairs were empty and they sat down opposite each other, Hal making certain he faced the street intersection but then Owl never seemed to care, saw whatever he
wanted to see no matter which way his chair faced; like the square-circle raven yesterday. Watching.

The endless drift of passing walkers, always there, going somewhere—or coming? What if none of them, every different shape and movement and skin and age and hair colour in the sunlight, were not going? What if everyone was coming back to somewhere? That slight teen with his quick, awkward steps, both hands thrust deep in his jean pockets, bleached in splotches, the waist as always belted below his buttocks and the crotch twitching almost between his knees … how … perhaps if he took out his hands the jeans would drop to his ankles. No one would care. He could be coming home.

The “Walk” light flicked green and a slender woman in a brief blue dress turned there; glancing around the intersection as the Whyte cars roared off. But she did not walk. She held a phone up to her perfect face with her right hand, talking, and with her left balanced two large Le Café coffee cups, one on top the other, upright against her talking chin. What a woman to have poised on a street corner, waiting for you. Her skirt hugged snug under her buttocks as she turned looking north up 104th Street, the black tights on her thighs flickered so beautifully with muscle. She shoved the phone into her hip pocket and plucked the top cup from under her chin: stir sticks protruded from both lids and she contemplated them one by one like a sudden mystery. Then she glanced up again and immediately ran across the bus lane so long-legged in heels, ran to the boulevard and a low black car easing to the curb, she ran in front of it into the traffic toward its opening door, the
driver was leaning across and she ducked in and the car leaped ahead—the driver’s profile strained forward, his blonde hair and shoulders black—nothing orange … gone.

He realized Owl had watched her run too, though he said nothing. He was tilted back and looking out, chewing a mouthful of Breakfast Egg-and-Bagel in serene Dene concentration.

Through the coffee shop window, the car window, the profile of the driver, every vehicle streaming past driven by someone, who could comprehend all the drivers in all the cars crossing here, crossing in Edmonton, all the near, the actual, accidents—no no—only one man walking, after twenty-five years … exactly fifty years after his conception, perhaps to the day … walking through the eulogy words Hal was finally unable to utter aloud last night but now not even numb-drugged sleep and morning sunlight could prevent them. When he broke down alone in their unchangeable bed he had glanced ahead, skimmed over those words forever unchangeably there and waiting, and now at the very thought he saw slivers of eulogy as if reading a book—have mercy on my visual mind—words he had written all night Monday, September 9, 1985, and long into Tuesday, read them word by malevolent word on the window shadows of Owl and himself shifting over Le Café glass: