Grandpère (18 page)

“We’ll talk to Angel in the morning. She has been talking more about her mom and has been going to counselling. We both think it’ll be good for her to be able to visit with her mother, so maybe we can arrange it in the summer.” Darcy sounds happy to hear that Jane is doing so well. “What about this guy Jim? Jesse thinks you’ve got it going on with him.” A teasing note creeps into his voice. “Says Jim is making himself pretty much at home there.”

“He’s a really nice guy. He’s been coming out to visit Grandpère and me a lot.”

“Yeah, he probably likes to visit the old guy.” Now there is no hiding the amusement in his voice.

“Yes. They get along well.” I’m not giving him any satisfaction, but he starts laughing, and I join in.

The next morning it’s raining hard, and we stay in the house. “Grandpère, we haven’t written down your memories for a long time. Do you want to tell some more?” I ask.

He settles back in his chair and thinks for a minute. Then he sits up straight, lays his walking stick across his knees and grips it with his hands, leaning forward. He rocks back and forth and nods at me.

“I will tell you a story of revenge. For our people, pride was very important. When people rose to speak at a gathering, they first told of their deeds that they were proud of. From what things they told, you knew what kind of a person they were. Some told of how many horses they took in a raid. Some told of how they found food when everyone was hungry. Some told of how many wives and children they were looking after. I remember one stranger who stood before the fire with human scalps on his stick. He told of how he had killed his enemies with honour. My mother told me afterward it was nothing to be proud of, but I remember thinking of him as a very brave man.

“When one of our people thought someone had wronged them, they expected something in return. Usually there was a council. Each person got to speak, but only in their turn. The council listened to the elders in it, and they would decide what the compensation would be. It was always just, and when the outcome was decided, everyone smoked for peace.

“I remember in one of the next villages there were two boys who fought so hard that one was killed with a blow to the head. The family of the dead boy claimed compensation, and the people had to give their son to take the other boy’s place. The people called him Son of Two Families. He hunted for both families, and they both claimed him as son. It was just, and everyone gained from a situation that could have left them enemies for life.

“I had a claim on a man who moved into our territory. Your mother and the boys were all grown, and Clementine and I had decided to take the pack horses and go on a trip. We were going to go to the edge of the lake to follow the old path back to our village, then carry on to the edge of the mountains. Our youngest son came with us, but he wanted to see only the old village. There was nothing left to see, just a clearing in the bush by then, but he wanted to come anyway. Then he was going to come back by himself.

“The trouble began when we went to round up the horses. We had turned them out as soon as the grass was green, and they were a fair way away by the time we started looking for them. We found the herd, but one of the saddle horses and one of the pack horses were not with the herd. We tracked them back for a long way till we found the remains of a small camp. There were tin cans in the bush, a place where there had been a fire and a pile of spruce boughs where a man had slept. We could tell that he had two horses tied up, and we suspected he had taken ours.

“We followed his tracks for a while, but they were old, and we lost them at the edge of a rocky mountain. We knew by then he was headed west, so we borrowed two others from the herd and went home with three saddle horses and two pack horses. The other horses were Alex’s, and he said he didn’t need them all summer, so we set out, hoping we would find our own horses on the way.

“It was a beautiful summer that year, and we took three days to get to the old village. I showed where the lodges used to stand and the cache pits where we kept our food for the winter. The cache pits were all caved in, just small holes in the soil covered with grass. We camped there for almost a week. Then your uncle left with his horse to go home, and we set out in the opposite direction, going north above the Lake Whose Waters Flow West.

“We went that summer to all the places we wanted to see. We went farther north, and camped beside the Neck of the Giant. We stayed a week there, then started back home. When we got back, we had been gone all summer. We turned the horses back out with the herd when we found it, and to our surprise, our other horses were already there. We turned the others loose and took our packs home.

“No one had been in our house while we were gone. Everything was just as we left it. That was strange, because your uncle was going to stay there while we were gone. I went to find Alex to see where our son was. Alex, with much grief, told me that he was dead. He said a stranger showed up and said he found a man shot to death in the bush. He took the RCMP and showed them, and it was our son. Alex said he went looking for the horse and found it with the herd but still saddled. He said our other horses were back there too; they had been used, as there were sweat marks on them from saddles and packs. There was no sign of any person that he could find. He couldn’t find the tracks where those ones joined the herd. The only stranger around was the man who found him.

“I asked Alex if he thought it was that man who had used our horses, and he said he wondered if he had something to do with the shooting too. He said the man had said he found him shot in the bush, but no one knew of anyone else in the bush, and it was just too much coincidence. He said maybe he got found with the horses by your uncle, and maybe there was a fight. Your uncle didn’t have a gun, so if there was a fight, it wasn’t a very fair one.

“We could not prove anything, and we were much grieved by our loss, so we spoke to no one about Alex’s suspicions, but he pointed out the stranger, and from that time on I was always aware of him. His name was Melvin and he was a big man with a bushy black beard, very strong, and he took work around town. He always had work, as he knew his way around in the bush, and he hired out with packers. He wasn’t kind to the horses, but he knew how to make them work. He reminded me of George, who I worked with many years before. He didn’t like dogs and would boot them out of his way if they blocked his path. One time, when I went to the herd with him and some others to catch horses, I noticed my horses would not go near him, and my suspicions increased.

“Melvin drank a lot and bragged a lot while he was in the village. One day while he was drinking, he said he had been out west a couple years before, and I knew he was the one who had taken our horses. You know when you suspect someone of something, you always look for proof, and the day I heard him say that, I suddenly knew he was the one who had killed my son. I don’t know how I knew it, but just at that minute, he realized who was listening to him. And he looked right in my eyes and was embarrassed, and suddenly I was sure.

“I decided then and there to get compensation. I didn’t want him to be my son. I wanted vengeance. Maybe it wasn’t right, but I wanted revenge. From then on I paid close attention to where he was. I didn’t know what to do, but I was waiting for an opportunity that I knew would come if it was meant to. One spring he needed a ride across the lake in a boat because the spring waters had taken out the bridge. I offered to take him. We took a hide-covered boat that the boys had made. I never even coated it with grease. He was nervous when he got in, since he had never used a hide boat, but when he saw it floated well, he started paddling, and so did I. We were about halfway across when the hide got wet and the water started coming in. He had a bucket that he bailed it out with, but soon he could not bail fast enough.

“When the boat was half-full of icy water, I said to tell me about my son. He said that the only thing he had done was find my son’s body. When the boat was nearly full, and he was bailing furiously, he started yelling that it was an accident, that he didn’t mean to do it. Then I jumped out of the boat and swam to shore. By the time I reached land, there was nothing to be seen of the boat or him. I reported a man drowned to the RCMP.”

I catch up to where he is with my note taking, and I look at him. His air is forbidding; his brow is furrowed, and his hands still grip the walking stick, white knuckled. His lips are sucked in tight, and he has quit rocking himself. He looks frozen.

“Grandpère, I will surely not be able to repeat this story while you are alive. I don’t think there is a statute of limitations for murder, and that sounds like a premeditated one. If you think the old age home is bad, what would you think about jail?”

“Much the same thing to me,” he says. “I didn’t kill him. If he’d learned to swim, he might still be alive today. Not knowing how to swim killed him.”

A pretty fine distinction, I think to myself, but to him I say, “Well, that’s all in the past. Right now let’s get some lunch.”

While I am typing this up in the afternoon, I have qualms about writing it. Is this a story I want my grandchildren to know? I decide to type it up anyway, but I file it in a different folder and try to decide what to call it. I finally type in “Folly” and put it in with the recipe folder. Probably hiding it from myself, I think, as I shut down the computer.

Jim comes out right after work on Friday. He brings a small bag with him, and when he wants to know where to put it, I point to my room. We have a nice supper, and afterward Grandpère goes out for a walk with the dogs. Jim and I clean up the kitchen and walk up to the lookout. It’s his favourite place to sit now too. He knows that this place is more than just a pretty spot. He knows who all the people are who have their ashes scattered here, and he says this spot makes him closer to the gods. I’m glad to share it with him.

We sit snuggled against the rock, watching the sun go down. Suddenly I feel nervous and embarrassed about asking him to stay the night. He catches my mood and says, “Don’t worry. I think Lorne would have wanted you to move on. He would have wanted you to be happy.”

I can’t quite meet his eyes, but he takes me in his arms and kisses me till I feel relaxed again. Then we head down to the house. Grandpère is already sleeping when we get there.

Jim picks me up in the living room and carries me through the bedroom door. I go to shut off the light, but he says to leave it on. I am self-conscious and shy to undress in front of him. He laughs at me and undresses first. Seeing him standing there naked, in his sixty-five-year-old birthday suit with a big hard-on, makes me laugh, and I take off my clothes. He holds me at arm’s length and turns me around. “Better than my wildest imagination,” he says. He takes me in his arms, and everything feels all right.

When we wake up in the morning, it still feels right that his head is on the pillow next to mine. I wake up first and am just looking at him when he opens his eyes.

“I have died and gone to heaven,” he says and smiles at me.

“Me too,” I say, and we snuggle together till we hear Grandpère stirring.

He stays all weekend, and puts up with the teasing Grandpère gives us. He keeps telling Jim he didn’t see any horses tied at the hitching rail. Jim tells him there is no hitching rail, but if he gets time, he’ll build one.

“That one will cost a lot of horses.” Grandpère must value me pretty high.

Jim knows how to use all the tools in the shop, and soon he has all the gates hanging straight and has done all the little repairs that I’ve been putting off. We have a great weekend, and when he leaves on Sunday night, all I can think of is when he’ll be back.

Chapter Thirteen

The next weekend Jesse comes out again. This time it’s Jessica’s turn to have Aaron for the weekend, and he says he doesn’t like to stay at home alone. It’s nice to have him here, but I don’t quite know how he’ll react to Jim spending the nights with me. He seems to take it in stride, and while he doesn’t tease like Grandpère, Jesse is a pretty appreciative audience for Grandpère’s teasing.

On Saturday night he leaves before supper and says he’s going into town to
take Jane to the movie. He doesn’t get home till after midnight; we wake up when the
dogs bark. King has such a little puppy bark that it’s funny to hear him helping Blue
warn us of approaching vehicles. Jesse comes in as he always does.
Clump
. That’s
the sound of his boots hitting the floor. A few steps, open the fridge door, peer inside
for a snack.
Glug, glug
. That’s him drinking milk out of the jug. Tiptoe to the
end of the hall, quietly close the door, then silence. In the morning he’ll still be
dressed. So much of the boy left in the man.

“How was your night in town?” I ask him at the breakfast table.

“It was fun. We saw a really good movie. Then we rented another one and went to watch it at her motel room. It’s just one room and a bathroom with a tiny kitchen. She pays a flat rate of eight hundred dollars a month. That’s pretty expensive for what it is.”

Jim says to him, “I’ve been thinking about asking Jane if she wants to share my rooms. I don’t use even half the rooms in my apartment. The whole rent where I stay is only six hundred.”

“Does she know? Because I said I would help her look at places today.”

“No, I never spoke to her about it yet.” Jim fishes his keys out of his pocket and takes the key to his place off his key ring. “Show her up there too. You can tell her about it, and she can decide if she wants to share the place.”

Jesse grins at him and puts the key in his own pocket. He leaves right after breakfast, taking his bag with him so he can head home directly from town without having to come back here. Jim tells him to stash the key in the entrance under the rock.

Our lives settle into a routine. On Wednesdays I go to the home to do what little work needs to be done there and bring Bertie home. Jim comes out after work and takes her back by curfew. On the weekends Jim comes out Friday and stays till Sunday night. Sometimes Jane comes out on Sunday and brings Bertie. Jane moves in with Jim, and he says she’s neat as a pin and a pretty good cook too.

Angel always asks about her mother when she phones, and I can tell she’s anxious to see her. When the restraining order runs out, it doesn’t get renewed. I ask Angel if she wants to come down on the bus by herself for a couple of days to visit with her mother. “Oh yes, please,” she says and we arrange for her to come on a weekend when the school is closed Friday for a Pro-D day. When I ask what that means, she explains that the teachers have to go to school, but the students don’t. So we arrange it, and when she arrives, I tell Jane to meet the bus and then bring her out.

They come out to the farm about four hours after the bus arrives. Jane keeps hugging Angel, and both of them are fairly glowing. We leave them to themselves as much as we can. They both know the farm pretty well, and I see them walking about out in the garden and the greenhouse, talking constantly. Jim and I are sitting on the bench in the shade behind the house when they come to the porch and sit down just around the corner. I am just about to get up and say hello when I hear Angel say, “I won’t, Mom. I just can’t. Where I live now, it’s how things are supposed to be. They’re so nice, and they’re always there. There’s always food. I feel safe there. I don’t trust you anymore, Mom. Sometimes you forget all about me.” Her voice breaks, and I can hardly make out the words.

I freeze and look at Jim. He grabs my hand and squeezes it, and I sit in tense silence. Then I hear Jane say, “I understand. I just wanted to know if you wanted to be together again.” Her voice sounds choked too. She continues, “I’d deserve it if you hated me.”

“Oh Mom, of course I don’t hate you. You’re my mother.” Angel says.

Jim grins at me. We get up quietly and walk around the house the long way.

Later Jane asks if it’s all right to take Angel home to her place to spend the night, and we say it is. Darcy and Faith phone that night to see how things are going, and I’m able to say, “Splendidly.”

“Do you think she’ll want to stay there?” Faith asks, the distress in her voice evident.

“No, I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I tell her. “No one is talking about her moving. They’re just catching up.”

Sure enough, on Sunday night Angel is catching the bus, cheerfully hugging her mother and telling us all she’ll see us in the summer. We all wave till we can’t see her anymore, and then Jane hugs us all, tears streaming down her face. At the same time she has a wide smile and tells us these are happy tears. “Thank you, thank you,” she keeps telling us.

When Bella stops by to visit, she’s full of news. She tells me about Jane being back in town. “She was a friend of Ben’s, wasn’t she? Do you know she was a drug user? She and that old man she lives with. He was too. I don’t know where he came from, but he is sure a lot older than her. It’s obscene, a young girl like that living with such an old guy.”

It amuses me that the gossipers have got things turned around, so I don’t correct her on any of it. Bella is full of praise for the gardens at the home and thinks it’s a nice place. She worries that she’s going to lose her driver’s licence. In the spring she was stopped for not signalling and got a ticket. Then she got another one when she didn’t stop at a stop sign. “I could see no one was coming, but he gave me a ticket anyway.” She got a third ticket for going too slowly on the highway. “Imagine that, a ticket for going too slow. They let all the speeders go rushing by, then stop an innocent person for going too slow.” The result of all those tickets is a letter from the motor vehicle branch to report for testing for licence renewal. “And I have to rewrite the test. It took me three tries to pass it when I was young. Shame on them, harassing an old woman.”

“You’ll do fine, Bella, you know so much more now than when you were younger,” I try to reassure her.

“I don’t like to read and can’t remember what I do read. That book could be written in a different language for all I know.” She gives a snort of a laugh and repeats, “Shame on them.”

If she loses her driver’s licence, which it sounds like she’s going to, she plans to sell her house and move into the home. There’s a waiting list, she explains, and sometimes it takes a couple years to get in. “They do everything for you there. It’s like an all-inclusive resort.”

“Yeah, to get in you just wait till someone dies,” Grandpère tells her.

Bella misses his humour and starts telling us how old some of the residents are and who she thinks will go first. Mrs. Daly is on the top of the list; not only is she over one hundred, she has cancer “riddled through her.”

“Do you think her ghost will stay in the room?” he asks her innocently, and Bella just looks puzzled by the question. I stand behind her and give Grandpère a scowl to let him know not to bug Bella. He just grins as though he’s glad to get a rise out of someone.

“I saw Jesse in town. He was by himself. Are he and Jessica still a family?” she wants to know.

“They have separated,” I tell her, knowing that I’m giving her gossip to spread. She wants to know all the details, but I change the subject and ask her how her kids are doing. As usual, they are all “doing great” and successful. But I wonder, if her kids are so great, why don’t they ask her to live with them? It’s a question I don’t ask out loud.

“I have to worry about my health. My cholesterol is too high, and the doctor says he has to put me on different medicine,” she tells me as she helps herself to another cookie from the dish I’ve set on the table with tea.

“Does he tell you to change what you eat?” I ask.

“Heavens no, I eat very well,” she replies with a merry laugh and tells me how good the cookies are while she eats another.

When she leaves, she walks heavily and struggles to get into the car. She putts off down the driveway with the car just idling. She leans forward, peering over the steering wheel, with both hands gripped on it as though she’s ready for anything.

“The question is, does she lose her licence first or does she quit fitting in the car?” Grandpère observes. He chuckles all afternoon about Bella’s driving.

On the weekend Jesse comes again, and this time he brings Aaron. The child is delighted with King, who has grown as heavy as he is. King is gentle with him. Jesse, Aaron and the dogs play out in the yard most of the day. They’re trying to teach the dogs to fetch sticks, but the dogs are not retrievers and don’t catch on to the game too well.

Jesse teaches Aaron to call Jim “Papa Jim,” and Jim is pleased as punch. He takes Aaron for a long ride on the four-wheeler and wins his little heart. At bedtime Aaron sits on Jim’s knee till he falls asleep, then Jesse takes him and puts him in bed with all his clothes on. “No need to wake him up just to change his clothes. These ones will be comfy to sleep in,” he tells me. I can see Jesse has far different ideas about child-raising than Jessica did; she would never have let the boy sleep in his clothes. For the first time I think maybe it’s good that they’re apart.

Jane comes out on Sunday and says there’s a party at the home, so Bertie doesn’t come with her. Jim and I take Aaron to the lake. We put the canoe in his pickup and take a picnic lunch. It’s a wonderful day. Aaron catches the only fish. It’s tiny, but he’s so happy about it that we clean it and take it home so he can eat it for supper. He shares it with all of us and is puffed with pride when we all say how great it tastes.

Grandpère, Jesse and Jane are sitting in the living room when we get back, and there’s a funny feeling in the air. I look closely. It looks as though Jane’s been crying, and both Jesse and Grandpère have odd expressions. I ask them if everything’s all right, and they assure me it is.

Later, when they leave, Grandpère says, “Remember, you are like the smoke.”

They both nod at him as though they know what he means. When I ask him what that was about, he just pretends he didn’t hear my question. I puzzle about it for a while, then put it from my mind.

The week before the girls are to arrive, Jane takes a week of her holidays, and she and Jesse make plans to drive down to the coast. I’m concerned that they’re going into a relationship too fast. I speak to Jesse about rebound romances, and tell him they seldom work.

He laughs. “You got it wrong, Mom,” he says. “We’re just friends. She isn’t ready for a relationship, and neither am I. She wants to pick up some of her things from a friend’s place. Everything will fit in my pickup, and I’m going along to help her out, more like a big brother or a good friend. Don’t worry about me, Mom, I’m a big boy.”

I smile and let it go. He truly has seemed much happier lately.

They’re back in five days, and when I ask how it went, Jane says she’s sure glad that she made the changes in her life that she did. “Going back and seeing it now, I can’t believe I wasted so much of my life down there. I am never going back.”

Jim comes over that evening, and Jesse and Jane take Grandpère up to the lookout on the bike. Jim and I putter around in the yard till it’s almost dark. Then we decide to walk up to meet the kids and Grandpère. We walk up in silence, and when we get close, we see they’re sitting around a fire. For some reason I feel as though we’re intruding and pull Jim into the trees. We stand silently watching.

Jesse and Jane are sitting on the ground, and Jesse has the pistol that Grandpère has been carving. He’s put a lot of detail into it, and it looks very real. Jesse is pointing it at the fire. Jane has what appears to be an arrow and is pointing that at the fire too. Grandpère is chanting; it sounds like the same chant he was singing when we had Angel’s fire. He has his arms held out from his body, and when he drops his arms, they both throw their objects in the fire. They all yell, “Smoke!”

I pull on Jim’s arm, and we quietly make our way back down.

“Do you know what that was about?” he asks me.

“No. If we’re supposed to know, they’ll tell us, I guess,” I reply. I tell him about Angel’s fire and how she felt so much better after, and he tells me he thinks Grandpère is pretty wise.

When they get back to the house, no one mentions anything about what they were doing, and neither one of us asks.