Adam's Peak (39 page)

I
t's the lull after eleven o'clock Mass, that Sunday-slow time when, church clothes shed, sins forgiven, everything feels lighter. Rudy takes his new library book,
Robinson Crusoe
, to the living room, where Susie has stretched the hallway telephone cord so that she and her best friend can both listen to the Beach Boys album playing on the record player. Rudy can't actually read with the music playing. The book is an excuse for him to sit near his sister, listening to the giggles and mysterious codes of her conversation. He sits sideways in the armchair, tapping his bare foot against the shoulder of Grandpa's crocodile lamp, shipped over after Grandpa went into the old people's home, and the crocodile teeters back and forth to the beat of “Help Me Rhonda.” In a mood of Sunday lenience, Dad hasn't complained about the volume of the music. He's in the trophy room, listening to a baseball game. Aunty Mary is wanting to make lunch, but Adam is in her way.

“Rudy!” she calls from the kitchen. “Come look after your brother.”

Guessing from his aunt's tone that complaint would be useless, Rudy stifles a whine and goes to the kitchen, where he finds his brother kneeling on the floor, directing a G.I. Joe action figure up the oven door.

“Come on, Adam,” he commands. “We're going out.”

Leaving his doll on the floor, Adam bounds ahead of Rudy, through the laundry room to the back door, like a puppy anticipating a walk. A puppy, in Rudy's opinion, would be better than a brother. At least he'd know what to
do
with a dog. Out in the backyard, however, the question of what to do with Adam leaves him baffled. Babysitting has always been Susie's department. She's good at it, but as Rudy goes through his sister's repertoire in his mind, he scowls. School and Doctor are boring, and dress-up skits with Mum's old dresses or Susie's outgrown ballet costumes are out of the question. He scrutinizes his brother, a wide-eyed imp in yellow shorts and a Cookie Monster T-shirt, and gives up.

“Go play in your pool,” he says, then dashes back to the living room for his book, praying Adam won't bawl.

He doesn't. Back on the patio, Rudy installs himself in the long recliner and opens his book while his brother sets out an armada of plastic toys in the inflatable wading pool. Content to be a surveillance officer, he opens
Robinson Crusoe
to reread what he missed while listening to Susie's phone conversation. The shipwrecked man has built a fantastic shelter all by himself, but now he's just sitting around, thinking—boring things about God's providence. The book is harder than Rudy anticipated when he signed it out. Put off by words like
iniquity
and
repine
, he looks up often to watch his brother and eventually abandons the reading altogether.

Out on the lawn, Adam has filled his plastic pail with water from the pool and is walking lopsidedly toward the flower bed, spilling and splashing along the way. “Use the watering can if you wanna water them!” Rudy calls, but Adam ignores him. He sits down next to the stone retaining wall that borders the flower bed and begins scooping dirt into his pail, stirring the sloppy mixture with one hand. He digs far down, eventually burying his entire arm to collect the last handfuls. As he digs and stirs, globs of mud stain his yellow shorts. Rudy imagines the fuss Aunty Mary will make, but as he watches, the temptation
to feel the mud flow through his own fingers becomes overwhelming. He leaves his book on the chair and crosses the lawn, spikes of freshly mown grass pricking the soles of his feet.

Crouching beside Adam, he immerses his hands in the pail. The mud is a thick, cool mixture of greyish clay and black soil.

“What are you gonna do with this?” he says.

“Build something,” his brother answers, matter-of-factly.

While Rudy wipes his hands on the grass, Adam turns to the pile of flattish stones left over from the retaining wall and begins sorting them. Aunty Mary has been nagging Dad to get rid of the stones ever since he built the wall, on a whim, in early summer. But Dad's interest in anything to do with the flower bed seems to have dwindled, and the stones, as a result, have become playthings.

With an air of confidence and expertise that Rudy finds surprising, Adam selects several stones from the pile, weighing them in his hands and tracing the uneven textures and bands of colour with his fingers. When his collection is complete, he squats next to it, pointy knees aimed skyward, and experiments with different structures, each one vaguely resembling the human-like figures built by Eskimos in the Arctic. Rudy watches, tempted once again to join in, but the intensity of his brother's concentration makes him hold back. Finally, Adam settles on a design. He dismantles the model then sets to work fixing the stones in place with the gluey mud. He spreads it thickly on the surfaces to be cemented, occasionally massaging his forehead with his fingers. As he works, his face and hair and the Cookie Monster on his shirt disappear behind grey-brown splashes and smears. The sculpture, when finished, is as high as Rudy's knees. It has a mysterious look, he thinks—as if it were alive. A silent, solitary observer.

Adam backs away from his work, wearing a critical frown, then turns and skips across the lawn to the sandbox. Rudy returns to the chair on the patio, glancing up now and again from his book to admire the stone sculpture. Only when his father appears at the laundry room door to call the boys for lunch does he begin to worry about his brother's muddiness. As Adam jumps out of the sandbox, calling “Look, Dada! Look!” Rudy braces himself against a scolding. But Dad just laughs. Dressed in his weekend clothes—white shorts and a
plaid, short-sleeved shirt—he looks unusually relaxed. His strong, spindly legs are tanned very dark; his calloused feet are immune to the baking hot patio.

“Look at
you
,” he says, taking Adam's head in his hands like a supermarket melon, ruffling the mucky hair. “You've been playing in the mud, just like your dada used to do.”With a wink in Rudy's direction, he adds, “I noticed your big brother was in on the fun, too. Good, good. I remember the mud we used to get—”

He seems to be on the verge of telling a story, but Adam, squirming out of his grasp, interrupts. “Dada! Look! I built a Chinese warrior like the one we saw on TV!” He bounces up and down like a Superball, while Rudy squints at the stone sculpture, re-imagining it as one of the famous terra cotta soldiers dug up by archaeologists in China.

Dad looks in the direction Adam is pointing, but Rudy can tell his father isn't really paying attention. His eyes drift back to the little boy, studying him, examining him, in that curious manner he often has. It's a special kind of attention, never accorded to Susie or, Rudy is certain, to himself.

“Very good, son. Very good,” Dad says, then he steps back. “We'd better get you out of these things or you'll have your aunty to answer to.”

Dad tows Adam by the forearm into the shade of the patio umbrella, where he strips the boy down to his brand new, ready-for-kindergarten underpants. Further invigorated in his near-nakedness, Adam bounces into the house, while Dad shakes out the muddy clothes and drapes them over his arm with a long, contemplative “Hmmm.” Rudy, detecting the signs of a father-son talk, folds the corner of his page and gets up. A lecture from Dad on this flat, hot Sunday afternoon would be almost as tedious as Robinson Crusoe's worries about the future of his soul. But Dad comes over and places a firm hand on his shoulder, preventing escape. For several seconds he says nothing, while Rudy, feigning preoccupation, tries to hold his balance standing on the outside edges of his feet.

“I know your brother's young,” Dad eventually says, “but it pleases me when you spend time with him. He needs to spend more time
doing boy things, if you know what I mean.”What Dad means is that Adam is a sissy, Rudy thinks. But he says nothing. “I was thinking that perhaps Adam could join you and the Heaney boys for baseball or street hockey one of these days,” his father continues.

The Heaneys are the only other boys in the neighbourhood who go to his school. They're stocky and foul-mouthed, and they insist that only girls go to the public library for something to do.

“He's too little, Dad,” Rudy protests, forsaking his balance. “Besides, he doesn't like sports. He'd just get in the way.”

Dad's shoulder grip tightens. “A brother is a valuable thing, Rudy. Someday you'll wish you'd spent more time with Adam. He looks up to you, you know.”

It's the sort of remark that can't be argued with. Still, Rudy ducks defiantly from his father's arm. “I should talk to
your
brother. I bet he'd agree with me. Little brothers are a pain.”

“My brother and I had very little to do with each other,” Dad says, his tone peculiar. “That's why I'm telling you these things.”

Frowning, Rudy tries to remember a story his grandfather once told him about Uncle Ernie—something about climbing a mountain. An important, beautiful mountain. But the memory has slipped out of reach, if it was ever real to begin with.

Inside the house, Aunty Mary's voice rises, questioning Adam's state of undress in her usual tone of exasperation. Lunch, Rudy guesses, will be late. He plants his feet in the patches of shade offered by a pair of potted azaleas and clasps his hands behind his head. A drop of sweat trickles down his side from his armpit.

“Where is your brother anyway?” he says. “Why don't we ever see him?”

Dad reaches down for Adam's muddy shoes. “He left home as a young man,” he says stiffly. “He might have left Ceylon.”

Pondering this, Rudy corrects his father absently. “Sri Lanka, Dad. They changed the name. Remember?”

Dad smiles. “Why do I need to remember? I have a son who knows everything. He's going to be a very wise teacher one day.”

Rudy makes a face. “I'm gonna be an archaeologist,” he says, and Dad tousles his hair.

After lunch, giving in to his father's wishes, Rudy suggests to Adam that the two of them go back outside to check on the warrior sculpture. Adam, dressed and clean, beams with an enthusiasm that Rudy finds both heartening and embarrassing. He watches his brother slide down from his chair and bolt toward the back door, only to be intercepted by Aunty Mary's washcloth. Observing the struggle that takes Aunty and Adam from the kitchen sink to the laundry room in an exchange of physical and verbal tugs—“You didn't eat any Jell-O.” “Don't want any.” “Stand still; your face isn't clean yet.” “Yes it is.” “Do you need to use the toilet?” “No!” “Put your shoes on!”—Rudy is struck by a realization that thanks to his brother he himself has been spared the worst of Aunty Mary's suffocating attentions. Of course, if it weren't for Adam, he then thinks, Aunty Mary wouldn't need to be here. But this latter thought is confusing and frightening, and he pushes it away.

In the laundry room, Adam slides his feet back into his muddy sneakers then slaps open the screen door. “Come on, Rudy!” he calls over the metallic squeal. “Hurry! Do you think it'll be dry yet?”

Rudy strides importantly to the laundry room and follows his brother outside.

Halfway across the lawn, however, Adam comes to an abrupt halt. “It's wrecked!” he cries. “It's all wrecked!”

Rudy carries on with deliberate calm. He reaches the sculpture and sees that two of Adam's stones, presumably the head and one of the arms, have toppled to the grass. Adam comes up behind, his face a crumpled mess of tears and flecks of yellow gravy that escaped Aunty's washcloth.

“It's wrecked,” he repeats through his sobs.

Rudy crouches beside his brother, like a grown-up would. He places a hand on Adam's quivering shoulder. “No, it's not,” he says. “We can fix this. Don't cry. We'll just mix up some more mud and stick these back on.” Basking in his newfound maturity, he reaches for one of the stones with further consolations—“No problem, men; this'll be a cinch”—then he freezes as Adam kicks the warrior.

The remaining arm lands next to Rudy with a soft thud. He scowls, incredulous, as his brother moves in for another go.

“Adam! What're you doing?! Stop that!”

Still crouching, he lunges to protect what's left of the warrior, but a vigorous kick knocks him back. In the seconds it takes him to stand, his brother, sniffing and grunting, sends stones and dried mud flying across the grass. When nothing remains of his sculpture, Adam stops. His face, though still messy, is no longer distressed. Rudy clenches his hands to keep them from smacking his brother.

“You idiot!” he squeaks. “We could have fixed it! Why do you have to be such a baby?”

Adam doesn't answer. His big-brother maturity hopelessly deflated, Rudy picks up a stone and fires it at the wooden fence as hard as he can. The crack of the impact makes Adam gasp. Rudy holds his breath, waiting for more tears—theatrical wails that will bring Aunty Mary out to the boy's defense, maybe even Dad and Susie, too. But Adam stays quiet. Bending for another stone, Rudy glances at his brother and notices then the stream running down Adam's leg into his sneaker.