Homesick (19 page)

“So why should I? What’s in it for me – getting eaten alive?”

“Five dollars if you locate my steer.”

“Five dollars?” Daniel was taken by surprise. For him it was a lot of money.

“Five dollars.”

“And if I don’t?” he demanded, suspicious of a catch.

“You’ll get fifty cents for effort. The prospect of an extra four-fifty ought to encourage you to look careful. Deal?”

“Deal.”

He heard the grass rustle, a dry twig crack as Daniel left him. Then he knew he was alone. Alone, it was more difficult to prevent the field beyond the curtain of trees from stealing back into his mind. To hold it out, he began to review in his mind the things he must soon tell Daniel.

It was very important to do it right. He had never said any of these things to his own son Earl. But then talking to Earl in such a fashion would have been pointless. None of it would have been any use to Earl. Earl had never been constituted to make anything out of common sense. This one was. This one weighed you while you weighed him. Earl had never weighed anybody. He had thought everyone was cut from the same cloth as he was. If you came right down to it, Earl wouldn’t have been able to learn what he had to teach him. This one, he suspected, knew half of it already. A shrewd, calculating little bugger to whom five dollars made all the difference
in the world. So different, the two of them, Daniel and Earl. How did it happen, the clouding and confusion of bloodlines in a family? For the life of him he had never been able to see himself in his own son and yet he believed he could in his grandson. What was the old saying? Character jumps a generation? Was there anything of Daniel’s father in him? Of course, he couldn’t say. He knew nothing about the boy’s sire, the tailor, or whatever he had been. There must be some of that in Daniel, some tailor, although he couldn’t spot it. Everything he saw in the boy struck him as pure Monkman. The last of the line. The only grandchild.

He thought of Martha, dead before she was a grandmother.

Monkman could feel his sweat drying in the folds and creases in the skin of his neck. He realized how tired he was. Not much sleep again last night on account of the dream. Now, every time his eyes closed an insect would light on his face and go for a stroll. They must take me for dead, he thought, an old man stretched flat on his back in the grass with his eyes shut.

He blinked, brushed his hand back and forth over his cheeks. The cool and damp of the earth was rising up, leaching into his flesh. How? The ground ought to be hot and dry as a fever, there hadn’t been rain in weeks. He was contemplating sitting up so he didn’t take a chill in his kidneys when a dragonfly came helicoptering inches above his face and pinned him to the ground with its beauty, with its ruby sheen and shimmer. Martha had owned a brooch shaped like a dragonfly. It had fragile lacquered wings. Martha died of a stroke. Vera’s husband of a heart ailment. No luck in this family. The tailor had looked old in the wedding picture she sent. Too old for a wisp of a girl like her. Bride and groom standing on courthouse steps. Is that where Jewish people got married? In court? There was nobody else in the snapshot. No family, no friends. So who took the picture?

Alec’s grip on his hat relaxed. It slid off his chest and dropped by his side. He was standing in a poorly lit room being fitted for a
suit. The sure, deft touch of the hands running the tape over his body was lulling, soothing. The tailor was measuring him. His limbs grew heavier and heavier, his joints looser and looser.

“Hey. Hey. Hey!”

Monkman woke with a gasp, wincing and gaping. Daniel was kneeling in the grass beside him, his hand resting on his grandfather’s shoulder.

“What?”

“You must have dropped off.”

The old man reached out, seized his grandson by the elbow, and pulled himself into a sitting position. His eyes narrowed and his head wobbled, assaulted by the dazzle of sun.

“No steer,” reported Daniel. His voice sounded all mumbly to Monkman because the boy had pulled out the front of his shirt and was peering down the neck of it as he spoke, searching himself closely and anxiously for ticks. “Nothing. I walked clear through and came out on crop on the other side. There’s bush in the middle of that field but I didn’t go on, in case you wondered why I was so long.” He broke off examining himself and lifted his face. “Jeez, I feel all crawly but I can’t see anything. How big are these ticks supposed to be anyway?”

Monkman was staring back the way they had come, staring out over the gently swelling and subsiding black earth. The air above the summerfallow quivered and bent, distorting the view like a pane of cheap, flawed glass.

Before he fell asleep there had been something to do with the boy. What? Then it came to him. Without preamble or introduction he simply said, “Your mother asked Mr. Stutz to have a man to man talk with you.” Having delivered himself of this news he studied the boy for any sign that Daniel had been warned of his mother’s arrangement. There was none. “Well,” said the old man, pressing on, “were there questions you’d been asking your mother that maybe she didn’t want to answer?”

Daniel shook his head.

“I guess it was her idea then? I guess she thought it was time you learned certain things it was more proper for a man to teach you.”

“I guess so,” said the boy apprehensively.

“Anyway, after your mother talked to Mr. Stutz he came to me because he didn’t feel it was his place to talk to you. He took it for family business and thought maybe I was the one should do it.” Monkman hesitated. “Seeing I’m the closest thing you have to a father.” Monkman squinted up at Daniel. “So maybe you should take a seat so we can do as your mother wants.”

The suggestion sounded like an order. Daniel sat with a look of extreme uneasiness. It was embarrassing to be talked to this way. Long ago he had read everything the
Reader’s Digest
had to say on the impending topic and doubted there was much he could be taught. He had even been able to correct Lyle on a few points. He was satisfied that his knowledge was pretty wide-ranging. He knew you couldn’t get
VD
from a toilet seat and he knew that husbands ought to be affectionate to their wives
after
the sex act as well as before it. Otherwise women felt used. And he knew whatever else fitted between these two bookends. With the old guy smiling that way, falser than even his teeth, he was sure he was going to be put through something horrible.

“I don’t know what your mother imagines is a man to man talk,” Alec began by saying, “but I’d guess it’s supposed to cover what a man should know to keep himself out of trouble. To my idea, what’s most troublesome for men is sex, drinking, and fighting. No particular order of importance.” But the last was a lie. There was a particular order of importance and the brave thing to do would be to get the worst bit over first. He reminded himself to tell the kid only what would prove useful to him. It was likely Daniel would do exactly as everybody else before him had done. There was no percentage in ignoring that simple fact. So whatever he said should keep in mind human nature. Mr. Stutz wouldn’t have kept it in mind. Mr. Stutz didn’t accept human nature as an
excuse for anything. He was always laying down the law as to how men ought to act, despite the impossibility of them performing any of the remarkable feats he called upon them to perform. Alec had always believed in working with what you were given, and human nature was a given. It was where he would begin.

“I don’t know any polite way of saying this, and the only way I’ve got of saying it is straight out. A boy gets to your age, or somewhere close to it, and something happens – that thing of his starts provoking and tormenting him continual. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will shortly. There’s no getting around it, that pecker of yours isn’t going to give you hardly a moment’s peace. Which leads me to what I’m going to say to you now. Which is about playing with yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not recommending it, I’m just saying that more than one has taken it for the solution of a predicament. There’s boys your age that suffer terrible worries from that. If it’s a sin, it’s got to be a small one. As to whatever rumours you may have heard about the results – about going blind or mental – I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. How’s a pecker to know the difference between a woman and a hand? A pecker doesn’t have a brain, or eyes. It’s just a story, like a horsehair in a water barrel turns into a worm. What I’m saying is let it alone if you can but, if you can’t, remember you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.” Monkman paused and waited. Daniel said nothing. All his attention was fastened on a spear of grass he spun in his fingers.

“You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?” asked the old man sharply.

Daniel nodded his head without looking up from the stalk of grass.

At least that was over. He hoped the boy had understood. “I won’t say nothing now about women,” said the old man brusquely. “I’ll save that one for when you’re older.” He took a deep breath of relief, felt himself on firmer ground. “Now drinking,” he said happily. “Stutz doesn’t have a single good word for it. He just goes
on about how it has been the downfall of thousands. I won’t argue with him. I know myself the trouble it caused me at one time. If I learned one thing from my trouble it was this: there’s no point in drinking if you aren’t happy. The thing about liquor is that it’s an encourager. It encourages happiness in a happy man and sadness in a sad one. It encourages whatever else you happen to be feeling. The young bucks fight when they’re drunk because booze adds oil to the fire young men carry around burning in their bellies. Now I’m not saying any of this to you now because I expect you to follow my advice straight off. I’m saying it so that when you come to make your own mistakes you can think back and test what’s happening to you against what I said was true. It might bring you to reason sooner. There’s nothing like a second pair of eyes for help. It’s what Mr. Stutz did for me when he pointed out certain things about my drinking when I was bad into it. You see, I couldn’t see the start of my misery because I was too deep into it. Now it’s true I still take a drink – mostly when Stutz is around – but that’s just to prove to him I’ve got my own will. I won’t be a slave to it or a slave to avoiding it. Besides, if you keep company with men you’re bound to keep company with liquor. Particularly around here. It won’t be long before you’ll be drinking beer out behind the dance hall to work up enough courage to speak to a girl inside. There’s no point if the courage isn’t inside you. When you’re puking in the bushes, ask yourself then if what your grandfather said wasn’t right.”

“My friend Lyle and me drank some of the gin his mother kept hid under the kitchen sink,” volunteered Daniel, encouraged by what he took to be his grandfather’s tolerant attitude to drinking.

“Thief’s pride is pitiable pride. I wouldn’t brag on that, if I was you,” said his grandfather sternly, “hooking some lady’s gin the way you hook your mother’s smokes.” Then, noticing Daniel’s obvious alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. I haven’t said nothing to your mother about the cigarettes. But if I was you, I’d think twice about laying hands on her property. The consequences aren’t likely
to be worth it. You need a cigarette that bad, lift it from my pack. Who do I have to complain to but myself?”

Daniel could feel his face flush and his ears burn. When had he seen? For a moment he considered denying the accusation but the calm, steady inspection that the old man was making of him helped Daniel recognize the futility of lying. It might, he thought, have been better to have been caught by his mother after all.

“Anybody ever teach you how to fight?” asked the old man.

The question was so unexpected, so unrelated to what had immediately gone before that Daniel was at a loss for an answer. “Pardon?”

“Can you fight?”

“Fight?”

“Yeah, fight. Anybody ever teach you to take care of yourself?”

As a matter of fact, nobody ever had. But he wasn’t about to admit it. “Yeah.”

“That’s good. Because you better be ready to handle yourself when school starts in September. A place like this, they’re not used to new boys. Anybody new is liable to catch it for a while until he teaches people to leave him alone.”

“My mother says she doesn’t believe in fighting. She says my father was a pacifist. So she is too.”

“If your mother’s a pacifist so’s Field Marshal Montgomery.”

“She says there’s better ways of settling an argument than with your fists.”

“No doubt there is – as long as you can find somebody to argue with who agrees on the procedures. I don’t think you’ll find many of those in Connaught.” The old man gave a sharp, foxy bark of laughter. “Imagine Vera talking that way. I can’t figure it. Maybe Earl but not your mother. I never came across anybody with more fight bred into them than she has. Not that she isn’t right in some ways. All my life I tried to avoid settling a disagreement with my boots and fists. That’s the truth. As God is my judge, I’ve walked away from more than one invitation to scuffle. When I was a young
man I was a demon to dance and at every dance in those days there were always the cocks-of-the-walk who showed up to pick fights. They all acted as if fighting was some kind of sport, an amusement like baseball, or pool, or a game of horseshoes. Fighting was their way of attracting notice. You know how I handled them if they stepped on my toes? I took the notice away from them. I said, ‘If you want to fight, you sonofabitch, I’ll fight you. But a week from now, cold sober and alone. Just the two of us with nobody to watch and cheer and carry on. Just you and me, friend. Set the time and place and I’ll be there.’ I meant it, too. And they could see I meant it and their friends could see I meant it. You know how many takers I got?” Monkman formed a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Zero. None. You know why? Because even the ones who pretend to like to scrap really don’t. It’s the cheering they like, the clap on the back, the chance to strut. Take away the crowd and you take away the guts.

“And you know how I discovered that fact?” said the old man earnestly, bending towards Daniel. “Entirely by accident is how I discovered that fact. I had this female cousin – Rose her name was, she’s been dead for years now – who was the hired girl to the postmaster’s wife. Now Rose was a good-natured, plain, hard-working girl but she was also a little on the simple side, not so as she couldn’t do a job if it was all explained to her, she could do that, but she was still simple, what I’d call trusting-simple, and there was this young fellow who lived next door to the postmaster’s who used to tease her. Now he must’ve been ten years older than Rose – she was about fifteen then – and he ought to have known better but he didn’t. His name was Billy Atkins and he thought pretty highly of himself. I suppose people encouraged him in it. He was handsome, the kind that lounges about decorating street corners. All the girls thought he was the cat’s ass and most of the boys were afraid of him because he had a reputation for being wild and one way or another he had whipped every one of them either in school or after he got kicked out of it.