The Guardians

secret. With ful concentration I am able to punch an elevator button, hold a menu, write my signature on the credit card slip—al without giving away my status as a Man with a Serious Disease. In a way, it's only a different take on the 'normal act' I've been keeping up since high school. It's likely that only my best friends from that time, my felow Guardians, know the effort it takes.

Then, in a smal town a hundred miles away, one of them ties one end of a rope to a ceiling beam and the other around his neck and the normal act has falen away.

There is only room for the lost now. To let the dead back in.

That's it, Trev. Keep moving. Keep it simple.

Button Shirt.

Find Seat on Train.

And when the cal for Grimshaw comes, do what every shaking, betraying part of you wil fight doing and get off.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 3

When I remember Grimshaw now, a colage of places comes to mind. The Old Grove Cemetery. The rail line that snaked through town, straightening only in front of the station, polka-dotted with bird shat. The sky: low, cottony and grey. The trail that folowed the river right out of town and could, it was said, lead a runaway al the way to Lake Huron. The sort of things everyone who has grown up in a smal town has their own version of.

And like every smal town, Grimshaw had a haunted house.

321 Caledonia Street. Once the Thurman place, though who the Thurmans were, and when it was theirs, we didn't know. Although it was red-bricked and wide-porched like most of Grimshaw's older homes, it was distinct in our minds, broader and higher, set farther back from the street. We saw foreboding significance in its broken weather vane, a decapitated rooster spinning around in the most mild breezes as though panicked, a literal chicken with its head cut off. Yet other than this, it was its sameness that left it open to stories we could dream taking place in our own kitchens and bedrooms. It was a dark fixture of our imaginations precisely because it appeared as normal as the houses we lived in.

The house was occupied only for brief stretches. Outsiders who'd been recruited to be the new bank manager or Crown attorney and thought a place of such character was worth an attempt at restoration. The money pit it inevitably turned out to be chased such dreamers away. Or, if you went with the versions we told each other, they were sent out screaming into the night by furious spirits and bleeding wals.

Ben McAuliffe lived across from the place. It alowed us to look out from his attic bedroom and through the maples that darkened its double lot, trying to catch a flash of movement—or, worse, a toothily grinning ghoul—in one of its windows. It spooked us. But no more than the werewolf and vampire comics we traded among ourselves that delivered brief, dismissible chils. Even then, we didn't think there was such a thing as a real haunted house.

Of al the things we ended up being wrong about, that was the first.

Al of us had families. Parents, from the long-gone to the present-but-only-in-body to the few (al moms) who tried hard to make contact but didn't know, when it came to teenage boys, where to start. There were siblings too. My older brother had already left for colege in Kitchener. Ben was an only child of the kind given miles of his own space by his mom, who rarely left the house after Ben's dad died. Randy, on the other hand, came from a big, red- haired Catholic brood, five kids who, viewed together throwing dinner rols at each other or administering Indian sunburns in their rumpus room, seemed to number closer to a dozen. But with the possible exception of one, none of the other familial players in our lives figured in what was to turn out to be Our Story.

We were boys, so you're supposed to look first to our dads in having a hand in making us the way we were, but for the most part, they were as absent as our teachers and the other elders advanced to us as 'role model' candidates. My own father was an accountant at the town's utilities office. Compromised, mildly alcoholic.

An essentialy decent man possessed of faults some children might have chosen to be wounded by, but for me were just the marks that living the better part of his life in Grimshaw had left on him, and therefore were forgivable.

But we had another father. One we shared between us. The coach. He had a name—David Evans—that struck us as too unutterably bland to belong to someone like him. For us he was always 'the coach,' a designation spoken in a tone that somehow combined affection, irony and awe.

The coach wore wire-frame glasses, Hush Puppies, hid a receding hairline under a wool cap on game days.

He looked more like an English teacher—which he in fact was between nine and three thirty, Monday to Friday—than a leader of anything more athletic than the chess club. But his rumpled-scholar appearance was both who he realy was and a disguise. We al got him wrong at first, which was how he wanted it. We were always getting him wrong. And then, out of the blue, he would say or show something that struck us as so essential and unguarded and true we became his. We believed. We wanted more of that.

The league's other coaches considered our success a freakish series of flukes. It wasn't any tactics or motivation our coach brought to the dressing room that lifted us to the top of the standings. How could it be? He didn't look like a hockey man. He didn't even swear.

They got him wrong too.

But what was it to get him right?

We knew he was married. Childless. Moved to Grimshaw five years earlier from Toronto. There were questions we had about him. Not creepy suspicions (of the sort we had about Mr. Krueger, for instance, the knee- patting driver's ed. instructor), just a handful of missing links in what we could gather about his story-Information that might explain why, beneath the coach's calm surface, we could sense something being held down, a muffled second voice. It might have been anger. Or a sadness too unwieldy to be alowed free run within him. There was, we sensed, something he might be helped with.

But he was the one who helped us. Our guardian. It was hard to see how this could ever be the other way around.

Our school hired a new music teacher at the beginning of our grade eleven year. Mr. Asworth, the old music