Come Back (22 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
DAILY PLANNER
1985:
August Wednesday 14
Hi.
Loving son: we will never know how much you thought, and wrote, and then destroyed. But you deliberately left us these spare diaries: they were to be, they are your message to us after you are gone. And on an otherwise empty day during your last August you offer us greeting:
Hi.
And suddenly Hal could not endure what was approaching through the shredded trees of his life; what had come, what was forever already there since that tiny word was written. Like the final exhalation of a breath.
Oh Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have pity on me a sinner. Up the basement stairs thump by thump and across to the back door, unlock, walk out on the deck. Face the last April sun blazing down through snow-spotted trees tipped with green buds.
The houses and condo blocks of the city loomed there as ever, piled blankly dark around him. A helicopter—the city police?—beat somewhere, fading east. Why didn’t they come and get his official guilt registered, take him and throw away the key, oh sure it was that old guy, he’s in here every day, name’s Hal, he comes and goes on 104th Street towards Saskatchewan Drive, he’s sometimes with that Dene guy, Owl, yeah, usually straggle beard, he run out yelling a name like crazy—why didn’t he go, what was the matter with him, why—
He heard a sound he has known since before memory: he stared at the sky, high and west, where the last blue light played in burning clouds and he saw the bent line of Canada geese, he heard their honking even more distantly clear when he found their ragged, undulating V, their giant wings stretching their long necks, their bodies yearning relentlessly north. His heart leaped as he watched, their sound, one arm of their V shifting steadily forward, shaping them into an N and then gradually out of it as they cried into a wobbly W and then bent slowly out into a larger variation of V; they were calling north high over the bright city and the dark river valley and the luminous sprawl of streets beyond, and it seemed to him they were writing their shape-shifting story letter by letter on the sky, he read it bright as memory:
Thom, his
Groota Brooda
/Big Brother Thomas, Thom, forever nineteen. And he was little Hal, almost nine then, he was looking up at Thom so huge beside him in the wagon box bumping towards the Wapiti Post Office and Thom’s big right hand lifted from the reins, pointed up. It was not spring, it was autumn and the V of the great geese were crying south. That last autumn before the winter
Thom enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces though no one drafted him. Two years earlier he had declared himself before an official government Registrar as a Mennonite Conscientious Objector and had been judged and lectured and granted exemption as an essential farm worker—with Mam he ran their Wapiti farm far better than their father was capable of—but the day after Christmas 1944 he travelled eighty-two miles to North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and enlisted in the Air Force and on Sunday January 28, 1945 he was dead. The telegram said he had been running a Basic Training obstacle course in Ontario when he lost his grip on a high bar, and fell. His neck broke.
Sixteen years to the day before Gabriel Thomas was born.
Their Wapiti Mennonite Church deacon Peter Block holds the telegram low in his left hand. Backed against their closed kitchen door in his black buffalo fur coat, but they are all staring at the dirt-yellow English paper he has translated. “A horrible accident,” he says in Low German. And again quietly: “Accident.”
On his Edmonton house deck, the distant Canada geese gone in the darkening spring sky, for Hal that word was like a bell tolling: “
Onn-jletj
…
Onn-jletj
.” And he thought again,
“Jletj”
means “luck,” the word literally meant “un-luck,” and his father’s Low German words ignoring completely their mother’s piercing shriek, words so fierce little Hal had never heard his mostly silent father speak to anyone like that, leave alone to the all-powerful deacon who spoke English as well as any school teacher:
“You always say there is NO UN-LUCK! There is only GOD’S WILL!”
And the Deacon gestured helplessly with one empty hand at their wailing mother and sister Margret, and then at Hal as well: who had read and understood the telegram words perfectly without translation, he had been at enough Wapiti funerals to know about dead.
Accident. Un-luck. Noun or verb—at best, stunning evasions.
Whatever it was, you could do nothing. These were the facts, you had to accept. Accept your big brother Thomas would walk those winter miles alone to the highway and flag down the Meadow Lake–North Battleford bus and after five weeks come grinding home through snow in a box on the back of a truck and in the corner churchyard beyond the barn four Royal Canadian Air Force soldiers would surround that box like posts and hoist their bayonet rifles up at the sky, Yes! you thought then, stab him, shoot him, God!
And when your oldest son so carefully backs up your truck, parks among small birches.
Facts.
The geese over the city were gone, and the sun. A last brightness flamed against clouds above the patches of roofs, beyond the six high-rises clear through a spray of bare trees: how long since he had remembered his beloved brother’s rigid face in that coffin, that dreadful uniform … he will not remember. No. Owl and tomorrow would come as certainly as the moon rising and now the sun was gone and it was time, yes, time for the detailed and programmed evening rituals that led him steadfastly through his life wilderness of utter avoidance into the blessed, daily blank
nirvana of unconsciousness. Go, not down into the basement, go upstairs, go up. Abandon this.
Gabe’s word: abandonment. No, impossible now. Down again.
DAILY PLANNER
1985:
August Tuesday 20 and across Wednesday 21
Yes—I’m sorry—I’m sorry—I’m incredibly sorry
Listen to pop music on the radio trying to hear a certain song. Go to Music Centre to look, their PA is playing like vibrating thunder “… and she knew that she would never drive through Paris in a …” I slam the door on it.
Where is there a saviour when you need one. It’s too much a romantic dream.
The effort needed to write down words thought in the mind is never good enough—words put down, even sung, are never, ever—o banal—somehow this Gabriel Thomas Wiens does not have the stuff to write down … too full, too empty
Arrange something beautiful, an image … I don’t know if I can do this, even for my darling Mir, this white and red rose picture wedding present, rolls of shots, they develop so trite. Vases all around, vases bought or hand-shaped—and I don’t know what exists inside a female—hence they are all
empty
, not even two transitory flowers—the colours alone don’t do it.
In evening meet Shirley, Susan, Donna, Mary, Simone and friend / feel like expired high school—feel like a
twit
I need to start everything all over again; life is good, lovely—but how can I do this living? Oh skip it
August Monday 26 and scrawled across two full pages to Saturday 31
Gabe: you must remember that the ramifications of this act before the 21st of September (M&L wed.) are going to put great distress on that whole happy situation. If you were a strong man you would wait at least till after. But Mir getting
(Saw A and skinny Joanne through the girders walking across High Level Bridge on opposite side as I walked to play tennis with Denn. A on railing side, her hair permed in gold streaks since I last saw her. When? Did she see me? I’ll never know)
Quit reading this, trying to find clues to who I am. Shut the case and go on with your lives. Cause here I sit and I know that I would preferably do no different—I’m no better than you. (I know / I do seek romantic crap) (NFT Board meeting 6:30 Citadel)
It’s going to be so messy. How long will it take a week imagine the poor person
Sorry Mir, I have no gift to give you—I have none for anybody. Even God—he just I would rather burn in hell than go to a “Father” who just creates and then leaves you on your own / I don’t want to go on living this given life: I
refuse
to accept being my self any longer. Therefore, I guess, proving I have faith in, I value my self.
Oh well, I can certainly babble contradictions
(
The Trial
—lovely music)
These photos I took to make Mir a present. I should have put the camera right up to the white and red roses in Clara’s stacked-clay vase, with a wide open aperture, that way the background would be blurry and foreground in beautiful focus. But I kept the camera back about 3 feet: crap, should do it over again // but I don’t have the money, and to make the effort, and time … Not drunk yet—suck some more. That’s better—the first waves of warmth pervade my being—and at the same moment I feel that I shall continue. hunnnnn needs to be seen All this stuff written Aug. 25/85
The long walk, bridge, university, valley, dining at home, Mom always so good to me I sometimes can’t stand it, yell, yell and walk out. Feel worse with every step
Top border of page, tiny, written at right angles
I cry for what is lost, and conversely for what will be lost, losing lost, losing lost, a nice skipping rhyme for a little kid but I’m too old. I look to the future at some date; I will be forgotten, the past over. I wish I could cry for and cry with all who cry, everyone crying inside their laughter, but I am selfish, I can barely cry for a few. I laugh but I cry. The white rose wilts, the red petals fall—why create at all if all your life is losing lost Aug 31/85 Does this help you I don’t know
September Sunday 1
Dinner at Mir and Leo’s, whole family. Travel and wedding talk and laughing. I egg Denn on too loud, Dad as usual not amused
Wide waterfall on High Level Bridge lit for Labour Day / bridge steel burns a sheet of light far down into the river it just keeps rollin’ along
September Monday 2
Cross the High Level, play tennis with Denn, all UofA courts full and more people come, they watch as they wait; naturally; but, my game totally falls apart, I can’t play with people watching me, I want to run away, I continue to hit the net. The joke is that they’re not even paying attention to me, why would they give a hoot how I play a game? And yet I fall apart
September Tuesday 3
How can that be my last entry? It at least indicates a character trait of mine, the shy nervousness when people watch me / maybe more than that—these are the kind of things that are so useless in the late discoveries of one’s existence And also my accidental, my accurate double-meaning choice of words
September Tuesday 3 across August Thursday 15 to Sunday 18
Please, if you must insist on a funeral, do not have it in Mennonite Church Edmonton, I hate the place: it never taught me how to live. Oh stupid again, blaming others, actually good people, making requests: did I want to learn? Do whatever you want—you made the effort to bring me into the world (what? a moment of joy?) you (and the world) can make the effort to clean up what remains
(Note: if you don’t have it, you just don’t have it. I can talk all I want about that and what would that explain? Extreme double meaning here, and do you know what I’m talking about? No? Can I talk more clearly? No.)
As for the people I love—forgive me, I am obviously not worthy of you. But I have, and I do, love you.
If I could write out the words of a song for you (in your style), I would do so, but for all the songs I know, I don’t know any that would do justice—I weep—I cry Oh Lord, why can I not show love—I can’t do anything without you: and obviously can’t do anything with you. Have pity
Grrrrreat
September Wednesday 4
I’m sorry (
Well enough of this
Well enough of this
The only words in the journal written in pencil. Hal had just enough control to check: the last words in Spiral Notebook (3) were dated June 22. He already knew every remaining page of the black Daily Planner 1985 was blank after Wednesday, September 4. He knew he would never find another Gabriel word, however often he might look; not an ink or pencil mark on thirty-four dated week pages. Except one: