Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

I didn’t look up until Walter summoned me to the bookless library. His fingers rested lightly on my shoulder as though I might not be able to find my way. Once we were behind closed doors, he reached an open hand for his car keys, which I deposited therein. “Have you been drinking?” I nodded, meek but with rising surliness, concealed in the booze that was now thrumming in my eardrums. “I suppose it was a condition of your negotiations.” I nodded again, this time modestly. “Well,” said Walter, “I would like to know exactly what Paul said.” I felt reluctant to convey this information, perhaps out of lingering loyalty to my favorite uncle, who had so often thrown the baseball on the tenement rooftops for me to field, but in the end I felt it wasn’t mine to keep.

“He said to tell you all that. . that sick people depress him.”

I returned to my room reconciled to my lost sainthood. For now, there was the OK Corral and its several possible outcomes. But that night, my grandmother died at last and nothing in the story of Wyatt Earp suggested an appropriate response, as he of course was dead too.

For the several days of the viewing, the wake, the funeral Mass, it was as if we were troops following orders. My mother kept slipping off, trying to check on my father’s progress. First it was a flat, then they wouldn’t take a check for gas, then a distributor cap, then the magneto, and later, when she told Uncle Gerry about the bad magneto, he said, with all his big-cop innocence, “Jeez, Mary, they haven’t had magnetos in twenty years!”

My father arrived on the day of the wake, a hot day more like August than late September. Greetings were fulsome, given the gravity of the occasion, Dorothy frayed with grief and worry and Constance somehow politicizing it and making the demise of my grandmother refer mostly to her own need for importance despite having married a Protestant. My father always seemed extraordinarily brisk, compared to my mother’s relatives, and more capable of defusing social awkwardness with sunny confidence. He hugged my mother so long that her sisters grew uncomfortable and abandoned the porch. As the baby of the family, she might be more “advanced,” but it was not their job to bear witness to the decline of standards. It was my turn with my father, and my mother followed her sisters indoors.

“Come here, Johnny,” he said, leading me to the trunk of his big sedan, which he opened with a broad revelatory gesture. There was his leather suitcase with its securing straps and, next to it, a ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Looking over his shoulder left and right as though fencing loot, he said, “These worthy folk are all indoors men, unlike you and me. They see the sky about twice a year. Now that the inevitable has come to pass, we’re going to rent a rowboat, attach this beauty to the transom, and run down to Fog Land for some floundering.”

I told him I could hardly wait, and he mussed my hair in approval. Later, I felt a pang at omitting to suggest that Grandma’s departure was an impediment to floundering. I helped my father take his bag to Paul’s old room and stayed with him for a short time because he seemed to forget that I was still there. He hung his clothes carefully and placed a bottle of Shenley’s blended whiskey on the dresser. He lined up three pairs of shoes, in the order of their formality, walked to the window overlooking Almy Street, and heaved a desolate sigh. I left the room.

I suppose he was nearly forty by then and wore his liberation from what he considered the ghetto Irish with a kind of strutting pride. The circumstance of my grandmother’s death was such that he would be forgiven for being a Republican and for condescending to the family with his obviously mechanical warmth. He was still remembered bitterly for summoning the family to the Padanaram docks to admire a Beetle Cat with a special sail emblazoned with I LIKE IKE.He now received news of Paul’s disgrace with a serious, nodding smile. Aunt Constance, rushing about to prepare the funeral dinner for the family, brusquely and with poorly concealed malice gave him the job of opening a huge wooden barrel full of oysters. Standing next to me in the backyard, he confided in me. “Here I am in fifty-dollar Church of London shoes, a ninety-dollar Dobbs hat, a three-hundred-dollar J. Press suit, shucking oysters. When will I ever escape all this?”

I was afraid to tell him that I was enjoying myself. He pointedly reminded me that he always made note of whose side I was on. “This group”—they were always a group —“ain’t too keen on getting out of their familiar tank town.” He liked bad English for irony but was normally painfully correct about his diction. He viewed himself as an outdoorsman, almost a frontiersman, based solely on having taught canoeing at summer camp in Maine. “You’ll find this outfit,” he said, gesturing to my grandmother’s house, “in street shoes.” For my mother’s family, the outdoors came in just one version: a baseball diamond. But his view of my mother’s family could be infectious, and I went to our first meal with him now viewing them as a group, nervously calibrating the array of forces around the table.

My father never seemed particularly interested in me, except when my alliance offered him some advantage, or at least comfort, in disquieting settings like this household. My grandfather thought he looked like an Indian and once greeted him with, “Well, if it isn’t Jim Thorpe! How are your times in the four-forty, chief? Leaving them in the dust?” Or, more succinctly, “How.”

My grandfather drove the back wheels on the majestic American-LaFrance hook-and-ladder. “A good place for him,” said my father. “Well to the rear.”

I knew his stay here would be a trial, though it seemed the only voice that carried up through the floor, causing him to flinch, was Father Corrigan’s. Religion was an empty vessel to him. When my mother compelled him to attend Mass, he did so with the latest Ellery Queen wrapped in the cover of the Daily Missal.

“Now the keening begins,” he said. “Your grandmother was a fine woman, but all the noise in the world isn’t going to get her anywhere any faster. When you hear them in the parlor tuning up, you may think they’ve gone crazy. This stuff’s about to go the way of the Model T. You’ll be able to tell your kids about it. The sooner it’s over, the sooner I can go back to America and try to make a buck.”

“Will I see Grandma again?”

“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, isn’t it? Ask Father Corrigan. Old Padre Corrigan never had a doubt in his life. He’ll tell you it’s only a matter of time. Me, I’m not so sure. He’ll have Grandma crooking a beckoning finger from the hereafter even if you can’t see it and he can. Poor fellow spent his life making promises to weavers with TB and loom mechanics with broken bodies. I guess he started believing it himself. You ought to hear him describe heaven. It sounds like Filene’s department store.”

Then he went off on the Irish. “Among the many misconceptions about the Irish,” he said, “is that they have a sense of humor. They do not have a sense of humor. They have a sense of ridicule. The Ritz Brothers have a sense of humor”—I had no idea who the Ritz Brothers were but he held them in exalted esteem— “Menasha Skolnik has a sense of humor. You think the Irish have a sense of humor? Read James Joyce. You’ll have to when you go to college. I did. You’ll ask yourself, ‘Will this book never end?’ ”

I always tried to agree with my father, even when I didn’t understand him. “I see what you mean,” I said, with an aching sort of smile.

“Here’s a famous one,” he said, as the wailing started downstairs. “ ‘If it weren’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world.’ Do I like this. They’re only charming when they’re drunk. When they’re sober, they’re not only not ruling the world, they’re ridiculing its hopes and dreams.” This was entirely true of my father himself. He was a merry boozer but a bleak observer of reality when sober. The present moment was a perfect example. He saw no legitimate grief in the response to my grandmother’s death, only posturing and inappropriate tribal memory. “Rule the world, my behind,” he added. “ ‘If it weren’t for blubber, Fatty Arbuckle would set the world record in the high jump.’ ”