Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“Christ,” said Thompson, drawing his knees up as if to scrunch himself into a smaller, less noticeable package, “the woman is insane.”

“One thing at a time, Mrs. Bradley,” said the RCMP constable.

“My daughter is finished with him,” she said. “He beats her, you know. I want him kept off my property.”

“I want to speak to Evelyn,” Thompson said. He looked bedraggled and frightened. “Evelyn and I will leave this minute if this woman wants. But I’ve got to talk to Evelyn.”

“My daughter doesn’t want to see you, mister. She’s finished with you,” said Grandma Bradley, shifting her weight from side to side. She turned her attention to the constable. “He beats her,” she said, “bruises all over her. Can you imagine?”

“The boy knows,” said Thompson desperately. “He saw them. How many times do I have to tell you?” He piped his voice to me. “Didn’t you, Charlie? You saw them, didn’t you?”

“Charlie?” said my Grandmother. This was news to her.

I stood very still.

“Come here, son,” said the constable.

I walked slowly over to them.

“Did you see the faces of the men?” the constable asked, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Do you know the men? Are they from around here?”

“How would he know?” said my grandmother. “He’s a stranger.”

“He knows them. At least he saw them,” said Thompson. “My little Padma-sambhava never misses a trick,” he said, trying to jolly me. “You see everything, don’t you, Charlie? You remember everything, don’t you?”

I looked at my grandmother, who stood so calmly and commandingly, waiting.

“Hey, don’t look to her for the answers,” said Thompson nervously. “Don’t be afraid of her. You remember everything, don’t you?”

He had no business begging me. I had watched their game from the sidelines long enough to know the rules. At one time he had imagined himself a winner. And now he was asking me to save him, to take a risk, when I was more completely in her clutches than he would ever be. He forgot I was a child. I depended on her.

Thompson, I saw, was powerless. He couldn’t protect me. God, I remembered more than he dreamed. I remembered how his lips had moved soundlessly, his face pleading with the ceiling, his face blotted of everything but abject urgency. Praying to a simpering, cross-eyed idol. His arm flashing as he struck my aunt’s bare legs. Crawling in the dirt, covered with blood.

He had taught me that “Those who are in the grip of desire, the grip of existence, the grip of ignorance, move helplessly round through the spheres of life, as men or gods or as wretches in the lower regions.” Well, he was helpless now. But he insisted on fighting back and hurting the rest of us. The weak ones like Evelyn and me.

I thought of Stanley the rooster and how it had felt when the tendons separated, the gristle parted and the bones crunched under my twisting hands.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” I said to the constable softly. “I didn’t see anybody.”

“Clear out,” said my grandmother triumphantly. “Beat it.”

“You dirty little son of a bitch,” he said to me. “You mean little bugger.”

He didn’t understand much. He had forced me into the game, and now that I was a player and no longer a watcher he didn’t like it. The thing was that I was good at the game. But he, being a loser, couldn’t appreciate that.

Then suddenly he said, “Evelyn.” He pointed to the upstairs window of the house and tried to get out of the back seat of the police car. But of course he couldn’t. They take the handles off the back doors. Nobody can get out unless they are let out.

“Goddamn it!” he shouted. “Let me out! She’s waving to me! She wants me!”

I admit that the figure was hard to make out at that distance. But any damn fool could see she was only waving goodbye.

IT WAS a vivid countryside they drove through, green with new wheat, yellow with random spatters of wild mustard, blue with flax. The red and black cattle, their hides glistening with the greasy shine of good pasture, left off grazing to watch the car pass, pursued by a cloud of boiling dust. Poplar bluffs in the distance shook in the watery heat haze with a crazy light, crows whirled lazily in the sky like flakes of black ash rising from a fire.

The man, his wife, and their little boy were travelling to a Stiles family reunion. It was the woman who was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. Her husband was a Cosgrave.

The boy wasn’t entirely certain who he was. Of course, most times he was a Cosgrave. That was his name, Brian Anthony Cosgrave, and he was six years old and could spell every one of his names. But in the company of his mother’s people, somehow he became a Stiles. None of them saw anything but his mother in him: hair, eyes, nose, mouth – all were so like hers they might have been borrowed, relatives exclaimed. Since his father had no people (at least none that mattered enough to visit), Brian Anthony Cosgrave had never heard the other side of the story.

“For God’s sake, Jack,” Edith Cosgrave said, “stay away from the whiskey for once. It’s a warm day. If they offer you whiskey ask for a beer instead. On a hot day it isn’t rude to ask for a beer.”

“Yes, mother dear,” her husband said, eyes fixed on the grid road. “No, mother. If you please, mother. Christ.”

“You know as well as I do what happens when you drink whiskey, Jack. It goes down too easy and you lose count of how many you’ve had. I don’t begrudge you your beers. It’s that damn whiskey,” she said angrily.

“It tastes twice as good when I know the pain it costs a Stiles to put it on the table.”

“Or me to watch you guzzle it.”

“Shit.”

The Cosgrave family had the slightly harried and shabby look of people who, although not quite poor, know only too well and intimately the calculations involved in buying a new winter coat, eyeglasses, or a pair of shoes. Jack Cosgrave’s old black suit was sprung taut across his belly, pinched him under the armpits. It also showed a waxy-white scar on the shoulders where it had hung crookedly on a hanger, untouched for months.

His wife, however, had tried to rise to the occasion. This involved an attempt to dress up a white blouse and pleated skirt with two purchases: a cheap scarlet belt cinched tightly at her waist and a string of large red beads wound round her throat.

The boy sat numbly on the back seat in a starched white shirt, strangled by a clip-on bow tie and itching in his one pair of “good” pants – heavy wool trousers.

“They’re not to be borne without whiskey,” Cosgrave muttered, “your family.”

“And you’re not to be borne with it in you,” she answered sharply. But relented. Perhaps it did not pay to keep at him today. “Please, Jack,” she said, “let’s have a nice time for once. Don’t embarrass me. Be a gentleman. Let me hold my head up. Show some respect for my family.”

“That’s all I ask,” he said, speaking quickly. “I’d like a little respect from them . They all look at me as if I was something the goddamn cat dragged in and dropped in the front parlour.” Saying this, he gave an angry little spurt to the gas pedal for emphasis and the car responded by slewing around in the loose gravel on the road, pebbles chattering on the undercarriage.

So like Jack, she thought, to be a bit reckless. A careless, passionate man. It was what drew her to him in the beginning. His recklessness, his charming ways, his sweet cunning. So different from what she had learned of the male character from observing her brothers: slow, apple-faced men who plodded about their business, the languor of routine steeped deep into their heavy limbs.