Homesick (36 page)

D
uring the spring, what with chores at The Bluebird, school, and difficulties in out-manoeuvring his mother, Daniel had found it possible only to make hurried, furtive visits to his grandfather. Strictly speaking, his mother had never actually forbidden him to call on his grandfather, but Daniel had never had a moment’s doubt as to what she preferred him to do. The visits Daniel made to his grandfather’s felt furtive. He and his mother had chosen to pretend that he no longer had any interest in seeing the old man. It didn’t matter that this was a lie. What was important was that it made life simpler and safer for all concerned. His mother could ignore his disloyalty as long as he didn’t rub her nose in it and Daniel could play the game of the good and obliging son. In this situation he couldn’t help feeling devious and insincere and the promoter of injured feelings. If two weeks passed without his dropping by Alec’s, his conscience was clear with his mother but unsettled and guilty in regard to his grandfather.

It was bad news when the old man punished him by sulking, but some relief could be had from that, he could look away from the long face and concentrate his attention on the television. What was in his grandfather’s favour was that he never had a harsh word
to say about her, while she was constantly going on about him, hammer and tongs, harping and nattering on his faults and failings and downright black nature. Sometimes Daniel wanted to ask her who she was trying to convince. Although she didn’t know it, it had been one of these rants shortly before Valentine’s Day that finally drove Daniel over the edge. For the six weeks following the breach that occurred at Christmas, he had not been able to summon up the courage to seek his grandfather out. But her going on like a maniac, yammer, yammer, had finally driven him to it. Fuck that noise, he said to himself, and went out and bought Alec the biggest, dopiest, most sentimental valentine he could find and delivered it by hand to his grandfather’s house. The old boy was tickled pink, there was no hiding it. Never handy with words, he tried to slip his grandson a five-dollar bill. Ordinarily, Daniel would have snatched it up, but that day, under the circumstances, he felt it would be like taking a bribe or kickback or something. So he said no, so as not to spoil the mood of the occasion.

It really did gripe his ass the way his mother went on about his grandfather. He wished she’d shut her mouth. “He was giving you cigarettes and whisky when I was living right in the house,” she was fond of saying. “God alone knows what he’d feel free to introduce you to with me nowhere in sight.”

In May, Daniel took the risk of playing hooky for an entire day to help his grandfather plant the garden. His mother would have had him by the short and curlies if she’d got wind of that. Daniel understood how stupid it was to take the chance, but the old man’s continual fretting and fussing over whether or not he would get his garden seeded by Victoria Day struck Daniel as so pathetic that he thought he had better pitch in and help finish the job or the old man would never enjoy a moment’s peace that spring. Daniel was pretty sure the worry over such a stupid thing was actually preventing his grandfather from sleeping.

As Victoria Day drew nearer, Daniel heard Alec say a hundred times if he heard him say it once: “There isn’t a year in the last
twenty I missed having the garden in by the Queen’s birthday – and look where I’m at now.”

Daniel sensed that lately his grandfather wasn’t quite the same. He would brood about silly things like the garden and was prone to hair-trigger explosions of temper. When Daniel asked him what difference it made if the garden wasn’t planted by Victoria Day but instead went in a few days later, the question seemed to confuse and confound the old man. But from confusion he quickly passed over into anger and began to shout menacingly that if Daniel didn’t know what difference it made, that only proved what an ignorant snip he was. There were other changes Daniel had noticed since Christmas. His grandfather struck him as generally less alert and certainly much more forgetful than before.

To put an end to all the bitching and moaning about the approach of Victoria Day, the boy promised the old man that he would give him a hand with the planting on the Friday before the long weekend. On the weekends his mother would monopolize his time at The Bluebird. Daniel lied and told his grandfather that he would have the Friday off because of a teachers’ convention. When his grandfather saw all the kids trooping past the house with books stacked in their arms on the day of the “holiday,” Daniel supposed the old boy would give him a sly wink and call him a rascal. But when Friday arrived and all the kids went streaming by the house at eight forty-five in the morning, obviously on their way to classes, Alec didn’t give them a second glance as he turned the earth in his garden with a potato fork. Nor did he say a word to Daniel. Why? Daniel asked himself. Didn’t he see them? Or was it that he couldn’t put two and two together? Or was he so obsessed with his Victoria Day deadline that he was prepared to overlook anything, so long as it helped him to meet it?

As to why his grandfather had fallen so far behind in his planting schedule – that was no mystery to Daniel once he had seen him at work. There were moments, standing in the midst of his plot, that Alec looked positively bewildered, a man who had lost his
bearings and had no inkling of where he was. He would barely begin one task when he was distracted by another. No sooner did he pick up a rake than he laid it down with a bemused look on his face and wandered off to the tool shed to hunt up stakes and twine to lay out rows. With his hands full of stakes and twine it would suddenly strike him that there wasn’t much sense in stringing out guides over unraked ground. The stakes and ball of twine would be tossed in the tall, unmowed grass at the edge of the garden where they would be lost. Meanwhile, Alec would take up a rake and scratch furiously back and forth in the dirt until another notion seized him. By mid-morning Daniel was so exasperated he could have screamed. Everything was taking twice as long as it should have, the old man misplaced everything he touched, he blundered into the taut twine Daniel stretched, stumbling and wrenching the stakes from the earth; he sowed the first half of a row with peas and the last half absentmindedly with beans.

Somewhere around four o’clock, after nearly seven hours of uninterrupted labour, the garden was finished. The old man surveyed their work and his face visibly relaxed as he announced that a small celebration was in order. While Daniel stowed the tools away in the shed, he would go into the house and crack them a couple of beers.

Five minutes later, Daniel found the dusty, sweaty old man asleep on the chesterfield. The boy hunted up a blanket and covered him so he wouldn’t take a chill when the perspiration dried on him. Then he went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, found a beer, and settled on a chair to drink it. Promises were made to be kept. Alec owed him this. Before leaving, he turned on the kitchen light, so that if his grandfather woke in the middle of the night he wouldn’t be confused about where he was, the light would act as beacon to help him find his way up the stairs and to his bed.

Now, with the start of summer vacation, Daniel is able to visit the old man nearly every day. He reaches an agreement with his mother that if he works for her half-days, the other half of the day is his own. Either he takes the morning shift, clearing tables, scraping, rinsing, and stacking breakfast dishes, and doing other odd jobs that have to be completed before preparations are begun for making dinner, or he can take the supper shift which begins at four and lasts until nine when the last man belches and farts his way out the door of the restaurant. The choice is up to him. All his old lady asks is that each Monday he mark his schedule on the calendar which hangs by the stove so that she can allot the remainder of her staff their hours. As long as he is punctual and sticks to the allotted shifts, she doesn’t poke her nose into his comings and goings too closely, although every once in a while in the midst of the clamour of the kitchen she remembers she is a mother and brushes up on the old Spanish Inquisition. It keeps them both in practice.

“So where were you all afternoon?”

“Around.”

“Around where?”

Being as there is not much around in a turd town like Connaught, it is not always easy to manufacture a plausible and satisfactory lie just like that, at the drop of a hat. He tries on the library for size. His mother favours libraries as suitable haunts.

“I went to the library and looked at books.”

“Find anything interesting? What did you read?”

“I don’t know. Just books.”

“I can check you know. One phone call is all it takes. I can ask that woman at the library if you were there all afternoon. Should I phone her?”

“Do what you like.” He can say this because he knows the library closes at five. Now it is six. Tomorrow his mother will be too busy to remember to check his alibi.

The question is, how much does she know for sure? There are days when he thinks it’s all a guess and others when he’s convinced
she knows everything. Whenever she drills him with that flat, steady stare of hers, the one that makes him feel like a bug in a bottle, Daniel asks himself, What experiment is she running on me now? There are times when it would be a relief to confess and end the awful suspense. But turning gutless wonder, breaking down and offering some snivelly, grovelly confession to clear the books with her, would be stupid if she didn’t know,
really
know. It would be like sticking his neck out for the axe and he didn’t fancy that at all.

So he kept on doing as he had been, but uneasily. Nearly always he signed himself on for the morning shift so that he was free to watch television with Alec in the afternoon. In the summer, during the afternoons, the local station ran pretty decent old movies, Abbott and Costello comedies, Errol Flynn swashbucklers, dusters. And on Saturdays there were the baseball games which both he and the old man loved.

Despite his grandfather’s rash of new oddities Daniel still found him easier to deal with than his mother. He hated to think what she would have to say about Alec if she could see him now, sitting in the house in a bulky knit Siwash sweater with two pairs of heavy wool socks on his feet while the mercury stood in the thermometer at 85°F. It was little wonder that his head didn’t work one hundred per cent, he was probably suffering from heat stroke, boiled brains. Whenever Daniel gave him the gears about overdressing, the old man grew sulky and grouchy. “Laugh now you little bastard,” he warned, “your turn’ll come to feel the cold.”

Although he got hostile any time Daniel teased him, it was the only way Daniel had of snapping him out of his moods. If he was sunk up to his ass in his thoughts he didn’t trouble to answer simple questions. He had to be ragged or needled into saying something. Daniel not only found the old man’s withdrawals into blankness upsetting, he also regarded them as insulting. What business had he switching off his own personal control switch to the outside world, shutting Daniel out and falling into a trance? Most often it happened when he watched television. It annoyed and aggravated
Daniel to no end because when the old man came out of his reveries he demanded explanations as to how the runner came to be advanced to third base, or how Miss Kitty came to be tied to a chair in her own saloon and where the hell was Matt Dillon anyway?

Daniel would have liked to tell him to take a flying fuck at the moon if he couldn’t bother to watch the television himself. But he didn’t. He just sourly let things take their course, the old man staring glassy-eyed off into space, one hand laid like a brick on the crown of his fedora as if he feared a windstorm might erupt in his living room and tear it from his head, the barely discernible twitching of his lips signalling some hunt of the mind the way shivers and tremors in a sleeping dog’s limbs betray pursuit in a dream.

The famous hat. There was a time when his grandfather had merely forgotten to remove it indoors, now it was clear that he refused to. Daniel thinks that only a crowbar could get between the two of them and effect a separation. He remembers the day late in July he let himself into the house and discovered his grandfather dripping onto sheets of newspaper spread on the floor in front of the kitchen sink. A froth of soap suds bubbled on the mat of his thick, grizzled chest hairs and there were smears of white lather caking his flanks and thighs. He was scrubbing himself with a scrap of washcloth so hard that his private parts were flapping energetically up and down and making the occasional sideways squiggle left and right. He was absolutely naked if you didn’t count the straw hat stuck to his head. Daniel was struck dumb in the beginning. It was embarrassing to be looking at an old person, a senior citizen, without his clothes on, and it got even more unnerving when his grandfather tried to engage him in a conversation as he skidded a soap-slippery washcloth over his belly. Daniel couldn’t stop his eyes from veering back and forth between the hat and the bobbling parts, between all that limber action down below and the rock solid steadiness of the hat riding up top. With every passing second his embarrassment grew more and more acute, finally transforming itself into hysteria and nervous giggles which sent him scrambling
for the living room. There he hunkered in the easy-chair, gasping out choked answers to the questions his grandfather flung at him from the kitchen, biting down hard on his knuckles to control himself during pauses in the conversation. Soon, however, the old man was roaring that he couldn’t hear him, what was he doing in there, come out and make himself understood. It was like trying to listen to a boy with a mouthful of marbles.