IT WAS a vivid countryside they drove through, green with new wheat, yellow with random spatters of wild mustard, blue with flax. The red and black cattle, their hides glistening with the greasy shine of good pasture, left off grazing to watch the car pass, pursued by a cloud of boiling dust. Poplar bluffs in the distance shook in the watery heat haze with a crazy light, crows whirled lazily in the sky like flakes of black ash rising from a fire.
The man, his wife, and their little boy were travelling to a Stiles family reunion. It was the woman who was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. Her husband was a Cosgrave.
The boy wasn’t entirely certain who he was. Of course, most times he was a Cosgrave. That was his name, Brian Anthony Cosgrave, and he was six years old and could spell every one of his names. But in the company of his mother’s people, somehow he became a Stiles. None of them saw anything but his mother in him: hair, eyes, nose, mouth – all were so like hers they might have been borrowed, relatives exclaimed. Since his father had no people (at least none that mattered enough to visit), Brian Anthony Cosgrave had never heard the other side of the story.
“For God’s sake, Jack,” Edith Cosgrave said, “stay away from the whiskey for once. It’s a warm day. If they offer you whiskey ask for a beer instead. On a hot day it isn’t rude to ask for a beer.”
“Yes, mother dear,” her husband said, eyes fixed on the grid road. “No, mother. If you please, mother. Christ.”
“You know as well as I do what happens when you drink whiskey, Jack. It goes down too easy and you lose count of how many you’ve had. I don’t begrudge you your beers. It’s that damn whiskey,” she said angrily.
“It tastes twice as good when I know the pain it costs a Stiles to put it on the table.”
“Or me to watch you guzzle it.”
“Shit.”
The Cosgrave family had the slightly harried and shabby look of people who, although not quite poor, know only too well and intimately the calculations involved in buying a new winter coat, eyeglasses, or a pair of shoes. Jack Cosgrave’s old black suit was sprung taut across his belly, pinched him under the armpits. It also showed a waxy-white scar on the shoulders where it had hung crookedly on a hanger, untouched for months.
His wife, however, had tried to rise to the occasion. This involved an attempt to dress up a white blouse and pleated skirt with two purchases: a cheap scarlet belt cinched tightly at her waist and a string of large red beads wound round her throat.
The boy sat numbly on the back seat in a starched white shirt, strangled by a clip-on bow tie and itching in his one pair of “good” pants – heavy wool trousers.
“They’re not to be borne without whiskey,” Cosgrave muttered, “your family.”
“And you’re not to be borne with it in you,” she answered sharply. But relented. Perhaps it did not pay to keep at him today. “Please, Jack,” she said, “let’s have a nice time for once. Don’t embarrass me. Be a gentleman. Let me hold my head up. Show some respect for my family.”
“That’s all I ask,” he said, speaking quickly. “I’d like a little respect from them. They all look at me as if I was something the goddamn cat dragged in and dropped in the front parlour.” Saying this, he gave an angry little spurt to the gas pedal for emphasis and the car responded by slewing around in the loose gravel on the road, pebbles chattering on the undercarriage.
So like Jack, she thought, to be a bit reckless. A careless, passionate man. It was what drew her to him in the beginning. His recklessness, his charming ways, his sweet cunning. So different from what she had learned of the male character from observing her brothers: slow, apple-faced men who plodded about their business, the languor of routine steeped deep into their heavy limbs.
Edith Cosgrave glanced at her husband’s face. A face dark with furious blood, dark as a plum. He was right in believing her family didn’t think much of him. She could not deny it. A man meant to work for wages all his life, that was how her brothers would put it. She only wished Jack had not failed in that first business. It had been his one chance, bought with the little money his father had left him. He was unsuited to taking orders, job after job had proved that. Now he found himself a clerk, standing behind a counter in a hardware store, courtly and gallant to women, patient with children, sullen and rude to men. Faithful to his conception of what a man owed to pride.
“It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “Don’t get your Irish up.”
He smiled suddenly, a crooked, delighted grin. “If one of them, just one of them, happens to mention – as they always do, the bastards – that this car is getting long in the tooth, why, my dear, that Stiles sleeps tonight cold in the ground with a clay comforter, I swear. Who gives a shit if my car is nine years old? I don’t. Nineteen forty-six was a very good year for Fords. A good year in general, wasn’t it, mother?”
“You’re a fool,” she said. It was the year they had married. “And whether it was a good year or not depends on how you look at it.” Still, she was glad to see his dark mood broken, and couldn’t help smiling back at him with a mixture of relief and indulgence. The man could smile, she had to grant him that.
“How long is this holy, blessed event, this gathering of the tribe Stiles, to continue?” he asked with the heavy irony that had become second nature whenever he spoke of his in-laws.
“I don’t have the faintest. When you’re ready to leave just say so.”
“Oh no. I’m not bearing that awful responsibility. I can see them all now, casting that baleful Stiles look, the one your father used to give me, certain that I’m tearing you against your will out of the soft, warm bosom of the family. Poor Edith.”
“Jack.”
“What we need is a secret signal,” Cosgrave said, delighted as always by any fanciful notion that happened to strike him. “What if I stamp my foot three times when I want to go home? Like this.” He pounded his left foot down on the floorboards three times, slowly and deliberately, like a carnival horse stamping out the solution to an arithmetic puzzle for the wondering, gaping yokels.
Brian laughed exuberantly.
“No, no,” his father declared, glancing over his shoulder at the boy, playing to his audience, “that won’t do. If I know your mother she’d just pretend to think that my foot had gone to sleep and ignore me. I know her ways, the rascal.”
“Watch the road or you’ll murder us all.”
“What if I hum a tune? That would be the ticket. Who’d catch on to that?”
“Goodnight Irene,” his wife suggested, entering into the spirit of the thing. “You used to sing it to me when you left me on the doorstep when we were going out.” She winked at Brian. He flung his torso over the front seat, wriggled his shoulders, and giggled.
“Mind your shirt buttons,” his mother warned him, “or you’ll tear them off.”
“My dear woman, you must have me confused with what’s his name, Arnold Something-or-other. He was the type to croon on doorsteps. I was much more forward. If you remember.”
“Jack, watch your mouth. Little pitchers have big ears.”
“Anyway,” he carried on, “ ‘Goodnight Irene’ isn’t it. How about ‘God Save the Queen’? Much more appropriate to conclude a boring occasion. Standard fare to bring to an end any gathering in this fair Dominion. After all, it’s one of your favourites, Edith. I’ll pay a little vocal tribute to Her Majesty, Missus the Duke, by the Grace of God, etc. How does that strike you, honey?”
He was teasing her. For although the Stileses’ hard-headed toughness ran deep in his wife, she had a romantic weakness for the royal family. There was her scrapbook of coronation pictures, her tears for Captain Townsend and the Princess. And, most treasured of all, a satin bookmark with Edward VIII’s abdication speech printed on it. She had been a girl when he relinquished the crown and it had seemed to her that Edward’s love for Mrs. Simpson was something so fine, so beyond earthly considerations, that the capacity for such feelings had to be the birthright of kings. Only a king could love like that.
“Don’t tease, Jack,” she said, lips tightening.
Brian flung himself back against the back seat, sobered by the knowledge she meant business. The game, the light-heartedness, were at an end.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” his father said testily, “now we’re offended for the bloody Queen.”
“You never know when enough is enough, do you? You’ve always got to push it. So what if I feel a certain way about the Queen? Or my family? Why can’t you respect that?”
The car rushed down into a little valley where a creek had slipped its banks and puddled on the bay flats, bright as mercury. The Ford ground up the opposing hills. Swearing and double-clutching, his father had to gear down twice to make the grade. A few miles on, a sign greeted them. Brian, who read even cornflakes boxes aloud, said carefully: “Welcome to Manitoba.”
The town was an old one judged by prairie standards and had the settled, completed look that most lack. Where Brian lived there were no red-brick houses built by settlers from Ontario, fewer mountain ashes or elms planted on the streets. The quality of the shade these trees cast surprised him when he stepped from the car. It swam, glided over the earth. It was full of breezes and sudden glittering shifts of light. Yet it was deeper, cooler, bluer than any he could remember. He threw his head back and stared, perplexed, into a net of branches.
His mother took him by the hand, and, his father following, they started up the walk to what had been her father’s house and now was her eldest brother’s. A big house, two storeys of mustard-coloured stucco, white trim, and green shingles, it stood on a double lot. The lawn was dotted with relatives.
“They must have emptied the jails and asylums for the occasion,” his father observed. “Quite a turnout.”
“Jack,” Edith said perfunctorily as she struggled with the gate latch.
Brian could sense the current of excitement running in his mother’s body and he felt obscurely jealous. To see the familiar faces of aunts, uncles, brothers, and the cousins with whom she had idled away the summers of childhood had made his mother shed the tawdry adult years like a snake sheds an old and worn skin. Every one of them liked her. She was a favourite with them all. Even more so now that they felt sorry for her.
“Edith!” they cried when they hugged and kissed her. Brian had his hair rumpled and, in a confusion of adult legs, his toes stepped on once. An uncle picked him up, hefted him judiciously, pretended to guess his weight. “This is a big one!” he shouted. “A whopper! A hundred and ninety if he’s a pound!”
Jack Cosgrave stood uncomfortably a little off from the small crowd surrounding his wife, smiling uneasily, his hands thrust in his pockets. He took refuge in lighting a cigarette and appearing to study the second-storey windows of the house. He had spent one night up there in the first year of their marriage. But never again. That same year he had come to his father-in-law with a business proposition when the shoe store failed. A business proposition the miserable old shit had turned down flat. None of the rest of those Stileses needed to think things wouldn’t have been different for Jack Cosgrave if he had got a little help when he really needed it. If he had, he’d have been in clover this minute instead of walking around with his ass practically hanging out of his pants and nothing in his pockets to jingle but his balls.
“Brian,” said Edith, her arm loosely circling a sister-in-law’s waist, “you run along and play with your cousins. Over there, see?” She pointed to a group of kids flying around the lawn, chanting taunts to one another as they played tag. “Can’t catch me for a bumble bee!” squealed a pale girl with long, coltish legs.
“Just be careful you don’t get grass stains on your pants, okay, honey?”
The boy felt forlorn at this urging to join in. His mother, returned to her element, sure of the rich sympathies of blood, could not imagine the desolation he felt looking at those children’s strange faces.
“Bob, dear,” said Edith, turning to a brother, “keep an eye on Jack, won’t you? See that he doesn’t get lonely without me.” They all laughed. Among the stolid Stileses Edith had a reputation as a joker. Jack Cosgrave, looking at his wife’s open, relaxed face, seeing her easiness among these people, felt betrayed.
“Sure, sure thing, Edith,” replied her brother. He turned to Cosgrave, seemed to hesitate, touched him on the elbow. “Come along and say hello to the fellows, Jack.” He indicated a card table set under a Manitoba maple around which a group of men were sitting. They started for it together.
“Jack,” said Bob, “these are my cousins from Binscarth, Earl and George. You know Albert, of course.” Jack Cosgrave knew Albert. Albert was Edith’s youngest brother and the one who had the least use for him. “This here is Edith’s husband, Jack Cosgrave.”
“Hi, Jack, take a load off,” said one of the men. Earl, he thought it was. Cosgrave nodded to the table, but before he took a seat his eye was caught by his son standing, arms dangling hopelessly as he watched his cousins race across the grass. The boy was uncertain about the etiquette of entering games played by strangers in strange towns, on strange lawns.
“Pour Jack a rye.”
“You want 7-Up or Coke?” asked Albert, without a trace of interest in his voice.
“What?” The question had startled Cosgrave out of his study of his son.
“Coke or 7-Up.”
“7-Up.” He sat down, took the paper cup, and glanced at the sky. The blue had been burned out of it by a white sun. No wonder he was sweating. He loosened his tie and said the first thing that came to mind, “Well, this’ll make the crops come, boys.”
“What will?” asked Albert.
“This here sun,” said Jack, turning his palm up to the sky. “This heat.”
“Make the weeds come on my summer fallow. That’s what it’ll do,” declared Earl.
“Don’t you listen to Earl,” confided Bob. “He’s got the cleanest summer fallow in the municipality. You could eat off it.”
“Is that so?” said Jack. “I’d like to see that.”
“Go on with you,” said Earl to no one in particular. He was pleased.
The conversation ran on, random and disconnected. There was talk of the hard spring, calf scours, politics, Catholics, and curling. Totting up the score after four drinks, Jack concluded hard springs, calf scours, politics, and Catholics weren’t worth a cup of cold piss. That seemed to be the consensus. Curling, however, was all right. Provided a fellow didn’t run all over the province going to bonspiels and neglect his chores.
Jack helped himself to another drink and watched the tip of the shadow of a spruce advance slowly across the lawn. It’s aimed at my black heart, he thought, and speculated as to when it would reach it.
“I would have got black,” said Albert of his new car with satisfaction, “but you know how black shows dust. It’s as bad as white any day.”
“Maybe next year for me,” said George. “An automatic for sure. I could teach the wife to drive with an automatic.”
“Good reason not to get it,” said someone.
“Albert’s got power steering,” Bob informed Jack. “I told him he was crazy to pay extra for that. I said, ‘The day a man hasn’t got the strength to twist his own steering-wheel…,’ well, I don’t know.” He shook his head at how the very idea had rendered him speechless.
“What you driving now, Jack?” Albert asked smoothly, leaning across the table.
You conniving, malicious shit, thought Cosgrave. Still doing your level best to show me up. “The same car I had last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. In fact, as I said to Edith coming down here, I bought that car the year we got married.” He stared at Albert, defiance in his face.
“I wouldn’t have thought it was that old,” said Albert.
“Oh yes it is, Bert,” said Cosgrave. “That car is old. Older than dirt. Why, I’ve had that car almost as long as you’ve had the first nickel you ever made. And I won’t part with it. No, sir. I’d as soon part with that car as you would with your first nickel.”
“Ha ha!” blurted out cousin Earl. Then, embarrassed at breaking family ranks, he took a Big Ben pocket watch out of his trousers and looked at it, hard.
Jack Cosgrave was drunk and he knew it. Drunk and didn’t care. He reached for the whiskey bottle and, as he did, spotted Brian sitting stiffly by himself on the porch steps, his white shirt blazing in the hot sunshine.
“Brian!” he called. “Brian!”
The boy climbed off the steps and made his way slowly across the lawn. Cosgrave put his arm around him and drew him up against his side. His father’s breath was hot in the boy’s face. The sharp medicinal smell repelled him.
“Why aren’t you playing?”
Brian shrugged. Shyness had paralysed him; after a few half-hearted feints and diffident insults which had been ignored by the chaser, he had given up.
Jack Cosgrave saw that the other boys were now wrestling. Grappling, twisting and fencing with their feet, they flung one another to the grass. He pulled Brian closer to him, put his mouth to the boy’s ear and whispered: “Why don’t you get in there and show them what a Cosgrave can do? Whyn’t you toss a Stiles on his ass, eh?”
“Can’t,” mumbled Brian in an agony of self-consciousness.
“Why?”
“Mum says I have to keep my pants clean.”
“Sometimes your mother hasn’t got much sense,” Cosgrave said, baffled by the boy’s reluctance. Was he scared? “She’s got you all dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and expects you to have a good time. Give me that goddamn thing,” he said, pulling off the boy’s bow tie and putting it in his pocket. “Now go and have some fun.”
“These are my good pants,” Brian said stubbornly.
“Well, we’ll take them off,” said his father. “It’s a hot day.”
“No!” The child was shocked.
“Don’t be such a christly old woman. You’ve got boxer shorts on. They look like real shorts.”
“Jesus, you’re not going to take the kid’s pants off, are you?” inquired Albert.
Cosgrave looked up sharply. Albert wore the concentrated, stubborn look of a man with a grievance. “I am. What’s it to you?”
“Well, Jesus, we’re not Indians here or anything to have kids roaming around with no pants on.”
“No, I don’t want to,” whispered Brian.
“For chrissakes,” said Jack. “You’ve embarrassed the kid now. Why’d you do that? He’s only six years old.”
“It wasn’t him that wanted to take his pants off, was it? I don’t know how you were brought up, or dragged up maybe, but we were taught to keep our pants on in company. Isn’t that so, Bob?”
Bob didn’t reply. He composed his face and peered down into his paper cup.
“Bert,” said Jack, “you’re a pain in the arse. You’re also one hell of a small-minded son of a bitch.”
“I don’t think there’s any need -” began Bob.
“No, no,” said Albert. He held his hand up to silence his brother. “Jack feels he’s got things to get off his chest. Well, so do I. He thinks I’m small-minded. Maybe I am. I guess in his books a small-minded man is a man that lets a debt go for four years without once mentioning it. A man that never tries to collect. Is that a small-minded man, Jack? Is it? Because if it is, I plead guilty. And what do you call a man who doesn’t pay up? Welsher?”
“I never borrowed money from you in my life,” said Cosgrave thickly. “What she does is her business. I told her not to write and ask for money.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Hey, fellows,” said Bob anxiously, “this is a family occasion. No trouble, eh? There’s women and kids here.”
“I told her not to write! I can’t keep track of everything she does! I didn’t want your goddamn money!”
“In this family we know better,” said Albert Stiles. “We know who does and doesn’t hide behind his wife’s skirts. We know that in our family.”
Edith Cosgrave came down the porch steps just as her husband lunged to his feet, snatched a handful of her brother’s shirt and punched clumsily at his face. Albert’s folding chair tipped and the two of them spilled over in an angular pinwheel of limbs. It was only when sprawled on the grass that Jack finally did some damage by accidentally butting Albert on the bridge of the nose, sending a gush of blood down his lips. Then they were separated.
By the time Edith had run across the grass, ungainly on her heels, Bob was leading Albert to the house. Albert was holding his nose with his fingers, trying to stanch the blood which dripped on his cuffs and saying, “Son of a bitch, they’re going to have to cauterize this. Once my nose starts bleeding…”
A few women and children were standing some distance off, mute, staring. Jack was trying to button his suit jacket with trembling fingers. “That’ll hold him for a while, loudmouthed -” he began to say when he saw his wife approaching.
“Shut up,” she said in a level voice. “Shut your mouth. Your son is listening to you, for God’s sake.” She was right. The boy was listening and looking, face white and curdled with fright. “And if you hadn’t noticed, the others are politely standing over there, gawking at the wild colonial boy. You’re drunk and you’re disgusting.”
“I’m not drunk.”
She slapped him hard enough to make his eyes water, his ears ring. “Christ,” he said, stunned. She had never hit him before.
“You’re a drunken, stupid pig,” she said. “I’m sick of the sight of you.”
“Don’t you ever hit me again, you bitch.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
“Don’t you ever give me reason to again. Stop ruining my life.”
“You don’t want to hear my side. You never do.”
“I’ve heard it for nine years.”
“He was yapping about that hundred dollars you borrowed. I said it wasn’t any of my affair. I want you to tell him I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Nothing at all. No, you didn’t have anything to do with it. You just ate the groceries it bought.”
“I didn’t ask him for anything. I wouldn’t ask him for sweet fuck all.”
“Don’t fool yourself. You don’t like being hungry any better than I do. Don’t pretend you didn’t want me to ask him for the money. Don’t fool yourself. You needed my brother Albert because you couldn’t take care of your family. Could you?”
Cosgrave straightened himself and touched the knot of his tie. “We’re going,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her last words, “get the boy ready.”
“The hell we are! I want you to apologize to Albert. Families don’t forgive things like this.”
“It’ll be a frosty fucking Friday in hell the day I apologize to Albert Stiles. We’re leaving.”
“No we aren’t. Brian and I are staying. This is my day and I’m having it.”
“All right, it’s your day. Welcome to it. But it sure isn’t mine. If you don’t come now, don’t expect me back.”
His wife said nothing.
It was only when he turned up the street and headed for the beer parlour, his shoulders twisted in his black suit, feet savage on the gravel, that Brian trotted after him, uncertainly, like a dog. The short legs stumbled; the face was pale, afflicted.
His father stopped in the road. “Go back!” he shouted, made furious by his son’s helplessness, his abjectness. “Get back there with your mother! Where you both belong!” And then, without thinking, Cosgrave stooped, picked up a tiny pebble and flung it lightly in the direction of his son, who stood in the street in his starched white shirt and prickly wool pants, face working.
By nine o’clock that night the last dirty cup had been washed and the last Stiles had departed. Edith, Brian, Bob and his wife went out to sit in the screened verandah.
It was one of those nights in early summer when the light bleeds drowsily out of the sky, and the sounds of dogs and children falter and die suddenly in the streets when darkness comes. In the peace of such evenings, talk slumbers in the blood, and sentences grow laconic.
Edith mentioned him first. “He may not be back, you know,” she said. “You may be stuck with us, Bob.”
“His car’s still in the street.”
“What I mean is, he won’t come to the house. And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him.”
“It’s your business, Edith. You know you’re welcome.”
“He’s always lied to himself, you know?” she said calmly. “It’s that I get tired of mostly. Big ideas, big schemes. He won’t be what he is. I don’t complain about the other. He doesn’t drink as much as people think. You’re mostly wrong about him, all of you, on that count.”
Brian sat, his legs thrust stiffly out in front of him, eyes fixed on the street where the dark ran thickest and swiftest under the elms.
“You should cry,” suggested her sister-in-law. “Nobody would mind.”
“I would. I did all my crying the first year we were married. One thing about him, he’s obvious. I saw it all the first year. Forewarned is forearmed. But if he blows that horn he can go to hell. If he blows it. I never hit him before,” she said softly.
They sat for a time, silent, listening to the moths batter their fat, soft bodies against the naked bulb over the door. It was Brian who saw him first, making his way up the street. “Mum,” he said, pointing.
They watched him walk up the street with that precarious precision a drunk adopts to disguise his drunkenness.
“He won’t set foot on this place. He’s too proud,” said Edith. “And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him. I’ve had it up to here.”
Cosgrave walked to the front of the property and faced the house. For the people on the verandah it was difficult to make him out beneath the trees, but he saw his wife and son sitting in a cage of light, faces white and burning under the glare of the lightbulb, their features slightly out of focus behind the fine screen mesh. He stood without moving for a minute, then he began to sing in a clear, light tenor. The words rang across the lawn, incongruous, sad.
“Jesus Christ,” said Bob, “the man’s not only drunk, he’s crazy.”
Edith leaned forward in her chair and placed her hand against the screen. The vague figure whose face she could not see continued to sing to her across the intervening reaches of night. He sang without a trace of his habitual irony. Where she would have expected a joke there was none. The voice she heard was not the voice of a man in a cheap black suit, a man full of beer and lies. She had, for a fleeting moment, a lover serenading her under the elms. It was as close as he would ever come to an apology or an invitation. Jack Cosgrave was not capable of doing any more and she knew it.
God save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen.
Send her victorious,
Happy and glorious…
Edith Cosgrave was not deluded. Not really. She was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. She got to her feet and took Brian by the hand. “Well,” she said to her brother, “I guess I can take a hint as well as the next person. I think the bastard is saying he wants to go home.”