Barnacle Love (18 page)

If I pressed my ear right up to the mesh screen of my bedroom window I could hear the city. The air, punctuated by the sounds of sirens, ambulances and fire trucks, smelled thick and warm. I wanted to meet these noises and return to spread exaggerated tales of blood and smoke and dead people being carried away on stretchers.

O Canada!

Our home and native land!

True patriot love in all thy sons command.

6:51
P.M
They wouldn’t leave. My father had bestowed his final dollar prize on Manny, but they wanted more. Manny looked up at my window to see if I was there, but I was careful to hide out of sight. I could hear them jeering and pestering my father. They laughed as he stumbled off the path and onto the lawn. I saw their faces grow bolder, angrier.

“You fucken drunk!” Manny shouted.

“Get-out-a-yere!” my father yelled.

“He’s embarrassed of you.” Manny looked up again to my window. “Afraid to hang around us anymore cause you’re a drunk.”

“Get out!”

They all continued to laugh except for Manny. The others rattled our fence. There was a moment when I wanted to throw myself out the window, imagined I could land softly on my feet and they would scurry in fear. My
legs felt wobbly and my head began to throb and hurt; the kind of pain you get from taking water up your nose in the pool, that sort of brain-freezing pain, the kind you’re helpless to stop. Manny then kicked the wrought-iron fence; all the while he looked up at my window. I could see my father. He managed to get up and moved toward the garden hose. He fumbled with the nozzle then turned on the water. As my father moved toward the boys, some scooted off, but others, like Manny and Dennis, sat solidly on their bikes, defiant. It was as if they welcomed the cold water on such a hot day. As he moved onto the veranda his feet became tangled in the loops of the hose. He lost his footing and fell backward, silently tumbled down the green-turfed steps and landed facedown on the Interlock path. His body opened up for a moment and then pulled tightly into a ball, like a pill bug, still.

As he slowly raised his head I could see the horror on their faces. Everyone took off, scattered nervously.

I waited.

He wasn’t getting up.

The hose danced like a spitting cobra without its charmer. The water cut great curves and arches against the sky. The nozzle finally wedged itself in a curlicue of the wrought iron, where it sprayed against the flag, which flapped like a drenched towel.

He still wasn’t up.

I ran downstairs, looked out the storm door to make sure that no one was around, then leapt down the veranda stairs in one bound. He lay contorted, beads of sweat gleaming as they trickled down his bald head. The blood that ran from his nose covered his lips like a clown’s.

“
Pai! Acorda!
Wake up!” I wedged my arms under his armpits, dragged him step by step into our house. In his room I hoisted him onto the bed as he clutched his invisible heart, silently mouthing the words to the anthem. But the tempo was lost; he was a man alone with his words. He caught me with his steel-blue gaze, his eyes darted around my face before they slowed down, locked with mine. I kept thinking about how big his head was compared to the rest of his shriveled little body.

“
Não quero mais sonhos.
” His voice strained then cracked. “Dreams, no more dreams.” His eyes were big. “You the man! You my little man.” He turned to his side and through the snorting sobs came, “
Sonhos, não quero mais sonhos
,” until the words trailed off into a whisper.

7:36
P.M
I walked outside, turned off the hose, and cleared the drenched veranda of everything: clothing, beer bottles, his vinyl chair. I placed his hat on my head. I stopped to look at Jesus standing there with his smug expression, his feet covered in gaudy pink and blue plastic flowers. I walked into the house and dropped everything on the living room floor, shut all the windows and locked the front door before I moved to turn off the stereo. My eyes became fixed on the wobbling record. I changed the record speed to
SLOW
. The voice became long and distant, a song buried in a dark tunnel as it struggled to find its way out. I was getting used to hearing and seeing things in that way. The needle settled in a groove, caught:
t … h … e … r … i … s … e—t … h … e … r … i … s … e—t … h … e … r … i … s … e—t … h … e … r … i … s … e …

WHEN I WAS ALONE, WHEN
my friends didn’t walk home from school with me or I managed to dodge into a laneway, there was something special about the glimmer of a silvery bit of metal buried underneath gravel and dead leaves or the burnt red of a rusted iron rod. I was fifteen and although it wasn’t expected of me anymore, I still found myself picking up small shards of metal or flattened tin cans. The real prize was “in the orange,” as I liked to call it, a thin sheet of copper or a ball of knotted copper wire.

Like the clicking sounds of old telegraph machines that sliced through the wind on sagging wires, Mother’s words rang clear:
Listen to the wind; see the wind.
I would raise a moistened finger or toss a blade of grass into the air to gauge where pieces of corrugated roof may have blown or tin cans rolled into the narrow gullies between garages.
These scraps were my mother’s treasures, and I was glad to offer them to her.

Much of what I found had gathered in the narrow crawl space, probably a foot at its widest point, that separated our garage from my father’s pigeon house. When I was a boy I loved to play in the aviary and sit on a small stool in the corner with my drawing pencils and paper. I loved the way the pigeons’ wings fluttered as they flew short distances from perch to perch, how their puffed breasts squeezed into the smallish holes, how they sidestepped on the narrow ledges my father had fixed to the wall. I especially loved the whistle in their wings, whirring in my ears as their soft plumes see-sawed all the way down to the encrusted ground. It was their flight that I tried to record in my drawing book, the mad frenzy of beating wings in the light that filtered through a Plexiglas roof and penetrated the dried pigeon shit like a stained glass window.

I came in through the garage and peered through the chicken-wire frame of the aviary. There was nothing inside. It had been empty for a few years. I allowed myself to remember how gentle my father had been when he would nudge a pigeon’s breast up with his knuckles. The pigeon would peck at his fist. But his hand would always be rewarded with one or two small eggs that nestled in the webbing between his fingers, or a hatchling, its bulging eyes and stiff white feathers bursting from its pimply raw skin.

“Just one drop each,
filho
,” he would say.

I would hover the dropper over their greedy beaks, pinch the end and allow the droplet to bulge at the tip before it fell into their pink gullets.

I ran down the path and made my way up to the attic. I tipped my knapsack over, spilling the contents across my mother’s workspace, an old Singer sewing machine that hung upside down. She looked at my “catch of the day” and her eyes narrowed with the clear idea of where the key to the Spam can or that spring would go. She made me feel like it was all destined, as if there was importance in my work, and that together something wonderful was possible.

“Ahhh, and look at this cup.” She rolled the child’s tin cup between her palms. “A hat! It would make a wonderful fisherman’s hat.”

She held it above the seated figure she was working on, a man about a foot high with a cable-knit sweater she had carefully painted. The cup sat nicely proportioned to his head.

“
My
fisherman,” she nodded. She searched in my expression for a shared recognition of who this latest whirligig figure was. I pretended to know and it gave her such satisfaction. She allowed me to sit with her in the attic. Quietly, against the glow of candlelight, her shredded hands betrayed how gingerly she worked the metal, holding the tin snips with such confidence and power.

“Do your hands hurt?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she paused to lift her head and stretch her neck. The faint smoke caused by the soldering drifted upward in curvy streaks. “But it’s a good hurt.”

“
Mãe
, there’s no such thing.”

“Oh, but there is,
filho.
”

I heard my father’s muffled curses; he was sure to be drunk by now, submersed in the basement like a mole, drinking from his store of homemade wine.

“When your father brought me here,” she began her story without disrupting the flow of her work, “the first thing I saw on that pier in Halifax was a weathervane, a green rooster with four cups that caught the wind and spun in the ocean air. It reminded me of home, the place I wanted to leave and the people I missed already.”

My father continued to swear at the top of his lungs. I could place exactly where he was by how loud he was—the top of the basement stairs. My mother searched on her table for the tin snips, desperately looking for something to drown him out.

My mother spent most of her time in the attic, twisting and hammering away at her scraps of metal. My sister was hardly ever at home; she seemed to always be studying for something. I had constructed my own set of rules for friends, how they were not to call on me or drop by without arranging things beforehand. I was angry that I allowed him to penetrate my world the way he did, but I thought it would be easier.

A few months earlier my Aunt Louisa had convinced my mother to visit Paulo, a faith healer from Brazil who claimed to heal sickness by ridding people like my father of the evil spirits that inhabited them.

“What else is there to do?” Aunt Louisa had said.

I could hear their voices through the heating vent in my room. I rolled the slatted grate wider.

“I’m not sure, Louisa. I don’t like this man everyone is talking about.”

“It can’t hurt. What is it that worries you?”

“Is he a man of God?”

“I can’t answer that. But he’s a man who might be
able to help. You’ve tried everything and still—” A sudden blast of hot air shot through the tunnel of galvanized metal and drowned out their voices.

My mother had gone to meet this healer and, a couple of hundred dollars later, returned with a bag of herbs that she would pinch like cotton candy and place in her cast iron skillet. I had seen her do this many times before, her solitary ritual. It was always performed when my father was out of the house. A match was dropped on the small mound of tumbled herbs; they would burn quickly into orange embers. Like incense, it was only when the glow left the charred twigs that the smoke would swirl in wisps. She’d sway the pan in front of her, walk into every room and say something, always mumbled. It had frightened me at first but then it became normal, like all things repeated.

The herbs were also versatile. To ensure their success even further, my mother had sewn tiny satchels no bigger than a dime and stuffed them with her herbs. She offered mine on a safety pin and fastened it on the strap of my undershirt. My sister didn’t want one at first, afraid it would damage her clothes, but then, boldly in front of me, pinned it to the front clasp of her Dici bra. My mother had cuffed her ear lightly.

“What’s the big deal?” my sister asked.

Embarrassed, I had left the room.

The herbs could also be boiled and the tea mixed with cod liver oil, which never really mixed, just congealed into a blob at the bottom of the small glass my mother offered us. My sister and I would pinch our noses then chase it down with milk.

My mother was willing to try anything. “That’s the source,” my Aunt Louisa had said one evening, pointing to the plant shelf filled with cacti, “the devil’s plant!” Her eyes widened for greater effect and the raised mole on her forehead seemed to flash like a beacon. I had laughed. “You no mess with the devil,” she trembled, “he lives in the best houses.” She seemed pleased with herself for discovering the root of our troubles and for deadening my laughter. The next day, all the cacti were thrown out.

A snap in the wind brought my mother to attention. My father was silent for the time being. She looked out the attic window.

“Go to bed now,
filho.
Be quiet on your way down.”

“Why don’t you leave him,
Mãe
?” I asked.

Her chin lowered to her chest. She was growing weary of the question in its various forms.

“He needs me,” she replied.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?”

“No. There are still his boots to paint, baskets of fish to fill, and then I have to fix this small fan propeller I found last week.” She patted the table with her hands in search of the propeller.

“Good night,
Mãe.
” I was too old to kiss her.

I lay in bed thinking about my mother, her determination to make something out of nothing.

I thought about The Dream—why they came here. I always thought it had been for the same reason. Mother had her attic and her metal and us. But my father didn’t seem to have anything; he didn’t seem to want anything, as if The Dream wasn’t worth holding on to. He dwelled on the “nothing.” Still, she always protected him as if she
needed to, had to. “We all have our crosses to bear,” she’d say. “Remember. Despite it all, he’s a good man. Just lost his way, I think.”

I couldn’t remember the last time I had gone to bed before midnight. Usually, the poisonous slurs that erupted from my father’s mouth as he stood at the bottom of the stairs kept me from sleep. My sister, Terri, slept in the room next to me and at nineteen had honed a boldness that both excited and frightened me.

“Shhh!” was followed by, “Be quiet!” through her door.

One night it had the desired effect; he heard her and shuffled down the hallway. I could hear his hands sliding along the paneling in the corridor to guide him. He descended into the damp basement, grumbling, “
Putas
in my house.” He was yelling those angry words,
cocksuckersh
and
fuckersh
—the
sh
sound was a trademark of our anglicized Portuguese. I wanted him to be like one of my uncles who got drunk and laughed, lay on a couch somewhere when no one was looking and slept it off. My father was different.