Sweeter Life (50 page)

“2B Young.”

“Byron Bradley Young,” he said. “That’s neat. A happy tombstone.” And unable to restrain himself, he hugged her with all his might.

After an early lunch, they headed to the United Church. Cyrus wanted to sit at the back with Janice, but she dragged him up front so he could sit next to Ruby. Isabel was on the other side of her, and Hank was fidgeting in his chair at the end of the aisle. The service was so dreary that at one point Ruby leaned over and, in a voice that wasn’t as whispered as it ought to have been, said to Cyrus, “The Mennonites do it better. Those people know how to sing.” Not long after that, the men from Worrell’s Funeral Home wheeled
the casket down the centre aisle and out to the hearse. The family followed in a limousine, and behind that was a long line of other cars, including Janice’s Volvo.

Cyrus had sketchy memories of his parents’ funeral. He remembered the feel of Clarence’s big warm hand surrounding his that day, and how his uncle never let go of him throughout the service, as if he thought Cyrus would try to follow his parents if given half a chance. He remembered, too, how Izzy had winced each time Ruby tried to hug her, how sharp and flinty she’d been in her grief.

At Lakeview, the men from Worrell’s set the casket on a sling-like contraption above the grave. Cyrus felt kind of wobbly on his feet, and he searched the crowd for Janice’s face. He could have used her stabilizing presence just then. People were crying softly, dabbing quickly at their eyes. Reverend Jansen said a few more words. Then the casket was lowered into the ground.

Cyrus watched the long, slow descent of that polished box, caught the hollow sound as it came to rest in its concrete enclosure. He might have tumbled into the gaping hole, if Izzy hadn’t grabbed his elbow and said, “Steady.” And that one word, more than the service, more than the limo ride, more even than the final moment of Clarence’s life, brought a lump into his throat. It was what Clarence had said, he remembered now. They had stood just like this, a ten-year-old boy and a sorrowful middle-aged man, as Riley and Catherine were laid to rest. His parents had driven off with no special farewell, no meaningful looks. They just walked out the door like it was any other day and not their last, leaving Cyrus to stumble blindly through days of bewilderment and pain, coming in the end to teeter at their graveside until his uncle drew him closer, his arm around his shoulder, and in a calm reasonable voice said, “Steady.” That was all he said. Steady. A man as good as his word.

Now Izzy had said the very same thing, served the very same purpose, and he felt so grateful that he turned and kissed her pale powdered cheek. That caught her completely off-guard, and they both would have tumbled into the open grave if she hadn’t been standing so squarely.

Janice rushed forward to help Izzy edge him into the shade of a large
sycamore. The rest of those in attendance took that to mean the service was over. Some drifted slowly to their cars; others offered Ruby one last handshake or smile of condolence.

When Isabel was satisfied that Cyrus would be fine, she looked around to see how her aunt was bearing up and noted that Ruby was her usual tower of strength, from the looks of it offering more comfort than she was receiving. When Isabel saw Hank, however, or rather the person talking to Hank, she had the biggest shock of the day. There, kneeling on the grass and waving his arm, was Gerry. Believing this to be a crisis that needed her attention, she marched directly over to the two men.

“I was sorry to hear about Clarence,” Gerry said, hoisting himself to his feet. “I always admired him.”

Over the past decade, she had kept tabs on Gerry—it was hard not to in a town like Wilbury—and she’d been a little annoyed that he seemed to do just fine without her. He and Ginny Maxwell had stayed together, not at all what Isabel would have predicted. She had thought Gerry would bounce down a long line of tramps and end up a sad and solitary man who couldn’t look after himself. Luckily for Ginny, he had gotten out of pigs altogether and had started a small greenhouse operation—seedless cucumbers, with one house producing geraniums and marigolds for local gardeners. Ginny had quit her job at the Gaslight Room and worked beside Gerry in the greenhouses or out in their little booth on the highway. To her credit, she had always had an artistic flair. Most people in town now owned one or two terracotta pots that she had hand-painted.

“Well,” Gerry said, as though he was working up to an unpleasant task, “I guess I better talk to Ruby.”

As he turned to leave, Isabel touched his arm and said, “Clarence admired you, too, Gerry. He liked the way you ran the farm.”

Those words stopped him in his tracks. He knew they were untrue. He could remember clearly the way Clarence had treated him, always so critical, and remembered, too, the more painful part: how dearly he’d wanted the man to approve of him. So he closed his eyes and searched Isabel’s statement for hurtful edges. But for all her faults, she’d never been cruel. She had simply been blind about this fact, the way she’d been blind about others. Gerry said,
“It was good to see you again, Hank. And you take care, Iz.” Then he did what was right and walked over to Ruby, who’d always been kind.

AT FOUR, THE FAMILY WENT BACK
to the house, and Izzy poured them each a stiff drink. She hauled out platters of food and put on soft, inoffensive music. She had decided it was time to get plastered. But first they needed a toast.

For as long as she could remember, even when her parents were still alive, it was Clarence who said something to commemorate an occasion. But he was gone now, and her brothers had never shown a talent for choosing the right words, so Izzy assumed that this task, too, would fall on her shoulders. It was Ruby, though, who held her glass high and said, “This is one sight your uncle didn’t get to see enough of, the three of you together like this. He didn’t show it sometimes, but he loved you all very much. And I can tell you, this would mean a lot to him.”

That was all it took to begin the ritual of remembering the dead. Isabel talked about those lazy summer nights of Tiger baseball and Coca-Cola and the rich perfume of the apples in the packing shed. Cyrus offered a hymn of thanksgiving that culminated in the purchase of an electric guitar. Even Hank, whose relationship with Clarence had been strained, was able to share a memory of his uncle coming to help Riley one day, the three of them up in the loft of the barn and discovering a wasp nest, or rather, being discovered by the wasps and chased yelping and cursing all the way to the house. What he remembered best, he said, wasn’t the sting or their comic skedaddle but the way they sat on the screened porch afterwards and dabbed themselves with calamine lotion, and how Clarence kept talking about the looks on their faces, the sight of them hightailing it across the yard, until he had them all laughing till their throats were sore.

Long before the stories ran out, Ruby excused herself. She was tired, she said, and would see them in the morning. Then she kissed them each on the forehead and went off to Hank’s room. It was barely past six o’clock and the sun was still high in the sky.

Izzy poured herself another drink, then looked at each of her brothers in turn. “You know,” she said, “for once, I think the Owens actually did the right thing.”

Cyrus finished his drink and helped Izzy clean up. As he walked back to Janice’s house that night, with the setting sun deepening the green of the lawns and trees, with each house, even the poorest, emanating a wholesome glow, he considered what Izzy had said. Was there for every moment in life a perfect word, a perfect action, something that not only fulfilled that instant’s potential but transformed it into something larger and more uplifting than anyone had imagined?

Janice opened the front door as he walked up the flagstone path, then led him into the kitchen where she fixed them each a whiskey. She knew he needed silence right now not chatter, and as difficult as it was, she waited for him to speak if he needed to, or to sit quietly if preferred. They remained that way for several minutes, holding hands over the tabletop, neither of them touching their drink. Finally he said, “When you work on your art, how do you know when it’s exactly right?”

This was not what she had expected. She took a sip of her Scotch and said, “I don’t know. I guess I don’t think in those terms. I mean, exactly right for whom? When my work pleases me I stop, which is a kind of rightness. But right in some objective sense? Who could know something like that? I don’t. I don’t care. It’s enough that it pleases me. Why?”

He shook his head. “What about your life? Do you ever get the sense that what you do is exactly right?”

“Not often,” she said. “Most of the time I feel like I mess up royally.”

“Me too. Always.” He looked around the kitchen, a spare scientific place, not at all like Ruby’s kitchen, or the kitchen he had shared with Eura in Toronto. He could easily imagine Mrs. Young in this room, putting together picture-perfect meals from
Better Homes and Gardens
.

Leaning forward, he said, “When I play, you know, not always but often enough, I do exactly the right thing. I’m onstage in front of a crowd, the band has set up this beautiful groove, a perfect shape that’s missing one part, something I’m not even aware of until just the moment it’s needed, and you know, nine times out of ten I have the part they need and I put it right where it’s supposed to be. It’s weird.”

“But working the way I do, Cy, I have only myself to worry about and myself to blame. You’re lucky. I remember my piano lessons and singing in
the band, and it was never like that, what you’re talking about. It sounds like you’ve found something quite magical.”

“Religious is what I’m thinking,” he said. “It feels like maybe it’s something I believe in.”

NEXT MORNING
, the Owens took Ruby to Orchard Knoll. She wanted to go through Clarence’s things and divvy them up accordingly. Some of it she would junk, some was too precious for her to part with and the rest could be claimed by anyone who felt the need. But in practice, the decision-making was not so easy. Ruby hated to see any of it thrown out. Surely Cyrus needed a set of ratchet wrenches? Couldn’t Hank use a set of onyx cufflinks? And what about those back issues of
Canadian Orchardist?
In the end, the Owens were primarily interested in photographs, though Hank pounced on Clarence’s Zippo, built like a tank, and kept flipping it open and closed until they had to ask him to put it away.

Poring over the snapshots, they puzzled out the path of the baseball glove that Isabel had safeguarded since Riley’s death. All along she’d assumed it was her father’s glove. But she realized now, by comparing a series of photos, that the glove had passed from Clarence’s hands to Riley’s. Ruby filled them in on the whole story.

“Your uncle was always of two minds about that darn glove,” she said. She pointed to a picture of Riley when he was about twelve years old, the glove tucked under his chin as he wound up to throw a pitch. “Those were pretty lean times for your Grandpa Owen. There was no way he could buy Riley the things he needed, so Clarence took him under his wing. He liked to say that he’d only ever been certain about two things in his life: that he loved Riley like a brother, and that Riley had more talent in his baby finger than all the rest of the folks he knew put together.”

Isabel leaned forward and touched Ruby’s arm. “He must have been pretty certain about you, too, to stay married almost forty years.”

Ruby laughed at that and rubbed her nose, as though the notion tickled her in some way. “The way I remember it,” she said, “it wasn’t like that at all. It wasn’t until after the war that we started dating, you know, after Clarence came home from Devon. I had already started to wonder if I was going to
end up an old maid. Everyone was getting married. For heaven’s sake, even my little sister had a husband and two children. But Clarence wasn’t one to rush into things. It took him forever to propose. So really, I think it was maybe more the opposite, dear. I think you could say our marriage worked out the way it did because he
wasn’t
certain, and maybe, in my own way, I wasn’t either. One thing for sure, we had to work at it every single day.”

Ruby picked up the photograph of Riley posing on the grass of Briggs Stadium with Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer. “Hindsight’s a terrible burden sometimes,” she said. “Clarence always blamed himself, I think, for the way things worked out for your father.”

The three siblings studied that glossy black-and-white photo and wondered if it could possibly be that simple, that their lives might have been brighter and sunnier if only Clarence had kept his glove to himself.

Izzy lifted the picture from the table and asked to keep it. She already had the glove; it seemed to her that the two things belonged together. When Ruby agreed, Isabel scanned the photo again, knowing that her memories of Tiger baseball and Coca-Cola would never be the same.

R
onnie had come to accept the fact that he would never hear The Solo again. Even so, he didn’t begrudge his hours of toil and tribulation for the Jimmy Waters Revival. The mystery had deepened in other ways, leading him to the music of Cyrus Owen and his bridge. So it wasn’t regret he felt when people mentioned Jim’s name. It was the heartache you might feel if a father or son or prophet became a traitor to the cause. How else to describe the hurt created by the Worldwide Church of Jim?

Brent and the rest of the staff at RonCon Productions had resigned en masse because they hadn’t been paid for months. Worse, the court injunction and suit for past royalties had seriously undermined the funding for Cyrus’s album. Ronnie needed the equivalent of a cool hundred thousand dollars to finish the project. While he could probably forego payment a bit longer, he was loath to draw on Nigel’s friendship any more than he had already. They had received a significant discount, and even when charging full price, a place like Hidey-Hole was a money-losing proposition.

Ronnie’s solution had been to send Cyrus and the band back home while he went to London to investigate alternative finances. With few options remaining, he made a trip to see Tommy Mac’s old mate Alec
Walker, who ran some girls and drugs but also a bit of loan-and-groan out of a flat in Shepherd’s Bush.