vowels.
“Fit for an old duffer, you mean,” his father said, pinching up a roll of fat above his waistband.
They collected Joe’s baggage and then, luggage banging their legs, sidled up to a wicket and bought tickets for Victoria Station from a black man. He felt cheated. He had expected his first Englishman to be more like Stanley Holloway. After boarding a third-class coach they stowed Joe’s bags and seated themselves just as the train pulled out. It slid away so quietly and serenely from the platform that Joe wondered for a minute if he were hallucinating. Where were the jerks, bangs and metallic clangs he remembered from the CNR milk runs of his boyhood?
The train gathered speed, and through a window pane smudged with grease Joe watched, without apparent interest, the row houses and villas shudder past, while waiting for Mark to have his say. To get all that off his chest. It wasn’t long in coming. After pointing out a few sights and architectural oddities, Mark said: “I’m sorry we didn’t make it, Dad. It wasn’t right that you had to go through that yourself. But we were broke and it was a hell of a long way to go. I hope you see our point.”
The train swayed past a school. A group of boys were huddling bleakly on a playing-field. What was it that Wellington had claimed? The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Joe pitied those kids their grey flannel shorts and muddy knees. It must be damn cold standing there. On the platform he had felt a raw, wet wind that had cut to the bone.
He turned away from the window to his son. “I didn’t expect you and Joan to come, Mark,” he said softly. “I told you that on the phone. I don’t want you to worry about that any longer. You know I never set much store on the formalities.” Having said that, he reached inside his jacket and took out an envelope which he passed to his son. “I brought these pictures for you,” he said. “I don’t know if that was wise or not. I took them with the Polaroid and they didn’t turn out all the best.”
Joe wasn’t sure why he had taken the snapshots. Funeral photographs had never been a family tradition, although some of the old-country Germans, Marie’s people, had always taken coffin portraits. Perhaps that was where he had got the idea. Still, it wasn’t like him. But then lately he had been acting in surprising ways that he could hardly credit. The world had changed since his wife had died.
Mark was tearing open the flap when Joe warned him. “I wouldn’t look at those now,” he said quietly. “Not here. Wait until you get home. She’s in the coffin and I’ll warn you – she doesn’t look herself.”
That was an understatement. The mortician’s creation, that’s what she was. A frenzy of grey Little Orphan Annie curls, hectic blotches of rouge on the cheeks, a pathetic, vain attempt at lending colour to a corpse. So thin, so thin. Eaten hollow by cancer, a fragile husk consumed by the worm within.
“What?”
“They are pictures of your mother in the coffin, of your mother’s funeral,” said Joe deliberately.
“Jesus Christ,” Mark said, stuffing the envelope in his pocket and giving his father a strange, searching look. Or was it only his imagination? Joe had trouble reading his boy’s bearded face. The strong, regular planes had been lost in the thick, curling hair, and only the mild eyes were familiar.
“And you’re really making out all right on your own?” his son asked a little doubtfully. “Tell me the truth, Dad.”
“Fine,” said Joe.
“And the pension? It’s okay, no problems there?”
“Full pension,” said Joe.
“And the charges were dropped?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus,” said Mark, “you’re a real tiger. What the hell got into you?”
Joe looked at his hand. What had gotten into him? He had broken that kid’s jaw as easily as if he were snapping kindling.
“Too long in the trenches,” he said, trying to smile. “Shell-shock.”
“On to other topics,” said Mark with feigned heartiness. “That’s the past. It’s dead, isn’t it? Forgotten. And you’re in England. You made it, Pop. After thirty years of talking about it, you made it.”
“I made it,” said Joe. He reflected that Mark would see this trip in a different light. He would remember the brochures read at the breakfast table, the magazines and travel books piled on the end table that slithered down in a cascade of shiny, slick paper at the slightest touch. All of them illustrated with quaint prospects, thatched cottages, the dark, mellow interior of old pubs with great adze-hewn beams.
But that wasn’t what he had necessarily come looking for. Joe had never explained to anyone what this place meant to him. If he had had to, he would have said: water mostly, tame rivers, soft rain, mist, coolness, greenery and arbours, shady oaks. Things of refreshment and ease. Poetry, too. Yes. Things that cut the deepest thirst. Peace.
Of course, these notions had grown slowly over the years. They began in his first school in a small country place in southwestern Saskatchewan in 1937. He started in May as a replacement for a Scot who had shot himself in the teacher-age. Nobody knew exactly why.
It wasn’t a happy place he had come to. The kids sat hunched in their desks and bit their dried lips and cast anxious glances out the window at dust devils that spun tortuously across the fields. They all looked tired and old and worried. The ceaseless wind rattled grit against the windows. Dust seeped in under the doors, crept under the sills, powdered them all with greyness and desperation. Their pinched faces and smudged eyes, irritated and bleary, watched him closely.
It was an accident his giving them what country folk wanted: a vision of water, of fecundity, of transparent plenty. He would never have planned it; he would have considered the idea cruel.
How still they had gone when he read:
Even the littlest ones had seemed momentarily transported. Towers, sweet water, heavy crops. He had begun to comb his anthologies of British poetry and mark certain passages with little slips of paper. When they became restless or edgy as the wind scored the siding of the school or the stove-pipes began to hum and vibrate, Joe would read to them. He was a good reader. He knew that.
Looking back, he considered it a miracle. But then, you tempt people with the impossible.
Those kids were lucky to get a goddamn orange in their stockings at Christmas. Few ever did. Tumbling pears.
And gradually, with each of the succeeding thirty-odd years of small towns and stifling classrooms, these visions of refreshment sustained
But Joe needed the old visions during those sweltering June days as he prepared class after class, row after row, face after face, for the Department of Education final examinations. Every year his head pounded and ached from the stunning sunlight, the smell of hot paper and dirty hair.
