How Should a Person Be? (19 page)

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chapter
2
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THE SACK

 

i
n a few hours it would be Margaux's birthday; it was time to deliver the champagne I had promised I would take to her studio so long ago, when I had missed her birthday and we ­were first becoming friends. I took the bottle from the
refrigerator, went down the stairs, and set off into the street.
When I arrived at Margaux's place, she opened the door to me, and she smiled. We went up the stairs, straight into her studio, which smelled of grease and paint, then we sat on
the floor and drank the champagne from her very best cups.

We spoke for several hours, getting happier and more
drunk. Then Margaux walked me to my apartment, since
it
was always so hard for us to leave each other, and we stood together in my garden, and the breezy air blew all
around us. The clean scent of pine trees was up, and it mixed
with the sweet stink of garbage bags that the neighbors
had
left out for pick­up.

I listened as Margaux finished the story she had been telling me, about the girl she had been in art school with—­the one who had left to join a Buddhist colony to paint pretty colors on the insides of temples. Shortly before her friend left, they had sat together in one of the classrooms, after dark, cross-­legged on a table. The girl wanted to tell Margaux about Margaux's other lives, and she pulled Margaux's hands into her own and reverently closed her eyes. Margaux was dubious but willing. A few moments passed
between them in silence, then the girl opened her eyes sud
denly and said, “I had a vision. There is a person walk
ing through a busy marketplace in some other far­away land. She is carry­ing a sack with something really heavy in it. The sack is really heavy. So she throws away the sack
.” The girl's brown eyes filled with pity, and she gripped
Margaux's
hands. “She didn't know how valuable the thing was inside.”

Margaux burst into tears upon hearing this, and her eyes filled with tears to remember it. “Do you still like me, even though I'm crying?” She laughed.

I smiled and nodded.

“All this time you've been recording me
.
.
. you have been
looking
at me, really
looking
!” It was like she was seeing
it for the first time, and her eyes got wide. “I wonder if it's 
true that
.
.
. Well, a person ­wouldn't spend all her time looking at something that doesn't have value, right?”

I nodded very gently.

She recovered herself and blew out a big breath that threw
up her bangs. Then she returned to being the quarterback
and slapped me on my arm. I watched as she was about to
leave the garden, but before she was past the fence, she turned
and walked back to where I was standing, and said into my ear, “I have never had a kinder friend
.
.
. or a more dif
ficult one.”

As Margaux walked away, I thought about what I
wanted to do. I would do it, too. I knew the value of what was in that sack. I would carry that sack and never put it down. I would carry it to the end.

N
ow I was tired. All I wanted was to rest. The six days of 
Creation each have their own morning and eve­ning, thereby showing their beginning and end. Only the seventh day has neither morning nor eve­ning. It stands outside of Creation, belonging to the divine order alone.

I wanted a day without morning or eve­ning. I wanted a day of rest.

A star shone brightly down into my garden, poking behind the clouds. And I stared up at the night sky. There ­were all
those stars with nothing around them, protecting them.
They ­were up there and I was down ­here, and into my head came the idea of fences; how when you have something you value, the next thing you have to do is build a fence around it. As it has been said,
Tithes are a fence for wealth. Vows are a fence for abstinence. Silence is a fence for wisdom.
These fences do not protect what we value from other people, like those fences that prevent things from being stolen away. These are fences against our own selves; against what in our selves can chase what we value away. I told myself,
Cata­log what you value, then put a fence around these things
. Once you have put a fence around something, you know it is something you value. Put a fence around what you want to make holy, and crown it with the seventh day. Crown it with rest. The fence and the rest make it holy.

I
did
value Margaux, but only now did I understand
something I had not before: Margaux was not like the stars in the sky. There was only one Margaux—­
not Margauxs
scattered everywhere, all throughout the darkness. If
there
was only one of her, there was not going to be a second
one.
Yet in some strange way, somewhere inside me, I had
always
believed that if I lost Margaux, I could
go out and find
another Margaux.

Now it seemed so horrible to me. And didn't it explain everything? But I had never wanted to be one person, or even believed that I was one, so I had never considered the true singularity of anyone ­else. I said to myself,
You are only given one
. The one you are given is the one to put a fence around. Life is not a harvest. Just because you have an apple ­doesn't mean you have an orchard. You have an apple. Put a fence around it. Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.

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chapter
3
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THE GRAVEDIGGER

T
here lived a man in our town who labored up at the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Those who worked with him consider him a loyal man, solid and unshakable. When he was young, he had been a wanderer through many of the great cities of the world, but after seeing what was what, he made some choices and began to apply the run-­of-­the-­mill gifts the gods had given him to what he determined with his own mind was important. He took the job as a gravedigger, and three de­cades later, he worked there still.

One morning, a ditchdigger, who was no longer young
but believed himself so, hurried through the cemetery, late for work as usual. He ran past the gravedigger, who had been up and digging for several hours already. The gravedigger nodded hello.

The ditchdigger nodded back and, out of breath, paused to take a moment's rest. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. For a few moments he watched the gravedigger work, then he said, uneasily, “Are you sure you should be digging there? Over there the sun is brighter—­wouldn't it make for a nicer plot over by those trees?”

The gravedigger looked to where the man was pointing.
He could see why the man would say that, but he knew
from experience that it was not always best to be in the sun or beside a grove of trees. There ­were advantages and disadvantages. Who could say which plot was best—­this one or that one or a third?

“Right ­here is fine,” the gravedigger said. “It's not the plot, it's the grave.”

The man shook his head and laughed. “If I had your job, I'd always be asking myself which plot was best. I'd keep on switching! You'd have this ­whole land covered in small holes, two feet deep.”

The gravedigger nodded and smiled gently, imagining
the scene—­all those bodies piling up by the gates. He might
have been this way too, but long ago he realized his intelligence didn't extend so far—­to know what was good from what was best—­so he taught himself to dig well, and did.

The man continued to watch the gravedigger work. When the gravedigger dumped the soil, it barely made a sound. When he cut into the ground with the shovel, it went in so neatly. Why was he doing this so carefully—­in the isolation of the cemetery! Who was he performing for?

“Come on!” the ditchdigger cried suddenly, impatient, feeling like the world was passing them by. “Why the care! You're only going to fill it up this afternoon—­and then it's going to be swimming with maggots and worms.”

The gravedigger stopped his work to reply, but the man
had already set off in the direction of his job, loping between
the headstones, now very far away.

The gravedigger said to himself, alone, “Not everyone can be a gravedigger. You have to make a neat job of it. I met a man once. He dug ditches. He wanted to see a grave. He was impressed when he saw me digging this way, how straight and deep it was. I told him:
It has to be. A human body is going in this grave.
”

THE GODS

A few weeks later, Sholem knocked on my door. He told me that he had been feeling uneasy. Though we'd held the Ugly Painting Competition, no winner had been declared. I admitted that this had kind of been bothering me too. We had simply never discussed it: Was the winner of an Ugly Painting Competition the person who made the uglier painting, as Sholem had, or was it the person who, though trying just as hard, made a painting that was inadvertently beautiful? Sholem said that he and Margaux had
talked about it, and they'd come up with an idea that seemed
fair. They would compete in a squash game. If Margaux won, then the person who made the more beautiful painting would be considered the winner of the competition, and if Sholem won, it would be the person whose painting was actually uglier. Did I want to come with them and
see? Of course I did! I was really eager to know who
would win.

The following afternoon, we gathered in our gym outfits, but while Margaux and Sholem went straight for the courts, Misha and Jon and I went up to the observation deck and arranged ourselves along the concrete wall, resting our arms along its edge, peering down into the court below. The squash court's white walls narrowed in a severe foreshortening,
making it look like a fluted, funnel-­shaped room.
The tan lacquered wood of the court's floor gleamed up at us, and I could see the stroke marks left behind by the
players who'd worn dark-­soled shoes.

We didn't speak, just waited. The stuffy, sweaty smell of the gym hung in the air behind us. Then we saw Margaux's blond head and dark roots from above as she walked onto the court—­and Sholem's curly black hair, his skinniness and bare legs, following behind.

We waited, drinking from our water bottles, silent. Then
they began. The game went very slowly at first, then grew more and more focused. Soon Margaux and Sholem ­were running back and forth, breathing very heavily. They smacked the ball against the wall, dodged into each other's
part of the court, and slammed against the back wall, groaning. They nodded briefly when the other made a
good move. They rubbed sweat from their brows and hit the ball too high. They ran forward and bent low, and at one point Sholem threw himself to the ground. Margaux followed the rolling ball, walking very slowly, and tossed it to Sholem to serve. He smacked it high in the air and ran to the edge of the court and missed.

After about half an hour of this, I heard Misha say to Jon, “Do you know the score?” Jon looked at me blankly, then we both looked at Misha. I told them I had no idea.

So we turned our attention more intently to the game. We watched and listened with real concentration, but none of us could hear anything from below except for explosions of laughter, moans, and cursing, and Sholem saying, “Fuck! I hate this fucking game!”

We remained very still, and we watched. Then finally Jon said, in his sweetly caustic drawl, “I don't think they even know the rules. I think they're just slamming the ball around.”

And so they ­were.

About the Author

S
heila
H
eti
is a writer who lives in Toronto.

About the Publisher

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”