The water was still heating on the Baby Bear stove when Irving Walters paid a visit the next morning. “Saw your chimney,” he said, “so I brought you over these.” He was holding an upside-down bouquet of lightly filled shopping bags in his huge gnarled hand.
Irving was more than a hundred years old, a hunched little Englishman who had retired to the Coast almost forty years earlier, after selling his dairy spread in Alberta. He had a wife named Minnie who was much younger than him, but Minnie was ill and stayed mostly indoors. Irving, on the other hand, was a going concern, maintaining his large property, a garden, a greenhouse and a visiting regimen that exasperated some of the neighbours, which he found amusing. His mother had signed a temperance pledge for him in 1902, when he was an infant, and he had never taken a drink in his life. He was proud of that. He got into the First World War as a bugle boy and witnessed the horrors of the trenches first-hand—lads and horses blown to bits. He blamed capitalism and man’s innate stupidity, considered all wars evil, and regarded all celebrations or commemorations of war, including Remembrance Day, as vile rituals that served only to perpetuate the madness.
His drooping eyes could be an awful, watery mess, sending discharges like gobs of vitreous humour streaking down around his bulbous nose, but otherwise he was remarkably intact for his age.
“Like to come in, have a coffee or a cup of tea?”
“No, I’ve had my two strong cups, thank you. Just dropping this off, making the rounds.” The plastic grocery bags contained two small succulent heads of butter lettuce and, underneath them, an earthy dozen of new potatoes. “First of the season,” he smiled, standing on the porch with almost schoolboy expectancy. Irving lived one house over from Jake. The two friendly exceptions. “So they did in that socialist fellow you worked for. It doesn’t seem so extraordinary.”
“What do you mean, ‘they’ did him in, Irving?”
He chuckled. “They, the world. Got to him, got him back. He made waves and went under.”
“Ah.”
“He seemed to have a lot of crackling vitality in him, but I guess you can’t really judge a man by his writing.”
“No, I guess not. As one American writer wrote, writing is a way for madmen to appear sane.”
Irving brayed at the Vonnegut line. “Wrote that, did he? Quite so, I suppose, although I daresay you can still judge the grade of lunatic from his writing. This Sloan had a very pretty wife, didn’t he?”
I nodded.
“Kind of a Spanish type,” Irving said. “I saw them together in the mall one time. A real Dona Maria, she was. I’d go on experimental life support for an indefinite duration, let them stick tubes in my brain and everything, if I could have her coming around ten minutes a day for tea and biscuits. I’d even let them refrigerate my withered carcass if there was a chance of climbing under a warm blanket with her after they thaw me out. Maybe they’d develop the technology to rebuild me so she wouldn’t have to wear a mask.”
The old soldier smiled dreamily under the spell of his scientific romance, then glanced over toward his house, probably remembering sick Minnie holed up inside.
“Oh well, mores the pity that they got him in the end. Have to be careful,” he said, waving goodbye.
As he crossed the yard, a bald eagle lifted off from the tip of a giant spruce. Irving had company on his rounds.
I ate my wild oats, realizing I had been warned twice in the last twelve hours.