See, this is what I hate. The minute we’re in the door, Mom puts on the tea. The first thing my nose and ears detect is a pork roast crackling away in the oven, producing a smell of such comfort and joy my eyes almost roll back inside my head. But here’s what’s astounding: at no time in my life can I remember my parents ever leaving the house when there was something in the oven. Dad is what you might call a reverse firebug. He’s obsessive on the subject of fire prevention, perhaps owing to an incident with Jack Daniel’s and lighter fluid during a summer’s camping trip we took when I was a kid. One minute he was kicking the barbecue into the lake and the next the cuffs of his polyester pants were alight—they went up with a synthetic gasp and melted against his calves.
So Dad, to put it mildly, is vigilant these days when it comes to fires. The idea that he risked home and business to make sure the number one son got pork for supper takes the edge off my appetite somewhat.
My mother bustles back and forth, banging the biscuit tin against the cookie tin, taking down plates, making a big deal of me, home, in the kitchen. Dad heads to the living room to wrangle with the fireplace. None of that is what I hate exactly, although it kind of is in a way. But mostly it’s the noise coming out of my mother. This weird sing-song she keeps chanting, a sort of mantra, as the Eastern-religion types call it.
“Tea for Larry, Larry loves his tea, God only knows—don’t you, Larry? You’ll have some biscuits with that, won’t you? Larry can eat biscuits, that’s for sure. A bit of cheese maybe, or—oh, I have some nice raspberry preserves from the bushes out back, Larry loves raspberry—don’t you Larry?”
What is she doing? She’s asking me questions and talking to herself at the same time. It’s the strangest thing—she isn’t even looking at me as she digs around, mumbling as though senile into the cupboards. We go through this every time I come home, and this, I realize—this thing that’s happening right here and now, this ritual of ours—is precisely what I hate. Because I’ve finally figured out what she’s doing. My mother is reassuring herself that I’m here, and—most importantly—that nothing has changed.
It never used to bother me before, in fact it felt natural and good. Me plunking my malnourished ass into the vinyl chair, my mother swirling around, clattering plates down in front of me, extolling me to let the tea “have a good steep” before reaching to pour myself a mug, Dad messing around in the next room with the fire, getting things nice and toasty in there for whenever I’m ready to come in and “have a good sit.”
It annoys the hell out of me all of a sudden.
“Mom,” I say, “sit down.”
“Just let me cut you a couple of slices of bread. Nice fresh bread today.”
“I’ve got a ton of biscuits here, Mom, it’s almost suppertime.”
“But you love the fresh bread,” insists my mother, sawing away at a new loaf. “Just one or two slices.”
“I know where it is if I want it.” I make my voice firm. I don’t think I’ve done it with her before. My deeper, question-mark-free, in-class voice.
My mother stops and looks up at me.
“Are you sure?” she says. As if I’ve just told her her bread tastes like shit. As if I’ve sprouted wings and am flitting around the light fixture above us.
“Yes,” I almost yell.
“Well you don’t need to yell, Larry.”
“I’m not yelling, Mom. I’m being emphatic.”
“Well, I don’t know why you need to be so emphatic about a couple of slices of bread.”
“You’re
the one who’s being emphatic about a couple of slices of bread,” I explain. “I’m responding in kind.”
Mom puts down the bread knife. “Dad,” she calls. “Will you have a piece of bread? I cut some for Larry, but he doesn’t want it now.”
In trundles my father, wiping slivers of wood from his pants.
“What’s he got against bread?” Dad wonders aloud to the cosmos.
I jerk forward and seize two handfuls of biscuits.
“Look! Biscuits are bread! Look at all this bread I’m having! Clearly I have nothing against bread!”
“Other people might wanna eat those you know,” Dad remarks as he pulls up a chair.
“He’s being emphatic,” emphasizes my mother.
“So that’s what he’s doing,” says Dad.
“Supper’s in an hour, Larry, you shouldn’t have all those biscuits.” My mother is turned away from me now, facing the stove.
I place the biscuits back on the plate, as opposed to throwing them at something. I take a moment to arrange them, being a bit prissy about it in order to annoy my Dad.
He looks at me in disgusted silence until I give in and meet his eyes. “Don’t go putting those back on the plate,” he says slowly. “Jesus Christ, is that what they’re teaching you up there in university?”
“Yes,” I reply. “They don’t feed me in university. They teach me to grab biscuits. Second-year Biscuit-Grabbing.”
I never realized how much they resent it. How nervous it makes them.
At Jim’s, the kitchen mostly smelled like dog. The whole house smelled like dog and wood smoke, so pungent it fogged out even Moira’s cigarettes.
Moira herself was at the table, smoking and watching a small black and white television with terrible reception.
“Hi, Moira,” I said.
“I’m not cooking,” said Moira without turning around. She jabbed her smoke in my direction.
Jim told her she didn’t have to. “Me ‘n Larry are more than capable,” he said. “Just take that thing upstairs.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about until Moira, expelling a brutalized sigh, leaned forward and turned off the TV. She yanked the plug out of the wall, wrapped the cord around the set and hoisted it under her arm like you see some women carrying their toddlers. In the other hand she balanced her ashtray and smokes.
“You make sure you keep that fire going then,” she yelled on her way down the hall.
Jim went to the stove and threw in a couple of chunks of wood. Jim’s wood stove was just like the one at Grandma Lydia’s, before she had electricity installed. As a kid, I got to mess around with the stove a lot because it was my job to dispose of Grandpa Humphries’s used Kleenex. It’s remarkable the crap adults are able to convince kids to do in the guise of having an important duty bestowed upon them. It probably wouldn’t have been so attractive a prospect to me if it hadn’t meant I got to burn stuff up. It was fun, manoeuvring the handle into the slot, then heaving the cast-iron burner aside to peer into the mini-inferno beneath.
I looked around for an electric stove or microwave, but it seemed the Arsenault kitchen was equipped with neither. Something occurred to me. My Grandpa Campbell’s house was old as well, but a two-storey, unlike the Humphries’s cottage. There were vents in the ceilings so the heat could travel to the upstairs bedrooms. As kids, me and Janet and Wayne would lie on the floor after we had been sent to bed, listening at the vents, hearing every word the grown-ups uttered. Mostly we couldn’t believe how much they cursed when we weren’t around. The vents were not complicated—they were basically holes in the floor with a decorative grille to keep us from sticking our hands or feet down into the kitchen.
So I craned my neck. Upward. Jim and Moira’s kitchen had the same kind of vents—maybe Moira was even crouched up there listening. It dawned on me then just how old Jim’s place was, as old as Grandma and Grandpa Campbell’s, as old as Lydia’s. I hadn’t recognized this before—that is, I knew his house was old, but, on PEI anyway, every house I’ve been in that was built before electricity is—how do I put this?—kept up, as they say. Jim’s place is
cozy, but it hasn’t exactly been kept up. Which seems like a bad idea, with an old house. My father hates them, he says they’re firetraps. Before I was born, and before they took over the Highwayman, my parents had been thinking of buying a big Georgian home on the outskirts of Charlottetown and turning it into an inn, a poor-man’s Crowfeather. But Dad said the thing was a money pit. The cost of rewiring alone would have devoured any possibility of an education savings for me. That’s a strange thing to think. My parents could have had an inn with electricity, or a son with a future. The idea that one equals the other; one cancels the other out.
“Jim,” I said, “you guys only have the wood stove here?”
Jim removed a couple of plastic tumblers drying in the dish rack and plunked them on the table. He was moving slowly, answering even slower. Water circles formed.
“If it’d been up to me,” he finally rumbled, “there wouldn’t even be electricity. But that one upstairs,” he tilted his chin heavenward, Moiraward, “she had to be able to get her stories on TV, otherwise it was no deal.”
I glanced down at the wainscotting. More vents. “But you guys have a furnace, right?”
Jim waved a hand as he sat down, and I heard something pop in his back—so loud in the quiet kitchen it made me twitch. “Never use it,” he said.
“Really?” My voice went high with effort. Even with half a pint of rum into us, the conversation was unspooling with about the same ease experienced by that pregnant cow of my youth, straining to expel head and hooves. “Why not?”
“Ah,” Jim poured what remained of the rum into the tumblers. “It’s ancient, for one thing. Who knows when the vents were last cleaned. Safer to just leave it be.”
“Yeah, but it must get freezing in here.”
Jim wrapped both long hands around his glass for a moment before cocking an eyebrow at me.
“You cold, Larry?”
Actually, I was sweltering. The wood stove had probably been going since dawn. That’s the thing about heating a two-storey house with one stove. The only way you can get warmth into every room is to let your kitchen be a sauna.
“Not at all,” I said.
“Well, there you go.”
Just to show him I was sincere, I shuffled off my jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. Jim watched, dully, before squinting back into his drink. These heavy silences kept occurring, which still the booze was doing nothing to dispel. At one point when we were outside, I realized we had been chucking the ball for Panda at least twenty minutes without saying a word to each other.
But that makes it sound like I was participating in it, the silence. And I don’t feel I was, exactly. That is, the silences were all Jim’s—they were a Jim thing. I was suffering them, as opposed to participating in them. Jim was the author of the silences; I was his audience. They seemed to spread from his mood, like a dark liquid creeping over a surface, seeping into the ground. I guess I was the surface—I was the ground.
Panda’s toenails needed cutting. The only noise for a few moments was the sound of the dog clattering and snuffling around somewhere under the table before flopping on top of my feet and starting to snore.
“You cut all the wood yourself?” I inquired at last. God help me, I thought. We could be talking about metaphysical poetry right now. This was a conversational gambit I might use with Uncle Stan.
Jim leaned back and, for some reason, unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt. Slowly, he started rolling them up. The deliberation of this gesture was unnerving. My defence system kicked in, shot some adrenalin into my bloodstream.
He’s going to beat you up now
, it told me. I touched my nose—a thing I do whenever I feel threatened. Instinctively, I covered my nose. Thank you Lydia Humphries for that particular quirk.
The rational part of my brain instructed me to sit tight—Jim would not just haul off and punch me for asking about wood. But his mood, it was so weird. I didn’t know what to expect.
Jim rolled his sleeves as high as they would possibly go—practically to the shoulder. Then he looked at me, raised his arms, and flexed. His biceps popped out.
“See?” said Jim.
“Wow.” His arms were so long and ropey.
“That’s what keeps me fit. Used to work out at a boxing club in Wethering for a while, but who needs it? You try chopping a cord of wood every day, see who messes with ya.”
I imagined Jim in his yard, heaving the axe—sweat flying from his black hair—bringing it down on a slab of wood with a satisfying, splintery
chunk
that echoes through the surrounding woods as if to warn it what’s to come. There was something so primal about the image, so Canadian, so Jim.
“Let me know if I can ever give you a hand with it sometime,” I offered.
Jim nodded, upending his tumbler of rum. “Maybe we’ll go out a little later, chop some to bring in.”
Panda lay heavy on my feet. He groaned and shifted, warming my ankles against his chest. One of my feet began to tingle for lack of circulation, so I moved it, causing Panda to gurgle indignation before jumping up and clattering to the corner of the kitchen where a tartan blanket was laid out for him. He flopped down onto it with an aggrieved huff he may well have learned from Moira.
Jim had his head cradled in both hands, suspending it above his empty glass. It was a desolate position—childish,
too, somehow. Like a kid told to sit there until the broccoli has disappeared from his plate. I could see tiny flecks of dandruff standing out brightly against Jim’s hair, seeming to have landed there like snow.
After forever, he raised his head to look at me. His eyes, although bloodshot, were precisely as black as his hair. He was like Dracula—Dracula with dandruff. His lips pulled themselves back from his teeth.
“Larry,” he whispered. I met his eyes and wanted to cover my nose again.
“A piece of advice. If you’re going to bring booze over here, next time bring more than a pint.”
Jim looked back down at the pointless glass on the table, long fingers raking his cheeks.
Minutes of nothing went by. Panda snored. The little hell inside the wood stove crackled away.
CHRISTMAS EVE
, the yearly trudge out to the car to plow through the snow to Stan and Maud’s for dinner. I wasn’t in the best of moods all day, anticipating it. I can’t understand the point of us going over there every year. Not to mention that all week I’ve been inwardly griping at the necessity of having to buy a present for every last member of the Humphries family. This is a Christmas Eve tradition—we all get together at Stan and Maud’s, stuff ourselves, watch Maud pour my mother one glass of wine too many so she starts giggling in a semi-hysterical way at everything coming out of Lydia’s mouth, and then open our presents to and from one another and marvel inwardly at each other’s bad taste. Truth be told, I have the feeling this whole ritual was initiated on my behalf, to give me the feeling of a big family Christmas
seeing as I’m an only child. I’m
old
now, though, I wanted to tell my parents, I’m almost twenty, I don’t give a shit. I don’t need someone to play dinkies and army men with after dinner. But parents get weird about their traditions, just like they get weird about a couple of pieces of bread, should you turn them down at the wrong time.