The Last Season (22 page)

I wondered if he saw them through the windshield, laughing as they drifted through the first part of the turn, their eyes suddenly seeing him standing there with his raspberries, smiling. Him, with a surprise for Batcha. Them, a surprise for Ig.

Oh God, if it hurt him and he had to lie there before he died and wonder what had gone wrong, I will kill Lacha. Please, Lord, tell me, please.

Dear Lord, let Ig have died instantly, unaware, please.
The field mouse and the silent owl.

I wondered: would Jaja be waiting for him? Poor Ig, always going on about Jaja being up in the clouds watching over us. So damned simple for him. Ig's heaven was just another floor over this one, something up past my bedroom, somewhere he'd never been, some indescribable paradise where Jaja would hold him in his arms and rock him like he used to when they were both still alive. Where the Nestlé's Quik can would be forever full.

How can that be? Father Kulas and now Father Schula with their promises of heaven, St. Martin's with its gawdy sculptures of the angels dancing above the skull, the hell-dwellers screaming frantically in the fires below.
How?
Tell me that.

How would Ig recognize Jaja if Jaja is really just some idea floating around up there? Ig wouldn't know what an idea was, for fuck's sake.

… because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to spue thee out of my mouth …

Am I one of Father Schula's Laodiceans? If so, I don't care. I'll spit right back.

Poppa had been working on the window, loosening the sashes and head jambs. The window had not been moved since Jaja died, nine years and four months before. He worked slowly, too slowly, and I realized he had been crying while he worked, for he wiped his sleeves across his face several times before standing. I looked down and shut my eyes as if praying; but I could not pray. One prays for answers, Father Schula had taught us in communion class. What could answer this?

That night was to be the lykewake,
pusta noc
. And I remember it clearer even than yesterday. Sophia and Batcha sat all afternoon talking in small voices, and I listened in only as long as I could take it. Batcha claimed she saw
smjerc
, the white woman of death, standing just outside the shed door on Sunday. Sophia moaned, almost with pleasure. I remember I felt like shouting “Bullshit!” at them and storming from the room. Batcha also claimed the chickens refused to eat yesterday. Probably she forgot to feed them. I had seen her in the morning out in the coop yard talking to them. No doubt she had been telling them about Ig; no doubt, too, telling the lilac and the raspberry and the goddamn leek garden. I wanted to ask her if she'd told the minnows, because he sold them, or the leeches, because he had captured them. Would they say a prayer for him?

Batcha made Jan open all the windows in the house except for my room. She wouldn't enter it, thank God, and I guess she hadn't the nerve to ask him. All the mirrors were covered with cloth. The calendars she turned backwards and all the pictures, too, even poor old Paderewski, who was a special invite at Jaja's funeral. She had been at work on poor Ig, too. He had a rosary clutched in one hand and a candle in the other — to find his way to heaven, of course — and one of her silly poplar crosses was there as well, I was positive, though hidden from Poppa. And I'm sure she had put a coin in, perhaps so he could work the bubblegum machiness. And something special of Ig's as well. Batcha would have opted for his prayer book, which of course, he couldn't read. I would have suggested his cap, or maybe a spoonful of Quik.

I couldn't bear it. I bolted for my room and sobbed to sleep, and when I awoke it was already dark and I could tell from the smell of fresh rolls and coffee and beer coming up through the register that
pusta noc
had begun. Poppa came up once and asked me if I'd be down. I said maybe I would later; I told him that I didn't feel good, but both of us knew I wouldn't be coming. Down below, their eyes would wrap around me like barbed wire.

I awoke later, at least I thought I was awake, but my eyes wouldn't work right. I had a sense of them being open with my body still locked in sleep. The room seemed blue with new light, and breathing, and then I realized that the room was not breathing but something was moving about in the room. I tried to turn my head to see but couldn't. Then the light changed and something bent down, directly over me, and made the sign of the cross.

Batcha.

She seemed younger somehow, moving freely without her usual sighs dragging. She seemed to float about the room, black and nearly indistinguishable—like an indoor photograph where the flash has failed—except for the eyes. When she leaned over me they came down like a drill press, ripping.

I could hear a faint murmur, and though it didn't sound like Batcha's voice, it was her. Polish. Chanting. I tried to hear, to understand.

“Bjôj v imje
 
tego, co njebo a zemje
 
stvorził, a nje chodz
r
e
chle
 
nazôd, jak vczora!”

I could make out only a part of it:
“Go away in the name of Him ... do not return....”

And another word.
“Vjeszczi!”
Calling me “monster” again.

I tried to move, to speak, but couldn't. I tried to wake out of the dream, but couldn't. I tried to hold my breath, to force something to happen, but couldn't. I was helpless and, suddenly, she was gone.

I awoke and the bedclothes were all on the floor. The sheet was completely soaked and my pajamas as well. I smelled it before I realized precisely what had happened.

I had peed the bed.

I waited until the day after the funeral. Jan and Sophia and their brat had gone back to Renfrew and Poppa was back in the shed sharpening his chainsaw. Batcha lay on her bed with the door open. I passed by once, turned and forced myself back. I hadn't been in her room since I was a child. She stared, expressionless, and I tried to smile and find something for my hands to do. I let them rise and play off the door frame, hanging with my fingers as if I were about to skin the cat the way I used to over Ig's door. I felt foolish, but I had to know.

“Batcha?”

The wolf eyes rose like white flames.

I hurried. “Why were you in my room the other night?”

She blinked. Once. Twice. Three times.

“I saw you,” I said.

She shook her head slowly from her lying position. No.

“Yes, Batcha.” I let my right hand drop to my rear pants pocket, almost as if reaching for a comb. I had the poplar cross there. I held it out the way Father Schula once held my water gun.

“How did
this
get there then?”

She blinked again, then closed her eyes; I thought she said something. I stepped in, seeing the electric lamp of Jesus on the cross Jan had brought her last Christmas. She kept her eyes closed though she had to know I was inside the room.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Vjeszczi!”
she hissed. The eyes opened and fixed me, stopping me dead. Her eyes seemed to widen and fall, shifting almost imperceptibly, like water in bucket.

“What?” I said, stuttering with surprise.

“Vjeszczi!”
She almost shouted it this time. I stared down, unable to deal with her eyes.

Vjeszczi.
I did not understand.

Vjeszczi?
Me, a monster?

I found Poppa throwing out dead crayfish. He had the galvanized tub tipped and partially drained, and the crayfish were tangled in a writhing scramble along the bottom, legs lightly scraping the sides, tails buzzing in what little water was left. He scooped with his right hand, oblivious to their claws, letting the live ones fall free on their own, leaving the dead to be tossed toward the ash heap.

“They're going soft,” he said as I came walking up.

“Maybe they're just molting,” I said.

Poppa shook his head. “Water's too warm. Too many in here. Shouldn't bother with crabs.”

“The Americans are crazy about them for bass,” I argued. “We've done as well by them as worms.”

Poppa wasn't interested. He tossed another handful. “Shells are soft,” he said.

“Poppa, what does
vjeszczi
mean to you?”

He put the tub down and looked up, startled.

“
Vjeszczi?
Children's tales, I suppose.”

I knew he was hiding from the point. “But what does it really mean?”

“Where did you hear it?” Poppa looked at me earnestly, as if afraid to hear.

“Batcha.”

Poppa shook off a small crayfish that had gripped him. It struck hard on the side of the tub and fell down onto its back, its tail bucking.

“What did she say?” Poppa asked.

“She called me one.”

Poppa looked up. “You're sure.”

“Yes.”

I could see his cheek muscles working. He turned, picked up the bucket of fresh water from the creek and dumped it into the tub. “I'll need more,” he said, and walked from the shed toward the milk house. I followed.

“Well, what did she mean?”

Poppa seemed more intent on the water than on me. “She's just an old lady,” he said.

“I
know
she's an old lady. Why did she call me that?”

“I don't know. She's upset about Ig, you know that. We all are.”

“I've heard her say it before. Before Ig. Before Ig died. When I was little.”

Poppa bent down, putting his knee into the muck and letting the fresh water run slowly into the pail. “She's not a fair person,” he said.

“You're telling
me
— she's always hated me.”

Poppa rose, rinsing the water absent-mindedly until it overlapped the top. “Not true, son. Not true at all. She's just gotten very old and set in her ways. There's too much of the old country in her maybe.”

“But what does it mean to you?”

“What?”

“Vjeszczi.”

Poppa stared as if he were hearing the word for the first time. “The same as you, I suppose.”

“Monster?”

Poppa smiled, seemed relieved. “Yes. But it's just children's tales, son. You can't take her seriously. You aren't taking her seriously, are you?”

He looked at me, knowing I was.

“She said it and she meant it.”

Poppa let go of a grin. “Well, are you?”

“Am I what?”

“A
vjeszczi
?” He was laughing now, his big brown teeth as dark as his face, his eyes disappeared. “I thought you were grown up, Felix. This morning I find wet sheets in the shed, now this.”

“It's no joke, Poppa!”

He wouldn't stop. I couldn't help myself, I started to cry. Tears were oozing out of my eyes and my jaw hurt so badly I couldn't speak. I tried and my throat caught, also hurting. Poppa noticed and set the pail down. He came over and put his arm around me and I fell into his shoulder, wanting to vanish in his gasoline and sawdust and varnish and coal oil. The smells were his strength, and I, the big pro hockey player, needed it. I couldn't believe what I was doing.

Poppa held me tight until I got a hold of myself. I couldn't recall the last time that had happened to me, but I doubt that I had needed him then any more than I did at that very moment. Every time his big right hand thumped into my back it drove Batcha further and further from me, until for a moment I thought I could see the whole thing was as foolish as Poppa believed.

“She blames me for Ig's death, I know. But it wasn't me. You've got to believe me.” Poppa's harder pat on the back told me he did. “And she still blames me for Jaja, too. Doesn't she?”

Poppa continued to hold me and thump on my back. But he said nothing. And that hurt more than the hand helped.

I left for training camp a week early. No excuse given, none demanded. Poppa took me out to the White Rose and waited for the Bancroft bus with me; I'd have to make connections to Peterborough. I'd felt I should say something to Danny Shannon and half hoped he might turn up for nothing more than a handshake, but he didn't, and I didn't have the time to tell Poppa to pull over for a moment while I popped into the Shannon house. We wouldn't know what to say anyway. I'd seen him at Ig's funeral, big watery eyes afraid to look, afraid not to look, as the Batterinskis trailed out after the coffin for the burial beside Jaja. Danny wasn't at the gravesite. Nor did he show up back at the house for the wake. I could understand.

Poppa stood patiently waiting with me, neither of us speaking. It was just going on for evening, the quick shift in temperature full of the hint of an early fall. The air died momentarily while the wind shifted, and the only sound out on the highway the roar of a full logging truck heading down the far side of Black Donald. Poppa kept his hands in his pockets. And with the wind still down, I knew the fabric was billowing with his nervousness.

“Late,” he said.

“Yah.”

I thought I should say something. Perhaps sum up the years or something profound or at least a thank-you and, if I could manage it, a small hint at Ig that he might use as an opening for forgiving me again. I was fairly certain he didn't blame me; he certainly acted no different toward me.

We heard the bus sigh as it crested the hill and then began sizzling down past the church. I picked up my duffle bag and the old suitcase just as the air brakes began, and though I turned and looked at Poppa there was not much to say without shouting. And all my wants were quiet. He stuck out his hand and I dropped the duffle bag again and took it and he squeezed harder than usual and stayed longer.

“We'll pray for you, Felix.”

I smiled but could only nod. The door burst open with a wash of cooled air and the driver was bouncing down to scoop up luggage, anxious to make up for lost time.