Homesick Read online

  “It sounds to me,” said Vera, leaning back from the sink to project her voice, “that this Mr. Williams is a big spoiled brat who wants everything his way!”

  “Right now I think he’d be satisfied with a fair shake!” snapped back her father. But he knew there was no convincing Vera. He directed his efforts to Daniel. “Take all that fuss about his draft deferment. Wasn’t it a crime how a healthy young man like him should get a deferment with Adolf Hitler running loose in the world? But who said boo about DiMaggio who had a deferment too? Yeah but Joe DiMaggio was a Yankee and a gentleman and everybody loves a Yankee and a gentleman. So which one sees service in two wars, gets called up a second time for Korea? Williams. But then nothing he ever done was right. The crap he got accused of in the papers. He wasn’t at the hospital when his first baby was born. He got divorced. Then everybody wept big crocodile tears because he took a shotgun and blasted a bunch of dirty pigeons in Fenway Park so’s the groundkeepers could get a break from cleaning up pigeon shit. The sonsofbitches even said he sold the furniture out from under his mother when it was his good-for-nothing brother who had stole it.” His voice was growing more and more agitated, quivering with indignation. “Okay, so he didn’t sell her furniture, what else could they say? Let’s say he doesn’t go out to California often enough to visit her. Ted Williams won’t visit his poor old Salvation Army mother, the scribblers said. Who’re they to say how much is enough? Who’re they to say what a man feels?”

  Vera, drawn from the sink by his plaintive, desperate tone, propped herself in the entrance to the living room and dried her arms with a tea-towel. “My,” she said, “aren’t you working yourself into a state. Who and what’re we talking about anyway? I don’t think it’s about Williams.”

  “Who else then?” demanded her father sharply.

  “Oh, I guess Earl hasn’t been by in quite a time, has he? Hasn’t paid a visit, I mean.”

  Her father didn’t bother to reply, acted as if she hadn’t spoken. “You know,” he remarked to Daniel, “they say that even now old Ted’s eyesight is so sharp he can read the label on a seventy-eight spinning on the turntable. Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t,” challenged Vera, tossing the towel over her shoulder. “And if you do, you’re even more gullible than you look.”

  Daniel turned himself toward his grandfather. “It isn’t as if Mickey Mantle is really my favourite player,” he said. “I like Willie Mays a lot better than I ever liked Mickey Mantle. Loads better.”

  There was nothing left for Vera to do but stand and stare at her son.

  11

  The station had signed off the air and now the empty, flickering screen was bleeding a numb stain of blue light into the darkness of the living room. The sound of rain on the roof, the gurgle of drain pipes discharging water from their throats masked the faint electrical buzz of the television set but did not disturb the two sleepers in the room.

  Tonight was professional wrestling, scheduled after the late-night roundup of local news, sports, and weather. Daniel and his grandfather never missed it. The old man egged on the villains in their treachery and pretended to dismiss any possibility of fakery, or the fix. “You can’t tell me that one of those flying leaps off a turnbuckle down onto a man lying defenceless doesn’t do damage,” he would argue.

  Daniel, still blind to instances of his grandfather’s irony, would attempt to reason with him. The old man got a kick out of seeing him so serious. “But that’s exactly my point. Don’t you see what I’m getting at? If it wasn’t fixed, if it wasn’t acting, somebody would get killed.”

  “Maybe an ordinary man would. But we’re not dealing with ordinary men here. We’re talking blond negroes. Now a blond negro has already defied one law of nature. No reason he can’t do it a second time and survive somebody leaping down on him off a turnbuckle.”

  It was really only the sport of arguing that kept them awake, not the wrestling, and after what had happened earlier that evening neither of them had had their hearts in arguing. So they had fallen asleep. Stretched out on the chesterfield Daniel lay closest to the source of light emitted by the television screen. The wavering blue light gave him the face of a boy sunk senseless in six feet of water. Across the room his grandfather slumped in an armchair, dressed incongruously in striped grey flannel pyjamas, plaid carpet slippers, and his straw fedora.

  Because he had worn the hat to the supper table there had been a dust-up with Vera. She had understood it as a provocation. That was the word she had used. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had simply forgot. He was still forgetting the hat even with them living in the house.

  She had got on her high-horse, as only Vera could, and spoke of deliberate rudeness, his lack of consideration. He hadn’t had the slightest clue of what she was talking about when she started in on him. “All I ask is that we eat in a semi-civilized manner. You wear that goddamn dirty hat to the table as a provocation, don’t you? Admit it.”

  “I don’t have nothing to admit.”

  That had started the donnybrook. Hot-tempered as she’d always been, Vera flew off the handle after a couple of exchanges and made a snatch for the offending article, tried to pull off his hat. He had thrown up his arm and knocked her hand away. It was instinct.

  “Keep your hands to yourself, girl,” he had warned her, with an old man’s angry dignity.

  “Mother may have tolerated eating with a boor in a hat,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I will.”

  It was her daring to bring Martha into it, in the same breath with the hat. “Be damned then,” he said.

  Wasn’t it just like her to refuse to take her meal at the table with him? And to insist the boy be her hostage in the living room, the both of them eating with plates on their laps? He knew Daniel hadn’t wanted to join her. She had had to call him twice, in that certain tone of voice, before he finally got up and reluctantly went into the other room with his glass of milk and plate. He was a good boy. He had told himself that it was as much for the boy as himself that he paraded around for the rest of the evening in the hat. He had wanted to show him that everybody didn’t have to wave the white flag where Vera was concerned. Where the hell did that girl get off, telling him what he could and couldn’t do in his own house? She had no business grabbing things from him as if he was a sugar-tit sucking baby. Making him eat alone. He supposed she thought that was some terrible punishment being denied her company for a supper. At least he had eaten in peace.

  The old man had begun to stir in his sleep. His massive head, which hung down from his neck like one of the sunflowers in his garden heavy with seed and drooping on its stalk, wobbled. His hands twitched and fumbled on the arms of his chair, opening and closing. Faster and faster the fingers curled and straightened, curled and straightened, until suddenly they shot out rigid and with a sharp, wordless cry Monkman snapped forward in his chair, eyes wide.

  He stared into the screen of the television, blue, cold as the ice of the dream from which he had just surfaced. He heard the sound of water trickling in his head. Awake, he was still half-suspended in the chill, watery dark of the dream. Then he realized that the sound of water in his head was the sound of rain, the first in over a month. He passed his hand clumsily over his face and smiled for the sake of the parched garden, smiled to remember it was summer and really there was no ice.

  The smile faded when he recalled what the boy had confessed to him. “Mom asked me to find out something from you,” Daniel had announced after Vera had gone to bed and they were alone with their wrestling.

  “What’s she want to know now?”

  “She wants to know where Uncle Earl is. She said you’d never tell her just to spite her, but she said you might tell me if I got around you right.” The boy looked painfully guilty. “I don’t know. It sounded like spying or something the way she wanted me to do it. I thought if I just came out and asked you straight – that would be better.”

  “I don’t know where Earl is,” he had answe
red. “Tell your mother that.”

  With the cold of the dream present in him, more than anything he wanted to talk, wanted to wake the boy. But that would not be fair. He has learned that dreams ought to stay dreams to the young. Nobody ought to show them different. And he cannot allow himself to become a beggar, going crawling to Vera. Having people in the house was supposed to make it easier, instead it had become harder.

  Which left Stutz.

  To avoid rousing the boy and questions he went as he was, turning on only the kitchen light to find a coat. He stood blinking under the unshaded bulb, wrinkled pyjama legs sagging beneath his overcoat, sockless feet sloppy in slippers, fedora tamped down until it bit his scalp. Then he stepped out into the rain. The abrupt passage from the glare of electric light to utter night left him blinded. It was only prudent to stand and wait for his eyes to adjust. Rain beat down on the stiff crown and brim of his hat, creating an unholy racket, like hail on a tin roof.

  For the first time he considered what the hour might be. It had to be well past two. Stutz would be in bed. In his day Alec had knocked on his share of doors early in the morning but carrying a bottle had insured a welcome. What could he carry to Stutz who hated and despised bottles? Corn. Stutz went weak for corn on the cob. Alec had been promising him a feed of sweet corn as soon as it was ripe. Wouldn’t Stutz gawk when he opened his door to a man with his arms stacked with cobs? “Get the glue on your dentures, Stutz,” he’d say, “look what we got here!”

  Even after his eyes started to allow for the darkness he couldn’t make out much with the sky overcast, the moon and stars cloaked in cloud. The corn patch had already grown above the height of a man and in among the stalks it was black as Lazarus’s tomb. He picked by feel, running his hands up the plants until they met with an ear to be pinched and measured and judged by his fingers as to plumpness and readiness for eating. Jesus wet work he swore it was, too, puddles standing between the rows and the gumbo sucking the slippers off his feet with every step he took, the long blades of the leaves laying a slash of damp on him wherever they brushed and all the while the rain pissing down for all she was worth. But at last his arms were full, his pyjama legs soddenly clinging to his legs, and he blundered out of the corn patch and into the road, bound for Stutz’s house. The journey had a fugitive, furtive air. Whenever he passed under a streetlight where the rain descended in gleaming, silver lines so straight they appeared to have been drawn with a ruler’s edge, Alec broke into an anxious shuffle and hunched low over his burden. What might people think if they recognized him toting corn through the streets in his sleeping costume?

  Plenty of banging and hollering finally raised a light inside the house and, some time later, brought Mr. Stutz to the back door, his usual deliberate self.

  “Aren’t you the drowned rat?” was his only remark as he swung wide the door. “Hurry up now and get yourself out of that.”

  Inside, spilling water from the brim of his hat down onto a small braided rug that Stutz had steered him to, Alec pondered what it would take to rattle Mr. Stutz. It was evident from the careful way he was dressed – shirt buttoned to the collar, suspenders hooked – that he had been in no particular rush to learn the reason for all the commotion at his door so early in the morning. Everything in good time. Another thing, he hadn’t acknowledged the corn piled in Alec’s arms which was already scenting the kitchen with its sweet, green smell.

  “This corn’s for you,” the old man said abruptly. “It’s picked fresh.”

  Stutz began to scold him, ignoring the corn. “Look at you,” he said, fetching a tea-towel which had been neatly hung on the door of the woodstove to dry, “you’ve gone and got yourself wet feet. Kick them slippers off,” he ordered, going down on his knees, “and let me give those feet a rub with a warm, dry towel. An old fellow like you – why the cold can climb right up your legs and settle in your kidneys. A kidney complaint is no laughing matter your age. You catch cold in your kidneys, then where’ll you be?” he asked, vigorously towelling the blue-veined feet naked on the braided rug.

  “Try and leave some skin on,” said Monkman, resentful at being spoken to in this way. “And don’t forget I’m standing here with an armful of corn.”

  “You can put it in the sink when I’m finished,” said Mr. Stutz, grunting like a shoeshine boy. “Right now I’m trying to work some colour into these feet of yours. They’re white as snow, bless me.”

  While Stutz chafed his feet, Alec stared down at the creases crosshatching the back of his neck. It occurred to him that Stutz wasn’t a young man anymore either. Time flies, as the man said. Yet he could remember as if it were yesterday the afternoon almost fifteen years ago that Mr. Stutz presented himself without warning at the garage and laid a claim on the job. He had acted as if it was his for the taking. It was in the week before Christmas, in the twilight of a short winter’s day threatening storm, that this large man carrying a cheap suitcase had appeared in the back of the shop, his shoulders dusted with snow. Earl and he had looked up from the bucket where they were rinsing gaskets, expecting that the man was a traveller who had hit the ditch and wanted a tow. Instead, he said he had come to take the job advertised in The Western Producer. He could start Monday.

  At first he had been leery about Mr. Stutz. Stutz was fairly young, looked fit, and wanted a job that nobody else had bothered to apply for. Immediately he had suspected a conscript on the run. Also, his last name, Stutz, sounded German. He had asked him point-blank, “You ain’t by any chance dodging your call-up, are you? Because I don’t want no involvement with the bulls.”

  “Not me,” said Stutz, “I only got one eye. The left one’s glass.”

  So he had read it as cockiness. But cocky or not he had had to hire him with a war on and a labour shortage. It took him a week or two before he changed his mind and gave it another name than cocky. Sincerity. Yes, there had been something about the bugger. He had introduced himself as Mr. Stutz and it stuck. In the back of the garage on that snowy afternoon he hadn’t troubled to try and sell himself, only waited unruffled and patient for his answer, suitcase hanging on the end of his arm. Take me, or leave me, his face said.

  It was Earl, always deathly shy around strangers, who had helped him decide. He spoke to the man. He said, “It was me wrote out the ad for the paper. Dad says I write a clearer hand than him.” Earl had seemed to be laying a claim for some of the credit in bringing the stranger to Connaught.

  Suddenly Monkman heard himself saying what he had only meant to think. “Earl’s been on my mind a lot lately. I think it’s because of Vera’s boy.”

  Mr. Stutz rose, groaning, from his knees. “I can take that corn off your hands now,” he said.

  As the ears thudded on the sink bottom, Alec suggested, “If you got a pot of water on the boil now we could strip a few ears and have them at the pink of perfection.”

  Mr. Stutz was the only man capable of discomforting Alec Monkman with a single glance. He discomforted him now. “It’s three o’clock,” he said severely. “I eat corn at three o’clock and it’d have me up and on the toilet before six.”

  “Corn was intolerant of Earl the same. But he couldn’t stay away from it or tomatoes. Tomatoes were the hives though. All summer long his mother used to have to watch him. He’d steal corn out of the garden; he’d sneak out with the salt shaker and eat tomatoes warm off the vines. Ate the corn raw and nearly shit himself silly. The boy never had a trace of sense.”

  “Now you go easy,” warned Stutz, “or you’ll work yourself into a state again. Remember what I told you before? You got to accept your part in it, Alec, but nobody can say how big that part is. And your part isn’t all of it neither.”

  Monkman did not appear to notice what was being said to him. “Vera wants to know where he is. She’s set the boy to spying on me.”

  “You know what I think. I’ve told my opinion before.”

  “And if I told her, what then? That girl’s flint. I always meant to – when we settl
ed our differences. But I can’t even get forgiveness where I don’t see I done any wrong. You tell me what I did that was so terrible? Asked her to stop at home and take care of her brother. Most girls would have jumped at the chance of such an easy life, keeping house for a man and a boy. She didn’t have enough work to keep her busy half the day, always smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes with her friends in the Chinaman’s. That’s suffering? Most girls that age would have been beside themselves to be free as a bird, a regular allowance to spend as they liked – plus what she stole from housekeeping. The way she milked me she could have been rich as a princess in a few years.

  “And I wouldn’t have asked her to do it but for Earl. He needed somebody after his mother passed away. Him going on about hearing Martha moving around the house when he was alone; I figured that for wishful thinking out of loneliness. So I wanted her there at home for him because he was high-strung, high-strung from a baby up. He always showed it.

  “And now she wants to know where he is? Did she ever think she’s got no right? Because she walked out on her brother, didn’t she? I’m not just talking about the Army and the war, but after, too. Because didn’t she disappear on him? After the war he never got a letter from her. You think that didn’t upset him? You’re goddamn right it did. No letter until the one she sent to announce she’d got married and that one was too late, he never got it. So sure he was upset. People disappearing on him left and right – his mother, his sister. No wonder he hung on my heels like a stray pup, probably afraid I was going to vanish into thin air on him, too, I suppose. You remember how that was, Stutz? We couldn’t turn ourselves around without bumping into him or tripping over him. He wouldn’t let us out of his sight.”

  “His company was no trouble. He was always a pleasant boy.”

  “Sure he was a pleasant boy. But you wasn’t the one responsible for him was you? You didn’t have to get him to some point of usefulness, did you?”