Homesick (5 page)

So for the time being he sat by the window in a many times
painted captain’s chair whose every scratch and chip, depending on the depth of the wound, revealed a different layer of colour, green or yellow or blue, which, like the rings of a tree, offered testimony to the chair’s age. He was occupying himself with solitaire, laying out the cards on a welter of overlapping coffee rings and a scattering of toast crumbs, playing every one with an old man’s maddening deliberation, each card held poised and quivering in sympathy with the slight current of tremor in his hands, his lips pursed judiciously and his attention divided between the game and the dirt street that ran past his house.

It was July and early afternoon. Already the sun had driven lawyer McDougal’s spaniel underneath his master’s caragana hedge, a hedge badly in need of a trimming. The sight of the caraganas stretching up to touch the eaves of the lawyer’s house, ragged and wild and infested with sparrows, always irritated Monkman. Several weeks before, when he had met McDougal on the steps of the post office, he had said, “You ever get it in mind to cut that hedge of yours, Bob, you’ll have to get the loan of the fire brigade ladder truck.” McDougal hadn’t liked that. But then McDougal wasn’t obliged to. No more than he, Monkman, had to like that flock of shitting sparrows which roosted there and crossed over from McDougal’s property to settle in his garden every afternoon and peck among his vegetables.

He stared at the dog lying there in the shade. His eyes were still sharp, no trouble there, thank God. From clear across the street he could make out the slight flutter of the spaniel’s flanks as it panted in the heat. Nothing else moved. The dusty leaves of the wilting elm in Monkman’s front yard hung limp and still, white in the hard glare of the sun.

There was no doubt that the day would be a scorcher. The garden would need water by tomorrow. He would have to take the truck and tank out to the creek, fire up the five horsepower Briggs & Stratton gas engine he had left there and pump another tank of water. Lately he had been having trouble getting the engine to
catch; his arthritis made it difficult to grip the toggle and he was no longer able to put the kick in a pull-cord he once could. Just another one of the annoyances that came with growing old, but one it was impossible to avoid without resigning himself to the death of his garden. The extended dry spell had led the town council to ration water and those who wanted more than their allotment had to find it themselves.

Monkman was not sure how a garden had come to be so important to him, more important even than his businesses. His businesses he scarcely paid heed to anymore. He was content to let Mr. Stutz oversee his interests and keep an eye on the help. The books and taxes he left to Cooper the accountant. But the garden was different. Perhaps it was experience teaching him, teaching the man who had embarked on a new career late in life and out of despair, that there was more challenge to keeping life in cabbages and onions than in keeping it in a movie theatre or hardware store. Over the years he had learned that in a small place like Connaught it was hard to go badly wrong in business. Because if it had been easy, he would have been finished long ago. No, all that was necessary was to see that the roots of an enterprise were firmly set. That done, in the absence of any real competition it could hardly fail to survive. Maybe not flourish, none of his businesses had really flourished, but they had all survived and that was enough for him. Unlike a plant, a shop or store needed no strong encouragement to live; once established it took a fool or act of God to kill it. But gardens he had found were a different matter. A man had to breathe some of his own life into a garden. A garden knew no other aid or kindness in this hard place of shattering hail and scorching heat, uprooting wind and early killing frost, except that which a man could offer.

When his wife was alive the garden had been no business of his. Monkman had spent no time in it beyond digging the potatoes in the fall if the ground was heavy and wet. Martha had kept a garden so she could eat her own canned vegetables during the long winter,
all put up to her taste. She had always complained there was no flavour in anything bought in a store.

For years and years now there had been nobody to preserve the carrots and beets and peas and beans. Alec Monkman ate what he could fresh and gave the rest to his customers and neighbours. (He had begun this practice years before, keeping ten-pound sacks of potatoes heaped beside the gas pumps at his garage so that people were free to help themselves.) Although at first this oddity of his was remarked upon, with time the town’s folk became accustomed to the sight of a mound of orange pumpkins in the lobby of his theatre, the boxes of carrots and onions and ripe tomatoes stacked by the front desk of his hotel. All of it was there for the taking. Monkman made no distinction between those too old or too ill to tend to their own plots and those too shiftless to bother to. All he wished was to be relieved of an old man’s embarrassing and prodigal surplus.

There had never been a surplus when Martha was alive. Of course, there had been the children too, more mouths to feed. Everything had gone into jars, she had been a demon among the steaming pots, ladling and scalding and sealing with hot wax. God knew that thirty years later there was likely still dusty stores of canned fruit and vegetables in the cellar because after her death he had not been able to bring himself to go down there and clear the shelves. It was more than he could do to set a foot on those stairs. For months his heart had hurt him at the thought, closed up on him like a fist. So he and Earl and Vera had eaten out of tins.

He thought of how she had lain all crooked at the bottom of those stairs. The naked bulb swinging to and fro at the end of the cord nailed to the beam overhead had made light and shadow play across her body in such a way that he had been tricked into thinking she was moving there on the floor. But that was all there was to that, a trick of the light.

Now, as whenever he caught himself thinking of his dead wife Martha, Alec Monkman gave a start and his hand sprang up to his
head. It encountered a hat. The hat was there. He pulled it off and swore. “Goddamn it to hell!” He was angry. What was he doing, wearing a hat in the house again, after all those years? What was happening to him?

He sat staring at the hat, his large hands holding it delicately by its brim as if he were balancing a plate of raw eggs in the shell, intent on keeping them from rolling off the edge and smashing at his feet. Monkman sat like this for some time, lost in reverie, then suddenly, with a disgruntled gesture, he dropped the hat on the table.

His fine white hair, thick for a man his age, had been disturbed when he had jerked off his hat in disgust. It stood ruffled up around the crown of his head, making him look like a caricature of shock. He was not shocked, only tired. Fatigue confused him. He scratched one bristling eyebrow and then the other with the thick nail of a forefinger; then pinched the long, fleshy blade of his nose between his two thumbs, a characteristic mannerism whenever he was perplexed. His large, clumsy body, shaped by years of hard labour and finally corseted in the fat of subsequent indolence, sprawled a little more in his chair, an elbow carelessly disarranging the cards laid out for solitaire. He had forgotten about the game.

His wife had stormed against his habit of wearing a hat in the house. He had seen nothing wrong in it, having trouble remembering what his own father had looked like without a hat. When his father had been in his seventies he had taken a picture of him standing in Round Lake, water up to his armpits, a cigarette in his mouth and one of those salt and pepper tweed caps on his head. That was what the old boy called going for a swim.

But Martha had seen hats worn in the house as the height of ignorance, boorishness beyond belief. “Where were you born? In a barn?” she would ask sardonically when he neglected to remove his. It developed into a test of wills. Her will, her opinion, had remained unshakable right up until the day nearly twenty years ago when she toppled backwards down the cellar stairs with a
clutch of canned preserves pressed to her breast, falling dead of a stroke amid the crash of breaking Mason jars. The shock of that had come close to entirely undoing Alec Monkman. Martha was only forty-four. Women of that age did not keel over dead of strokes. Where was the sense in such a thing?

He gave up wearing hats in the house. It was the surrender of a long, stubborn resistance. There was not a time that his children could not remember him eating his dinner in a sweat-stained fedora tipped back on his head, or listening to his favourite radio program in a cap pulled down over his left eye. After her death they saw him sit bareheaded by a silent radio, the ribbon of untanned skin beneath his hairline which had always been hidden by his hats exposed on his forehead like the brand of the biblical outcast. And for twenty years after Martha’s funeral he had never entered the house without at once removing his hat and hanging it on the hook by the door.

But recently, as if by magic, he was finding hats appear on his head. He did not know how it happened. Coming up his street, as far away from home as Kruger’s yard, he began to mumble to himself as he ran his fingers lightly over the fleur-de-lis topping Kruger’s iron fence, calling himself to attention, reminding himself to hang his fedora on the hook by the door. People who saw his moving lips assumed he was having a chat or argument with himself, as lonely old men do. He was really chanting, over and over again, “Hat on the hook. Hat on the hook. Hat on the hook.” Monkman had no idea what went wrong. An hour after going indoors he would pass a mirror, or reach up to scratch an itch lurking in his widow’s peak and discover – a hat! He struggled to puzzle out an explanation. Could it be that he had intended to go out, put on his hat, and then, distracted by a ringing phone, the crying of the cat to be fed, lost track of his original intention, only to wander his house in a hat? Or had he, despite his precautions, despite his chant, simply not remembered to take it off? Was that possible? It was strange. Often he could recall in vivid detail the
hat swaying slightly from side to side on the hook before coming to rest. He could see it all, plain as his hand held before his face. Then a doubt. Was that today, or yesterday? Maybe it was yesterday he had watched the gentle rocking of the hat on the hook. He could not be sure.

Sitting in the hot sun which poured upon him through a dusty pane spotted with the marks of a rain stillborn a week ago, he told himself: Vera is coming today and I have a pink toilet and wear my hat in the house. He understood how he had been saddled with the toilet but the hat he was not certain about.

Years ago Monkman had heard someone say – a minister maybe, although he wondered how, since he didn’t attend church, although it could have been at a funeral, or an occasion that demanded an address at the school – that man’s thoughts of the past are largely made up of regret and his thoughts of the future largely of fear. It was one of the few true things he had ever heard a preacher say and he had chosen to remember it. In the past few months he had taken to reminding himself that with so little future left to him, surely he had less to fear, more to regret.

He sensed that the business with the hat was linked to the fact that recently Martha was often in his thoughts and those thoughts were sweet. Something or someone was trying to speak to him. He was certain of it. Did they both want the past? Alec his Martha and Martha her Alec in a hat?

Considering that, it slipped his mind who he was really waiting for that hot July day.

4

M
r. Stutz, weighted down with luggage, led Vera and Daniel into his employer’s house. He did not trouble to knock. After fifteen years together both he and Alec Monkman walked in and out of one another’s houses with the same freedom as they poked their noses into one another’s lives. If they had been encumbered with women this could never have happened; a woman’s sense of privacy would have been outraged, there would have been a stop to it. But as someone in Connaught once said, neither Stutz nor Monkman needed a wife. They had a marriage of sorts already. Sometimes this surely seemed so. Their squabbles shared characteristics with those of long-established couples. They hinted at a rich background of past grievance, were conducted with fearsome tenacity, yet managed to avoid topics that would make for a permanent rupture. Mr. Stutz no longer invited Monkman to attend church and Monkman no longer badgered Mr. Stutz to join him in a drink.

Stutz was surprised to find the kitchen empty. Where was Alec? He thumped down the suitcases he carried and Daniel unslung a duffel bag from his shoulder. “Alec?” Stutz inquired, walking to the entrance of the living room, Vera trailing behind. His ruddy
face was moistly shining as if it had been rubbed with butter, which was the way it always looked in hot weather. Summer was a trial for Mr. Stutz. A big man in the midst of a fleshy middle-age, he panted through June, July, and August, the sun bleaching his blond eyebrows fairer and fairer and burning his face redder and redder until when Labour Day rolled round he was all scarlet and white.