Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

Antoinette stood up from her seat. “My grandmother is a saint,” she sang out, in a high mechanical voice. “She is being welcomed by the angels this very minute.”

Paul blew up his cheeks and nodded.

“Kathleen?”

Kathleen rose and gazed around the room with her electric blue eyes. “Our grandmother—”

I knew I was next, and I felt the ironic expectations of my father, who loved to see me on the hot seat. I never really believed it was the test of character he claimed.

“—brought to our family the highest standards of piety and family concern, especially as to her devotion to Holy Mary Mother of God.” Even knowing they’d been prepped, I asked myself where the two little hussies had come up with this chin music. I hadn’t long to think about it, though; it was my turn.

“Johnny?”

I sat dumbfounded, a weird tingling in my scalp. My father looked at me with a faint smile and my mother gazed into her lap. Both seemed to understand I wasn’t up to this. I had the whirlies.

“Why don’t you stand up?” Uncle Walter said gently.

I rose slowly, the tightness in my throat making speech impossible. A glance at my father revealed ill-concealed hilarity. Uncle Paul was waggling his empty beer at Constance, who stood in the doorway bearing down on me with her eyes. The cousins looked like winners. Only a brief picture of my grandmother rescuing me from this, which she certainly would have, allowed me to break quietly into inarticulate tears.

Uncle Walter smiled sadly and said, “Thank you, Johnny. That’s how we all really feel. You’ve done us all a big favor— thank you.” As I sat down, my father’s glance said he could hardly believe I’d pulled off this stunt. I could almost hear him saying, “Fast one there, M.B.,” or, “Smooth.”

Uncle Walter turned his gaze to my father but quickly looked away; my father was fussing with the napkin in his lap and plainly intended to say nothing at all about the passing of my grandmother. My mother stared at the side of his head, and I knew that in more private circumstances she would have been ready to raise hell. He surely knew ahead of time how brittle any words of tribute might have seemed. My mother’s family were great at seeing through things, and he wasn’t about to walk into a trap. Paul stood a carrot in the mound of his mashed potatoes and hummed “The Halls of Montezuma,” satire that seemed somehow directed at my father. Kathleen and Antoinette were still smirking at me for crying, and I consoled myself with napalm fantasies as their mother stood between them, urging them to clean their plates while tossing me an artificial look of bafflement that suggested I’d lost a step or two to her darlings.

As Aunt Constance turned somewhat loftily to return to the kitchen and another unwelcome course, my mother, always ingenious when it came to defusing tension with her chaotic sense of humor, asked, “Where you going, Constance?”

She stopped but did not look back. “To the kitchen, Mary. Why?”

“Wherever you’re going”—she pointed to the uncanceled first-class stamp affixed to Aunt Constance’s behind—“it’s going to take more postage than that!”

So we got some relief, and Constance could do no more than smile patiently through the laughter before continuing to haul food. The cousins were bouncing their heels on the rungs of their chairs, and I hoped their waning patience would undo all their prissy decorum. In the past I had seen their pandering, obsequious grins turn into frustrated rage in a blink — ballistic in pinafores — and I could wish for that.

“Gerry, tell us about some crimes.”

“Oh, Mary, nothing so exciting. Mostly just blocking jaywalkers with the horse. Ran down a purse snatcher on Sunday.”

“That must have been satisfying.”

“Yes, yes, it was. They slam into the old ladies to get the purses. We get a lot of broken hips, nice old ladies who might not walk again. When we catch the snatcher we take him up the alley and give him the same, couple shots with a paver.”

We all admired this.

“What’s the horse’s name?” I asked.

Gerry lit up. “Emmett. From a farm in Nova Scotia.” It was clear Gerry preferred Emmett’s company to ours. Embarrassed to reveal so much emotion, he ran his finger around the tight collar of his uniform. “Seventeen-hand chestnut,” he said in a choky voice.

“This is real food,” Paul announced. “It’s certainly not K-rations and, by cracky, she’s no international cuisine.”

“What d’you mean, international cuisine ?” said my father. The rest of the family regarded him alertly. He seemed aggressive.

“Let me give you an example, Harold.” Paul bounded back with startling volubility. “I was taken to a French restaurant in the city of New York with, if memory serves, a five-star rating from acknowledged experts in the field, and I don’t mean Dun-can Hines. Because there were four of us, all friends, I was able to sample each celebrated entrée, and I can report to you without prejudice that they all smelled like toilet seats. It gave me the fan-tods. I prefer a boiled dinner.”

My father seemed ostentatiously bored. I had noticed the faint ripple of cheek muscles as he violently suppressed his yawns. His boredom became so pronounced it looked like grief and was probably taken for that. I knew better. I’d heard an argument start in his bedroom with my mother before dinner in which he stated that my grandmother was being “impetuously canonized,” a claim my mother made no attempt to refute. She just called him a son of a bitch. “Ah,” said he, “the colorful household vernacular.”

Uncle Paul began to wail at the end of the table. It was astonishing. He looked around at his family and sobbed, not bowing or covering his head and face. A theory about traditional keening may have lain behind this, perhaps giving it a somewhat academic tone that didn’t make it any less alarming.

“What’s the matter, Paul?” my mother asked softly, which only raised the volume. I’d never seen anything like this before. I was thrilled at this splendid racket. Uncle Walter stood and placed his hands on Paul’s heaving shoulders, giving them rhythmic squeezes, as the campaign medals tinkled. That seemed to calm Uncle Paul somewhat. Aunt Dorothy had begun a contrapuntal snivel, and Walter gently raised his palm for it to stop. Constance ran to the table with a glass of water, taking the position that Paul had something stuck in his throat. My mother held her cheeks, which streamed hot tears. Dorothy lowered the window, then the shade, and turned the Sunbeam fan up several notches until napkins began to flutter. Paul struggled to his feet, and Walter steered him slowly to the door as though fearing Paul would buckle.

My father jumped up and threw out an arm in Paul’s direction with startling emphasis, a mariner spotting land. “For Christ’s sake, tell him to pull himself together!” He was nearly shouting. There was something experimental in his exasperated tone.

Walter stopped, his back to us and his head bowed. He turned slowly, his head still bent, but when he was faced our way, I saw his eyes blazed.

“You would do well,” he said to my father levelly, “to mind your own business.” A terrible quiet followed.

Once Walter had steered a gasping, heaving Paul from the room, my father sat in the ensuing quiet and wiped his lips with his napkin in thought. “Exactly,” he said, as he rose and walked out of the room.

Constance soared in with the hot apple pie. I wondered why she always described things as being fresh from the oven, as she did again now. My mother had a terrific sweet tooth and fell on her slice with relish. Cocking her ear to a slight sound, she said, “He’s heading up the stairs,” and, at a series of thuds, announced,