Grandpère (3 page)

“Finally, when I had it all straight, I went home. First I stopped and told Sven he was no longer my friend, that we were enemies from that day on, and that if I saw him, I would try to kill him. I never saw him again. I went home, and no words passed between Clementine and me about anything for some time. Ever since, though, I’ve never been drunk. I won’t say I never had another drink, but something in me would make me stop.

“I stayed home a lot that winter, and Clementine and I learned to love each other more. The following year your mother was born.”

His voice comes from deep inside him, the words booming around the room, as I strive to keep up with his story in my peculiar shorthand. It takes a while for my head to absorb what the words mean. My mother was born the following year? My blue-eyed mother, impossible in her dark-eyed family? My mother, who was always teased about being a throwback to some unknown Scottish ancestor? Is Grandpère telling me that he was not my blood? That my blood grandfather was some blond man named Sven?

I can’t speak. I can hardly think. I just look at him. My thoughts are a jumble. I think of the family tree I treasure, with all the names of the ancestors hanging from the branches. Now in my mind’s eye a broken branch stretches rough and jagged above the canopy.

He looks steadily at me. He answers my unspoken questions. “I’ll never know. Maybe she was a throwback. I know I loved her more than the rest. She was a sunshine girl, my Annie, always smiling and dancing. She never lost that. But my story today was to tell about drinking. It is one of the bad things in this world. Days and years can go by in a haze. Some of the young men did not have as much to live for as I did. My cousin spent his whole life in a bottle, and his only reward was to die young with no pride and no friends.”

He seems unaware of the emotions swirling around me. He yawns and says he thinks he will catch a nap. I take my notepad to the office and fire up the word processor. But I cannot type. I make stupid spelling mistakes and soon I quit. I go out into the garden and crawl along the rows, pulling up weeds. Inside I am seething with emotion. I feel that a firm foundation has crumpled, as though who I am has been compromised. I try to tell myself that it doesn’t matter, but right now it does. It matters to me to know who I am. I feel this has changed who I am at some basic level.

With difficulty, I make myself think of other things. I try to notice the birds singing and to feel the heat of the late afternoon sun on my back. I think of my children and their children, and again I am overcome with the feeling that this has changed who they are. Lorne and I had five children, every one of them with blue eyes — not surprising with my blue-eyed Irish husband’s genetics, even less surprising now. I must be truly distracted, for I find I’ve pulled vegetables along with the weeds.

Giving up on doing anything useful, I take the dogs for a walk. There is a hill behind the house with a path to its top — we call it the lookout — where I scattered Lorne’s, my parents’ and my two lost children’s ashes. I always feel at peace when I sit up there. As we climb, the mosquitoes buzz around us, but they are the fat lazy ones that hatched recently and they don’t bother to land or bite. At the top of the hill is a smooth rock. I like to sit on it and admire the view. Today it is especially pretty. The light green of the new poplar leaves contrasts with the dark spruce and fir. The dead pines stand purple against the horizon to the west, and the dark green patches interrupting the forest in every direction are hay fields. Far off to the east, a tractor drones around a patch; from here it seems to be plowing.

Sitting on the rock, a peace comes over me, and I say firmly to myself that it does not matter. What makes a family is love, not genetics. I repeat this every time I think of Grandpère, and by the time I am ready to go down to make supper, I am calm.

After supper I decide to do some baking and make an apple crisp and a rhubarb-strawberry pie. The rhubarb has gotten very large, and the strawberries are just getting ready. We still have strawberries from last year in the freezer, and I remind myself to make them into jam pretty soon.

By the time I am done, Grandpère has gone to bed. I decide to finish typing his story and now I can do it quickly. The house is clean, and the guestrooms are made up for the kids’ visit. My oldest son Clint is coming for the weekend with his wife Patty. The new baby is their fourth child, another boy. They were hoping to have a girl, but they knew for months it was a boy. They showed me the pictures from the ultrasound and pointed out his tiny balls. It is a marvel to me still that we can take pictures of babies in wombs. It seems to take away some of the anticipation of birth, but at least I knew what colour to knit the sweater.

Chapter Two

In the morning Clint, Patty and the boys arrive in a new car. Clint is very happy about it being a four-wheel drive and he shows it to me and Grandpère.

“Do you want to go fishing today, Grandpère?” he asks.

“I sure do,” Grandpère answers. They go to the shed and get the fishing gear.

“We can take the car right to the river.” Clint is excited. He is very handsome with his long, dark hair tied behind his head in a ponytail. He is tall and slim and has an easy smile.

He asks the boys if they want to come. The two older boys, Ryan and Jayden, want to go, so I take them into the house with me to make a picnic lunch. We make tuna fish sandwiches and put together a bag of tiny baby carrots, and I send one of the pies. Patty throws in some juice boxes and some packets with cheese and crackers. Then the boys climb into the back seat and do up their seatbelts without being told. Sometimes when I take them to town with me, they tell me to do up mine. It is the only time I ever wear one. I don’t think the government has the right to tell me that I have to wear it. It’s my car, my life and my decision. I recognize my rebellion here, but it pleases me to do as I please. I am glad that the children wear them, though.

“Have fun!” we yell as we wave them off. We look at each other and laugh, for we yelled in unison. Patty is tall and slim, even now after just having a baby. I compliment her on how she looks, and she says, “I only get pregnant in my stomach. After the baby is born, I’m almost able to put on my old jeans.” No doubt running around after three lively boys helps keep her that way.

“I used to get pregnant even in my face,” I tell her. “Even when my last baby was born, I gained thirty-five pounds. It took me six months before my jeans fit.”

Patty laughs and says she can’t imagine me heavy. Standing beside her I feel tiny; my head doesn’t reach her chin. We are good friends, my daughter-in-law and I. Her mother lives in Ontario, and she does not see her very often, and our relationship is like a mother-and-daughter one. She is a good mother to the boys, who are well behaved and polite. She and Clint look at each other with such love that it sends a pang to my heart for my own lost love, gone from me these past four years. Sometimes I miss him so.

The baby is still sleeping, and the three-year-old, Pierre, is sitting on the four-wheeler. He loves to ride it, and last time he visited, he figured out how to turn the key to make it go. I have the key safely hung inside the door now, so I get it and we ride round and round the yard. He keeps telling me to go faster, and I think his dad must go a lot faster with him than I do. I tire of the endless circles long before he does, and I distract him with feeding the chickens. He loves to get the eggs and wants to pack the bucket. He drops it and breaks two eggs. His little face is crestfallen, and he says, “Eggs broken.” I tell him that dogs like broken eggs, so we feed each dog one egg, and they delight him by eating the shells too. He laughs, “Silly dogs, not supposed to eat shells.” He is talking well now. He is sturdy and strong, his brown hair is long and curly and his blue eyes remind me of my own children’s. They were so like him.

When we go into the house, Patty is nursing the baby. He is tiny, his little fists curled tight, and sucking as though he is starving.

“Is he good?” I ask.

“So good,” she replies. “All week now he’s been sleeping for eight hours at night.”

“It is a blessing,” I say, and I mean it. Pierre was a cranky baby who refused to sleep through the night till he was over a year old. When he was a baby, they were here a lot. I spent some nights up with him, for I wasn’t sleeping much at that time either. Patty must have been remembering, too, because she said, “You won’t be up with this little guy, Mother. When he does wake up, he just wants a new diaper and a feed and then he’s right back to sleep.”

Pierre wants to hold “his baby,” and Patty sets him on the couch with the baby’s head propped up on his arm. I take some pictures to put in my album. I have an album to record each of my children’s lives. Seth on Pierre’s lap will be the latest addition. I love these new cameras; take out the memory card and you can print photos from the computer in less than five minutes. Patty is surprised that I know how to do this, and I tell her that Darcy and Faith’s girls taught me to do it just last winter. They are my oldest grandchildren, and at fourteen and fifteen know more about computers than I ever hope to. They really like to show me how to do things; it’s such a role reversal. I have to remind myself that one is never too old to learn new skills. What good teachers these young ones are!

Grandpère and Clint and the boys get home in late afternoon. They have three big fish that Clint and Grandpère agree are Dolly Varden, landlocked salmon. They caught them in the river, so I have my doubts, but I keep my doubts to myself.

We cook up the fish and visit around the table for a few hours. Grandpère keeps nodding off. He won’t go to bed yet, since he doesn’t want to miss anything. Clint surprises me when he says they’re going partway back to the city tonight. The boys have a soccer tournament the next day, and they have to be there for the team.

“We’ll be out again in a few weeks,” Clint says. “Make sure you keep this old man busy. He was trying to sleep at the river, and now at the table.”

“I wasn’t sleeping, I was just making sure the back seat of the car was comfortable,” says Grandpère, grinning at Clint. “Just the same, who was it caught all three of them fish? I might be old and sleepy, but somebody’s got to teach you guys to fish.”

Ryan breaks in. “You should have seen it, Grandma. Dad was holding the rod for a long time, then he gave Grandpère a turn, and just like that he had a fish. He let me reel it in. And he caught the other two, but Dad and Jayden got to reel them in.”

Grandpère smiles as though he’s won the lottery. He tells them, “Goodbye. Come again when you want a fishing lesson.” When they drive out, Grandpère and I are both tired and head to bed before the sun has even gone down. It’s nice to see the kids and their families, but we are not used to the noise and confusion that accompanies small children and are never all that sorry to see them go.

The next day I go to put the picture of the boys into the album. I stop at the page with the family tree. I take a pencil and draw a branch bent like a question mark above my mother’s name and write Sven on it. Then I feel disloyal to the rest of those names and slip the album to the bottom of the pile.

We get a lot of company in the summer. Close family, extended family and friends all drop by for a visit, some for a few hours and some for a few days. We like to have visitors and make coffee and entertain them. Most everyone leaves with fresh produce, because we always plant way more than we can possibly use. I think all gardeners who have space to plant do the same thing. It’s little effort to plant; tending and harvesting consume the gardening hours.

One of my friends drops by one morning. I have known Bella since high school. She married right after graduation. Her son and two daughters are the same ages as some of my children. Bella was always heavy, and now she can hardly get in and out of her car. It seems as though her younger self is peering out at me from the centre of a balloon.

“Did you know that Carrie went into long-term care?” she asks.

“No, I never knew. Last I heard was that she had a stroke and was getting rehabilitated.”

“Well,” she says, and I know she’s going to tell me a story that’s going around. Bella knows all the stories that go around. “You see, she just had that stroke because she was so mad about her husband leaving the business and the boat to the kids. I guess she thought she was going to sell everything that guy worked so hard for and live in luxury the rest of her life. It wasn’t like he left her penniless, you know. He left her two grand a month to live on, but that place she’s in is going to cost forty-five hundred. Those kids will have to cough up the rest.”

There is a note of righteous indignation in her voice as she relates this story, and I wonder what she objects to: Charlie not giving all of his fortune to Carrie, Carrie not recovering from the stroke or the children having to pay.

Bella loves to talk about her children’s successes, so I change the subject by asking how her John is doing.

“He got a raise this year. He makes three hundred and sixty thousand every year now. They bought a cottage down at the lake and a new boat, so of course they needed a new truck to haul it.” She laughs gaily. “I can’t ever keep up with all the things they’re doing. This fall they’re going to Italy and France. And all three of his girls are in university.”

“What are they taking?” I ask.

“Environmental science, the older two, and little Isobel is taking general studies till she can find her direction.” She prattles on about John’s house and the last time she visited, what the furniture was like and what art they had. Only just aware of her story, I’m saying, “Really?” and “How nice!” in the appropriate places. I’m still thinking about Carrie and her stroke.

Can a person really have a stroke on demand? Who would deliberately want to become dependant? I force my attention back to Bella and realize she’s giving me a look that makes me think maybe I missed a response cue. Grandpère is grinning from his side of the table. I smile sweetly at both of them and ask if they would like to come out to the garden with me. I am older than Bella, but she takes as long to move about as Grandpère does.

I take pity on them and bring the four-wheeler over. They sit beside each other, perched on the carrier behind me. They hold on to my sweater, and Bella squeals while Grandpère assures her of my careful driving. On the way out we talk about the bear that’s been hanging around. I tell them if the bear charges, I’m the only safe one, because all I have to do is shut off the bike. I won’t even have to run, because I can walk faster than either of them can run. You don’t need to outrun a bear; you just need to outrun the slowest person there.

We pick a plastic tub full of vegetables for Bella to take, and new potatoes, onion and dill to make soup for dinner. Grandpère and Bella sit at the table and gossip about our neighbours. I cook, chop up the potato and onion, throw in the aromatic dill and a little salt and put them on to boil. No need to peel these fresh potatoes.

“Did you hear that Dixon boy is going to jail?” she asks him.

“Yes, poor kid, both of those other kids riding with him died.”

“Well, it serves him right.” Bella knows all the boys’ parents. “I hope he gets a long time. You know, they get out after just a couple of months, and it’s not even like jail, it’s like a hotel with TV and telephone and everything.”

What Bella knows about jail is probably what she learned from the TV. She seems to know all the characters in all the shows, and any lull in the conversation she fills with her accounts of reality shows: who’s likely to win and how each show is progressing.

Finally she has to leave for a doctor’s appointment, and even knowing better than to ask about any of her illnesses, I still inquire, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m going for a checkup. My blood pressure is high, and we like to keep an eye on my cholesterol,” she says.

Pretty soon we’re waving, and Bella’s on her way, probably planning to visit someone else after the doctor to tell what she learned here, which wasn’t much. If she has nothing interesting to relate, she may just make something up. An uncharitable thought. I chastise myself.

Grandpère says to me, “Your friend, she is going to the doctor when nothing is wrong with her but that she is fat and lazy and has nothing to do. If she had something to do, she would be a lot healthier.”

Bella is my friend by reason of long acquaintance, not because we are soul sisters, and I feel no need to defend her, so I merely agree with him. Bella has put on weight like armour, ill health has plagued her all her adult life and while I have some sympathy for her, I can also see that many of her problems are largely self-inflicted.

“I don’t like to see doctors at all,” he tells me, as though I don’t already know. Grandpère and I are both healthy; we eat well and stay active. We joke to each other that we’re only ever going to see the doctor by accident.

He still isn’t finished with Bella. “When you asked her how John was, she told you all the things he had, not how he was. I tell you, girl, that is a bad thing about these times. We’ve all been taken over by things. Things are so important to that lady that she doesn’t know if her son is happy or not. She is measuring his happiness by how many things he has.”

He is not usually so blunt. Normally when someone annoys him, he gets sarcastic and makes up little barbs that he throws around for a couple of days to laugh at. “Lyle Dixon is a good kid. He just got liquored up one night and had an accident, killed some of his good friends. The memory of that will hurt him all his life. He doesn’t need that woman wishing him bad.”

Now I understand. The Dixons are related to him through his second wife. He knows the boy. I placate him. “Grandpère, if it’s his first offence and he’s sorry, the judge will go lightly on him.”