Collected Stories

young women passing through the screen door, promenading, swinging between the creaking chains.

Without haste Albert stepped between the green plots to the Ford. Smiling, a pretense of regret in his look, he said, “There was more business to do than usual.” He mentioned a lease. Baloney, of course. It wasn’t what he said but how he spoke that mattered. He had a lippy sort of look and somehow, to Rexler, his mouth had become an index: lippy, but the eyes were at variance with the lower face. Those eyes reflected the will of an upper power center. This was Rexler’s early manner of observation. His eagerness, his keenness for this had weakened with time and, in his seventies, he did not care about Albert’s cunning, his brothels, his secret war against his brother Ezra.

At the first candy store Albert parked the Ford and gave Rexler a copper two-cent piece—a helmeted woman with a trident and shield. With this coin Rexler bought two porous squares of blond molasses candy. He understood that he was being bribed, though he couldn’t have explained exactly why. He would not in any case have said a word to Aunt Rozzy about the house with all the girls. Such outside street things never were reported at home. He chewed the candy to a fine dust while Albert entered a cottage to make the rent collection for his mother. Not a thing a university man liked doing. Although where money came from didn’t much matter.

Albert was in a better humor when he came out and gave little Rexler a joyride through the pastures and truck gardens, turning back just short of Dor-val. Returning, they saw a small crowd at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk. There had been an accident. A man had been killed by a fast train. The tracks had not yet been cleared and for the moment a line of cars was held up and Rexler, standing on the running board of the Model T, was able to see—not the corpse, but his organs on the roadbed—first the man’s liver, shining on the white, egg- shaped stones, and a little beyond it his lungs. More than anything, it was the lungs—Rexler couldn’t get over the twin lungs crushed out of the man by the train when it tore his body open. Their color was pink and they looked inflated still. Strange that there should be no blood, as if the speed of the train had scattered it.

Albert didn’t have the curiosity to find out who the dead man was. He must not have wanted to ask. The Ford had stopped running and he set the spark and jumped down to crank it again. When the engine caught, the fender shuddered and then the file of cars crept over the planks. The train was gone—nothing but an empty track to the west.

“So, where did you get lost such a long time?” said Aunt Rozzy.

Albert said, “A man was killed at the Grand Trunk crossing.”

That was answer enough.

Rexler was sent down to the garden in the yard to pick tomatoes. Even more than the fruit itself, the vines and leaves carried the strong tomato odor. You could smell it on your fingers. Uncle Mikhel had staked the plants and bound them with strips of cloth torn from old petticoats and undershirts. Though his hands were palsied, Uncle Mikhel could weed and tie knots. His head, too, made involuntary movements but his eyes looked at you steadily, wide open. His face was tightly held by the close black beard. He said almost nothing. You heard the crisping of his beard against the collar oftener than his voice. He stared, you expected him to say something; instead he went on staring with an involuntary wag of the head. The children had a great respect for him. Rexler remembered him with affection. Each of his olive-brown eyes had a golden flake on it like the scale of a smoked fish. If his head went back and forth it was not because he was denying anything, he was warding off a tremor.

“Why doesn’t the boy eat?” Aunt Rozzy said to Albert at dinner. “Did he let you stuff yourself with candy?”

“Why aren’t you eating your soup, Robbie?” Albert asked. His smile was narrow. Albert was not at all afraid that he, Rexler, would mention the girls on the porch swing or his long wait in the car. And even if something were to slip out, it would be no more than his mother already suspected. “I’m just not hungry.”

Shrewd Albert smiled even more narrowly at the boy, bearing down on him. “I think it was the accident that took away his appetite. A man was killed on the tracks as we were coming home.”

“God in heaven,” said Aunt Rozzy.

“He burst open,” said Albert. “We came to a stop and there were his insides—heart, liver….”

His lungs! The lungs reminded Rexler of the water wings used by children learning to swim.

“Who was the man?”

“A drunkard,” said Aunt Rozzy.

Uncle Mikhel interrupted. “He may have been a railway worker.” Out of respect for the old man no more was said, for Uncle Mikhel was once a CPR laborer. He had been a conscript on the eastern front during the Russian war with Japan. He deserted, reached western Canada somehow, and for years was employed by the railroad, laying tracks. He saved his groschen, as he liked to say, and sent for his family. And now, surrounded by grown sons, he was a patriarch at his own table in his own huge kitchen with large oil paintings out of the junk shop hanging on the walls. There were baskets of fruit, sheep in the fold, and Queen Victoria with her chin resting on her wrist.

Cousin Albert had turned things around with sparkling success and seemed to be saying to little Rexler, “See how it’s done?”

But Rexler was transfixed by the chicken soup. As a treat, Aunt Rozzy had served him the gizzard. It had been opened by her knife so that it showed two dense wings ridged with lines of muscle, brown and gray at the bottom of the dish. He had often watched the hens upside down, hanging by trussed feet, first fluttering, then more gently quivering as they bled to death. The legs too went into the soup.

Aunt Rozzy, his father’s sister, had the family face but her look was more sharp and severe by far. There was nothing so red as her nose in zero weather. She had cruelly thick legs and her hindquarters were wildly overdeveloped, so that walking must have been a torment. She certainly did not put herself out to be loved, for she was wicked to everyone. Except, perhaps, little Rexler.

“Did you see what happened? What did you see?”

“The man’s heart.”

“What else?”

“His liver, and the lungs.”

Those spongy soft swelled ovals patched pink and red.

“And the body?” she said to Albert.

“Maybe dragged by the train,” he said, unsmiling this time.

Aunt Rozzy lowered her voice and said something about the dead. She was fanatically Orthodox. Then she told Rexler that he didn’t have to eat his dinner. She was not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was aware of it. He loved them all. He even loved Albert. When he visited Lachine he shared Albert’s bed, and in the morning he would sometimes stroke Albert’s head, and not even when Albert fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew in close rows, row after row.

These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life—his being—and love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his soul.

Aunt Rozzy had the face, the fiery face of a hanging judge, and she was determined to fix the blame for the accident on the victim. The dead man himself. And Rexler, walking in Monkey Park and beginning to feel the strain of his excursion, the weakness of his legs, sat down with the experienced delicacy of a cripple on the first bench he came to.

Cousin Reba, always ready to disagree with her mother, said, “We can’t assume he was drunk. He may have been absentminded.” But Aunt Rozzy with an even more flaming face seemed to believe that if he was innocent his death was all the more deserved. She sounded like Bertolt Brecht when he justified the murder of Bukharin. The one thing to be proud of, according to the playwright, the only true foundation of self-respect, was not to be taken in by illusions and sentiments. The only items in the book of rules were dead items. If you didn’t close the book, if you still harked back to the rules, you deserved to die.

How deep can the life of a modern man be? Very deep, if he is hard enough to see innocence as a fault, if, as Brecht held, he wipes out the oughts which the gullible still buy and expels pity from politics.

The destruction of the dwarf brick houses opened the view of the river, as huge as a plain, but swift nevertheless, and this restoration of things as they had been when first seen by explorers opened Rexler himself to an unusual degree, so that he began to consider how desirable it could be to settle nearby so that he might see it every day—to buy or rent, to have a view of the rapids and the steely speed… why not? He was a native son, and he had no present attachments in New York. But he knew this was an impracticable fancy. He could not (for how