Down in the Ground, page 11
At the top of the valley, the boy told his injured friend to hop on the seat, and he pedalled as hard as he could on his Higgins all the way to the friend’s house. The friend’s mother was gardening and looked up as the posse arrived. The boy had his friend’s blood all over the back his shirt. The mother, without waiting to hear the story of how the friend had been injured, pulled out her car keys from her pocket and drove her bleeding son away at high speed.
That night, the boy’s father appeared just before bedtime on the front porch with a group of his friend’s fathers around him. He had a lock in one hand and the smashed CCM of his injured friend in the other.
“You must never go back to the valley. There are buggers down there. One won’t be bothering anyone for a long time but buggers nonetheless. I’m locking up your bike for a week to teach you that there are places you can go and places you can’t go.”
The world grew smaller from that night on.
The boy lay in the dark, thinking about the man and what could have dragged him down to the valley.
He thought about the scar on his friend’s head, and how he would always wear it on the outside, and perhaps on the inside.
He didn’t understand why the man hurt so much that he would want to hurt any of them.
As he lay awake, anticipating the long ride in the other direction to junior high in September and perhaps starting a delivery service for some of the local stores with his Higgins, he concluded that freedom was not what he thought it was; that the world was a small and troubled place; and that his Higgins would only take him so far.
Knowledge
IT WAS DARK inside the cat, but the bird wouldn’t know that anymore. The mother robin was frantic, but as birds probably do, she would soon forget what happened—the hatchlings pale and veiny lay scattered around the base of the apple tree and the spattering of her mate’s blood dripped from the boughs and branches. She’d find a new mate just as red and just as capable if not better at making a nest. The problem wasn’t the birds or the cat. It was Joey.
Joey had to spend April, May, and early June in his room. He had to sleep when he felt tired. His glands were swollen, and the doctor told him if he ever wanted to have children he had to take it easy. His dishes and cutlery needed to be boiled. He couldn’t touch the taps in the bathroom with his hands. His father duct-taped six-inch rulers to the faucets, so Joey could turn them on and off with his elbows. And maybe if he didn’t have to turn the taps on and off he’d have the energy to have children when he grew up.
Little things. That’s what makes illness less contagious. And learning how to cope, how to deal with the bad things, his mother had told him, things that are here to test us so that we know what is true and what is false, and what is worthy of our love and demanding of our fears.
The birds, Joey thought, were worthy of his love. They became his pastime. He could see them through his window when he lay in bed. First the father bird hopped on the back of the mother bird. He couldn’t see the details, but they were mating or as the guys at school called it, fucking. He wondered why people said fuck when they were surprised by something or angry at someone. Hopping on the back of something didn’t involve either surprise or anger for the birds, as far as he could see.
Then the robins built a nest together. Joey’s father called that the long haul. Joey wasn’t sure what the long haul was either. “He’s in it for the long haul, son.” The nest wasn’t going anywhere.
Joey’s mother put out wool as the father bird, the one with the redder chest, who wove twigs together as if he had found the plans in Popular Mechanics, the one magazine of his father’s Joey was permitted to read. The mother bird laid eggs. Joey thought that’s what the guys at school meant when they talked about someone getting laid. Each one was slightly speckled, robin’s egg blue eggs, because robins lay blue eggs and the colour is named after them.
One morning when the sun came through the branches of trees, the eggs cracked and alien-like creatures, naked, beaked, big-eyed, veiny, lay in the nest with the mother robin on top of them just as she had sat on top of the eggs after she laid them.
He’d written to his science teacher that he didn’t have a microscope at home and the school refused to lend him one, so he couldn’t see the paramecium like the other kids. He told the science teacher about the birds.
“Okay,” the teacher wrote back. “Your project is to record what the birds do each day as they go from eggs to hatchlings to pin-feathered nestlings. You are going to be the class ornithologist.” Joey thought the word sounded cool. He said it to himself several times until it tripped off his tongue. “Record every detail until their mother pushes them out of the nest and they fly away.”
Joey hadn’t counted on the cat. It was not the neighbour’s cat. The McGowans next door kept their cat on a short chain in their backyard. They said it was to keep it from spraying. Joey thought spraying meant it peed on things, but his older brother said that spraying was a cat’s way of getting off. Joey wasn’t sure what his brother meant.
There had to be plausibility in what his brother said. Joey asked his mother if there was.
“Your father will have to have the talk with you about the birds and the bees.”
Joey was confused. Robins build a nest. Robins come out of eggs. What did bees have to do with it? He knew bees pollinated things. Did they pollinate eggs? Were eggs like flowers? If baby birds lived long enough, were they fed honey? Was that it? His science teacher would need a report from Joey so Joey wouldn’t fail Grade Five. Mono was not a good reason for failing Grade Five. If he was older, mono was an excuse for all sorts of things. His brother stopped dating a girl he didn’t like in Grade Eight and to make her go away he told her he had mono.
The cat climbed the apple tree. The father robin tried to protect the babies. Joey thought the word was in-sync. The father bird was just showing his in-syncs. The bird had lunged at the cat, dug its claws in the cat’s hackles that were up because the cat not only had to attack the nest but had to give the appearance of attacking the nest as if it meant business.
Joey had seen the back hairs stand up on his grandmother’s German shepherd before the dog died of old age, and his grandmother said: “It has its hackles up because it sees a cat.” Cats probably had hackles too because they had fur on their backs.
The cat pawed at the air and the father robin got too close to peck it and got pinned against an upright branch. That’s when the cat bit the bird’s head off. The father robin’s wings flapped furiously but without a head it didn’t know when to stop and it fell from the tree without flying. Then the cat started inching toward the nest.
“No! No!” Joey shouted and banged on the glass, but the cat looked at him as if it didn’t care. It just looked at him as if he wasn’t there. Joey yelled: “Fucking cat!” But realized that fucking was probably something else and he felt horribly tired, exhausted, and angry, and was afraid his mother had heard him using a swear word.
The mother robin was making weird sounds in her throat, not song but screeching as if she was terrified or pissed off. She flew to one of the higher branches where the cat could not come after her. Then the nest got knocked off the bough by the cat and the baby birds fell and bounced off the exposed roots of the apple tree.
Joey could see them on the grass below his window. The cat climbed down, skidding part way where the trunk became straight up and down, digging in its claws and almost falling forward with anxiousness to reach the remains of the father bird. The cat tore open the body of the father bird and then shoved it aside when it did not want it anymore.
One of the hatchlings had landed on a lower branch, close enough to see through the window, and was raising its head though its eyes, round and dark blue under thin eyelids, could not open. Its head bobbled and wavered and fell back.
The round bulb of the body was pale, roundish flesh with veins he could see through the skin. As the cat climbed up the tree for a second time, it approached the hatchling that lay on its back on the branch. The small bird’s belly rose and fell, and then it shuddered and was motionless. Joey recorded the incident in as much detail as he could write. He was driven to tears by what he had seen and he thought the only way he could do justice for the robins was to be their ornithologist.
Joey’s teacher phoned his mother several days later. Joey heard his mother’s half of the conversation from his room. It sounded as if the teacher was upset with what Joey had given him. Joey worried that he might have to repeat Grade Five. His father and mother came to his room and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Are you confused, son?” his father asked.
“About what?”
“About the birds and the bees.”
His mother said: “We think it is time we had the talk with you.”
Joey felt embarrassed but he was not sure why. He felt as if something, maybe his confusion, maybe his understanding of how he thought things worked, maybe the fabric of the world he trusted and had always known was about to be taken from him. He was afraid of what they would tell him. His father sat and stared at the science report Joey had written about the robins.
Joey wrote that the cat next-door sprayed and wasn’t to blame, and how the fucking birds took twigs and wool and patched things up between them, and how the hatchlings looked like his eye ball or his private parts, and how life was about misery, about getting his head bitten off, about sleeping all day because he could not stay awake if he wanted to have children, and how the father robin must have been sleeping when the cat climbed the tree because he wanted to have more baby birds and needed his rest. Joey wrote that, when he went to sleep at night, he did not see girls or mother robins even though both were not there and he never bothered to think about them so he wouldn’t spray like the neighbour’s cat, but only saw darkness when he closed his eyes except for when he dreamed.
When he dreamed, he saw the sight and sound of a helpless baby bird being chewed in a cat’s mouth, a cat he had never seen before and that probably didn’t live in the neighbourhood, ruining his science project so he would have to repeat Grade Five, not because he was stupid but because he had to sleep all day and all night and only opened his eyes to see how the birds were doing and wonder why they were doing it.
He explained that the robins built a nest with wool his mother had set in the lower branches of the apple tree, and that when the nest fell from its cradle in the branches a single strand of red Phentex was still attached to the bough and it dangled alone in the breeze, and the cat that had killed the birds lay in the branch where the nest had been and batted the skein like a toy as it moved back and forth with the wind.
And if he could have children someday, if he ever recovered and was able to stay awake, he was afraid of being devoured by something he could not even see because his eyes were too young to open even if he could lean against the window frame with the sash raised now the warm weather was here and listen for the buzzing of bees among the finger-ling twigs and nodes that wanted to bear apples but had to be awakened for them to grow.
Constant
MY SISTER SAID God had nothing to do with it, that our father was to blame. I should have killed the old man but decided he wasn’t worth the bother. If I had, God would have wanted me dead, and killing God, my sister said, was next to impossible.
Every Sunday morning before the sun came up, our father would rouse the four of us from our warm beds and set us to work around the house. We could have understood getting up that early on that day if we had embraced religion with specified times to pray. At least we would have made God happy. But our father was adamant that spiritual beliefs were fallacies. He had a long argument about why people believe things and why we shouldn’t, and in the midst of his knotted logic we were on the receiving end of both our old man and the Almighty. The only thing we had to cling to, deep down inside, was that we all had to be busy or we were lazy good-for-nothings. The more tired and exhausted we became, the more our father said we weren’t believing in him.
Mom had always kept the place spic and span, but after she passed—I was the youngest and was ten at the time—there was no stopping our father from taking up the theology of cleanliness. He would rant that his wife had been the patron saint of sparkling.
The bathroom and kitchen faucets had to shine. Not a footprint could be seen on the living room carpet. No one ever went in there. Our only tv was in the corner so if we wanted to watch anything we had to sneak off to a friend’s place, and if our father found us missing there was hell to pay. My sister always vacuumed her way out.
We learned a kind of sanitation art, how to do things in such a way as to magnify our work in his eyes. If we gave a window an extra polish with a soft cloth it would shine and reflect his face, and he loved to see his face in the glass with the outside overlaid on it. He said it made him feel part of the world.
My two older brothers figured out how to hide nicks and scratches in the furniture with the sweat and grease that beaded on their faces. We did everything to please our father. None of that mattered.
One by one, my older siblings fled. My sister was the last to go and she left me alone. I thought that was crappy. She held up her hands one Sunday afternoon. Her cuticles were bleeding from the cleanser, the bleach having eaten away the natural luster of her nails. She slapped our father’s face and left an imprint of her blood on his cheeks.
When I was sixteen, I got a job working for a shipping company down by the lakeshore. I told the old man I was getting a job, that I wasn’t a lazy good-for-nothing, and he said he was going to take ninety percent of each paycheque as compensation for the work my brothers and sister had put him to. I agreed. I wasn’t up for a fight. I’d make the money go where I wanted it to go.
Emptying or loading a transport was a night’s work, and the pay was good. I was saving up to get away from the bastard. I had no intention of just walking out. I wanted to land on my feet. My second-oldest brother had just left with nothing to go to. He got into drugs. I don’t know where he found the money. The only thing he knew how to do was clean. The rest of his short life was a mess. When they found his body in an alley, all my father could say was that my brother died in filth.
The Sunday of my departure came when I was so bone weary I couldn’t move my arms. The night before, with a push on to empty three trucks rather than the usual one and turn around a shipment in record time—I imagined a man from the Guinness Book standing behind the plastic drape on the loading dock with a stopwatch and a clipboard—I wasn’t sure where I was let alone whether I had broken any records. Our foreman was just as bad as my Dad. He kept me late, long after the buses stopped running, and I had walked home the six miles as dawn was coming up only to be awakened twenty minutes after I got in to “put my nose to the grindstone.”
My father’s wake-up calls were coming earlier and earlier because he had stopped sleeping. When I heard his voice telling me to get up and get to it I told him to fuck off. He disappeared and came back with a bucket of kitchen compost and dumped it in my bed.
“Look at the rot you live in,” he yelled.
I got up, showered, shaved, and packed my bags. I had some friends from work who told me if I ever needed to I could crash on their couch. I did. I slept on that couch until I finished my final high school term. My father would appear on Saturday nights and yell at me on the loading dock until the foreman got tired of him coming up and interrupting the rhythm of our work and had him arrested for trespassing.
My sister moved back to the city. Her venture out west didn’t work out. They guy she hooked up with, she said, was just as crazy as our father. She had done okay on her return, got a nice apartment, bought a car, and cleaned up her act, as she put it wryly. She took me in. She said that without the bother of a boyfriend nagging her to do this or that, it would be good to have me around. I think she was afraid our father was going to come for her. I was her protection.
One summer evening we drove by the old house. It was for sale. We stopped and asked one of the neighbors what had happened to our old man.
“You didn’t hear? He spent all his time cleaning. We saw him scrubbing the driveway. He was down on his hands and his knees. We pretended not to notice because if people want to do weird shit, well, they have a right, and who are we to question. But we should have questioned. The hazmat people had to evacuate half the block. Your Dad decided to concoct the perfect toilet bowl cleaner. He’d said something like that to Harry next door, and Harry told him to be careful. Your old man almost killed us. He’d left the window open and green clouds of mustard gas poured out and rolled down the street. A couple of boys who were playing road hockey had to be hospitalized. The old guy had mixed bleach, vinegar, and toilet-bowl cleaner in a bucket. He’d made about five, maybe six gallons of the stuff before it got to him. He’d set the buckets in each room. Maybe he thought he was going to let the gas clean the walls. Who knows? By the time we found him the paint was peeling off the walls and he had drowned in his own lungs.”
My sister and I wanted to cry all the way back to her place. We had a right to cry. We couldn’t. Our father had been the one constant in our lives, and he was gone. But after a long silence as we turned on to the lakeshore expressway to head back to the comfortable mess my sister lived in and in which I was now a part, a bug spattered on the windshield and out of habit, I opened the car window, leaned almost entirely out and began to try to rub it clean with my sleeve. I felt guilty, not for the bug, but for the mess.
She pulled me back inside the car, asked me what on earth I was thinking. I didn’t know. I looked at her and tried to explain the smudge that was now spread across the sleeve of my shirt. She looked at me in shock for a moment, and we both began to cry.
