Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

“Well, that’s something,” he said, looking around the room for his belt. He picked a sweater off a chair and peered under it. “Then you see what’s going on around here, don’t you?” he asked. “You see what your grandmother is mistakenly trying to do?”

I nodded.

“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a smart boy.” He sat down on the bed. “Come here.”

I went over to him. He took hold of me by the arms and looked into my eyes with all the sincerity he could muster. “You know, being intelligent means responsibilities. It means doing something worth while with your life. For instance, have you given any thought as to what you would like to be when you grow up?”

“A spy,” I said.

The silly bugger laughed.

It was the persistent, rhythmic thud that first woke me, and once wakened, I picked up the undercurrent of muted clamour, of stifled struggle. The noise seeped through the beaverboard wall of the adjoining bedroom into my own, a storm of hectic urgency and violence. The floorboards of the old house squeaked; I heard what sounded like a strangled curse and moan, then a fleshy, meaty concussion which I took to be a slap. Was he killing her at last? Choking her with the silent, poisonous care necessary to escape detection?

I remembered Thompson’s arm flashing frenziedly in the sunlight. My aunt’s discoloured thighs. My heart creaked in my chest with fear. And after killing her? Would the madman stop? Or would he do us all in, one by one?

I got out of bed on unsteady legs. The muffled commotion was growing louder, more distinct. I padded into the hallway. The door to their bedroom was partially open, and a light showed. Terror made me feel hollow; the pit of my stomach ached.

They were both naked, something which I hadn’t expected, and which came as quite a shock. What was perhaps even more shocking was the fact that they seemed not only oblivious of me, but of each other as well. She was slung around so that her head was propped on a pillow resting on the footboard of the bed. One smooth leg was draped over the edge of the bed and her heel was beating time on the floorboards (the thud which woke me) as accompaniment to Thompson’s plunging body and the soft, liquid grunts of expelled air which he made with every lunge. One of her hands gripped the footboard and her knuckles were white with strain.

I watched until the critical moment, right through the growing frenzy and ardour. They groaned and panted and heaved and shuddered and didn’t know themselves. At the very last he lifted his bony, hatchet face with the jutting beard to the ceiling and closed his eyes; for a moment I thought he was praying as his lips moved soundlessly. But then he began to whimper and his mouth fell open and he looked stupider and weaker than any human being I had ever seen before in my life.

“Like pigs at the trough,” my grandmother said at breakfast. “With the boy up there too.”

My aunt turned a deep red, and then flushed again so violently that her thin lips appeared to turn blue.

I kept my head down and went on shovelling porridge. Thompson still wasn’t invited to the table. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, his bony legs crossed at the ankles, eating an apple he had helped himself to.

“He didn’t hear anything,” my aunt said uncertainly. She whispered conspiratorially across the table to Grandmother. “Not at that hour. He’d been asleep for hours.”

I thought it wise, even though it meant drawing attention to myself, to establish my ignorance. “Hear what?” I inquired innocently.

“It wouldn’t do any harm if he had,” said Thompson, calmly biting and chewing the temptress’s fruit.

“You wouldn’t see it, would you?” said Grandma Bradley. “It wouldn’t matter to you what he heard? You’d think that was manly.”

“Manly has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t enter into it,” said Thompson in that cool way he had. “It’s a fact of life, something he’ll have to find out about sooner or later.”

Aunt Evelyn began to cry. “Nobody is ever pleased with me,” she spluttered. “I’m going crazy trying to please you both. I can’t do it.” She began to pull nervously at her hair. “He made me,” she said finally in a confessional, humble tone to her mother.

“Evelyn,” said my grandmother, “you have a place here. I would never send you away. I want you here. But he has to go. I want him to go. If he is going to rub my nose in it that way he has to go. I won’t have that man under my roof.”

“Evelyn isn’t apologizing for anything,” Thompson said. “And she isn’t running away either. You can’t force her to choose. It isn’t healthy or fair.”

“There have been other ones before you,” said Grandma. “This isn’t anything new for Evelyn.”

“Momma!”

“I’m aware of that,” he said stiffly, and his face vibrated with the effort to smile. “Provincial mores have never held much water with me. I like to think I’m above all that.”

Suddenly my grandmother spotted me. “What are you gawking at!” she shouted. “Get on out of here!”

I didn’t budge an inch.

“Leave him alone,” said Thompson.

“You’ll be out of here within a week,” said Grandmother, “I swear.”

“No,” he said smiling. “When I’m ready.”

“You’ll go home and go with your tail between your legs. Last night was the last straw,” she said. And by God you could tell she meant it.

Thompson gave her his beatific Buddha-grin and shook his head from side to side, very, very slowly.

A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the bridge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.

Like my aunt and Thompson, all the chickens had gone to roost to wait for rain. The desertion of his harem had thrown the rooster into a flap. Stanley trotted neurotically around his tethering post, stopping every few circuits to beat his bedraggled pinions and crow lustily in masculine outrage. I watched him for a bit without much curiosity, and then climbed off the step and walked toward him, listlessly dragging my stick in my trail.

“Here Stanley, Stanley,” I called, not entirely sure how to summon a rooster, or instil in him confidence and friendliness.

I did neither. My approach only further unhinged Stanley. His stride lengthened, the tempo of his pace increased, and his head began to dart abruptly from side to side in furtive despair. Finally, in a last desperate attempt to escape, Stanley upset himself trying to fly. He landed in a heap of disarranged, stiff, glistening feathers. I put my foot on his string and pinned him to the ground.

“Nice pretty, pretty Stanley,” I said coaxingly, adopting the tone that a neighbour used with her budgie, since I wasn’t sure how one talked to a bird. I slowly extended my thumb to stroke his bright-red neck feathers. Darting angrily, he struck the ball of my thumb with a snappish peck and simultaneously hit my wrist with his heel spur. He didn’t hurt me, but he did startle me badly. So badly I gave a little yelp. Which made me feel foolish and more than a little cowardly.

“You son of a bitch,” I said, reaching down slowly and staring into one unblinking glassy eye in which I could see my fate looming larger and larger. I caught the rooster’s legs and held them firmly together. Stanley crowed defiantly and showed me his wicked little tongue.