The Monkeyface Chronicles (19 page)

Now my grandfather and I are coasting down the laneway hill on our bicycles.

“I'm going to share some especially good things with you today, Philip,” he calls over his shoulder, “to help celebrate this glorious day!”

I'm not sure what's so
glorious
about today; it is unseasonably cold, the sky is grey and threatens a downpour at any minute. Still, I'm glad to see that his confidence has returned since the day he surrendered his driver's licence.

We reach the bottom of the hill, and the Tabernacle protestors pick up their signs and banners and charge at us from across the parking lot. There are only six of them, including Adeline's mother, but what they lack in numbers they make up for in volume. They line up at the edge of the Tabernacle property, just feet from our driveway, and wave their signs and chant:

“The Mother/Child bond is SACRED! SHAME on YOU!

The Mother/Child bond is SACRED! SHAME on YOU!”

The tires of my grandfather's bike scrunch to a halt in the laneway gravel.

“Philip,” he says, his voice rumbling, “you stay here. I'm going to put and end to this nonsense once and for all.”

He swings a leg over his bike, boots the kickstand down, and strides toward the chanters. They part as he passes through them. The only one who keeps chanting is Candace Brown, whose voice is as rough as sandpaper from weeks of screaming at our family. She follows behind my grandfather, waving her
Pretenders and Idolaters will SUFFER
! placard at him, until he steps into the Tabernacle and closes the door behind him.

Adeline's mother walks to the edge of our driveway, glaring at me as if she's trying to light me on fire with her rage. “Do you think we don't know what goes on inside your house?” she hisses. “Do you think we haven't heard the rumours?”

“Whatever,” I say.

“You . . . you . . . hideous . . . we will expose your father's lies. We will expose all of you, you . . . you . . . mutant! We will make you all pay for pushing Adeline from the path of righteousness.”

“Maybe
you
pushed her from the path,” I suggest.

For minutes that seem like hours, the eyes of the other five protestors flit from me to Candace Brown to the Tabernacle door.

My grandfather eventually emerges with Pastor Vangelis.

“Children of the Lord,” the pastor booms from the steps, “this vigil of protest will now end. Please come inside.”

The congregants do as they have been instructed, filing one by one into the windowless concrete building, dragging their signs and banners behind them, except for Candace Brown. She stands there, arms akimbo, and croaks, “What?”

“There will be another time, Candace,” Pastor Vangelis says. “Come inside.”

“But . . . ”

“Come inside, child.”

“But . . . the sacred bond . . . they must be punished . . . ”

“Candace . . . ”

“They took my daughter away from me!” she rasps.

“Adeline was lost to us anyway,” Pastor Vangelis says, more firmly this time. “Now, Candace, come inside. There will be another day.”

Adeline's mother walks through the Tabernacle door, her head hung low. Pastor Vangelis enters behind her, and pulls the door closed with a solid thump.

My grandfather straddles his bicycle once again.“What did you say in there?” I wonder.

“I'll explain everything over some good food and an excellent bottle of wine,” he says, pedaling forward. “Come on.”

We turn onto Main Street, and I pedal along beside him.

“Seriously,” I insist, “how did you know that the pastor would make them stop? I can't wait until lunch.”

My grandfather pedals faster; the chain and sprockets hiss and click as he shifts into a higher gear. I push harder to keep up.

“Well, I didn't
know
what the pastor would do. There is no insurance in life, Philip. There are no guarantees. You can only do what you have to do, and hope that things go your way. Let's just say,” he says between breaths, “that each person in a small town is a gear in a complex little machine, like the works inside a clock. If you want to be sure that everything keeps running the way it should, then you've got to make sure that you're the drive gear, the gear that powers all the others.”

“Is that a quote from somebody famous?” I wonder.

“I came up with that one by myself,” my grandfather says.

As we pedal under the single set of stoplights in downtown Faireville, my grandfather coasts to the curb. “Wait here with the bikes,” he instructs, then he goes next door into Angus Angelo's, his favourite butcher shop.

“That's some grandfather you've got there, son,” says a grey-haired man, as he hobbles past with a woman who is probably his wife. “Best damn mayor this town ever had.”

“Yes, sir,” I reply.

He looks admiringly at my grandfather's bike. It's a simple machine, with fat, old-fashioned tires, an enclosed chain and gears, a sprung seat, with everything painted semi-gloss black, including the wheel spokes, handlebars, and the wire basket over the wide front fender. It looks like it may have been built during World War Two.

“They take away his driver's licence, and he just keeps on goin' on an old bicycle,” he says. “The only thing that's ever gonna take ol' Vernon Skyler down is the Grim Reaper himself. Ain't nobody else is gonna do it.”

“No, sir,” I say.

“When he comes out, tell him that Willie Wendell said ‘hi.'”

“Yes, sir.”

As the couple wanders away, Willie Wendell's wife whispers to him, “Isn't it nice that the ol' mayor spends so much time with his retarded grandson?”

Retarded grandson?

“He's a class act,” Willie Wendell whispers back. “And I'll bet he taught the kid his manners, ‘cause I doubt that fruity father of his has done ‘im much good.”

Willie Wendell's wife giggles.

I want to turn around and say something
un
mannered to these twittering old buffoons, but my grandfather has emerged from the butcher shop, and I don't want to embarrass him. Into the basket on his bicycle he drops a plump bundle wrapped in brown waxed paper. “Angelo saved the two best filets for us,” he says. “I guess I've still got some influence in this town.”

As we pedal through Faireville, some of the older people on the sidewalks wave, tip their hats, and call out “Hallo, Mayor,” and “Hiya, Vernon,” to my grandfather. He answers each of them by name.

I am seated comfortably in one of the red leather chairs across the dining room table from my grandfather, but my body feels like it is floating in the air, since we shared a bottle of red wine during our extravagant lunch. Before we ate, I was dispatched to the basement to select a bottle from the wine cellar. I had no idea my grandfather had a wine cellar.

“Pick a nice Bordeaux,” he instructed, “something from the top or second row of the rack nearest the door — a Pomerol, St. Emillion, or a Pauillac.”

I was astonished. There were hundreds of dust-coated bottles lying on their sides in dark wood racks, with names like Chateau Lafite, Latour, Margaux, Mouton-Rothschild, Haut-Brion, Petrus, Valandraud. I randomly grabbed one.

My grandfather inspected the bottle before carefully pouring its contents into a wide-bottomed decanter, the smell of the wine filling the room like blackcurrant jam cooking.

“1990 Lafite-Rothchild Pauillac,” he said. “A good choice, Philip. This one cost me close to a thousand dollars at auction. Sotheby's, I think . . . or maybe it was Bonham and Butterfield. I should keep better track of these things.”

“
A thousand dollars
?” I yelped. “For a bottle of
wine
?”

“Today I am going to let you in on a secret,” he said, his eagle eyes glinting mischievously, “that will be worth celebrating with a good bottle of wine.”

Now we've finished the bottle, which was so delicious I still feel faint — and it's not just the effect of the alcohol coursing through my bloodstream.

“So when are you going to let me in on this great secret?” I blurt out.

“Let's retire to the living room,” my grandfather says, “and chat like civilized men. Would you like to try a glass of good vintage port?”

“Sure!” I say, being careful not to slur the word.

My grandfather joins me in his living room, with a bottle in one hand and two port glasses in the other. “1983,” he says wistfully as he fills my glass with the tawny liquid. “A very good year. The year I first hired your mother.” Then he adds, “Which, of course, allowed your father to meet her, and is the reason I'm lucky to share your good company today.”

He sits down on the Edwardian-style sofa across from me. Although the outside of my grandfather's house looks like the bungalow of any retired farmer or factory-worker in Faireville, the interior is impeccably decorated, like a miniature palace. He crosses his leg at the knee, settles back, then jumps up again.

“Cigars!” he says. “Port like this deserves a great cigar!”

He crosses the room to the fireplace mantle, where he lifts the lid of a small wooden box that has been up there for as long as I can remember. The room fills with a sweet, earthy scent. He withdraws two cigars about the thickness and twice the length of my thumb, trims them with a tiny silver guillotine, then returns to his casual perch on the sofa. He dips the trimmed end of the his cigar into his port, lights it up, then passes the lighter and the other cigar over to me. I duplicate his moves exactly.

“Don't inhale,” he warns, “just fill your cheeks with the smoke, savour its taste for a moment, then let it curl back out of your mouth.”

We sit together for a while, saying nothing, just sipping the port and watching the thick white smoke from our cigars curl languidly toward the ceiling. I have never felt more sophisticated, more gentlemanly than I feel right now. I have also never felt more light-headed.

“Was that wine really worth a thousand dollars?” I wonder.

“I've got a few bottles of 1998 Chateau Petrus that are worth about three thousand a bottle,” my grandfather says. “The port we're drinking, which I bought right from the source in Portugal back when it was released, is likely worth about that now. You're surprised that I have that kind of money, aren't you?”

He takes a long sip of his port, then a deep pull from his cigar.

“In politics, Philip, especially local politics, I realized early on how important it was to cultivate an image that allowed people to project themselves onto me. Most of the people who vote in municipal elections here in Faireville are hardworking people with simple lives. I was successful in politics here because I always seemed to be one of them.”

He takes another long sip from his port glass.

“If people knew how much money I actually have, they wouldn't trust me the way they do. They would not be able to project themselves onto me. So, I keep it quiet. I live in a modest home, but in the privacy of my home I eat good food, drink excellent wine, and I smoke these great cigars. I drove what seemed to them to be a modest old car, when in fact each year it cost me more than the price of a new Cadillac to keep it running. Now I ride what looks like a modest old bicycle, but it's a Swiss-made machine I imported for ten thousand dollars. Unlike many people with wealth, I practice
inconspicuous
consumption.”

“How did you manage to make so much money?” I ask. If Dennis were here, I bet he would feel a lot closer to our grandfather after hearing this.

“Real estate,” he says. “I've bought up a lot of property here in Faireville, one lot, one building, one bank auction, one estate sale at a time. Half the population here pays rent to me, or their mortgage payments go into my bank account. And, because I rent at lower rates than the other landlords, and I offer lower interest rates than the banks, half the people in this town ‘owe me one.' In politics, it's good when a lot of people ‘owe you one.'”

I'm having difficulty focusing my eyes. My grandfather keeps splitting into two hazy grandfathers. I'm drunk for the first time in my life. It is not an unpleasant feeling.

“To paraphrase
you
,” I say, somewhat murkily, “you're the gear that drives all the other gears and wheels in Faireville.”

“Exactly,” he says. “How do you think I got Pastor Vangelis to call his flock away earlier today?”

“How?”

“Well, it seems that nobody informed him that the ground the Tabernacle is built on is not owned by them, but is in fact
leased
for a ten-year term. From me. I simply pointed out to the good pastor that it would be a very sorry situation indeed if I refused to renew their lease when it expires next year. None of those trailers they've got parked there are big enough to tow that big concrete building away.”

My grandfather drains the last of his port, then takes another long, deep draw from his cigar.