Grandpère (20 page)

I am dusting with the feather duster, so I go over and pretend to dust him off. “Yes,” I say, “she is. And she doesn’t want to see any dusty old men.”

“Get out of here,” he feints at me with his stick, and I dance out of range.

When Bertie gets up, she tells me to go do whatever I want, and she will finish the housework. At breakfast she and Grandpère make plans for the day. She’s brought her crocheting, and he is finishing the last walking stick from the shop. They’re going to gather more sticks from the bush, he says. They’re all close enough to walk to, and the sticks need to dry for a while before he can work them. I tell them if they want me to take them anywhere, just holler for me.

On Friday Rose phones to tell us Jack’s funeral is on Saturday and asks if we want to come. I ask Grandpère and Bertie if they want to go. Bertie does; Grandpère doesn’t. Bertie says she should go back to the home so she can get her clothes ready. I drive her into town, where a bus will come and take them to the church and the reception.

When I get home, Grandpère has made lunch.

“Bertie is a good influence on you,” I tell him.

“She’s all right, but a steady diet of her would make a man old before his time,” he says.

I’m surprised. “I thought you really liked her.”

“I do. But I’m not Jack. I don’t need her to get my slippers or hold my arm when we are walking. She hardly lets me go to the bathroom by myself,” he complains.

I understand. He needs to have his own space. Bertie likes to look after people, and he hates feeling as though he needs to be looked after.

I change the subject. “Jim is moving in here at the end of the month.”

He gives me a self-satisfied look as though he’s the one who arranged it all. “The Great Spirit searched the world and sent you a good man,” he tells me, and he keeps nodding to himself, smiling away. He looks the way I feel.

That day Grandpère goes for a long walk with the dogs. I stay busy in the garden and the greenhouse. I pick all the chili peppers that have turned red and set them out in the screens to dry. If they’re not dry enough, they’ll get mouldy during storage. I found this out the first year I dried them. Even the chickens wouldn’t eat those mouldy dry peppers.

I thin the carrots for the last time this year. I always pull the biggest ones, and by the time I‘ve thinned one row, I already have a five-gallon bucket picked. I wash them and lay them in the shade to dry. I clean the root cellar; only one small sack of potatoes is left from last year. The sack looks as though it’s alive, covered with long sprouts reaching out through the burlap in quest of light. I take the potatoes and give them to the chickens, then sweep the cellar floor. By the time that’s done, the carrots are dry. I put them in a plastic tub with the lid on and set it on a pallet. These are the first vegetables in from this season, and I survey the cellar with great satisfaction before closing the door.

When I get into the house, I can hear Grandpère talking, but I can’t quite hear what he is saying. It sounds odd, so I go into the living room to see if he wants something. He is sitting bolt upright in his chair, talking in Carrier as though he’s having a conversation with someone.

When I come into the room, he looks at me with a smile. “Look, Anzel, they are all here,” he tells me in a voice full of wonderment. He looks beside him, and speaks again in Carrier, gesturing toward me. He laughs again, then looks at me.

“Who is here?” I ask, for obviously he can see something I can’t. The hair on the back of my neck prickles, and goosebumps cover my arms even though it’s warm.

“My family. My Clementine. All of them. They are coming for me. Don’t go!” he cries and stretches out his hand. He sits there for a minute, then in a dejected voice says, “It isn’t time.”

He looks up at me and says, “You couldn’t see them?”

“No, but I felt them. It gave me goosebumps.” I want to reassure him that he’s not going crazy. There was definitely something in this room that isn’t usually here.

“My time is coming. I see them more and more when I am awake now. The veil between the worlds is thinning out for me.” He sounds melancholy.

“Oh Grandpère, you’ve got a lot of life in you yet,” I say, trying to cheer him up.

“I am getting tired,” he says. “I don’t care about dying. I am looking forward to it. This old body is tired. There I have a young body. When I sleep, I go there. I think the spirit world is the same as the land of dreams. You can go anywhere just by thinking it. Things change into other things, and your body can be old or young, just however you want it to be. My friends are there. I spend more and more time there.” His voice sounds yearning, and I reach over and pat his hand.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” I ask.

“Sure,” he says. When I bring him the tea, he tells me he thinks he knows what is happening to the people in the home. “When you get old, you get abilities young people don’t have. When you are young, you are focussed on learning things and need a strong focus to be able to learn. When you get old, you can do most things by habit. Your body knows how to do almost everything without your spirit directing it. Then the spirit can wander, and other senses can be learned. I can see things that aren’t in this world, sometimes when I am wide awake now. I think some of the people in the home have wandered off in their spirit bodies and are living in both worlds at once. I think that’s what Jack did.”

“Yeah, probably,” I agree. That’s just how it seems, their bodies are present but nobody is home.

“Thank you, Grandpère, for remembering to stay in your body,” I tell him, and that makes him smile. We drink our tea and have a quick meal, and right afterward he goes to bed.

In the morning he wants to go up to the lookout. I ask if I should pack a picnic, but he says no, he just wants to sit up in the sun for a while. I take him up on the bike, and he tells me to come back for him in a while. I put a woollen blanket on the ground, and he sits on it facing the morning sun, his legs bent up and his arms wrapped around them. One dog sits down on each side of him and they stay there when I leave with the bike.

I sweep the mud room and the porch, then pick all the ripe tomatoes in the greenhouse and freeze them whole. I can stew them later in the fall when the weather isn’t so nice. It’s nearly noon by the time I finish, so I go back up to get Grandpère. It looks as though he and the dogs haven’t moved. He hears me coming and gets slowly to his feet. He doesn’t say anything, just smiles and climbs on the back. He looks peaceful and happy. I grin back at him and take him down to the house.

He eats a big lunch. We both like to fry the ripe tomatoes and have hot tomato sandwiches, and the new row of spinach has given us its first tender leaves for a salad. We linger over lunch as he tells me how good it is that Jim will be here for the winter. He thinks Bertie and Jane will be good company for each other. He says it’s kind of good for us that Jesse and Jessica have split up, since we’ve seen more of Jesse this summer than in the last three years. He wonders if everything is all right with Clint and Patty; we haven’t seen them since Christmas. I tell him they are most likely just busy. Patty is off maternity leave, and travelling with four young boys can’t be too much fun. “I’ll see if everyone can come for Christmas again,” I say.

“Maybe I’ll see them then,” he says. “Right now I think I will have a short snooze.” He goes into the living room and lies down in the recliner chair. Within five minutes I can hear him snoring away.

I go outside and play in the flower beds for a few hours. I dig up some of the daffodils and split the bulbs apart, then replant them spaced out better. They have multiplied so much that I have to dig another spot to plant them all. It is an enjoyable task. Knowing each bulb carries the promise of spring flowers makes each one precious. I deadhead the rest of the spent flowers on the annuals; they will keep blooming right till freeze-up if they can’t set seed. By the time I’m finished, it’s nearly suppertime.

When I go into the house, Grandpère is still sleeping in the chair. He hears me in the kitchen and comes out to sit at the table while I prepare the meal.

“Clementine and I were on the horses. We were going to pick berries. We had a pack horse, and we were going to the meadow to pick strawberries. We had your dehydrator on the horse,” he says.

“What?” I say. “When was this?”

“Right now. It was what woke me up. I knew the dehydrator shouldn’t be there. I said to Clementine that it wasn’t right to have that on the horse because it took electricity. She started laughing, and then she disappeared. Then I woke up. It was so real.” He sits there for a bit, then adds, “I wanted it to be real. I was disappointed when I woke up.”

“You will see her again, don’t worry,” I say to him. Then I think that is a silly thing to say. The only way he’s going to see her again is if she’s waiting for him when he dies. If that is really how it works. But he doesn’t find anything wrong with my words. “Yeah, they are waiting,” he says and starts talking about other things.

In the evening we play crib. I haven’t had a game with him for a while, and he wins the first two games. I win the next two, and we play one more to break the tie. The first hand in the last game, he gets a perfect hand of three fives and a Jack, which matches the five turned up on the pile. He says it’s the first time ever that he got that hand. He skunks me, and is happy when he goes to bed.

I wake up early, and he is not up. I make the billing for my time this month for Rose, who has been reminding me to bring it in. I make pancakes for breakfast, and he’s still not up, so I put some in the oven for him and go outside. It is a gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky, cool in the morning but not yet cold. The dogs are starting to get their winter coats, and King has such long fur that it’s getting a bit matted, so I groom him for a while. He’s not used to it and wiggles around a lot, but finally he’s soft and fluffy again. Blue has shorter hair but really likes being groomed, so I brush him for a while, too, so he doesn’t feel left out.

When I go back in the house it is midmorning already, and there’s still no sign of Grandpère. I go to check on him. He’s lying on top of the blankets, completely dressed in his clothes that he wears to go to town. He looks as though he’s sleeping, but I clear my throat, and at the sound he opens his eyes. He gestures me closer.

“I have been waiting for you,” he says in a voice that sounds as though it is coming from his toes. “They are here. This time I’m going.”

Chapter Fifteen

I go to Grandpère’s bed and sit down on the edge. “Do you want me to stay with you, or are you coming for breakfast?”

“I just wanted to say goodbye.”

His eyes close and his head sinks into the pillow. My skin prickles, and I reach for his hand. I hold it and squeeze it a bit, but there is no answering squeeze. His whole body goes limp, and a cloud of silver grey seems to gather about him. The cloud hovers above Grandpère for a few seconds, and the room seems briefly illuminated. In that strange light it seems as though I hear voices and music. Then the light swirls into the cloud, and all of it disappears.

“Did you see that?” I ask.

There is no reply. A weird smell is in the room, and when I look at him, I realize he is gone. I put my head down on his chest, but there is no heartbeat to hear.

I sink to the floor beside the bed, holding his dead, limp hand. Gone. Gone so quickly. He just held on long enough to say goodbye. I lean against the bed and hold his hand to my cheek. My tears get it wet, and it feels wrong to get his hand wet with my tears. I pat his hand for a while, then tuck it beside him on the bed. I look at him for a while, then cross his hands on his chest. That looks wrong too. I pick up his walking stick and put it under his hands. One hand curls around it, and the other lies on top. That looks better.

I go make a pot of tea. I put two cups out. Then I put one back in the cupboard. As I drink my tea, I think of the promise I made. Should I haul him out to the landing and give him the same end as old Duke? The more I think about it, the more I think that it’s the right thing to do. I imagine him in the chair, making me promise. When I am thinking about him, I can feel him right there, and I imagine his voice telling me to get on with it.

I go back into his room, half-hoping he would not still be dead. But he is. He looks peaceful, as though he’s sleeping, but that sweet-sour smell is still in the air, and I want to do something. I take the top blanket and fold it up around him. Then I think I should sew it closed. I start at the feet, and using the packing needle and sinew thread, I sew big looping stitches to hold it closed. As I get to the top, I open it and put his hat on his head. I kiss his weathered old cheek and say, “Goodbye, my friend, goodbye. I hope you are at a party in the spirit world.” I close up the blanket again and stitch it shut. I cover him up with another blanket and tiptoe out of the room.

I take the bike and go out to the landing. The kids have sawn a huge pile of wood, leaving pieces about ten feet long. I take these for the bottom of the pile. I put two rows flat, parallel to each other, then cross them with the next layer. I build up the deck, layer by layer, till it’s as high as my chest. “You need moss,” says a voice in my head, and I remember him saying, “You make a nest with a layer of moss.”

I take the bike and trailer to the tall trees and gather up a trailer full of soft moss, which I lay in a fluffy pile in the centre of the wood. Now what? “You need the body,” says the same voice in my head. I go back to the house. It seems wrong to drag him out to the bike trailer, and he won’t fit in the trailer unless I fold him up. I wonder if the car will make it to the landing, so I take the bike back out and eye up the trail. I don’t think the car will make it. There are too many stumps. I go back to the house, trying to think of how to get Grandpère to his funeral pyre with dignity.

I think of the long toboggan in the garage. I can strap it on top of the bike trailer. I go get it and lay it on the bed beside him. I lift him on to the toboggan; he is lighter than I remember. I get four rubber snap straps and strap him down so he can’t roll off. Then I put a blanket on the floor and pull the toboggan off the bed onto the blanket. The whole thing slides out of the room, down the hall and to the door, where I’ve backed the bike trailer up to the steps.

I pull the toboggan up onto the top of the bike trailer and tie it on with rope. I bring matches and a knife for making feather sticks to light the fire. Then I hear Lorne’s voice saying to never mind the feather sticks; take along some paper and diesel, that’s the best way to start a good fire. I feel as though he’s helping me and approves, so I do.

I drive very carefully back to the landing with my precious cargo. The dogs trot alongside the trailer like an honour guard. When we get to the landing, the dogs start barking and run back toward the house, barking as though someone has come. I have a sinking feeling that it might be Bella, but they come back with Jim.

“I just asked the dogs where you were, and followed them,” he cheerfully says, then takes in the pile of wood and the bike. “What are you doing?”

My voice is not good, but I croak out, “Grandpère,” and indicate the toboggan with its shrouded occupant.

He stands looking at it for a long minute, then comes to me and puts his arm across my shoulders and leads me over to a log, where he pulls me down beside him. My tears, which have dried up since morning, start running again. He is silent, and we sit there till I quit sobbing.

“Are you sure this is the best way?” he asks, and I can hear the reservations in his voice.

“I promised him,” I say. “He made me promise.”

“A promise made is something that has to be done, then,” he answers. “I’ll help. What do we need to do?”

“We need to get him on the pile. He’s pretty light. I can almost lift him myself.”

Jim goes over to Grandpère, and undoes the rope that I have secured him to the trailer with. “Is the toboggan going or staying?” he asks.

“It’s wood. It will help him along,” I reply, and he waves me away. He picks up the toboggan and slides it to the centre of the pile. I climb up and arrange the moss around Grandpère. I take off the snap straps, as it doesn’t feel right to have him held down. “We need to make a teepee over him with wood, and put things he might want inside,” I tell Jim.

He raises his eyebrows. “What things?”

“I don’t know.” I think about what he might want to take along.

“You get what you need. I’ll lean up the teepee,” he says, and I take the bike back to the house. I go into Grandpère’s room. His carving knife and the carving he is working on are on his night table. I put them in a box. Then I get his moccasins that the girls gave him for Christmas and his winter jacket. The pancakes from breakfast are still in the oven. I put them on a paper plate, butter them and cover them with syrup and berries. I put them all on the bike, then I go back and get the twenty-two. I fill it with shells but don’t put one in the chamber. I drive back to the landing.

Jim has covered him up with a wooden teepee, and I take a slab off and slide the stuff inside. He looks at what I am putting in, but doesn’t comment on any of it.

“Now we completely cover everything. It takes a lot of wood to burn a body,” I say, echoing the words Grandpère said to me when we burned Duke.

We build the pile till even Jim can’t reach the top.

“Now we say our last goodbyes, then we light the pile all around,” I say. He bows his head, and so do I. In my mind I see Grandpère walking down the trail. He doesn’t have his stick, and he’s walking with the stride of his younger days. At the edge of the bush he turns and waves his hand. I wave back, and I say out loud, “He’s really gone.”

“He had a good, long life, and he stayed good till the very end,” Jim says. We stand there for a while longer, then I get the jug and pour diesel around the base of the wood pile. Jim lights it with a match, and the fire starts instantly. We sit down on the log and watch the fire. Within a half hour the whole pile is blazing. I am not prepared for the smell. When the smoke wafts our way, it smells as though we’re cooking a roast. It disturbs me, and I get up and walk a bit farther away. Jim comes, too, and soon we are walking circles around the pyre.

“We are supposed to sing him to the spirit land, but I don’t know any of the songs,” I tell Jim.

“I know a medicine chant for catching fish,” he says.

“Let’s sing it, then,” I tell him, and he starts. It is simple, and soon we’re singing the fishing chant, walking circles around the fire. It is getting late; the air is cooling off away from the fire. We stop singing the fishing song when we hear a loud explosion from the fire.

“What the heck was that?” Jim asks.

“Probably the bullets exploded,” I say.

“You loaded the gun?” Jim looks surprised.

“What good is a gun with no bullets?” I say to him.

He shakes his head and laughs. “You’ve got a point there.” He wants to know if I want to eat, but I’m not hungry. I tell him to go to the house and get himself something, and he leaves on the bike.

I sit on the log to watch the fire. I think I can see Grandpère’s outline in the centre of the fire, so I pile on more wood. I throw on a lot more till I can no longer see him. It doesn’t smell like roast anymore.

When Jim comes back, he’s brought two sleeping bags, a thermos of tea and some sandwiches. He pours tea, and I drink some. I try a sandwich and am hungrier than I thought. I eat both the sandwiches, as he says he ate at the house and brought these for me. We wrap up in the bags and watch the fire burn. When it starts to die down, we pile another big heap of wood on top.

Jim sits on the log and drapes the sleeping bag over his back. I sit on the ground in front of him and lean back. He wraps his arms around me, and we sit in silence, listening to the crackle of the fire and watching the flames leap into the air. I drift in and out of sleep. It seems that sometimes there is a whole crowd of people around the fire, but each time I open my eyes, the crowd fades, and it’s just me and Jim sitting there.

Daylight fades, and the stars appear one by one till the sky is ablaze with stars. The only sounds are quiet cracklings from the fire. Occasionally the fire collapses, and sparks fly high up into the air, leaving red streaks behind. When the fire gets low, we heap on more wood. It’s getting cold, but I don’t want to go to the house. “Let’s just sleep here by the fire,” I suggest.

Jim goes back to the house and brings the foam mattress and two pillows. We make up a bed where we figure the sparks won’t land, and I fall asleep right away, sleeping in my clothes. I dream of Grandpère. He is young in my dream, and he is dressed in leggings and a tunic cut to a point in front and back. Grandmère Clementine is with him, and they are going in a canoe. She has on a flowered dress, and she is helping him pack the boat. He has the twenty-two, but the wood is burned off it. They’re excited to be going on a journey, but they stop and eat pancakes that I bring to the shore. He picks up a smooth red rock and gives it to me, and tells me to save it and call him on it if I need him. They climb into the boat, which has changed into a motorboat, and he starts it. They wave and yell goodbyes till they are just a dot on the water horizon.

When I wake up, Jim is building the fire up again, and dawn is breaking in the east, turning the sky brilliant red. I lie there quietly. Yesterday floods back into my mind. I realize I am holding something warm in my hand and look to see what it is. It is a smooth, round red rock, the one Grandpère gave me in my dream. I look at it with astonishment.

I sit up. I’m definitely awake. I stare at the rock. Jim sees me sit up, and comes over to plop down on the mattress. “What do you have there?” he asks, looking at my rock.

“Grandpère gave it to me,” I say and hand it to him. “In my dream,” I add.

“He gave it to you in your dream?” His eyebrows go up, and he turns the rock over and looks at it closely. “Looks like a real one to me.”

I don’t have any explanation, so I just shrug. He hands the rock back as though it has suddenly become too hot to handle, and I tuck it into my pants pocket.

It feels all right to leave the fire now, and we go back to the house. I explain about the box and the bones to Jim, and he says he will make a box. He goes out to the garage, and comes back in right away with a wooden box. It is about two feet long by one foot high and wide and has a lid held on with hinges. It’s the same kind of box we used to collect Duke’s bones, I know it’s one Grandpere made. It makes me grateful, and I thank him in my head. It’s just the right size, and I tell Jim that when the fire is dead, we will collect the bones.

The phone rings, and it is Rose. Jim talks to her, tells her Grandpère has died, then says to give us today and not come till tomorrow. When he gets off the phone, he comes over and sits by me. “You should phone the kids and tell them. They’ll want to know,” he says.

I haven’t yet thought about phoning them, but agree that I should. I phone Clint first. He isn’t home, but Patty is. She wants to know what I’m having done. I tell her he is being cremated, and she says it’s just as well; she hates those open-coffin funerals. I tell her we’ll have a memorial service, and she says they’ll be down as soon as they can get away. She offers to phone the rest of the family, and I thank her and tell her I’d appreciate it.

Jim is listening while I talk to her, and when I hang up the phone, he’s nodding. “He is being cremated. I wondered how we were going to explain what we did. We’ll hope no one asks for details. Just pretend you did it the normal way,” he says.

I agree. “I think we can get into big trouble for doing it Grandpère’s way. It’s good, what we did, but it isn’t like it used to be. Before he died, I thought I wouldn’t do it. But now that it’s over, I’m glad I kept my promise.”

Jesse arrives in mid-afternoon. When Patty phoned him, he says, he just got in his truck and drove straight here. He has tears in his eyes, and keeps saying it’s the end of an era. I tell him how Grandpère stayed in this world till he said goodbye, and that he’d told me he was getting tired and was not just ready to die, he was eager. “He even put on his good clothes to die.”

Jim and I were heading out with the empty box. We look at each other, then at Jesse.

“What can I do?” Jesse asks.

“Come in to the house for a while,” I say. We sit at the table and drink tea while I explain about how Grandpère didn’t want me to send his body off to strangers and made me promise to send him off in his own way. I explain about the funeral pyre, how much wood we used and how it smelled like roast.