Believing Cedric (6 page)

Then, just as the drought and dust of the decade seemed to be settling into a tolerable future, the Second World War rose out of it. Only this time it was another list of people who had taken on the role of “the sudden enemy.” Instead of the anti-Chinese, anti-Mennonite, and anti-Eastern European tendencies of the First World War, the politicians were flaring up with comments and actions that were in turn anti-Semitic, anti-German, and anti-Hutterite. The worst of it being against the Japanese, who, if they weren't interned, had to eke out an existence under a rain of bigotry and insults that pelted them from the moment they left their houses to the moment they'd locked themselves in again. Peter felt sorry for them, but not as much for their hardships as for their naivety, the fact that they'd let themselves believe—because they were integrated, because they were Canadians in Canada—that that would be enough. He could see it in their faces, the disgusted surprise, the shock at how easily a community could turn on itself. Their assumption that everyone would be seen as equal in the gloom of hard times, was a mistake he knew, they wouldn't make twice.

In 1940, as it became increasingly clear that the war would be a long one, the government revoked its “no conscription” policy. He was thirty-four years old, which wasn't the most sought-after age for a soldier, but it was young enough. He began the habit of walking into the house after work and, before even taking off his shoes, sitting heavily on the bench beside the door to sift through the mail, scanning the return addresses for anything that looked official or military. He did this religiously for five years, chewing the inside of his lip as he placed the scanned mail on the wood beside him. A draft letter never came.

Within only four years of the war ending, he had given away all three of his daughters, two of them to men working in the growing sugar industry and one to a returning air force pilot who had never gone overseas or been under enemy fire but had somehow managed to crash two farm planes in the months before their wedding, his arm in a cast as he walked down the aisle. One of his daughters became a school teacher, something Peter had always thought of as a noble pursuit, as well as his being comforted by the fact that nothing unsafe, nothing destructive, ever happened in classrooms.

When his father turned seventy-five in 1956, Peter and his wife had the entire family over for a meal and a drink to celebrate. Peter nursed a single rum and Coke throughout the evening, until, with the ice having melted and the taste gone flat, he went into the kitchen and poured it down the sink, spattering water around with his hand to rinse the brown film from the enamel.

Near the end of the night, after most of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren had gone home, his father pulled out a carton of eggs—a treat for the horses that he never failed to bring—and gestured to Peter that he was going outside. The two of them stepped out and walked through the dark, the frost on the grass crunching under their feet, until they were leaning on the barbed-wire fence near the barn. The horses, recognizing their previous owner's smell and shape, had soon gathered in front of them, nickering in low murmurs, their heads high, ears pointed and quavering.

His father hinged the carton open, and there was just enough light to see the two bulging rows inside. “So,” he began, “the Russians went back into Hungary. Like I thought they would.” He said this naturally, as if continuing a long conversation they'd been having, speaking in Ukrainian, as he always did when addressing his immediate family, or animals. “Crushed their revolution. Now they're back to where they were.” He cleared his throat again. “Always the same.”

Peter didn't reply. As a rule, his father spoke very little, and even less about politics or the country he'd fled fifty years earlier. Which meant that, when he did, Peter usually stopped whatever he was doing—hammer in hand, shovel in dirt, standing in the cold—and listened.

“Like in the Ukraine, same thing. People trying to make changes, getting killed. And it's just simple things they want. To farm and go to church, read. But you know what? You can't change a Russian's mind. And as long as they're there . . .” He shrugged.

Peter watched his father take an egg out of the carton and hold it out to the closest horse, who wrapped its velvety mouth around it, lifted its head into the night sky, rolled the egg down the length of its tongue, and quietly crushed it at the back of its throat.

“I've heard stories about what Stalin did to us in the thirties. Had soldiers guarding the harvests and stock. Then he sent all the food away. They say there were so many starved bodies you couldn't count them.”

He took another egg from the carton, wrapped his fingers around it, and reached out farther, to a different horse. He waited for its nostrils to brush against his hand, then slowly opened it.

“I heard that, when the Nazis invaded, people were cheering. Thought they were finally free. But after the Germans did the same, the Russians came back anyway.”

He rubbed his knuckles along the same horse's forehead, working them into its broad swirl of hair, the horse pushing lightly against his hand. He didn't speak for a while. Then, “There are still stories about the concentration camps they made for us here in Canada. You know they kept them open for two years after the war ended, kept us working, men in bunks, behind barbed-wire, shooting at those who tried to escape. Afterwards, Ukrainian newspapers here were outlawed. But we slowly blended in. We have learned to be quiet.”

The shyest of the horses, which had been just off to the side of the others, began digging at the ground, swinging its head like a pendulum. His father noticed and walked over to it, getting as close as he could, trying to give it an egg before the others could crowd in. “We have worked hard to be out of Russia's reach,” he said gently, leaning farther over the fence, talking toward the horse's face. “We have worked very hard.”

When the others had reached him and were gathering closer, one of them nudged his arm and the egg fell from his hand, landing in a clump of bunchgrass, still intact. The timid horse had heard it, and sidled closer, surreptitiously manoeuvring through the others, and when it found the egg in the grass, it threw its head back high to swallow it, stamping the ground once.

His father straightened up, speaking through a smile, “Perfect.”

Now, six years later, Peter holds that conversation in his mind like a piece of incontrovertible evidence. He'd been following the lead-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis for weeks without even knowing he was. The
US
had been debating whether or not to invade Cuba for months, while the papers printed clips of a Russian naval buildup in the Atlantic that didn't make any sense. Then, the day before, Kennedy finally set the public straight, announcing that the world was indeed in crisis and that he had just given the Russians an ultimatum: Cuba was quarantined, lines on ocean charts were drawn, and the consequence of crossing them was firmly implied. The Russians, however, hadn't shown any sign of stopping.

Then today, after coming home from his shift, he'd picked up The
Lethbridge Herald
from the doorstep, flipped through it, and within minutes had walked to the cupboard of dusted bottles and pulled the whisky from the shelf. The front page read,
UNITED STATES AND RUSSIA MAY CLASH BY NIGHTFALL
, with a subheading stating that both
US
and Soviet forces had been ordered into a “state of combat readiness and diligence.” But what had struck him the hardest was a political cartoon inside. It had pictured the two leaders of the superpowers at a poker table, the tense faces of the political world watching from the barely illuminated sidelines, the smoke of Castro's cigar threading through the lamplight. Kennedy was sliding a teetering heap of poker chips into the centre of the table, Khrushchev eyeing him coldly above his cards. The president's mouth was open to say the one word in quotation marks below. “Call.”

True, he didn't know Russians in the same way his father had, but he was sure he understood them better than most people, and certainly enough to know that the world was about to see a nuclear exchange of some kind. Because the situation had already snowballed too far, too fast, and now, at the very least, one or two buttons would have to be pushed, and this, out of the simple need to maintain posture. Something,
somewhere
, had to be annihilated. As his father said, you cannot change a Russian's mind, and within days, whether the world realized it or not, those missile-laden ships carving through the sea toward Cuba had come to signify the very embodiment of Russia's political conviction, of its tenacity, of its bold and stubborn determination. Could anyone really picture such boats being snubbed, being wrist-slapped, and pointed back home like a child kicked out of a game for disregarding the rules? Not likely. No, Peter thought, sliding the newspaper onto the kitchen counter, this would come to blows. In the end, his father, thinking that they were out of Russia's reach, had been wrong.

As it happened, Peter's wife spent her Tuesday afternoons at a friend's house, and the fact that she wasn't there to spend time with, on this day of all days, seemed almost poetic. Because, as Peter was now substantiating, that was how you had to do it, you had to live like nothing was ever going to happen to you—you or anyone else you cared about. You had to buy your groceries, keep to schedules, and check your wrist for the time, all while you plodded along across this no-man's-land of a world, with catastrophes flaring up in every direction around you. That's what you had to do—that and nothing else. Peter was done with trying to calculate the statistical likelihood of getting hit between the frontlines. It was high. Higher than ever. And no amount of guessing or preparation could do a single thing about it.

Which, naturally enough, led him into his backyard, to sit with a bottle of whisky and watch the sky like it was Dominion Day and the fireworks had just popped from the ground and fizzled into the night sky, wavering sparks tracing them to the spot where they would detonate. There was even a part of him that was half-curious as to what it would look like, wondering if he would see the wave of destruction fanning out over the land like he'd seen on some of the safety commentaries before movies—which made you feel anything but safe—houses pulverized in microseconds, frames of instant tinder skeletons that wouldn't even have the time to topple to the ground.

Peter returned his drunken gaze to Cedric, who was now nearing his house. And as Peter was watching him, something bizarre happened: the boy stopped in his tracks and, blinking hard, held his hands out in front of him, turning them over, inspecting them. When he was finished, he let them drop to his sides and started taking in the rest of his surroundings, pivoting in a full circle, absorbing the details of the skyline, the knee-high grass, the coulee where his companions were climbing up the other side. Then, as if remembering something, he turned directly to Peter and started walking toward him. He was walking, Peter noted, in a very different manner now, with confidence and direction, ostensibly forgetting his sore ankle altogether.

Impulsively, Peter raised his glass at this strange Johnson boy, feeling a little dizzy, a little unsteady in his chair. “Hey, kid,” he mumbled, waiting to hear what would come out of his mouth next, “here'z . . . to th'end o'the worl' tonight.” He pushed the glass out to clink with an imaginary counterpart and took a sip.

The boy didn't flinch at what he'd said or at his inebriation. He had walked straight toward Peter and stopped just in front of him, placing his foot—his bad foot, as far as Peter reckoned—onto the raised deck where Peter's chair was perched. “See,” Cedric said, “the thing is, you're wrong about that. The world's not gonna end tonight, or tomorrow, or any time soon for that matter. Trust me.” A practised smirk, a sweep of his blond hair.

Peter shifted in his seat. “Oh yeah, kid? Wlll . . . I'm sher yer parens tellya everythin's fine'n'dandy, but I'm afraid th'truth is—”

“No,” Cedric interrupted. “That's not what they tell me. Not at all. In fact, if I was to go down that street
right
there,” he pointed, “and ask my parents about what you just said, about the world coming to an end tonight, they wouldn't be able to reassure me in the least. Instead, they'd exchange this kind of serious look and avoid the question, which, if you think about it, is the kind of thing that would make a boy lose sleep for weeks, months even, waiting around for the world to blow up. I mean,
Christ
.” Cedric shook his head. “What a thing to say to a kid.”

Now Peter was squirming in his chair, feeling more than uneasy and, to his unpleasant surprise, somewhat nauseous. “Look,” he slurred, “whut I'm talk'n'bout is politics, kid, 'bout complucated . . . adult things, 'kay? 'Bout Russian boats and Kenndy and . . .” Trailing off, feeling weary, annoyed even, Peter looked over Cedric's shoulder at the barn not far behind him, then at one of the horses he'd put out to pasture for his father. It
was
strange how calm the horses appeared, standing placid and regal.

Cedric cleared his throat.

Peter shook his head. “Anyweh, like isaid, these'r complucated . . . gron-up things, kid. Ya wuldn't unerstan.”

“Oh believe me,” Cedric said, smiling, “I know all about those adult things.” He straightened up. “Just like I know this crisis'll blow over. Like I know that, after it does, the Cold War will just build and build, long past Kennedy's assassination, and will only dwindle away just before the Soviet Union collapses.” The boy, looking quite happy with himself, gave Peter an exaggerated wink. “That's what I know.”

“Wha'ju . . . ?
Whah?
” Peter squinted.

Cedric removed his foot from the raised deck. He placed his hands in his pockets. “And I know much more than that,” he said, looking for a moment into the dry grass at his feet. “Much more. I mean, don't get me wrong, it isn't roses for everybody. Bad things happen. To the world. To me.” He swallowed. Then, shifting his weight, Cedric pulled a sudden finger from his pocket and pointed into Peter's face. “But it doesn't play out the way you think. So keep the doomsday trumpeting to yourself. You hear?”