Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

“I don’t quite understand how it happened myself,” said his grandfather quietly. “I didn’t plan it. One thing led to another and somehow it got away on me, I couldn’t turn back. It started the summer – it was the summer Earl came down with his nervous trouble – I mean to say, well, his nerves got bad and they said he’d have to go away to the hospital. Stutz and me figured at most he’d be gone a couple of weeks, no more, that they’d get him rested up and we’d have him home again in no time. So I didn’t see any point in upsetting your mother with that kind of news. Especially as we looked on it as… as temporary, I didn’t think she’d ever need to hear about it. Anyway, well,” he said, stumbling as he explained himself, “if she heard how it was with Earl she was likely to put the blame on me for it. Your mother and I weren’t on the best of terms at any rate, so I didn’t think there was any percentage in stirring things up. Let sleeping dogs lie, I thought to myself.

“The problem with all my figuring was that Earl was gone a long time longer than I had counted on. The thing was – he’d stopped talking. The doctors in that place were determined to get him talking, but no dice, he wouldn’t. Mostly he just sat. He sat through the fall and he sat through the winter and he sat through the spring and not a word out of him. The fucking doctors couldn’t fix him. Then come summer in that place he came down with the other – the spinal meningitis. How was it he caught a disease in a hospital where nobody was really sick? They couldn’t explain that one to me. Had an explanation for everything else wrong with him but not for that.

“Then he talked – with the spinal meningitis he talked. The doctors couldn’t make him talk but the meningitis could. Fever had him talking the whole of the day before he died. It isn’t something I care to remember… him talking in this stuffy little room with the flies buzzing and dancing against the window screen and the meningitis curling him up on the sheet. He just curled and curled like something drying up maybe, a leaf or something. And there was a smell in the room, I remember this smell – and somebody shouting down the hallway and Earl curling up.”

He stopped, rubbed his forehead slowly and deliberately with his fingertips. “Stutz had to take me out when he died. It was me shouting then. By Christ, yes. I was telling those doctor bastards what I thought. Shouting how come it was that you went into their hospital with one thing and went out in a box with another.” He laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I had plenty to tell them . It was different when it came to your mother. I had nothing to say to her. How was it going to look me not notifying her of how things had stood with her brother for eleven months and then suddenly writing that he was dead, all the how and when and where of it? All of that which has to be explained at such a time. Because people are full of questions then, it’s natural. I knew she’d never forgive me, that it would finish it with us. I kept thinking that if I could get face to face with her then I could explain it the way I couldn’t in a letter, make her see that I meant the best for him, did my best for him – that it wasn’t my fault.

“Because I did do my best for him,” said Alec, beginning to speak more emphatically. “It’s God’s truth that I did. I visited him once a week over bad roads in every kind of weather – a hundred and twenty miles there and a hundred and twenty miles back. I made sure they kept him nice in there. Every visit I brought him a new shirt, or pants, or sweater, or shoes. Something so he’d know. And I kept bringing them until the doctors and nurses said I should stop. That’s why I quit it. They said it was making the other patients jealous how he was dressed. It was causing trouble. They had started stealing his things, or maybe he was giving them away. Two of them dividing up his clothes had got in a fight. I seen the doctors’ point. What they said was true, I suppose. I seen it myself, a fellow walking around on the ward bold as brass in a shirt I’d bought for Earl. Earl’s shirt he was walking around in.

“But the thing is… the thing is I never got a chance to explain to your mother how it was because she never came home. So there I was, lying. And the longer the lying went on, the harder I knew it was going to be to tell her. For all those years I carried it, and then the two of you came home to me and when I finally came face to face with your mother I could see it was no good. I saw there was no explanation she would accept after all that time. Whatever I said would only push us farther apart.” He dropped his voice. “So I didn’t say nothing. I kept quiet.”

Daniel shifted on the truck seat, cleared his throat. “So if Earl’s dead, where is he?”

The old man roused himself, blinked his eyes. “Beg pardon?”

“So where is he – Earl?”

“There’s a graveyard on the hospital grounds,” said the old man matter-of-factly. “He’s buried there.” Monkman knew how that must sound to the boy, hard, unfeeling. He also knew it was beyond his power to explain why he had done what he had done. There could be no putting into words what had prompted his decision not to bring Earl home for burial. Part of it had been not knowing whether he possessed the strength to see the boy lying beside his mother, beside Martha. Seeing that would have made his losses somehow crueller, unbearable. But there was more to it than even that reluctance. There was the trick, the game he had already started to play with himself. If Earl’s grave was not in Connaught, reminding him, it might be possible to imagine him some place far away like Vera was, not forever lost but capable of someday finding his way home like Vera could.

If the old man could not entirely correct the impression his bald statement about Earl’s burial had left with the boy, at least he could try to soften it. “That’s what I had in mind for you today,” he continued, “to show you where Earl is. It’s been a while since I was there…” Faltering, he broke off and tried another tack. “I had these flowers made special for him,” he declared, staring down at his lap. “Flowers for winter,” he explained, “they don’t freeze.” Alec lifted his eyes to the dirty dishwater sky. “It won’t be long now before the snow flies. I ought to get my garden cleared…” He lost the thought, the sentence trailed away. He began again. Daniel sensed his effort to concentrate, to speak firmly. “I thought you would take me,” he said, “and that I could show you where he is, so when the time comes you can tell your mother.”

“What do you mean when the time comes?”

His grandfather tried to smile but only succeeded in baring his false teeth in a disturbing grimace. “Maybe you haven’t noticed but I’m no spring chicken. I’m getting on. While I’m still alive I don’t want your mother to know any of this, but after – well, she has to finally know, doesn’t she? And another thing, I’ve been thinking Earl ought to be brought home. You can tell her that for me, can’t you? Tell her to bring Earl home. She’s been left most everything I got so she can afford it. Tell her to bring him home, won’t you?”

Hearing him beg made Daniel uncomfortable. “Stutz knows all this stuff,” he said uneasily. “Let Stutz tell her. Why do you want to get me involved in all of this? I’ve got enough trouble of my own with her. I don’t need any of this shit.”

His grandfather went on doggedly pressuring him. “No,” he said. “This is family. It’s for the three of us to settle. I want you to settle it for me, Daniel. Would you do that? I want you to promise me you’ll tell her – but not before time. Remember, not before time. I’ve got to know in my mind it’s taken care of. Promise.”