Waiting for Joe (30 page)

When he’s finished, Ken expels a long breath of air, as though he’s been holding it the whole time. “Wow, oh, wow,” he says. Then he looks at the ceiling and says loudly, “Sometimes you need to yell at us, right?” He turns to Joe. “Big Daddy just gave you a shove in the right direction. He’s chased you down like Paul of Tarsus. And here you are. Do you need a bigger light or a louder voice?”

Just then Maryanne enters the room carrying a tray. With dessert and tea, she tells them. She sets the tray down, and begins setting mugs and bowls of sorbet on the table, and as Joe watches, his churning thoughts settle.

“Honey, you missed hearing what happened to Joe,” Pastor Ken says.

“I heard,” she says quietly and begins to pour.

“Just what would you have me do in your ministry?” Joe asks. “My father’s in great shape, but I sure don’t see moving him to Vancouver.”

Maryanne looks at him, the glass teapot suspended in the air, in it a swamp of red flowers and leaves. “Of course not. But you’d be able to get to Winnipeg now and again to see him. It wouldn’t be easy, I know. But remember those first disciples, they were willing to leave everything and everyone in order to serve the Lord. Even their families,” she adds and resumes pouring.

Pastor Ken tosses the crumpled serviette on the table. Then he sits forward on the loveseat, as though about to call a meeting to order. “What we need, Joe, is for someone to pray over the mail.” The cheques, the money orders, the requests for literature. “And we need to get organized in there. We’ve got to be able to get back to people sooner. The turnaround time is much too slow.” The volunteers they have now, who sort the mail, work in the call centre and prayer room, need to be organized.

“You’re so good with people,” Maryanne says. With him on board, she says, she would be able to let one of the two girls moving product across the country go.

“I don’t think so,” Joe says, startling them as he gets up from the loveseat.

“Joe, wait,” Pastor Ken calls out to him as he leaves the room.

Within moments Joe is striding along the winding driveway through the Japanese cherry trees, feeling the pull of
the grade in his thighs. He rounds a curve and sees the gate below, realizing then that someone will need to let him out. The last bit of sunlight glazes the water in the inlet, and the spaces between the wrought iron bars on the gate look solid, like clear glass.

He turns and takes in where he’s been, the sheen of water flowing across the black shale plates, bushes whose branches bend to the earth beneath the weight of giant, pastel flowers, the row of tall cedars beyond them. He’s seen a documentary on the various places where the Garden of Eden might have been, on a mountain in Turkey; between the Blue and White Nile rivers; the great saline reed bed where the Euphrates and Tigris rivers merge. There’s a muddiness there that matches the muddiness of the sky, and so it’s impossible to know where the water and sky meet. A concave swelling of water, of longing to forever be children walking and talking with God at the breezy end of the day. He’s seen another place where the Garden of Eden may have been, and like in the Joni Mitchell song, it’s a paved-over parking lot.

He looks up at the ten-foot height of the gate, at the spear-shaped tips at the tops of the bars, thinking that somehow, he’ll climb over it. Then he hears a buzz, then a click, and when he pushes on the gate it opens. Maryanne calls out, her voice distorted and loud, but he gets the message. They’ll be praying for him. Good, he thinks. Everyone needs to be prayed for. The goodwill embodied in a prayer goes somewhere, and like a moth, it finds a source of light.

Five years later

W
EEDS BURNT BY THE SUN
crunch beneath Joe’s feet as he walks along the side of the highway, the metal water bottle clipped to the belt of his shorts pinging rhythmically against a pocket rivet, as though counting his steps. In the far distance a murky haze has begun to rise on the horizon and he fixes his eyes on it, thinking it is like silt at the bottom of a fishbowl. I don’t know. Maybe it’s rain clouds. But it’s almost too much to hope for, given that he’s got his tinderbox of a motel room in Winnipeg to look forward to, the air conditioner conking out just before he left to go to Brandon.

The intense heat this summer is like the heat of that last summer he had with his mother. The same water restrictions, newscasters reporting with a heightened urgency the record amount of water being piped into the city from Shoal Lake, the sightings of funnel clouds. He recalls the swish and chug of lawn sprinklers coming to life after dark, his mother’s obvious flouting of the water restriction
making him wild as he ran through the spray of water clad only in his underwear, and she watched from the veranda, the sphinx shape of her stiff hair a silhouette, her cigarette rising and the spark flaring into a pocket of light around her mouth.

He dreamed of her last night. He awoke to the smell of the damp earth beneath the footbridge in Brandon, the algae rimming the duck pond in the park just beyond, and he remembered his mother had come to him. She was not warm and solid, but not a ghost either. She made a hollow for him with her arms and he set his forehead against her breastbone and stayed there. For how long, he can’t remember. But he does remember that when it ended she’d taken his face in her hands and pressed her mouth against his, hard, for a long moment, as though she was telling him it was important that he know something. He’d thought she meant to tell him he was forgiven for breaking into the church. For being away from the house with his father when she lost her life.

He’s returning to his room at the Palomino, the last of the cheap motels along Pembina Highway to offer a small kitchen. When he’d heard from Pauline that Clayton had split with his family and had returned to his hometown to die of cancer, he took a bus to get to Brandon quickly, and then he was just there, a presence beside Clayton’s bed until he died. Nothing was said between them, only Clay’s eyes taking him in, and then closing.

In the years since his business went bust, Joe has helped build two houses for Habitat, one in Calgary and another in a small town south of Winnipeg. Joe, a rough carpenter, clean-shaven, his hair a brush cut, a pencil stuck behind
his ear. Joe, stacking food at the Food Bank, long-haired with his scruffy jeans gone through at the knees, blending in, steering clear of gratitude.

The sun is behind him now, and the air is thick with the scent of sage. All around him are coulees, shallow bowls of sunlight set down among the humped beige land. A wilderness just beyond the highway that he’s driven so many times, failing to notice the moguls, the tall and silvery sage, ribbons of ragweed the colour of rust, stiff and tall. He’s nearing a dugout pond now, one of several he’s passed, all of them looking like mirrors set down on the earth.

“I don’t know,” he says. Maybe if he cuts across that field he’ll eventually wind up somewhere close, or not close, to Winnipeg.
I don’t know
has become his new mantra, what he says to himself when he gets up in the morning. Not knowing where he’ll be tomorrow or the next year used to fill him with dread. What he feels now is a certain weightlessness, that one small step is a giant leap of possibility.

Sometimes he takes the bus past the old house, thinking he’ll see Laurie, but so far he never has. One year, a strip of earth had been turned up along the front walk and bushes had been planted, surrounded by the fresh look of cedar bark chips, and the next year, the bushes were gone, and the sidewalk had been taken up and interlocking bricks put down in a random pattern of red and grey that looked like shadows. He was glad again that he’d given the house to her. Glad that she’d been there for his father at the end.

He cuts away from the highway and goes down the slope of the ditch, the dried reeds slashing at his bare legs. He ducks between the strands of the fence and heads out
across the field when, within moments, he’s surprised by a flock of Franklin gulls rising up all at once, the air filled with their complaints. And it comes to him then, that the dream of his mother had nothing to do with forgiveness. Rather, with her cold, hard and long kiss, she was telling him that he should know that he is alive, while she is not. He stands for a moment to watch the gulls turn across the eastern sky, and remembers seeing the doe and her yearling at the beginning and end of the day through his last winter at the Happy Traveler. Then, in spring, something told them to leave, and wherever they went, it was the right place to be.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Carol Shields Writer in Residence Programme at the University of Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Canada Council for the Arts during the writing of this novel.

And a special thanks to Anne Collins for asking all the right questions.

SANDRA BIRDSELL, among Canada’s finest fiction writers, was born in Manitoba, and lived for many years in Winnipeg. Her novel
The Russländer
was nominated for the Giller Prize, and her bestselling novel
Children of the Day
was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of three collections of short stories, among other works. She lives in Regina.