Small Beneath the Sky (16 page)

It took only a minute or two for the reply. “Two hundred bucks,” the man said. Patrick told me later that Dad looked as if someone had farted in the room. “The stones are of poor quality, and they're smaller than they look.”

“C'mon,” my father said, “look again.”

“Not interested.”

Back on the street, Dad's face was flushed with fury. “That guy doesn't know shit from tar,” he said. No one was going to jew him, he told Patrick. He was smarter than that. The old bugger was a cheat and a fraud. It was too late to try another store, so Patrick sought out a bar with a pool table to distract him.

I knew that my father would blame his son-in-law for the failure of whatever scheme he'd had in mind. There was an obvious flaw in Patrick's character—he didn't know how to be the straight man in an important negotiation; he didn't know how to find a fence who knew the value of diamonds and was willing to give and take a little. Would my father have sold the ring and pocketed the money if the price had matched the figure in his imagination? Or was he just curious, as he'd have had us believe, wanting to determine the magnitude of the favour he'd be granting when he gave the ring back?

About a week later, Mom phoned for our regular Sunday chat. When I brought up the ring she told me Dad had returned it. In front of the Legion regulars, he'd pulled the ring out of a pool-table pocket. “Well, I'll be go-to-hell!” he said. When the cattle buyer dropped by after an auction in the middle of the week, my father the hero let him in on the good news. “I've got something here you might like to take a look at.” He uncurled his fist, the ring shining in his palm. Dad announced where he'd found it, and the cattle buyer snatched it from his hand as if it were about to disappear again. Dad told Mom the big Albertan spat out a thank you, then said he'd lost the ring over a week ago. Wasn't it odd it hadn't turned up until now?

The man didn't offer Dad a reward, didn't even buy him a drink. “He's a goddam skinflint,” Dad said. “I wish I'd smashed that shitty piece of glass with an eight ball.”

My last encounter with the parsimonious side of my father's character would take place four years later, around his deathbed. His most prized possession was a 1972 bronze El Camino, a strange mutation of a vehicle, half car, half truck. I'd caught the bus from Saskatoon to sit with him and Mom in the hospital, and I planned to go back the same way a few days later. She suggested I take the El Camino. Dad wouldn't need it any more, and it would save me time. All that day, Dad had been quiet; in fact, I'd wondered how much of my mom's and my conversation he'd been able to hear, let alone understand. Suddenly he sat straight up in bed. “Whose truck is it?” he asked and glared at me and Mom. They were the last words he spoke to me.

“Yours,” I said. “Dad, it's yours.”

The El Camino was the only thing of my father's I inherited. Patrick and I drove it for about five years, until the bottom floor on the passenger's side had rusted through and we could see the road spinning past underneath us. We sold it to a neighbour who wanted to use it to haul his garden waste to the dump. We liked him, so we accepted his offer with no dickering. He sold the truck for double the price about six months later to the teacher who ran the autobody shop at the local school. With the help of his students he was going to restore the El Camino and make it vintage.

Dad had been right—there was a weakness in our characters. We had no guts, no skill, no delight in the bargainer's thrust and parry; we let people take advantage. If he'd heard what we'd been paid for the truck he'd refused to sell, he'd have been disgusted. We didn't know what things were worth.

till death do
us part
   

L
ONG BEFORE DAD
became ill with lymphoma, my mother insisted he tell us what he wanted done with his body when he died. She'd expressed her own wishes to me, and in her pragmatic way, she wanted Dad to figure out his while he still had his druthers. I was home for a visit when she raised the topic, and the three of us were watching the hockey game on
TV
. My parents were living in a decent house by then. Grandpa Ford had bought it a decade earlier for $6,000, and Mom and Dad gave him $50 a month until they'd paid it off.

I wasn't prepared for the discussion, but there was no stopping my mother once she got going. “Tell Lorna while she's here,” she said, “and while you're not in a coma or anything.”

Dad looked as taken aback as I felt. He kept staring at the
TV
, though hockey wasn't really his thing. He preferred world wrestling or baseball. “I don't know,” he finally said.

“Well, I'm going to be cremated. Do you want that too?” Dad said nothing. “There's no sense in buying plots—that's just a waste of money. Besides, with the kids so far away there'll be no one here to take care of them.”

“I guess that would be okay, to be cremated.”

“What should we do with your ashes?”

There was another pause, as Guy Lafleur scored a goal against Toronto. A minute later, Wendel Clark got a penalty for elbowing. “You could hire a plane,” Dad said, “and drop the ashes over the roof of the house.”

My father loved planes. In the mid-1940s, as the war was coming to an end, he'd gotten a job driving the flight crews to Swift Current's small airstrip on the edge of town. Decades later, my brother ended up in the air force, flying search-and-rescue helicopters over the Atlantic and the North. Every time a helicopter went over their house, my parents would stand in the yard and wave, in case it was my brother somehow wired like a homing pigeon and heading west.

“That's just like you,” Mom said, “to come up with something expensive. We can't afford a plane. Besides, I don't want you hanging over my head on the roof for the rest of my life!”

Dad looked confused. He sipped at his beer, the organ in Maple Leaf Gardens blasting out its maddened song.

“What about the garden?” I asked.

“That's a good idea,” he said. “You could dump me in the garden.”

“No way. I'd be tasting you every time I ate a potato.” Mom turned to me, and then, with a mischievous look, said, “Maybe we could pour him in an empty beer bottle, pop a cork in it and throw it in Duncairn Dam.”

“That wouldn't be a bad idea,” Dad said. Relieved at his response, I laughed. He and Mom did too.

Duncairn Dam was a good choice. During my summer holidays before high school, Dad and I went fishing almost every Sunday afternoon at the dam in his speedboat while Mom worked at the swimming pool. The first day he'd pulled the boat into our backyard on Fourth West, Mom was furious. There was barely enough to make the rent or buy groceries, yet he'd bought a boat. We didn't know where he'd found the money, but his pockets were bottomless when there was something he wanted.

At Duncairn, Dad would drink three or four beers, tipping the empties over the gunwales to fill them with water, then letting them sink. “Don't tell Mom,” he'd say, and I never did. We'd go home to the chicken she had fried in case we didn't catch any fish, our faces red from wind and sun. I'd always say I'd had a good time.

I didn't let Mom know I felt lonely and bored in the boat with my father—I could never take a friend because I didn't know what kind of condition he'd be in, and he and I didn't find it easy to talk. The usual routine was to roar back and forth across the water several times, sit fishing for what seemed like days, then zoom from one end of the dam to the other until the motor was almost out of gas. At last we'd putter in to shore, where Dad loaded the boat onto the trailer and we'd start the forty-or-so-mile drive home. Sometimes I'd get to water-ski if it wasn't too windy. Our game was that he'd try to dump me, yanking the steering wheel rapidly to the left, then the right. It was a source of pride for him when I stayed upright, banging over the hard, bumpy wake, skis rat-a-tat-tatting like a machine gun in a gangster movie. I loved the noise, the ferocious rush of the wind and my father's head turning to look back at me while I swung from side to side like a crazed pendulum, almost lifting off into the sky.

My parents' faces flickered in the fiery action of the game on the screen.

“Where are you going to be?” he asked, and looked at Mom. “I think I want to be with you.”

I waited for her to say something like, “That'd be a first.” Or, “You want to be with me when you're dead? You never spend any time with me now.” But she didn't lash out. Instead she got quiet, and the hockey game suddenly became interesting again. I let my eyes rest on the lamp on top of the
TV
. Although the brand of the television had changed over the years, from a wood-encased Fleetwood to an
RCA
to a Hitachi, the lamp had been there since Dad brought home our first set the year I was eight. It was a square piece of plastic with a light bulb behind. When it was turned on you saw a cowboy in silhouette, riding a horse, with an orange-and-yellow sunset blazing behind him and a dog trotting alongside.

After we watched the Leafs kill their latest penalty, Mom told Dad she wanted her ashes scattered on the farm where she grew up, by the freshwater stream that ran into the lake. “You remember where that is,” she said to him, “the green spot just beyond the quicksand where the cow went under.” She'd told me she thought it was as good a place as any.

“That's it, then,” Dad said. “I'll go there too.”

“And I don't want a funeral,” she added. “Just the family. They can sing ‘How Great Thou Art' by the lake, and someone can read the Twenty-third Psalm.”

“Okay by me.”

“Well, that's that,” Mom said. “Lorna, let your brother know.”

We scattered my father's ashes by the lake on a cold day in spring, the ground wet and slippery under our shoes. It was an alkali lake, thick with salt, encrusted with a white scab around its shores and exuding a rotting, brooding fecundity. It nestled in what could have been a pretty setting, at the bottom of hills prickly with cacti and spackled with lichened stones, but Uncle Lyn had turned the crest of the hill closest to the house into a garbage dump. It was strewn with old washers and stoves, oil barrels, the husks of cars, phantom combines waiting for a phantom crop. Down the slope, years of my uncle's rye whiskey bottles glinted in the sun, some broken, others intact, labels peeled away by rain and snow.

It was the only lake for miles around when my mother was a child, and it was all she knew of beauty. Aspens spilled out of the coulee's tucks and folds and cooled the summer days with noisy shade. Mallard ducks, unbothered by the stench or the taste, bobbed up and down on the wind-pleated water. Though the raw salt starched her hair and coated her face in a thin, stiff mask, she swam there every summer until she married and left home. The alkali-dense water made her buoyant.

My parents had worked out these last rites in less time than it took for a power play in a hockey game. Of course, they had grown up on farms across the road from one another. They'd known each other as children. The minerals leaching into the food and water that nourished them came from the same dry wheatland soil. They listened to the same wind, the same bird calls, the daily sibilance of the grass. Their eyes filled with the unblinking prairie light that candled the stubble at dawn.

At the lake, my mother scooped out a handful of ashes and released the last of my father to the wind. “There you go, Emerson,” she said. She dusted her hands on her dress. “You made my life better.” It was one of the most shocking things I'd ever heard. Only she knew what he had given her; only she could offer him those final words of love and praise.

my mother for
a long time
  

A
UNTIE GLAD
lived across the street in a bungalow that could have been the twin of my mother's. The same white siding, the same slope to the roof, the same narrow verandah. At ninety-five, she was the eldest in their family, and of seven siblings, she would be the last one left. Like my mother, Glad was severely independent, living alone since her husband had died over thirty years before. Recently, though, she'd begun losing track of time. The day of the week, the year, even the seasons seemed to slide into one another like water pouring from the pump into a half-f pail.

During my aunt's years of canning and preserving, on the labels of her jars of fruit, jams and jellies, she'd note in pen and ink a significant happening from the day. On the glass jar glowing a burgundy-red in her cupboard, the label said, “August 12, 1999, Chokecherry Jelly. Frieda Fitch broke her hip.” On a taller jar of saskatoons on her cellar shelf, she'd printed, “July 21, 1980. Jock MacPherson died in bed,” and on a stubby sealer, brown inside, “September 8, 1972. Mincemeat. Russia 5, Canada 3.” She'd also kept journals over the years, starting in 1932 when she was a young woman. Most of the entries were as brief as her labels, the thin books full of the weather and simple daily tasks. “Went to the Yuricks for water today. Stopped for coffee.” Or, “Hens not laying. One egg this week. Rusty and I played crib for it.” Or, “Had a bath,” an event important enough to record every time. In the journal for 1948, on May 24 she wrote, “Peggy had a baby girl”—those five words alone on the page, no other entry for the rest of the year about the newest member of the family. I was that baby. My aunt's unadorned notation marked the written beginning of my long relationship with her, with my mother and with words.