Guy Vanderhaeghe - Man Descending

The Ogdens were famous for two things: their meanness and their profligacy as breeders. The place was always as warm with kids who never seemed to wear pants except in the most severe weather, and tottered about the premises, their legs smeared with grease, shit, or various combinations of both.

“Wait here,” my grandmother said, slamming the car door loudly enough to bring the two brothers out of their shop. Through the open door I saw a motor suspended on an intricate system of chains and pulleys.

The Ogdens stood with their hands in the pockets of their bib overalls while my grandmother talked to them. They were quite a sight. They didn’t have a dozen teeth in their heads between them, even though the oldest brother couldn’t have been more than forty. They just stood there, one sucking on a cigarette, the other on a Coke. Neither one moved or changed his expression, except once, when a tow-headed youngster piddled too close to Grandma. He was lazily and casually slapped on the side of the head by the nearest brother and ran away screaming, his stream cavorting wildly in front of him.

At last, their business concluded, the boys walked my grandmother back to the car.

“You’ll get to that soon?” she said, sliding behind the wheel.

“Tomorrow all right?” said one. His words sounded all slack and chewed, issuing from his shrunken, old man’s mouth.

“The sooner the better. I want that seen to, Bert.”

“What seen to?” I asked.

“Bert and his brother Elwood are going to fix that rattle that’s been plaguing me.”

“Sure thing,” said Elwood. “Nothing but clear sailing.”

“What rattle?” I said.

“What rattle? What rattle? The one in the glove compartment,” she said, banging it with the heel of her hand. “That rattle. You hear it?”

Thompson could get very edgy some days. “I should be working on my dissertation,” he said, coiled in the big chair. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time in this shit-hole. I should be working!”

“So why aren’t you?” said Evelyn. She was spool knitting. That and reading movie magazines were the only things she ever did.

“How the christ do I work without a library? You see a goddamn library within a hundred miles of this place?”

“Why do you need a library?” she said calmly. “Can’t you write?”

“Write,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “Write, she says. What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you know about it?”

“I can’t see why you can’t write.”

“Before you write, you research. That’s what you do, you research.”

“So bite my head off. It wasn’t my idea to come here.”

“It wasn’t me that lost my goddamn job. How the hell were we supposed to pay the rent?”

“You could have got a job.”

“I’m a student. Anyway, I told you, if I get a job my wife gets her hooks into me for support. I’ll starve to death before I support that bitch.”

“We could go back.”

“How many times does it have to be explained to you? I don’t get my scholarship cheque until the first of September. We happen to be broke. Absolutely. In fact, you’re going to have to hit the old lady up for gas and eating money to get back to the coast. We’re stuck here. Get that into your empty fucking head. The Lord Buddha might have been able to subsist on a single bean a day; I can’t.”

My grandmother came into the room. The conversation stopped.

“Do you think,” she said to Thompson, “I could ask you to do me a favour?”

“Why, Mrs. Bradley,” he said, smiling, “whatever do you mean?”

“I was wondering whether you could take my car into town to Ogdens’ to get it fixed.”

“Oh,” said Thompson. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t think I’m your man.”

“Ask anyone where it is. They can tell you. It isn’t hard to find.”

“Why would you ask me to do you a favour, Mrs. Bradley?” inquired Thompson complacently. Hearing his voice was like listening to someone drag their nails down a blackboard.

“Well, you can be goddamn sure I wouldn’t,” said Grandma, trying to keep a hold on herself, “except that I’m right in the middle of doing my pickling and canning. I thought you might be willing to move your lazy carcass to do something around here. Every time I turn around I seem to be falling over those legs of yours.” She looked at the limbs in question as if she would like to dock them somewhere in the vicinity of the knee.

“No, I don’t think I can,” said Thompson easily, stroking his goat beard.

“And why the hell can’t you?”

“Oh, let’s just say I don’t trust you, Mrs. Bradley. I don’t like to leave you alone with Evelyn. Lord knows what ideas you might put in her head.”

“Or take out.”

“That’s right. Or take out,” said Thompson with satisfaction. “You can’t imagine the trouble it took me to get them in there.” He turned to Evelyn. “She can’t imagine the trouble, can she, dear?”

Evelyn threw her spool knitting on the floor and walked out of the room.

“Evelyn’s mad and I’m glad,” shouted Thompson at her back. “And I know how to tease her!”

“Charlie, come here,” said Grandma. I went over to her. She took me firmly by the shoulder. “From now on,” said my grandma, “my family is off limits to you. I don’t want to see you talking to Charlie here, or to come within sniffing distance of Evelyn.”

“What do you think of that idea, Charlie?” said Thompson. “Are you still my friend or what?”

I gave him a wink my grandma couldn’t see. He thought that was great; he laughed like a madman. “Superb,” he said. “Superb. There’s no flies on Charlie. What a diplomat.”

“What the hell is the matter with you, Mr. Beatnik?” asked Grandma, annoyed beyond bearing. “What’s so goddamn funny?”

“Ha ha!” roared Thompson. “What a charming notion! Me a beatnik!”

Grandma Bradley held the mouthpiece of the phone very close to her lips as she spoke into it. “No, it can’t be brought in. You’ll have to come out here to do the job.”

She listened with an intent expression on her face. Spotting me pretending to look in the fridge, she waved me out of the kitchen with her hand. I dragged myself out and stood quietly in the hallway.

“This is a party line,” she said, “remember that.”

Another pause while she listened.

“Okay,” she said and hung up.

I spent some of my happiest hours squatting in the corn patch. I was completely hidden there; even when I stood, the maturing stalks reached a foot or more above my head. It was a good place. On the hottest days it was relatively cool in that thicket of green where the shade was dark and deep and the leaves rustled and scraped and sawed dryly overhead.

Nobody ever thought to look for me there. They could bellow their bloody lungs out for me and I could just sit and watch them getting uglier and uglier about it all. There was some satisfaction in that. I’d just reach up and pluck myself a cob. I loved raw corn. The newly formed kernels were tiny, pale pearls of sweetness that gushed juice. I’d munch and munch and smile and smile and think, why don’t you drop dead?

It was my secret place, my sanctuary, where I couldn’t be found or touched by them. But all the same, if I didn’t let them intrude on me – that didn’t mean I didn’t want to keep tabs on things.

At the time I was watching Thompson stealing peas at the other end of the garden. He was like some primitive man who lived in a gathering culture. My grandma kept him so hungry he was constantly prowling for food: digging in cupboards, rifling the refrigerator, scrounging in the garden.

Clad only in Bermuda shorts he was a sorry sight. His bones threatened to rupture his skin and jut out every which way. He sported a scrub-board chest with two old pennies for nipples, and a wispy garland of hair decorated his sunken breastbone. His legs looked particularly rackety; all gristle, knobs and sinew.