When I Was Young and In My Prime (3 page)

It's been four months since. I've been back for several visits in the meantime with Mom, but today is the first time I've come back alone, and the first time I've worn the coat. In fact, I haven't worn it much all winter. But one day a few weeks ago, in a second-hand shop near the hardware store where I was buying paint, I found a long soft olive-green scarf to go with it. Since then, I've been wearing the coat like it was always mine. James has been out of town on tour (a last-minute gig opening for a singer/songwriter slightly more up-and-coming than he is), and I've repainted our whole apartment and worked a long string of late shifts, alternating between waiting tables and painting, writing a little, talking to practically no one except,
You want another pint? Need some change?
One day, walking to the streetcar, I realized the old coat was the only thing I was wearing that didn't have holes in it.

Grandpa grunted when I came in wearing it this afternoon. I paused, trying to interpret the sound. It could have been a grunt of greeting and recognition. Or it could have been mild disgust. Or something far less communicable than any of that.

Now, in curtain-filtered dusk light, he's telling me stories, a rare mode these days. I keep still and watch his lips as he speaks—the bluish purple bumps on them, just where the wet inner lip shows itself. They've always been there. What are they? Blood blisters? Something to do with blood.

We sit at the kitchen table in the half-dark, two cups of bitter coffee between us. He speaks slowly, and my mind wanders during the pauses—
What time does my shift start? Why can't my tongue resist this canker? Shit I forgot to feed the cat before I left
—each thought a kite lifting into another corner of the kitchen. I'm able to keep each line of thought taut, circling him, and still follow the slow line of his story. Sometimes he pauses so long I think he's stopped, and one or two of the kite lines go slack, drop to the countertop.

Grandma's lying down in the front room. Every once in a while she calls out, “Peter?” He closes his eyes and, after a second, calls back,“Put your head down Mary, you're napping.”

A minute later his eyes are still closed. I'm beginning to wonder if he's fallen asleep when he opens them wide.

“Had it made the year before I married your grandmother. A month's salary. Picked out that brown-green material. Wool. Houndstooth, they call it. Had it made by the tailor. Dammit. What was that man's name. Pollack. Slowacki. Stan Slowacki. Yessir. I was the talk of the town. Peter Friesen, Alf and Evelyn Dowswell's new farmhand with a houndstooth coat and a feather in his hat.”

“The coat is older than your marriage,” I say, looking from the bumps on his lips into his eyes. My coffee's finished but he's barely taken a sip from his.

“They don't make things like they used to anymore,” he says. And for a moment I hear the phrase the way it must have sounded the very first time it was said.

July 28, 1930

Now by golly for another chapter: I have been in Winnipeg the reason was the supposed-to-be circus which took place on the 26th of July. It was quite interesting, but most of all I liked the exhibition of the wild animals who were put in one cage and one man amongst them. Baby! didn't he fix them though, and all he had was a whip and a revolver with blank shells in it and a chair which he used as a shield. With all those animals like lions and tigers, leopards, wild cats, bears & others, I would not have wanted to stay in there with a couple of loaded guns and that fellow had the nerve to be in there with only what I said and do with them what he liked except petting them. I am just looking ahead for the big day I will leave again for the money-eating city called Winnipeg. How things will hatch out then, I will put down here without a doubt. With a little patience strong will good hope etc. one might find life interesting enough to have it worthwhile living for.

The expenses I made on this trip:

(The money I spent on the big baboon Johnny Schritt is .75 train fare home + .80 circus ticket + .10 dinner + .15 streetcar = $1.90. Be gosh she's going down like the grain in the grain exchange.)

February 5, 1971

Ice storm, driveway like glass. Astronauts

Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell landed on
 

moon 9:45 am today. Stuart Roosa
 

orbiting. We carved with soap today at school.

a list of birds

1 the domestic goose
(anser anser)

When he is six years old, there are two wars: the Russian Revolution and his war with the goose.

The path from the house to the garden is blocked by a gander from his mother's flock. Several times now he's been turned back, his shoulders beaten by the gander's wings, his bare legs clamped by the gander's bill. Told how he must grab the neck—just so, at the back of the head—

he enters the barnyard. War has always been about territory.

The goose charges, neck outstretched, wings flapping, bill open, hissing. The boy reaches, fumbles, falls to his knees, finally grips feathered muscle. Unsure for a moment what part of the goose he holds, he opens his eyes and stands—is soon seen by his mother from the kitchen window tapping the gander's head in the dirt, lecturing it, dragging it forward until the thing follows in submission.

Releasing the gooseneck, he feels five years older and free from that day on to walk anywhere in the yard his heart desires, the goose

hissing like

hunger from a
 

distance

2 the great grey owl
(strix nebulosa nebulosa)

Now he is a boy on his way home from school, where they
 

teach in Russian and he may not speak his mother tongue.

He passes a row of silver spruce in a fenced-in farmyard—
 

unusual. If a man plants trees they are always fruit trees, who
 

doesn't need fruit trees more than silver spruce?

Rumours of ghosts clamber about this house; its shimmering

evergreens glow and moan when you pass at night.

His sisters asleep in a row above him, he lies awake nights in

 
his place at the foot of the bed, turning the mystery over in
 

his mind. Sucking it slowly. Making it last.

Finally one evening he climbs the fence to see for himself—
 

taking care not to rip his pants or there'll be hell to pay
 

when he gets home—

goose-pimpled
               
he approaches the first tree sees

nothing
               
moves aside a branch and

      
holy mother

                                      
a grey and stately owl

swivels its head.
                         
He follows its gaze

   
to the next tree and there
           
is another and

                          
another and

      
another
                       
each tree loaded

with great grey owls
             
dozens of them

all swivelling their heads,

           
calm, real.

3 the ruby-throated hummingbird
(archilochus colubris)

When he is seventeen he works on a farm near Winnipeg as hired man for a James Henry Lytle
(hypocrite and as big a windblow as any of the Lytles are, but a good man all the same)
.

One day he's in the barn grooming the horses.
 

He hears a
 
humming.

Out of the corner of his eye

a flash then

there it is
     
still
     
suspended like Christ himself
     
then

darting to
       
fro
 

      
up
           
down

like some kind of crazy pendulum.

Insect? Moth? Bird?
He hasn't any idea what to make of it, thinks that, for all he knows, it could be a fairy, come to him with a message.

Smudges in the air where the wings should be—
like someone took a thumb to a fresh charcoal drawing.