Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

“Hey. Hey. Hey!”

Monkman woke with a gasp, wincing and gaping. Daniel was kneeling in the grass beside him, his hand resting on his grandfather’s shoulder.

“What?”

“You must have dropped off.”

The old man reached out, seized his grandson by the elbow, and pulled himself into a sitting position. His eyes narrowed and his head wobbled, assaulted by the dazzle of sun.

“No steer,” reported Daniel. His voice sounded all mumbly to Monkman because the boy had pulled out the front of his shirt and was peering down the neck of it as he spoke, searching himself closely and anxiously for ticks. “Nothing. I walked clear through and came out on crop on the other side. There’s bush in the middle of that field but I didn’t go on, in case you wondered why I was so long.” He broke off examining himself and lifted his face. “Jeez, I feel all crawly but I can’t see anything. How big are these ticks supposed to be anyway?”

Monkman was staring back the way they had come, staring out over the gently swelling and subsiding black earth. The air above the summerfallow quivered and bent, distorting the view like a pane of cheap, flawed glass.

Before he fell asleep there had been something to do with the boy. What? Then it came to him. Without preamble or introduction he simply said, “Your mother asked Mr. Stutz to have a man to man talk with you.” Having delivered himself of this news he studied the boy for any sign that Daniel had been warned of his mother’s arrangement. There was none. “Well,” said the old man, pressing on, “were there questions you’d been asking your mother that maybe she didn’t want to answer?”

Daniel shook his head.

“I guess it was her idea then? I guess she thought it was time you learned certain things it was more proper for a man to teach you.”

“I guess so,” said the boy apprehensively.

“Anyway, after your mother talked to Mr. Stutz he came to me because he didn’t feel it was his place to talk to you. He took it for family business and thought maybe I was the one should do it.” Monkman hesitated. “Seeing I’m the closest thing you have to a father.” Monkman squinted up at Daniel. “So maybe you should take a seat so we can do as your mother wants.”

The suggestion sounded like an order. Daniel sat with a look of extreme uneasiness. It was embarrassing to be talked to this way. Long ago he had read everything the Reader’s Digest had to say on the impending topic and doubted there was much he could be taught. He had even been able to correct Lyle on a few points. He was satisfied that his knowledge was pretty wide-ranging. He knew you couldn’t get VD from a toilet seat and he knew that husbands ought to be affectionate to their wives after the sex act as well as before it. Otherwise women felt used. And he knew whatever else fitted between these two bookends. With the old guy smiling that way, falser than even his teeth, he was sure he was going to be put through something horrible.

“I don’t know what your mother imagines is a man to man talk,” Alec began by saying, “but I’d guess it’s supposed to cover what a man should know to keep himself out of trouble. To my idea, what’s most troublesome for men is sex, drinking, and fighting. No particular order of importance.” But the last was a lie. There was a particular order of importance and the brave thing to do would be to get the worst bit over first. He reminded himself to tell the kid only what would prove useful to him. It was likely Daniel would do exactly as everybody else before him had done. There was no percentage in ignoring that simple fact. So whatever he said should keep in mind human nature. Mr. Stutz wouldn’t have kept it in mind. Mr. Stutz didn’t accept human nature as an excuse for anything. He was always laying down the law as to how men ought to act, despite the impossibility of them performing any of the remarkable feats he called upon them to perform. Alec had always believed in working with what you were given, and human nature was a given. It was where he would begin.

“I don’t know any polite way of saying this, and the only way I’ve got of saying it is straight out. A boy gets to your age, or somewhere close to it, and something happens – that thing of his starts provoking and tormenting him continual. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will shortly. There’s no getting around it, that pecker of yours isn’t going to give you hardly a moment’s peace. Which leads me to what I’m going to say to you now. Which is about playing with yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not recommending it, I’m just saying that more than one has taken it for the solution of a predicament. There’s boys your age that suffer terrible worries from that. If it’s a sin, it’s got to be a small one. As to whatever rumours you may have heard about the results – about going blind or mental – I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense. How’s a pecker to know the difference between a woman and a hand? A pecker doesn’t have a brain, or eyes. It’s just a story, like a horsehair in a water barrel turns into a worm. What I’m saying is let it alone if you can but, if you can’t, remember you aren’t the first and you won’t be the last.” Monkman paused and waited. Daniel said nothing. All his attention was fastened on a spear of grass he spun in his fingers.

“You know what we’re talking about, don’t you?” asked the old man sharply.

Daniel nodded his head without looking up from the stalk of grass.

At least that was over. He hoped the boy had understood. “I won’t say nothing now about women,” said the old man brusquely. “I’ll save that one for when you’re older.” He took a deep breath of relief, felt himself on firmer ground. “Now drinking,” he said happily. “Stutz doesn’t have a single good word for it. He just goes on about how it has been the downfall of thousands. I won’t argue with him. I know myself the trouble it caused me at one time. If I learned one thing from my trouble it was this: there’s no point in drinking if you aren’t happy. The thing about liquor is that it’s an encourager. It encourages happiness in a happy man and sadness in a sad one. It encourages whatever else you happen to be feeling. The young bucks fight when they’re drunk because booze adds oil to the fire young men carry around burning in their bellies. Now I’m not saying any of this to you now because I expect you to follow my advice straight off. I’m saying it so that when you come to make your own mistakes you can think back and test what’s happening to you against what I said was true. It might bring you to reason sooner. There’s nothing like a second pair of eyes for help. It’s what Mr. Stutz did for me when he pointed out certain things about my drinking when I was bad into it. You see, I couldn’t see the start of my misery because I was too deep into it. Now it’s true I still take a drink – mostly when Stutz is around – but that’s just to prove to him I’ve got my own will. I won’t be a slave to it or a slave to avoiding it. Besides, if you keep company with men you’re bound to keep company with liquor. Particularly around here. It won’t be long before you’ll be drinking beer out behind the dance hall to work up enough courage to speak to a girl inside. There’s no point if the courage isn’t inside you. When you’re puking in the bushes, ask yourself then if what your grandfather said wasn’t right.”

“My friend Lyle and me drank some of the gin his mother kept hid under the kitchen sink,” volunteered Daniel, encouraged by what he took to be his grandfather’s tolerant attitude to drinking.

“Thief’s pride is pitiable pride. I wouldn’t brag on that, if I was you,” said his grandfather sternly, “hooking some lady’s gin the way you hook your mother’s smokes.” Then, noticing Daniel’s obvious alarm, he added, “Don’t worry. I haven’t said nothing to your mother about the cigarettes. But if I was you, I’d think twice about laying hands on her property. The consequences aren’t likely to be worth it. You need a cigarette that bad, lift it from my pack. Who do I have to complain to but myself?”