As a Thief in the Night (10 page)

Following Elsie from plant to plant, Olyvia asked questions to which she already knew the answers, then listened deferentially to Elsie's opinions, asked further questions, and put into practice whatever action was suggested to her. Although this was not because Olyvia revered her younger sister's knowledge or practices over her own. As the oldest sister of four it was to her, during her teenage years, that their father, an artist in this area alone, had passed on most of his wisdom and thoughts on viticulture. But Olyvia sensed and felt what the rest of their family did not: that Elsie's connection to, and perhaps her dependence upon her plants was continuous and not a mere stepping-stone or temporary medicine that had aided in her initial recovery. The roots that Elsie had laid deep in the ground all around the old schoolhouse were the ones that she held to when the terrible tempests of her son's death threatened to carry her away. Everyone else, Gord included, recognized that making wine was important to Elsie, but none of them went so far as to bind her well-being to that of the grapes, or to connect her stability to the changes in the liquid they drew from the fruit. Of course Olyvia could have shared this knowledge, but she held perceptions of this kind to be private, as if she had somehow been initiated into them through her own struggles and trials. How would Olyvia do with the vines? How would the three or four vintages that she would nurture and harvest turn out?
  Dependability and consistency were not Olyvia's strong points. But creative work
was
her secret discipline. She had the ability to focus on tasks, at least those that appealed to her as an artist, and see them through to an end that she was proud of. When she was a girl she had seen the pieces of music she had meticulously composed and mastered as having a life of their own, and now, as a woman, she saw the costumes she made for the theatre in the same way. Once these things had evolved as she felt they needed to evolve, once they had reached their aesthetic end through her hand and eye, she would set them apart from the rest of her chaotic existence, and from a distance take a pride in them that no misery or fault could compromise. And when some new pain or trial seemed to be surrounding her, Olyiva would bring these works before her mind's eye and draw security from them and say: I did that, and it is good and beautiful, and my creation cannot be taken from me, not even by God Himself.

At his eighth grade graduation Ezra was called to the podium and cited as "Male Athlete of the Year". It was an honor that he had coveted ever since he'd found out that such an award existed. Mrs. Simon, staring at the audience through murky glasses, presented it to him with words he repeated to himself in bed, as he went to sleep, for months.

There was a dance after the graduation ceremony too, and partway through it two hands reached round him from behind and covered his eyes. "Guess who?" a girl's voice spoke in one ear. He did not have to guess. Removing the hands from his face he turned and she was smiling at him. Would he like to dance with her?

Early in July Gord brought a transport truck home from work to help with the move.
  In one afternoon, with the help of all three sisters and their spouses, the trailer was filled with the contents of the old schoolhouse. Later that summer night the truck made its way down Highway #401 towards Windsor. An old Beaumont with one headlight, and two sleeping boys inside its rusting doors, followed close behind it. It was late and there weren't many other vehicles on the road. Now and then one came from the other direction and lit the thoughtful face of the pretty, hopeful woman behind the Beaumont's wheel. They really needed a new car.

W
e gather near water out of physical necessity of course, but also as a result of the spiritual urge that again and again, across all ages, drives us out to the broad, easy river, the glassy lake, the rock-tossed, stormy shores of the Atlantic, and the endless expanse of the Pacific.

Belle River, Ontario, is no different. Two hundred years ago a French ship belonging to Louis XIII and crewed by men who felt the call of the water more acutely that those of us who do our wandering on dry land, quivered beneath the thunder and battled the waves of a Lake St. Clair storm—the type of storm, as Melville pointed out, that often can rival or better the storms of our oceans. Joseph Papineau, the ship's stout and weather beaten captain, spotted the mouth of a tree-lined river beyond rising waves, and pointing his drunken finger (which was missing its tip as a result of a fight at an Irish harbor bar) shouted, "Quelle Belle River!" to his exhausted and quaking shipmates. Along the river's banks they found shelter. Others followed. Many years later, with Papineau dead and almost completely forgotten, a man and his wife and their two boys drove over the bridge as a cold dawn was breaking onto the small city:
  "Quelle Belle River!" What port in a storm is not beautiful?

The waves rose and the sky darkened above the same lake from which Captain Papineau had founded Belle River, but it was not Papineau that the clouds fell upon, it was Ezra Mignon.
  His forehead rested against the cool pane of his large bedroom window. His breath formed a fog on the glass that he wiped away every few seconds. Outside, the waves crashed and sprayed over the old iron breaker wall. It stood, brown and ugly and rusting, against the forces of the water at the back of the two-story brown brick house they had rented. His room was the smallest in the house, very close to the size of a closet in fact, but he thought it was the best room. It was the only bedroom on the house's main floor, and was set back in a corner. The back wall was composed of three windows that looked onto Lake St. Clair. On a clear day, searching the horizon, he could see all the way to Michigan. Ezra liked that and he liked the way the waves sounded at night.

Before the storm had come he and Layne had been swimming. As far out as they could walk the water was only waste high. They had fought and tipped each other over on an old inner tube that Gord had brought home from the truck yard.

Elsie stared out over the water from her lawn chair, but unlike Ezra, the horizon was not what she contemplated. She stared northeast, towards an island that she could not see but knew was not far away. Her father was on that island. She had not seen him since just after Moira had given birth to Ezra, and Harold Mignon had never even laid eyes on his grandson Layne.  She knew he was there though, working in his vineyard during the days, and eating and reading the newspaper during the evenings, not to mention making everyone around him as miserable as possible. Having spoken to Sarah, he knew that Elsie and the boys were on the other side of the lake, a short ferry ride away. But neither Elsie nor her father had called one another. Having spoken not a single word in twelve years, the words she directed across the water now were not kind ones.

After speaking to several other people and parents in town Elsie and Gord decided that Ezra would attend St. Anne's Catholic High School.  It was a twenty-minute bus ride west to Tecumseh (named after the great chief!) and Elsie had taken a part-time job driving the school bus. He could ride with her. The local high school, Belle River District, was much smaller, with maybe five or six hundred students, and had a reputation for fights and drugs.

She took him to Freed's Department Store to be fitted for a uniform. They bought white button up shirts, black and navy dress pants, golf shirts with the school crest on them, and a blue cardigan. The discipline, she thought, would be good for him.

Ezra had always been terrified, after any sort of break or vacation, of going back to school. He would sit on his bed on Sunday night with his stomach hurting and drowning in fantasies of how awful things were going to be. Eventually, when he couldn't take any more self-punishment he'd crawl into bed with Elsie (Gord asleep on the couch downstairs, television and lights still on, snoring). She would talk to him and remind him that he always felt this way going back to school and that everything had always turned out fine. Eventually he would begin to feel better and drift off to sleep while still holding her hand.

But now he was almost fourteen, and it was time he stopped being such a pansy about going back to school. So instead of seeking comfort with Elsie, Ezra turned up his clock radio and tried to find some in music. He listened until a song called "The Look" came on and his confidence rose with the tempo of the music. He thought in pictures about how he was going to impress everyone at his new school with his athletic abilities.
  How confidently he would carry himself!  By the end of the first day he'd probably have an entire group of friends, and a girlfriend too. And he saw himself yelling something impressive out the bus window to his new girlfriend as they pulled away at the end of the day. All his new friends would laugh and all the kids in the crowded parking lot would wonder about who he was. Elsie would smile to herself in the driver's seat. The music played on and on, and he sat up in his bed and watched the waves crash over the iron breaker wall.

Of course the first day was nothing like that. The homeroom teacher, Mr. Deshamps, had a big belly, was well over six feet tall, and seemed to be always blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief. He spoke with a bit of a lisp, which immediately led the boys to the conclusion that he was a homosexual. In addition to being their homeroom teacher, they would see him for religion class. On the second day of school, to Ezra's completely unprepared dismay, he showed the students a pro-life video, complete with a mangled fetus lying twisted and broken at the bottom of an empty stainless steel trashcan.

For the first few weeks lunch was the worst time of day for him. Classes, at least, offered him the small comfort of being able to blend into the crowd, but at lunch he was on his own, to sink or swim according to whatever friendships he might make. In the weeks before school had started Gord and Elsie had repeatedly comforted him with the idea that, it being grade nine and the beginning of high school, everyone would be making a fresh start. Instead, being in a new and uncomfortable situation, the other students did what teenagers usually do when faced with the unknown: they found something they did know and clung to it for dear life. Each found a group of other students with whom they had gone to middle school and insulated themselves with their common past. This provided them with a level of comfort from which they could safely move out into other groups, and still always have a home to return to should their efforts fail. Ezra had none of this, and wasn't at all sure about how to go about the business of easing himself into such sealed company.

He spent lunch hours trying to keep his isolation hidden. If the others found out, if they began to look at him as friendless and alone, he knew he was doomed to remain an outsider. It was his secret, and if he was ever going to be accepted he had to guard it. He would purposely make his way to the cafeteria slowly, so that he'd be able to hide in the long line for as long as possible. When he ate he'd look for a group of people that had a few empty seats to their left or right, then he'd sit one seat away from the group, close enough that, to anyone looking, it would appear possible that he was leaving a seat between him and his very good companions for comfort. At the same time, he was far enough away that the group would not feel like he was an unwelcome guest. There were a few times during those first weeks that he tried to lean into a conversation or share a joke with the group of boys he had sat near, but each time he did he was ignored.

With time to kill, he wandered the halls. He walked with a sense of purpose, as if he had people to meet. Each hall, each path between the portables, could only be walked once, perhaps twice—more than that and he might see the same people too often, and then it would be obvious that he had nowhere to go.  After he'd used up all the space the school had to offer he'd go to his locker, place some of the contents on the floor, and pretend to be cleaning it out.  But students weren't allowed to be at their lockers during lunch, so he could only do that until he was sent back to the cafeteria by one of the teachers.

That was how Ezra Mignon spent his first months of high school. He also played minor league football, watching the high school players as they made their way out to the field every afternoon. If only he were a little bigger he could have played too, and his talents would have brought all this misery to its proper ending. No one here recognized him for what he was. A social misunderstanding was underway that no one seemed to be interested in correcting. He was sure he'd done nothing wrong, but there he was, a friendless fool who found himself completely alientated in an environment he felt should have embraced him.

The hallways were as crowded as the Tokyo subway, but the people he found himself pushed up against were not nearly so polite. Fighting his way through the swarm towards his next class, Ezra would come face to face with a boy that looked like a full grown man, and then, in one of those moments of visual violence, the man-child would look down at Ezra as if he were an insignificant animal in the way of a much larger beast, and Ezra would move sheepishly out of the way. He was five feet, seven inches tall, but still only one hundred twenty-five pounds.  Each time he was intimidated in this way, he left the confrontation diminished and cursing his own weakness. He felt shame over his perceived failure and did what he could to conceal it from Gord and Elsie, but his aunt and uncle saw that he was struggling.

Once a month the entire school attended mass at St. Anne's Catholic Church. Ezra was surprised, even offended, that being Anglican, he was not permitted to take communion.  The priest made the announcement right before the hymn: If you were not Roman Catholic you could get in line with everyone else, make your way to the altar with the others, and receive a blessing from the same priests who had just refused you a wafer. Apparently they, by way of Rome and going all the way back to St. Peter himself, had come to an exclusive knowledge of how the body of Christ should be portioned out. Ezra took all this quite seriously—but was very anxious about what the right thing to do might be. Again he was silent and did not seek advice or answers from the people around him that could have helped. Instead, he often slipped away from the group to hide in the shops adjacent to the church. On a few occasions, instead of going up to receive the blessing, he placed one hand over the other, and took the communion that he had been forbidden. Sometimes, he gave into the fear that the ground underneath his feet would split open and swallow him if he ate it, and he took his wafer and slyly pocketed it; other times he just went right ahead and ate it.

Upon their move, Elsie had wasted little time in finding an Anglican church. Being in a new town she saw it as all the more important in establishing a social network for her family. St. Mark's by the Lake had just hired a new minister with a near operatic singing voice. Father Paul Esau Matts was below average height, stocky, and kept a closely cropped dark beard. It was immediately clear to any informed member of the congregation that, in addition to being a chain smoker and having a habit of using the lord's name in vain, he was a man of the church with a promising future. He was ceremonially gifted and performed all the sacraments with grace and a slow and deliberate use of gesture and word, so that the meaning of the lit candle, the spreading of incense, and the carried cross seemed to be contained in the way he carried out each task. There was, however, concern among the members of the congregation that St. Mark's would be a mere stepping stone for Father Paul, a means to the end of some position of higher prestige.

After a short period of assessing the situation, Elsie determined that an opportunity existed here for the boys. It would be a couple of years before Layne would be old enough, but Ezra, at fourteen, could begin working immediately as a server and altar boy under Father Paul.  Elsie arranged things with the minister, simply informed Ezra that this was something he would be doing, and set dates for him to be trained in the formalities and ceremonial duties he would be involved in at services.

As a boy, Ezra had been encouraged to speak to his mother. Elsie and Gord had done the same with Layne, and in the beginning Elsie had done it with them and spoken out loud to her dead sister. The boys had asked if their mother could hear them, and Elsie had told them that she believed she could.

Ezra had done this less as he reached adolescence. His words to her had become shy and silent and private, but now that they had come to live by this river and on this lake and he found himself alone, he spoke to her more nights than not. Ezra would shut his eyes as he walked down the street, or as he sat in class, or while he was watching television, and try to feel as deeply as his body would allow in the hope that her fingertips might still be able to reach out of the ether to bless and protect him.

He searched for her ghost outside the darkening pane of his bedroom window, within the changing shapes and shadows on his bedroom walls, and in the high branches and leaves of the tall trees in their front yard. In the growing space of his adolescent loneliness, he spoke to her. If he had become lost, he felt that his suffering must be necessary according to the logic of some grand design. At present that design eluded him, but in the painful and exacting voice of the introvert he fell to his knees at night and sought the voice of paternal reason and comfort.