Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (13 page)

“Maybe that was a bit conceited of you,” said Mr. Lougheed thoughtfully, craftily.

“Yes I know. That night when I was meditating I let the question go down in my mind, am I doing this for my own ego? It came to me that it didn't matter. What I am doing it for doesn't matter. Whatever put the idea into my head to do it, I have to trust that. It may be an act that has a purpose beyond me. I know how that sounds. But I am just lending myself, I am being used. The whole thing really grew. I was going to do it for just those two old ladies but I couldn't do it right away because I wanted time to prepare, and so we arranged for Sunday and now I'm hearing about it from people on the street, people I don't know at all. I'm amazed.”

“Aren't you bothered by the thought that you might make a fool of yourself in front of that many people?”

“That isn't an expression that means anything to me, really.
Make a fool of yourself
. How can anybody do that? How can you make a fool? Show the fool, yes, expose the fool, but isn't the fool just yourself, isn't it there all the time? Show yourself. What else can you do?”

You can hang on to your sanity, if possible, Mr. Lougheed could have said, but did not think of it till later. Even if he had thought of it then, the time for saying it had passed.

Outside his door on Sunday morning, Mr. Lougheed found a dead bird. He was prepared to believe a cat had brought it. Cats did come into the house, were fed by Calla or Rover, left the smell of their urine in the downstairs hall. He picked up the bird and carried it downstairs and out into
the back yard. A bluejay. He admired the cold bright color. Though they were not admirable birds, jays. He had grown up on a farm and could not help passing such judgments on all forms of plant and animal life. He remembered some visitor to the farm, a lady, not young, crying out over the beauty of a field full of wild mustard. She wore a kind of dusty pink or beige hat, chiffon, if that was the stuff, and the conspicuous folly of the hat blended with the folly of her pleasure, in his mind, and had remained to this day. Of course it was the looks, later the words, of the grown-ups, that informed him where folly lay.

He meant to bury the bird, but he could not find anything to dig a hole with. The door had been broken off the basement. There used to be some tools in there, but he supposed they had been carried away. The ground in the back yard was like cement, anyway. Stones everywhere, broken glass. He put the dead bird in the garbage pail.

He had lived in this house for twelve years, ever since he sold his drugstore business and came out here to live near his married daughter. His daughter and her family had moved away but he had stayed on. The house and yard had been in a run-down condition even twelve years ago, though he had not foreseen, nobody had, that they would get to be in the state they were in today. The place had belonged to a Miss Musgrave, whose family had had money. She was still living, then, in the downstairs rooms where Rex and Calla and Rover lived today. Soon after moving in Mr. Lougheed got the scythe and started cutting down the long grass in the corners of the yard. He meant to trim it up and make a decent lawn, a favor to all concerned. But he had not been doing this very long when a window was wrenched up and a loud, unladylike, in fact alcoholic, voice called out to him.

“This is Musgrave property!”

That was Miss Musgrave, who was crazy, but in a familiar way. In his drugstore days he had known ladies like her, coming in with their lipstick crooked and their hats too,
diddling with their prescriptions, wheedling, lying, taking offense. Miss Musgrave was long dead now and he almost missed such familiar craziness. He was left with the present crew, and it was beyond him, always beyond him, to judge whether they were crazy or not. Even Eugene. Most of all Eugene.

People had argued with him that he ought to move out of here. Why did he not? He did not like apartment buildings, he said, he did not like heights, did not want the bother of moving. There was more to it than that. Whatever he learned here, he was not sorry to have learned. He listened to his contemporaries talking and he thought that their brains would crack like eggs, if they knew one-tenth of what there was to know. He could not finally regret having seen the performance of Rex and Calla, or having read the newspaper that Rover sold, and had thrust at him one day for a joke. He read every word of it though the blurred type hurt his eyes. The bad type, the spelling, some blotched, possibly obscene drawings, as well as the needs admitted to in the want ads and an editorial which disagreed with the city council—referred to throughout as shit-artists and ass-holes—worried him along the same sore and exasperated nerve; but he kept on, with an odd apprehension of a message that could flash out almost too quick for the eye to catch it, like some commercials he had heard about on television.

But this performance of Eugene's was one thing he did not mean to watch. It offended him too much, it made him too uneasy. He made his breakfast, which was as usual two slices of brown toast, a boiled egg and tea. He did not hear Eugene, and supposed he had gone out earlier. While he ate he remembered a feeling he had had in the back yard, while he was holding the bird and thinking of the chiffon-hatted lady and the field of mustard and his parents. He had been remembering something else, from that, and now he could tell that he had been remembering his dream. He knew that he must have dreamed it again last night, and he seemed
to have no choice but to sit and try to see which part of it he could call to mind.

This dream, which he had dreamed on and off since middle age, had its start in a real incident that had happened when he was a child, and living on the farm, with his older brother Walter and his sister Mary who was to die of diphtheria when she was eighteen. In the middle of the night he had heard the phone ringing, three long rings. Each family along the road had its own number of rings—their own, which Mr. Lougheed still remembered, was two longs and two shorts—but three long rings was a general alert, a signal for everyone on the line to pick up their phone. Mr. Lougheed's father, in the kitchen directly below the boys' bedroom, shouted into the phone. He never did accept the principle of the telephone, and seemed to rely on the strength of his voice to carry over whatever distance was necessary. With the shouting they were all roused and came down to see their father putting on his boots and jacket—the time of year was May, springtime, but the nights were still cool—and, though Mr. Lougheed could not remember what was said, he knew that his father had told them something about where he was going and that his brother Walter asked and received permission to go along, just as he himself asked and was refused, on the grounds that he was too young and could not keep up.

They were going to chase a mad boy, a young man, really, nineteen or twenty years old, who had lived on the next line of the township. Mr. Lougheed could not recall what information his father gave out about this boy beyond his name, which was Frank McArter. Frank McArter was the youngest of a large, poor, decent family of Catholics. He had been taken away from home for a while after a series of fits but had returned cured, and was living there quietly taking care of his old parents, now that his brothers and sisters were gone. Mr. Lougheed did not think his father mentioned at the time that the reason all the men were
called out to track down Frank McArter was that earlier that evening, probably before dark (and before milking, certainly, because it was the bawling of the unrelieved cows that brought in a neighbor passing on the road), he had killed his father in the barn, using a pitchfork and the flat of a shovel, then his mother in the kitchen, using the same shovel which he must have carried from the barn for the purpose.

These were the facts. The dream, as far as he could tell, contained but did not reveal them. Awake he had all this information about the murder, double murder, in his memory, though he could not think when or how it was given to him. In the dream he never understood clearly what all the urgency and commotion were about, he knew only that he had to find his boots and hurry out with his father and brother (if he hurried, in the dream, he would not be left behind). He did not know where he was going and it would not dawn on him until he had gone along for a while that there was something they were going to find. Their progress might be easy and cheerful at the start, but often it would be slowed by confusing and deflecting invisible forces, so that Mr. Lougheed would find himself separated, doing things such as mixing a prescription in his drugstore or eating supper with his wife. Then with such too-late desperate regret, through reproachful, unhelpful neighborhoods, and always some kind of gray weather, not disclosing much, he would be trying to get back to where he ought to have been. He never dreamed the dream through to the end. Or he never remembered. That was it, more likely. When the dream first came to him his parents and sister were dead but his brother was still alive, in Winnipeg, and he had thought of writing to him, asking him about Frank McArter, and if they had actually found him that night or not. There was a hole in his memory at that point. But he never did write—or when he did write, he did not ask this question, because he forgot, and if he had remembered he might have felt foolish anyway—and then his brother died.

This dream always left some weight on his mind. He supposed it was because he was still carrying around, for part of the day, the presences of dead people, father and mother, brother and sister, whose faces he could not clearly remember when he was awake. How to convey the solidity, complexity, reality, of those presences—even if he had anybody to convey this to? It almost seemed to him there must be a place where they moved with independence, undiminished authority, outside his own mind; it was hard to believe he had authored them himself. A commonplace experience. He remembered his own mother, sitting down at the breakfast table, saying in a voice of astonishment that was almost complaint, “I've been having a dream about your grandma! Oh, it was
her
!”

Another thing he was made to think about was the difference between that time and now. It was too much. Nobody could get from one such time to another, and how had he done it? How could one man know Mr. Lougheed's father and mother, and now know Rex and Calla? It occurred to him, and had occurred to him before, that there was after all something to be said for dealing with things the way most people of his age seemed to do. It was sensible perhaps to stop noticing, to believe that this was still the same world they were living in, with some dreadful but curable aberrations, never to understand how the whole arrangement had altered.

The dream had brought him in touch with a world of which the world he lived in now seemed the most casual imitation—in texture, you might say, in sharpness, in authority. It was true, of course, that his senses had dimmed. Nevertheless. The weight of life, the importance of it, had some way disappeared. Events took place now in a diminished landscape, and were of equal, or no, importance. Mr. Lougheed riding on a bus through city streets or even through the countryside would not have been much amazed to see anything you could name—a mosque, for instance, or a white bear. Whatever it looked to be, it would turn out to be
something else. Girls at the supermarket wore grass skirts to sell pineapples and he had seen a gas station attendant, wiping windshields, wearing on his head a fool's hat with bells. Less and less was surprising.

Sometimes in the records they played downstairs he would hear an absolutely clear, and familiar, unmolested line of music. And he knew what would happen, how this would be mocked and twisted around, blown up, blasted out of all recognition. There were similar jokes everywhere, and it must be considered that people found them satisfying.

The Ross Point pier was a long-unused, broken-down pier which disappeared almost entirely at high tide and at low tide slipped into the ocean at its far end. Mr. Lougheed coming around the bend in the sea walk—he had had to come after all, he had been too restless to stay away—half expected to see no one there, to discover that he had imagined the whole thing, or, more likely, that it had been an elaborate hoax concocted by others. But this was not so; people had gathered. There were no steps here—there were steps a quarter of a mile back and a little way ahead, past Ross Point—but Mr. Lougheed got himself down the bank, hanging onto broom bushes, and not thinking of the risk of broken bones until later. He hurried along the beach.