As a Thief in the Night (4 page)

That year Ezra was ready. He played fullback and middle linebacker and played well, though the other boys, in that marked and exaggerated sense of their own victimization children often indulge in, suspected nepotism and said as much amongst themselves, but within an earshot of Ezra. The first time he carried the ball that year had been a dive play right up the middle. The field had split open before him like the Red Sea. He turned out huge gains all year and moved from sideline to sideline on defense, quick enough to avoid being blocked, and physical enough to punish opponents. But alongside this success an unspecific fear began to clutch at him, and slowly this fear bound itself to his sense of self worth.

It was the fourth quarter of a semi-final game in November. It had rained heavily earlier in the day. Under the stadium's cold lights the boys walked through the mud and took their places for the convert attempt. Ezra was the team's long snapper. He looked through his legs at the sure, outstretched hands of Mike Loft, and his own shook. He felt the eyes on him and his own closed tightly and then slowly opened again. Great players, he had been told, loved to be in these situations. But he did not. He had played well, but it would not matter, none of it would matter if he failed now. His fear became the future. The ball hit the mud two yards in front of Loft and rolled awkwardly to his side. By the time the young quarterback was able to get off the ground he was hit by two defenders and driven to the ground. The other team scored once more in the last two minutes. Final Score: 21-13: a loss for his team and also to his sense of self-worth. He walked alone off the field aching, mud covered, and defeated.

They had lost and he was responsible. The shadow side of success, the side that tells you that what you
are
and who you
are
is dependent upon that success, and that if you do not have it, then you are nothing, whispered in his ear as he walked off the field. They all knew it, too. The other players, his coaches, the parents that had been watching, would all define him by his failure. His anxiety guessed at the words they would speak about him under their breaths.

Elsie brought a cup of tea to him in bed and stroked his hair. Gord came in too and sat on the edge of the bed with her. He patted Ezra's knee through his blankets and looked at him evenly. "You hold your head up high now. Everyone that was there today knows you were one of the best players on the field."

"It was my fault!" Ezra's voice cracked as he tried to fight off his tears.

"No, Ezra, it wasn't." Gord lifted Ezra's chin so his eyes might meet his own. "That was one play of probably a hundred and twenty today. Dozens of other things happened that decided that game. That particular play just happened to be at the end of it."

"When it mattered," Ezra responded quietly and cast his eyes down again.

"Listen boy, in that game it all matters. There's no other twelve-year-old in this world that I would rather have had out there with me today." A tear came slowly down Ezra's cheek. A little embarrassed, he smiled to himself. His uncle hugged him. "I'm proud of you. Get some rest now."

Ezra looked up at him shyly. "Okay."

Elsie remained and spoke quietly with him in the low light of his bedroom. A few minutes later Sarah snuck in to check on him and say goodnight before she left for home. As she backed out of the driveway, her headlights had shone through his window. Both she and Olyvia usually went to Ezra's games, though Olyvia's attendance was somewhat more erratic. At the game today she had brought wine in a thermos. She'd slowly become drunk then passed out on Elsie's couch as soon as they'd gotten home. Gord sighed and shook his head at her on his way to the kitchen. But then he stopped, took a few steps backwards, and looked down at Olyvia lying there. Her black hair covered the pillow her head rested upon, and her skin looked even softer than usual. The smell of wine escaped from her lips, and under the spell of her vulnerability, a longing rose up in him. He sighed and stepped away just as Elsie came out of the bedroom.

"Ready for bed?" he asked as he moved to turn off the lights.

"Should we leave her there?" Elsie asked motioning towards Olyvia.

"Yeah, just leave her."

Ezra Mignon was dreaming of his mother. Far away, he traced her profile as it moved through her father's vineyard. A ghost of her womb, his hidden eye followed her steps and the easy sway of her arms and torso. She was wearing a long, thin dress, purple and white, that a summer breeze drew slightly behind her as she walked between the rows of vines. Her hair was worn down; tangled in places it conveyed an air of freedom and beauty to her demeanor, as it sometimes can for women who are not overly conscious of their appearance. The brown leather straps of her sandals were wrapped round her ankles and tied at the bottoms of her calves; silver bracelets played loosely around her wrists. She was alone and it was dusk; the August sunlight was soft and did not threaten her eyes. He watched as she ran her hands along the vines in places, stopped, smelled then tasted the grapes, and smiled faintly to herself. She hummed a song he did not recognize as she began to daydream, looking off into the distance without really seeing, or perhaps seeing something no one else saw. Her face abruptly took on an expression that no longer spoke of summer contentment, or a place someone knew as home. Her eyes seemed to steal the last rays of intensity from the dying sun behind her; her grip fastened, her arm tightened. The grapes she had plucked and held in her hand bled violet streams from between her fingers. She looked around, frightened, towards the horizon, back to the house, and then to the grape juice running down her arm. Turning, she walked purposefully back between the rows of vines toward the house.

At night, after dinner, she walked to the pens her father kept and fed the goats that wandered outside the barns. The only ones still alive were male. She playfully put soft pressure against the crowns of their heads with her palm and whispered to them. Yes, she liked to do this, he thought to himself. Steam rose from the cup of tea she held in her hand. The peace he had seen earlier had settled on her face again. He followed her inside. The wind had grown stronger.

She stepped across the creaking wooden floors towards her room. Lighting a match at her bedside, she protected the flame with her hand and brought it to two candles on her nightstand.
  Under the safety of her blankets she smoothed over her lap and picked up her book. There was a small circular window cut out of the wall above her head that had hinges along the side and opened out like a door into the yard. The glass on the outside was dirty from the goats kicking mud upon it and the only thing that could be seen from her room was that it was night outside.  The wooden frame that surrounded the glass was covered with old green paint that was peeling off in places. It didn't fit properly into the space that had been cut for it so the wind rattled it against the surrounding walls. She continued to read, but occasionally looked up, seemed to think to herself, and then went back to the pages in front of her. He began to cry, or believe he was crying, though he could not see or recognize himself anywhere within the dream. Rather, it was as if he were watching from an opening in the ceiling above the bed. He knew her. Her hands had run through his hair and across his arms to comfort him after nightmares. She had made him feel safe, even in the dark. While he had played, and drawn, and practiced his letters, hers were the eyes that had proudly watched over him.

Her face changed again. Not as before, still with a hint of whatever intuition or thought had drawn her attention earlier. She closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths, placed her book on the nightstand, and blew out the candles beside her. There was movement outside the window.
  The goats were outside the barn in the enclosure again. They began their song and the noise drew itself out along a line of haunted air, rose to a pitch higher than anything he thought an animal could produce, and then fell to a soft trembling that he thought might just contain beauty, and possibly would have, had the sounds that came before not been so terrible. He looked down at her again. Her eyes, broken open by the phantom song, shone like two moons in the vacuum of cold starless space. The sound came again. The window rattled. And Ezra was suddenly stricken with the fear that his fractured memories of her were not real, but rather fantasies he had envisioned to fill the hole within himself that her loss had left.

THE ARMOR OF GOD

E
zra walked past the dead little boy every morning. Gord and Elsie's child had been stillborn just ten months before Ezra was born, and now, each morning on his way to the bus stop, and each day on his way home, he walked past the boy's gravestone. Looking through the arched entrance to the cemetery he imagined the boy sitting on top of the black marble slab. He did not remember when he had first seen him, but as the seasons changed around them, and as the years pulled on Ezra's young body, and as his boyish face began the slow tragedy of its change into the face of a young man, he imagined the boy changing and growing older with him. Most of the time he just sat there, a smiling phantom with eyes trapped in this land of breath and temporality, and waved at Ezra.  Much more rarely, when something he had seen or remembered on his broken throne had hurt him, he pulled his legs up to his chest, hid his face, and wept.  Ezra did what he could to comfort him in the odd purgatory that he seemed to be trapped within, but even when he was smiling he appeared to be sad. Not having a name seemed wrong, so Ezra, having dreamt up a resurrection, decided to give him one: he named him Balyn, after a knight in a story he had read about two brothers named Balyn and Balan.

His brother Layne was always late for the bus. There seemed to be only one pace at which he moved, his own, and any attempt to increase that pace invariably met with failure. Each morning he would come running down the road in his jogging pants, his blonde hair disheveled and sticking up in the one place his handful of gel had been applied as he bolted out the door with Elsie's voice chasing after him. Jogging pants were all he ever wore, mostly because they allowed him the convenience of wearing the same thing to school that he had slept in. This sort of happy, lazy practicality made perfect sense to Layne and characterized much of what he did.
  Static caused the jogging pants to stick to his legs in different places as he ran. One of his ankle elastics had crept halfway up his calf revealing his red striped sports sock. The other sock could not be seen, but it would be a safe bet to say it was probably a different color.

Jenna Ricketts and Ezra watched him run down the side of the road towards them. She was a year ahead of Ezra and had just started high school. Layne and he had waited for the bus in front of her house ever since she had moved to Walpurgis with her mother, stepfather and little stepbrother and stepsister five years before. Ezra would turn thirteen soon and, being seen as trustworthy and responsible by Jenna's parents, had begun babysitting for them. Trustworthy and responsible were not words her parents would have used to describe her though. At fourteen she already smoked, dated older boys, and drank on weekends. The high school bus usually came a little earlier than his did, and more than once she had hinted to him that she had already had sex.

Ezra sat by himself on one of the back seats of the bus and rested his head against the window. Balyn waved goodbye to him as the bus pulled away. The bus moved past his house and he saw Elsie through the kitchen window cleaning up the breakfast dishes.

Then the bus drove past Melanie Rafalia's house. She had called him her boyfriend when he was only in grade one and she was in grade seven. She had kissed him on the cheek. He remembered where he had been standing in the schoolyard when she had laid her hands on his shoulders and spoke of her devotion. One day, through some gift of circumstance, they might meet again.

Ezra wiped the fog off the window as they approached the church. Just above the trees at the back of the churchyard he could see the rooftop and chimney of the house that he and Layne had lived in with their mother. He wondered what Layne still remembered about living with her.  Just ahead he saw the Tree.

During the morning ride to school it stood in the sun, by evening, on the way home, in the shadows of the church. He spoke about the Tree each and every time he questioned Elsie about the man he could no longer picture that had left him and his brother behind. Under the influence of this need the impression he held of his father leaving and the lightning scarred tree in the churchyard had been drawn together by some hidden chain of emotional necessity until the two lines of force had become superimposed upon one another. This strange cohesion bound his father's abandonment, the tree, and the lightning that had split it with such singularity that no denial from the sober mouth of reality could now tear them apart.

There were other similar trees near his mother's house. Two of them stood on a hill not far away. Before he had had the high fields across from his aunt's house to wander in they had been his destination whenever he went off on his own. Even then he had always brought his small sketchpad and pencil. Once he had drawn a picture of a boy sitting under one of the trees while holding his baby brother on his lap. He had long ago lost the drawing, but for some reason he still remembered it very clearly. Ezra went to these trees almost as if he were doing so to avoid the one in the churchyard.

Yet there were days he found himself leaning against the church fence staring at the Tree.
  His plain blue eyes would measure the Tree and slowly follow the path the lightning had marked.  Sometimes staring like this for ten minutes or so was enough and he could walk away; other times it felt like something more was required, and he would climb over the fence and walk the perimeter of the property, perhaps once, perhaps a half dozen times. Reaching up, he would touch the bottom of the split the lighting had made and then run his hand along the bark. He walked round and round the Tree, carving a circle into his deepening fear.

Split along the upper half of the trunk with the mark of the lightning, the old oak was still alive. Ezra studied the Tree's thick roots as they clawed at the grass and dark soil. He sometimes imagined the roots were the horribly gnarled hand of a witch reaching up to drag him to her lair. There she would feast on his heart, his blood running down her crooked chin, her cruel mouth deformed with a grin inspired by his annihilation. On other days the curious need to expose the deepest parts of the roots came over him. Twice he had gone home to Elsie with broken fingernails and bloody hands from trying to dig away the hard soil.

So strange that he felt driven to dig out the roots of a tree until his hands had bled. So strange that he had to avoid a tree just because it had been struck by lightning. For almost his entire childhood Ezra had been no stranger to compulsions and odd rituals.

The thoughts and performances had begun with persistent feelings of shame. Had he killed the grass and weeds by walking on them? If he had, was it because it was necessary for them to be killed, or was it just another symptom of his corruption? Better to stick to the sidewalk. To watch his step...but then...don't step on the crack or...
  Just a silly saying, but horrible thoughts occurred to him. Where did they come from? Then came the awful certainty that the turnings of his mind created reality, followed by a terror that he could not control them or their manifestations. Passing by certain trees or signs on the road he had had the feeling he was being called back, sometimes long after he had passed, to touch them. The compulsion persisted until he gave in and ran back, later making up some excuse if his mother, or now Elsie, had had to wait for his return. It was incessant, and it was humiliating: at the mall it might be the shirt he had had to go back and straighten on the rack; at the grocery store perhaps the piece of fruit that had to be moved, or the woman he had to discretely chase down and circle, or the water in the fountain that he had to draw his hand through in some odd way. Bed sheets demanded to be tucked into each other with such accuracy that his momentary emotional balance depended upon it. Shoelaces had to be the same length; if one was adjusted, then the other had to be adjusted in the same way so that precisely the same pressure would be applied to each foot.  After turning his bedroom doorknob to open the door, the doorknob on the other side had to be turned immediately, so that things would remain in balance. Entrances and exits always played prominent roles in his rituals, though calling them entrances and exits is not really getting to the heart of the matter, they were thresholds. Ezra did not know why things needed to be done this way; he just knew that it needed to be so.

Just before his seventh Christmas he'd snuck into Gord and Elsie's closet where he knew they'd hidden the gifts. Ezra really didn't want to see his gifts; he just wanted to ease aside the folds of one of the bags for a peek. He rested his head on the doorjamb so that he could look inside a bag with one squinting eye. Then, on his back, he felt that mysterious touch, that unexplained sensation of being under the eyes of another, and saw Elsie's shadow move on the wall. He turned his guilty gaze and saw her disappointment, then ran through the front door in horror of what his aunt must now have thought of him. Falling to his knees on the front porch he began to sob, and then, to the bewilderment of his aunt who had followed him outside, dug his nails into his own face. He ran them down his swollen cheeks to his neck and shoulders and collapsed in a heap of self-condemnation on the freezing wood of the porch.

Somewhere near the beginning of fifth grade his teacher leaned over his desk to help him with his artwork. He was working with markers and as she leaned over him the tip of the blue marker he was using brushed against her blouse leaving a thin, crooked streak on the smooth fabric. She did not notice. In a nervous struggle against his offense he kept quiet as she moved on to the next student. The knowledge of his crime gnawed at him throughout the day, but still he pressed his tongue to silence. Ezra spent the entire year returning to the mark he had made. He watched the way she dressed closely, and when he saw her wearing the same blouse, he tried to steal subtle glances at the spot that he had colored. Both at Christmas and at the end of the year, when it came time to buy Mrs. Rose a gift, he had pleaded with his aunt Elsie to let him buy her a blouse. It was far too personal, Elsie had said, and asked what had ever put such a strange idea into his head anyway.

The summer before he turned thirteen Elsie decided that it was time for Ezra to receive his first communion and to attend confirmation classes. They had begun attending St. Paul's Anglican Church shortly after they had moved to Walpurgis, along with Sarah, George, Little Marty, and Rebecca. And though Elsie did not follow dogma in any strict sense, and even (being a woman of practicality in the spiritual as well as the earthly sense) had an aversion towards it, there were aspects of church life in which she had come to believe. The idea of people coming together as a community, providing each other with support, and spending time with those families and individuals in Walpurgis who were perhaps of a like mind in this regard, was something that, in today's world, Elsie believed could only be found, however flawed, at church.

Olyvia had half-heartedly argued with her over the decision that Ezra would attend confirmation classes. "Why go filling his head with all that when he's still young enough to learn something authentic? They'll give him fixed stars to believe in when the uncomfortable truth in life is that there are none."

"What matters to me is that it's one of the rare ceremonies we have left, something that marks a change. I have a lot of good memories of those Sundays, you know."  Elsie sighed to herself. " We'll probably never again be together like that."

Olyvia ignored the last part of what she'd said: "Do you really think Ezra sees it as some sort of coming of age ceremony, or is it just another hoop that some adult is making him jump through?"
 

B
ut Elsie would not be swayed.

Taking small pieces of concrete that had crumbled off of the parking blocks and throwing them at the rusting basketball backboard, Ezra waited after class for church to let out. Two or three times he missed the backboard and the small rocks hit cars in the crowded parking lot behind the net. When he missed the second time he cringed and looked behind him to check if anyone had seen. The second Sunday of classes had just finished. A small, dark-skinned boy from his class named Leonard was sitting on the steps of the church hall. "Don't worry, I won't tell,'" he said and grinned slightly at Ezra. He was moving something around on the steps beside him that Ezra couldn't see. "Hey, check these out," he said and motioned for Ezra to sit beside him. By his feet were several round painted stones. He pulled some out of his pocket and put them in Ezra's hand.

Ezra moved them around slowly. " What are they for?" he said without looking up.

"I found these stones in my basement. They were my dad's."
  He looked Ezra over.  "Your parents making you do this class too?"

"No," Ezra said looking down and moving the thin layer of pebbles in front of the steps around with his foot. "My mom's not alive anymore."

"What about your dad?"

"I don't know my dad."

"My dad's dead too. You know anything about Native Canadians?" Leonard asked, changing his tone of voice.

"Maybe a little...from school or whatever."

"Well, my dad was a Native Canadian, you know; he painted these rocks that I keep in my pocket."

Ezra passed back the small stones and Leonard passed him some of the others to examine. "So you just live with your mom?"

"My mom and my stepfather. He's from Florida."

"You like him?"