The Rest is Silence (17 page)

“Please don't call me that.”

“If she won't, I'd like to, Melvin,” Leroy said, grinning.

“I was asking Benita.”

“Benita? Who's that?”

“I need to talk to you about something,” Leach said to Benny, ignoring Leroy.

“I was going to go for a run.”

“On a Friday night? I bet you've got a date. A good-looking girl like you must have plenty of dates.”

“You never know, Melvin.”

He looked at Leroy, shook his head, then strode back to his office. He called over his shoulder. “Glass dishes are too expensive.”

Benny left the lab. She had been looking forward to this run all day. She was going to meet her new friend Rachel at the south end of the park. Benny jogged west, into the park, and headed south. She passed the zoo and ran around a lone horse, which looked weary and defeated as the hack urged it on with the clucking of his tongue. Its shod hooves clip-clopped on the pavement. She waited for Rachel on the sidewalk across from The Plaza. Even though Benny was living in a polluted city, with plastic everywhere, the barnyard smell from the row of horses and their manure piled against the curb, the fresh breeze coming out of the park, and the trees that towered over the street made her feel like she belonged there.

Then she spotted Rachel running along Central Park South toward her. She was happy to see that ragged hair bobbing up and down over the backs of the tired horses. There was a fluttery feeling in her belly, and she started to run again to meet her new friend.

18

Forest Garden

The days are getting shorter but continue to be hot and sunny. Today we will harvest potatoes from Lina's no-till experiment. The dying tops of the potato plants lie on the brown straw. My fingers move the crumbles of straw and plunge into the friable ground, cool and moist. The grass is gone. An earthworm glistens in the soil. I push more straw aside and my fingers bump against a potato. Then another one beside it. There are teeth marks in many of them where mice have nibbled. Despite this we have a crop of gorgeous baking potatoes that will last all winter. No digging, no weeding.

It is time to plant garlic. After lunch we take the largest bulbs from what we harvested in August and separate the cloves, putting the largest of them aside in a pot to be pressed into the ground. We rake the decaying straw off the potato bed and leave it in the walking rows. I step on a fork to loosen the soil. We pull out grass, dandelions, and hawkweed, and then rake the bed level. It's a rectangle of dark earth with sharp corners and neat sides, weed-free and ready to plant. We shovel composted cow manure into the bed.

We push the cloves into the soft ground, one every six inches, until we run out of garlic. I cut the sisal from a bale of oat straw, grab a flake, and shake it so it loosens, then spread the straw thickly on top of the bed. Finished, the blanket of golden straw contrasts with the green around it and the blue of the sky.

The straw is dry and dusty, and the mixture of shit and straw aggravates my asthma, long dormant. I wheeze and cough. Lina goes to her tent and when she returns she hands me a pipe.

“Smoke this.”

“You want me to inhale smoke into my already messed-up lungs?”

She tells me it's medicine from her grandmother and I take it from her, find a match by the stove, and light it. I haven't smoked anything since I left home. As soon as the smoke hits the back of my throat I cough it all out. She laughs at me.

“Not so fast. Take a smaller drag.”

It's hot and rich. I hack up a wad of viscous, near-solid mucus, take a few steps into the trees, and spit it onto the ground. She's laughing at me when I come back.

“That was fast. You O.K.?”

“What is it?”

“It's a mixture. It's old, though. I'll have to collect new leaves.”

She takes my hand and we walk across the road to the clear-cut where we picked raspberries. She shows me the tall stalks of mullein with their spears of musky-smelling yellow flowers and, below these, the hairy leaves the colour of sage. She pulls a few of these off. We find elecampane growing in Martin and Jenifer's garden and coltsfoot in the ditch along the road. We tie them up and hang them from branches above the stove in our outdoor kitchen beside the gummy leaves of tobacco she grew in our garden and harvested recently.

I continue to smoke her grandmother's mixture while the leaves we gathered dry. Once they dry, she crumbles them and puts them in her leather pouch. I smoke a bit each afternoon and my bouts of hacking and wheezing abate. My asthma all but disappears. Go figure.

We wake to frost one morning the night of the full moon in September and Lina moves into my tent full-time. She says it will be warmer that way. Not that she needs an excuse. We hustle to finish the cabin, shingling the walls with cedar, framing the windows, and installing a wood stove and chimney. All this we do using only hand tools. I know that's not saying a lot — it's not the Chrysler Building — but it makes me proud every time I see the cabin in the clearing when I come home. And now it's finished.

We take our tents down and move into the cabin. What a difference. I sleep better because it's always dry, especially once we have the wood stove lit.

We finish splitting and piling our winter's wood supply against the cabin. On a warm afternoon in early October we walk through the woods to the pine grove. We make love on that spongy mattress, with bits of sun reaching the ground to keep us warm. I lie on my back. The pine branches have made room for one another over the past century, filling the sky but not criss-crossing, not getting in one another's way. These trees have spent a century and a half learning how to live together. My arm is around Lina and her head is on my chest.

“Could you see living here a long time?”

There is something unattainable about her. It's going to cause me pain.

“My father wanted me to have his name when I was born, but my mother wouldn't let him. She's a proud Wendat. Traditional. She wants me to come home and have a family.”

“Will you?”

“Maybe one day. I'm not through roaming.”

The sun moves behind the trees and I shiver in the shade.

Drowning, October 1994

The last night I saw my father he was dazed in the basement. It was Sunday night and I was headed back to college after coming home for the weekend. He had been drinking since suppertime. My ride was waiting out front as I went down to say goodbye. The car honked. Dad called me back from the hallway.

“How'd your exam go?”

“It's not till tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry, I forgot.”

On the way back to Lowell I sat in the back seat of my roommate's Civic, her friend in the passenger seat and some old Bowie playing too loud for me to hear what they were talking about. I didn't care, stuck in my own thoughts as I was, except that they kept turning around to include me in the conversation and I had to make an effort to hear them above the music. We pulled up to the house and I went straight to bed.

October 25

When the phone rang the next morning, I was lying on my back with my eyes open. I went to the kitchen, past the cat, and took the phone from my roommate, Justine. Who is it? I mouthed at her.

She shrugged and said, “Ask them not to call so early next time.”

The radio was on, broadcasting the day's news from the city. I took the phone.

It was the police. He was saying something about my father that I couldn't hear. There was a ringing in my ears that hadn't been there before he spoke. He said it again.

“There's been an accident. Your father was found unconscious.”

Then the ringing stopped. I had to pull it out of him by asking if Dad was all right before he told me he was dead. It was as if I had been expecting it for a long time and it was only at that instant that the realization surfaced. He said I needed to identify the body, and I didn't hear much after that because the word
body
floated through my head.
Body, body, body.

“Do you want an officer to drive you home?”

I told him no and hung up. Justine was brushing her teeth.
That is such an ordinary thing to be doing at this moment, this moment that is stretching so long.
I didn't want to have to tell her or anyone. As long as I didn't say a word everything would be all right. But she could see something was wrong and I had to say the words, as awkward as they felt fluttering out of my mouth.

That's not how it was meant to work, was it? To tell someone I barely knew that my world had capsized while she stood in front of a mirror getting ready for class. Where were the explosions and the blackouts and high winds knocking down trees? Justine hugged me but I was rigid; I was already calculating how to get the twenty-six miles home. There was a bus that didn't leave until late that evening, but I had to get home sooner than that. If I had been in better shape I could have run it. A marathon.

Justine offered to drive me. She talked most of the way, lightening the atmosphere and keeping my mind partially diverted. It was a beautiful fall day and I felt crummy for liking it. We pulled into the driveway and I got out, then watched the car back onto the street for the hour-long drive back. I needed to be in the house first, before I went to the morgue, so I would have something familiar to hold on to before I saw him. The place was tidy and smelled like it had been recently cleaned. I had been associating death with disorder. The police officer had implied that Dad had killed himself, which I didn't believe. I looked for a note on the counter, by the phone, on his desk. Nothing. But then I went upstairs to my room. The cover on my bed was neat and lying by the pillow were his skates, laced up and tied together.

Friends of his I didn't remember came to the house the night after the funeral. There were cousins I had never spent much time with, Dad's two siblings, a few of the teachers he had worked with, and a couple of students who had liked him. I assumed my mother would have to turn up, that she would walk through that door as suddenly as she had walked out of it. How could she not? As I stood in the kitchen that afternoon, after leaving Dad in a pine box at the church, I looked beyond each person I was talking to at the door. Her absence that afternoon stung more than the pine box had. My father's death hadn't solidified; I had spoken to him too recently to believe he was gone. But my mother? Wind whistling across an empty parking lot.

The darkness was gathering as the last guests left. I stood on the driveway looking at the garage door. I grabbed my hockey stick and a ball from the garage and started shooting it at the door, one-timing it again and again as it bounced back to me. Never again would I clean off the ball marks I was making. I ate some tuna casserole one of the neighbours had brought and went upstairs to bed. It was three nights before Halloween, the end of the year when the Celts say that the veil between this world and others is flimsiest. Things were dying, receding into the earth — that was obvious — and the air was crisp and clean. The living and the dead, what is spirit and what is flesh, more easily communicate when the veil is thin. I felt myself being tucked in. There was a pressure first at the sheets by my feet, then working its way up my back until finally my neck and shoulders were covered against the draft from the open window. I turned to the door, yellow with light from the hallway, but saw nothing.

A card from my mother arrived two days after the funeral, again in an envelope with no return address. She had heard about my father's death from a friend and said she was sorry that I had to deal with it alone. She said she wasn't well, that she had had a malignancy removed from her colon the previous summer, and that she would try to see me when she was feeling better.

Two weeks after the funeral I went home to bury my father. I picked up his ashes at the crematorium on the way. The clerk shook my hand and stared into my eyes without blinking. He handed me a heavy metal box over the counter as if I were buying a pizza. There was no way Dad was in that box.

It was late afternoon when I got to the house, and the sunlight was slanting through the kitchen window onto the counter where I had eaten all those breakfasts and carved pumpkins. The house was inhabited by a silence that was corporeal. I held the metal box filled with his ashes and bits of bone and struggled to remember what my dad's voice sounded like. The harder I concentrated, the farther away it receded. I put side three of his copy of
Quadrophenia
on the turntable and turned it way up to drown out the quiet.

Later I got the shovel from the garage and headed out to the backyard. At one end of where the rink had been, behind one of the goals, was the apple tree I had given my father when I was nine. A dozen shrivelled apples that I hadn't picked in October clung to its bare branches. I pushed the shovel into the ground beside the tree. Was this even legal? I folded the watercolour of Sam Peabody I had painted for him as well as a note the tooth fairy had left under my pillow, in his handwriting.
You have lost your last baby tooth. Here's 25¢. You are no longer a child.

I knelt beside the hole. I would have to sell the house; I'd never live there again and I could use the money. I pounded the ground and swore out loud. It wasn't money I wanted. If you have kids, you owe it to them to stick around, not disappear like a wisp of smoke. I lowered the box and the two pieces of folded paper into the hole. It wasn't until I received that lame card from my mother that I felt really angry. Did she give him the idea — the permission — to do his own disappearing act? I wanted her to leave me alone. I threw dirt into the hole until it was full, then hammered the mound down with my fists. When I stopped, the indentations of my knuckles were on the surface.