Barnacle Love (15 page)

I could hear his urging: “Balance! … Balance! No hurt youself!” His fading voice mixed with the warm wind humming in my ears.

I was six then. As I grew older I ventured farther, past Senhora Rosa’s variety store where colored balls and blinking dolls wrapped in cellophane dangled from invisible strings tacked to the yellowed ceiling. Everything twisted and twirled every time I made my way into the store, pushing the large “Coke” handle and
tripping the familiar chime. I pedaled to the clicking of colored straws that covered my spokes, all the way to the top of our street to the synagogue, “da church for Jewish peoples,” and onto Dundas Street with the blur of the Red Rockets. That’s where I stopped.

By the age of seven, Palmerston, Markham, and Euclid Avenue all bored me. Manny had coined it “Name That House!” I’d call out a number and he would tell me the color of its brick: pink, blue, or lime green. For some, we were even able to name who lived there.

“86 Euclid?” I’d shout.

“Yellow with green porch, aluminum awning, Mr. Almeida by himself, breeds canaries.” A slight pause then, “Cheesy fingers—Rothmans!”

Manny was amazing. He had it right down to the brand.

When things got that predictable we moved on to new adventures, to the backs of our houses. I pedaled through the intricate labyrinth of laneways, with their crooked garage roofs, dark gurgling gutters, and tangled clotheslines. We would ride our bikes across the cracked and uneven concrete, dodging sewer grates and peeling out from gravel patches. Some nooks in the laneways had been good places to dump garbage: old shoes, a wedding dress, shopping carts, a wig, worn tires.

By age ten I knew everything about where I lived, every picket and dented door, the pitch of every mother’s call when the streetlights came on and we scurried onto our verandas and then into our dimly lit homes like ants disappearing into sand holes. After a storm, I knew how the water ran from the garage spouts toward the center of
our lane, how these small murky streams would meet and mix with spots of gasoline that dotted our laneway. Once together the colorful blue and violet film would swirl and gather before picking up speed and dumping itself into the storm sewer. We used to enjoy racing twigs or cigarette butts, anything that could float. We’d squat at the top of these alley creeks, name our men, and then drop them into the speeding rivulet. We’d run alongside, cheering.

I felt safe growing up. I was comforted by what I knew, what was familiar. It was only at night that the alley became sinister. I had a recurring nightmare that someone was trying to hurt me …
I dropped my bike and ran barefoot down my laneway. Small stones and shards of glass cut into my dirty feet. I couldn’t look back at their faces. I ran, opened my hands and chopped the wind in front of me. I could hear them breathing, mocking, “You, boy, with the pretty hair. Why don’t you come in, got something I’d like to share.” The words swam inside my head like minnows, tickled my brain: “little boy with the pretty hair” …

It took the summer that no one slept—the summer my family butchered a pig and Emanuel Jaques, the shoeshine boy, went missing—to realize the words my father had used to cushion me,
balance
and
no hurt
, and the place I knew so well could no longer protect me.

I would wake up in the morning to the whir of my sister’s blow-dryer mixed with Streisand’s “Evergreen” or the high-pitched vocals of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” blaring in the background. She was sixteen and in
a couple of weeks I’d be twelve, and that was one year before officially becoming a teenager, something I felt I was quite qualified to be considering only a week before I had found a hair between my legs—the first.

My sister and I lived in separate worlds: she stayed on the phone for hours, watching TV and listening to CHUM, all at the same time. I chose to spend my summer outside where I could get on my bike and pedal up the street to see Manny or Dennis, to trade hockey cards, play nearest-to-the-wall or buck-buck, or hop from one garage rooftop to the next all the way up the laneway. We’d take a break outside Senhora Rosa’s store and cool off with a Lola. Our bikes were our constant companions, our ticket to the world beyond our street and our neighborhood.

“Maybe that’s what he was doing,” Manny said.

“Who?” I asked, sucking on the now white ice of my grape Lola.

“Emanuel. He was working on Yonge Street shining shoes so that he could buy a new bike!” Manny was pleased with himself.

“What, and he never came back? No … I don’t think so. You know they’re saying he did things … for money. And it wasn’t shining shoes.”

“No,” Manny said. “I don’t believe what they say. I
know
he just rode away and didn’t want to come back.”

I wanted to believe Manny was right. Like Emanuel, all we wanted was an escape from our little Portuguese neighborhood. We wanted our mothers to buy peanut butter, Swanson TV dinners, and macaroni and cheese. We wanted our mothers to drive—to summer camp or the
Eaton Centre. We wanted our fathers to wear shirts and ties to work. We wanted them to go to the park and play with us, kick a soccer ball around. But there was always work, and then the other work they went to after dinner. If there was any time left over, it was used to fix the house and tend the gardens. It seemed we measured everything by time, or the lack of it. And we didn’t want to interpret, at the bank or when someone rang the doorbell selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners. We were tired of responding to the teasing of schoolmates—“No! We don’t eat fish every day!”—with clenched teeth. Some of us had already found ways to fight what it was we were supposed to be; my sister had gone from Terezinha to Terri, with an
i
, and even though my name was registered at school as Antonio, teachers always took the liberty on that first day of calling out Tony, and I never corrected them.

For our parents, Palmerston Avenue
was
“back home.” Nothing had ever really changed. There were always eyes behind curtained windows, like those of Senhora Gloria, who saw and heard and thrived on all things seen and heard. Fados sifted through screen doors, the smell of barbecued sardines wove through the chain-link fences, and colorful clothing and bleached towels flapped in the warm wind until they were hard and crunchy on the clotheslines. Our backyards were contradictions, with their neat rows of beans and tomatoes and kale propped up by a mishmash of weathered dowels, old hockey sticks, and scraps of quarter-round. Nothing was ever thrown out. Everything was to be used. Squirrels and raccoons were supposedly deterred by a series of tin cans filled with dried beans, or the rattle of nails against tin
pie plates suspended with twine. Large dill pickle jars sheltered the tender tomato plants from the unpredictable frost. My mother’s old pantyhose were used to tie the long bean plants on their rapid ascent. Even the large trout or bass that our neighbor Mr. Barber kindly offered my father—my mother insisted the man he lived with who lisped and wore outrageous shirts, Mr. Wolenska, was his brother—was always received with a smile and thanks, only to be whisked to the backyard where it was buried in the garden to be used as fertilizer. My father was convinced that lake fish weren’t good to eat, they didn’t have the natural sea salt that kept other fish healthy and free from disease and pollutants.

It was an annual event—
a matança
—the killing. This was the kind of thing that embarrassed me; here we were in a big city with butcher shops throughout Kensington Market and yet the farmer mentality brought over from the Azores had survived.

I watched as they dragged the pig from the dumper of my father’s truck and tied its hind legs with rope. The tongue lolled outside the pig’s mouth, its pinkness dragging on the dirty floor. Its snout was brown with gravel and sand. My Uncle David’s garage door was up so all our neighbors could see. He lived only three houses down from us on Palmerston Avenue, and it was roomier in his three-car garage. My uncles looped the rope over the rafters in the ceiling to hoist the pig off the floor. I held my breath against the taut sound of rope rubbing against the I-beam, the creaking sound of the pig’s spinning
weight. Uncle Clemente kicked the large plastic pail under the limp carcass. His cigarette dangled from the corner of his lip, the ash longer than the cigarette. He picked up a bucket of boiling water, doused the pig, and stood back. It swayed in the air, encased in a swirl of steam. Both Uncle Clemente and Uncle David began to rasp its skin with a kind of flexible steel blade, looped and held together by a wooden handle. They worked like lumberjacks in a squatting dance, dragging the blades over the pig’s haunches, down its round belly, and to its ears close to the floor. Taking turns ridding the pig of its fine hair. Uncle Clemente’s glasses clouded as he worked in the putrid steam. My Uncle David then stepped in and held the pig to keep it from turning. My Uncle Clemente wiped his knife on his jeans, moved close, and leaned on the pig with one hand to steady its weight. He adjusted his footing, bent slightly before he wiped his glasses in little circles with his thumb. He looked up at me for a second before slashing the pig’s throat with one swift swipe. I wanted to turn away but was drawn to the blood’s first squirt as it gurgled and streamed into the plastic pail. It turned purple as it hit the bottom of the blue pail and then liters of it became red, almost black, once again. My Uncle Clemente looked at me and grinned. He always liked to tease.

My father saw me come out of the garage, looked up and smiled. He had been busy digging a large hole for the pig’s guts beside the fig tree and between the rows of peppers. It was good fertilizer, he’d say. Without asking, I walked toward him and picked up a shovel to help. A daddy longlegs had been hiding under the handle and it
waltzed up my arm. I let it crawl on the back of my hand before raising it safely to one of the branches above.

“What you do?” my father said. And almost as if catching himself, “You want to help?” He sat on his haunches and hung his head between his knees. I wanted to leave. My father was spending more and more time in the basement, entertaining friends in the middle of the day with his homemade wine and
presunto.
He was getting meaner with his words. My mother said that work would pick up soon; Portuguese people were doing better and could now afford to renovate their basements. They’d need his truck to help them remove all that soil.

His eyes remained fixed on me as I dropped the shovel.

“Here, come with me.”

I followed him back into the garage. The first pail was now full and ready for the women who would boil it for hours with parsley, garlic, and rice until it turned black and thick like mud and was ready to be forced into the bleached intestines to make sausage. Tomorrow my mother would cut one up and mangle it in a frying pan with olive oil. We’d spread it across our toast, the day before and where it came from forgotten.

“
Pronto
, Clemente. I ready with the hole!”

My Uncle Clemente placed a large stainless steel pail under the pig. I could feel my father’s hands on my shoulders; they were large and sun-dark, and their backs were covered with golden hair. My hands were small and fine and white, and the hair on them wasn’t visible, just felt like peach fuzz. A gentle squeeze was my cue to look up, pay attention. My Uncle Clemente raised a long
knife over his head, turned to me and smiled once again before he plunged the knife into the pig’s belly, exposed the inches of white fatty layers that opened like flowers in time-lapse photography. He sliced firmly down to the pig’s gullet then stood back. Foul gases and steam puffed from the bloated pig. My uncle turned around. His Coke-bottle glasses had steamed over. Behind him the intestines slowly tumbled out into the pail, all blue and purple and milky as the pig swayed in suspension. With a touch of ceremony, my father took a drink of wine and passed it around to the men. They all drank and mumbled prayers of thanks as they made the sign of the cross. The stench wafted across the garage and dug into our hair and clothes and throats. My father offered me the cup of wine but my stomach churned and my head spun.

“
Filho
, bring this stuff to the hole I dig outside.” He pointed to the jumble of guts. He stopped in mid-sentence to watch me spew the few pieces of toast I’d had that morning all over the garage floor. My Uncle David rolled his eyes and Uncle Clemente just shook his head, another thing to hose down on what was an already busy day. My father came over and lifted me up. I tucked my head and snotty nose into his collar, took in his scent of Old Spice as we moved through the backyard then down the stairs into the cool darkness of the basement. I could see my mother in the cellar kitchen chopping onions.

“What happened?” she asked.

“He’s no feeling good.” My father cupped my face. “Okay? … Okay?” He placed me on the covered sofa. Everything in my uncle’s basement—sofa, chairs, coffee table, and the large wooden TV—had once been on the
main floor. The living room had been converted to a bedroom when my grandmother and Aunt Louisa came from Portugal. A large floral bedspread that hung from a line divided the basement kitchen and family room. It was held up by wooden clothes pegs with rusted hinges. When we had large family gatherings, the bedspread came down and was converted into a tablecloth for the large pieces of plywood sitting on A-frames that were used as a dining table. There was a strange sense of comfort in knowing the routines and in understanding the function of every object in the house.

My mother came to sit beside me in her wilted dress. Her hair was tucked under her kerchief. She gently stroked my hair. I closed my eyes and heard my father’s footsteps as he moved away from me; her cool breath blew on my damp forehead. My aunts whispered behind the curtain. They sat around the kitchen table and chopped onions or parsley.

“It’s been a few days now. Still not a word, not even close to finding him.” I could hear my Aunt Louisa’s frustration tugging at her voice.

“They took his name away, you know. They gave him a new name—
Shoeshine Boy
,” my Aunt Zelia replied. “This is not a Portuguese name.”