“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 make 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
“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
