Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“Brian,” said Edith, her arm loosely circling a sister-in-law’s waist, “you run along and play with your cousins. Over there, see?” She pointed to a group of kids flying around the lawn, chanting taunts to one another as they played tag. “ Can’t catch me for a bumble bee !” squealed a pale girl with long, coltish legs.

“Just be careful you don’t get grass stains on your pants, okay, honey?”

The boy felt forlorn at this urging to join in. His mother, returned to her element, sure of the rich sympathies of blood, could not imagine the desolation he felt looking at those children’s strange faces.

“Bob, dear,” said Edith, turning to a brother, “keep an eye on Jack, won’t you? See that he doesn’t get lonely without me.” They all laughed. Among the stolid Stileses Edith had a reputation as a joker. Jack Cosgrave, looking at his wife’s open, relaxed face, seeing her easiness among these people, felt betrayed.

“Sure, sure thing, Edith,” replied her brother. He turned to Cosgrave, seemed to hesitate, touched him on the elbow. “Come along and say hello to the fellows, Jack.” He indicated a card table set under a Manitoba maple around which a group of men were sitting. They started for it together.

“Jack,” said Bob, “these are my cousins from Binscarth, Earl and George. You know Albert, of course.” Jack Cosgrave knew Albert. Albert was Edith’s youngest brother and the one who had the least use for him. “This here is Edith’s husband, Jack Cosgrave.”

“Hi, Jack, take a load off,” said one of the men. Earl, he thought it was. Cosgrave nodded to the table, but before he took a seat his eye was caught by his son standing, arms dangling hopelessly as he watched his cousins race across the grass. The boy was uncertain about the etiquette of entering games played by strangers in strange towns, on strange lawns.

“Pour Jack a rye.”

“You want 7-Up or Coke?” asked Albert, without a trace of interest in his voice.

“What?” The question had startled Cosgrave out of his study of his son.

“Coke or 7-Up.”

“7-Up.” He sat down, took the paper cup, and glanced at the sky. The blue had been burned out of it by a white sun. No wonder he was sweating. He loosened his tie and said the first thing that came to mind, “Well, this’ll make the crops come, boys.”

“What will?” asked Albert.

“This here sun,” said Jack, turning his palm up to the sky. “This heat.”

“Make the weeds come on my summer fallow. That’s what it’ll do,” declared Earl.

“Don’t you listen to Earl,” confided Bob. “He’s got the cleanest summer fallow in the municipality. You could eat off it.”

“Is that so?” said Jack. “I’d like to see that.”

“Go on with you,” said Earl to no one in particular. He was pleased.

The conversation ran on, random and disconnected. There was talk of the hard spring, calf scours, politics, Catholics, and curling. Totting up the score after four drinks, Jack concluded hard springs, calf scours, politics, and Catholics weren’t worth a cup of cold piss. That seemed to be the consensus. Curling, however, was all right. Provided a fellow didn’t run all over the province going to bonspiels and neglect his chores.

Jack helped himself to another drink and watched the tip of the shadow of a spruce advance slowly across the lawn. It’s aimed at my black heart, he thought, and speculated as to when it would reach it.

“I would have got black,” said Albert of his new car with satisfaction, “but you know how black shows dust. It’s as bad as white any day.”

“Maybe next year for me,” said George. “An automatic for sure. I could teach the wife to drive with an automatic.”

“Good reason not to get it,” said someone.

“Albert’s got power steering,” Bob informed Jack. “I told him he was crazy to pay extra for that. I said, ‘The day a man hasn’t got the strength to twist his own steering-wheel…,’ well, I don’t know.” He shook his head at how the very idea had rendered him speechless.

“What you driving now, Jack?” Albert asked smoothly, leaning across the table.

You conniving, malicious shit, thought Cosgrave. Still doing your level best to show me up. “The same car I had last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. In fact, as I said to Edith coming down here, I bought that car the year we got married.” He stared at Albert, defiance in his face.

“I wouldn’t have thought it was that old,” said Albert.

“Oh yes it is, Bert,” said Cosgrave. “That car is old. Older than dirt. Why, I’ve had that car almost as long as you’ve had the first nickel you ever made. And I won’t part with it. No, sir. I’d as soon part with that car as you would with your first nickel.”

“Ha ha!” blurted out cousin Earl. Then, embarrassed at breaking family ranks, he took a Big Ben pocket watch out of his trousers and looked at it, hard.

Jack Cosgrave was drunk and he knew it. Drunk and didn’t care. He reached for the whiskey bottle and, as he did, spotted Brian sitting stiffly by himself on the porch steps, his white shirt blazing in the hot sunshine.

“Brian!” he called. “Brian!”

The boy climbed off the steps and made his way slowly across the lawn. Cosgrave put his arm around him and drew him up against his side. His father’s breath was hot in the boy’s face. The sharp medicinal smell repelled him.

“Why aren’t you playing?”

Brian shrugged. Shyness had paralysed him; after a few half-hearted feints and diffident insults which had been ignored by the chaser, he had given up.

Jack Cosgrave saw that the other boys were now wrestling. Grappling, twisting and fencing with their feet, they flung one another to the grass. He pulled Brian closer to him, put his mouth to the boy’s ear and whispered: “Why don’t you get in there and show them what a Cosgrave can do? Whyn’t you toss a Stiles on his ass, eh?”

“Can’t,” mumbled Brian in an agony of self-consciousness.

“Why?”

“Mum says I have to keep my pants clean.”

“Sometimes your mother hasn’t got much sense,” Cosgrave said, baffled by the boy’s reluctance. Was he scared? “She’s got you all dressed up like Little Lord Fauntleroy and expects you to have a good time. Give me that goddamn thing,” he said, pulling off the boy’s bow tie and putting it in his pocket. “Now go and have some fun.”

“These are my good pants,” Brian said stubbornly.

“Well, we’ll take them off,” said his father. “It’s a hot day.”

“No!” The child was shocked.

“Don’t be such a christly old woman. You’ve got boxer shorts on. They look like real shorts.”

“Jesus, you’re not going to take the kid’s pants off, are you?” inquired Albert.

Cosgrave looked up sharply. Albert wore the concentrated, stubborn look of a man with a grievance. “I am. What’s it to you?”

“Well, Jesus, we’re not Indians here or anything to have kids roaming around with no pants on.”

“No, I don’t want to,” whispered Brian.

“For chrissakes,” said Jack. “You’ve embarrassed the kid now. Why’d you do that? He’s only six years old.”

“It wasn’t him that wanted to take his pants off, was it? I don’t know how you were brought up, or dragged up maybe, but we were taught to keep our pants on in company. Isn’t that so, Bob?”

Bob didn’t reply. He composed his face and peered down into his paper cup.

“Bert,” said Jack, “you’re a pain in the arse. You’re also one hell of a small-minded son of a bitch.”

“I don’t think there’s any need -” began Bob.

“No, no,” said Albert. He held his hand up to silence his brother. “Jack feels he’s got things to get off his chest. Well, so do I. He thinks I’m small-minded. Maybe I am. I guess in his books a small-minded man is a man that lets a debt go for four years without once mentioning it. A man that never tries to collect. Is that a small-minded man, Jack? Is it? Because if it is, I plead guilty. And what do you call a man who doesn’t pay up? Welsher?”