He searched for Joe among the people in the churchyard as he passed by, but failed to see him. He would have been satisfied with a glimpse of what was left of Verna, her dark hair, the way her mouth pulled to one side when she was thinking, long legs carrying her about with such swift resolution.
Joe’s bike was chained to the step railing along with several others, and so Alfred knew he was at the Saturday club, where he’d said he would be in the note he’d left beside the telephone. Exposure to religion of any kind would be an antidote against it later on, Alfred had told himself when Joe asked if he could attend services at the Salt & Light Company. The truth was, he was relieved Joe was occupied and supervised; it meant he required less of Alfred’s thinking time.
He reached the intersection at Portage Avenue and waited for the traffic light to change, thinking that Joe was likely in the basement. Carving a squirrel or cat from a bar of soap, or filling in the blanks on one of the worksheets he was forever bringing home. Blessed are—
the poor in spirit
. Blessed are—
they that mourn
, Joe’s handwriting, tight
and careful. Alfred didn’t know that at that moment Joe was with a church deacon who scanned the lines of scripture with his finger for Joe to follow as Joe read aloud, falteringly, stumbling over the archaic arrangement of sentences in the King James Bible, beginning to commit scripture to memory that would eventually sound like poetry coming from the boy’s mouth.
The liquor store and the Fuel and Supply hardware store shared the same building, its bright green exterior dominating the city block. Just beyond it was Weston’s Bakery whose red brick chimney stack towered over the store, and today the odour of bread baking was almost overpowering. Why were the bakery windows bricked in? Alfred had often paused to wonder, and concluded that if there was something called sin to be counted against a man, then it was a sin to shut out daylight. Nor was it right for the smell of baking bread to turn a person’s stomach.
He came out of the liquor store with the box of beer clenched under his arm. Beyond the entrance of the Fuel and Supply store the yellow canoe still hung on wires from the ceiling. He had planned on working it into the sphere of Verna’s toleration gradually. To put the canoe on the river a couple of times before it got too cold, give Joe a bit of experience before next summer when he’d license Earl’s old Jeep and take Joe camping. The idea of taking Joe out on the water seemed like a betrayal of Verna now.
Earl saw him coming and took a haversack from the seat of his wheelchair, readying it to receive the carton. Alfred wedged the box down inside, and Earl tore open the lid and took out a bottle and offered it to him. When he refused, Earl uncapped it and drank deeply before
pushing it out of sight between his thighs. Alfred sat down at the table across from him, cold suddenly.
“It’s supposed to snow,” Earl said.
Alfred nodded, seeing the cover of blue-grey clouds hanging above the city in the north. He thought of Verna in the ground, wearing a light dress one of her sisters had chosen, a lace shawl, no protection against winter.
They sat in silence for a long moment, watching the activities at the church. A car arrived and several women, who appeared to have been waiting for it, got in. At a time like this, religion might give a person something to shake a fist at. A good woman had been taken too soon, and there was nothing to blame but chance.
And then Earl expressed his disgust over the number of draft dodgers being given refuge in the country, the anti-Vietnam War protests going on south of the border, and when that failed to gain a response from Alfred, he read aloud from the newspaper, beginning with the front page story of the killing of Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle, while Alfred listened, but did not take in the words, and the remainder of the morning passed.
Around noon, Earl barked, “Here comes trouble,” and seemed relieved at the sight of Joe running across Arlington Street into the park, Pastor Ken and Maryanne crossing the street behind him.
Joe suddenly grew shy as he neared Alfred, and he stopped to stand looking at the ground. Pastor Ken and Maryanne Lewis moved in to flank him.
“I’ll be going now,” Earl said and lifted his stumps as he swung round on the bench. He raised his hands and scowled to fend off Pastor Ken when it appeared he would
come to his assistance. He pulled his wheelchair close, lifted the haversack of ale, and then slid off the picnic bench into the chair and set the haversack onto his lap. “Be seeing you around, tiger,” he said with a wink to Joe.
Pastor Ken came over to Alfred, gripped his hand, the handshake becoming a kind of embrace as he enclosed Alfred’s hand in both of his and held on, until Alfred drew his own away.
“It is good to see you again,” the pastor said, and his steady gaze flickered. Likely he was remembering why they’d met in the first place, Alfred saying to them as they were about to leave the house,
It would seem to me that you folks would have your hands full preaching to people in your own country
.
“We want you to know that we’ve all been praying for you,” Pastor Ken said.
“What for?”
The pastor seemed startled and his wife broke in to say, “These past months must have been very difficult for you. And for Joe.” She put her hand on Joe’s shoulder and he looked up at her as she nudged him toward Alfred. “He’s such a fine boy, Mr. Beaudry. It’s been a blessing for us to get to know him.”
Alfred could only nod. The little shithead. He saw Joe turn and scan the park, pretend he was not part of what was happening. He was still wearing the Spiderman T-shirt Verna had bought at the beginning of summer. It had stretched and hung like a skirt beneath his windbreaker. His hair had grown thick and long, and was coppery from having been bleached by the sun during summer.
“We want to thank you for allowing Joe to be part of our worship family,” Pastor Ken said.
“Yes, well,” Alfred replied. He hadn’t realized this was what he’d done.
Joe looked at his father then, his pale eyes clouded and swimming.
You’ve left him in the chicken coop and he’s been waiting for you all this time, Alfred heard Verna’s voice say, and it was like a rock dropped on his foot.
Moments later when Joe and Alfred went toward home they were caught in a downpour of snow pellets that bounced before their feet and in the street beyond, the air a swirl of white around them, suddenly, and filled with the sound of crackling.
“I need a new parka,” Joe said, his shoulders shrugged up to his ears against the cold.
“We’ll get you one.” Alfred’s bank account was scraping bottom, as the pension didn’t stretch far enough. Tomorrow he would call the club and let them know he was ready to come back to work. He went to brush the ice pellets from Joe’s hair, but let his hand fall to his side. Pay off what’s owing on the canoe, he told himself. Store it in the garage rafters until spring, start a layaway for a tent and a couple of sleeping bags.
“Sorry,” he muttered to Verna under his breath as they went along the walk to the house, covered now in a layer of snow that had begun to melt, their footprints slurred and quickly filled with water. Joe pushed on ahead, wanting to be the first to the door, Alfred realized, as the boy held it open wide enough for him to pass through.
Alfred entered the hall and was confronted by the odours of furniture polish, cleansers and bleach, of Verna’s cleaning day. Even before he ventured farther, he knew that the
house had been transformed in his absence. The clutter was gone and the floors shone, freshly laundered clothes had been ironed and folded and lined up on the couch in several piles. The kitchen sparkled with cleanliness and order; there was a lasagna on the stove and a note saying what temperature to set the oven, and for how long he should cook it.
Alfred followed Joe from room to room, feeling that he’d been accused and found wanting, then feeling that, no, he’d been invaded. Likely by the women he’d seen getting into the car in front of the church earlier. Strangers had rummaged about the shelves and drawers, disturbed Verna’s arrangement of things. The smudges of her hands on the cupboard doors had been wiped away, her ashtrays emptied and washed and lined up on a windowsill.
Alfred remained silent as he took in Joe’s room, the bed made up with fresh linen, the pillows plumped, toys arranged on the shelves, as though Verna had only just straightened them. Christ, he thought. Even Earl was in on this. Alfred had sat there, shivering with cold the whole time, thinking he was keeping the man company.
He left the inspection of his own room for the last, and realized as he went along the hall toward it that he was clenching his fists. The worst of it was that these women had breathed in Verna’s house. The do-gooders had taken in particles of Verna and left something of themselves behind. He pushed open his door and was relieved to find that they had sense enough to leave his and Verna’s room as it was. He stood for a moment taking in Verna’s rubber thongs on the floor beside the bed, when he felt Joe watching him from the door.
“The house looks great, eh, Dad?”
“Some people should mind their own business,” Alfred said. Then he picked up Verna’s thongs, held them for a moment before putting them in the closet. Your intentions were good, he thought to say to Joe, but when he looked up, Joe had gone.
The traffic along Portage Avenue flows past Alfred’s window at Deere Lodge, currents of lights streaming both north and south, and through it he sees his own face reflected in the windowpane. When he’d been a prisoner of war in Japan he’d seen enough men die to be able to recognize his own end coming for him a mile away. His legs are shaking now, made unpredictable by his fever, and he has to bear the brunt of his weight on his arms.
He thought death was coming for him when he’d been sent to work in the coal mine in Japan, in the shaft that had been dug out under the sea. In places it was chest-deep with water that stunk of sulfur. By then his feet had become like clubs, swollen three times their size, and he couldn’t gain purchase with his toes to feel his way along the shaft that was scattered with rocks, the ground uneven with hollows and sudden risings. He told himself that if he was going to survive, he had to remain upright. He had to keep moving, to concentrate while he chipped away at the scant splinters of coal to be found in the mined-out seam.
But now, his life is behind him. It’s across the room on the bureau. Joe and Verna: Alfred’s second birth coming in a sudden burst of noise and light when he was forty-four years old.
“Mr. Beaudry?” an attendant calls from the door, startling him, and his knees cave in. She grasps Alfred tightly about his chest, preventing him from doing serious damage to the floor. He says this aloud but she doesn’t appear to have heard and calls out to someone, and seemingly within an instant another woman is lifting his arms and putting them around her neck. “Lock your fingers, Mr. Beaudry,” she says and as Alfred hangs on to her, he feels the heat emanating from her body.
He reflects on the effort it takes, the number of people, the amount of time to keep someone like him from toppling over and becoming a danger to himself and others. The women guide him across the room, and he says, “Not the bed. I need to sit up,” and is relieved when they steer him over to the La-Z-Boy.
When they leave he struggles upright, trying and failing to reach the clock radio on the side table and turn its face away. The effort brings on a convulsion of shallow coughing that hurts, and he lies back and pushes against his ribs to hold it in. From down the hall the yeller calls out suddenly, the sound large and hollow, as though he’s inside a barrel. So the yeller is still with us. Still standing between him and the great scythe about to mow them both down. The yeller calls for a nurse, but it sounds more like a grunt, like he’s saying, hearse, hearse. Why don’t you give the poor man what he wants, Alfred will say to the women when they return.
He closes his eyes against the irritation of the glowing digital numbers of the clock and immediately sinks toward sleep. But within moments his legs below the knee grow clammy and cool. It’s like he’s calf-deep in water, in the
mine shaft and heading deeper into the blackness under the sea. And then he sees himself guide the yellow canoe among large rocks and away from the shore. He hears Joe call out, his voice deep now and strong. “It’s okay, Dad. I’ve got it.” Joe moves slowly, for his benefit, his broad back bent over the canoe as he steadies it and waits for him to climb inside.
Joe pushes off a rock shelf with the paddle and they shoot out from the shallows into the sudden depth of the lake and into sunlight, the water smooth and as solid-looking as sheet metal. And the next moment they’re coming near the cabin set back in among cottonwood and pine, where people crowd about the shore waiting for them. They wave, call out for Joe, anxiously rush forward when the canoe bites into the red sand, as though they intend to lift it with him and Joe inside and carry it on their shoulders up the rocky slope.
People emerge from the cabin and across its broad cedar deck and along a narrow footpath winding through dark spruce, Joe among them, all of them wearing what look to be white robes made of bedsheets fastened at the waist with hemp rope. They file down to the shore, wait there for the pastor and the deacon to call them out into the lake to be dipped backward beneath the surface, one by one, held there for a moment before being brought up, gasping, water streaming across their faces.
Alfred hears sobbing, and laughter, then a song rise from the congregation gathered along the beach, the singing giving way and becoming the sound of ringing bells, the tinkle of glass chimes, the cry of the bird falling toward the water. Look, someone shouts. Look, the bird, the Holy
Spirit descending on Joe. A gull, fishing in the shallows, despite the hullabaloo. Joe cries out,
Hallelujah!
again and again, his hands raised, his features lit with what might be joy, the word Verna had superimposed on the photograph of Joe taking his first baby steps; the word he used to think was the spelling of his name.