Homesick (21 page)

Daniel shifted his buttocks on the ground. He wondered if his grandfather’s uncontrolled shouting had been heard up at the house. He hoped not. It had given him an odd feeling. So had his grandfather’s question.

“I don’t know,” he said lamely.

“No, I suppose there’s no reason you should. And I’ve gone on and on talking. I should have stopped long ago, before I got to such old stories.”

“I liked them,” said Daniel.

“Well, whether you did or not, they’re finished with now. We’d better be getting home.”

“What about the steer?”

“To hell with the steer. I don’t care about the steer anymore.”

“I could check the bush in the field back there.”

“No.”

“It wouldn’t take long. No more than twenty minutes,” argued Daniel. “And then you’d know.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Monkman irritably. “I don’t care.” He was picking himself off the ground the way a toddler would, braced on all fours, raising his hind end tentatively, by degrees, testing his balance. Then one final effort, an abrupt wrench up out of his stoop and he stood swaying, a little dizzy finding himself upright.

“We come all the way out here and as soon as we get here you’ve all of a sudden got to go. Where’s the sense in that?” demanded the boy peevishly.

“It’s late,” said Monkman, avoiding looking at his grandson. He was angry. By arguing with him the boy made him feel foolish. Yet he knew he wasn’t going to let him set one foot in that bad-luck field.

“It isn’t late.” Daniel glanced at his watch. “It’s not even three.”

“I’m the one who decides whether it’s late or not. So it’s late. Come along.”

“What about my chance for five dollars?” the boy wanted to know. “Have you forgot that?”

“Come.” The old man swung round on his heel and struck out into the summerfallow with awkward, stumbling fury. Anger jerked him like a puppet over the furrows; his boots flicked aside the hot, black, sifted earth; his shoulders see-sawed and twitched.

Daniel stood his ground. “I’m going to look,” he called after him, although without much conviction.

The old man didn’t bother to turn. His right hand snapped up. Pinched between forefinger and thumb something fluttered. When he saw what it was Daniel followed, resigned. The money was something.

10

V
era stood at the kitchen sink with suds creeping up her forearms, remembering Bob the housepainter. Every now and then the ridiculous row about baseball going on between Daniel and her father in the living room reached such a pitch that this became difficult, but Vera did her best to disregard the noise. For the life of her, she could not fathom how nothing made the two of them happier than an idiotic squabble over something of absolutely no consequence. Of course, the old man was a great tease, always had been, and delighted in provoking Daniel. Vera had warned him not to pay his grandfather any mind, but the boy hadn’t profited from her advice and rose to the bait every time. Daniel might learn yet that there was no winning with the old man. Beat him six ways to Sunday and he still would never cry uncle or allow that there was an outside chance of his ever being wrong.

It was a remark of her father’s before dinner which had brought Bob to mind after all these years. Vera had just pointed out to her father that if he wanted to clean the wax out of his ears with a wooden matchstick, maybe the privacy of the bathroom was more suitable for the operation than the dinner table. He had fastened her with a look of calculated pity and said, “You ought to have
considered getting married again, Vera. Then maybe you’d have learned how to live with a man.”

Well, she had considered it and it was Bob the housepainter she had considered marrying. Strange to think. Since Bob, she doubted whether she’d had six dates in the past ten years and, if the truth be known, it would have been no loss to have missed any of them. Probably the business with Bob wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did either, if she hadn’t met him a little less than two years after Stanley died, when she still believed she was obliged to find Daniel a father and thought she couldn’t raise a boy on her own. And who could say? Given the way things had worked out, maybe her thinking then had been correct.

The real mistake was going to bed with him. On the other hand, maybe she needed to make up her mind if she could live with him, day in, day out, in that department. There was nothing else to rule him out. After four months of those sedate outings of his – Saturday-night movies, picnics in the park – Vera knew he wasn’t a drinker, a gambler, a ladies’ man, or the sort who had a dangerous temper. Just a solid, dependable thirty-nine year old without much hair who painted houses for a living and was desperately shopping for a wife to settle down with before it was too late. That pretty well summed up Bob. And although that one trial run in the sack made up her mind, she hadn’t realized it at the time. The unfortunate thing was that Bob must have come to the conclusion it was a sign, because not long after he popped the big question. Popped it standing in line at the Exhibition to buy Daniel a ticket for the merry-go-round, popped it holding her kid in his arms.

Vera didn’t handle the situation very well. She should have asked him for time to think his proposal over. Anything would have been better than her flat-out no, given without a second’s hesitation. It must have seemed like a fearful slap in the face coming like that, and awfully humiliating. He probably assumed he was in like Flynn after having done her the dirty. Mostly Vera blamed herself for not having an answer ready for a question she should have
suspected was coming. But had she even known what her answer would be until she got taken by surprise like that and had the truth torn out of her?

Aside from turning as white as a sheet of paper and blinking his eyes a couple of times, Bob was taking it pretty well. He said he was sorry and she said she was sorry, too. Then there was a painful silence. “Look,” she said finally, “maybe Daniel and I had better go home.” And she stretched out her arms for the baby.

Wasn’t she taken aback when Bob wouldn’t hand him over? Likely he wanted to prove he could be sophisticated about this; the refusal of a proposal was no big deal to him – plenty of other fish in the ocean. The problem was he couldn’t keep his voice from sounding tight and self-righteous when he said, “I don’t see any reason why we should spoil the little one’s fun.”

Meanwhile Daniel was starting to fuss. The minute he’d seen his mother reach for him he’d held out his arms, clenched and unclenched his fists to show he wanted her to take him. Vera said, “Really, Bob, I think we should call it a day after what’s happened.”

“What
has
happened?” said Bob a shade belligerently. He was having a time keeping a grip on Daniel while the baby whined and twisted in his arms.

“Let’s not argue about this. You’re upsetting the kid. He wants to come to me. Give him over.”

Bob jostled and shifted Daniel in his arms, struggling to get a better handle on him. The baby stuck out his chubby arms and whimpered. “No, Daniel,” Bob said, “you can’t go to your mother. It’s too hot for her to lug around such a big, heavy boy.”

Vera remembered the merry-go-round lurching into motion behind Bob right then, and a burst of recorded music from a speaker over the ticket booth starting up loud enough to wake the dead. And kids screaming as the ride picked up speed, and the blur of colours as it went round and round. She had felt dizzy and panicked, something inside her giving way, breaking loose, and beginning to spin and whirl heavily and slowly and then faster
and faster and lighter and lighter until she thought the top of her head was about to fly off. The second she heard her voice, shrill and brittle, she knew it was all wrong, the wrong voice for a situation like that. “Bob,” she said, “give Daniel to me. Give him to me right this instant.” It was a school teacher’s voice and Bob recognized it for that and got his back up because of the tone. He looked hurt and stubborn at one and the same time. “What? You think I’m going to do something to him? What do you think I’m going to do to him?”

“I don’t think anything. I just want him,” she said.

“Be sensible, Vera. To me carrying him is nothing. He’s light as a feather.”

Rage. When she put a name to that spinning, tearing commotion going on inside her, that was it. Rage. He was her kid. Hers. What right did Bob have to debate whether or not he’d turn him over? What’s more, it was plain that Daniel, sensing a troubled atmosphere, was beginning to be frightened. He began to cry unconvincingly, without conviction, to see if it would get him what he wanted. Which was his mother.

“Hush,” said Bob.

She grabbed for Daniel. Bob held on. His mouth went grim, his eyes narrowed with determination. He pulled, she pulled. Not until Daniel let loose a blood-curdling scream did she let go, throwing up her hands as if they’d been burned. She hadn’t realized what they were doing to the kid. The pressure marks from her fingers stood white on the flesh of his little arms. Bob and Vera stared at each other, panting. She spoke but three words. “I’ll kill you,” is what she said and she meant it. If she’d have had a carving knife in her hands she’d have rammed it clean through him.

Bob had shot her a queer, ugly smile. Vera believed that the strength of what he was feeling had shaken him, just as the strength of what she was feeling had shaken her. The smile was part disgust, part injured feeling, part triumph. “Let’s hear the magic word,” he said. “Then I’ll think of following orders.”

She had been so disturbed and confused, at first she misunderstood. Vera got it into her head he was trying to blackmail her into saying yes to marrying him. But that wasn’t it. All he wanted to hear her say was please. Only please. Please give me my son.

A father dictating at the dinner table, laying down the law. “No dessert until I hear the word please.” Bob the housepainter was waiting for her to say it. Waiting while Daniel screamed his face purple and flopped and snapped in his arms like a fish.

He wanted her to bow down and she couldn’t. Bow down to me and you can have what you want. It was her father all over again and she couldn’t. “You want him so bad,” Vera said, “you can keep him.”

Then she had turned her back on Bob and walked away. She counted her steps while colliding with people in the crowd. “Drunk,” said a woman in disgust when she bumped into her. Vera’s hands trembled uncontrollably. Thirty steps, she told herself. I’ll give myself thirty steps before I turn back. She couldn’t walk a straight line. The tinny, shrieking carousel music behind her seemed to be tossing her from side to side. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

She heard someone running, a hand on her shoulder jerked her around. “Vera, what’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?” cried Bob, alarmed. He set Daniel down at her feet, the baby stamped his white boots, clutched at her skirt, screamed. His face, shining with tears, looked like a wet plum. Snot was leaking onto his upper lip and slobber onto his chin. When she swept him up into her arms his body burned hers clean through her blouse.

“Lucky for you that you came after me and not me after you,” was all she had said to Bob. It was all that needed to be said. She never saw him again.

“Mickey Mantle? That’s your idea of a ballplayer? Mr. Showboat popping his arsehole swinging for the fence and glory every time he steps in the batter’s box?” Her father’s voice had built to such
heights of bogus outrage that it could no longer be ignored. Vera took up the scouring pad and furiously attacked a pot.

Daniel contradicted him. “He bunts. Lots of times he bunts.”

“Sure he bunts, when the count is two and two. That’s when the chicken shit bunts.”

“You won’t say a good word about him just because he’s a Yankee.”

“Leaving aside he’s an asshole – you’re right. But it’s not the Yankees I hate so much as their fans. Ever notice how everybody claims they’re a Yankee fan can’t name five players on the team? All they know about the Yankees is that they’re winners and that’s enough for them. A Yankee fan is generally ignorance tied to no convictions.”

For Vera, it wasn’t enough that these dumb disputes drove her crazy by endlessly running in circles like dogs snapping at their tails; what was worse was that listening to them busy themselves with their nonsense made her feel alone. Sometimes she couldn’t stop herself from butting in with her shiny two bits’ worth, and taking Daniel’s part, even though she knew her help wasn’t appreciated in the least.

“I like the Yankees!” she shouted from the kitchen.

“See?” said the old man. “What’d I say?”

It was difficult to decide what was responsible for Daniel losing his temper, the indignity of his mother intervening on his behalf, or the self-congratulatory and annoying way his grandfather had of delivering insults. “Better to cheer for the Yankees than a bunch of pitiful losers like the Red Sox!” he cried in a choked voice. “Who wants to cheer for a team of losers like them!”

“J do,” announced the old man with some smugness. “Because me, I got a sense of loyalty. A real fan picks and sticks. A genuine fan stands by his team, win or lose, that’s how you know a real fan.”