Grandpère (5 page)

“Do you promise?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He leans back in the chair, contented. I wonder what kind of a crazy promise I’ve just made. Can I really do what he asks? I decide to talk it over with Clint when he comes at Christmas.

We go to bed, and my dreams are full of fire.

Chapter Three

The preparations for Christmas are fun. The tree is a fake one, and I don’t even take the decorations off it from year to year, just tuck it in the storage shed. The tree is covered with decorations that are mostly homemade by two generations of children. I know who made every one of them. I don’t take the Christmas lights off the house, so it’s just a matter of plugging them in.

My three boys say they can come, and my daughter’s husband and his new wife will come Boxing Day. My daughter Nadine died in a car accident when the girls were tiny — a senseless crash when she was driving to the store for milk — but Faith is a lovely woman who keeps close to our family, for the girls’ sake as well as for mine. Darcy was a lucky man to find her. Tammy and Sarah are my oldest grandchildren, both throwbacks to the Native and French side of our family. Both have black hair and eyes, and they are beautiful and smart.

The days leading up to Christmas are cold and windy. Grandpère never seems warm enough. His chair is almost on top of the wood stove, and he is constantly putting another stick of wood in. It is too hot for me, so I move my work table over by the window where it is cooler and gets better light. We while away the hours making gifts for everyone. Grandpère whittles away, making a whole row of ducks and some horses, bears and even a moose. He has trouble with the moose horns, till finally he whittles them right off. He says it’s winter, and the horns fall off anyway.

I laugh at him, knowing he will tell the little ones stories about each animal. I bake butter tarts and mincemeat tarts, shortbread and cinnamon rolls and freeze them. I make bread, cabbage rolls, chicken wings and shepherd’s pie and freeze those too. When all our company comes, I shouldn’t have to cook much. The root cellar is full, and we have lots of the garden harvest stored — more than we can possibly eat in one winter — so I make a mental note to myself to make sure all the kids take stuff home.

The first ones to arrive are Parker and Kristen with their three boys Ezra, Cameron and Coby. The boys are seven, eight and nine. They look as alike as three peas in a pod, all blue-eyed with dark brown hair. They want to go outside and slide down the driveway as soon as they can, so they gulp down their soup and pile on their outdoor clothes. The dogs are so excited that I fear they’ll trample the boys, but Parker and Kristen aren’t worried. They tell me it’s three on two, so the dogs might get trampled instead. We watch them from the window, and I see that the boys have the dogs well in hand. Coby walks back up the hill with his arm draped over the young dog’s back.

Kristen is tiny, smaller than I am, but she is a bundle of energy. Now that the boys are in school, she works full-time in an office building in the city. I don’t really know what she does, but Parker is proud of her work.

“Kristen got a promotion and a raise for Christmas from her boss. She is going back in January as head honcho in the office,” he tells us.

“I am already head of the office,” she grins. “They just finally decided to acknowledge it and pay me what I’m worth.”

“She makes more than I do now,” Parker says. “Pretty soon I can just stay home, and she can support me in the style I’m accustomed to.”

“Try that and you’ll soon be looking for a new woman,” she retorts, and we all laugh.

They bring in their bags, and I put them in my room. They object to putting me out of my own room, but I show them the bed in the office, and they can see it’s comfortable, so they’re okay with it. I put a foam mattress and an air mattress on the floor in their room so the boys can all fit in easily. We don’t blow up the mattress; the boys can do it.

We are just finished this when Jesse and Jessica arrive. Their truck pulls up honking, and we go to the window to wave. They have one four-year-old boy, Aaron, who is sleeping when they arrive. He wakes up on the way into the house and won’t come to me, he just clings to his mother, hiding his face in her shoulder. She says he won’t be so shy when he finishes waking up.

I get supper ready, and we have to call the boys in. They’ve made tracks
in the snow all over the yard and a long line of snow angels, made by falling backward
into the snow and waving their arms and legs. Jesse has been out with them, pulling them
up carefully so as not to smudge the angel prints. His little boy didn’t want to go out
— he wanted to watch TV — but Grandpère and I haven’t had TV for several years. He
couldn’t hear it unless it was blaring, and I don’t care to watch TV. We have some
movies, though, and Aaron is content to watch
Cinderella
on the computer screen
in the office, curled up on my cot and sucking his thumb.

Jesse and Jessica married when they were in their thirties, and Aaron was born when Jessica was thirty-five. I think it is old to have children, but more and more young women are working through their twenties and having kids later. I have a hard time liking Jessica. She doesn’t have anything nice to say. When she talks about things, she tells everyone what she doesn’t like instead of what she likes. She has already told me what a bad job the road crew is doing, how bad the restaurant meal was on the way here, and all about her friend Jackie, who is going through a messy divorce. Jackie came with them last time, so I know her. It seems she and her husband are fighting about everything, doing it through lawyers and the courts. Jessica sounds quite self-satisfied as she relates their squabbles, and I think it’s mean to talk to me about her friend’s personal business. She is my son’s wife, the mother of my grandson, and I want to like her, but I just don’t.

Kristen seems able to distract her, and they talk about the kids. Jessica says Aaron has been to the naturopath, and he is allergic to wheat and milk. I wonder what I am going to feed him, but Jessica has that under control. She has brought soy milk, juice boxes and a box full of packaged things for him to eat. At the supper meal she lets him watch the movie while we all sit around the table. I hope he isn’t getting supper all over my bed, but I don’t need to worry, since he hasn’t touched any of it.

After supper Kristen and I do the dishes, and when we get to the living room, the older boys are hanging around Grandpère’s chair. They want him to tell a story.

“I will tell you of the battle of the giants,” he starts. “Once long ago, when there were few people on the earth, there lived a race of giants. They were living all over the earth. One day a land bridge came up from the bottom of the sea, and a giant walked across to this country. The animals and the people were afraid, but the giant made friends with them. The giant would walk around, and his tracks would leave lakes and ponds behind. He would lie down for a nap, and when he woke and moved on, grassy meadows were left behind. His name was Ice Fisher, and he was bald because of his head brushing the sky.

“Ice Fisher and the people lived in peace for many years, but the giant was lonely for others of his kind. He went back across the bridge and was gone for a long time, and when he returned, he had a woman with him. Everyone rejoiced to see him. He was not back for long when another giant arrived. He came with a storm, ripping up earth with his giant hands and wanting to fight. He wanted the woman giant. Ice Fisher and the stranger fought for many days. They made thunder in the skies, and their weapons made slashes in the earth.

“In the heat of the battle a Dené man, a friend of Ice Fisher who was very brave, came close to the strange giant and cut the back of his leg with an axe. The bad giant fell back onto the land with his feet in the western sea and his head in our northern lands. Over time the giant’s body became a huge mountain, and the caribou used his body for migration.

“Our people lived below the head of the giant, where they would meet the caribou. Every year the caribou came and gave themselves to the people for meat and clothes, thread and horn and bone. The people grew strong and spread out all over the land.”

Ezra asks, “What happened to the good giant and his girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. The time of the giants was long ago. They probably went to the other side.”

“What other side?”

“The spirit side, where everyone goes when they are done living,” Grandpère explains.

“Is that where Grandpa lives now?” Cameron asks.

Kristen looks at me to see if this question bothers me, but I have made peace with Lorne’s passing, and I answer him myself.

“Yes. Grandpa is having fun with his friends there.”

“Thank you for the story, Grandpère, I hope another giant comes here so I can see one,” puts in Coby. He thinks for a minute and adds, “I hope it’s one of the good giants. If it’s a bad one, I’ll chop him down.”

“You better get big and strong before you chop down giants,” Grandpère tells him.

“I am strong already,” he says, bending up his arm to show us his muscles. I reach out and squeeze his upper arm.

“Wow, you sure must work hard,” I say to him.

“Yep, I sure do. I help my dad a lot, and me and Cameron and Ezra go to tae kwon do.”

Now the other boys are hauling up their shirt sleeves, and we have to admire everyone’s tiny muscles.

Aaron comes out of the office and says he is hungry. His mother opens a package of noodles and pours hot water over them. She explains that the noodles are made from pea flour and this is one of the things he really likes. I want to feed him some real food, but I let it go for the time being.

Happy now, he sits on my lap while the noodles soak. “Do you know Santa is coming here?” he asks me.

“Yes, I do. I sent him a letter and told him that we will have eight boys here, so he doesn’t need to go to your house this year.”

“We got you a yellow sweater, but we wrapped it up so you can’t see it,” he tells me cheerfully.

“Aaron, you aren’t supposed to tell her what it is,” the three older boys say in a chorus. He looks crestfallen, but I snuggle him in closer and tell him, “I guessed anyway.”

Parker laughs and says, “He keeps a secret as well as I do.” Parker was always the one who couldn’t wait to give his gifts. I don’t think there ever was a Christmas when he was young when his gift was a surprise.

Aaron eats the noodles and goes with the other boys to blow up the air mattress. The pump is foot-operated, and they squabble about whose turn it is and how long each of them gets to use it. Pretty soon they decide to count the pumps, and each one gets ten. Almost as much air leaks out between personnel changes as they put into it. We laugh from the other room, knowing that by the time the mattress is pumped up, they’ll be ready to use it.

We talk of the farm, what a good harvest we had and what a beautiful fall it was. Jesse asks me if Grandpère and I got enough wood in.

“Yes, we brought two bike-trailer loads in every morning,” I answer, but the thought of the wood and Grandpère’s fit, and the use he wanted to put the rest of the slab pile to, set my heart and mind racing, and I quickly change the subject.

We all go to bed pretty early. The kids are worn out from travelling and playing, and Grandpère and I usually don’t stay up late. I’ve made up a bed for Aaron in the room with his dad and mom, but he gets into bed with them. That’s why I put them in the room with the queen-sized bed. He always sleeps in their bed. I guess it’s not really my business, but it bugs me. I feel sorry for Jesse. What kind of a sex life can they have with a four-year-old kid in between them? Not your business, I sternly remind myself.

In the morning Grandpère and I get up at six-thirty. We are being really quiet. We haven’t spoken, but we have been communicating. I think he has taught me sign unconsciously, because I understand him when he tells me all my children are slugabeds. I sign back that my grandchildren are too. We don’t laugh, but grin at each other as loudly as we can.

He lets me know we should eat when the kids get up. He points to his mouth and his stomach, and his hand indicates the table with seats all around. Then he holds up his hand in a wait gesture.

I shake my head no. I point to the clock, indicate both hands up, and shrug maybe.

We roll our eyes a bit, and I get us each a spoon and a bowl of berries with yogurt. All the berries are good this year. I’ve thawed out huckleberries and raspberries. He gives me a nod of thanks, and we have just barely begun to eat when Ezra and Cameron get up. They tiptoe out of the bedroom and come to lean on me.

I whisper to them, “Do you want some berries and yogurt?”

They both nod. It seems they know quiet talk too.

By the time I get their berries, Coby has emerged, rubbing his eyes and stretching. I give him my bowlful of berries and go off to make breakfast. Those boys will not be quiet for long.

Today is Christmas Eve. Clint and Patty expect to arrive before noon. The boys are all in a state of high excitement by the time breakfast is over. Their cousins are coming, and they will get to see the “new baby Seth,” as they call him. The last time they were all together was at Easter, as they’ve never managed to coordinate their visits all year.

Aaron eats bacon but can’t have pancakes because of the flour in them. He can have berries but can’t have yogurt, no milk products even. He can have goat milk, but one swallow is enough for him. He shakes his head, sticks out his tongue and shudders. “Yuck. I don’t like that. Goat milk is gross.”

“It’s good for you. It will make you grow big and strong,” says Grandpère.

“I’ll drink it,” says Coby, taking the glass and drinking it all.

Jessica brings Aaron a glass of soy milk, which he drinks down with no problem. I tasted it one time when they were here and had much the same reaction as Aaron had to the goat milk. I guess it’s all in what you get used to.

Clint and Patty arrive, and we set them up in the biggest room. They’ve brought a playpen for the baby, and the older boys have their own sleeping bags. They say they are going to camp out in the living room tonight and watch for Santa. The other boys say they want to do that, too, so I say they can all sleep there if they promise to go to sleep, otherwise Santa won’t come. For now they should put their bags in the room with their parents’. Off they race.