Mennonites Don't Dance (21 page)

Magda pushes the plant back into place. She wonders what will become of it now, whether it will be able to root itself again. She brushes her hands on the thighs of her jeans, leaving soiled handprints, and begins to kick her way through the rows of vegetables, feeling a constriction of guilt over ruining her grandparents' careful work. Yet she knows they won't be angry with her.

“Doesn't it make you sad to use this garden?” Magda said to her grandfather once, when they were weeding between the rows of green beans.

He stopped and leaned on his hoe, bobbing his head as he looked around. “Your grandma and I, we've forgotten what happened here,” he said. “And the Lord, He has forgotten, too.”

“What does that even mean?” Magda scowled, chipping at a clod of dirt with her hoe. “You're remembering it right now.”

He was quiet for a moment. “It means we choose not to remember.”

“Well, whatever. God might forget,” Magda said. “But people don't. They just leave.”

“
Miene dochta
,” he said a little sadly. “Look at these beans you helped me plant.” He bent over and plucked a slender, green pod. “See, you have to pick them so there's room for new ones to grow. Some day, I think, you will know how to forget, too.”

Standing alone in her grandparents' garden, Magda knows it's just a matter of time before she'll have to return to the house and face her mother. As she turns to go, she finds her grandfather sitting on the bench swing he built for her, next to the grass she had tried to hide in.

Magda breathes as deeply as she can and lets out a long, uneven breath. “Has she come to take me away?” Magda says. She sits next to her grandfather on the swing. He smells like
rollkuchen
from her grandmother's kitchen.

“I don't know,” he says, taking her hand and holding it tight.

“It's not up to me, is it?”

Her grandfather is quiet for a while, nodding his head in quiet thought.

“Some things are up to you.”

U
NDONE
H
ERO

I
NSIDE THE KITCHEN CUPBOARDS OF THE
farmhouse, pots are stuck to the shelves, cemented with condensation as cold seeped through the hundred-year-old sawdust insulation.

Leaning against the sink, Alec listens to the storm. Even the air in the house has begun to stir as wind finds its way in through cracks that have opened up around windows and doors. The gas has been turned off since his father stopped paying bills and the wood burning fireplace isn't able to keep up.

If Alec's mother were alive, she would use her hair dryer to shrink-wrap the windows in winter plastic. Without her, the musty old curtains swell softy and go flat. The whole house bends to the wind and hunches under the weight of snow.

“If I ever start shitting myself, you just take me out back and shoot me, eh?” his father says from his chair in the living room. “Better to go to hell a little early than be stuck here in my own shit.” He has tried to make this pact with Alec dozens of times over the years. But where it used to sound like a threat, now there's a tremble in his father's voice.

“Yeah. You already know I won't do that, Dad.”

His father reaches down beside him for his cane and thwaps the floor with its crook, showing more strength than Alec thought he still had. Enough perhaps, to keep on this way for weeks.

“I'm not going to any home, whatever you have in mind. You make sure I'm good and dead before they come to take me away. You do it. That sister of yours can't be trusted.”

“She's not coming, Dad. You know that.”

“Good. Don't need her,” he says. “Don't need anything.” He leans back in his chair and presses his head into the rotten upholstery.

Yesterday Alec called to tell his twin sister. Just in case she might want to make peace before their father dies. Cassandra however, is staying in Winnipeg, uninterested in revisiting what she thinks she dealt with years ago.

Selfish, Alec thinks. If not for Dad, or herself, then — He pushes the thought aside.

“Why don't you bring us both something for the pain, eh?” Alec's father says, coughing out each word.

“Sure, Dad. Why not?”

“Why not is right. And hey — ” He spits and conceals the bloody phlegm inside a handkerchief. “We'll toast that sister of yours. Don't need her anyway.”

“You already said that, Dad.”

“Yeah and it goes double. Just like the drink you're gonna pour me.”

Alec spins his wedding ring on his finger. He'd have brought his father home with him to Saskatoon, but the last thing he needs is a crotchety old man to teach his three-year-old daughter, Allison, how to swear. And besides, his father is determined to be right where he is. It would be easier to turn a stone into bread than get him to budge. The same is true of Cassandra.

Even when Alec and his sister were younger, Alec stayed at home until he finished college, driving an hour into the city every day while Cassie ran off the first chance she got. And now, here he is again, back after the hospital called to say his dying father was demanding to be released and was there someone in the family who could come and get him? Who else but him? Who else would know his father keeps his liquor under the sink behind the Drano.

Alec fills a glass two fingers high with cheap Scotch and carries it back to the living room. His father's sour breath has frozen on the window, near where he's tucked in up to his chest under a heavy quilt. The layers of frost are uneven and bend and shift images on the other side of the glass into a relief that's almost beautiful.

“What? My liquor not good enough for you?” his father says, taking a long, grateful snort.

“I don't drink, Dad.”

“Ha. Just like your mother,” he says. “I knew there was something I didn't trust about you. Next you'll be wanting me to get on my knees and beg that God of yours for mercy before I die.”

Alec sits down in his mother's favourite reading chair and pretends to listen to his father's rant, wondering whether the old man has been to the toilet. It would be just like him to wait, no matter the agony. He'd wait until Alec went to bed, even though he's not supposed to get up on his own. Which he must have done last night. Because, if nothing else, he's at least clean.

“I'll guar-an-tee you this,” his father is saying. Guarantee. The first ‘a' pronounced like the ‘a' in arsenic. Garr-an-tee. The way he says it has always made Alec want to turn and shout “Guarantee, Dad! It's pronounced guarantee.” But Alec never did, and his father kept repeating himself until someone paid attention.

“What, Dad? What do you guarantee?” Alec says, making sure to pronounce the word correctly.

“That a man can only ever count on his son, that's what.” He shrinks back into his chair. When he goes on, his voice is a blunt edge. Alec remembers how it once seemed sharp enough to cut spirit from flesh. “Can't count on women. Where are they when the chips are down?” His mind has drifted and he isn't speaking to Alec anymore. “Off getting something for themselves. Even my Carol's gone and deserted me.”

Alec looks into his father's face, its wrinkles that weren't there even last year, now covered with a three-day bristle of white-and-grey whiskers.

“Dad,” Alec says. “Mom died. She didn't leave you.”

“Your father's a good man, Alec. He just doesn't know it,” Alec's mother had sometimes said.

And there were days. Like when he bought Alec and Cassie toboggans for their seventh birthdays, and before the kids could get themselves stuffed into their snowsuits, was already at the door waiting for them. He was more excited than they were, which was almost better than presents.

All morning, their father helped them drag the toboggans up a hill at the back of their property. He waited until both kids were ready and gave Cassie, then Alec, a mighty push before jumping on the back of Alec's sled and riding down with him. Up and down. Dozens of times, each time breathlessly fun, right up until the end.

After what turned out to be the last run, Dad sat in the snow at the bottom of the hill and Alec watched as his expression clouded over. By the time they trudged back to the house all three of them were caked in snow and exhausted. While the kids stood in the porch, peeling off their damp parkas and snow pants, their father went to the bedroom he shared with their mother and shut the door.

Just before supper, when the food, which had been prepared in silence, was taken from the oven and brought to the table, Dad's door opened. When he sat at the table he was so quiet that all the sound in the room seemed to have been swallowed. He didn't appear angry. Yet, Alec knew that he had spent all that time behind his door thinking hard thoughts.

“Mommy and I made tuna noodle casserole,” Cassie said. She always said Mommy or Daddy instead of Mom and Dad when she was anxious.

Alec looked in his father's direction to show he was paying attention and not thinking about eating, even though he was starved and worried that his stomach would start to rumble and betray him. But he accidentally met his father's eyes. He was trapped.

Alec knew that staring back was seen as a challenge. Yet, looking away was an admission of guilt to whatever it was his father thought he'd done. So he couldn't look away, but if he'd had a clear shot he sure would've kicked Cassie under the table to make her stop squirming.

Before he spoke, Dad took a deep breath. “You two think I'm some kind of Santa Claus.”

Silence.

“You know that's not true,” Alec's mother said, spooning tuna and noodles onto Dad's plate.

“No? Well maybe we should start with the fact that these two didn't even think to say thank you for those goddamn toboggans, or for my dragging them up that goddamn hill all morning.”

On cue, Cassie began to cry. Softly, at first, but then in hiccupping sobs until she could no longer catch her breath. Pathetic.

“Look what you've done,” Mom said. “The kids are plenty grateful for those sleds. They've talked about nothing else since coming in but what a wonderful time they had out there with you.” But that's as far as she went. She wrung her frustration into a damp tea towel and led Cassie from the table to help her calm down.

Alec didn't move from his chair, expecting that once they were alone his father would go on with his tirade. Dad pounded his fist on the table, once, and glowered at his noodles. Eventually he lowered his face into his hands and shook his head. He got up and left the kitchen, leaving Alec to wonder whether he was allowed to eat.

Now, what feels like a hundred years later, Alec wonders if his father still remembers that day with the toboggans. How, when he and Cassie were older and their mother gone, they were just supposed to know when they were expected home after being allowed to visit a friend. It was the same kind of test as the staring. If they arrived too early, Dad assumed they were guilty of something. Too late, and they must be trying to push their limits, which would quickly get snapped back until there was no slack left in the rope.

There was only ever a ten-minute window of correctness and Alec became expert at climbing through.

Cassie though, never did figure out when to come home.

“You need a nurse to visit,” Alec says as his father lapses into another fit of coughing. “They said your lungs would fill up.”

“No-ho!” he says, catching scraps of breath and using them to expel his voice, together with drops of spittle. “You know what I said about that. When it's my time I'm ready to go, damn it! Just get out of here if you aren't going to help me. Or do me in like a good son.” With his fingers shaking he uses his next breath to light a cigarette.

Alec looks up as though God might be in the ceiling, but sees only flaking paint and rotted wood, frozen drops of water from where the heat of the fire meets the cold of the rest of the house. Smoke rises from his father's chair, covering him with grey gauze.

In the years since Alec and Cassie's mother died, Dad's bitterness had slowly eroded any gentleness that once existed. He stopped going to the Mennonite Brethren Church in the nearest village, but insisted Alec and Cassie stand at the end of their driveway every Sunday morning, no matter the weather, to be picked up by their nearest neighbours and ferried to Sunday School.

Back in the kitchen, Alec lifts a blackened pot from the sink. The oats he left in it from breakfast have bloated and the pot is beginning to gather frost around its edges, like the pond outside would have done sometime back in October. The same pond Alec and Cassie used to float waxed-paper boats on after the summer rains, when there were any. And where in a different November, they watched a flock of late-migrating Canada geese land, skidding on unexpected ice before their bodies splashed down into the unfrozen centre.

By morning the geese were all on the shore of the pond, eating their fill of wilted greens. All but one. An albino goose, eerily white, was frozen in the centre of the pond, its pink eyes wild with panic and wings beating the ice.

Alec and Cassie, who always woke early to fresh snow, had spilled outside, unable to delay their play another moment. But then they'd heard the terrible honking and arrived at the pond to find the goose there, its flock unconcerned and eating.