Once You Break a Knuckle (7 page)

IN 1805 GAUSS MARRIED
his first wife, Johanna Osthoff, a tanner's daughter he'd known since childhood. As kids, the two of them built hideouts among the sweet-gums and peat bogs feeding into and out of the river Elbe. Some nights they snuck from their homes. Johanna helped Gauss climb trees – he was a short boy, but he had strong arms – and Gauss guided her gaze around the night sky. As an adult, Johanna liked to read and she liked her own fierce individuality. Her favourite novel was
Ardinghell and the Blessed Isles
. If she were living right now, she'd open a used bookstore across the street from Chapters, she'd sip chamomile tea with friends named Chakra and Peaceflower, and while her husband crunched numbers and found the dimensionality of fractals, she'd lead protests and rear a family whose politics would shape our future. She had the hands of a woman who would know how to operate a belt sander. When clean, she gamed with the scent of wild animals. Her fingernails were chewed to beneath the quick, and Gauss, to a friend, would one day confess that he looked upon those gnarled nails with a sense things had come and gone. When he knew her as a child – even, perhaps, when they first became romantic – he remembered her hands as lithe and delicate as a babe's. But Johanna's hands were never soft; for years she'd helped her old man at the tannery, bucking leather and scraping rawhide with a scud. You see, what Gauss remembered was how he'd
imagined
her hands to be. When we're young, we overlook our lovers' inadequacies, and the true test of companionship comes when we must weather those inadequacies through eyes grown wise by age and disappointment.

I met my wife at a lake near Saskatoon when she was nineteen and fleeing. I'd just dropped out of university because of a girl named Austin who had tar-coloured hair and a droopy eyelid that always made her look tired. My wife was cross-legged on the beach with a bottle of rye speared in the sand, a box of matches on her knee. She'd sparked a fledgling campfire. I had a messed-up head and a 1969 GTO that reeked of early-twenties angst. I asked my future wife if I could help her set up camp. At first she said nothing, just tied her hair in a crimson ponytail that caught the sun's light like a bottle. Then she sent me for kindling, and I chopped wood until my shoulders pearled with sweat, until the sun hung like a dollop on the horizon and the tarry Saskatchewan dirt was gummed beneath my nails. We built the fire and hit the rye and didn't say a whole lot.

That was sixteen years ago. Things worked out. I spent a year pouring forms and wrestling concrete and after doing that in the howling Regina winter I'd had my fill of the workforce. I graduated with honours in mathematics, returned for a teaching certificate, and eventually landed a job here, in Invermere, heart of the Kootenay Valley, far from the maddening prairie flats. But it's been a learning curve – I was a city boy, unversed in the nuances of rural life, the divide between rednecks and bluecollars, the gestures and conventions everybody takes so seriously but won't spend a minute to explain. Kids use words like
“ratbag” and “minkstuffing.” Men shrug, unworried, when their sons learn to drift at the gravel pits. Fights break out in the school parking lot, and the more robust among us wade into the throngs to haul the combatants apart. My wife, bless her, has dragged me through it. Sixteen years now I've sped along in her wake. She's managed to start her own renovation gig, and together we've raised our son to be someone into whose care you could entrust a belonging.

I am thirty-eight years old. My wife is thirty-three. It's 1994, the International Year of the Family, but, while I rig this heliotrope in the backyard, my wife has left town to see a trade show in Calgary. She's gone to admire Hilti watersaws and the latest in laser levels, to visit a couple cowboy bars and grind across those skid-marked floors in snakeskin boots. She'll be wearing her red hair so it dangles to her shoulders, and she has this way of pulling it behind her ears to expose a mole on her collarbone. It's all a means for her to let off steam – I'm not exactly the portrait of an Adonis. Every now and then I put her on edge: she'll groan at the way I drink my coffee; she'll lock the bathroom door when she showers; she'll come home from work smelling of sawdust and exertion, but no coaxing can lure her to bed. Lately, I haven't seen her naked much, and she's always exasperated when I do, as if I shouldn't be so excited, as if we were a goddamned teenage couple without all the benefits of being teenagers.

But the heliotrope. The science fair. Like I said, it was my son's idea. Most of his classmates have opted for traditional
science fair gigs: his friend Duncan has concocted a baking soda volcano; another boy, Richard – who has a glass eye – is doing a spinning Cartesian diver; one kid, apparently, plans to build a replica particle accelerator that smashes marbles together like atoms. If my son were here he might have a shot at convincing me to do something more grand, something to be proud of, like a small-scale homopolar railgun. I'm not too upset that he's away. I don't like him to see me drink, and I've had one or two tonight, I've had one or two one or two times. He's out of town, with his mom or with his soccer team, it doesn't really matter.

Gauss would have known where his children were, every hour of the day. He had six in total, two-thirds of whom survived to adulthood. For a man of his accomplishment, he sought modest futures for his offspring: marry a good woman, have good children, be a good dad. He abhorred the thought that they follow him into mathematics, but not for selfishness or even underestimation of their intellect; rather, Gauss foresaw the rise of the working class, of people like my neighbours who respect jobs that build things, jobs with a weight you can test against the strength of your arm. Only his eldest, Joseph, took this advice. The others fled to the new world, the frontier, to carve their way among the prodigal sons and daughters who waged war on the Confederacy.

A week ago my son had his first real run-in with the locals. I mean the hicks – the right-wing gun toters who exploit our unemployment system, who pop welfare cheques on dope from the Native reserve, who think beef
jerky and Coke constitutes a decent lunch to pack their kids. Their children are the type who shatter Kokanee bottles on semi-trailers, who pelt windshields with clumps of clay big as potatoes, who find genuine humour in the suffering of others.

It was recess, and a group of these cockroaches had trapped a grain-thin boy in the school's red spiral slide, and they were taking turns battering into him boots-first. Well, my son walked by and my son stepped in. The hicks administered him a lesson in numbers. It marked the first time he reamed a blow off his forehead, the first time a nurse at the brick hospital had to sew him up. My wife removed the sutures three days later – I'm a tad clumsy – with a delicacy I didn't know her tradeswoman fingers could muster. She braced her hand on his forehead, wrist across his cheek, and I knelt nearby for encouragement. She smelled like drywall and the hemp-oil salve that labourers knead into their palms. After she plucked the last stitch from his eyebrow, she swabbed iodine on her thumb and massaged it over the gash like mothers do in movies from the fifties. —There, she said, grasping him at both shoulders. —You're fixed up.

We stayed up late that night, my wife and I. I had marking to do, and a new assignment to concoct, and together we soaked our worries. It felt as though we'd come out of a bath. You might call it a dark hour. Invermere, despite the blaring inadequacies, for a long time had been our haven, and I don't think either of us felt ready for the approaching weight of our son's adolescence. My dad used
to say they toss the manual out with the placenta, but I sense even that joke is a relic of time slipped by. Nowadays, you'd get a manual drawn in the multilingual cartoon way you see in aircraft safety leaflets. I'm only half kidding: what good will the values my dad beat into me do against a generation unfazed when one of their own ODs on PCP, against kids who pawn their parents' electronics for coke money, against the advent of meth labs and pushers who market it as a good way to stay thin? These are the things that loiter on the horizon. You don't have to be a mathematician to put two and two together.

My wife sat beneath a hotel blanket. She had a rye and Coke on the bedside and she clutched at our ancient tortoiseshell tabby. I had a few Kokanees – comfort beer. My wife looked old. In the incandescent light her red hair was yellowed as though by cigarette smoke, and the creases at the corner of her eyes were deep and rigid. All the wrinkles around her mouth curl downward. She has, through no fault of my own, spent much of her life frowning. Like all of us, she has a past: when her dad died, she thumbed it, penniless, to the Prairies, and you can guess how she paid her way; her brother took the family car on a joyride to a logging camp in northern Manitoba and hasn't been heard from since; she has an ex-husband – a marriage that lasted sixteen days, one for each of her years. She only tells me these details when she drinks whiskey, and she only drinks whiskey on occasions like Christmas or a long weekend or the day that could have been her anniversary.

So that night, a week ago, I slurped beer suds and racked my brain for questions a grade ten kid could puzzle through. My wife sipped from a ceramic mug that had a picture of the two of us hoisting a trout. When she finished her drink, she rattled the meltwater ice cubes, and I shuffled to the kitchen to fix another. A good husband must do something kind and unique for his wife every day. Nothing else makes sense.

—Ever wonder if we could've done better? she said when I came back.

—We've done okay, I said, and passed her the drink, which she took in both hands like an offering.

—I want him to stay like he is. A boy. I don't want him to be like us.

—Like me?

—That's not what I said.

The day after we met, on that beach near Saskatoon, my wife showed me how to gather barnacles for protein. She shanked a pocket knife between the rock and the shell and popped the creature off like a coat snap, this grin on her face like nothing in the world could be more fun. I never got the hang of it. She has stopped showing me how.

—We're not unhappy, I tell my wife.

—Don't you ever wonder if you could have done better? she says, and she looks at me with eyes grown wise and disappointed.

Gauss's first wife died in 1809, complications from childbirth. A number of people have recounted the scene at her deathbed – how he squandered her final moments,
how he spent precious hours preoccupied with a new puzzle in number theory. These tales are all apocryphal. These are the tales of a lonely man. Picture them, Gauss with his labourer's shoulders juddering, Johanna in bed with her angel's hair around her like a skimmer dress, his cheek on the bedside, snub nose grazing her ribs. He'll remarry, yes, and love his new spouse. He'll father three devout middle-class sons unafraid to scull for their lot. He'll become a mathematician scholars name when they talk about the Big Five.

But picture him, the Prince of Mathematics, as he closes Johanna's eyes with his stumpy, working-class hands. Things he notices: her immaculate, cream-coloured fingers; the dint on her eyebrow from banging it on a grandfather clock; the wallpaper they installed themselves, herringboned and crooked near the ceiling where he had to balance on his drafter's bench. And Gauss suddenly realizes the whole place smells like chamomile tea. Maybe it's too much for him. He needs a drink, which will become a pattern – one or two gentleman's glasses while he idles, sometimes more when the missus takes the boys out of town. His face puckers at the edges, not tears, but fear. He can't know what will happen next: and what is more terrifying to a mathematician than the unknowable?

It's 1994, the International Year of the Family, but my wife is crossing the Rockies, or browsing a trade show in Calgary, or driving a 1969 forest-green GTO south to the American border. If she's in the Rockies, she's got her sister with her; she's fucking a twenty-four-year-old
cowboy, Gus, if she's in Calgary; and if she's on the way to the border then she's tucked my son beneath a yellow hotel blanket, because she's taking him away from here, away from the drudgery he'll suffer as a boy in a small town, from the hockey louts he'll fall in with and the mill job he'll get locked into and the girl he'll drug with Rohypnol in 2003. And I'm in my backyard. I'm building a heliotrope. And it's well past dark and I've been drinking, I won't lie. I've been drinking. See, I don't know where my wife is. I don't know where she's taken my son. But I do know I caused it, I've done something wrong – because I'm a man, a mere math teacher, and I have certain specific inadequacies, none of which are the fault of mathematics.

RECEPTION

I spent the winter break of my graduating year alone with an aging tom. It was a year when Invermere suffered heavy snowfall in time for Christmas, and the city plows combed the streets in a way that left great palisades across the driveway. Each morning I chipped at this barricade with an aluminum shovel until I'd carved a gap my truck could squeeze through.

Weeks ago everything had gone to shit. Lightning split a tree in the front yard and magnetized all the electronics in the house, including the clocks, so it was always one thirty-nine that December. Mitch Cooper, a long-time buddy, cracked his house's foundation when the clutch of his family's Jeep caught in first gear, and it'd be years before his folks let him live that one down. Then my old man took a bullet to the chest in Kosovo. Twenty-three years in the Force and he'd only twice gone without his Kevlar. His lung collapsed. The doctors at the base reinflated it, pried the bullet out, and sent him home. He was on a plane back, or on a train to get on a plane back, or in a car, on
the road, in a country, driving fast, to get on a train, to get on a plane back. The RCMP wasn't one-hundred percent. But they'd let me know.