Homesick Page 14

  “It’s you,” she called out as Monkman grappled his way out of the truck. “When I heard the truck I wondered who could be company. We don’t expect you except water days, Tuesday and Friday.”

  That’s what I’m counting on, thought Monkman grimly. His salute, however, was cheerful and hearty. “Good day, missus. Is the boss around?”

  The rest of the Markers, the pups who had sucked her skinny, began to show themselves. The second oldest boy crept on to the porch. When he had identified the visitors as familiar he pulled open the screen door and shouted back into the house, “It’s nobody. Just Monkman.”

  With this reassurance the rest trooped out: the five-year-old twin boys, the two girls, the oldest with her baby brother in her arms. The twins sprang off the steps, hurled themselves onto the yard gate and began to swing ferociously back and forth on it. The remainder of the Markers aligned themselves on the porch in a fashion that suggested they were readying themselves to repulse attack.

  “No, Alfred’s not here,” answered Mrs. Marker. “Him and Dwayne took a part to town for welding.”

  “Don’t matter,” said Monkman. “I was just going to ask him how’s tricks. What about you, Etta? How you been keeping?”

  “I’d keep better without the baby’s eczema. I’d keep better with the electricity or if I had one of them gas washing machines. Otherwise – I got no complaints. Yourself?”

  “Not bad, Etta.”

  “If we ain’t bad, we must be good.”

  “If you say so, Etta,” said the old man agreeably. He swept his eyes around the yard. “I was wondering if you could do something for me?” he asked. “I want to leave the truck parked here and I was wondering if you could keep the twins from crawling all over it?”

  “Did you hear that, twins?” said Mrs. Marker, raising her voice. “The man wants you to stay off of his truck. You do it!”

  The boys reacted to this by ducking their heads, sticking out their rear ends and swinging the gate even more violently, as if they intended to tear it off its hinges.

  “I mean it!” warned Mrs. Marker. “You keep yourselves and your boots off the hood of that truck or I’ll brain the both of you! No more Freshie, either,” she added ominously, “if I catch you.” She turned her attention back to Monkman. “What do you want to leave it here for?” she inquired. “You walking somewheres?”

  “Oh, we thought we’d go scouting for saskatoons. They ought to be getting ripe by now.”

  “Saskatoons don’t amount to much this year,” offered Mrs. Marker, seizing a handful of her skirt. “And the wood ticks are awful bad. I’d stay out of the bush if I was you. I pick the kids over every night. Every night they’re thick with them. For the amount of saskatoons you find the ticks don’t make it pay.”

  “Ticks don’t have a taste for bloodless old buggers like me,” said Monkman, smiling. “They’re for the young ones like Daniel here. The sweet ones.”

  “Berries don’t amount to much this year. Hardly worth your while to look.”

  “When you’re my age you find you fill your time with any kind of foolishness. I get a couple of cupfuls, I’ll be happy. It passes the time.”

  Mrs. Marker crooked her finger at the biggest boy on the porch. “Doyle here knows all the best places to look. Doyle, you take Mr. Monkman and show him where to look. He’s the wanderer,” she explained. “Knows every inch of the place, Doyle does. I’d appoint him guide, if I was you.”

  “No, don’t bother,” said Monkman, holding up a hand to ward off Doyle. “Where’s the fun if you don’t find them yourself?”

  “South,” urged Mrs. Marker desperately as the old man and boy began to move off. “South’s your best bet. They ripen south first,” she called, pointing.

  “South, my ass,” muttered Monkman under his breath. “North it is.” The old man led the way. A few minutes’ walking brought them to four ramshackle granaries. A flock of blackbirds exploded out of the shadows cast by the buildings where they had been feeding on oats and barley leaked onto the ground. The sudden flight, the whir of wings, the indignant cries of chek! chek! gave Monkman a start and shook him out of an absorbing rehearsal of what exactly he would say to Alfred Marker when he confronted him with the steer that had supposedly been dispatched by a bolt from heaven. It was then it struck him what going north meant. There were only two clumps of bush big enough to hide a steer in to the north. One ran along the fence line separating quarters and the other was a five- or six-acre patch of uncleared poplar, birch, and scrub oak standing in the midst of the field.

  The field. Thinking of it made him apprehensive, made him step more quickly, made his chest tighten. They were crossing summerfallow now, heading toward the distant fence line where the tops of the poplars flickered silver in the sun and wind. The old man found it heavy going. His boots sank to the laces in the loose powdery soil as if it were new snow and the black earth radiated a fierce, dusty heat up into his reddening face. He wished he could turn back. A visit to the field was a visit to bad luck. For twelve years he had superstitiously avoided it whenever possible.

  “When I reach those trees I’m going to find a spot of shade and cool myself out,” he declared, trying to initiate conversation. Talking would prevent thinking.

  Daniel plodded along beside him without a trace of enthusiasm. Halfway up his shins his trousers were grey with dust. “Yeah, it’s pretty hot, all right,” was all the response Monkman could get.

  “It’s hotter than the hubs of hell. A man could take a heart attack on a day like this. Plenty have.”

  “My Dad died from heart trouble,” said Daniel. “He was forty-eight. That isn’t very old.”

  Monkman threw the boy an appraising glance. Daniel’s expression was guarded, set. “You don’t remember him, do you?” asked Monkman.

  The question provoked no change in the boy’s face. “No,” he said.

  Monkman let the matter drop. They went on in silence until they reached the wood where a narrow strip of grass separated the tilled ground from the grove. Groaning theatrically, the old man shuffled over to the shade spread by the trees and lowered himself stiffly, in stages, down into the brome grass tassels. There he lay, the crushed stems prickling the skin of his back through his shirt and the pollen and dust he had disturbed settling on him. He had placed his hat squarely in the centre of his chest. Twice he sneezed violently.

  “If you’re too tired to walk back, I’ll fetch the truck for you,” the boy offered, hovering over him.

  “No, I’m fine. But what you can do is take a prowl in the bush and see if that bastard’s tied my steer up in there.”

  Daniel wasn’t eager to take up the suggestion. “She said there’s ticks in the bush.”

  The old man laughed.

  “What’s so funny? You think it’s so funny, why don’t you go look yourself?”

  “Played-out, fat old men aren’t built for bush. They’re not built for climbing over deadfalls and squeezing through all that kind of shit.”

  “So why should I? What’s in it for me – getting eaten alive?”

  “Five dollars if you locate my steer.”

  “Five dollars?” Daniel was taken by surprise. For him it was a lot of money.

  “Five dollars.”

  “And if I don’t?” he demanded, suspicious of a catch.

  “You’ll get fifty cents for effort. The prospect of an extra four-fifty ought to encourage you to look careful. Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  He heard the grass rustle, a dry twig crack as Daniel left him. Then he knew he was alone. Alone, it was more difficult to prevent the field beyond the curtain of trees from stealing back into his mind. To hold it out, he began to review in his mind the things he must soon tell Daniel.

  It was very important to do it right. He had never said any of these things to his own son Earl. But then talking to Earl in such a fashion would have been pointless. None of it would have been any use to Earl. Earl had never been constituted to mak
e anything out of common sense. This one was. This one weighed you while you weighed him. Earl had never weighed anybody. He had thought everyone was cut from the same cloth as he was. If you came right down to it, Earl wouldn’t have been able to learn what he had to teach him. This one, he suspected, knew half of it already. A shrewd, calculating little bugger to whom five dollars made all the difference in the world. So different, the two of them, Daniel and Earl. How did it happen, the clouding and confusion of bloodlines in a family? For the life of him he had never been able to see himself in his own son and yet he believed he could in his grandson. What was the old saying? Character jumps a generation? Was there anything of Daniel’s father in him? Of course, he couldn’t say. He knew nothing about the boy’s sire, the tailor, or whatever he had been. There must be some of that in Daniel, some tailor, although he couldn’t spot it. Everything he saw in the boy struck him as pure Monkman. The last of the line. The only grandchild.

  He thought of Martha, dead before she was a grandmother.

  Monkman could feel his sweat drying in the folds and creases in the skin of his neck. He realized how tired he was. Not much sleep again last night on account of the dream. Now, every time his eyes closed an insect would light on his face and go for a stroll. They must take me for dead, he thought, an old man stretched flat on his back in the grass with his eyes shut.

  He blinked, brushed his hand back and forth over his cheeks. The cool and damp of the earth was rising up, leaching into his flesh. How? The ground ought to be hot and dry as a fever, there hadn’t been rain in weeks. He was contemplating sitting up so he didn’t take a chill in his kidneys when a dragonfly came helicoptering inches above his face and pinned him to the ground with its beauty, with its ruby sheen and shimmer. Martha had owned a brooch shaped like a dragonfly. It had fragile lacquered wings. Martha died of a stroke. Vera’s husband of a heart ailment. No luck in this family. The tailor had looked old in the wedding picture she sent. Too old for a wisp of a girl like her. Bride and groom standing on courthouse steps. Is that where Jewish people got married? In court? There was nobody else in the snapshot. No family, no friends. So who took the picture?

  Alec’s grip on his hat relaxed. It slid off his chest and dropped by his side. He was standing in a poorly lit room being fitted for a suit. The sure, deft touch of the hands running the tape over his body was lulling, soothing. The tailor was measuring him. His limbs grew heavier and heavier, his joints looser and looser.

  “Hey. Hey. Hey!”

  Monkman woke with a gasp, wincing and gaping. Daniel was kneeling in the grass beside him, his hand resting on his grandfather’s shoulder.

  “What?”

  “You must have dropped off.”

  The old man reached out, seized his grandson by the elbow, and pulled himself into a sitting position. His eyes narrowed and his head wobbled, assaulted by the dazzle of sun.

  “No steer,” reported Daniel. His voice sounded all mumbly to Monkman because the boy had pulled out the front of his shirt and was peering down the neck of it as he spoke, searching himself closely and anxiously for ticks. “Nothing. I walked clear through and came out on crop on the other side. There’s bush in the middle of that field but I didn’t go on, in case you wondered why I was so long.” He broke off examining himself and lifted his face. “Jeez, I feel all crawly but I can’t see anything. How big are these ticks supposed to be anyway?”

  Monkman was staring back the way they had come, staring out over the gently swelling and subsiding black earth. The air above the summerfallow quivered and bent, distorting the view like a pane of cheap, flawed glass.

  Before he fell asleep there had been something to do with the boy. What? Then it came to him. Without preamble or introduction he simply said, “Your mother asked Mr. Stutz to have a man to man talk with you.” Having delivered himself of this news he studied the boy for any sign that Daniel had been warned of his mother’s arrangement. There was none. “Well,” said the old man, pressing on, “were there questions you’d been asking your mother that maybe she didn’t want to answer?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “I guess it was her idea then? I guess she thought it was time you learned certain things it was more proper for a man to teach you.”

  “I guess so,” said the boy apprehensively.

  “Anyway, after your mother talked to Mr. Stutz he came to me because he didn’t feel it was his place to talk to you. He took it for family business and thought maybe I was the one should do it.” Monkman hesitated. “Seeing I’m the closest thing you have to a father.” Monkman squinted up at Daniel. “So maybe you should take a seat so we can do as your mother wants.”

  The suggestion sounded like an order. Daniel sat with a look of extreme uneasiness. It was embarrassing to be talked to this way. Long ago he had read everything the Reader’s Digest had to say on the impending topic and doubted there was much he could be taught. He had even been able to correct Lyle on a few points. He was satisfied that his knowledge was pretty wide-ranging. He knew you couldn’t get VD from a toilet seat and he knew that husbands ought to be affectionate to their wives after the sex act as well as before it. Otherwise women felt used. And he knew whatever else fitted between these two bookends. With the old guy smiling that way, falser than even his teeth, he was sure he was going to be put through something horrible.

  “I don’t know what your mother imagines is a man to man talk,” Alec began by saying, “but I’d guess it’s supposed to cover what a man should know to keep himself out of trouble. To my idea, what’s most troublesome for men is sex, drinking, and fighting. No particular order of importance.” But the last was a lie. There was a particular order of importance and the brave thing to do would be to get the worst bit over first. He reminded himself to tell the kid only what would prove useful to him. It was likely Daniel would do exactly as everybody else before him had done. There was no percentage in ignoring that simple fact. So whatever he said should keep in mind human nature. Mr. Stutz wouldn’t have kept it in mind. Mr. Stutz didn’t accept human nature as an excuse for anything. He was always laying down the law as to how men ought to act, despite the impossibility of them performing any of the remarkable feats he called upon them to perform. Alec had always believed in working with what you were given, and human nature was a given. It was where he would begin.

  “I don’t know any polite way of saying this, and the only way I’ve got of saying it is straight out. A boy gets to your age, or somewhere close to it, and something happens – that thing of his starts provoking and tormenting him continual. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will shortly. There’s no getting around it, that pecker of yours isn’t going to give you hardly a moment’s peace. Which leads me to what I’m going to say to you now. Which is about playing with yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not recommending it, I’m just saying that more than one has taken it for the solution of a predicament. There’s boys your age that suffer terrible worries from that. If it’s a sin, it’s got to be a small one. As to whatever rumours you may have heard about the results – about going blind or mental – I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. How’s a pecker to know the difference between a woman and a hand? A pecker doesn’t have a brain, or eyes. It’s just a story, like a horsehair in a water barrel turns into a worm. What I’m saying is let it alone if you can but, if you can’t, remember you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.” Monkman paused and waited. Daniel said nothing. All his attention was fastened on a spear of grass he spun in his fingers.

  “You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?” asked the old man sharply.

  Daniel nodded his head without looking up from the stalk of grass.

  At least that was over. He hoped the boy had understood. “I won’t say nothing now about women,” said the old man brusquely. “I’ll save that one for when you’re older.” He took a deep breath of relief, felt himself on firmer ground. “Now drinking,” he said happily. “Stutz doesn
’t have a single good word for it. He just goes on about how it has been the downfall of thousands. I won’t argue with him. I know myself the trouble it caused me at one time. If I learned one thing from my trouble it was this: there’s no point in drinking if you aren’t happy. The thing about liquor is that it’s an encourager. It encourages happiness in a happy man and sadness in a sad one. It encourages whatever else you happen to be feeling. The young bucks fight when they’re drunk because booze adds oil to the fire young men carry around burning in their bellies. Now I’m not saying any of this to you now because I expect you to follow my advice straight off. I’m saying it so that when you come to make your own mistakes you can think back and test what’s happening to you against what I said was true. It might bring you to reason sooner. There’s nothing like a second pair of eyes for help. It’s what Mr. Stutz did for me when he pointed out certain things about my drinking when I was bad into it. You see, I couldn’t see the start of my misery because I was too deep into it. Now it’s true I still take a drink – mostly when Stutz is around – but that’s just to prove to him I’ve got my own will. I won’t be a slave to it or a slave to avoiding it. Besides, if you keep company with men you’re bound to keep company with liquor. Particularly around here. It won’t be long before you’ll be drinking beer out behind the dance hall to work up enough courage to speak to a girl inside. There’s no point if the courage isn’t inside you. When you’re puking in the bushes, ask yourself then if what your grandfather said wasn’t right.”

  “My friend Lyle and me drank some of the gin his mother kept hid under the kitchen sink,” volunteered Daniel, encouraged by what he took to be his grandfather’s tolerant attitude to drinking.