A Short Story
George rose every morning at first light. He dressed always in his red-checked shirt, sleeves rolled above the elbow, and blue denim overalls tucked into heavy gray work socks, the tops of which he rolled over his boots. Having fed himself quietly in the old tacked-on kitchen, he would let himself out by the side screen door, carefully holding the spring in his right hand to avoid the grating, chittering noise the door otherwise made.
Before I began to attend our local school a half mile away, the road edged in late summer with raspberry canes black with fruit, George had begun his ritual. Every morning of my childhood, unless illness intervened, I heard the soft close of the screen door from my perch at the second-storey hall window and watched his smooth, nut-brown head bob down the walk past my mother’s beds of mixed perennials into the lane to pass out of sight through the small plank door in the side of our oldest barn. Even then, it had held little beyond rusty junk, cast-off crates, bits of wire and wood, all too valuable to throw away but too limited in usefulness to do anything but take up space.
All those early years, at daybreak, I waited, breath suspended, for that bald brown head to reappear beyond the barn, the far end of which contained large loading doors, always enough ajar to allow anyone, even my portly father, to slide through without difficulty.
Always George came out of that barn strangely altered. Into my world of fields edged with a lace of poplar and pine came his head with a long-handled axe carried across his shoulder, foreshortened to such a degree that the bright wedge-shaped blade hovering behind seemed to me like some strange, sinister bird. Pressed against the upstairs glass, breathless with dread, I watched the two fade into the obscurity of the lower meadow.
Very slowly, the small sounds of early morning would reassert themselves: the buzz of a bluebottle against the glass, the bright drops of bird song from the fringe of woods, the soft rhythmic toll of cow bells from our herd drifting away from the barns.
Released from the vision, I would tumble downstairs to the empty kitchen to steal the bits of left-overs that would sustain me until our formal breakfast, the smells of which usually reached me in the back garden before my mother’s soft call slipped round the corner to lose itself in the rows of bushes—gooseberry, currant, raspberry—that made a thick wall between the sand hills and the masses of flowers that seemed to me to echo her warmth, her soft authority.
The back garden, so much a part of my childhood, was my first defence against those breath-stopping visions of George. To leave the garden in answer to her call, was to return to the pleasures and tasks of a day filled, especially in summer, with the comforting rituals of life on a small dairy farm.
My father, a man who had always found comfort in habitual action, rested silently in his chair beside the door to the hall, the front legs tipped up, the rounded ends of the chairback repeating the scars in the green paint of the wainscoting that crept up the kitchen walls all the way around. He would not move until my mother slipped the eggs from the crackling dripping onto a plain white plate set silently at his end of the sturdy maple table that took most of the back wall of the old tack-on kitchen.
My father never spoke before breakfast had been cleared, the linoleum cloth wiped, and the hot mugs of long-perked coffee placed like functionless fenceposts before us, and even then, he directed nothing to me beyond soft grunts, a well-established code that meant sugar or cream or that I was free to leave. My mother fared little better: her soft grunts were warmer, kinder, but no less absolute. In response, more coffee came, cream was replenished, more toast made. My father was the source of all activity in that room until habit drove him from his chair with a solid thump of wooden legs on a scrubbed pine floor to his round of activities in the yard and barns. He rose heavily, moved in his soft rubber boots across the kitchen with the ponderous grace of the overweight, brushing my mother’s back with his right hand, while his left rose in anticipation of the screen door which, it seemed to me, always closed this early meeting with a loud, sharp bang like an exclamation mark.
The sound echoed in a room that felt hollowed out, empty, like the pause that follows sudden cracks of summer thunder. Into the silence of that bang nothing could intrude except the soft touch of my mother’s hand as she ran her fingers through my hair, loving fingers that caressed the slope of my neck as they returned to the tasks of the morning. Over her retreating shoulder she always threw the same gentle reminder: “See to the hens, boy”.
And so began my days, that second-storey world hidden behind the hens, the milk cans, all the sweeping and watering and feeding, like black ice under forest moss. The filled feed troughs, the pails of bright, clear pump water making tiny flash floods among the perennials, and the harvest of brown speckled eggs from our small colony of hens piled like melons in the wicker basket together created a surface on which I could stretch my days. Like my father, I found relief in the familiar routines of morning.
Summer afternoons found me far from the house and barns, a sandwich bulging one side pocket of my jeans, an apple the other. The great meadows of tufted beaver grass on the far side of the creek separated our grazing meadows and fields of wheat, oats, corn, and sunflowers from the vast crown lands to the south.
These meadows, head-high or higher, and crisscrossed with the secret paths of muskrat, sometimes beaver, seemed a gateway to the mysterious world of George. I was drawn summer after summer to their green, shadowy tracks and on occasion through them to the edge of the uncut forest beyond. My summers were thus compromised. The warm pleasures of family life that centered on my mother and on the chores I performed for her were coloured by the fragments that each day drew me in fearful fascination to the second-storey window to watch George’s brown head fade into the haze of the lower meadows, the crescent of blade trailing, and to the shadowed green wall of the great meadows that lay waiting on the far side of our fields.
In the summer of my eighth year, an August heat wave baked the land for over a week so that I went often to the relative cool of the far meadows. On one of these mornings in late summer, the glare still slipping through the thick tufts rising in whispering green arcs over me, I lost myself in the deeper tracks of the tall beaver grass. The rich smells of damp decay had dissipated days before: the floor stretched tight with dryness like snakeskin taut in the heat between nails in weathered planks. The thin sounds of my passage, caught in the endless rhythm of hummocks, slowed, then ceased altogether. In the oppressive heat, even the susurrations of grass became fitful. Glazed and soporific, I lay back against one of the great tufts and slept.
Two voices, angry and violent, erupted suddenly farther on the grass. Words punched their way through the hot silence of the afternoon, the early pauses between them filled with the rustlings of small meadow creatures in flight. Alarmed, I crept toward the disturbance, listening now for what the words meant. One of the voices belonged to George:
“Tu hell with yuh! Damn our soul to hell! Yuh just can’t do stuff like that!”
“Look, I’ve explained it isn’t my fault! It’s the government. I just do the surveys.”
“Jesus ‘n Mary! Just the bloody surveys, eh? Y’r gonna bring those other bastards in, yuh said, maybe even a ‘dozer if yuh c’n find a way, an y’r gonna take it down, an’ if yuh try any o’ that, I’ll stop yuh! I ought to stop yuh right now, yuh son of a bitch!”
“Christ, George! Put that thing down! You keep waving it around like that, there’s gonna be trouble! George! For Christ sake. George, Jesus!”
There came a sound, the biting chunk of an axe, only once after the voice stopped. And beyond that, a silence.
But it was wood. I know that sound. The axe into wood. Not the other. Not the other. Horror rose in me in spite of knowing. It was the silence, the terrible silence. The sound had etched itself deeply into the meadow, into me; nothing seemed to live outside it. My world was unmade.
I crept in the direction of the blow, pulled by the power of the act, the fear flowing in a warm spread of darkening blue denim.
In the sweeping green of the tall grass, I saw a single human figure. It seemed colossal in the superheated meadow, rising out of the green haze like a dark threat.
I turned and ran, panic driving me through the grass away from the horror. I felt my fear come after me in the imagined, rhythmic thud of pursuit, the heavy beat of my own heart. The grass too seemed malignant, the great tufts always in my path, the blades slicing at arms and face, the edges sharp enough to cut.
The meadow was a trap; the more deeply I buried myself in the grass, the more difficult my passage became and the more powerfully my fear drove me. At the end of endurance, I sprawled, belly down between the hummocks, breath choking my throat.
I lay in the hot dust of the meadow floor, neither oblivious nor aware, but vaguely conscious of a sundering rift within me. My eyes saw dust dancing in the greening half light; my hands twitched over the rough, dry meadow floor, but I felt curiously out of connection. I floated away strangely buffered, aware as one is aware of heat lightning, flickerings at the furthest edge of sensation.
I lay there in tenuous connection until the horror forced an awkward gathering of arms and legs for a stumbling run through the great hummocks of grass into the utter difference of trees bruising in their solidity. I could not rid myself of the panic that drove me, and I ran until I fell once again in our fields. There I lay in black despair until rough hands lifted my body and I smelled something so familiar that I gave over everything to that and drifted off into nothingness.
I remembered little beyond a kind of rhythm like the swing of a pendulum and that smell, something so familiar, so comforting that I must have slept. I had not heard George’s approach as he came after me through the tall grass so great was my terror. I had not felt those strong, coarse hands lift me tenderly and gently carry me home.
For the rest of that summer, my mother’s warmth sustained me, the caress of her fingers, the gentle absolute of her voice following me about my chores. My father remained what he had always been, an authority of habit, an essential touchstone for us all. But the events of that hot August day had somehow compromised my world, had altered everything, so that all I had once found the essence of life slowly began to become little more than reflections on a taut surface below which lay something dark that seemed to deepen and grow. The more I tried to be what I had been, the more aware I became of difference, and the more unsettling, even frightening, became my days.
I no longer paused at the second storey window to watch George, for that dreadful crescent of steel that aped every movement of his brown head had become unbearable. The carefree days of my childhood had ended. I was lost.
He stood on the long, dusty lane for a long time, the summer air so heavy with heat that nothing moved, not the grasses that lined the ditch or the dusting of wildflowers, nothing. He didn’t hear the old town taxi pull away from him and make its run toward the great pine that dominated the corner. A silent roiling dust cone followed it after the turn, billowing out from the taxi on the gravel road that ran as straight as an arrow toward the black-top county two lane that lay on the far side of the ridge. But of that he saw nothing, only the lane leading to the old farmhouse with the great ridge with conifers and birch behind caught in a moment as if time had congealed, like he stood at the edge of a painting or had become part of a Kodak moment.
He felt caught, as if he were immersed in some mysterious way in a silence that stretched to the very edge of his vision, like looking at some stage set of which he was a part.
Everything seemed enveloped in that curious, profound quiet that sometimes happened on hot summer afternoons. He remembered moments like this in the tall grass of the beaver meadow the other side of the fields when he was a boy. He’d felt as if the air itself had stopped, heavy with a silence that kept him lying quietly under the great humps, the curving mass of grasses hanging over him like protective hands, the air coloured with pale green light.
He looked at the long lane fenced on either side, the old grey wooden posts standing tiredly at predictable intervals, the twin ditches choked with growth, the familiar brown-green of summer, a mixture of sun, grass, weeds, and the filmy layers of dust sprayed like mist from the endless run of tires. His eyes traveled up the lane, somnolent and still in that heavy summer way, to the turnabout, a patch of barren dusty ground. Beyond rose the white clapboards of the house, stained with the telltale brown of the lane.
The layers of brown dust clinging to the clapboards softened the contours of the house, its awkward two storeys set against the grasses, wildflowers and lichened rock of the fallow meadows behind it. A line of alder and bush separated the farm from the great ridge of granite bedrock that heaved itself up to slice the sky. He remembered the great fire that had swept through the upper forests, that had eaten away the stands of pine and birch, that had left the farms below covered in ash, that had left his childhood world an ugly grey-black smoldering place of dejection. He remembered that time as his eyes traveled that ridge, the final frame of the scene before him, crowned with a sprinkling of conifers and birch once again.
Now there was second growth behind the ridge in the hills, but the pines had not returned in any number, and only the farms remained, silent in the heavy afternoon. He looked to the left of the house. The barn sat on its own flattened rise, the roof swaybacked, its spawn of outbuildings sprawling down the side of the low hill. His eyes traveled across the yard, back to the house. The windows stared blankly past him as if he were not there.
He found it hard to breathe in the heavy heat and the silence. Nothing changed for a long time, or so it seemed to him. The house, the outbuildings, the yard and the lane with the great rock face rising behind it seemed like a painting, like those in an exhibition of Wyeth landscapes he’d seen on campus. He stood looking at it all, waiting for something to break the spell. And it came with a sudden fury that staggered him.
He heard once again the staccato rapid-fire of small arms as sudden and as devastating as it had been in the halls of the Ecole Polytechnique. He had been one of a group in the south corridor engaged in desultory half-serious discussion of the latest environmental scare, the discovery of high levels of radon gas in a small village to the north. A male figure had suddenly appeared from the side hall they’d been approaching, had turned to face them, and had opened fire with what was later found to be a stolen automatic Israeli weapon. He found himself now as he had found himself then- face down, fear a bitter taste in his mouth. Then, he had literally felt the concussive thud, the strange spreading warmth. Now, still rigid, his mind ranged over his body and found nothing but the ghost of that warmth and the dull echo of pain in his right shoulder. Fourteen had died before the gunman had blown himself apart. He’d lain alone in that sudden unbelievable silence that overpowered even the sounds of those who came to help, those who filled the hall with horror and activity.
The first rapid reports ceased suddenly, and awkwardly he rose, as isolate now as then, in time to hear the rattling roar of the returning taxi as it crested the small rise before the lane. Having turned at the great pine, it had raced back, hitting the loose planks of the old log bridge that spanned the stream, hidden, except where the great beaver meadows intervened. It flowed on behind the straggling line of alders that followed its course until it turned into the maturity of forest that lay beyond the meadows. He turned toward the road barely in time to see through the cloud of dust spreading like a great V, the disembodied hand of the driver as he passed the lane, both taxi and he mostly obscured.
Another event in Montreal flashed across his memory, a single painting seen in a gallery window. His girl of the moment had forgotten the artist’s name, but she knew the painting and said that the blue thing was an “auto” like the taxi, and that the great orange Vs laid like arrowheads on their sides had meant speed, a kind of forceful puncturing or penetration of the air. Speed, he thought, speed and force and human will: the painter had been right.
The air was clearing now as the noise of the taxi faded, but an impression remained as strong as the impression had been when he had stopped in front of that painting, that here only the dust had life, a roiling, streaming ephemeral impression in an orange-brown funnel of power. Even the acrid smell had a memory attached in the shattered stillness of the afternoon.
Nothing had altered in any significant way: not the lane, nor the house, nor the barn. The scene had the same summer look of drowsy silence, but the moment had passed. Memories had butted into a place where he had not wanted them. They faded now as bird song rippled through the stillness: he felt and heard the susurrations of light summer breezes eddying over the fields in pools of movement.
He picked up his forgotten bag from the edge of the weed-filled ditch and began the walk up the lane to the side yard. He passed the white picket fence that surrounded the small patch of tame grass, mown assiduously by his mother with an old hand mower. In the dust of the side yard, he passed the beds of perennials lined with peonies and the same white fence. A graveled walkway led both to the cutting beds beyond and the common entrance to the house, the side kitchen door that faced the outbuildings on the far side of the back yard.
As he placed his hand on the gate post, he marveled at how little had changed, and he knew that both here and in the large perennial garden, the edges of which he could see beyond the house, his mother still held sway. He remembered her urgent but gentle call that found him often in the back garden among the towering rows of delphinium, monkshood, daisy and coneflower, and the huge blackberry bushes that had been mostly his responsibility and always his refuge from the world of the farm proper. That was the domain of his father, an overweight, ponderous, but strangely graceful man with a nature so taciturn, a connection so tenuous, that it seemed to consist of little more than grunts, some, so it seemed to him, kinder than others. His father rarely spoke, but was always predictable, caught in his daily round of farm life. As a child, that was how he had known him, a distant habitual man. He had immersed himself in the softer, sweeter world of his mother. It was she, he remembered, who had shaped his days, who had lessened the impact of his father’s demands and the daily chores he had had to perform. He had sought her approval, not his. And it had been her world that had given him the fallow time to become who he was.
After the great fire, the apocalyptic event that had ended his childhood, he had been packed off to an aunt in a town that was little more than a cluster of buildings, most of them built by their owners. The town lay some twenty miles distant crouching around the forks of the river as if the river could offer some protection from the wilderness that lay about it. There followed the unhappy years at the small local school, the painful years at the high school to which he was bussed daily, and finally the intoxicating freedom of the great city of Montreal far to the south. These were the good years, filled with friends, girls, galleries, bars and restaurants, and his growing interest in environmental science. What he remembered with the greatest feeling, though, was the freedom to talk endlessly everywhere his friends gathered, in the bars, the restaurants, the lounges, on the street corners, in their lodgings, and most often in the halls of the Ecole.
The sharp report of the screen door as it slapped against its frame jolted him out of his reverie. He heard once more the terror in that hallway and felt the familiar burning pass through his shoulder. He looked up, and there stood his mother, startled into immobility by the utter unexpectedness of his appearance.
She stared at the dark silhouette in front of her, the sun a bright dancing presence behind him, but she knew, and the knowledge made her for the moment unable to function. No one else ever stood quite that way, she thought, but he was different too: a subtle hesitancy in his stance that she saw at once behind the façade of a son grown to manhood. She knew of his work and of the shootings, and she would have travelled to Montreal–inconceivable– but she would have gone nonetheless had he not called from the hospital to reassure her. Even then, she would have gone, but Otis had refused to allow it, and she had obeyed him as she always did. Since that time, she had drawn away from him in silent protest, and now, her estrangement was as thorough as farm life permitted. Otis had suffered too, she knew, but they had the solace of their own worlds: she the house and the gardens, he the farm, a world that encompassed hers and gave him power over her, undiluted despite the silence between them.
The moment faded as quickly as the echoes of the slap of the screen door, and she began to run, calling his name, all else forgotten in the potency of the moment. She saw the gate open, saw him begin to move toward her. Time seemed to stretch itself so that it felt like an eternity before she felt the solidity of his flesh as she came up against him in an embrace almost sexual in its intimacy.
He found he could say nothing. The rush of feelings from his childhood flooding through him were too powerful for speech. Instead, he caressed her hair, her shoulders, and gently turned her toward the house. She remained silent as they walked to the kitchen door, but once inside, she came suddenly to life, resetting the table with food and the inevitable pitcher of iced tea.
The bustle of activity left him isolate at the kitchen door, and his eyes searched the far wall at the table’s end for the telltale marks in the wainscoting that his father’s chair repeated daily as it ended all meals with the thud of its front legs hitting the pine floor with the force of a judge’s gavel. He had always tipped his chair back once the serious eating was finished, balancing precariously on its rear legs while he enjoyed the last of his iced tea. No one ever remained at that table, not even the occasional hired hands, once those front legs descended, preceded as they were by the soft scrape of the chair back as it traced its predictable pattern along the wall. It was a sound and a movement so familiar that as his eye traveled the old groove, his mind supplied the many layers of early experience through which those chair legs penetrated like a punch through sheets of paper. The only difference, he thought, is that the pages holed by his father’s habit, held a part of his life he had lost. The university for all its pleasures, all its freedoms, its friends, and its knowledge, had failed to fill the void. Thus, he had come home looking for whatever it was that he no longer had. And it would be in his mother’s world if it were anywhere, that much he knew. It lay in his beginnings perhaps, back here, where his life had opened. So here he stood, looking into a world essentially unchanged, but one as elusive as any world behind the footlights.
He watched his mother turn after the table had been finished, aware finally that he had not responded to her chatter. He saw her deep puzzlement as she looked at him standing in the doorway. She stepped back, silent now, waiting. And he had nothing to offer her, nothing to assuage the sudden fear in her eyes. He knew she felt the estrangement as surely as did he, and he knew she had no defense against it.
He spoke to her from where he stood rooted in that doorway. “Í came home for something. Something I’ve lost, something you alone gave me, mom, way back when George was still here. But it’s not the same, is it? Here, I mean, it’s not the same. Am I making any sense, mom?”
His estrangement from her and her world hurt her in the deeper reaches of her being. But his immobility, his words, his sorrow, brought swarming over that hurt a maternal protective spirit that flamed bright within her. She looked at him now as her child, not as a man, but as a child hurt and wanting her solace. She ran to him, put her arms around him, and waited. She waited with a certainty she had never lost that she could give him as she always had her abiding faith in home, that she could envelop him in that certainty, feel it flow into him. But his immobility, his awkwardness in her embrace, defeated her. She had no defense against that emptiness, for it had never been hers. All she could offer was here. She stepped back now and looked at him.
Since the time of the great fire when Jason had left the farm, she had poured all her deeper powers into her gardens, and under her knowing hands, they had prospered. The sensual connection had grown stronger and stronger, her pleasure more erotic, her estrangement form Otis more complete.
Now the flow had altered as her heart, her very soul went out to her son. As he stood facing her, she reached out for him once more, and in spite of himself, he came to her, the eternal source of his solace. He held her without connection, only shame and fear sharp and black within him.