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 answered. “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
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
