Nights Below Station Street (8 page)

It was in his nature to drink, and he had to drink – he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t. To be what he was – what image he had of himself – it was only natural and authentic that he do so.

He crossed the line after he was thirty, that is, he fell under a tractor while fighting a fire. He was laid up for almost a year – periodically. And finally lost his job, and got drunk every day. Every time he drank, Joe would resolve to
quit. Sitting about the tavern, or down at the wharf, or working outside around the house, or hobbling once again to the liquor store through a variety of streets, as if he was making for himself some obstacle course and really wasn’t thinking of the wine he was about to buy, he would resolve to quit.

He would take his bottles down to the bank and throw them over – only to climb down after them in the middle of the night. The bank was about sixty yards from their back door, which faced the river. There were small spaces of grass and alders where men and women hid away in the afternoons to drink – old veterans and girls who had grown up to go nowhere, and ended up at fifty somehow still in print dresses, their hair clasped by some silver broach. Joe often hopped down there to drink with them, and they would sing some songs together. And sometimes one of his friends, a salesman from the Gaspé, who always had a bottle in the trunk of his car, would come along. Joe would bring him into the house, and the man would try to get Adele to call him Uncle Pete. Then in the morning Joe wouldn’t be able to stare himself or anyone else in the face. He would sit out in the porch, with his chair turned about facing the wall, while Rita and Adele walked out the door to church.

Once in January in his bare feet, he walked down over the bank and stepped on a broken wine bottle, cutting through to a tendon. After this his left foot bothered him also, and he found that he could no longer get a job full time – but only part-time doing odd jobs. For a while he took a job with a local finance company repossessing furniture. He would go into houses and while children cried in bewilderment and men swore at him and threatened him, and women both yelled and pleaded, outside the days were bright, and the heat played down like a vapour on the
steps, and dandelion heads lay tousled in the fresh-mown grass. He would take away chairs and couches – and feel sick of himself and the world. After a while he gave almost everything up, except drink.

Because of his difficulty, Rita had to start fending for herself at a time when it wasn’t as accepted or as natural for women to go out to work. At this time, for a woman to work meant the family had somehow fallen. That is, the very women who today were saying that a woman’s career was indispensable were quite prepared to stay home then, because staying home was as much commonplace as working now is. But Rita, and a thousand Rita’s like her, worked every day.

Joe remained in this phase of his drinking for seven years. Pledges from the priest didn’t solve matters, even when Father Dolan walked in telling Joe he would go to hell – if hell was not where he already was – while Rita sat in the corner, her breasts heavy, and Joe, who towered over the priest, nodded like a child.

Joe managed to stay away from the hospitals and clinics, and managed to stay clear of anyone who suggested they might have a solution for his drinking. In those days he hated the
AA
and the detox with a passion, and cursed every time they were mentioned. He also looked at Rita at this time as if he was blaming her for something that no one else understood.

Some nights they would find him alongside the ditch, as far away as Ridge Road, with his coat and mittens on, alone in a snowbank. Adele became coolly efficient at spotting his huge somewhat misshapen back against the long evening sky.

Then he gave it up for three months.

One night, after that three months, when Rita needed him to baby-sit, his nerves were bad; that is, she was going
out with people he felt had made fun of him and he felt one drink would make everything all right.

Well, all I need is one drink
, he thought to himself.
One beer. What’s a beer – it is nothing – a beer is nothing – it’s not going to be like last time – yes last time –”

And with these thoughts he went back and forth and looked out the window nervously – convinced at this instant that he would not drink. Or if he did everything would be different.

He had promised Rita he would baby-sit Adele. Rita was helping to make props for the Christmas play, she was pregnant with Milly. She had tried to get Joe interested in the Christmas play because she knew as long as he was working he would not drink – and Rita perhaps could also sense a drunk coming on.

It was getting close to Christmas and Joe had always found staying sober at Christmas impossible.

“Keep care of Delly – I’ll keep care of Delly – no problem.”

Thinking of a drink he was accustomed to the immediate fear that was now associated with this thought – and then the overwhelming security that he had been dry for three months – and that one beer wouldn’t hurt.

One beer is not going to make the difference between life and death
, he thought. The fact that Rita did housework for people who had no respect for him suddenly came to mind and made him angry.

He woke up Adele and put her in the half-ton and headed to the tavern. He had stolen the Christmas money that Rita kept in the kitchen drawer, but he only planned to use a small amount of it, and he proceeded to buy two draft, while Adele waited out in the truck. He stared at them for an hour – almost, he was sure – resolved to not drink them.

Later that night he made it back home – up over the bank with stars sparkling off the snow, singing an old Irish song he’d learned on his ship, remembering a fight in Vancouver, and forgetting completely about the truck, or Adele sitting in it.

Rita was still a young woman and there were men, who for obvious reasons thought she was easy, or available. That is, they
assumed
concern for her, because they could condescend to her husband. To make matters worse, they often pretended that they liked Joe, and that they wished to include him in what they did. Joe would sometimes find himself going somewhere with Rita, and feeling that she was embarrassed he was there.

Joe felt, only rightly, that it was not him they wanted, it was her, and though he didn’t tell Rita this, the same stubbornness he had when he had thrown the Chief Petty Officer down the stairs came over him.

As it happened, every six or seven months Myhrra would find new friends. And so, caught up with new friends, Myhrra didn’t come to the house very often. Sometimes, feeling obligated, she would drop in, sit down in the chair for a moment, and then she would be out the door after a cup of tea.

One always knows how a family feels toward you by how the children react to your presence. It was invariable that Adele and Milly were now scared stiff that Myhrra would leave once she got there, or that she would stay only a certain amount of time, or that Joe or Rita, who seemed to have no one coming in at all anymore, would do something to make her leave. Adele would always try to tell some jokes to lighten everyone up, and Milly would tell these jokes right after her. Myhrra would sit there listening, in her blue slacks and kerchief, and then, just at the punch line (or so it seemed to Adele), she would get ready to leave. No matter how fast she told her joke, or no matter what style she told it in, or no matter how Rita sat, Myhrra would (it seemed to Adele) be unable to get the punch line.

The whole family felt they had done something wrong.
One night Adele saw a group of cars in Myhrra’s yard.

“Go on up, go on up,” Adele said to Rita, excitedly. “I’ll baby-sit, I will I will. Go on up, they’re probably playing auction or something.”

“I’ll behave – I’ll behave,” Milly screeched, running about the house. “I’ll behave –”

Rita got dressed and went out, only to come back a few minutes later. When Adele pestered her she got angry.

“They’re having a bridge party up there,” she said. “I’m not going to intrude on a bunch of ladies sitting down to play a game of bridge. I have a load of ironing to do as it is.”

“Ha, you could beat any of them,” Adele screamed, throwing a sudden tantrum and throwing a dishcloth over Milly’s head, and then kicking a chair.

“I haven’t played bridge in my life,” Rita said.

And then for some reason Adele got doubly angry at this.

Rita, with her loose top and her ponytail and her scuffed shoes, smiled and asked Adele and Milly to help her make divinity fudge, but Adele went upstairs instead and played an old Beatles record, while Milly stood at her door begging her to come out.

It was a tradition for Myhrra to take Adele for a drive on Tuesday afternoons. On one particular day Myhrra was quieter than usual, and Adele, sitting on the passenger side of the car and staring out the window at the river, past houses and fields, tried desperately to think of something nice to say, but every time Myhrra glanced at her she would promptly look at her boots.

Myhrra stopped on a lane and looked at the field with some apple trees in it She got out of the car and stayed outside for a long time, leaning against the hood and staring, smoking one cigarette after another. It was the field that she and Mike, her ex-husband, had at one time owned, and which they sold during their divorce.

“Do you want me to come outside, My?” Adele said, rolling down the window half an inch. “What are you thinking about?”

“H’m?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing so much.”

“I have to pee, My.”

“Pardon me?”

“I have to real bad. My back teeth are floating about, the school bus has already gone down river.”

“I know, I know, Delly dear. Just a moment, I have to pee too.”

Another few minutes went by and Myhrra stayed exactly where she was, with the red kerchief she wore blowing up in a gust of autumn wind, and the smell of pebbles.

“I was invited to your house for supper tonight, Delly hon, but I can’t go. Tell your mom I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Adele looked at the big rabbit paw on the mirror and stroked it for good luck.

Myhrra didn’t visit them for some time, spending more time with her friends from across the river. One night just after Rita had closed the drapes, they heard Myhrra’s car turn in their yard, and blow the horn, but no one this time went to the window.

Myhrra still made it to the hospital every Wednesday. One day a voice called out to her as she passed a room.

“Hey!” he said. The voice belonged to Allain Garret. He was an old man from down river who worked in the woods. He had seven daughters and five sons, worked cutting pulp, and had a huge television in the centre of his living room, with one family chair. The floor was brown tiled and a thousand hockey games were watched from this chair. During the 1972 series with Russia, he had taken off the front door so his friends could sit in the porch and watch it. But because so many people stopped in at the house to watch it, he was himself pushed to the background, and ended up watching it, leaning through one of the porch windows, while people half stood and half crouched in front of him, and his nieces and nephews sat on the stairs. One of his little nieces, Gidget, who was eight at the time with big brown eyes, leaned on his shoulder and went to sleep in the sun. When Canada scored the winning goal, he happened to be staring at a potted plant that his wife had left on the sill, and he was thinking of its green stem, and how that reminded him of the sea. It was only a momentary reflection, but he missed the goal.