Homesick (41 page)

What Daniel thought could be surmised. He was pointedly ignoring the old man, looking away from him, across the road and into a neighbour’s yard where the storm-shattered limb of an austere and venerable elm dangled, hanging from a pliable shred of the tree’s tough inner bark and twisting in the wind.

“Look at all these flowers made special for Earl,” implored Alec. “Mrs. Harding put a drop of perfume on each of the paper heads so they’d be as near real flowers as can be. What’s the use of these flowers if we don’t go? It’d be a terrible waste. Just smell them,” he coaxed, holding out a few to the boy.

Daniel knocked them aside with the back of his hand. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just leave me alone? I can’t take you. Why do you keep at me? How many times do you need to be told? Do you want to get me in trouble? Do you believe she won’t find out if I take you? She always finds out!” he cried.

“Daniel –”

But Daniel had finished with him. The boy flung himself out of the truck, slamming the door on the startled face of an old man awash in artificial flowers.

It was shame that drove Daniel to run down the bare, windy road, shame at disappointing someone he had only just that minute realized he loved.

21

T
he following Wednesday morning Alec Monkman began to clean his garden. When he started the job the air was keen and thin, so keen and thin that the only smell it could float was the itchy, prickly one of tomato bushes and even that smell drifted in and out like radio reception from a distant station – despite his carrying armfuls of frost-blackened tomato plants directly under his nose.

By nine o’clock the sun was shining with a cold, untempered brightness and the sky was the palest blue, an exact match for the colour of Monkman’s eyes, which seemed intent on reflecting the season. However, Monkman paid no notice of the sky. He was too busy pulling up tomato plants, wrenching stakes out of the obstinate earth and throwing them in a pile in the middle of the garden. In no time at all even this easy work made him grow flushed and warm. It was because he had let himself run to fat, he told himself, prodding his middle. When he turned to the corn patch he was already slowing, visibly tiring. He cleared it as a child might, uprooting each stalk and bearing each singly to the rubbish heap upright in his fist like a withered staff of office, its roots dribbling earth onto his shuffling boots and the drab leaves rustling alongside his
ruddy, sweaty, dirt-streaked face. Having deposited a stalk with the rest, he turned mechanically on his heel and trudged back to pull up another. The corn on the rubbish heap stood stacked higher than his head before the plot was eventually cleared and at the close of that task he was sweating so freely that he removed his jacket and, without thinking, tossed it up on the pile, repeating the same motion that had disposed of the last of the corn. The jacket was soon covered by his next load, pea vines, and forgotten.

Clearing was nothing like planting had been. He had gotten confused planting. He hadn’t remembered certain things. But clearing was easy, there was nothing to be confused about. You just took everything up. You worked until all was bare, empty.

Alec worked blindly on. At mid-afternoon, as he approached the last of it, what was left of the cucumbers and beans, the pain in the small of his back grew so sharp that he was obliged to breathe quickly and shallowly through his mouth. Something else. There was a loud, windy roar in his ears whenever he bent over. But he disregarded the pain and the roaring and stumbled about his garden with his nose to the ground like a dog, swinging his head from side to side, suddenly stooping to seize a single parched leaf, a broken twig, the smallest scrap of waste he had earlier overlooked. Back and forth he went, racing the approaching dusk, his breath coming faster and faster, stiff fingers pecking at the dirt, pinching up this or that.

The supper siren wailed from Connaught’s town hall, the dim light was failing. It was time to give up. He could no longer spot the last tiny shreds of refuse and his hands trembled so violently that the only way he could control them was to stuff them in his trouser pockets. The garden was as clean as he could make it. He went into the house and closed the door.

22

I
t was a little past noon when Daniel let himself into his grandfather’s house, unannounced, without bothering to knock. Having once lived there, he was inclined to treat it as his own and never give a second thought to the old man’s privacy. Making amends was uppermost in the boy’s mind, not respecting his privacy. He had come to tell his grandfather he was sorry for what had happened and how he had treated him. For a week he had avoided him because he knew, no matter what excuses he made to himself, that he had been afraid and disloyal. Over and over he had asked himself how Montgomery Clift or James Dean would have behaved in his place. The answers always came out the same. Montgomery Clift would have driven the old man wherever he wanted to go, to the ends of the earth. If need be, James Dean would have stolen a car to transport him.

He was a coward.

Because the television wasn’t blaring, at first Daniel assumed the old man must be out. Alec never missed the farm report and markets which were broadcast over the noon hour. Yet despite the utter quiet and stillness of the house Daniel had the sense it
wasn’t empty. An unsettling feeling arose in him that he was being watched or listened to.

“Anybody home?” He paused, shouted again. “Anybody home?” He felt a mixture of uneasiness and relief that no one answered and he was free to leave. But as he turned to do so he got his answer, a vague confusion of sounds that came from the direction of the living room, muffled, deliberate thumps; a gritty scrabbling which sounded like a dog’s nails slithering on a polished floor. Then as abruptly as they had begun the sounds ceased. Either that or they had been overwhelmed by the loud, frantic drumming of his heart. Daniel strained to catch them again, face drawn and rigid.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

No reply. The rooms thrummed vacantly. “Alec?”

Nothing.

With reluctance Daniel stole to the entrance of the living room and eased his way through the door for a look. It came as a great relief to him when he saw it was only the old man after all, the old man standing in the middle of the living room with his back to him, leaning on one of the kitchen chairs.

“Alec?”

He did not answer, did not move a muscle.

The boy wondered if this was a display of sulking, a bit of the cold shoulder because he hadn’t got his way last Saturday. Daniel decided to ignore it. “You gave me a scare,” he said brightly to the hunched, brooding shoulders. “Didn’t you hear me call?”

No reply. And there was something in the manner his grandfather held himself, a stubborn, secretive dignity, which rooted Daniel just inside the doorway, which prevented him as surely as a hand thrust in his chest from taking one more step into the living room and trespassing. He was convinced his grandfather had heard him, knew he was there. The awkwardness of the situation kept him nervously talking.

“I suppose you’re pissed off at me about last Saturday. Okay, I get the message then – I know you’re pissed off. I’m sorry. But I’ve been pissed off at you, too, lots of times – about baseball, about all kinds of things. But that didn’t mean I wouldn’t talk to you. So what do you say? You going to talk to me?”

His grandfather stood leaning on the back of the kitchen chair, monumental in his silence. A doubt crossed Daniel’s mind. What’s wrong with this picture? Something was. The doubt carried him two steps further into the room. “Alec, what’s the matter?” he asked. His voice was louder than he had intended.

The bowed shoulders heaved, the chair scraped and shifted on the floor. His grandfather used the chair to support himself as he fought to turn around; it was his prop, a four-legged crutch which he savagely jerked and shoved so that its abrupt, violent hopping on the floor made it seem alive, something struggling to tear itself free from his grip. Between the sudden, desperate leaps of the chair on the floor the old man adjusted his balance, scuffling his feet into a new position while the chair that kept him upright trembled and quivered under the burden of his weight, threatening to tip. A brief pause, the room swelling with the rasp of his laboured breathing, and then once again the dull, heavy load of flesh tried to turn itself to the boy. The chair rocked, its feet scratched, it gave a startled jump. A few inches closer. And with each painful step, with each convulsion, the understanding grew in Daniel that something terrible was striving to show itself to him.

At last he was face to face with it and only wanted to look away. His grandfather was not right. One side of his face had melted and run like hot wax, the muscles were all loose and hanging. His mouth sagged open and his left eyelid drooped, obscuring half the staring blue of the pupil.

“What happened?” Daniel whispered. “Why are you like this?”

The old man’s right hand rose slowly from where it rested on the back of the chair. Up, up it came and laid a forefinger like a bar across the slack lips and fallen mouth. The child’s sign for secrecy.
He tried to shush but the sound he made bubbled instead, loose, sloppy, full of spit.

“Oh God, oh God,” Daniel muttered, stepping from foot to foot in his apprehension. “Oh God, oh God. Somebody. Please.”

A word was floundering in his grandfather’s mouth. His tongue could be glimpsed fluttering rapidly between the barricade of false teeth.
“Fro’en!”
he blurted suddenly.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me. I don’t know what to do for you. Tell me what to do,” whispered Daniel, hopping lightly from foot to foot like a small boy needing a pee.

“Fro’en!”
cried the old man, banging the chair on the floor, shaking it, shaking his head violently from side to side.
“Fro’en! Fro’en! Fro’en!”

Daniel started to cry. “Don’t you see?” he asked. “I can’t understand you. I can’t understand you, Alec. Don’t you see?”

Maybe he did. The rage died. The old man stood staring and panting. Then once more his right hand lifted to his face; awkwardly he stabbed three of his fingers into the cheekbone beneath the partially veiled eye and drew them deliberately and brutally down to his jaw. The white pressure marks showed on his skin like frost.

“Fro’en,”
he said, speaking softly now but with urgency.
“Fro’en.”

At last Daniel understood. His grandfather was telling him he was frozen.

Panicked by the emergency, Daniel turned to his mother, spilling into the telephone the story of how he had discovered the old man clinging to a chair back for dear life. “He’s sick or something,” he kept repeating. “Real sick.”

“All right, Daniel,” said Vera calmly, once she had judged the seriousness of the situation. “I want you to stay there with him.
Don’t leave him and see that he doesn’t fall. Don’t try and move him yourself, he’s too heavy for you. Just wait. Someone will be there right away. It won’t be long. Just stay calm and collected. I know you can. I know you can be brave for me. Will you do that for me, dear?”

Daniel promised he would.

Vera made a quick decision not to call for the ambulance. It was stationed at the mine site twenty-four hours a day in readiness for serious accidents and in the time it would take the ambulance to cover the distance to town, Stutz could be at her father’s with minutes to spare. When she rang Stutz at the garage she was cool and terse. “Listen, Daniel just called to say something has happened to Dad at the house. The kid says he’s sick and he’s plenty upset so I think he must be. You better get over there, fast. By the sounds of it he probably needs the hospital.”

Mr. Stutz burst into the house and upon Monkman swaying behind a chair in the living room, his face scarcely recognizable. Daniel stood beside him, his grandfather’s sleeve knotted in his fist to help anchor him. When the boy saw Stutz he began to clumsily pat the old man on the back. “Here’s Mr. Stutz,” he said encouragingly. “You’re okay now. Mr. Stutz is here.”