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  Man Descending

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  A collection of stories

  These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as convincingly as he reveals it through the eyes of an old man approaching senility. Moving from the hilarious farce of teenage romance all the way to the numbing tragedy of life in a ward for incurables, these twelve stories inspire belief, admiration, and enjoyment, and come together to form a vibrant chronicle of human experience from a gifted observer of life's joys and tribulations. This is Guy Vanderhaeghe's brilliant first book of fiction.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Man Descending

  Copyright © 1982 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Afterword copyright © 2004 by Leo McKay.

  The Watcher

  I SUPPOSE it was having a bad chest that turned me into an observer, a watcher, at an early age.

  “Charlie has my chest,” my mother often informed friends. “A real weakness there,” she would add significantly, thumping her own wishbone soundly.

  I suppose I had. Family lore had me narrowly escaping death from pneumonia at the age of four. It seems I spent an entire Sunday in delirium, soaking the sheets. Dr. Carlyle was off at the reservoir rowing in his little skiff and couldn’t be reached – something for which my mother illogically refused to forgive him. She was a woman who nursed and tenaciously held dark grudges. Forever after that incident the doctor was slightingly and coldly dismissed in conversation as a “man who betrayed the public’s trust.”

  Following that spell of pneumonia, I regularly suffered from bouts of bronchitis, which often landed me in hospital in Fortune, forty miles away. Compared with the oxygen tent and the whacking great needles that were buried in my skinny rump there, being invalided at home was a piece of cake. Coughing and hacking, I would leaf through catalogues and read comic books until my head swam with print-fatigue. My diet was largely of my own whimsical choosing – hot chocolate and graham wafers were supplemented by sticky sweet coughdrops, which I downed one after another until my stomach could take no more, revolted, and tossed up the whole mess.

  With the first signs of improvement in my condition my mother moved her baby to the living-room chesterfield, where she and the radio could keep me company. The electric kettle followed me and was soon burbling in the corner, jetting steam into the air to keep my lungs moist and pliable. Because I was neither quite sick nor quite well, these were the best days of my illnesses. My stay at home hadn’t yet made me bored and restless, my chest no longer hurt when I breathed, and that loose pocket of rattling phlegm meant I didn’t have to worry about going back to school just yet. So I luxuriated in this steamy equatorial climate, tended by a doting mother as if I were a rare tropical orchid.

  My parents didn’t own a television and so my curiosity and attention were focused on my surroundings during my illnesses. I tried to squeeze every bit of juice out of them. Sooner than most children I learned that if you kept quiet and still, and didn’t insist on drawing attention to yourself as many kids did, adults were inclined to regard you as being one with the furniture, as significant and sentient as a hassock. By keeping mum I was treated to illuminating glances into an adult world of conventional miseries and scandals.

  I wasn’t sure at the age of six what a miscarriage was, but I knew that Ida Thompson had had one and that now her plumbing was buggered. And watching old lady Kuznetzky hang her washing, through a living-room window trickling with condensed kettle steam, I was able to confirm for myself the rumour that the old girl eschewed panties. As she bent over to rummage in her laundry basket I caught a brief glimpse of huge, white buttocks that shimmered in the pale spring sunshine.

  I also soon knew (how I don’t remember exactly) that Norma Ruggs had business with the Liquor Board Store when she shuffled by our window every day at exactly 10:50 a.m. She was always at the store door at 11:00 when they unlocked and opened up for business. At 11:15 she trudged home again, a pint of ice cream in one hand, a brown paper bag disguising a bottle of fortified wine in the other, and her blotchy complexion painted a high colour of shame.

  “Poor old girl,” my mother would say whenever she caught sight of Norma passing by in her shabby coat and sloppy man’s overshoes. They had been in high school together, and Norma had been class brain and valedictorian. She had been an obliging, dutiful girl and still was. For the wine wasn’t Norma’s – the ice cream was her only vice. The booze was her husband’s, a vet who had come back from the war badly crippled.

  All this careful study of adults may have made me old before my time. In any case it seemed to mark me in some recognizable way as being “different” or “queer for a kid.” When I went to live with my grandmother in July of 1959 she spotted it right away. Of course, she was only stating the obvious when she declared me skinny and delicate, but she also noted in her vinegary voice that my eyes had a bad habit of never letting her go, and that I was the worst case of little pitchers having big ears that she had ever come across.

  I ended up at my grandmother’s because in May of that year my mother’s bad chest finally caught up with her, much to her and everyone else’s surprise. It had been pretty generally agreed by all her acquaintances that Mabel Bradley’s defects in that regard were largely imagined. Not so. A government-sponsored X-ray program discovered tuberculosis, and she was packed off, pale and drawn with worry, for a stay in the sanatorium at Fort Qu’Appelle.

  For roughly a month, until the school year ended, my father took charge of me and the house. He was a desolate, lanky, drooping weed of a man who had married late in life but nevertheless had been easily domesticated. I didn’t like him much.

  My father was badly wrenched by my mother’s sickness and absence. He scrawled her long, untidy letters with a stub of gnawed pencil, and once he got shut of me, visited her every weekend. He was a soft and sentimental man whose eyes ran to water at the drop of a hat, or more accurately, death of a cat. Unlike his mother, my Grandma Bradley, he hadn’t a scrap of flint or hard-headed common sense in him.

  But then neither had any of his many brothers and sisters. It was as if the old girl had unflinchingly withheld the genetic code for responsibility and practicality from her pin-headed offspring. Life for her children was a series of thundering defeats, whirlwind calamities, or, at best, hurried strategic retreats. Businesses crashed and marriages failed, for they had – my father excepted – a taste for the unstable in partners marital and fiscal.

  My mother saw no redeeming qualities in any of them. By and large they drank too much, talked too loudly, and raised ill-mannered children – monsters of depravity whose rudeness provided my mother with endless illustrations of what she feared I might become. “You’re eating just like a pig,” she would say, “exactly like your cousin Elvin.” Or to my father, “You’re neglecting the belt. He’s starting to get as lippy as that little snot Muriel.”

  And in the midst, in the very eye of this familial cyclone of mishap and discontent, stood Grandma Bradley, as firm as a rock. Troubles of all kinds were laid on her doorstep. When my cousin Criselda suddenly turned big-tummied at sixteen and it proved difficult to ascertain with any exactitude the father, or even point a finger of general blame in the direction of a putative sire, she was shipped off to Grandma Bradley until she delivered. Uncle Ernie dried out on Grandma’s farm and Uncle Ed hid there from several people he had sold prefab, assemble-yourself, crop-duster airplanes to.

  So it was only family tradition that I should be deposited there. When domestic duties finally overwhelmed him, an
d I complained too loudly about fried-egg sandwiches for dinner again, my father left the bacon rinds hardening and curling grotesquely on unwashed plates, the slut’s wool eddying along the floor in the currents of a draft, and drove the one hundred and fifty miles to the farm, right then and there.

  My father, a dangerous man behind the wheel, took any extended trip seriously, believing the highways to be narrow, unnavigable ribbons of carnage. This trip loomed so dangerously in his mind that, rather than tear a hand from the wheel, or an eye from the road, he had me, chronic sufferer of lung disorders, light his cigarettes and place them carefully in his dry lips. My mother would have killed him.

  “You’ll love it at Grandma’s,” he kept saying unconvincingly, “you’ll have a real boy’s summer on the farm. It’ll build you up, the chores and all that. And good fun too. You don’t know it now, but you are living the best days of your life right now. What I wouldn’t give to be a kid again. You’ll love it there. There’s chickens and everything.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. There were chickens. But the everything - as broad and overwhelming and suggestive of possibilities as my father tried to make it sound – didn’t cover much. It certainly didn’t comprehend a pony or a dog as I had hoped, chickens being the only livestock on the place.

  It turned out that my grandmother, although she had spent most of her life on that particular piece of ground and eventually died there, didn’t care much for the farm and was entirely out of sympathy with most varieties of animal life. She did keep chickens for the eggs, although she admitted that her spirits lifted considerably in the fall when it came time to butcher the hens.

  Her flock was a garrulous, scraggly crew that spent their days having dust baths in the front yard, hiding their eggs, and, fleet and ferocious as hunting cheetahs, running down scuttling lizards which they trampled and pecked to death while their shiny, expressionless eyes shifted dizzily in their stupid heads. The only one of these birds I felt any compassion for was Stanley the rooster, a bedraggled male who spent his days tethered to a stake by a piece of baler twine looped around his leg. Poor Stanley crowed heart-rendingly in his captivity; his comb drooped pathetically, and he was utterly crestfallen as he lecherously eyed his bantam beauties daintily scavenging. Grandma kept him in this unnatural bondage to prevent him fertilizing the eggs and producing blood spots in the yolks. Being a finicky eater I approved this policy, but nevertheless felt some guilt over Stanley.

  No, the old Bradley homestead, all that encompassed by my father’s everything, wasn’t very impressive. The two-storey house, though big and solid, needed paint and shingles. A track had been worn in the kitchen linoleum clean through to the floorboards and a long rent in the screen door had been stitched shut with waxed thread. The yard was little more than a tangle of thigh-high ragweed and sowthistle to which the chickens repaired for shade. A windbreak of spruce on the north side of the house was dying from lack of water and the competition from Scotch thistle. The evergreens were no longer green; their sere needles fell away from the branches at the touch of a hand.

  The abandoned barn out back was flanked by two mountainous rotted piles of manure which I remember sprouting button mushrooms after every warm soaker of a rain. That pile of shit was the only useful thing in a yard full of junk: wrecked cars, old wagon wheels, collapsing sheds. The barn itself was mightily decayed. The paint had been stripped from its planks by rain, hail, and dry, blistering winds, and the roof sagged like a tired nag’s back. For a small boy it was an ominous place on a summer day. The air was still and dark and heavy with heat. At the sound of footsteps rats squeaked and scrabbled in the empty mangers, and the sparrows which had spattered the rafters white with their dung whirred about and fluted ghostly cries.

  In 1959 Grandma Bradley would have been sixty-nine, which made her a child of the gay nineties – although the supposed gaiety of that age didn’t seem to have made much impress upon the development of her character. Physically she was an imposing woman. Easily six feet tall, she carried a hundred and eighty pounds on her generous frame without prompting speculation as to what she had against girdles. She could touch the floor effortlessly with the flat of her palms and pack an eighty-pound sack of chicken feed on her shoulder. She dyed her hair auburn in defiance of local mores, and never went to town to play bridge, whist, or canasta without wearing a hat and getting dressed to the teeth. Grandma loved card games of all varieties and considered anyone who didn’t a mental defective.

  A cigarette always smouldered in her trap. She smoked sixty a day and rolled them as thin as knitting needles in an effort at economy. These cigarettes were so wispy and delicate they tended to get lost between her swollen fingers.

  And above all she believed in plain speaking. She let me know that as my father’s maroon Meteor pulled out of the yard while we stood waving goodbye on the front steps.

  “Let’s get things straight from the beginning,” she said without taking her eyes off the car as it bumped toward the grid road. “I don’t chew my words twice. If you’re like any of the rest of them I’ve had here, you’ve been raised as wild as a goddamn Indian. Not one of my grandchildren have been brought up to mind. Well, you’ll mind around here. I don’t jaw and blow hot air to jaw and blow hot air. I belted your father when he needed it, and make no mistake I’ll belt you. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” I said with a sinking feeling as I watched my father’s car disappear down the road, swaying from side to side as its suspension was buffeted by potholes.

  “These bloody bugs are eating me alive,” she said, slapping her arm. “I’m going in.”

  I trailed after her as she slopped back into the house in a pair of badly mauled, laceless sneakers. The house was filled with a half-light that changed its texture with every room. The venetian blinds were drawn in the parlour and some flies carved Immelmanns in the dark air that smelled of cellar damp. Others battered their bullet bodies tip-tap, tip-tap against the window panes.

  In the kitchen my grandmother put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea. After she had lit one of her matchstick smokes, she inquired through a blue haze if I was hungry.

  “People aren’t supposed to smoke around me,” I informed her. “Because of my chest. Dad can’t even smoke in our house.”

  “That so?” she said genially. Her cheeks collapsed as she drew on her butt. I had a hint there, if I’d only known it, of how she’d look in her coffin. “You won’t like it here then,” she said. “I smoke all the time.”

  I tried a few unconvincing coughs. I was ignored. She didn’t respond to the same signals as my mother.

  “My mother has a bad chest, too,” I said. “She’s in a T.B. sanatorium.”

  “So I heard,” my grandmother said, getting up to fetch the whistling kettle. “Oh, I suspect she’ll be right as rain in no time with a little rest. T.B. isn’t what it used to be. Not with all these new drugs.” She considered. “That’s not to say though that your father’ll ever hear the end of it. Mabel was always a silly little shit that way.”

  I almost fell off my chair. I had never thought I’d live to hear the day my mother was called a silly little shit.

  “Drink tea?” asked Grandma Bradley, pouring boiling water into a brown teapot.

  I shook my head.

  “How old are you anyway?” she asked.

  “Eleven.”

  “You’re old enough then,” she said, taking down a cup from the shelf. “Tea gets the kidneys moving and carries off the poisons in the blood. That’s why all the Chinese live to be so old. They all live to be a hundred.”

  “I don’t know if my mother would like it,” I said. “Me drinking tea.”

  “You worry a lot for a kid,” she said, “don’t you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. It wasn’t a question I had ever considered. I tried to shift the conversation.

  “What’s there for a kid to do around here?” I said in an unnaturally inquisitive voice.

  “Well, we
could play cribbage,” she said.

  “I don’t know how to play cribbage.”

  She was genuinely shocked. “What!” she exclaimed. “Why, you’re eleven years old! Your father could count a cribbage hand when he was five. I taught all my kids to.”

  “I never learned how,” I said. “We don’t even have a deck of cards at our house. My father hates cards. Says he had too much of them as a boy.”

  At this my grandmother arched her eyebrows. “Is that a fact? Well, hoity-toity.”

  “So, since I don’t play cards,” I continued in a strained manner I imagined was polite, “what could I do – I mean, for fun?”

  “Make your own fun,” she said. “I never considered fun such a problem. Use your imagination. Take a broomstick and make like Nimrod.”

  “Who’s Nimrod?” I asked.

  “Pig ignorant,” she said under her breath, and then louder, directly to me, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. Drink your tea.”

  And that, for the time being, was that.

  It’s all very well to tell someone to make their own fun. It’s the making of it that is the problem. In a short time I was a very bored kid. There was no one to play with, no horses to ride, no gun to shoot gophers, no dog for company. There was nothing to read except the Country Guide and Western Producer. There was nothing or nobody interesting to watch. I went through my grandmother’s drawers but found nothing as surprising there as I had discovered in my parents’.

  Most days it was so hot that the very idea of fun boiled out of me and evaporated. I moped and dragged myself listlessly around the house in the loose-jointed, water-boned way kids have when they can’t stand anything, not even their precious selves.

  On my better days I tried to take up with Stanley the rooster. Scant chance of that. Tremors of panic ran through his body at my approach. He tugged desperately on the twine until he jerked his free leg out from under himself and collapsed in the dust, his heart bumping the tiny crimson scallops of his breast feathers, the black pellets of his eyes glistening, all the while shitting copiously. Finally, in the last extremes of chicken terror, he would allow me to stroke his yellow beak and finger his comb.