Miriam Toews - A Complicated Kindness

I sat in the toboggan hut and propped up my lighter on the bench next to the sheet of music so I could almost see the notes and taught myself how to play “All Through the Night.” I liked the way the flame lit up the gold shiny metal of the horn. I stared at the lights of the city. And then I plowed my way through it over and over and over until it became not beautiful, but in a way almost bearable.

I imagined Tash lying in her bed with her window open thinking hey, that’s Nomi on her French horn, the most beautiful instrument in the world when played properly. I tried to smoke a Sweet Cap afterwards but my lips were too numb to hold on properly so I just held it between my fingers and watched it burn away.

Ihave a car, a Custom 500 Ford four-door, plenty of legroom. He’d taken it to the car wash before he disappeared and left it gleaming in the sunshine on the driveway.

How did he leave? Walk? Hitchhike? How do you leave a town with no train, no bus, no car?

I also have a French horn I plan on learning how to play, an Akai stereo and my records, Tash’s stuff, and an official looking note saying the house is mine.

All my dad left with was his new suit, his dipping bird, and the bible he’d had since he was a kid. He laid out all the information in a note he left on the kitchen table. How to deal with the sale of the house, how to change the oil in the car, not to get a basement apartment if I could help it, and to list my number with my first initial only. N, he wrote (in case I’d forgotten?), looking forward to that delicious meal you promised. I’ll give you a year or two or five to develop your system. In the meantime, we have work to do. Remember the affirmative words of Jesus, Nomi. Lo, I am with you always.

He left me a verse from Isaiah, the prophet of redemption: For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

I doubted that. But I liked it. I liked the way it sounded and the way it made me feel.

That N was nice. That mysterious fullness. I looked at it for a long, long time. I think he’d been aware of writing it when he wrote it. I think he might have slowed down when he wrote it, looked at it and smiled. It was what I had. It was a very loving N. He hadn’t needed to write it. I knew my first initial.

He’d written a PS too, another verse. And remember, when you are leaving, to brush the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.

Against whom, I wondered. Against what?

I sat in his yellow lawn chair for a while, staring at the highway, waiting, in case he’d change his mind. He was going to use his enormous lung capacity to climb mountains and clean the garbage off the top of them for a couple of years and I’d use mine to learn how to play the French horn properly. And if none of that worked out, we’d just breathe.

There was something else too. I’d just been excommunicated, shunned, banished, exiled, whatever you want to call it. If Ray wanted to keep his faith and stay in town…yeah, I’d have been a ghost to him, a kid he loved but couldn’t acknowledge. And it was comforting, in a fragile, loss-filled kind of way, to know that Ray had decided to keep the love alive in his imagination, and leave. That’s what people around here are forced to do if they aren’t strong enough to live without some kind of faith or strong enough to make a stand and change an entire system or overthrow a church. And who of us are that strong anyway? Not the Nickels, that’s for sure.

This weird thing happened to me while I waited for what I knew was not going to happen. I stared at stuff for a while and then I slowly started filling the car with my things trying not to make too much noise because it was still really early and people were sleeping and then the neighbour kid came out of her house in her summer nightgown and asked me if she could watch while I loaded the car and I said sure. She told me she was a sleepy snake. She asked if she could feel my head. She put her finger on her cheek and said she had a good idea.

Yeah? I said. Gonna clean your room? She said noooooo.

Gonna drink your milk? I asked. Noooooooo, she said. She started humming softly and dancing around the car in her little white nightie.

I have an idea, I have a good idea, she said, finger on her cheek the whole time. I dragged it out for a long time until I had loaded everything and was ready to go.

Come here, freak, I said. I spun her for a really long time in the front yard telling her shhhhhh whenever she shrieked or laughed. And after ten or fifteen minutes of spinning we both fell down on the wet grass and everything, the sky, the sun, the clouds, the branches overhead were swirling around and making me feel like throwing up so I closed my eyes and that’s when the odd thing happened. I started to see things in my town clearly, the pits, the fire on the water, Travis’s green hands playing his guitar, him whispering in my ear move with me, and the trampoline, and the old fairgrounds and the stuff written on the rodeo announcers’ booth and the lagoon and the cemetery, and the toboggan hut and the RK Ranch and the giant horses and my windowless school and my desk and American tourists and The Mouth and Main Street and the picnic table at the Sunset Diner, and Sheridan Klippenstein and everything, everything in town, the whole of East Village, and it didn’t seem so awful to me any more in that instant that I knew I’d probably never see it again except for every time I closed my eyes and then I saw my dad in his suit standing in front of the mirror at Schlitzking Clothing and his green eyes blinking behind his large glasses and a smile just beginning to form.

I thought about Menno Simons and what kind of childhood he must have had to want to lead people into a barren place to wait out the Rapture and block out the world and make them really believe that looking straight through a person like she wasn’t there, a person they’d loved like crazy all their lives, was the right thing to do. I thought about Lids in Eden having her brain electrified and I thought about that little piece of newspaper that had floated down into our town from some other place that had on it the words for the way things could have been. Which is what I’m calling my assignment. It’s got a nice ring to it even though it kind of reminds me of a Barbra Streisand song. I’ve put my name in the top right corner and I’ll be leaving it on your front porch. I’m assuming you’ll mark it INCOMPLETE, the word circled in red. I don’t need it back, Mr. Quiring, don’t worry. Feed it to the chickens. And please be kind to Lids.

It looks like I’m still trying to impress you with my story, as though it matters. I’m like a terminal patient still dreaming of the day I climb Everest. There’s a part of me that needs your approval and I don’t know why. Maybe it comes from being a teacher’s kid. Or maybe I just wanted you to think I was as creative as my sister. And maybe there’s a chance you’ll ask me to read my story to the class.

There were so many times I wanted to talk to you, but what could I say. Because in a whole bunch of perversely complicated ways I can understand your attraction to Trudie and hers to you but in another whole set of perversely complicated ways, I can’t. Where’s that guidance counsellor when I need her, eh?

You provided my family with an ending. You took to heart your own advice. You practised what you preached in class. Every story must have a beginning, middle and end. I’ve enclosed, with my “Flight of Our People” assignment, a copy of an excerpt from the last letter you wrote to your sad, sweet Trudie. Except that in this letter you don’t call her your sad, sweet Trudie any more. You don’t include any formal salutation at all. Seems a little harsh considering the “bottomless depths” of passion you originally felt. But things change. Stories unfold. Narrative arc and all that. You just begin.