Swing Low (4 page)

By now it is quite dark outside. A light rain is falling. I smell lilacs. Or I smell something that reminds me of lilacs and of my hometown in May (this is my hometown in May) and especially the walk down First Street and then up William and finally across Main to the school. Every spring my desk was swamped with lilacs. Children brought me jam jars and ice cream pails and plastic honey tubs, whatever empty containers they could get their hands on, filled with lilacs, until I began running out of space for them and I’d have to beg the children to stop.

I like to imagine that the teacher has left the room inside my brain and every last neuron is out of its seat and acting
up. I will walk in and ask them to take their seats, and miraculously they will.

Does it matter? Not everything does matter so much after all. When I was a young man I vacillated wildly between thinking everything mattered, that every word, every action, every task was important, to thinking that nothing at all mattered, that everything was futile. I had a gambler’s mentality, all or nothing. Just as I appeared close to achieving normalcy and balance to a point where I could say Life is Good, I would notice myself cracking under the pressure of its goodness. Is this the sort of thing my doctor wants to hear? Should I ring my bell and have the nurse run in here so I can tell her that sometimes I think things matter and sometimes I think they don’t? What does a ham have to do around here to get cured?

Keep writing. I had intended to review my life as a movie but I can see now that it’s not fitting nicely into that format. It has all the structure of a bamboo hut in a hurricane and I must apologize for this lack of cohesion. A series of jerky stills, courtesy of my renegade mind, will have to do. Just wait for the inevitable upside-down slide in the carousel. Why don’t you run downstairs and make yourselves some popcorn while I repair the reel. Oh, but there we go, I imagine you running and the image creates a tiny spark. I remember now.

When I was a boy I loved to run. One day I was out running all over town, through people’s yards and up and down
back lanes and empty streets, when I happened to come across an apple pie cooling on the wide wooden railing of Mr. and Mrs. I.Q. Unger’s back porch. I was about nine and I should have known better, but I decided to take the pie and run. I had visions of myself enjoying a huge feast for one somewhere in the bush outside of town. I turned around to make sure I hadn’t been followed and there, peering out from behind an old shed in the yard, was my little brother, the one I mentioned earlier, the one who replaced my dead sister, the one who stole my mother’s heart.

What are you doing? he asked me, in Low German.

Nothing, I said, go away.

You’re supposed to come home now, he said, you’re supposed to stop all this running and come home.

I looked back at my pie. It was a perfect pie, light beige strips of dough criss-crossed on the top, bubbles of baked apple oozing through the tiny squares, columns of steam rising up from it.

Get lost, I said quietly, again in Low German.

My brother stepped out from behind the shed and slowly took aim at me with a homemade slingshot. I laughed.

Come with me right now or I’ll shoot this thing, he said in a menacing voice.

Ha ha, I said, hoping the people inside the house wouldn’t hear us.

My brother took a few steps towards me and said, I mean it, I’ll shoot you. I could see the ugly little rock he had placed up against the elastic, holding it between his finger and thumb. He was only four or five years old.

I smiled at him and made a face. He came closer. I didn’t move. Finally he was only a few steps away from me and still he kept coming closer, pointing that homemade slingshot at my face and telling me to come home. Right now, he said, over and over again in a whisper. Right now.

I stepped backwards. He came closer. I took another step backwards, towards my pie, and another step, hoping, in one fluid motion, to grab the pie, leap over the porch railing, and avoid getting shot by my brother.

At this point he was so close to me I could have reached out and grabbed the slingshot, but my brother had it cocked and ready to fire. All he had to do was let go. I took one more step backwards, thinking that it would buy me another second or two to formulate my plan, but that’s when the plan died.

The heel of my shoe caught between the slats of the railing, and in an effort to pull it free I lost my balance and fell on my stomach. The pie, perched precariously on the rickety railing, fell too, right onto my back, face up, intact and still perfect. But irretrievable. As my brother stood beside me laughing, I frantically tried to grab at the pie burning a hole into my back.

My shoe was still caught, preventing me from rolling over, and anyway, if I had rolled over the pie would have slid off my back and been ruined and at that point I was still hoping to eat it.

Reg, I hissed, get the pie off me! I’ll share it with you, I promise. Please!

I was in agony. I imagined the skin melting off my back and the pie dropping into a cavity next to ribs and kidneys
and whatever else was in there. My brother, however, was thoroughly entertained and had no intention of ending the show by helping me out.

Please, I begged him. I could have wriggled on my stomach and the pie would have fallen off but still I harboured a faint hope that the pie would be mine and I didn’t want to pick pieces of it off the dusty wooden floor of that old porch.

Just then Mrs. Unger, the pie-baker and owner of the property on which I lay twitching and smouldering and begging for mercy, opened her back door and stepped onto the porch.

Reg shrieked and fled and Mrs. Unger ran back inside for oven gloves. Seconds later she had removed the pie, then hammered my foot out from between the slats, sat me down at her kitchen table, and was preparing a soothing ointment of aloe vera and something else to pack on my smoked hide.

I cried, shamelessly, and her old husband held out his stiff handkerchief. After treating my back, Mrs. Unger gave me a large piece of that apple pie with ice cream and after that she gave me another, smaller piece. I ate very slowly and she asked me, in Low German, if I needed to stay away from home for a while.

I told her no, no, that in fact I must return immediately, that I had a lot of work to do, and my parents would be wondering where I was. Mrs. Unger told me that she had often seen me running, was I training for the Olympics? she asked. Then she added that if I ever needed a destination, her door was always open. Her husband piped up and said he would put a sign up over the door that said Finish Line.
The three of us chuckled and in all the years to follow, never once spoke of my attempted pie theft.

The word “home” induces such nostalgia these days it makes my head hurt. I imagine that I am massive and hovering somewhere in the sky with a bird’s-eye view of Canada. Gradually my vision narrows and all I can see is the province of Manitoba, all the way from Hudson Bay through the Inter-lake, down to the prairie farms and towns of the south. But then my vision narrows again and all I can see is the town of Steinbach, my town, with its many churches and cars and split-level stucco homes, and then the vise grip again and all that appears is my home, what used to be my home, and then even that disappears and all I can see is my kitchen table, where my daughters and my wife are seated and having an animated conversation, and then zoom, the only thing I see is her, and then — this happens very quickly — we’re face to face, I would like to give her a kiss, but just at that moment I drop from where I’ve been hovering in the sky, and I’m falling to the earth so fast my eyes are forced shut and the wind is screaming like a runaway train and … it makes my head hurt, like I said. Like I think I said, the idea of home.

I think I will lie down again and try to get some sleep. It’s almost five in the morning. I can see now how the sun
might rise. Often in the darkest middle part of the night it seems impossible. But at this hour there are signs. I’m very tired, too tired to soak my feet as I had planned, too tired to undress, too tired to check on Hercules, too tired to think of the call, too tired even to crawl under my blanket.

I
t is
6:12
a.m. I’ve been dreaming of a 1948 Oldsmobile. I’m sitting next to Elvira. She’s fifteen years old and driving her dad’s car without a licence. Now I’m not so sure it was a dream. I think it is a memory and that in fact I haven’t been sleeping at all. I’m sorely tempted to get up and look out my window to see if perhaps there’s a ‘48 Olds idling in the parking lot, ready to take me away from here. Elvira and I and several of our friends had borrowed her dad’s car for a trip to Winnipeg. She and I shared a bag of sunflower seeds and just for
dumheit
she drove home from the city through the dry ditches of the countryside instead of on the Trans-Canada Highway. That big Olds handled the culverts well. Our friends were in the back seat, and we all had a terrific time! Until the police stopped us and confiscated her father’s car and threatened us with farm labour, which is what juvenile delinquents did in my day. I mentioned to the
police officer that I was up to my neck in farm labour at the present, which made my friends smile anyway. I felt the sting of his knuckled backhand across my face.

Elvira leapt into the fray and shouted at the police officer, How dare you, or How could you, or something along those lines. She and I weren’t dating at that point, but it was at that moment following her defiant outburst that I fell in love with her. And furthermore I realized that I would need a girl like her if I were to survive. At the time, however, it wasn’t so much a conscious realization, but more of an instinct.

Seeing as the car was confiscated anyway, we spent the rest of the day bowling and in the evening we all split the cost of a cab back to Steinbach (forty miles). I sat next to Elvira in the back seat, and my legs shook so badly from nervousness that they knocked over the bag of sunflower seeds she had balanced in her lap and I spent the rest of the drive home picking seeds off the floor of the cab, apologizing intermittently, and shaking.

Unfortunately, I have tracked blood all over the floor of my room. My blisters have opened up again and I’m not sure what to use to wipe it up. A nurse will enter soon and sigh. Have placed several sheets of notepad paper on the floor to soak up the blood. Have placed my feet in the large blue container beside my bed. Will wait for nurse.