Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

Vera refused to let her own fear master her. She made herself walk purposefully slow under the big white moon smoky behind a smear of cloud, her heart pattering fast as it tried to climb up her throat, her feet dragging as if they were in chains. She wasn’t going to permit herself to run no matter how strong the impulse grew to scamper for the lighted kitchen where her mother and father sat. “Sissy!” she hissed at herself under her breath. “Pissy-pants!”

Between Vera and safety was the weird rustling of caragana and lilac hedges crowding the wooden walk, the slap of an unlatched gate in the wind, the shadows which shifted like premonitions across her path, the big boys who crouched in the limbs of the trees that grew by the funeral parlour, ready to spring howling and whooping down out of the trees which bore berries bright as blood, the ones every kid in Connaught called undertaker berries and believed were poison and red because the undertaker poured the buckets of blood he drained from corpses onto their roots at midnight. If you didn’t run screaming when the big boys dropped out of the trees screeching like baboons their dignity was offended. They crowded threateningly close and tried to make you cry with lurid suggestions as to what they might do with you. “Let’s tie her up and leave her for the night in the back of Michaelson’s hearse, right on the spot where the stiffs ride!”

There was very little satisfaction to be got trying to terrify Vera. One night when they threatened to make her eat a poisonous undertaker berry she said, “I don’t believe they’re poisonous anyway. Anybody with a brain knows that.”

“So eat one then,” a big boy dared her.

She didn’t hesitate but stared him straight in the face, reached up with her eyes still on him, fumbled with the branch, plucked a single berry, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it at once, like a pill, before she realized exactly what she was doing. A second later she had spun round and was running for all she was worth to her house because if she was going to die it had to be at home. She found her father alone in the kitchen, playing solitaire. Her mother had been tired and had gone to bed early. Vera dragged a chair up as close to him as she could get and sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen to her. Her knees were jammed so tightly together that her legs shook.

“Are you cold?” her father said, looking up from his cards. “You shouldn’t be out at night dressed like that.”

Vera wanted to tell him she had eaten an undertaker berry to show it wasn’t poisoned and she wasn’t afraid. She thought it would please her father more than straight A’s, more than getting the lead in the Grade Four play, to know this because he had always told her that the most important thing in life was “to have the courage of your convictions.” Well, she had had them. She’d swallowed that awful berry to prove she was right. But if she had come right out and told him that it would be bragging, and bragging had nothing to do with the courage of your convictions. Convictions were just convictions.

So there was nothing to do but sit close to him and think about what that berry might be up to in her stomach.

Yet the next morning when she woke and found herself alive, Vera knew that she would have eaten a whole pie made from undertaker berries, eaten it all, just to please him.

During the spring, what with chores at The Bluebird, school, and difficulties in out-manoeuvring his mother, Daniel had found it possible only to make hurried, furtive visits to his grandfather. Strictly speaking, his mother had never actually forbidden him to call on his grandfather, but Daniel had never had a moment’s doubt as to what she preferred him to do. The visits Daniel made to his grandfather’s felt furtive. He and his mother had chosen to pretend that he no longer had any interest in seeing the old man. It didn’t matter that this was a lie. What was important was that it made life simpler and safer for all concerned. His mother could ignore his disloyalty as long as he didn’t rub her nose in it and Daniel could play the game of the good and obliging son. In this situation he couldn’t help feeling devious and insincere and the promoter of injured feelings. If two weeks passed without his dropping by Alec’s, his conscience was clear with his mother but unsettled and guilty in regard to his grandfather.

It was bad news when the old man punished him by sulking, but some relief could be had from that, he could look away from the long face and concentrate his attention on the television. What was in his grandfather’s favour was that he never had a harsh word to say about her, while she was constantly going on about him, hammer and tongs, harping and nattering on his faults and failings and downright black nature. Sometimes Daniel wanted to ask her who she was trying to convince. Although she didn’t know it, it had been one of these rants shortly before Valentine’s Day that finally drove Daniel over the edge. For the six weeks following the breach that occurred at Christmas, he had not been able to summon up the courage to seek his grandfather out. But her going on like a maniac, yammer, yammer, had finally driven him to it. Fuck that noise, he said to himself, and went out and bought Alec the biggest, dopiest, most sentimental valentine he could find and delivered it by hand to his grandfather’s house. The old boy was tickled pink, there was no hiding it. Never handy with words, he tried to slip his grandson a five-dollar bill. Ordinarily, Daniel would have snatched it up, but that day, under the circumstances, he felt it would be like taking a bribe or kickback or something. So he said no, so as not to spoil the mood of the occasion.

It really did gripe his ass the way his mother went on about his grandfather. He wished she’d shut her mouth. “He was giving you cigarettes and whisky when I was living right in the house,” she was fond of saying. “God alone knows what he’d feel free to introduce you to with me nowhere in sight.”

In May, Daniel took the risk of playing hooky for an entire day to help his grandfather plant the garden. His mother would have had him by the short and curlies if she’d got wind of that. Daniel understood how stupid it was to take the chance, but the old man’s continual fretting and fussing over whether or not he would get his garden seeded by Victoria Day struck Daniel as so pathetic that he thought he had better pitch in and help finish the job or the old man would never enjoy a moment’s peace that spring. Daniel was pretty sure the worry over such a stupid thing was actually preventing his grandfather from sleeping.

As Victoria Day drew nearer, Daniel heard Alec say a hundred times if he heard him say it once: “There isn’t a year in the last twenty I missed having the garden in by the Queen’s birthday – and look where I’m at now.”

Daniel sensed that lately his grandfather wasn’t quite the same. He would brood about silly things like the garden and was prone to hair-trigger explosions of temper. When Daniel asked him what difference it made if the garden wasn’t planted by Victoria Day but instead went in a few days later, the question seemed to confuse and confound the old man. But from confusion he quickly passed over into anger and began to shout menacingly that if Daniel didn’t know what difference it made, that only proved what an ignorant snip he was. There were other changes Daniel had noticed since Christmas. His grandfather struck him as generally less alert and certainly much more forgetful than before.

To put an end to all the bitching and moaning about the approach of Victoria Day, the boy promised the old man that he would give him a hand with the planting on the Friday before the long weekend. On the weekends his mother would monopolize his time at The Bluebird. Daniel lied and told his grandfather that he would have the Friday off because of a teachers’ convention. When his grandfather saw all the kids trooping past the house with books stacked in their arms on the day of the “holiday,” Daniel supposed the old boy would give him a sly wink and call him a rascal. But when Friday arrived and all the kids went streaming by the house at eight forty-five in the morning, obviously on their way to classes, Alec didn’t give them a second glance as he turned the earth in his garden with a potato fork. Nor did he say a word to Daniel. Why? Daniel asked himself. Didn’t he see them? Or was it that he couldn’t put two and two together? Or was he so obsessed with his Victoria Day deadline that he was prepared to overlook anything, so long as it helped him to meet it?