Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

My father, a dangerous man behind the wheel, took any extended trip seriously, believing the highways to be narrow, unnavigable ribbons of carnage. This trip loomed so dangerously in his mind that, rather than tear a hand from the wheel, or an eye from the road, he had me, chronic sufferer of lung disorders , light his cigarettes and place them carefully in his dry lips. My mother would have killed him.

“You’ll love it at Grandma’s,” he kept saying unconvincingly, “you’ll have a real boy’s summer on the farm. It’ll build you up, the chores and all that. And good fun too. You don’t know it now, but you are living the best days of your life right now. What I wouldn’t give to be a kid again. You’ll love it there. There’s chickens and everything.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. There were chickens. But the everything - as broad and overwhelming and suggestive of possibilities as my father tried to make it sound – didn’t cover much. It certainly didn’t comprehend a pony or a dog as I had hoped, chickens being the only livestock on the place.

It turned out that my grandmother, although she had spent most of her life on that particular piece of ground and eventually died there, didn’t care much for the farm and was entirely out of sympathy with most varieties of animal life. She did keep chickens for the eggs, although she admitted that her spirits lifted considerably in the fall when it came time to butcher the hens.

Her flock was a garrulous, scraggly crew that spent their days having dust baths in the front yard, hiding their eggs, and, fleet and ferocious as hunting cheetahs, running down scuttling lizards which they trampled and pecked to death while their shiny, expressionless eyes shifted dizzily in their stupid heads. The only one of these birds I felt any compassion for was Stanley the rooster, a bedraggled male who spent his days tethered to a stake by a piece of baler twine looped around his leg. Poor Stanley crowed heart-rendingly in his captivity; his comb drooped pathetically, and he was utterly crestfallen as he lecherously eyed his bantam beauties daintily scavenging. Grandma kept him in this unnatural bondage to prevent him fertilizing the eggs and producing blood spots in the yolks. Being a finicky eater I approved this policy, but nevertheless felt some guilt over Stanley.

No, the old Bradley homestead, all that encompassed by my father’s everything , wasn’t very impressive. The two-storey house, though big and solid, needed paint and shingles. A track had been worn in the kitchen linoleum clean through to the floorboards and a long rent in the screen door had been stitched shut with waxed thread. The yard was little more than a tangle of thigh-high ragweed and sowthistle to which the chickens repaired for shade. A windbreak of spruce on the north side of the house was dying from lack of water and the competition from Scotch thistle. The evergreens were no longer green; their sere needles fell away from the branches at the touch of a hand.

The abandoned barn out back was flanked by two mountainous rotted piles of manure which I remember sprouting button mushrooms after every warm soaker of a rain. That pile of shit was the only useful thing in a yard full of junk: wrecked cars, old wagon wheels, collapsing sheds. The barn itself was mightily decayed. The paint had been stripped from its planks by rain, hail, and dry, blistering winds, and the roof sagged like a tired nag’s back. For a small boy it was an ominous place on a summer day. The air was still and dark and heavy with heat. At the sound of footsteps rats squeaked and scrabbled in the empty mangers, and the sparrows which had spattered the rafters white with their dung whirred about and fluted ghostly cries.

In 1959 Grandma Bradley would have been sixty-nine, which made her a child of the gay nineties – although the supposed gaiety of that age didn’t seem to have made much impress upon the development of her character. Physically she was an imposing woman. Easily six feet tall, she carried a hundred and eighty pounds on her generous frame without prompting speculation as to what she had against girdles. She could touch the floor effortlessly with the flat of her palms and pack an eighty-pound sack of chicken feed on her shoulder. She dyed her hair auburn in defiance of local mores, and never went to town to play bridge, whist, or canasta without wearing a hat and getting dressed to the teeth. Grandma loved card games of all varieties and considered anyone who didn’t a mental defective.

A cigarette always smouldered in her trap. She smoked sixty a day and rolled them as thin as knitting needles in an effort at economy. These cigarettes were so wispy and delicate they tended to get lost between her swollen fingers.

And above all she believed in plain speaking. She let me know that as my father’s maroon Meteor pulled out of the yard while we stood waving goodbye on the front steps.

“Let’s get things straight from the beginning,” she said without taking her eyes off the car as it bumped toward the grid road. “I don’t chew my words twice. If you’re like any of the rest of them I’ve had here, you’ve been raised as wild as a goddamn Indian. Not one of my grandchildren have been brought up to mind. Well, you’ll mind around here. I don’t jaw and blow hot air to jaw and blow hot air. I belted your father when he needed it, and make no mistake I’ll belt you. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” I said with a sinking feeling as I watched my father’s car disappear down the road, swaying from side to side as its suspension was buffeted by potholes.

“These bloody bugs are eating me alive,” she said, slapping her arm. “I’m going in.”

I trailed after her as she slopped back into the house in a pair of badly mauled, laceless sneakers. The house was filled with a half-light that changed its texture with every room. The venetian blinds were drawn in the parlour and some flies carved Immelmanns in the dark air that smelled of cellar damp. Others battered their bullet bodies tip-tap, tip-tap against the window panes.

In the kitchen my grandmother put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea. After she had lit one of her matchstick smokes, she inquired through a blue haze if I was hungry.

“People aren’t supposed to smoke around me,” I informed her. “Because of my chest. Dad can’t even smoke in our house.”

“That so?” she said genially. Her cheeks collapsed as she drew on her butt. I had a hint there, if I’d only known it, of how she’d look in her coffin. “You won’t like it here then,” she said. “I smoke all the time.”

I tried a few unconvincing coughs. I was ignored. She didn’t respond to the same signals as my mother.

“My mother has a bad chest, too,” I said. “She’s in a T.B. sanatorium.”

“So I heard,” my grandmother said, getting up to fetch the whistling kettle. “Oh, I suspect she’ll be right as rain in no time with a little rest. T.B. isn’t what it used to be. Not with all these new drugs.” She considered. “That’s not to say though that your father’ll ever hear the end of it. Mabel was always a silly little shit that way.”

I almost fell off my chair. I had never thought I’d live to hear the day my mother was called a silly little shit.

“Drink tea?” asked Grandma Bradley, pouring boiling water into a brown teapot.

I shook my head.

“How old are you anyway?” she asked.

“Eleven.”

“You’re old enough then,” she said, taking down a cup from the shelf. “Tea gets the kidneys moving and carries off the poisons in the blood. That’s why all the Chinese live to be so old. They all live to be a hundred.”

“I don’t know if my mother would like it,” I said. “Me drinking tea.”