COVIDs and Rhinoceroses

 

“Today we’ll talk about the virus,”

Miss Minnish said, and drew a perfect circle on the board

Then shaded edges ‘til it was a ball, (she also teaches Art).

Then she drew spines, with tips so finely rendered

“They look sticky,” Erin said, and I agreed

“And just for fun, let’s put a window here

So we can see inside,” Miss Minnish said

And looking through the window we saw

Two jagged lines, “These are its genes,” she said

“Of which it has but two. Enough,” she said “to guide it to

A hungry human cell in noses or lungs and order these same

Human cells to make more COVID cells just like it.”

(Like birds that lay their eggs in others’ nests, I thought

And Erin said, “More like ten million for the price of one.”)

“But How big is it,” Jeremy sitting at the front wondered aloud.

“Bigger than a fly’s eye?”

“You take a fly’s eye, say,” Miss Minnish said,

And drew one on the board (she also teaches Art)

“Now cut it in half (she cut it with a brush)

Then cut the half in half, and again and again and again

For 6 gazillion times!”

She told us then about masks and spittle and droplets carrying viruses

Like vagrants on a bus, and how 2 meters equals 6 feet, 6.7 inches

But I was barely listening.

 

I’ve always been afraid of big, big things

Like hippopotami and elephants, grizzlies and tall giraffes

And other things I’ve only seen in zoos. (Not so much dogs

Unless they’re big like Larsen’s German Shepherd.)

But now, tiny, evil things are everywhere: I feel them crawling in my bed

My hair, my pillow, my clothes, my book . . . Peeyoo!

No leash, no bars can hold them safely back.

Darn you, COVID, for wiping out the edges of my fears:

I may not sleep again, hay for my nightmares fills my universe.

 

At midnight, mother comes and sits on the side of my bed. She takes off my mask . . . and then takes off the second one. We talk about bears and rhinoceroses and how they almost never show up in Rosthern. We talk about dust and flies and germs and COVID and we admit small stuff is everywhere. Then we talk about the people world . . . the middle-sized world in which we humans live. She says the big things and the little things sometimes creep into our world and we middle-sized have to learn how to protect ourselves. She says there are no rhinoceroses or COVIDs in the room so I’m safe ‘til morning. I tell her she can go now and she does, but just to be safe I put one mask back on . . .  but not the second one.

 

Fifty Ways to Lose your Children

 

Fifty Ways to Lose your Children©

George G. Epp

Fish Creek Church

No one could bring himself to go home until a water-colour sunset dimmed to candle-light in the west and the pall of night descended on bush and pasture and the steep and scrubby banks of the South Saskatchewan. A few had brought flashlights and as they’d all regrouped in answer to the search leader’s whistle, four of us volunteered to continue into the night by the faltering and inadequate light we’d brought with us. I was one of the latter. The rest were advised to head back to their cars and home while there was still dusk enough to find their ways.

                So team-leader Aaron Barstow, Edie Clausen, Donavon Dueck and I, Danny Schmidt were left to huddle once more to plot out our “strategy;” Aaron had used that word a lot since the Mounties had put together groups for the search and Aaron had volunteered to lead ours. Donavon clicked the switch on his flashlight a few times, banged it against his thigh and shined it upward at his face when it flickered on. I remember he looked demonic lighted that way.

                “Save your batteries,” Aaron said. Donavon switched off his light, stepped closer into the circle.

                “Don’t think my batteries have a lotta life left,” he said.

                “No,” Aaron said. “We’ll only have an hour or two at best.”

                The futility of it struck me. I recalled being up in LaRonge on a visit some dozen or so years ago and signing up for an aerial search. A plane had apparently gone down somewhere between Prince Albert and The Pas and search command had assigned Nipawin Air to search an area about the size of a postage stamp on the wall map, a full hour east of LaRonge. I and two local men volunteered to act as spotters and we crawled into an ancient 4-seater Beaver on skis and headed out. How our pilot found the assigned area was beyond me, but we flew and flew due east, then west, then east again, our eyes watering with the cold and intense peering down into a vast, undifferentiated forest broken up only by lakes and rivers. We’d been told to look for anything that didn’t fit: the glint of light off metal, a slash through the trees, smoke that might indicate a signal fire. Anything.

                Needle in a haystack; contact lens lost in a meadow.

                “I don’t see any point in stumbling around on the steep part of the river bank in the dark,” Aaron was saying. “There’s an open field of stubble between this bush and the road, and beyond that, a pasture with a few heifers. We’ll search those looking for, I guess . . . any signs that she walked across there: Kleenex, a footprint, anything.”

                That’s what we did for an hour, walking four abreast with five feet between us. We walked the margin of a harvested wheat field, then the pasture where a half dozen heifers followed us and days of cattle-making-tracks would probably mean that footprints would be indistinguishable, even in daylight. I shone my flashlight in short arcs in front of me with one hand and turned up my collar, zipped my jacket up to my chin with the other. Last night had been the first autumn frost; tonight would—the forecast said—be even chillier.

                As kids, we’d lose things . . . a lot. I remember the typical conversations:

Me, “But I’ve looked everywhere!”

Mom, “No you haven’t. There’s one place you haven’t looked and that’s where your pencil case is right now.”

Her name is, or was, Tiffany Sadowsky. She’s eleven, is tall for her age at 5’2” with long brown hair. She was wearing a Pioneers club jacket—blue—and jeans. There were eight kids and two adult leaders on the canoe trip that started in Saskatoon and camped at Fish Creek, where it was discovered in the morning that her sleeping bag was empty and Tiffany wasn’t answering when they called. Unfortunately, they’d chosen a cell-phone dead-spot to camp, and by the time the two leaders had rowed downstream far enough to be in cell phone range, a full hour had passed, plus another until the RCMP were able to get to them. Ordered to stay where they were, the young canoeists had yelled themselves hoarse during the wait, had defied orders by making fruitless, short forays into the bush.

All that was three days ago. The StarPhoenix had ferreted out as many details as they could; the photo-spread of her family made me feel ill, as if the paper would send a card to Tiffany’s mother thanking her for the boost in circulation the loss of Tiffany had created for them. They were a sober-looking family: a single mom, blond and heavily made up for the photographer, an adolescent boy with long, dark hair and a very thin six or seven year-old girl with the same long, brown hair of her sister. And then there was Tiffany, sitting on the edge of the couch with her arm around her mother’s shoulders and a grin that was at once mischievous and . . . well, happy.

The facts were few, and so the speculations were many. Coffee row in Rosthern eliminated the rapture, remained equivocal on drowning and third-party involvement in that order. We were content, it seemed, to simply assume that that Sadowsky girl had just disappeared for reasons unknown. Calloused emotions, blasé responses. I kept thinking about “there’s one place you haven’t looked, and that’s where she is.” Do the Mounties know this?

No material thing, no person, no remains of a person can exist without a place. My pencil case was in my school bag where I knew it wouldn’t be, so I hadn’t looked there.

It was 10:30 when we decided to make the walk back to Fisher Road before our flashlights gave out completely. Sadie was sitting up in bed reading when I went upstairs and she needed to know what the day had been like. But there were no tellable details. We walked, we looked, we found nothing.

I checked in on Jamey and Russell who should have been asleep but were building a Lego fort.

Jamie looked up. “Did you find the girl?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid we didn’t. Maybe tomorrow.”

He turned and turned Lego blocks between thumbs and fingers of both hands, got up, sat down on his bed. “Maybe she’s in heaven.”

“Or maybe she’ll be found safe and sound in some warm place. You guys need to go to sleep. School tomorrow.” Jamey is nearly eleven, Russell nine and already showing early symptoms of the second child syndrome: contrary and acquiescent by turns, unnecessarily competitive with Jamey and the odd hint of pleasure in torturing the cat. Russell climbed up to his bunk after three or four urgings and I made to tuck him in, but didn’t.

“I don’t feel sleepy,” Jamey said and I knew what he really meant, that a lost girl out in the cold and dark must be found before the world sleeps.

I lay awake for a long time myself.

I’m a dreamer. My dreams extend the worries of the day into rabbit holes and down dark alleyways. Sometime that night I woke up, my pajamas wet with sweat. I’d been looking, not for Tiffany with the long, brown hair, but for Russell, and then not Russell but Jamey. I ran down long corridors with door after door, all locked and rounding a corner, I ran into Donavon. His face was the face I’d seen in the semi-darkness of the Fish Creek almost-wilderness, demonic, almost sneering. He laughed. Said nothing. Laughed again and then ducked into a door marked MANAGER. I tried to move, shouting ”Tiffany! Tiffany!” but my feet wouldn’t move. And then I fell. Down into a deep well, somewhere like the farm where as a boy I watched my dad and two neighbours pulling a dead calf out of the well. I woke up when I hit the water.

Sadie turned on the light. “You screamed,” she said and wrapped her arms around my head.

I felt breathless, and the familiarity of the art on the walls, I think, the reassuring sameness of the room and Sadie’s caresses slowly brought my heartbeat back to normal. Or near to it. I told her in chopped sentences about my nightmare; she’d been here before. She knew me better than I knew myself.

“I think I’d die if that was Russell . . . or Jamey lost out there,” I said.

“It’s not Jamey and it’s not Russell,” she said. “And it never will be.” She sounded so sure.

Sadie persuaded me to go to church the following morning. “You can go hunting after lunch,” she said, and I acquiesced . . . reluctantly. During sharing and prayer, Pastor Christy prayed that Tiffany would be found, and for her family that they would be comforted. My soul rebelled, do we not know that Jesus will not plow through the shrubs, the rocks and the stones to find a lost girl?

“I’ve got to go,” I whispered to Sadie. She nodded.

“I’ll go home with the Brookses,” she said.

I drove back, parked the car on a field driveway and walked the short, winding trail down to the old, collapsing Fish Creek Church and on toward the river. The campsite was obvious. Police, searchers, thrill-seekers had trampled the grass there and a circle of grey ash remembered the fire around which the Pioneers had gathered for their dinner. A log had undoubtedly served them as a seat as they watched the sparks soar into darkness. I sat. Maybe at the exact spot where a young girl sat gazing into the fire and then did, or didn’t, go to sleep under the stars.

I closed my eyes and sat, just sat. Nothing to do. We’d looked everywhere. The only voices speaking into my silence were the lap, lap, lapping of the water eddying around a rock and the almost inaudible whisper of poplar leaves twisting in the wind, green-tinged with the muted yellow that heralds the dying of summer. In time I sensed a presence. So close that it might be my mother sitting beside me on the log. And the poplar leaves and the eddies seemed to say, “There is one place where nobody has looked, and that’s where Tiffany is.”

“There’d have to be a million places where no one has looked,” I thought. “What’s more, I’ve no idea what places have been searched and what places have been missed.” By now, the RCMP would be telling Sharlene Sadowsky that missing children not found within twenty-four hours are seldom found alive.

In the gentlest of ways, Sadie had hinted to me that my emotional reaction to the missing child of strangers was . . . well, more than usual. I countered that as a father of two children and a mid-grade teacher, I couldn’t help but see my children and my students’ faces in the lost girl. I even recited the last verse of John Donne’s prophetic poem: “Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: It tolls for thee.”

“It’s not just that,” she said. “You need to accept that you’ve done what you can. You’ll need to let it go. If not sooner, than later.”

It was early afternoon when I finally left the place that by now had become haunted for me. I had known this place long ago; paddling the South Saskatchewan downstream from Saskatoon to the junction with the North branch had been mine and Donovan’s boyhood goal as adventurers. Twice, we’d put in at Gabriel’s Bridge and then hankering for a change, had Donavon’s dad drive us and his canoe to Saskatoon where we put in at the CPR Bridge.

Our first night’s bivouac that time had been at the very spot where the Pioneers had lost their friend, and probably also their innocence. It was also the place where a snuffling black bear scared the hell out of us, where we disembarked so fast that our provisions got left behind and we had to restock at Batoche—on bags of peanuts and a dozen chocolate bars.

 

Classes had just gotten underway the week before and unremarkably, Tiffany’s story faded with the day-to-day of organizing, teaching, coaching, cajoling and encouraging the twenty-three Grade Sevens I’d been assigned. But it all came back when the StarPhoenix and CTV reported cursorily that Tiffany had been found safe and sound, that a custody battle, a stalking and a nighttime kidnapping were involved and charges had been laid.

Safe and sound. Probably a medical check was done and all her organs deemed to be functioning normally and she had no visible contusions, no broken bones, so “safe and sound.” An answer to prayer.

I didn’t think so, and still don’t.

In about the middle of October, Russell was suspended for two weeks for laying a vicious beating on his best friend, Raymond. It had to do with a Tooney one of them had found in the playground at recess. We left his counselling to the school psychologist but removed most of his privileges at home, hoping for some kind of “born again” change in his attitude. Sadie and I were left with the feeling that Russell would grow up like a kite, picking up on and riding the crests of winds over which neither he nor we had control, possibly crashing with an unanticipated lull in the breeze. How would we live with that? Would we be up to it?

And then there was Jamey. So easy, like a puppy on a leash and so happy to be contained in the radius of that restriction. He never loses his pencil box.

Paul Simon is responsible for an ear worm that recurs for me often, that being the catchy tune in “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.” When I sing it in my head these days, it goes, “Fifty Ways to Lose your Children.”

I mentioned this to Pastor Christy. She’s very wise. She said, “I guess we can only lose our children if we assume we owned them in the first place.” For me, this was a poignantly powerful answer. Also, for me at that, at this time, it was no answer at all. Maybe it will be some day.

So much in this world depends on whether or not Tiffany has been truly and lovingly found. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.

There’s another parable that was forgotten by Writer/Apostle Luke. In it, the Prodigal Son never returns.

 

 

 

 

               

Barbed Wire Seminary©

 

Cypress Hills 

Barbed Wire Seminary©

George G. Epp

 

“Why do horses always snort like that when they’re walking?”

            “Like what. Pete?”

            Pete closed his mouth and made a noise through his nose that sounded about as much like a horse as a cowbell sounds like a violin. “You know what I . . . there! That sound.”

            “Oh, that. Well Trigger’s just blowin’ his nose. An’ they don’t do it just when they’re walkin’. They do it when they’re in their stall in the barn, too.”

            “I don’t think so. ‘Least I never heard it.” Pete slapped Trigger’s flank with a knee; the smallish palomino gelding had a hard time keeping up with Art’s long-legged black. “They whinny in the barn. ‘Specially when you give ‘em their oats.”

            “No, whinnies is different.”

            Trigger snorted again. “See, Art? Nothin’ came out. Shit, he didn’t even pull out a hanky!”

            Art and Pete had both signed on with the Bar Eleven Hereford Ranch in April, and since then had been riding the fences—of which there were at least 60 miles—replaced poles, spliced broken wires and before May rolled around, had exhausted every topic of conversation they could come up with. Because their horses were right under them, so to speak, Pete particularly could always find some obscure horsey trivia with which to break the silence . . . and the snorting. Under the open sky in a bedroll at night, he’d speculate on the stars, their relative distance from each other, what they might be made of if not electricity and how to locate the Little Bear.

            A good story teller would describe them here, but a good reader will easily put together what two cowpokes who haven’t washed, changed their clothes, shaved for a week-and-a-half would look like. And smell like, for that matter. And he’d be right. Mind you, Art was at least five inches taller and seventy pounds heavier that Pete. That’ll have to do.

            I said they’d been through every topic they could come up with. What I should have said was that they’d exhausted all the safe subjects, the subjects that were about things, stretching to animals, like the horse’s snorting habit. Some sage sometime said that there are three levels of conversation, the lowest being about things, the second about people and the loftiest about ideas. Neither Art nor Pete had spent a lot of time at lofty, so if a question of, say, the kinship of all living things ever came up, it would have to be by accident.

            And it did—come up . . . by accident—when they were at the farthest end of the Bar Eleven’s grazing allotment and their canned beef and canned corn and jerky had all been eaten. 15 cans divided by 15 days would equal 1 per day, but even if their math had been up to it, their appetites hadn’t been. Art put up a rabbit snare with a bootlace but all he caught was a skunk, which he proposed to dispatch with his rifle so he could have his bootlace back. 

            Hunger had made Pete testy. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? “Don’t shoot the skunk, Whaded he ever do to you?”

            Art lowered his rifle by about 6 inches. “What?”

            Pete put his thumbs behind his belt and stood with his feet about 18 inches apart, sort of like James Arness in a Gunsmoke poster. “He’ll chew his way out. He’s prob’ly got a wife and kids at home. God made skunks too, ya know.”

            Art lowered his rifle another 3½ inches. “What?”

            Pete shuffled in the dust. “Just don’t like to see animals killed for nothin’.”

            “So. I’ll tell ya what. You go and untie that polecat and bring me my bootlace and I won’t shoot it.” Art lowered his rifle all the way and smirked. “Jes remember. You wooden shoot a skunk, but he sure’s hell won’t hesitate to shoot you.”

            “Nah. he’ll get out on his own.”

            Art raised his rifle, pulled the trigger . . . and missed. The bang of the gun startled the skunk, who leaped back, tore the bootlace off the barbed wire to which Art had attached it and loped off, trailing 2½ feet of leather bootlace behind him. Art shot off another two bullets that missed, and as he was reloading, the skunk disappeared into the shrubbery around a slough.

            Art slid the rifle into the scabbard of his saddle. “Suppose yer gonna tell me now that God saved his little . . . stinky creature.” He untied his bedroll and spread it out under a tree. “Tomorra yer gonna ride like hell across the hills and get us some food and then yer gonna ride back an’ make me a supper like you’ve never rustled up bafore.”

            “C’mon Art. That’d take all day and the missus gonna be mad as hell at us.”

            “No, Pete. Not us . . . You!”

            “What’d I do?”

            “You pissed me off, made me miss the skunk. You cost me a bootlace!” Art was trying to roll a cigarette with the last shreds of tobacco shaken carefully out from the bottom of a pouch. The resulting cigarette was hardly thicker than a soda straw and the tobacco so dry that when he lit it, it flared up like a torch and he was lucky to get one flaming hot drag out of it.

            Pete laughed. He shouldn’t have. Art jumped up in a rage, grabbed Pete’s bedroll and hurled it up into the tree, where it probably has made some magpie couple a mighty fine nest for these past three years since Pete, Art and the Bar Eleven parted. 

 

Pete slept fitfully on the bare grass, his left forearm as a pillow, Trigger’s saddle-blanket covering his legs and the saddle over his shoulders and his free arm. He had plenty of time to think, to think about skunks and rabbits and ladybird beetles and elephants and the right to live to a ripe old age . . . and people, he thought, which led him to Art and when he thought about him as a living thing, he suddenly grew very sentimental about the fact that he would have to spend the next day or two or more with one boot unlaced and how awful that would be and it would be his (Pete’s) fault. What’s more, he (Pete) was wearing cowboy boots a lot like those worn by James Arness in Gunsmoke (only misshapen and soiled with much non-movie-set wear and tear) and so he didn’t even have a lace to give him (Art) if he’d wanted to.

            But he’d make it all up to Art.

            The first hint of daybreak, however, found him much more optimistic mentally and far, far stiffer and sorer physically. As he straightened his aching back and rubbed a painful hip, he looked over at Art cocooned in his soft, warm bedroll, then while contemplating the grueling 10 mile or more cross-country trip to the ranch, begging for more rations, scrounging a bedroll or a ladder (no, a ladder wouldn’t fit on Trigger), his convictions gradually moved to the stupidity of his colleague in putting up a snare with a bootlace, of the obvious imbecility of the skunk in getting caught in it and Art’s equally obvious ineptitude with a rifle. And then, the bedroll high up in the branches of a sprawling spruce tree, well.

            It was hunger, he told himself, not Art’s orders that drove him to make this trip to the ranch yard. Mrs. Perkins had obviously short-changed them on the groceries, probably to save a few dollars or (and this thought began to percolate at about the time the sun came up and he topped the first hill and began a precipitous descent into the coulee) or she thought of him and Art as nobodies to be exploited like slaves.

            As Trigger slowly and laboriously climbed the far side of the coulee with Pete leading the way, angry, aggressive thoughts assailed him (Pete, not the horse). (I realize here that I’m not very good at rendering Pete’s thoughts in the way Pete would have experienced them; he’d probably never used the words laboriously, aggressive, and especially not assailed in his life.) He imagined himself walking up to Boss Man Perkins and saying, “Now see here . . .” or “What the hell . . .” but he wasn’t able to finish any of the sentences and, anyway, having been on the seasonal work circuit for about 20 years now, any such conversation would undoubtedly go something like this:

            IRATE PETE: Now see . . .

            BOSS PERSON: You’re fired!

            Pete had a vague idea about at least one lofty thought, a thought he had nevertheless found words for. Justice. He would have said to Boss Man Perkins, “That’s not fair,” and it would have been exactly what he was thinking now after he’d resigned himself once again to the plaintive, subservient mewing that seasonal cowboys have to do to get a job, to keep a job, to get enough cash together to survive the droughts between jobs. Even the skunk experienced more justice; he got a bootlace for his folly.

            As it was, it went rather well. Boss Man Perkins and skinchy Mrs. Perkins weren’t home; Pete filled his saddlebags with cans of meat, peas, gravy, a bag of potatoes and even some tinned peaches. He nipped into the freezer and took out 4 T-Bones for supper, picked up a bedroll stored in the bunkhouse closet and was gone. In and out like a ghost. He could hardly believe his luck. He was leaving the bunkhouse when it occurred to him that filching a tin of tobacco for Art would be the icing on the cake. He went back; an unopened can of Navy Fine Cut wasn’t hard to find going through the regular ranch hand’s lockers (that were never locked, cowboys are completely trustworthy).

            The summer sun was setting behind the verdant hills when Pete finally arrived back from his grocery shopping. Art was seated with his back against the ash, reading a tattered copy of Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey. He jumped up the second Trigger and Pete hove into earshot, reached into a saddlebag before they’d even stopped and pulled out the bag of potatoes. He tore the bag open, took out a potato and commenced feeding on it, dirt and all,

            “Is that all you brought? Spuds?”

            Pete pulled a near-dead Trigger to a stop, took off the saddlebags and dropped them onto the grass at Art’s feet. “Feast yer eyes on that. ‘N’ build a fire. We’re gonna eat steak tonight!”

            A rotting fence-post and a few dead branches from the ash would have to do. Pete piled them all together, shoved a few handfuls of dried grass under the lot and put a match to it. Art plopped the four steaks in the frying pan, added a couple of quartered potatoes in with them, opened a tin of gravy and poured it over the lot and set the pan over the smoky fire.

            The steaks turned out to be pork chops, the gravy burnt to the pan and the potatoes were decidedly underdone when the two hungry plainsmen agreed they could wait no longer.

            After supper, Art glued together two cigarette papers, wrapped them around enough tobacco so that the end product was about the thickness of a cigar. He puffed on that while he put together another which he lit off the first. He belched. He puffed. He farted. He belched again.

            Pete snorted. Lightning whinnied. Trigger snorted.

            “How’d you talk the missus into giving you all this good stuff?” Art said between puffs.

            “She did’n zactly give it me,”

            “Whatd’ya mean.”

            “She wasn’t home, so I took it.”

            “You what?”

            “I took it. Same stuff she’d ‘a’ given me . . . ‘cept for the tobaccy and the . . . the steaks, I guess.”

            “So you stole it.”

            “No, I never stole it. If you know somebody’s gonna give you something, and they ain’t home and you take it, that ain’t stealin.’”

            “Sure’z hell is! She’d never of give you the tobacco and the . . . the . . . pork chops!”

            “No, I just borrowed them, I guess.”

            “You hippo crate! Yer all holy, holy when it comes to . . . to not shootin’ skunks. But stealin’ stuff from yer boss, well that’s OK, is it?”

            Art took another long drag on his sausage-cigarette. “Anyway, you can’t borrow a pork chop. ‘Less you was fixin’ to return it someday.”

            Pete felt a chill creep up his back, lodge in his neck. It really hadn’t felt like stealing, except maybe for tobacco, and since he didn’t smoke and Art was right now consuming the goods, his part in it could, he now saw, be considered a moral failure, maybe even a sin. Hell . . . burning hell forever and ever, That’s where sinners went. And didn’t the fact that he did it (especially the tobacco) just to please Art carry any weight in his favour? 

            Pete watched the sun set over the aromatic sagebrush, a gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the Oak tree and in the distance, a coyote howled his love song and a smaller voice farther away answered. (I think I plagiarized this line from my memories of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, sorry.) Pete felt an ache beginning in his chest and rising up to constrict his throat and he thought of all the girls he would never know, their flaxen hair blowing in the breeze, their red lips, their smiles and their . . . their . . ..

            An orange, gibbous moon was rising in the east when Pete finally raised his head from crossed arms and went back to unroll his bedroll, pulled off dusty boots and crawled in, zipping up his cocoon in hopes of shutting out the thoughts of the evening.

            And he dreamt, but couldn’t remember what he dreamt when he woke up at dawn. (And if he had remembered, he wouldn’t have told me anyway.) Whatever it was had awakened him smiling.  He unzipped his pilfered bedroll, sat up, stretched and pulled on his boots. He walked over to where Art was snoring softly and gave him a kick in the place where he’d determined his butt to be.

            “Git up, horseface!”

            Art bolted upright. “What the hell?!”

            “Git up! I ain’t goin to hell and yer gonna help me!”

            “Go ta hell! Whaderya talkin about?”

            “So I stole the steaks and the tabaccy. OK, and maybe the rest of the food. So give me the tabaccy can and five bucks. I’m goin’ back to confess so’s I don’t go to hell when I die!”

            “Go ta heaven, ya mean? Who’re you kiddin.’ You and me ain’t goin’ to heaven . . . heaven’s for preachers an’ people who . . . who sing in . . . in the choir, an’. . . an’ such.”

            Art rolled over, pulled the blanket over his ear. Pete went scrabbling through his saddle bag, the one with the secret pocket where he kept whatever little money he hadn’t spent on whiskey and jujubes and since they’d been riding fences for almost a month, shopping days had been few and far between. Actually zero. There were two silver dollars, two quarters and a five dollar Abe Lincoln. Two silver dollars, two quarters and a five dollar Abe Lincoln. He thought as follows: “If’n I put a dollar in the tabaccy can, that should pay for what Art smoked last night, an if I give Mrs. Perkins a dollar fifty, I can keep the Abe Lincoln, and cancel my sins of thievin’.”

            Although Pete didn’t know it, he’d just stumbled into the existential question over which all the popes, career theologians and preachers had battered their heads since time immemorial. How much or how little self-sacrifice is required to tip the balance in favour of the plaintiff on judgment day? (Sorry, that’s really two existential questions.) Or if sins are forgiven, is it just the past ones or does that include the ones you expect to commit tomorrow? (Make it three; I’ve got to plan better.) Pay attention, Pope Pius, Martin Luther, Menno Simons, John Calvin; the answer may hinge on Pete’s hoarded Abe Lincoln and the measure of his penitence weighed against his self-worth as a vagrant, itinerant, cowboy person with nothing to his name but a decrepit horse, a couple of flannel shirts, a sweat & dirt impregnated hat, a worn saddle and halter, two leather saddle bags—and an Abe Lincoln!!

            Trigger wasn’t happy about repeating the long ride to the ranch. But when they got there, Pete was elated to discover that nobody was home, neither in the house, nor in the barn, nor in the bunkhouse. He’d confiscated the tin of tobacco from Art’s saddle bag; now he put one silver dollar inside and returned it to its rightful place in the third locker to the right of the stove. He loped over to the house –his worn boot heels exaggerating his bow-legged gate—and laid a dollar fifty on the kitchen counter. That should more than cover the pork chops that he’d mistaken for steaks. He led Trigger, then, to the cattle trough and while the poor nag was slurping up a bellyfull of brown water, Pete took a look around, returned to the house and pocketed one of the two quarters.

 

Soon after Art found his tobacco gone, he figured out that Pete hadn’t been kidding when he said he Was going to make things right. He swore a purple streak, kicked at a few tumbleweeds and generally exhibited all those withdrawal symptoms that every smoker who’d ever collected butts in the gutters would recognize. He saddled up Lightning and rode off in the direction of the ranch, then pulled up when common sense told him that with three hours head start, even Trigger would beat him to the can of Tobacco. Back under the Oak, he built as big a fire as the scanty supply of twigs would allow and fried up a pound of bacon, ate it standing up while waiting for the coffee pot to boil. (You may be wondering where he got the water for coffee; I know, I was. Look up Deus ex Machina on Google if this troubles you.)

            Art rode at least five miles of fence, fixed three broken wires and disentangled one bawling calf from a barbed wire snare before heading back to the Oak. Some people get a lot done when they’re raging. Pete was already there, cooking a pot of beef (or pork) stew and singing a butchered first verse of Strawberry Roan. Had Art not smelled the beef (or pork) stew, he would probably have ridden Lightning right over Pete. But he didn’t. He just swore a violet streak at Pete while he shoveled a plateful of beef (or pork) stew into his mouth. Pete just smiled as if he knew something Art didn’t know, which he did.

            “You could’ve just left a couple dollars and kept the tabaccy can.”

            “I asked you fer five bucks but you jest told me I was goin’ to hell anywise.”

            “I didden mean it, you moron.”

            Pete kept smiling, even through the “moron” bit.

            Pete got up, belched and whistled the Strawberry Roan part where the horse in question goes to horse heaven and . . . and they hang his saddle on the corral fence and a note on the grave that says, “Poor ole Strawberry Roan. All the names signed below he has thrown. His saddle hangs here, please leave it alone, this marks the fate of old strawberry roan.” This part always brought a tear to Pete’s eye, but not today. (If you click here, Wilf Carter will sing this sad ballad for you.) Today he reached into his saddlebag hanging over a tree branch, took out a tin of tobacco and tossed it in a perfect arc into Art’s lap.

            “What the . . . you stole it . . . agin?” But Pete could see that Art was as happy as any smoker would be to open his Christmas present and find it to be six cartons of tailor-mades. Art was assembling his papers and matches so fast his hands were shaking.

            “Do smokers go ta heaven, I wonder,” Pete said. And then, “Nope, didn’t steal it, no sir. I met good ole Abe Lincoln and he bought it for me . . . well, for you, akshally.”

            Abe was leaning against the Oak, smoking one fat rollie, blowing smoke rings out his nose and rolling another one. “Good beef (or pork) stew for supper and a long smoke (puff, puff) after ‘s enough heaven for me.”

            “You owe me five, don’t forget.”

            “Ya paid too much. Give ya two come payday.”

            Pete swelled with his new-found piety. “Yer prob’ly gonna roast in hell for all eternity, and when that’s over, you’ll . . . you’ll be lyin’ in yer own ashes and cryin’ for a cigarette. And . . . guess . . . what . . . I won’t be there to bail ya out.

            “Really? Where will you be?”

            “Figure it out, moron.”

 

“Where do horses go when they die?” Pete asked this at about the three-mile mark of their fence ride around Rattlesnake Ravine.

            “They don’t go nowhere. They jest lie there.”

            “No. I mean . . . well, ya know what I mean.”

            “Member that sorrel broke a leg last place we worked? Tommy Feister just put a bullet in ‘im, tied a leg to his pommel and dragged him inna the coulee for the coyotes.”

            Pete was silent for a time. “I think there’s a heaven for horses.” He slid off trigger, took a hammer from his saddlebag and re-stapled a wire to a willow pole. “Horses got souls. They oughta be berried proper.”

            “You tryin’ to tell me that sorry specimen of yers got a soul?”

            “When Trigger snorts, he’s prayin’.”

            “What?” It was Art’s turn to dismount and tie together the ends of a broken wire. “Do y’all even pray? I never seen ya.”

            Pete had tried, but all he could ever think of was the short prayer his Aunt Bess taught him to intone before crawling into bed. Jesus, Jesus make be good so I can go to heaven when I die. Pete had often wished that everything could be simpler, that everything that mattered wouldn’t be out of his mental reach, but then, how simple would it have to be? No point in asking Art; Art for whom the universe revolved around the lighted tip of a cigarette, around the amber of a great whiskey whisked about in the twirling of a crystal glass, under the swirling skirts of the dancer at the Mandijust Saloon in Scarf City.

            Art found a hollow on the edge of Rattlesnake Ravine that was perfect for an overnight bivouac. They had another supper of beef (or pork) stew, this time made much more palatable with the addition of a few wild onions. Art lighted up his first, then second, then third cigarette sitting cross-legged on his bedroll and Pete thought about writing in his journal, which still retained its virginal purity, and changed his mind. He had licked his pencil repeatedly a few times but could never bring himself to deface the pristine first page.

            Anyway, what actually was the point? Wasn’t his life like everyone else’s—including Trigger’s—little more than being born, doing stuff until you’re too old and too tired to do stuff anymore, and then dying? He had a vision of himself with a bullet through the brain, being dragged by one leg into Rattlesnake Ravine to feed the coyotes.

            As the darkness deepened, Pete got up, took a curry comb from his saddle bag and went over to where Trigger was placidly munching on a stand of juicy grass. He ran the curry comb, brush side, down Trigger’s back. Trigger raised his head, turned to Pete and said, “My God that’s good! A little lower would be nice,” and went back to tearing up mouthfuls of grass, enough to make Pete wonder if at that speed, he could be chewing it properly.

            He crawled into the sleeping bag, remembered that he’d pilfered that too and hadn’t paid for it. But somehow, it bothered him less than his earlier qualms about right/wrong and his chances at eternal bliss or the fire. Perhaps heaven really is a cigarette after a hearty beef (or pork) stew, or a back rub and fresh, green grass. And maybe sins forgiven and friends who call you moron on occasion but have your back. (I’m not sure Pete actually thought this last bit, but I just figured, if he didn’t, he should’ve.)

 

The end (finally!)   

           

   

           

Five Wives - A review

 

Thomas, Joan. Five Wives.Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers, 2019

Actual memory of the news of five missionary men being killed by Waoranis in the jungles of Ecuador in 1956 is, by now, confined to sixty year-olds and older. The occasion was called “Operation Auca,” Auca being a pejorative among neighbouring tribes for the Waoranis. Five missionary families lived scattered among the Quichua aboriginals whose contact with the Catholic and later Evangelical missions had been established earlier. The five families were connected, some by a Wheaton College education, and their goal was very distinctly to reach the Waoranis for Christ.

Feeling a compulsion to make a move to that end, the five men—Jim Elliot, Nate Saint, Ed McCully, Peter Fleming and Roger Youderian landed on a sandbar in the mission plane and commenced making forays by plane over a settlement of Waoranis, dropping gifts. Some records have Jim Elliot shouting Waorani words into the jungle on a megaphone. The intention was to trek in to a settlement, thinking that the gift drops—including photos of the five men—would have allayed any fears the Waorani might have of these particular outsiders.

It was not to happen: for some reason, the Waorani attacked the men and destroyed the plane. Theories exist for the attack including the possibility that the pilot, Nate Saint, panicked and shot and killed one of the Waorani men and the attack avenged his death. The primitive lifestyle and the violent aggression toward threat among the isolated Waorani was well known; Shell had abandoned attempts to establish oil exploration in the area after Waorani killed a number of their workers.

To write a novel with the events of the killings and the surrounding ripple effects in families and in supporting churches has to have been a daunting task for award-winning author, Joan Thomas of Winnipeg. There was no shortage of historical records to help piece the facts of the case together, which she has done skillfully. But while family and churches related to the events live on—as in this case—a particular art is needed in keeping the line between fiction and fact clear to readers. Thomas has appended an explanation of her strategy in doing so . . . at the end, but I still kept looking up people and places and events in the historical record as if I were reading a journalistic accounting.

Both fiction and journalism—I have to remind myself—exist on a continuum between proven fact and creative invention; neither live solidly at either of the poles. Obviously, the story has been told and retold in different ways depending on the observers’ viewpoints.

In one description, “Operation Auca” is seen as the moving hand of God beginning a plan whose end would be the Christianizing of the Waorani people. The five were obedient servants to the call of God and their sacrifice was covered by Jim Elliot’s maxim, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” Their deaths spurred many young people into mission work, we’re told.

Another way of describing it would point out the unbelievable naivete of these five missionaries who misjudged the nature of the Waorani community’s outlook and counted on the miraculous hand of God to protect them and then to draw the Waorani to himself through them. Anthropologists have said that the Waorani had likely never seen a photograph before the gift drops and that these miniatures of human faces would have frightened their animist sensibility and would probably have the opposite effect to that intended.

And then there’s Five Wives, in which neither viewpoint is touted. Thomas has written the novel more with the “this, that and both,” non-binary approach. Characters are allowed to be naive, intelligent, courageous or cautious as people are. Quite clearly, the characters in the narrative have something in common: they follow the bidding of their Lord to the letter as they read it, not unlike an infantryman obeys his superior officer. A critic might say—as Thomas does in the novel—that once you ask for God’s hand in some things, you begin to see God’s hand in everything. Many could find cause to scoff at this; Thomas doesn’t.

Five Wives let’s in the certainty/uncertainty sub-theme in the imagined interactions among the central characters of the story. For Jim Elliot and Elizabeth (Betty), as well as for Peter Fleming and Olive the certainty/uncertainty starts early in their relationships when the men are initially certain that God is calling them to remain single in order to better fulfill their mission tasks. It’s only after another signal (from God) that they both find assurance that marriage is—if not the best way—a good, God-approved way to proceed. The decision to embark on the “Operation Auca” likewise raises doubts in the minds of the five wives who go back and forth between “God will protect them,” to “it’s too soon, so too dangerous” and “if it’s God’s will, then who are we to stand in the way?”

This sub-theme plays significantly into the core theme of the book. Characters never become unified enough in their purpose to erase doubts about each other. Marj Saint, wife of the pilot, is decidedly ambivalent about her role in the marriage and mission (in the novel) beyond being a breeder of children and a keeper of the household, but after the death of their husbands, her participation with Betty in continuing the work of converting the Waorani either belies her frustration with her subservience to “men,” or else it releases the potential in her to do what the “men” only hoped to do. Again, Thomas leaves sorting out motives to the reader.

Economic-corporate greed, finally, is revealed in all its ugliness in the isolation of the Waorani on a reserve so that oil exploration can proceed unhindered. The knowledgeable reader won’t be surprised by this latter development; it’s simply a more recent case of corporate/government colonialism with indigenous cultures being sacrificed in the process . . . again with the—probably unintended—cooperation of religious zealotry. A reader can hardly be blamed for reading into the history of missions to indigenous Ecuadorans the conclusion that evangelical Christianity finds destroying a culture and habitat of many in order to save as many as possible from unimaginable perdition in the next life a noble trade-off.

One of many poignant aphorisms Thomas comes up with goes something like, “Don’t assume that the people to whom you’re relating are just people who tried to be like you . . . and failed.” The Waorani didn’t wear clothes in their isolated state; more recent photos of life on the reserves shows them in jeans and T-shirts. It raises for me a question of the morality of missionaries offering salvation for the soul while in effect accompanying it with an entire cultural package. A “to be born again is to become like us” syndrome.

The major missionary effort lingering after the massacre of the five men had to do with Bible translation into the Waorani language. To hear words of an isolate language is one thing, to practice and practice the pronunciation is another, to devise a system of phonetics or syllabics is yet another, to learn what utterances roughly mean is yet another, but the highest hurdle in this learning is semantic: what are the accompanying conventions of communication that can’t be written down? What are the connotations of things that white North Americans can’t know because they are bound into centuries-old cultural habits and assumptions? For instance, how do you convince a people that they need to be saved from their sins if they have no concept of sin, and evil comes at them as spirits lying in wait in their environment, possibly carried in by strangers? What do you call Jesus if they have a similar-sounding word that means “tree,” or “water?”

Five Wives won the Governor General’s Literary Award for 2019; an earlier book, Reading by Lightning also won several less prestigious awards and nominations. Thomas’ prose is fluid and expressive, the complexity of her subject with its present to past to present transitions is expertly handled and her principal characters—particularly two of the five wives and the sister of Nate Saint—are economically but precisely drawn. The writing certainly makes Five Wives deserving of praise; the content so evocatively handled only adds to its appeal.

Thomas indicates in her post script that the narrative after the events of “Operation Auca” and its immediate aftermath, are complete fiction. The involvement of descendants of the principals in the making of a film (an actual film was made) I found too sparse to merit inclusion. Any criticism I might have of Five Wives would be in this area; I could have done without “the speculative present” altogether, but such are the considerations that have to be made when writing novels based on “actual events.” Novel means new. Perhaps a different genre name would be in order when, for instance, we pick up Miriam Toews’ Women Talking or Rudy Wiebe’s The Mad Trapper.

I’m not a fast reader, but I finished Five Wives in record time. It’s a compelling story, well told. I borrowed a copy through the Wheatland Regional Library system but had to wait three months before it became available. If you borrow it and find a small jam stain on page 220 or thereabouts, that would be me.

This Mortal Coil - Short Story

East to Wakaw on 312

This Mortal Coil©

George G. Epp

To God, one day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as one day. Why not ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand? Why not, “to God, one minute is as a million years . . .?”

I think about this every day, except Sunday, mostly between lunch and afternoon snack when one of the volunteers or a starched dietary aide comes around with the snack wagon. “Kevin! Will you have some coffee and a cookie today?” 

Between lunch and snack time is the longest part of day here; the minutes ticking past like years, waiting for coffee or juice and a cookie or two like we used to wait for Christmas.

They don’t want us in our rooms then. Easier to keep an eye on us if we’re all seated in a circle in the common room with the skylight and the nurses’ station. It’s when they check our rooms for “rats, snakes and contraband,” the director of care, Vanessa, says. They clean our toilets and return our clean laundry and sterilize our disgusting leavings, north wing in the morning, south wing between lunch and snack time in the afternoons.

And in our pod, the eleven of us sit in a circle, Phil Ferguson and I in our wheel chairs, two in brody chairs and the rest in ordinary made-for-regular-normal-human-beings chairs, and most of us nap, heads lolling back, sideways, chin-on-chest and a few of us drooling shamelessly: it can be beyond depressing for me, for instance, who can only sleep when it’s inconvenient like in chapel when a well-meaning pastor from a local church holds forth about making the best of every day.

These compassionate, local pastors—no doubt fulfilling what they see as their Christian duty—modulate what they say, how they say it to match what I think they imagine are the very specialized needs of us pioneer people among them, who can only see three-score-and-ten in their rear-view mirrors. They’re so gentle, so obsequious, so soothing, these pastors: they put me to sleep.

Can’t blame them. My body’s confined to this wheelchair. The assumption that my mind is no longer ambulatory seems a logical conclusion. 

Paaah!

The minutes tick by like centuries.

Mrs. Diana May Goerzen is snoring, lolling and drooling. I can’t look. She was in my class all the way through school. They’ll be moving her to the north wing soon.

I wheel myself over to the big table where bib folding, visitor dining, staff kibitzing happens. There’s a jigsaw puzzle there: 1,000 pieces that all look the same, more or less. I pick one up at random and put it in my pocket. 

There’s a talk show on TV; the sound’s turned down but it doesn’t matter, really, because the two hostesses are wearing short skirts and shirts with the top two buttons undone. The two men wear suits and ties and look a lot like store manikins, especially since I can’t hear what they’re saying. They all laugh a lot—apparently they’re very clever conversationalists.

Vanessa Locklear gets me. We have a naughty compact going on. After I was ordered in no uncertain terms not to tell my jokes on the premises anymore, she leaned over to me one day and said, “Hey Kevin. Got a joke for me?” and she winked. 

I said that my wife and I (I like to personalize my jokes) went to the doctor to see what we could do to prevent another pregnancy. He said Rina should sleep upstairs and that that would fix that. So I said, well if that works, I’ll sleep upstairs too!

Vanessa’s in charge of resident care, but she comes to my room personally when I’m having one of those days where I can’t get out of bed without screaming pain. That would be about one or two days a week. “More, more, more morphine?” she sings and we both smile. “Serve it to me in a cereal bowl,” I say. “No way,” she says. “I need you alive, Casanova.” And I’ll say something like, “Does your husband suspect?” and she says, “I’m being super careful, but stop calling me at home in the middle of the night, OK?”

She brings stuff; old photographs, clippings I can’t read until later because I can’t concentrate with the needles raging up and down my back. Lately, she’s been bringing in sample bottles of Jack Daniels and slipping them under my pillow as if they were clandestine spy drop-offs. Ah, Jack Daniels. Some things never change, thank God. I made the mistake of asking a starched care worker to twist the cap off one for me and she said, “Where’d you get this, Kevin? You know we don’t allow liquor in here!” I told her my cousin had brought it in because he knows I’m allergic to flowers. She took the bottle with her—I presumed to turn it in to the care director—but came back with it and a glass with some ice ten minutes later.

I can’t remember the names of many of the people in the place, except for the half-dozen or so I knew back in the day. But days I remember, at least some, especially days that got all the senses working.

I might be twelve or thirteen, lying on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush. There’s a breeze as subtle as the holy ghost caressing the ripened wheat fields into an undulating prairie sea, setting the heart-shaped poplar leaves to spinning. The musty/sweet aroma of dry grass, mown hay and cattle rides on the breeze and the sun casts dappled shadows across my face. I can remember the Canada Thistle digging into my back. Weird. I can remember nothing about the few days before or after lying in the sun on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush on a summer’s day.

We recreate here at St. Judes. They call it recreation time. We move our arms to a video the recreation director plays as she sits in a chair and does the exercises with us. It’s a funny word, recreation; literally to discard something and make it over again. Create it again. Make me a spine over again, LORD. Please. Recreate me.

We bat balloons around and across the circle. 

Except for Diana May who’s gone into a permanent rage, apparently. She pointedly leafs through a Good Housekeeping magazine while we do our balloon-volleyball thing. The magazine rides in the basket of her walker all the time and by now is dogeared and tattered.

I often had daydreams about Diana May when we were both raunchy teenagers; usually cavorting in some storybook meadow, or lying in the sun on our backs in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush on a summer’s day. She was a hoot.

I never tell dementia jokes anymore like “What’s one advantage of having Alzheimer’s? You can hide your own Easter eggs,” or, “you only need one book.”

I wasn’t asked not to tell jokes for any other reason than that they were mainly sexual, and, of course, like Hamlet says of his mother, who’s raunching around with his uncle, “. . . at your age/ The hey day in the blood is tame .” My blood still has a bit of hey day. I swear I feel some days like a twenty-year old with a very bad back, and a temporary weakness in my left arm, left leg.

The possibility that I might be following Diana May into never never land occurs often, especially when I have to stop in mid-sentence because I can’t come up with a word or a name. “That happens to all of us, Dad,” my daughter says. “There’s nothing wrong with your mind.” 

As daughters go, Sandra’s the best. Every Saturday she takes the long drive from the city and we spend the afternoon talking about stuff that doesn’t matter and she holds my hand (the right one, the left one’s useless) while we sit in silence and then we have supper together at the table with the jigsaw puzzle and she says at least once, “I wish I could take you home,” and I say, “That would be nice, Sandy, but look around, I’ve got everything I need and what’s more, I like it here.”

We tell these comforting lies every week. “It’s my turn to be old, honey,” I say and I know she remembers the movie where Arthur’s butler is really sick and Arthur asks him if he wants anything he, Arthur, can do for him. And the butler, Sir John Gielgud, says, “I want to be young again,” and Arthur says, “I’m sorry, but it’s your turn to be old.”

That’s funny . . . if you’re Arthur. But when you realize you’ve turned into the butler, well . . ..

So the trust company in town has my POA: Power of Attorney. All my bills go to them and they pay them. They send Sandy and Ike a statement of account every month so there’s no chance of “elder fraud,” Ben Floman at the trust company assured me. 

I’ve lost interest in money; used to be a balance in the bank meant access to stuff, good food, good times. I could pay the home a million dollars and I’d still be sitting here waiting for my supper dessert, in a wheelchair, feeling the warning signs of another bout of pain. That’s if I had a million dollars, which, Ben Floman says, I would have if I sold the three revenue houses in town that Ben rents out for me.

Ben seems annoyed that I keep putting off selling the rental properties; that’s probably my main reason for telling him “I’ll think about it” for the the third year in a row at tax time. I suspect he’s got an angle but I don’t know what it is. Also, I’m kind of on strike when it comes to decisions.

 “What would you like for dessert today, Kevin?”

“I’d like Baked Alaska followed by a snifter of Apricot Brandy, please.”

“Sorry, we just have ice cream with chocolate sauce or banana pudding.”

“You asked me what I’d like,” I say . . . argumentatively.

“Which will it be, Kevin?”

“I’m leaving it up to you. I made a decision about socks this morning and I’m still tired from that.”

I can tell by the disarray of Donna's hair that she’s having an exasperating day. She drops a bowl of pudding on my plate and moves on. The only thing I can think of that might be worse than me sitting here in this dining room, stirring a thin pudding with one piece of banana in it, would be having to wait on a testy old man in a wheel chair who has a knack for making a bad day worse. Donna's kids may be in reform school, her husband cheating on her and she may just have been diagnosed with breast cancer. Maybe she has to drive around this dining room distributing desserts because they pay her minimum wage for it and she needs it to pay the rent.

She’s not complaining though. I don’t complain much anymore either. The chaplain here paid acute attention to me when I was transferred here from the personal care hell Ike and Sandy found for me when things were getting desperate. I complained about everything on one of his visits: the food, the service, the smells, the beds. “We need to remember, Mr. Martens, that everyone has their own cross to bear.”

“You asked me about me, not about everyone,” I said. “And I don’t know what that means, ‘cross to bear.’”

“We all suffer, Mr. Martens. That’s what that means. We just have to bear up under . . . under whatever burdens life places upon us.”

“So what’s your cross?”

“Well, we’re here to talk about you,” he said.

The chaplain and I have figuratively walked around each other ever since. I should say, “rolled,” I guess—in my case.

Our brains are race car drivers. Our bodies are race cars. Together we burn rubber. But eventually, the valves burn and try as you want, you can’t do better than fifth or sixth place. And then the transmission gets wonky and the car spontaneously flips out of gear just when you’re thinking you might make the podium this time. Finally the fenders fall off, the differential wears out, and it matters not a whit how much you pound on the wheel and swear in frustration: you know this baby isn’t gonna get you on the track, not now, not ever.

Neat metaphor. Except that race car drivers just get a new car when the old one has to be retired.

Thing is, on good days, you still feel young and athletic and rarin’ to go. I have roughly two days a year like that.

I guess the trick would be for the car and driver to decline at exactly the same speed. Race car drivers should then be buried in their cars, not in caskets. If I ever meet the man on the throne in the great beyond, I’m gonna ask him about the point of creating a brain that outlasts the body . . . also about mosquitoes and why two arms instead of three.

Come to think of it, Diana May’s mind is in far worse shape than her body; she still walks just as fast as I can get my electric chair to go down the straight-away. Problem is, she never knows where she’s going, not even when it’s her room she’s possibly looking for. I asked her one day if she wanted a lift and she punched me in the face.

Vanessa came in one day and said, “What can I do to convince you to get out of bed this morning, Kevin?”

“Weeeellll!” I said.

“Besides that, I mean.”

“Could you jack up my brain and drive a new body underneath?”

“I’ll get right on that,” she said.

Phil Ferguson sits across from me in the dining room. He had polio in the big epidemic when he was a kid and his already-compromised race car ground to a stuttering halt when he was sixty or so. I don’t know where his dinner-time thoughts come from but there’s got to be one every day. “So,” he said the other day, “now we know our premier’s nothing more than a socialist in sheep’s clothing.”

“Sheep don’t wear clothes,” I say. “Of course he’s a socialist. He’s a New Democrat.”

“What?” He’s chosen the ice cream. “It’s like . . . it’s like we’re turning communist here.”

I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about. Is there something wrong with the ice cream? “We’re lucky to live in a socialist country,” I say. “Gives us a nice place to get ready to die . . . and a pension.”

Phil finishes his ice cream, backs away from the table and wheels himself between tables toward the hallway. 

Ike and Sandy bought me this electric wheelchair after my stroke. With severely diminished use of my left half, I guess they didn’t want me spending the rest of my few days rolling in circles.

I guess free health care is the next best thing to good health . . . or sudden death. My pension plus a few hundred dollars rental proceeds more than pay for everything I need. Every three months or so, Ben comes to tell me that he’s investing most of the rental money into a GIC or something. Every Christmas, I tell him to write a check to Sandy for ten thousand dollars. That’s the maximum gift I can give her and Ike without them having to pay income tax on it. I’d have given Vanessa a thousand dollars as a Christmas present but Sandy said that would be “a very, very bad idea.” Instead, I had Ben give a thousand dollar donation to St. Judes. I got a third of it back at income tax time.

What a great socialist, communist country this is! Thank you, Tommy Douglas!

I used to read . . . a lot! Especially after Sandy married and left and the evenings were excruciatingly long and empty. I would read the paper every morning over breakfast, I read books about the economy and politics and history for an hour or two in bed before going to sleep. I read great literature like Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazoff and one winter, at least three of Shakespeare’s plays (with the help of Cole’s Notes, of course) because I wanted to know; I had to know. 

Now, I read the headlines in the paper between breakfast and lunch and do the Wordfind puzzle. Must be the stupidest activity on earth—except for cutting a picture into tiny pieces and then spending hours putting it back together again.

“Well you’ve got to fill your time with something,” Ike said when I mentioned the futility of looking for words in a sea of letters. Filling your time. An interesting concept. Abraham was almost hundred when he fathered Isaac, Sarai was 90. Apparently they filled their time on a “let’s get pregnant” project. I could go for that . . . if perchance I could. That’s another thing Hamlet didn’t get about his mom; your mind still says, “let’s get it on,” even though your body may be saying, “sorry, I gave at the office . . . a long time ago. Go take a cold shower.”

Ann and I met at the U of S, Education Faculty. I graduated a year ahead of her and went teaching at a country school twenty miles out. We were married a week after her graduation and set up housekeeping in an apartment in Nutana. Ann landed a plum job in the Catholic system, teaching Kindergarten and I worked for the Correspondence Branch, writing course material. I’d found in my first year out there at Kenville that I was neither good at nor enjoyed dealing with the snotty noses and petty hurts of kids, even though I like kids . . . in principle.

I got tired of writing reams of Social Studies units in about six months; took a short course, got my realtor’s license and a job at Remax selling properties. I started flipping houses the year Sandy was born and with a few lucky breaks, got into renovating and renting houses. By the time Sandy started school (that was the fall before Ann died of a sudden heart attack while jogging down Meewasin Trail—that was in April) I had already quit the business and we were living off rental properties.

I could be thirty-one or two. Sandy in pyjamas leaning on my shoulder on the sofa, twirling a button on a string while I read aloud a chapter of Wind in the Willows. She’s just had a bath and the sweet smell of her hair reminds me that Ann would shower after running and that I didn’t run with her that day and she’d be sitting on the other side of Sandy if I’d been with her to call for help when she . . ..

Sandy could be in Grade four or five and we’re kind of used to just me and her. We’re on our tenth or eleventh book and the illustrations have stuck with me: I see a frog in formal dress smoking a cigar, leaning on his cane and Sandy twirling a button on a string and the dark sole of her foot . . . and she’s back and forth between wanting to be a writer or a teacher. I sit on the edge of her bed some nights and she buries her face against me and cries herself to sleep. Twenty years later, her tears are still hot on my skin.

Vanessa asked me about Ann once. I told her that since she died, I have never been able to cry. Not even when my mother died. I didn’t shed a tear. 

“The well’s gone dry.”

“Would you like to cry?” she asked.

“What would be the point?”

“It’s not the kind of thing that has a point to it, you old curmudgeon.”

That’s new. I was Casanova, now Curmudgeon. It’s a great word. Truth is, I’m neither. She knows it and Sandra knows it. Ann knew it and Diana May used to know it.

“It’s all pretend, you know,” I say.

“No it’s not,” she says. “Pretending is a deliberate act. We do what we have to do, what we can do, eh?”

Like I said, Vanessa’s the one person here who gets me. Or tries, at least. I think she gets everybody here. Or tries, at least. I told her once in a pain-induced moment of weakness that her husband had to be a very lucky man. She laughed, “I’m not married . . . and before you ask, no I will not marry you.”

“So you’ve kind of dedicated yourself to being a

. . . a missionary to old people.”

“Not even close,” she said. “I’m a professional who gets good pay and owns a nice house, a nice car and both money and time to travel. What’s more, I like this job.”

I felt a pang of . . . something at the possibility that being considerate was in aid of primarily a good salary. “And here I thought you’d crawled out of Song of Solomon.”

“You give me way too much credit,”she said as she left. “You’ll catch me on a bad day, Kevin, and you’ll think I crawled out of Ecclesiastes.”

“Diana May died last night,” Vanessa tells me on a Saturday morning when summer’s in the air, wafting through an open window and the smell of lilacs is sweet, almost heavy. “I know you’ve known each other for years. I wanted to tell you myself.”

“What?”

“She died last night. In her sleep. It was very peaceful.”

“What?”

“Diana May died last night, Kevin.”

I raise the head of my bed with the remote. Vanessa isn’t wearing her starchies; she’s in street clothes. “What happened. Did she fall?”

“No, she just slipped away in her sleep.”

My back is bad . . . again. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that. Diana May?”

Vanessa straightens my coverlet. “Yes, Diana May. I’ll let you know when the memorial service happens. You’d want to be there, I’m guessing.”

I’m trying to process. “I think she died some time ago.” I say.

“Unfortunately, that’s true, Kevin. Are you gonna be OK?”

“How d’ya mean?”

“I mean, are you . . . OK?”

“Actually, Wonder Woman, I’m jealous.” I don’t know why I called her ‘Wonder Woman.’ Sometimes I just open my mouth and crap comes out.

She knits her brow. “I understand, Kevin.”

Sandy will undoubtedly be here promptly at two. Suddenly the rehearsals of parts with her for her Hamlet debut come rushing back to me. She’s Ophelia, but I remember that it was Hamlet’s mortal coil speech that stuck in my head while helping her learn her lines. We’re on the same sofa that we read on when she was eight or nine and I’m reading, then reciting:

“To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”

Sandy bursts into tears. She’s thinking about her mom. I take her in my arms and the sweet smell of her hair reminds me that Ann would shower after running and that I didn’t run with her that day and she’d be sitting on the sofa with me and Sandy if I’d been with her to call for help when she . . ..

But she’s late, and I try to get out of bed because I hate not to be up and about when she comes. It’s no use; the thought of lifting myself up to a sitting position seems a mountain to climb. When she arrives, she’s all solicitous, but what can she do?

“Hi Dad,” she greets me. Gives me an awkward hug. “How are you?”

“It’s three o’clock and I’m in bed. That’s how I am.”

“I’m so sorry. Are you in pain?”

I wave off the question. “Diana May shuffled off her mortal coil last night.”

“What?”

“Diana May! You remember. She was mom’s friend all through college; you used to call her Auntie Di.”

“Well, I don’t remember. Sorry. I wasn’t there when you and mom were in college.”

“Well you were probably only three or four when Diana May quit coming to our house.”

Sandy looks puzzled. “Were you and she friends?”

“Memorial service is on Tuesday, in Kenville. No way I can go. Anyway, I’m not sure I would if I could.”

Sandy stands up, leaves my bedside and examines the flowerbed outside my window. “I could take you there if you’d like to go.”

“No, no. If my back stays like this I couldn’t ride all that way in a car.”

It comes to me in a rush. The fear of dying, the pain of dying, the finality of dying is nothing to us compared to that of our children. It’s the survivors who do the dying; the dying are just . . . released. “Come here, Sandy,” I say. “Help me up.” 

Together we wrestle me to a sitting position, into a dressing gown and into the wheelchair. I’ve less pain than I expected. “We’re gonna take a walk in the garden, you and me and your mom.”

I drive my wheelchair through the door to Pod 6 and Sandy follows. The garden is magnificent. Rose bushes are resplendent in reds and greens and yellows and whites and the salvia borders have never been brighter. We sit in the shade of a maple tree, she on a lawn chair and me in my wheelchair and I share all the memories of Ann I can call to mind, laughter and picnics, hikes and trips, the joy of knowing we would have a child and the wonder of her when she came.

When I’m done, Sandy says so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat, “Do you want to die, Dad?”

“Definitely not,” I say. “I want to be young again!”

She laughs. “Sorry, Dad. It’s your turn to be old.” And then she cries, and with all the effort I can muster, I hoist myself upright and she jumps up. 

“What the hell are you doing?!” and she clenches me in her arms to keep me from falling, then lowers me back into the chair.

Later, when we say our good-byes, she says, “Get better, Dad. I’ll bring Ike when I come next week."

“That’d be great,” I say. 

“Really wish you wouldn’t,” I think. Bring Ike, that is.

I might be twelve or thirteen, lying on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush. There’s a breeze as subtle as the holy ghost caressing the ripened wheat fields into an undulating prairie sea, setting the heart-shaped poplar leaves to spinning. The musty/sweet aroma of juicy grass, mown hay and cattle rides on the breeze and the sun casts dappled shadows across my face. I can remember the Canada Thistle digging into my back. Weird. I can remember nothing about the few days before or after lying in the sun on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush on a summer’s day.