The teacher’s cat comes stretching into the room, his pupils diminishing to slits. He marks me for his own, then the teacher, then cuts a long-bodied path through our work to sit waiting beneath the clock.
“Yahoo.” The time-bird comes out fighting. “Yahoo, yahoo, yahoo—” It hurls a dozen fast insults, the cat hunching and cackling his desire.
“Easy, boy,” the teacher murmurs, distracted by the image she’s just cut free. She holds it at arm’s length for perspective. Tilts it, plumed and wounded, to the light.
I opened the bird—took scissors from the craft box and pushed them in, snipped up the belly and laid it wide. Gizzard and guts. I hunted for its love, the egg-tenderness, inner mirror to the feathers it would’ve closed over a brood. Then fanned out a wing, held flight in the palm of my hand. Made a perch of my finger so it could hang bloody-breasted from its claws.
I felt the others draw close, then wailing and tears. The teacher grabbed and shook me, terror rending her face. Why hers and not the bird’s? So peaceful. Dead on its glinting breast.
“She cut it open, Carl. With scissors.”
“So?” Hearing yourself, you softened your tone. “Cathy, kids dissect stuff. I did it. My friends did it. It’s normal.”
“At three?”
You brushed the back of your hand down her breast.
“It’s not normal.” The teacher tore herself from your gaze, staring past you to a doll on the floor. “She won’t look me in the eye, won’t speak—”
“I told you before,” you said evenly, “she’s quiet.”
“It’s more than that, you know it is.” Her voice sped up. “She won’t listen either. No, not won’t. It’s like she can’t, like she’s deaf, but only sometimes—” The light came on. “Only to human speech!”
You took a step back, your hand falling away from her side.
“It’s not healthy, Carl,” she insisted. “I’ve never seen a child play the way she does.”
Your dual focus on me was too much. The charge began coursing, forcing me to run circles up on my toes. It flowed into my hands, making me shake them, flap them hard to release a shower of sparks.
“See that?” The teacher pointed. “See what she’s doing? She’ll do that for an hour at a time.”
You gave her your shiniest, most settling smile. “She’s just being a bird, aren’t you, chicken? Just flapping her little wings.”
“Carl—”
“Come on, chicken.” Your hand looped out and tightened on my arm. “You come back down now. You know chickens can’t fly.”
Later, you nodded to where I hunched scribbling on the floor, my face close to the paper, as close as I could get it without colouring my nose. “See there? That’s a happy kid. She’d be happy doing that all day.”
The teacher stiffened in your arms. “But that’s what I mean, Carl. It’s not right to be happy with one thing for so long.”
“Oh, now.”
“See how she screams if you interrupt her. Go on.”
“She’s quiet, Cathy, that’s all. She’s a child of God.” You slipped the top button of her blouse from its hole.
“Carl!”
“We’re alone, sugar. Empty church.” Another button. The teacher cast me a glance. “Cathy,” you moaned, licking a finger and tucking it inside her bra. She melted, the spine sliding out of her to clatter on the floor. You pulled her after you into the storeroom, drawing shut the door.
Empty church.
Except for me, Preacher. Had you forgotten about me?
Back in Mary’s bed, Carl tries lying on his side, but finds the increase in pressure to his left eye unbearable. Besides, the mattress is too soft, with a definite central sag. He rolls onto his back and sighs.
“Ever seen a grey jay?” Mary asks.
“I wouldn’t know. Why?”
“He looks like a blue jay, only grey, and no crest on his head.” She pauses. “Used to have one, though.”
“One what?”
“Crest. He’s greedy, see. Steals scraps from the other birds, animals too, even humans, snatching them right off the plate. Then one day he eats so much he can’t move. That’s how he gets himself caught. This woman grabs him and lays him down on a stump while her man hoists up his axe. He’s not such a good aim, though, lops off grey jay’s crest instead of his head. Ever since then grey jay makes the softest nest, even uses the silk from old cocoons.”
It takes Carl a moment to realize she’s finished. “The softest nest? Is that supposed to be some kind of moral?”
“If you want.”
“I thought this was a story about greed.”
“Greed’s tricky. Some seem greedy when the truth is they just need a lot to keep going. You take shrews—if they’re awake, they’re eating, everything from ants to whatever they can manage to drag down. They’re like little furnaces. They’ve got the heat up so high it’s all they can do to get enough fuel. Weasel’s the same.”
Carl says nothing, a memory playing across the backs of his eyes. For years he rose early to gather the eggs, crawling up the ramp into the shadowy coop, sliding his hand under the sighing birds. He heard scuttling beneath the floorboards from time to time but said nothing, knowing Papa would make him go after whatever it was, down on his belly in the dark. He caught sight of the weasel only once, streaking away from the coop with a white feather in its fur. Papa gave him a dozen of the best with the strap, one for every mangled bird.
“Why don’t you spill it, Reverend.”
“What?”
“You wanted to talk to me, right? I can’t see what else you’d be doing bumbling around out here.”
“Well, yes, actually. I thought we could discuss all this—fuss that’s been going on. See if maybe we couldn’t work something out.”
“Not if that something includes you levelling this bog.”
He holds up a hand. “Now look, I’m not sure where you got that idea—”
“From you. You know, a couple of weeks ago, you and Mayor Lavinia and the guy with all the equipment. ‘Pulp trees, horticulture grade peat.’ “She mimics the forestry consultant’s deadpan tone. “That guy.”
Carl gapes at her blindly, stunned. “You were there?”
“You never heard how the trees have ears? That’s some sweet deal you’ve got going, Reverend. The town tears out the bog and sells it off, then they turn around and invest in your little project. You get cheap land and the money to build with, Mercy gets hundreds of kids and their families passing through every summer, and Lavinia—well, she’s the real winner here, let’s face it—Lavinia gets shut of me and everything I remind her of, gets shut of this messy old bog, and gets to keep a certain preacher close at hand.”
He smiles tightly. “You’re mistaken, Mary. What you witnessed was simply an information-gathering exercise.”
“Horseshit.”
“I assure you, Mayor Wylie and I are—”
“Screwing like rabbits?”
“W-what?” He forces a laugh. “For your information, Lavinia Wylie—”
“There’s nothing you can tell me about Lavinia I don’t already know. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is, you came out here to get me to stop stirring up the shit, only you thought you’d find some old girl gone soft in the head. Isn’t that what Lavinia told you?”
He searches for a half-truth, coming up dry.
“You thought you’d just come out here and sweet-talk me or scare me, or whatever it took to get your way. Well, now you’ve met me, what do you think? You think you’re going to get me to stop nailing up those scrolls? No way, Reverend, no matter how many kids you hire to rip them down. You think I’m going to quit writing to the papers?” She chuckles. “Stroke of genius signing myself Mother Nature, eh? Nothing like birchbark to make them sit up and take notice. That’s the thing, see—they open those scrolls in their little offices and the smell of the forest hits them square in the face. Once they get a whiff of that, they don’t need anybody to tell them how much it matters.”
“Of course it matters,” Carl says evenly. “But we must remember to worship the Creator, Mary, not His creation.” For a moment he imagines his words have hit home. Until she speaks.
“You know something, Reverend, I never met Castor’s mother—she was long dead by the time I came along—but she was called Mary too. This was her land. Breed land, Castor called it. I guess most of what got parcelled out to the Metis was land the whites couldn’t use.” She pauses. “Until now, that is. Anyway, it was her land, and Castor’s, and now I guess it’s mine. It’s only a little corner of what you’re after, but I’ll be damned if it’s any use to me with the bog torn out.” Her voice swoops in close. “It’s not happening, Reverend. You can kiss your blessed camp goodbye.”
The teddy’s a thin secret between Lavinia and her sheets. She squirms a little, feels a naughty scratch of lace. The colour suits her—apricot glow according to the catalogue, and for once they got it just right. Carl called her a peach the first time she wore it for him. Threatened to peel her and suck up the juice.
She reaches for the bedside clock. A quarter after twelve. Maybe he’s gone straight back to the motel for some reason. Or maybe something’s happened to him. He could be lost out there, or hurt. He could be— Stop it. He’d phone if there was a problem, she made sure he took his phone. He’s probably turning up the street right now. She’ll hear his car any minute, then the back door deadbolt as he lets himself in with her spare key.
She could pretend to be asleep. That way he could gaze at her from the bedroom doorway, take in her mussed-up hair, her glossy parted lips. Her thighs prickle with impatience. Surely they can’t still be talking. Even a preacher can only talk for so long, and as for Mary—well, really, what on earth could crazy Mary have to say?
Lavinia feels her heart contract.
It was rarely spoken of at home, and never when Mama was within earshot. The few times Daddy dared bring it up were when he came in to kiss Lavinia goodnight.
“You’re a lucky girl, Lovey, you know that? I never had a daddy to tuck me in, all I had was a brother.” That was usually the end of it—he’d kiss her on the forehead and leave her lying alone in the dark. One night, though, he took a deep breath and went on. “He was a good brother. Saved my life when I was just a few weeks old.”
Lavinia wanted to ask how, and why, and where the brother was now, but she was silenced by Mama’s dark shape in the door. “Time to go to sleep, Lavinia. Renny, let her sleep.”
Daddy sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed.
“Renny,” Mama said again, and he rose stiffly and followed her out of the room.
Lavinia caught snippets of the argument that ensued. Elsa, he’s my flesh and blood. You swore to me, Renny, you swore! Then came a terrible sound, the report of the slamming front door. Lavinia lay trembling. Heard Mama let out a loud, racking sob.
Daddy must’ve heard it too. He couldn’t have made it far, must have been standing shocked and wretched on the stoop. He shut the door carefully on his way back in. Lavinia closed her eyes during the charged silence that followed, drifted off to the familiar rhythmic creaking of their bed.
All mention of the brother ceased. A couple of years later Lavinia got wind of the family shame at school. She fought her own battles, knowing better than to bring the matter home.
The teacher had seen one of my drawings. After nearly two months of hugging them to my chest and sidling past her with teeth bared, I’d marched right up to her, waved one like a flag, watched her eyes open wide.
She hovered as the last of your flock took their reluctant leave, then dragged you to the schoolroom, where the drawing lay in wait on her desk. I was rocking. Riding the red horse with its whinnying face to the wall.
“It’s Clare’s, can you believe it? And no doubt there are hundreds like it. She smuggles a bunch of them out of here every week.”
“Hmm.” An innocent sound, enough to show you were listening, nothing more.
“It’s almost expressionistic,” she rushed on. “Can you believe the composition, the precision? It’d be incredible for a twelve-year-old—but for three?”
“Hm.”
Confused by your lack of enthusiasm, she tried again. “The images are so compelling, especially that middle one. I almost feel as though I’ve seen it before.”
Like all of them, the page was divided into five. Each black border enclosed an image somehow incomplete, cut to size by the absolute line. The centre block showed a waning moon, blue and glassy in a pinkish sky.
“These are not a child’s drawings, Carl.” She swept a hand toward the crude scribbles she kept tacked to the wall. “See any difference?”
Of course there was a difference. I held my crayons like I meant it. I bore down hard, wore my tools down long before the others did, with their vague ideas and even vaguer hands.
“Carl?”
Something was troubling you, Preacher, comprehension just below the horizon, the rusty birdsong before the dawn. It was that thin, icy slip of a moon. You’d never seen it, but you knew it all the same—the knowing somehow shameful, almost incestuous—the way it hung as though hooked into that fleshy sky. It was a very particular blue, that moon, like a surfacing vein—a little milk, a little rose.
It would come to you. Later, when you were alone, it would come with an ulcerous twinge, your gut taking a bite of you from inside. You’d turn your back to the mirror, drop your pants and find it gleaming on your own behind.
And then you’d remember.
Wild Bill. He was your papa’s prize coloured German, a shit-brown billy goat with a little black smile, black trails beneath his eyes and a bristling black ridge along his spine. Eel-backed, they called it. His coat was like long sick grass, as if he’d grown up out of the dead corner where your papa dumped turpentine and old motor oil, any poison he could find.
He was the scourge of your tender years—his sideways yellow eyes, the way he stood up like a man to tear leaves from your mother’s fruit trees, the stink of him.
He pissed in his own mouth to stroke it through his coat when the neighbours brought their nanny goats round. She-goat after she-goat, Wild Bill circling, lips drawn to show his ochre teeth. He mounted them like they were boulders. Raising himself up like a conqueror on the last thrust, planting his front hooves on their backs.
His chain-link tether was too long, your papa forever uprooting and moving the peg before you could be sure of its reach. Thinking he was still penned up for the night, you crept into the yard. A low bleat was the one warning you got. You took to your heels, kicking up chicken feed, shinning up the old ash tree seconds too late. Wild Bill reared up on his flinty hooves, goring you with a dirty horn.
Maybe it wouldn’t have scarred so mirrored and blue if your papa hadn’t heard you scream. Yellow. He bent you over his knee, spoke it slow and broken to the beat of the strap—yel-low, yel-low—while your mother stood watching, unconcerned. The wound opened wide, took a month to stop weeping and heal.
Recognizing the scar, you realized I’d seen it. You couldn’t begin to understand how—all you knew was that I’d caught sight of your bare backside and the Lord only knows what else. So quiet, so caught up in my drawing. You’d never dreamt I had eyes for you.
What would I draw next? What had I already drawn, stashed away like ammunition, so many charges and rounds? The teacher was right. It wasn’t healthy to be happy doing one thing.
You took my crayons. Hid every last one of them away.
The Reverend hasn’t spoken since Mary put him in his place. She imagines touching the hard line of his mouth, insisting with her fingers until it buckles into a genuine smile. She could almost feel sorry for the poor mayor. Imagine looking to a mouth like that for love.
Not that Lavinia deserves much sympathy. Mary can scarcely believe the same blood runs in their veins. Their encounters may have been few and far between, but the first set an unforgettable tone.
At seven years of age Mary had never even heard tell of her cousin. Normally loose-lipped to a fault about the inhabitants of Mercy, Castor had kept mum on the subject of his little brother’s family, knowing Mary would be curious, and that her curiosity could only lead to pain.
What he failed to understand was how lonely she was, how badly she needed a friend. Even when he was home, he was often too worn out or too wasted to play. On the day in question he lay fully dressed on his bed, tipping a bottle to his lips and staring up through his vault of mortared glass. Mary tugged at his sleeve, even whined a little, then gave up and went looking for somebody her own size.
She took nothing with her. Heading south on one of Castor’s many trails, she followed it further than ever before, breaking branches to mark her passage, losing all sense of time. Eventually spruce gave way to poplars, poplars to swaying grass. Beyond lay the shape of a town. She had long known of Mercy’s existence but was still shocked to see so many houses crowded together, and not one of them glittering like home.
She approached stealthily, pushing her way into a bank of snowberries that bordered the grounds of a huge red house. At the time she paid little attention to the building that was the Mercy United Church—she was too busy watching the girls who were playing in its yard. All three had on pale, frothy dresses and shiny black shoes. The short, yellow-haired one was running the show, riding around in a make-believe coach while the other two shouldered its weight. “Gee-up!” she kept screaming at them. “Geeee-up!”
Mary caught a whiff of them when they circled close—flowers held too tightly and too long. The smell made her anxious, but she’d come too far to turn around and go home. On their next pass she steeled herself and stepped out from the hedge. The three of them stopped dead and stared.
In the heat of their combined gaze Mary caught an unflattering glimpse of herself from the outside. She was wearing one of Castor’s old shirts for a dress, chopped at the sleeves and cinched with a strip of hide at the waist. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung to her elbows in dark, tangled skeins.
The leader wore hers in two tight, shiny braids, each with a red ribbon at its tail. They fluttered defiantly as she stepped forward between the other two. “Who are you?”
It was a bewildering question, one Mary had never heard. She gave the only answer she could think of. “Mary.”
“Mary? That’s it? No surname?”
Mary stood motionless, unsure. The horse-girls giggled.
“I guess we’ll have to give you one.” Yellow-braids thought about it for a moment and smiled. “Contrary. That’s it. Mary. Quite. Contrary.”
More giggling. Mary was the wild kid among the townies—she knew that—but somehow it seemed as though she were the tame one, brought up soft while they’d been sharpening their claws. “Okay,” she said finally.
“Okay? Mary Contrary? Okay?” Yellow-braids turned to her horses and they started whinnying for her, holding their bellies and rolling their eyes. Mary took a step back.
“Hey!” said Yellow-braids, spitting almost, then abruptly sweet. “You wanna play?”
Mary was powerless in the face of such an invitation. “Okay,” she heard herself say. “Sure.”
“Good.” Yellow-braids gave her a smile. “Franny,” she said to one of the horses, “gimme your scarf.” Franny untied the pink band that was holding back her hair. Yellow-braids circled behind Mary. “Shut your eyes,” she ordered, and just like Franny, Mary wordlessly obeyed. She felt the scarf drop down over her eyes, then sharp little knuckles knotting it at the back of her head.
“Can you see?” Yellow-braids demanded. “And don’t you dare lie.”
“No.”
Mary felt hands on her back. “We’re playing Blind,” Yellow-braids said in her ear. “You have to trust me. I’m your guide.”
Mary could hear the horses stifling themselves.
“Get back, Franny,” Yellow-braids barked. “You too, Paula, get out of Mary Contrary’s way.” She said the name differently that time, her tone protective, as though she were speaking of someone she loved. The last of Mary’s misgivings dissolved. She melted back into those hands and allowed herself to be pushed around.
Yellow-braids went slowly at first, telling her when to lift up her feet. “There’s a rock here, Mary, step over it, that’s right.” After a while she sped up and started taking sharper turns, but Mary was too elated to mind. Running without her eyes was like flying. She let her arms rise up in their sockets, placing her faith in the air.
The tree trunk caught her full in the face. Sheet lightning flooded her skull, then blackness, until a tugging at the blindfold dragged her back. Yellow-braids stood over her, the scarf hanging limp in her hand. Franny was blubbering, Paula blinking, stunned.
“You shouldn’t have,” Franny wailed, “you shouldn’t have.”
“I never meant it!” Yellow-braids turned on her and shrieked. “It was her hair, her filthy hair blew back in my eyes!”
Mary rolled over onto her side, somehow found her feet and stood. Her nose was streaming. Franny screamed and ran for it, then Paula, with Yellow-braids bringing up the rear. “She asked for it!” Mary could hear her yelling after them. “She did it to herself!”
Mary didn’t let herself cry the whole way home. Not until Castor was washing her face with rain from the barrel.
“She got small bones, this girl?” he asked, dipping the cloth. “Pointy little face, quick on her feet?”
She nodded.
“Black hair?”
She shook her head. He seemed relieved, until she told him how bright the girl’s hair was, except for a dark line down the middle where the two halves came apart.
“Christ,” he said, “you mean to tell me she’s already bleachin’ the kid’s hair? It was black as pitch when she was born. And not the kind that falls out, either, the real thing.”
“When she was born?” Mary asked, sniffling. “Did you see it?”
“Do you know her, Castor?”
He stroked her forehead where it was starting to turn blue. “You keep your distance from that one, Mary,” he said finally. “You keep to the bog.”
It should be easy to ignore somebody you can’t see, but Carl finds the opposite to be true. Every rustle, every creak Mary makes commands his attention. Her presence looms large, spawning questions in his darkened mind.
She coughs, small and dry like a cat, and he finds he can no longer hold his tongue. “This father of yours,” he says, “how did he feed you?”
“The world’s full of food, Reverend. Somebody chucks out a sack of potatoes because the eyes have sprouted, but that just means they’re ready to grow.”
He flashes on the black towers in his mother’s garden, each one six tires high, packed with swelling tubers and dirt. It was a trick she knew, a way to choke twenty pounds from a single plant. “You lived on potatoes,” he says, the words bitter in his mouth.
“Not only. Castor was a crackerjack slingshot. Squirrels and hares, platefuls of wood frogs in spring. Not to mention fool hens. The bog was still crawling with them back then, you could just stroll up to one with a stick in your hand and nail it between the eyes. He got stuff in town too, a soup bone from the butcher, a bag of soft apples. He had the kind of face people gave to, ugly but soft, not too proud. Even pissed, he was harmless to everybody but himself.”
“Sounds like the ideal parent.”
Her silence is disconcerting, impossible to gauge. “You got kids?” she says finally.
He opens his mouth to find it empty. For a moment the girl’s face hangs before him, devoid of expression, framed in her mother’s fine hair.
“Well?”
“One. A—daughter.”
“Yeah? Well, I don’t see her. You keeping a close eye on her, Reverend?”
“She’s in good hands,” he says quickly. “She’s only three. I can hardly take her with me on business—”
“Business? You and Lavinia?” Mary clucks her tongue. “Wait, don’t tell me, your little girl’s at home with the wife. The two of them praying for you, counting the days till you’re home.”
A chill runs through his body, a ruthless current of control. “For your information, my wife is dead.”
“Oh.”
“Satisfied?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I bet.”
“I mean it, Reverend. I never knew my mother. Never even knew who she was.” She pauses. “Where is she?”
“My wife? What kind of a question—”
“Your daughter, I meant your daughter. Where is she?”
“I told you,” he says through his teeth, “she’s in very good hands.”
Deprived of a creative outlet, the charge rained, flash-flooding me until it welled in my useless hands. My eyes were ground-level windows stuck open in a storm. No choice but to hammer them closed. Three strikes left and three strikes right—I kept at them until they swelled, until there was nothing but endorphin green, pain like springtime in the blood.
You caught me at it, grabbed hold of my little fists. You must have recognized them, Preacher—surprisingly powerful, sized to the socket of a three-year-old eye. You’d carried them all your life, curled like code on a twisted gene. They were your gift at my conception, the glint in your paternal eye.
You could’ve comforted me with crayons. Instead, you taped your thick winter mitts over my hands and smuggled me out to the car.
You drove clear across town, from Winnipeg’s suburban south to its alien north end, far from the family doctor, in the hope that you wouldn’t be known. One hand on the wheel, the other barring me like a door, you careened into the hospital’s lot.
The intern was wary, he’d seen black-eyed children before. To save you from suspicion, I socked myself as hard as the mitt would allow. A shadow came down over his face. A beaten child was one thing—the diagnosis simple, if sad. Another can of worms altogether, the child who beat on herself. He excused himself, a white beard returning in his place.
“What have we here?” the new doctor asked. “Hello there.”
My eyes were overripe plums weeping through slits in their skins. He peered into them and watched the pupils roll away.
He took a step back, waved and watched my padded hands lie limp, pulled faces to my waxy smile. His hand crawled along my arm, feeling me shrink. Finally, he feigned stubbing his toe, yelped aloud and looked up to find me unconcerned. When he turned to you, his face was impenetrable. “Does she speak?”
“She’s pretty quiet.”
“Does she say any words?”
“She—used to. A little.”
“When?”
“When? I’m not certain. When she was a baby. One, maybe one and a half.”
“And she stopped?”
“She’s quiet, yes.”
“You’ve said that already, Mr. Mann.”
“Yes,” you admitted finally. “I suppose she did at some point. Stop.”
I pawed at my forehead. The doctor watched me out the corner of his eye. “Does she like routine? Get upset over change?”
“Don’t all children?”
“Some more than others. How does she play?”
“Pardon me?”
“Does she play well with other kids?”
“Well, she’s—”
“I know, she’s quiet.” He paused. “Does she play with one toy for a long time? Do the same thing over and over?”
“I—I don’t know, really. She draws.”
A light came on in the doctor’s wire-rimmed eyes. “Any good?” Faced with the idiot, he hoped for the elusive savant.
“How do you mean?” you asked, stalling.
“Does she draw well? Unusually for her age?”
“Oh. I don’t think so.” Liar. “Not that I’ve noticed, anyway.” Liar, liar.
The doctor fished in the white pocket of his coat, drawing out a thin red pen. I reached for it, but by the time he’d found paper, you’d already snatched it away.
“It makes her nervous,” you explained, eyes on the door.
“Drawing?”
I croaked, and when the pen didn’t come, I rained blows on my temples and wailed.
“See?” you said. “I don’t know why, but sometimes it gets her all riled up.”
“Okay.” He took the pen from your fingers, hesitated, then slipped it away. “What about rocking? Flapping her hands? Ever seen her do this?” He stretched up on tiptoe, fluttered his hands and began stepping gingerly about. Your jaw dropped, followed by your gaze.
“Well?” He stopped short, letting his hands fall.
You couldn’t look up. “Yes. Something like that. Now and then.”
“Uh-huh.” He leaned in close to my ear. “Clare? Can you hear me? Would you like a treat, Clare? Would you like some candy?”
I was humming, swaying on the steel table, slapping the hard shell of my skull. Calling the hand to home base reaffirmed the skeleton’s ties. Otherwise the neck bone connected to the thigh bone or, even worse, to nothing at all.
Tinkling. Tweezers in a test tube. I froze, then leaned forward into their crystalline tone.
“Mr. Mann,” the doctor said gently, “I think you’d better sit down.”
Autism. He said the word—said it was possible, probable even, but not certain. Further testing required, and even then no hard proof, only diagnostic criteria based on the behaviour of the child. Bewildered, you asked how it could have happened, assured him you were a healthy, God-fearing man.
“Better God-loving, Mr. Mann,” he answered quietly, “if you want to come through this in one piece.” With that, he handed you a slip of paper, the specialist’s number and name.
You took the road out of town rather than home, unwilling to return to our lives. Cowed by the everlasting Trans-Canada, you kept to the Perimeter, four blacktop lines that box the city in, a detour for those who would rather pass it by.
“George, George, George of the jun-gle,” you sang suddenly, “strong as he can be!” You glanced at me. “Remember, chicken, you used to laugh when Daddy sang that song.”
Your hands were shaking so violently, you began to mistrust your ability to steer. You pulled onto the shoulder beside a furrowed field. Slowed to a standstill and stared.
To think I’d been the kind of baby you could leave waiting forever. Once, in my car seat, I watched you through the windshield—the waitress leaning close to pour your coffee, you squeezing the Styrofoam, breathing her fragrant steam. Your sunglasses glinted on the seat beside me. I reached for them, slid their golden arms down the sides of my fragile skull. They were on the floor when you got back. It frightened me, Preacher, looking out through your dark.