Wild Fell (11 page)

“Mom, please . . . he’s so far from home. I’m all he’s got right now. And he’s so beautiful. Look at him. Mom, please? Let me keep him?”

But she was adamant. “Absolutely not. We’re going right to the pet store on the way home. I don’t know what you were thinking, Jameson, but you’re going to have to learn that sometimes your actions carry consequences. This is as good a time as any to learn that lesson.”

“Dad?” I looked imploringly at my father, but he looked away. I had a sudden, dreadful vision of Manitou on display in one of the terrariums at Willard’s Pet Shoppe on Bank Street, as far away from the paradise in which he was born and had lived his short, wild life as possible. I pictured children poking him with their grubby fingers, or tapping on the glass walls of his prison trying to get a reaction. I felt a return of some of the rage I felt on the bus when Prince swung him through the air, but there was a new, desolate identification with Manitou that I hadn’t felt the last time. I hated my mother then, and wished her dead. “Dad, please. Please? I’ve never wanted anything more in my life. And if you let me keep him, you never have to give me anything ever again, not even for Christmas, or on my birthday.”

My mother said peremptorily, “Don’t try to play your father and I off one another, Jameson. You know better than that.” She turned to my father. “Peter? Where did you park? Let’s get home. After we drop the turtle off, we can all go to Ponderosa to celebrate Jameson’s first night back. Would you like that, Jameson? It would be a special treat.” You can tell us all about your adventures at Camp Manitou this summer. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Before I could reply, my father said to my mother in a very clear, firm voice, “Alice, I think Jamie’s old enough to be responsible for the turtle he’s brought home. I think it’ll be fine.”

My mother stared at my father, open-mouthed. “I
beg
your pardon? The decision has been made, Peter. I’m not having that thing in my clean house. Turtles are messy and they’re crawling with disease. I’m not having us all die of salmonella just so Jameson can keep a pet.”

“We can talk about it later, Alice, if you like.” There was the faintest trace of an edge to his voice, faint but detectable to both my mother and myself. “But I think it’ll be fine. What was his name? Manitou? Like Gitche Manitou, the head-honcho Indian spirit? Good name. Jamie will take good care of him, won’t you, son? We can use that old terrarium, the one I kept my garter snake in when I was a boy. I think we still have it, don’t we, Alice?”

My mother narrowed her eyes and said nothing.

“Yes, Dad, I promise.” I turned to my mother pleadingly. “Mom? You’ll see. Is it okay? Dad says I can.”

She didn’t reply to me, either, but she shot my father a look of icy fury. Then she said, “Jameson, take your duffel bag and wait for us outside. I want to have a quick word with your father before we drive home.”

I slung my duffel over my shoulder. My parents never raised their voices to each other in public, let alone fought in public, so I knew that this would be settled in a matter of minutes in one of two ways. Either Manitou would be coming home to live with me in a terrarium in my room where I could take care of him, or else we’d be stopping off at Willard’s on the way home, in which case I would never forgive my mother as long as I lived. Just before I reached the exit, I turned back and observed my parents.

My mother’s face was white with rage and she was speaking to my father in a voice too low for anyone around her to hear. But whatever she was saying was no less furious for its inaudibility. So engrossed was my mother in berating my father that she didn’t even notice that he stopped listening to her long enough to give me a brief, almost imperceptible wink.

When he did that, I knew we’d won, at least this round.

My mother sat in the front seat and smoked steadily as she stared out the window. My father tried to make light conversation—with her, at first. When she pointedly ignored him, he tried to engage me instead, but I was too self-conscious to answer beyond monosyllables. Both my father and I were acutely aware of my mother’s silence, as we were doubtless intended to be.

Jovially, my father said, “I guess Ponderosa is out of the question, Alice . . . ?
Or would you still like to have dinner there? I bet Jamie could use a steak, couldn’t you, son? I sure could.”

My mother stared straight ahead without replying.

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “I’m not all that hungry.”

My father glanced sideways at my mother, then back at me in the rear-view mirror. He sighed. “Well,” he said. “Hidey-ho! Home we go!”

As soon as we arrived at our house, my mother went up to their bedroom and slammed the door. Rather than jumping, both of us exhaled our relief simultaneously.

My father grinned and said, “Well. Let’s get this little fellow out of that bag and into something more comfortable.” He laughed at his joke. I laughed too, more in solidarity with my father than at his joke, which really wasn’t all that funny. The love I felt for my father at that moment was profound and all-encompassing. “Put him in the sink, Jameson. Run some water first so the porcelain is a bit moist. It’s high enough that he won’t be able to get out. Then you and I will get the terrarium out of the garage and get his new home ready.” My father reached out and gently squeezed my shoulder. “You like him, don’t you? I can tell. Your first pet. Well, well. How about that? Kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. Thank you, Dad. You know . . . for making it, you know, okay with Mom.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s okay with Mom,” my father said. “But it’s okay with me, and she’ll get used it, you’ll see. Come on now; let’s get that sink ready for him. He’s been in that paper bag of yours for a very long time.”

I ran the water in the sink, then gently took Manitou out of the bag and placed him on the damp porcelain. It could have been my imagination, but the turtle seemed to revive as I watched. He crawled around the perimeter of the sink, not scrabbling hysterically as he had in the bag. If not actually pleased with his temporary quarters in our kitchen sink, he seemed, at least, resigned to it. I felt the first stirrings of something like actual guilt for having taken him home with me. I shuddered to imagine the height from which he must have fallen to have landed on the floor of the bus.

I knew fear. I’d known it for three weeks. I could only imagine what Manitou had felt when he fell from John Prince’s hand.

Inside the sink, the turtle circled the perimeter of the porcelain, pausing where the water had puddled, as though he was confused by its presence in a world gone so completely alien in every other way.

I said, “Dad, do you think he’ll be okay?”

“What do you mean, son?”

“I mean . . . do you think he’ll be okay living here with us? Do you think he’s happy?”

My father regarded me thoughtfully. “Jamie, let me ask you a question,” he said. “Did you think about any of this when you brought him home? I mean, I know he’s beautiful, and I know you wanted to have him as a pet. But did you ask yourself about any of that when you reached for him this morning?”

I thought about it, then shook my head. “No, I guess not.”

My father paused. When he spoke again, his tone was gentle but serious. “Well then, son,” he said, “it’s pretty simple: you made a choice that has impacted this creature’s life. You brought him home with you. You took him out of his world and into yours. Now you’re responsible for him. Actions have consequences. Your mother was right about that part, even if the way she said it wasn’t quite the way she meant it to sound. It’s up to you to take care of him now. Do you understand what I’m saying, Jamie?”

“Yes, Dad. I understand.” I did, too. What had seemed like a great idea this morning in the swamp now seemed to be a portentous responsibility.

“Jamie?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“I want you to know something.” He took my chin in his hand and squeezed it very gently. “I know Camp Manitou was hard for you.”

“Dad, it—”

“Jamie, listen to me, I know what it was like. I’ve been to camp. I saw it in your eyes on Parents’ Day when we had that talk. I recognized that look. I know you were putting on a brave face for me, and I know why you were doing it, too. I know you wanted your mother and I to be proud of you. Well, we
are
proud. I just wanted you to know that. That’s one of the reasons why I thought you should keep Manitou. You showed me that you could be responsible this summer, and I’m going to trust you now.

My eyes filled with tears, but I was smiling for the first time since I could remember. “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

“I love you, too, sport.” His own eyes were slick when he ruffled my hair. “Good,” he said. “Now then let’s go find that old terrarium of mine. Nobody should have to live in a paper bag as long as Manitou did this afternoon. Or our kitchen sink, either.”

Dinner that night was a humourless affair, though less tense than the car ride had been.

After my father and I had set up the terrarium, and filled it with water that would need to be changed daily until we were able to install a filtration system—as well as moss and small gravel rocks for him to rest on—we put Manitou inside.

“I think that’ll do it,” my father said. “Now I think we need to take a ride to the pet store and pick up some turtle pellets. Then maybe we should stop at the library and check out some books on turtle care so you’ll know how to take care of him properly.”

At the pet store, my father found a paperback book on the care of reptiles and amphibians. I found one specifically on the care of turtles. My father shrugged his shoulders and bought them both. In the car afterwards, my father and I didn’t say much to each other, but that didn’t mean we weren’t communicating.

When I think back today, that ride home from the pet store was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, full of promise. In retrospect, the wonder of that moment made everything that was to come later all the more cruel.

When we got home, my mother had come out of the bedroom and was cooking dinner. Without turning, she said, “Dinner in fifteen minutes, you two. And wash your hands, for heaven’s sake. I know you’ve been handling that filthy thing.”

My mother clearly still resented her edict about the turtle having been overridden by my father, but she was less angry than she had been in the car. Sustaining that level of ire over a long period of time wasn’t impossible for her, but it drained her in the same way that leaving a battery outside in sub-zero temperatures would drain its energy. In order to conserve the status quo, my mother must have realized she would have to dial her anger down.

Not for the first time, I looked between my father and my mother at the dining table and wondered why they had ever married in the first place, since she clearly didn’t really seem to even like him and he seemed to put up with her out of a sense of loyalty to something other than his love for her.

But in those days, in the early 1970s, divorce was something shameful that “other” people did, the sort of “other” people that people like my family and I had only heard of, but didn’t really know. A boy in my class at Buena Vista Public School, Tommy Marx, had divorced parents, a distinction he wore like an affronting port-wine stain birthmark. To the rest of us, Tommy never seemed completely
clean
.

The wife was usually to blame, in popular divorce lore. Even if the husband was the cause of it, it was because of her deficiency in performing her role as a wife and mother. And she passed along her disgrace to her children by alchemical transmutation.

While I had on occasion overheard my mother and her friends refer to divorced men as “cads,” or “bounders,” whenever the topic of a divorced woman came up, their mouths would set in obdurate lines, their eyes managing to communicate both pity and a kind of flinty resentment that one of their own sex would have let down the team so badly by falling so low. They used the term “broken home,” which I found horribly vivid, picturing, as I did, an actual smashed house: shattered walls, jagged spikes of timber beams strewn as though from a great height, deadly shards of glass, rusty nails, everything pointed and lethal—all of it the woman’s fault, a failure at the only thing that really mattered in a woman’s life.

Still, when I pictured my parents divorcing—something I did with increasing frequency as time went on—I imagined a world composed of my father and me alone, a world which was, if not always joyful, at least always even-tempered and full of simmering love and acceptance. For that, I would have gladly worn the port-wine stain of being the child of a broken home. In those fantasies, my mother was always living somewhere else and my father and I formed a universe of two.

“Mom, is it okay if Hank comes over after dinner so I can introduce her to Manitou?”

It seemed politic to ask permission from my mother rather than my father this time. Even though there was always a better chance of her saying no, I’d been the recipient of enough bounty from my father today that she would forbid me almost anything at this point, just on principle. I waited, resigned to that outcome.

To my surprise, she said, “Yes, Jamie, that would be fine. But she can’t stay too late. It’s been a long day for you, and for your father and I because of you. And please don’t make too much noise. I have a headache. You can play in your room. Do we understand each other, young man?”

“Thanks, Mom.” I began to push my chair back in preparation to leave the table. “May I be excused?”

My mother sighed deeply and theatrically, and reached for the pack of cigarettes and the lighter she always kept on the buffet table. She smiled wanly. “You didn’t even finish your dinner, Jamie. I can see how glad you are to see me, and how glad you are that I put in all that work to make your favourite dinner to welcome you back home. Oh well, I should be used to that by now. No one in this house appreciates what I do.”

Two years before, when I was seven, my mother complained about all the work she did for my father and me, and how no one appreciated the sacrifices she’d endured for our benefit. I’d made the mistake of suggesting to her that if she didn’t like housework, she could get a job and hire someone else to do the cooking and cleaning.