Homesick (8 page)

They began a search. “Look carefully,” said Vera. “It was only a little iron cross. It may have fallen over, or been choked with growth.” She was striking at tussocks of dry grass with the hoe, hoping to hear the sound of metal striking metal. “Somewhere on the edges,” she repeated. But after two complete circuits around the graveyard they still hadn’t discovered what they were looking for.

Daniel had a thought. “A lot of people die in twenty years,” he said. “She wouldn’t be on the edges anymore. I mean she’s likely surrounded by now. Dead people all around her.”

They drifted farther in, amid the crowd of headstones. “It’s a little iron cross,” his mother kept saying, “and if he painted it every year, it could be white.”

Daniel suddenly called and beckoned her. “Hey, Mom, was Grandma’s first name Martha?”

Vera hurried over to where he stood. Where he stood was not before a little iron cross but a five-foot-high slab of white marble, blazing ferociously white in the sun. It was something to which the word monument could fairly be applied, at least in Connaught. Twelve months ago it had provided Alec Monkman with a topic for proud discussion with Mr. Stutz. “Now they’re making a special delivery from Regina in a covered truck, Stutz. I don’t understand the principle of that – a covered truck – it’s going to get rained on sooner or later, isn’t it? But the fellow who sold it to me was most specific on it being delivered in a covered truck, mentioned it more
than once. The best. Real guaranteed Pennsylvania marble. I don’t know how they intend to unload it, weighing what it’s got to, but that’s up to them. They’re the experts. Just as long as they don’t chip or crack it.”

There it was, rearing up from the earth, wide as a double door, thick and deep as a bookcase. Sprays of lilies and woolly lambs were carved in relief. Chiselled into its bone-white face were the words,

Martha Serena Monkman
1895-1939
Loving Mother and Wife

The grass on the plot showed evidence of recent cutting and the weeds had been pulled. There was even a jar of flowers. It was true these were brown and dry but in such arid heat flowers would wither and curl in a day, mummify in a week. Vera reached down, picked up the jar, and shook the dead petals and stalks out at her feet. She handed the jar to Daniel. “Go get some more,” she said tersely. She didn’t look at him. Her eyes remained fixed on the grave and the block of marble.

“Some more flowers?”

“Yes. Some more flowers.”

He did as he was told, without arguing. There was something about her face. Going out the gate, he glanced back. His mother’s spine was slumped and her arms hanging loosely at her sides.

Daniel had no idea of where she expected him to find flowers on such a godforsaken, parched and barren hillside, but find them he did, clumps of orange-red blossoms emerging from hairy, grey-green leaves. As he stooped to gather them, grasshoppers came spitting up into his face from the short grass like grease from a hot skillet.

In a short time he had collected a fist-sized bouquet. Returning to present them to his mother he found she was still standing
before her mother’s grave, looking for all the world as heavy as the tombstone itself.

“I have the flowers,” Daniel called out to her, holding them aloft as he approached.

Vera turned. There had been a change. It was in her face and bearing. She no longer slumped and dangled; she had bucked up her spine and worked herself into an anger. Daniel hoped it wasn’t him.

“I don’t know what these are,” he said apologetically.

“Scarlet mallow,” answered his mother softly. The softness didn’t deceive him. “Scarlet mallow and stone lilies. Put them in the jar. It’s time to go.”

He was kneeling, putting the flowers in the jar when she bolted down the hill without him. Maybe it was because of his slowness or clumsiness with the arrangement. He had to run like the very devil to catch up. She didn’t say a word to him all the long way back, but from the look of her, from the way she pounded that poor road, making the dust spurt with her feet, Daniel decided Sunday dinner would be pleasanter for all concerned if she had found what she had gone looking for, weeds and rust.

6

I
n 1939, Alec Monkman’s wife died. Her death was a watershed in his life; after it he became a success. Success was late in coming to him. Until he was fifty-two Monkman was just Connaught’s drayman, a bull-necked, slope-shouldered pair of overalls who shovelled coal and wrestled heavy freight, explaining himself with a wry smile and the old saying, “Strong back, weak mind.” His business worth consisted of a dilapidated truck used for summer delivery, a sleigh and team of Clydesdales which he drove in winter when the roads were bad.

Grief was responsible for his success, grief made him daring and reckless. Monkman had always kept a stern eye on the bank book, had always been a careful, saving man. But the death of his wife robbed money of its significance. So when Rudy Kollwitz’s arthritis made it difficult for Rudy to run a projector and impossible to splice a broken film, forcing him to put his shoebox of a movie theatre up for sale, Alec withdrew all his savings, negotiated a mortgage at the bank, and bought The Palladium cheap, taking all of Connaught by surprise.

His purchase of the movie house had nothing to do with its soundness as an investment, which nevertheless was considerable
with a war going on and people hungry for newsreels, and hungrier still for entertainment to push the newsreels out of mind. No, he only believed that running a picture show would help fill the interminable spaces which his evenings, deprived of Martha, had become. The movie theatre would give him something to do, he told himself. It gave him too much to do. He grew pale and drawn with the strain of doing. By day he lifted and shifted ton upon ton of dead weight; by night he sat tense in a projecting booth high above the rows of heads communing with and adoring the bright images he cast into the darkness.

It was a family affair, The Palladium. Alec ran the projector and Vera sold admissions and popcorn. Earl, who couldn’t be trusted to do much because he was flighty and couldn’t keep his mind on things, sat in the foyer, kicking his heels on the rungs of a chair, watching the people troop in. Generally he slept through the second showing of the picture curled up in a seat in the back row of the theatre. Alec had tried to persuade Earl to stop at home but he wouldn’t. Ever since his mother died he was afraid to be by himself. He said alone in the house he heard things. When he was downstairs he heard his mother walking upstairs, and when he was upstairs he could hear her moving in the kitchen, opening and shutting the cupboard doors.

Monkman did not know what to make of this talk of ghosts, except that the boy wanted mothering. Mothering would put him right. The year Vera finished her Grade Ten he took her out of school to run the house and mother little Earl. After all, she had more schooling than he had ever seen and he knew of no earthly reason for her to venture further into the realms of geometry-trigonometry,
Hamlet
, or Latin.

For this his daughter never forgave him. She tried to persuade him to leave her in high school, to permit her to graduate. Vera assured him she could manage it, school, the house, Earl. He would not hear of it, would not yield. “It’s too much for a girl of sixteen,” he said, “to run a household and go to school. You’d end
up ruining your health. I won’t have it, Vera. That’s all there is to it.”

To Vera it felt like a death sentence. She loved school. It was the one thing which lent her life a sense of movement. Turning back over the pages of a notebook in June she could say to herself, “Here is all I know now that I didn’t know before. This is how far I’ve come.” The notion that one thing built on another, that the second theorem of geometry was predicated on the first, and the third on the second, was a comfort to her. Vera was attracted to order and valued knowledge that could be measured – so many lines of “Lycidas” committed to memory, so many French verbs conjugated. French was Vera’s favourite subject. Walking home, striding into a blustery March wind on long, ungainly legs, she would imagine herself pacing the windswept deck of an ocean liner, speaking French to a dark man. “
Je ne sais quoi
,” she would say softly to herself, and then laugh a sophisticated laugh, rehearsing the future. But her stupid, stubborn father snatched that away. “Earl needs you,” he argued. “He’s just a little kid. He needs a mother.”

So get him one, Vera thought. Do I look like a mother?

“He’s not happy,” her father added.

Vera had always been his blunt and fearless child. “Little wonder,” she said.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You ought to quit riding him around the country at night. That’s what I mean.”

“Watch your step, miss.”

“You don’t want to know – don’t invite me to tell.”

For the moment she could see he was ashamed. Well, he ought to be. Doing as he did. Sometimes she truly believed he’d gone clean off his head. When her mother was alive Vera had never seen him drunk even once. Not at a wedding, not at Christmas, not at New Year’s. Now, once a month, regular as clockwork, he could be expected to go on a scandalous rip, using whisky to light a fire in his belly against the encroaching darkness.

Drunk he was a different man, a lunatic. Stumbling and ranting,
he would kick in the pickets of the front fence, rampage through the garden, tearing up all the stalks of new corn, roaring that winter was coming, get the corn in, even though it was only June. One night he wrenched all the cupboard doors off their hinges, trampled them to splinters under his boots, and fed them into the woodstove. With the stove lids left off, Vera was sure the house would catch. Every time a gust of wind whistled down the chimney and twisted its way through the tin pipes, the fire blazed up roaring and spitting sparks. As she tried to push the stove lids back into place with a broom handle, leaning back from the flame and heat, Vera thought she heard her father whisper, “Let’s see her slam the sonofabitching cupboard doors now, Earl.”

These things were terrible but worse were the nights when Monkman stood swaying at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the banister and shouting for Earl to get himself dressed, they were going for a ride. Those nights his daughter wished him dead.

Vera did all she could to prevent him taking Earl. She offered herself in her brother’s place. “Take me, Daddy,” she would coax. “You don’t want Earl. Take me.”

He never listened. “I want my boy!” he bellowed up the stairs. “Goddamn it, Earl, get up and get yourself dressed! I want some company for a drive!”

“You’ll kill him, Daddy, driving drunk. Don’t,” Vera pleaded. “One of these nights you’ll roll that old truck and kill him.”

Her father could not tell her that he took Earl because he knew that with Earl in the cab he would not permit himself to swing the wheel off the road, hard into the ditch and the racing darkness. Instead, he said, “Earl and me are different from you, Vera. We’re alike. We’re sad and we need each other.”

“
You’re
not sad. You’re just sorry for yourself and drunk. That’s all.”

“Your daddy is as sober as a judge, Vera.”

Her father carried Earl off at any possible hour – midnight, one in the morning, two. In such a state he was no respecter of anyone’s
sleep. All that mattered to him was the headlong rush down a country road, the old truck pressed to the limit, the speedometer needle shaking like a trembling finger. Earl sat beside him rigid and glassy-eyed as any rabbit locked in the glare of oncoming headlights. The noise was deafening. The cab of the truck rattled and groaned and squealed. Stones spurting up against the floorboards made a crazy, ragged drumming, a drumming punctuated by the steady slap slap of the glove compartment with the broken catch flapping up and down on its hinges. The sight of the dark, flat land spinning by on either side robbed Earl of the power of speech. Even when a tire caught loose gravel and the truck lurched violently from side to side, the fields suddenly swinging towards him heavy and full of menace, he couldn’t holler – only lock his knees and brace his arms against the dashboard, while in his mind’s eye he imagined the truck hurtling over and over, the gas tank slopping gasoline, the windows showering glass.

It was out of fear of darkness that Alec drove. In the beginning of his crazy drives, when he was drunkest, he lost the fear, knew only abandon, release. Ever since the death of his wife the oppression and misery of night had lain heavy on him. Night work was not cure enough. When darkness fell, he grew anxious. He fidgeted, could not keep still. Everything drew in on him, shrank. It was like being squeezed and choked in a tight black suit cut for a smaller man. Monkman feared to see the world of day recede, people and buildings shut off from view. Hated the withering away – to a street, to a house, finally to one lighted room in which he sat with a ticking clock. It started him drinking, the thought of the darkness eating up the world, gnawing it smaller and smaller.

It was this which sent him out into the country. As many times as he went, as many times he was convinced this was the way to beat it. Tearing along the narrow roads helped push back what threatened him. Mile after mile he rolled up the great carpet of darkness with his headlights and proved to himself nothing had been taken away forever, the earth was still there, as it had been.
That was what he needed, wanted, when the night gathered in, to know nothing had changed. But the relief was only temporary, a drug compounded of speed and drunkenness. Lacking one or the other, it was nothing. So as he sobered, the elation drained away and the old unease filtered back. He began to see danger, to understand the durability of darkness. His hands went slick with sweat as the road tilted and swayed beyond his windshield. All went slippery and untrustworthy on him: road, tires, steering wheel.