Homesick

come it was that you went into their hospital with one thing and went out in a box with another.” He laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I had plenty to tell them. It was different when it came to your mother. I had nothing to say to her. How was it going to look me not notifying her of how things had stood with her brother for eleven months and then suddenly writing that he was dead, all the how and when and where of it? All of that which has to be explained at such a time. Because people are full of questions then, it’s natural. I knew she’d never forgive me, that it would finish it with us. I kept thinking that if I could get face to face with her then I could explain it the way I couldn’t in a letter, make her see that I meant the best for him, did my best for him – that it wasn’t my fault.

“Because I did do my best for him,” said Alec, beginning to speak more emphatically. “It’s God’s truth that I did. I visited him once a week over bad roads in every kind of weather – a hundred and twenty miles there and a hundred and twenty miles back. I made sure they kept him nice in there. Every visit I brought him a new shirt, or pants, or sweater, or shoes. Something so he’d know. And I kept bringing them until the doctors and nurses said I should stop. That’s why I quit it. They said it was making the other patients jealous how he was dressed. It was causing trouble. They had started stealing his things, or maybe he was giving them away. Two of them dividing up his clothes had got in a fight. I seen the doctors’ point. What they said was true, I suppose. I seen it myself, a fellow walking around on the ward bold as brass in a shirt I’d bought for Earl. Earl’s shirt he was walking around in.

“But the thing is… the thing is I never got a chance to explain to your mother how it was because she never came home. So there I was, lying. And the longer the lying went on, the harder I knew it was going to be to tell her. For all those years I carried it, and then the two of you came home to me and when I finally came face to face with your mother I could see it was no good. I saw there was no explanation she would accept after all that time. Whatever I said would only push us farther apart.” He dropped his voice. “So I didn’t say nothing. I kept quiet.”

Daniel shifted on the truck seat, cleared his throat. “So if Earl’s dead, where is he?”

The old man roused himself, blinked his eyes. “Beg pardon?”

“So where is he – Earl?”

“There’s a graveyard on the hospital grounds,” said the old man matter-of-factly. “He’s buried there.” Monkman knew how that must sound to the boy, hard, unfeeling. He also knew it was beyond his power to explain why he had done what he had done. There could be no putting into words what had prompted his decision not to bring Earl home for burial. Part of it had been not knowing whether he possessed the strength to see the boy lying beside his mother, beside Martha. Seeing that would have made his losses somehow crueller, unbearable. But there was more to it than even that reluctance. There was the trick, the game he had already started to play with himself. If Earl’s grave was not in Connaught, reminding him, it might be possible to imagine him some place far away like Vera was, not forever lost but capable of someday finding his way home like Vera could.

If the old man could not entirely correct the impression his bald statement about Earl’s burial had left with the boy, at least he could try to soften it. “That’s what I had in mind for you today,” he continued, “to show you where Earl is. It’s been a while since I was there…” Faltering, he broke off and tried another tack. “I had these flowers made special for him,” he declared, staring down at his lap. “Flowers for winter,” he explained, “they don’t freeze.” Alec lifted his eyes to the dirty dishwater sky. “It won’t be long now before the snow flies. I ought to get my garden cleared…” He lost the thought, the sentence trailed away. He began again. Daniel sensed his effort to concentrate, to speak firmly. “I thought you would take me,” he said, “and that I could show you where he is, so when the time comes you can tell your mother.”

“What do you mean when the time comes?”

His grandfather tried to smile but only succeeded in baring his false teeth in a disturbing grimace. “Maybe you haven’t noticed but I’m no spring chicken. I’m getting on. While I’m still alive I don’t want your mother to know any of this, but after – well, she has to finally know, doesn’t she? And another thing, I’ve been thinking Earl ought to be brought home. You can tell her that for me, can’t you? Tell her to bring Earl home. She’s been left most everything I got so she can afford it. Tell her to bring him home, won’t you?”

Hearing him beg made Daniel uncomfortable. “Stutz knows all this stuff,” he said uneasily. “Let Stutz tell her. Why do you want to get me involved in all of this? I’ve got enough trouble of my own with her. I don’t need any of this shit.”

His grandfather went on doggedly pressuring him. “No,” he said. “This is family. It’s for the three of us to settle. I want you to settle it for me, Daniel. Would you do that? I want you to promise me you’ll tell her – but not before time. Remember, not before time. I’ve got to know in my mind it’s taken care of. Promise.”

The way he was carrying on, Daniel didn’t see he had any choice but to promise. Seeing the old man in such a helpless state was upsetting. Yet it made him angry, too, because this was not a kid’s business. What right did he have foisting it off on him? It felt like blackmail. “All right,” Daniel snapped, only wanting to shut him up, “so I promise.”

“Good, good,” breathed the old man. But the relief Daniel’s pledge gave Alec was only temporary. He started in again. “Don’t you think we could go?” he wheedled. “It’s not really so far and nobody’s going to stop us. If you’re worried about looking small behind the wheel we can set you up on a cushion so you sit every bit as tall as me. That would do it, don’t you think?”

What Daniel thought could be surmised. He was pointedly ignoring the old man, looking away from him, across the road and into a neighbour’s yard where the storm-shattered limb of an austere and venerable elm dangled, hanging from a pliable shred of the tree’s tough inner bark and twisting in the wind.

“Look at all these flowers made special for Earl,” implored Alec. “Mrs. Harding put a drop of perfume on each of the paper heads so they’d be as near real flowers as can be. What’s the use of these flowers if we don’t go? It’d be a terrible waste. Just smell them,” he coaxed, holding out a few to the boy.

Daniel knocked them aside with the back of his hand. “Look,” he said angrily, “why don’t you just leave me alone? I can’t take you. Why do you keep at me? How many times do you need to be told? Do you want to get me in trouble? Do you believe she won’t find out if I take you? She always finds out!” he cried.

“Daniel -”

But Daniel had finished with him. The boy flung himself out of the truck, slamming the door on the startled face of an old man awash in artificial flowers.

It was shame that drove Daniel to run down the bare, windy road, shame at disappointing someone he had only just that minute realized he loved.

21

The following Wednesday morning Alec Monkman began to clean his garden. When he started the job the air was keen and thin, so keen and thin that the only smell it could float was the itchy, prickly one of tomato bushes and even that smell drifted in and out like radio reception from a distant station – despite his carrying armfuls of frost-blackened tomato plants directly under his nose.

By nine o’clock the sun was shining with a cold, untempered brightness and the sky was the palest blue, an exact match for the colour of Monkman’s eyes, which seemed intent on reflecting the season. However, Monkman paid no notice of the sky. He was too busy pulling up tomato plants, wrenching stakes out of the obstinate earth and throwing them in a pile in the middle of the garden. In no time at all even this easy work made him grow flushed and warm. It was because he had let himself run to fat, he told himself, prodding his middle. When he turned to the corn patch he was already slowing, visibly tiring. He cleared it as a child might, uprooting each stalk and bearing each singly to the rubbish heap upright in his fist like a withered staff of office, its roots dribbling earth onto his shuffling boots and the drab leaves rustling alongside his ruddy, sweaty, dirt-streaked face. Having deposited a stalk with the rest, he turned mechanically on his heel and trudged back to pull up another. The corn on the rubbish heap stood stacked higher than his head before the plot was eventually cleared and at the close of that task he was sweating so freely that he removed his jacket and, without thinking, tossed it up on the pile, repeating the same motion that had disposed of the last of the corn. The jacket was soon covered by his next load, pea vines, and forgotten.

Clearing was nothing like planting had been. He had gotten confused planting. He hadn’t remembered certain