A cheerless Saturday morning in October found Daniel standing beside his grandfather’s pickup in a windy street, waiting for the old man to come out of his house. With each new gust the wind seemed to gather strength, setting all the naked elms which lined Monkman’s street swaying and creaking faintly. By nightfall their broken branches would litter the road. On Main Street, the tin store signs flapped and clanged as clouds of grit were driven down its length with the force of buckshot, pinging softly wherever they struck glass. Overhead the sky was streaked like a river heavy with silt, murky with the dust swept up from farmers’ fields and scurried into the heavens. A blanched, fuzzy sun tried to break out from behind this dirty grey curtain.
Daniel, shivering, leaned his back into the wind, wobbling indecisively on his heels when he lost his balance in its violent fluctuations. Every now and then he blew on his numb red fingers and then drew them up inside the sleeves of his jacket. Underneath the jacket he was wearing a white shirt and tie as his grandfather had requested.
He wondered if maybe being so nervous made him feel the cold more. There were times – if he was really nervous – that he shivered in a perfectly warm room. Now he trembled like a leaf thinking about how he was going to tell Alec it was out of the question, there was no way he was going to do what he wanted. It wasn’t so very long ago that he had stepped out of his grandfather’s house and into the windy street in the hope that he would find there the courage to say what had to be said. He hadn’t though.
Now he repeatedly and impatiently glanced at the front door, wanting his grandfather to make an appearance so he would be forced to settle it. When Daniel had left him over a quarter of an hour ago, his grandfather had promised to be right out. So where the hell was he? Dawdling and pottering, most likely. Checking all the lights and the burners on the stove for the tenth time, looking for the cigarettes or matches he had mislaid. He was getting to be a proper pain in the ass to get moving, apt to lose track of time and things, speedy as a drugged snail. Hurry up for chrissakes, don’t you know it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out here?
Daniel had debated climbing into the cab of the truck where he would be warmer out of the wind, but he worried he would feel trapped again, like he had in the house. He was still convinced it was wiser to break the news to his grandfather out in the street, rather than inside the house, or inside the truck where the old man had a chance to corner him. Inside anywhere Alec might be tough to escape. But out in the street if the old boy started to argue and kick up a fuss all Daniel had to do was turn away and walk off in any direction. That was his right, wasn’t it? There was nothing that said he had to go along with every crazy idea the old bugger dreamed up, was there?
When his grandfather had raised the matter nine or ten days ago, Daniel had naturally assumed he was speaking of some time in the far distant future, not thinking in terms of weeks or even days. He remembered how and when Alec had broached the topic because it was at an historic moment, only minutes after Bill Mazeroski had homered in the last half of the ninth inning to give the Pirates a ten-nine win and the World Series. Daniel was still crowing in triumph over the two dollars his grandfather had handed him to settle their World Series bet when Alec suddenly said: “I been thinking – some time you and me ought to take a trip.”
“Why not?” Daniel, vindicated, grinned delightedly. It wasn’t just the two dollars which had put him in a good mood, it was also coming out on top for once. He had finally got the better of him. The old bugger’s jaw muscles had locked when he saw that rocket from Mazeroski’s bat go sailing over the fence. For a second he looked like a man pissing ground glass. Tough titty.
“A long trip,” his grandfather qualified.
“The longer the better,” said Daniel.
“Of course, with my eyes the way they are lately,” said Alec, “you’d have to do the driving. Be my chauffeur.”
His pronunciation made Daniel smile. Chuffer, he’d said. Be my chuffer. “I’m your man,” Daniel agreed. “The two of us’ll see the world together. You and me.”
“Good,” said Alec, nodding his head. “Good.”
Nothing more had been mentioned until several days later when Alec began to think aloud in Daniel’s presence. “I guess it would have to be on a Saturday,” he mused, “when you don’t have school?”
Daniel didn’t have a clue to what he was referring. “What would have to be on a Saturday?”
“The day we take our trip – it would have to be on a Saturday, wouldn’t it?” asked the old man earnestly. It was his earnest air which led Daniel to suspect a joke. His grandfather was always particularly, devoutly earnest when he argued that pro wrestling was on the up and up.
“For sure a Saturday,” said Daniel, assuming an equally serious manner. “Even a globe trotter like me can’t afford to miss school.”
In the next few days Daniel watched his grandfather’s prank grow more elaborate and detailed. Alec related his plans to make the truck roadworthy for a long trip. It needed an oil change and wheel alignment and while it was in the garage he might as well put new tires on all around, didn’t Daniel think? Daniel soberly thought and agreed. Two could play this game. Yes, by all means, tires all around. And his grandfather went off, pretending to order it done.
On Thursday, however, when his grandfather had set their departure for eight o’clock Saturday morning, and issued directions as to how Daniel was to dress for the trip, the boy experienced a pang of uncertainty. But reason urged him to dismiss it and he did. In the past his grandfather might have allowed him to pilot the truck on country backroads where cops never patrolled and traffic was virtually non-existent, but he had more sense than to encourage an unlicenced thirteen year old to venture out on the highways. Daniel’s height alone would make him conspicuous behind the wheel. The RCMP would stop and charge them before they made fifty miles.
Daniel, with spiralling anxiety, wished his grandfather would give up his practical joke. But there were no signs he was ready to relent, not even when Daniel provided him with opportunities to make a clean breast of it. When Daniel had asked: “So where are we going Saturday, on this big trip of ours?” his grandfather had replied: “Saturday’s soon enough to know. Marching orders issued Saturday.” Then, with hesitation. “You haven’t said a word to her now, have you?”
Daniel had sworn he hadn’t.
Putting on a white shirt and tie this morning, as his grandfather had told him he must, was part of Daniel’s attempt to turn the tables on Alec. Hoist him with his own petard, as Mr. Gibson who taught Shakespeare was fond of saying. If that old fart thought he was going to have a good laugh at Daniel’s expense, tricking him into a white shirt, a tie, and expectations of a trip, he’d better think again. Because how would Alec feel if, rather than going all foolish and sheepish at falling for a practical joke, instead Daniel went all downcast and heart-broken?
Alec might learn that there was more than one actor in this family. Oh, how could you play such a mean trick when you knew how I was looking forward to this? he’d accuse him mournfully. It’s a pretty raw deal, if you ask me, to raise a person’s hopes way up and then crush them.
He’d feel King Shit of Turd Island then, wouldn’t he?
And the bonus would be beating the old bugger twice in less than ten days. First the World Series, then giving him a dose of his own brand of mischief. He who laughs last, laughs best.
Yet this morning it had only taken Daniel a minute to realize the mistake was his. His grandfather really did expect them to leave on a trip within the hour. For Alec it was no joke, but a certainty, real. There he was, all in a fuss in his Sunday best, a wrinkled, dark blue suit. “There’s something else,” he kept muttering to himself as he quick-shuffled his feet from room to room. “Just hold your horses. It won’t take me but a second to find it once I think of it.” Daniel couldn’t take his eyes from the huge black oxfords which Alec dragged back and forth on the linoleum. He could see his grandfather had made a disastrous attempt at polishing the shoes. His eyesight must be as bad as he claimed because there were thick dabs and crumbs of polish stuck like mud to the oxfords, which left a dull, streaky finish.
Suddenly the old man brought himself up short, frozen in the effort to recollect what was nagging at him. Grandfather and grandson stood face to face. The boy glimpsed a series of black smudges all down Alec’s white shirt front, fingerprints left behind when he did up his buttons with shoe polish sticking to his fingers.
He’s dotty, thought Daniel.
A surge of blood chased this unbidden thought and heated his face. It was then he rushed off outside, to wait in the street and consider what he must do.
There was no longer any question that Alec meant what he said. The truck was the clincher. In all the time Daniel had known him his grandfather had never once washed or cleaned the truck. This morning it gleamed, even under the muddy sky. Months, maybe years, of mud and dust had been hosed and scrubbed from fenders and door panels. His grandfather would never have carried any joke that far. Never.
Every few seconds Daniel cast an apprehensive eye at the house. What in Christ was keeping him? It had been almost twenty minutes. Then the door opened and Daniel could guess the reason for the delay.
His grandfather forged his way down the walk, swerving unsteadily from side to side as he was buffeted by the wind, his suit jacket tail whipping and flickering out behind him, his left hand grimly pinning his hat to his head. Held tightly in his right fist an enormous bouquet of artificial flowers he had spent the last quarter of an hour turning the house upside down for wildly fluttered and flaunted their blooms in the gale. Mrs. Harding, the beautician famous for her useful hobbies, whom he had appealed to when he realized that all his own flowers were brown and withered in the garden, was much celebrated for her skill at manufacturing paper flowers to decorate wedding cars, high school graduation exercises, and anniversary parties. The bouquet Alec bore was testimony to her floral artistry. For him she had created three dozen red crêpe-paper poppies tastefully set off by contrasting Kleenex carnations in pink, yellow, and white. Each of Mrs. Harding’s flowers was furnished with wire coat-hanger stems wrapped in green tape.
Daniel’s need to purge himself of his bad news made him rude and abrupt. No sooner had his grandfather reached the truck than Daniel lunged forward at him, desperately shouting, “I can’t go. Forget it. There’s no way I can go. Just forget this trip, okay?” But his words were drowned in the roar of the wind, scattered harmless down the street.
“What?” shouted back Alec. “What?” He went to cup his hand behind his ear but when it came up full of artificial flowers, confounded he had to let it fall back down to his side. He leaned forward and tried to tip his head to better catch what his grandson had to say. When he did, the wind curled up his hat brim and the fedora shuddered, threatening to take flight.
“I can’t go on any trip with you!” cried Daniel, going up on tiptoe so that he was shouting directly into his grandfather’s face. Still, his grandfather couldn’t grasp what he said. The old man shook his head and gestured impatiently toward the truck, waving the bouquet. “You’ll have to get out of this wind! I can’t make out a goddamn thing you say!” he bellowed, jerking open the passenger door and clambering into the cab. Daniel was left no alternative except to crawl in on the driver’s side, where he didn’t want to be. He slammed the door and sat clenching the steering wheel while the old man fussily arranged the gaudy, showy abundance of the bouquet on the seat beside him. What was he doing with pretend flowers? Could it be that the old fart was angling to pay a visit to some woman? Daniel found the notion pretty disgusting. Yet he knew it was possible. One of Pooch Gardiner’s admirers had been nearly as old as his grandfather. Old Softy was Lyle’s nickname for him.
It seemed to have slipped his grandfather’s mind that Daniel had something to say to him. He was lost in sorting through his flowers, examining them for damage and carefully setting aside any whose petals had been torn by the wind.
“I can’t go on any trip with you,” said Daniel. His voice, pitched to overcome wind, was much too loud for the small space and quiet of the cab. “I just can’t,” he added, dropping his voice.
Monkman did not lift his eyes from the flowers. Only a pause in the sorting signalled he had heard his grandson. A white carnation hung still in his fingers. He twirled the stem and the bloom spun. “We aren’t going too far,” he said.
Daniel, his eyes fastened on the dizzy blur of spinning white, was tempted to say, We aren’t going anywhere. Instead, he asked, “How far is not too far?”
“A hundred and ten, maybe a hundred and twenty miles one way.”
“On the highway?”
“On the highway,” confirmed Alec quietly. He glanced up at the boy for the first time.
The undisguised, naked eagerness Daniel encountered in his grandfather’s face caused him to lower his eyes. “I can’t drive on the highway without a licence,” he said. “The police would arrest us.”
His grandfather’s failure to agree, his silence, condemned Daniel. Guiltily, the boy could feel Alec’s eyes crawling up the back of his neck. He struck out angrily. “Where do you get such a goddamn stupid idea! Expecting I could drive you so far! I couldn’t manage it. I’d likely kill us and somebody else too! You’ve got no business asking me to do it! What got into you? You ought to know better. You want to get us both into serious trouble?”
The only reply to this outburst was the dry stirring and rustling of paper. Daniel threw a furtive, sidelong look in the old man’s direction and discovered that he was gathering all the artificial flowers into his lap. They lay in a profuse, tangled heap across his thighs, a drift of blossoms banked against the bulge of his belly.
Alec, when he detected Daniel spying on him, said with dignity, “You promised.”
“I thought it was a joke. Honest I did.”
“You promised, and I got nobody else to take me.”
“There’s always Stutz,” suggested the boy.
“Stutz,” said his grandfather, scorn surfacing in his voice. “Stutz’s kept busy acting as banker and handyman to your mother. He’s got no time for me. No, I’ll leave Stutz to the kind of company he prefers.”
His stubbornness only succeeded in exasperating Daniel. “I don’t get it,” he said sharply “Where is it that you’ve got to go all of a sudden? What is it you’ve got to see? And what’re you doing with those stupid-looking flowers? Who are they for? You got a ladyfriend or something?”
“Earl,” said Alec. “The flowers are for Earl.”
Daniel’s surprise at this answer drove any other questions out of his head for the moment. In the ensuing silence he became aware of the ferocity of the wind’s assault upon the truck – he could feel it rocking and jarring beneath him. The sloppy swaying of the chassis and the intense, fixed gaze of his grandfather through the windshield produced a queer sensation in the boy; he fell prey to the illusion that the truck was actually travelling down a road he could not see, a road hidden from him but clear and plain to his grandfather’s staring eyes.
Unable to understand what he had been told, Daniel asked, doubtfully, “Earl? Do you mean to say you want to take these flowers to Earl?”
“Yes,” said Alec. His eyes remained trained down the long, straight street. “That’s right. To Earl.”
Daniel was confused. He tried to remember how his grandfather had answered his last questions as to Uncle Earl’s whereabouts. Finding his Uncle Earl’s name scratched on the yellow wall had made Daniel curious about him. He had wondered if it wasn’t possible that the two of them, uncle and nephew, might not share some profound family resemblance. Daniel could recognize little of himself in either his mother or grandfather, and the desire to find himself in another was strong. For a time he had been full of questions about Earl, questions that his grandfather seemed to wish to avoid answering. The last thing he had learned about Earl was that he was in the States, working on an oil-drilling rig. That was what his grandfather had told him.
“So Earl’s back?” Daniel inquired innocently. “Back in Canada?”
The old man’s head snapped furiously around.
“Back?” His voice was grating, harsh. “What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about – back? Earl’s dead. He’s dead.”
It sounded like an accusation. As if his grandfather was accusing him, Daniel, of murdering Earl. But what he was saying had to be wrong. “Dead?” said Daniel. “He can’t be dead.” Then a possibility struck him. “Has there been an accident? Tell me, did Uncle Earl have an accident on his drilling rig?”
“He’s been dead since July 21, 1948,” said the old man in a dull voice, spent now of its earlier fury, earlier passion.
“What’re you talking about, dead since then?” demanded Daniel fearfully. Was his grandfather really crazy? “Not Earl. You don’t mean Earl. You’ve mixed him up with somebody else. Maybe somebody whose name sounds like his. Talk sense. Think. Just a couple of months ago you said he was working in the States. That’s what you told me, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you?”
“It was July 21, 1948 Earl died,” said his grandfather wearily. “Died in that goddamn hospital full of nurses and doctors and not one of them – not one – ever did him an ounce of good. I should have kept him at home for all the good was ever done him there.”
“But that can’t be!” Daniel objected, incredulous. “That was twelve years ago. Twelve years? I mean -” he fumbled, attempting to express himself, “I mean people aren’t dead twelve years and nobody knows.”
“Stutz knows. I know. Now you do, too.”
But Daniel didn’t want to know. Not this. “It’s crazy what you’re saying. How could Mom not know? His own sister. His own sister would have to know. She’d have to know.”
“I don’t quite understand how it happened myself,” said his grandfather quietly. “I didn’t plan it. One thing led to another and somehow it got away on me, I couldn’t turn back. It started the summer – it was the summer Earl came down with his nervous trouble – I mean to say, well, his nerves got bad and they said he’d have to go away to the hospital. Stutz and me figured at most he’d be gone a couple of weeks, no more, that they’d get him rested up and we’d have him home again in no time. So I didn’t see any point in upsetting your mother with that kind of news. Especially as we looked on it as… as temporary, I didn’t think she’d ever need to hear about it. Anyway, well,” he said, stumbling as he explained himself, “if she heard how it was with Earl she was likely to put the blame on me for it. Your mother and I weren’t on the best of terms at any rate, so I didn’t think there was any percentage in stirring things up. Let sleeping dogs lie, I thought to myself.
“The problem with all my figuring was that Earl was gone a long time longer than I had counted on. The thing was – he’d stopped talking. The doctors in that place were determined to get him talking, but no dice, he wouldn’t. Mostly he just sat. He sat through the fall and he sat through the winter and he sat through the spring and not a word out of him. The fucking doctors couldn’t fix him. Then come summer in that place he came down with the other – the spinal meningitis. How was it he caught a disease in a hospital where nobody was really sick? They couldn’t explain that one to me. Had an explanation for everything else wrong with him but not for that.
“Then he talked – with the spinal meningitis he talked. The doctors couldn’t make him talk but the meningitis could. Fever had him talking the whole of the day before he died. It isn’t something I care to remember… him talking in this stuffy little room with the flies buzzing and dancing against the window screen and the meningitis curling him up on the sheet. He just curled and curled like something drying up maybe, a leaf or something. And there was a smell in the room, I remember this smell – and somebody shouting down the hallway and Earl curling up.”
He stopped, rubbed his forehead slowly and deliberately with his fingertips. “Stutz had to take me out when he died. It was me shouting then. By Christ, yes. I was telling those doctor bastards what I thought. Shouting how come it was that you went into their hospital with one thing and went out in a box with another.” He laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I had plenty to tell them. It was different when it came to your mother. I had nothing to say to her. How was it going to look me not notifying her of how things had stood with her brother for eleven months and then suddenly writing that he was dead, all the how and when and where of it? All of that which has to be explained at such a time. Because people are full of questions then, it’s natural. I knew she’d never forgive me, that it would finish it with us. I kept thinking that if I could get face to face with her then I could explain it the way I couldn’t in a letter, make her see that I meant the best for him, did my best for him – that it wasn’t my fault.
“Because I did do my best for him,” said Alec, beginning to speak more emphatically. “It’s God’s truth that I did. I visited him once a week over bad roads in every kind of weather – a hundred and twenty miles there and a hundred and twenty miles back. I made sure they kept him nice in there. Every visit I brought him a new shirt, or pants, or sweater, or shoes. Something so he’d know. And I kept bringing them until the doctors and nurses said I should stop. That’s why I quit it. They said it was making the other patients jealous how he was dressed. It was causing trouble. They had started stealing his things, or maybe he was giving them away. Two of them dividing up his clothes had got in a fight. I seen the doctors’ point. What they said was true, I suppose. I seen it myself, a fellow walking around on the ward bold as brass in a shirt I’d bought for Earl. Earl’s shirt he was walking around in.
“But the thing is… the thing is I never got a chance to explain to your mother how it was because she never came home. So there I was, lying. And the longer the lying went on, the harder I knew it was going to be to tell her. For all those years I carried it, and then the two of you came home to me and when I finally came face to face with your mother I could see it was no good. I saw there was no explanation she would accept after all that time. Whatever I said would only push us farther apart.” He dropped his voice. “So I didn’t say nothing. I kept quiet.”
Daniel shifted on the truck seat, cleared his throat. “So if Earl’s dead, where is he?”
The old man roused himself, blinked his eyes. “Beg pardon?”
“So where is he – Earl?”
“There’s a graveyard on the hospital grounds,” said the old man matter-of-factly. “He’s buried there.” Monkman knew how that must sound to the boy, hard, unfeeling. He also knew it was beyond his power to explain why he had done what he had done. There could be no putting into words what had prompted his decision not to bring Earl home for burial. Part of it had been not knowing whether he possessed the strength to see the boy lying beside his mother, beside Martha. Seeing that would have made his losses somehow crueller, unbearable. But there was more to it than even that reluctance. There was the trick, the game he had already started to play with himself. If Earl’s grave was not in Connaught, reminding him, it might be possible to imagine him some place far away like Vera was, not forever lost but capable of someday finding his way home like Vera could.
If the old man could not entirely correct the impression his bald statement about Earl’s burial had left with the boy, at least he could try to soften it. “That’s what I had in mind for you today,” he continued, “to show you where Earl is. It’s been a while since I was there…” Faltering, he broke off and tried another tack. “I had these flowers made special for him,” he declared, staring down at his lap. “Flowers for winter,” he explained, “they don’t freeze.” Alec lifted his eyes to the dirty dishwater sky. “It won’t be long now before the snow flies. I ought to get my garden cleared…” He lost the thought, the sentence trailed away. He began again. Daniel sensed his effort to concentrate, to speak firmly. “I thought you would take me,” he said, “and that I could show you where he is, so when the time comes you can tell your mother.”
“What do you mean when the time comes?”
His grandfather tried to smile but only succeeded in baring his false teeth in a disturbing grimace. “Maybe you haven’t noticed but I’m no spring chicken. I’m getting on. While I’m still alive I don’t want your mother to know any of this, but after – well, she has to finally know, doesn’t she? And another thing, I’ve been thinking Earl ought to be brought home. You can tell her that for me, can’t you? Tell her to bring Earl home. She’s been left most everything I got so she can afford it. Tell her to bring him home, won’t you?”
Hearing him beg made Daniel uncomfortable. “Stutz knows all this stuff,” he said uneasily. “Let Stutz tell her. Why do you want to get me involved in all of this? I’ve got enough trouble of my own with her. I don’t need any of this shit.”
His grandfather went on doggedly pressuring him. “No,” he said. “This is family. It’s for the three of us to settle. I want you to settle it for me, Daniel. Would you do that? I want you to promise me you’ll tell her – but not before time. Remember, not before time. I’ve got to know in my mind it’s taken care of. Promise.”
The way he was carrying on, Daniel didn’t see he had any choice but to promise. Seeing the old man in such a helpless state was upsetting. Yet it made him angry, too, because this was not a kid’s business. What right did he have foisting it off on him? It felt like blackmail. “All right,” Daniel snapped, only wanting to shut him up, “so I promise.”
“Good, good,” breathed the old man. But the relief Daniel’s pledge gave Alec was only temporary. He started in again. “Don’t you think we could go?” he wheedled. “It’s not really so far and nobody’s going to stop us. If you’re worried about looking small behind the wheel we can set you up on a cushion so you sit every bit as tall as me. That would do it, don’t you think?”
What Daniel thought could be surmised. He was pointedly ignoring the old man, looking away from him, across the road and into a neighbour’s yard where the storm-shattered limb of an austere and venerable elm dangled, hanging from a pliable shred of the tree’s tough inner bark and twisting in the wind.
“Look at all these flowers made special for Earl,” implored Alec. “Mrs. Harding put a drop of perfume on each of the paper heads so they’d be as near real flowers as can be. What’s the use of these flowers if we don’t go? It’d be a terrible waste. Just smell them,” he coaxed, holding out a few to the boy.
Daniel knocked them aside with the back of his hand. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just leave me alone? I can’t take you. Why do you keep at me? How many times do you need to be told? Do you want to get me in trouble? Do you believe she won’t find out if I take you? She always finds out!” he cried.
“Daniel -”
But Daniel had finished with him. The boy flung himself out of the truck, slamming the door on the startled face of an old man awash in artificial flowers.
It was shame that drove Daniel to run down the bare, windy road, shame at disappointing someone he had only just that minute realized he loved.