Man Descending (7 page)

“Go on with you,” said Earl to no one in particular. He was pleased.

The conversation ran on, random and disconnected. There was talk of the hard spring, calf scours, politics, Catholics, and curling. Totting up the score after four drinks, Jack concluded hard springs, calf scours, politics, and Catholics weren’t worth a cup of cold piss. That seemed to be the consensus. Curling, however, was all right. Provided a fellow didn’t run all over the province going to bonspiels and neglect his chores.

Jack helped himself to another drink and watched the tip of the shadow of a spruce advance slowly across the lawn. It’s aimed at my black heart, he thought, and speculated as to when it would reach it.

“I would have got black,” said Albert of his new car with satisfaction, “but you know how black shows dust. It’s as bad as white any day.”

“Maybe next year for me,” said George. “An automatic for sure. I could teach the wife to drive with an automatic.”

“Good reason not to get it,” said someone.

“Albert’s got power steering,” Bob informed Jack. “I told him he was crazy to pay extra for that. I said, ‘The day a man hasn’t got the strength to twist his own steering-wheel …,’ well, I don’t know.” He shook his head at how the very idea had rendered him speechless.

“What you driving now, Jack?” Albert asked smoothly, leaning across the table.

You conniving, malicious shit, thought Cosgrave. Still doing your level best to show me up. “The same car I had last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. In fact, as I said to Edith coming down here, I bought that car the year we got married.” He stared at Albert, defiance in his face.

“I wouldn’t have thought it was that old,” said Albert.

“Oh yes it is, Bert,” said Cosgrave. “That car is old. Older than dirt. Why, I’ve had that car almost as long as you’ve had the first nickel you ever made. And I won’t part with it. No, sir. I’d as soon part with that car as you would with your first nickel.”

“Ha ha!” blurted out cousin Earl. Then, embarrassed at breaking family ranks, he took a Big Ben pocket watch out of his trousers and looked at it, hard.

Jack Cosgrave was drunk and he knew it. Drunk and didn’t care. He reached for the whiskey bottle and, as he did, spotted Brian sitting stiffly by himself on the porch steps, his white shirt blazing in the hot sunshine.

“Brian!” he called. “Brian!”

The boy climbed off the steps and made his way slowly across the lawn. Cosgrave put his arm around him and drew him up against his side. His father’s breath was hot in the boy’s face. The sharp medicinal smell repelled him.

“Why aren’t you playing?”

Brian shrugged. Shyness had paralysed him; after a few half-hearted feints and diffident insults which had been ignored by the chaser, he had given up.

Jack Cosgrave saw that the other boys were now wrestling. Grappling, twisting and fencing with their feet, they flung one another to the grass. He pulled Brian closer to him, put his mouth to the boy’s ear and whispered: “Why don’t you get in there and show them what a Cosgrave can do? Whyn’t you toss a Stiles on his ass, eh?”

“Can’t,” mumbled Brian in an agony of self-consciousness.

“Why?”

“Mum says I have to keep my pants clean.”

“Sometimes your mother hasn’t got much sense,” Cosgrave said, baffled by the boy’s reluctance. Was he scared? “She’s got you all dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and expects you to have a good time. Give me that goddamn thing,” he said, pulling off the boy’s bow tie and putting it in his pocket. “Now go and have some fun.”

“These are my good pants,” Brian said stubbornly.

“Well, we’ll take them off,” said his father. “It’s a hot day.”

“No!” The child was shocked.

“Don’t be such a christly old woman. You’ve got boxer shorts on. They look like real shorts.”

“Jesus, you’re not going to take the kid’s pants off, are you?” inquired Albert.

Cosgrave looked up sharply. Albert wore the concentrated, stubborn look of a man with a grievance. “I am. What’s it to you?”

“Well, Jesus, we’re not Indians here or anything to have kids roaming around with no pants on.”

“No, I don’t want to,” whispered Brian.

“For chrissakes,” said Jack. “You’ve embarrassed the kid now. Why’d you do that? He’s only six years old.”

“It wasn’t him that wanted to take his pants off, was it? I don’t know how you were brought up, or dragged up maybe, but we were taught to keep our pants on in company. Isn’t that so, Bob?”

Bob didn’t reply. He composed his face and peered down into his paper cup.

“Bert,” said Jack, “you’re a pain in the arse. You’re also one hell of a small-minded son of a bitch.”

“I don’t think there’s any need –” began Bob.

“No, no,” said Albert. He held his hand up to silence his brother. “Jack feels he’s got things to get off his chest. Well, so do I. He thinks I’m small-minded. Maybe I am. I guess in his books a small-minded man is a man that lets a debt go for four years without once mentioning it. A man that never tries to collect. Is that a small-minded man, Jack? Is it? Because if it is, I plead guilty. And what do you call a man who doesn’t pay up? Welsher?”

“I never borrowed money from you in my life,” said Cosgrave thickly. “What
she
does is her business. I told her not to write and ask for money.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Hey, fellows,” said Bob anxiously, “this is a family occasion. No trouble, eh? There’s women and kids here.”

“I told her not to write! I can’t keep track of everything she does! I didn’t want your goddamn money!”

“In this family we know better,” said Albert Stiles. “We know who does and doesn’t hide behind his wife’s skirts. We know that in our family.”

Edith Cosgrave came down the porch steps just as her husband lunged to his feet, snatched a handful of her brother’s shirt and punched clumsily at his face. Albert’s folding chair tipped and the two of them spilled over in an angular pinwheel of limbs. It was only when sprawled on the grass that Jack finally did some damage by accidentally butting Albert on the bridge of the nose, sending a gush of blood down his lips. Then they were separated.

By the time Edith had run across the grass, ungainly on her heels, Bob was leading Albert to the house. Albert was holding his nose with his fingers, trying to stanch the blood which dripped on his cuffs and saying, “Son of a bitch, they’re going to have to cauterize this. Once my nose starts bleeding …”

A few women and children were standing some distance off, mute, staring. Jack was trying to button his suit jacket with trembling fingers. “That’ll hold him for a while, loudmouthed –” he began to say when he saw his wife approaching.

“Shut up,” she said in a level voice. “Shut your mouth. Your son is listening to you, for God’s sake.” She was right. The boy was listening and looking, face white and curdled with fright. “And if you hadn’t noticed, the others are politely standing over there, gawking at the wild colonial boy. You’re drunk and you’re disgusting.”

“I’m not drunk.”

She slapped him hard enough to make his eyes water, his ears ring. “Christ,” he said, stunned. She had never hit him before.

“You’re a drunken, stupid pig,” she said. “I’m sick of the sight of you.”

“Don’t you ever hit me again, you bitch.” He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Don’t you ever give me reason to again. Stop ruining my life.”

“You don’t want to hear my side. You never do.”

“I’ve heard it for nine years.”

“He was yapping about that hundred dollars you borrowed. I said it wasn’t any of my affair. I want you to tell him I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Nothing at all. No, you didn’t have anything to do with it. You just ate the groceries it bought.”

“I didn’t ask him for anything. I wouldn’t ask him for sweet fuck all.”

“Don’t fool yourself. You don’t like being hungry any better than I do. Don’t pretend you didn’t want me to ask him for the money. Don’t fool yourself. You needed my brother Albert because you couldn’t take care of your family. Could you?”

Cosgrave straightened himself and touched the knot of his tie. “We’re going,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her last words, “get the boy ready.”

“The hell we are! I want you to apologize to Albert. Families don’t forgive things like this.”

“It’ll be a frosty fucking Friday in hell the day I apologize to Albert Stiles. We’re leaving.”

“No we aren’t. Brian and I are staying. This is my day and I’m having it.”

“All right, it’s your day. Welcome to it. But it sure isn’t mine. If you don’t come now, don’t expect me back.”

His wife said nothing.

It was only when he turned up the street and headed for the beer parlour, his shoulders twisted in his black suit, feet savage on the gravel, that Brian trotted after him, uncertainly, like a dog. The short legs stumbled; the face was pale, afflicted.

His father stopped in the road. “Go back!” he shouted, made furious by his son’s helplessness, his abjectness. “Get back there with your mother! Where you both belong!” And then, without thinking, Cosgrave stooped, picked up a tiny pebble and flung it lightly in the direction of his son, who stood in the street in his starched white shirt and prickly wool pants, face working.

By nine o’clock that night the last dirty cup had been washed and the last Stiles had departed. Edith, Brian, Bob and his wife went out to sit in the screened verandah.

It was one of those nights in early summer when the light bleeds drowsily out of the sky, and the sounds of dogs and children falter and die suddenly in the streets when darkness comes. In the peace of such evenings, talk slumbers in the blood, and sentences grow laconic.

Edith mentioned him first. “He may not be back, you know,” she said. “You may be stuck with us, Bob.”

“His car’s still in the street.”

“What I mean is, he won’t come to the house. And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him.”

“It’s your business, Edith. You know you’re welcome.”

“He’s always lied to himself, you know?” she said calmly. “It’s that I get tired of mostly. Big ideas, big schemes. He won’t be what he is. I don’t complain about the other. He doesn’t drink as much as people think. You’re mostly wrong about him, all of you, on that count.”

Brian sat, his legs thrust stiffly out in front of him, eyes fixed on the street where the dark ran thickest and swiftest under the elms.

“You should cry,” suggested her sister-in-law. “Nobody would mind.”

“I would. I did all my crying the first year we were married. One thing about him, he’s obvious. I saw it all the first year. Forewarned is forearmed. But if he blows that horn he can go to hell.
If he blows it
. I never hit him before,” she said softly.

They sat for a time, silent, listening to the moths batter their fat, soft bodies against the naked bulb over the door. It was Brian who saw him first, making his way up the street. “Mum,” he said, pointing.

They watched him walk up the street with that precarious precision a drunk adopts to disguise his drunkenness.

“He won’t set foot on this place. He’s too proud,” said Edith. “And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him. I’ve had it up to here.”

Cosgrave walked to the front of the property and faced the house. For the people on the verandah it was difficult to make him out beneath the trees, but he saw his wife and son sitting in a cage of light, faces white and burning under the glare of the lightbulb, their features slightly out of focus behind the fine screen mesh. He stood without moving for a minute, then he began to sing in a clear, light tenor. The words rang across the lawn, incongruous, sad.

“Jesus Christ,” said Bob, “the man’s not only drunk, he’s crazy.”

Edith leaned forward in her chair and placed her hand against the screen. The vague figure whose face she could not see continued to sing to her across the intervening reaches of night. He sang without a trace of his habitual irony. Where she would have expected a joke there was none. The voice she heard was not the voice of a man in a cheap black suit, a man full of beer and lies. She had, for a fleeting moment, a lover serenading her under the elms. It was as close as he would ever come to an apology or an invitation. Jack Cosgrave was not capable of doing any more and she knew it.

God save our gracious Queen
,
Long live our noble Queen
,
God save the Queen
.
Send her victorious
,
Happy and glorious …

Edith Cosgrave was not deluded. Not really. She was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. She got to her feet and took Brian by the hand. “Well,” she said to her brother, “I guess I can take a hint as well as the next person. I think the bastard is saying he wants to go home.”

How the Story Ends

C
ARL
Tollefson was what people, only a short time ago, commonly used to refer to as a
nice, clean old bachelor
. In any event, that was the manner in which Little Paul’s mother, Tollefson’s niece, chose to characterize him to Big Paul while their guest unpacked in his room upstairs.

“I was so pleased to see he was a
nice, clean old bachelor
,” she said, buttering toast for her husband, who refused to go to bed on an empty stomach. “Most old men get awful seedy if they don’t marry. And I really had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl – I couldn’t have been more than ten. Eleven maybe.”

“Christ, Lydia,” said Big Paul, “don’t you think they keep them clean in that T.B. sanatorium? They don’t have no choice about bathing in a place like that. They make them. Sure he looks clean.
Now.”

“Did you notice he wears elastic sleeve garters to keep his cuffs even? When was the last time you saw somebody wear sleeve garters, Paul?” She slid the plate deftly in front of him. “I think it’s real cute.”

“You make sure he has his own plate and cup,” said Big Paul, who was mortally afraid of illness. “And make sure it’s a different colour from the dish set. I don’t want his stuff getting mixed with ours. I’m not eating off no goddamn T.B. plate.”

“You know better than to talk such ignorance,” his wife answered him. “He’d die of embarrassment. Anyway, he isn’t contagious. Do you think he’d get a foot in the door if he was?”

She tilted her head and lifted an eyebrow ever so slightly in the direction of their son, as if to say: Do you really think I’d put him in jeopardy?

Little Paul stood with his thin shoulders jammed against the wall, and a harried look on his face as he scratched the red scale of eczema which covered his hands. His hair, which had been cropped short because of the skin disorder, appeared to have been gnawed down to his skull by a ravenous rodent, rather than cut, and made the scalp which showed through the fine hair seem contused and raw.

He was six years old and slow to read, or count, or do most things people seemed to expect of him. In school he gave the impression of a small, pale spider hung in the centre of a web of stillness, expecting at any moment to feel one of the fragile threads vibrate with a warning.

“Give him a chipped plate then,” said Big Paul around a mouthful of toast. “You can keep track of that easy enough. He’ll never notice.”

“You might buy three or four weanling pigs,” his wife replied, ignoring him, “and he could look after them. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind doing light chores for his room and board. We could feed them garden trash. It would keep him busy pottering around until he found a place.”

“Where’s he going to find a place?” asked Big Paul with that easy contemptuousness which had first attracted his wife to him. “Nobody is going to hire an old fart like him.”

“He’s not so old. Sixty-six isn’t
so
old. And it’s not as if farm work is all bull labour any more. He could get on with a dairy farm and run the milking machines, say. Or maybe work a cattle auction. He knows cattle, he said so himself.”

“Anybody can say anything. Saying something doesn’t make it so.”

“Tollefsons were never blowhards nor braggers.”

“One lung,” said Big Paul moodily, “he won’t last long. You saw him. The old bugger looks like death warmed over.”

“Paul,” his wife returned sharply, “not in front of the boy.”

“Why did he come here?” whined Little Paul, who felt something vaguely like jealousy, and decided he could exercise it now that his presence had been formally recognized.

“To die in my upstairs bed,” his father said unhappily, apparently speaking to himself, “that’s why. To die on a goddamn spanking-new box-spring mattress.”

“Don’t listen to your father,” said his mother. “He’s only joking.”

“What do you want?” Tollefson said, startled to see the silent, solemn boy standing in the doorway dressed in pyjamas. He tried hard to remember the child’s name. He couldn’t.

“That’s my dad’s bed,” Little Paul said pointing to where Tollefson sat. “He owns it.”

“Yes.” The old man took exception to what he read as a note of belligerence in the boy’s voice. “And this is my room. Nobody is welcome here who doesn’t knock.” Little Paul’s settled gaze made him uncomfortable. He supposed it was being shirtless and exposing the scar of his operation – an L of ridged, plum-coloured tissue, the vertical of which ran alongside his spine, the horizontal directly beneath and parallel to the last bone of his rib cage. Whenever Tollefson thought of his missing lung he felt empty, hollow, unbalanced. He felt that way now.

“Why can’t I come in here without knocking?” the boy demanded listlessly, his eyes shifting about the room, looking into things, prying. “This is my dad’s house.”

“Because I have certain rights, After all, I’m sixty-six and you’re only …” He didn’t know. “How old are you anyway?”

“Almost seven.”

“Almost seven,” Tollefson said. He extended one blunt-fingered hand scrolled with swollen blue veins, grasped a corner of the dresser and dragged himself upright. Then he unzipped a cracked leather case and removed two old-fashioned gentleman’s hairbrushes which he slipped on his hands.

“What are you doing?” said the boy, advancing cautiously into the room. He thrust his tattered head from side to side like some wary buzzard fledgling.

What an ugly
child, Tollefson thought, and was immediately ashamed. He glanced at the hairbrushes on his hands and remembered he had originally intended to have them initialled.
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity
rang in his mind.

What exactly had his married sister, Elizabeth, said to him forty-five years ago on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday party?

“Carlie,” she had sung in the lilting voice he had been pleased to hear her daughter Lydia had inherited, “you’re a handsome young devil. You do know that, don’t you?”

No. He hadn’t. Never dreamed it. The notion had surprised and confounded him. He would have liked to ask someone else’s opinion on the matter, but that was hardly the thing a person did.

This startling information, however, did lead him to begin to take great pains with his appearance. He refused any longer to let his father cut his hair. Instead, he went to the barber in town for a “trim” and his first baptism with bay rum. His sideburns crept past his ear-lobes; his hair appeared to be trying to mount a plausible pompadour. He bought elastic-sided boots, took to looking at himself in store windows when he sauntered past, and lounged on street corners with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. Carl Tollefson began to suspect more than one girl of being in love with him.

Nobody told him any different until, in a moment of fanciful speculation, insane even for him, he remarked to his brother-in-law Roland that he thought the butcher’s wife had her “eye on me.”

Elizabeth spoke to him a second time. “Carlie, you remember what I said to you about being a handsome devil? I’m sorry, but I only meant to give you a little confidence – you’re so shy around girls. The thing is, Carlie, there never was a Tollefson born who was anything but plain. I swear to God Roland married me out of charity. Still, I learned some time ago that nothing much helps; you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. So let me give you a little advice – the girls around here don’t much run to hair oil and elastic-sided boots. What they want is steady, and God knows you’re steady. Just remember, Carlie, we’re all in the same boat – there never was a Tollefson who turned a head with his profile.”

“You think I don’t know that,” he had replied with a tight, pinched laugh. “What kind of fool do you think I am?”

Studying his face in the mirror he was puzzled by the mystery of how he had been able to believe in his supposed good looks, even for a second. Evidence to the contrary stared out at him from the mirror as it had every one of those mornings forty-five years ago as he had so carefully shaved.

Of course, age hadn’t improved him. But, by and large, it was the same old face, only a little more used up. An indifferent kind of face: mild blue eyes which in a certain light appeared unfocused; a limp mouth which he often caught himself breathing through; a decent, ordinary, serviceable nose for a decent, ordinary face; and a set of small, neat ears which lay close to his skull and gave him the surprised look of a man caught in a fierce wind.

Perhaps it was from the moment he realized what he
was
in comparison with what he hoped to
be
that he turned in upon himself. And although he bore no resentment against his sister for planting the seed that flowered in his humiliation, he always sensed that the story of his life might have been very different if she had never said what she had. Not better, only different.

After all, he did not renounce all of what he had come to be; that would have been an admission that everything stemmed from self-delusion, and he was too proud to do that. The sideburns disappeared and the never-to-be-completed edifice of his pompadour crumbled from neglect, but the elastic-sided boots and the trips to the barber endured.

Nor did he dare court the local girls, imagining that they scorned the memory of his debonair days and thought him a poor thing, likely simple. Yet when the chrome-backed hairbrushes he had ordered from the catalogue finally arrived, he hadn’t returned them and requested a refund. He was not quite the same young man he had been before his twenty-first birthday.

“What are you doing?” said Little Paul again, with greater emphasis.

“I’m going to brush my hair,” Tollefson told him, cocking his head and looking at himself in the glass from a different angle.

“And then what?”

“I’ll get myself ready for breakfast. Like you should. I’ll wash my face and hands.”

“Why?”

“Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

“Why can’t I come to your room without knocking?” the boy asked again.

“Because I might be doing something I don’t want anybody to see.”

“Like what?”

“Praying. Having my private talks with God that nobody has any business butting into,” said Tollefson sternly. “For Jesus told us: ‘When thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.’ ”

“Here? In this room? God would come here in this room?” the boy said excitedly, his fingers digging and twisting at the crotch of his pyjamas. “Come here and talk to you?”

“Yes, in a way He would.”

Little Paul thought for a moment, sucking his bottom lip. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “God wouldn’t fit in such a little room. Jesus might fit, but not God.”

“Same thing, son,” said Tollefson, slipping into his shirt.

Little Paul appeared to be sceptical of Tollefson’s contention, but he let the subject drop. “My dad’s buying you pigs,” he informed the old man.

“That a fact?”

“Can I help you look after them pigs?”

“You can if you promise not to come here in my room without knocking any more.”

“All right.” He climbed on to the bed and crossed and locked his legs.

“Why don’t you go to the bathroom, son?”

“Don’t need to.”

“Suit yourself. But no accidents on my bed, eh?”

Little Paul giggled at the idea. Somehow Tollefson heard this as a plaintive sound. The boy didn’t seem to have acquired the knack of laughter. Tollefson began to do up his shirt.

“Why did you come here?” the boy asked abruptly.

Tollefson paused at his collar-button. He always did up his collars. He was that kind of man. “I never thought about it,” he said. “I suppose because there was no place else to go.” He considered further. “No, God brought me here,” he decided at last.

“To die in this upstairs bed,” added Little Paul conversationally, patting the bedclothes with a hand crusted with eczemic lesions.

That terrible spring Big Paul often inquired of Tollefson, “Did you bring this goddamn miserable weather with you, or what?” He made a point of the goddamn, always careful to stress it after he learned from Lydia that her uncle had turned “churchy” some time during the past twenty years.

“I don’t remember hearing anything about his being religious from Mom,” she said. “He didn’t catch it from home; I know that for sure. Grandpa Tollefson’s acquaintance with church was of the marrying and burying variety.”

“Why do they have to creep?” said Big Paul. “He minces around like he was walking on eggs. They all walk the same and they all talk the same. They’re so jeezly
nice
. I never thought there’d come a day when I’d have to sidle past some creeping christer slipping and sliding around my house.”

“There’s nothing the matter with religion,” declared his wife. “You could do with a little yourself.”

“What really frosts my ass about guys like him,” said Big Paul, who found anything out of the ordinary offensive, “is they got no idea of what’s
normal
. Take him. He wouldn’t say shit if his mouth was full of it. Yesterday he fell down in that slop in the corral. Know what he says?”

“Can’t imagine.”

“ ‘Oh Lord, how long?’ he says. ‘How long what?’ I asks. ‘Oh Lord, how long will it rain?’ he says, and then laughs like he was in his right mind. That’s his idea of a joke!”

“If God happens to answer his question, let me in on the secret,” said Lydia. “I want to hang washing some time this week.”

But April was not a month to hang washing. April was a month of cruel rains. The eaves on the house choked on ice water; the poplars behind the cow sheds glistened in an agony of chilling sweats; and sparrows shrank to black clots of damp feathers which rode telephone wires that vibrated dolefully in the wind.

Big Paul’s farmyard swam in water. The early calves were dropped from the warm bath of the womb into numbing puddles – where four drowned before they found the strength to gain their feet. Others shook in the steady drizzles until they contracted hemorrhagic septicemia, shat blood, and died between their mother’s legs.