FIVE
■

 

the word aids was never spoken in our house. Not during that period in July, 1984, when it was suspected my uncle had it; nor after, in the late summer, when we knew for sure. There was a barely restrained hysteria then, a sustained but muted mania over something we all knew was there but had a name we could not speak.

The reason it could not be spoken was because of me. This I knew for certain. Whatever secrets were being kept were to deny me knowledge of what was really going on. Conversations stopped when I walked into a room. Forced cheerfulness and idle questions would follow.

“How was your day, Jacob?”

“What did you do outside, Jacob?”

“What do you want for your birthday, Jacob?”

Jeanette and my mother joined my grandmother in this behaviour, and I marvelled at the three of them in collusion over something. Together for the first time in agreeing that whatever this was, it must be kept from me.

And so, of course, I was dying to know.

The night my grandmother smashed her bowl, my uncle was taken to the hospital by ambulance. He did not come out until the middle of August. Those weeks he was away would be the last full days of my childhood, before a long and complicated adolescence began. My mother and aunt and grandmother succeeded in keeping the truth from me, but they knew they couldn’t keep it forever. My uncle’s situation consumed them to the point that it was as if I didn’t exist. I became, for those short weeks, something of a neglected child. I didn’t mind. I preferred to be neglected than weighed down by whatever was troubling them. I wanted to know, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved.

After a week of hanging about the house and attempting to find out what was going on, I decided to weather the storm by spending as much time away as possible. Unfortunately, in addition to the weirdness at my own house, Cameron began exhibiting a weirdness of his own.

It started simply. One day I called him up to go to his house. He told me I couldn’t because his parents were busy waxing the floors. A few days later I ran into him on the sidewalk outside of the library and again suggested we go back to his place. Again he said we couldn’t. His father was cutting the grass and didn’t want anyone around.

“Isn’t your father at work?” I asked him.

“Not today,” Cameron said. “He took the afternoon off.” He wouldn’t look at me while he said it, just kept his eyes cast down. I knew he was lying. I couldn’t imagine why. I thought, in my innocence, there were troubles at his house, too.

A few days later, I asked him if he would come to my house. I also told him all about what was going on, so it wouldn’t come as a surprise if my grandmother looked at him like he had two heads, or if conversation dried up when he walked into a room. He begged off, saying he was going to visit his aunt in Halifax.

At dinner that night, I complained to my mother that Cameron was being strange.

“In what way?” my mother asked.

“He never wants me to come over anymore. He says his parents are always doing something. Like tonight he said they were going to see his aunt. They never go see his aunt on a week night!”

My mother and Jeanette exchanged glances. My grandmother didn’t catch any of it. She was busy feeding her cat, Princess, in the dining room. Jeanette sometimes complained that Princess, who was older than me and weighed almost as much, was the only member of the family who got to eat there. My mother put her arm around me and said she was sure there was a perfectly good explanation.

But that is what parents say when there isn’t.

“You want me to call Mrs. Simms and find out what’s going on?”

“Why would you do that?” I asked, genuinely surprised. My mother generally didn’t get involved in my affairs unless it was serious, like the year before when one of the Shannon brothers gave me a black eye at recess. She called Mr. Shannon and threatened to have the boy arrested. My grandmother was aghast because the Shannons were good Irish Catholics. From her point of view, it was only Protestants who got rough and tumble. But that incident was not to be compared to this. This was a kid thing. Maybe Cameron was mad at me for something that I’d done and I didn’t know it. He had done nothing wrong, except to come up with what I was sure were excuses to not have me over or come to my house.

I was tempted to ask my grandmother if she had provoked an argument with Mr. or Mrs. Simms in the supermarket over their atheism, something that had happened once before. My mother beat me to it. When my grandmother came back to the kitchen and resumed her seat, my mother said to her, “Have you been talking lately to Mr. or Mrs. Simms? Cameron’s parents?”

“Not recently,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason,” said my mother.

My grandmother harrumphed and dropped her fork beside her plate without taking a bite. “Now come on, Caroline. There must be a reason. No one asks a question like that out of the blue without some purpose.”

My mother shrugged, casually, without guile. “Jacob says that they’ve been away a lot lately. I was just wondering if you knew where they might be going?”

“Me? For heaven’s sake, do you think I take account of every coming and going in Advocate? I don’t work for the Gazette. Really! Sometimes I think you girls …”

As my grandmother went on, I realized my mother had not told her the truth. Why would my mother withhold this? Especially now since she had my grandmother riled up about being accused a gossip?

Depressed at the situation in my house, and equally as unhappy with things outside of it, I excused myself and went outside. I picked up a smooth stone and walked around with it, massaging it like a Chinese stress ball. I wanted to throw it through someone’s window, but didn’t have the nerve. I hadn’t met up at the mill with Deanny for a while, because sometimes she’d be there waiting for me and sometimes she would not. I regretted the lack of playmates. After a time, I went back into the house, had a shower, changed into my pyjamas, and went to my room to get ready for bed. For the summer I was allowed to stay up until ten o’clock and watch television with the adults downstairs, but I often chose to stay in my room and read. My mother came in to wish me goodnight and said my uncle would be coming home from the hospital a week from Saturday.

“Good,” I said.

My mother smiled, and kissed me on the cheek as I lay in my bed. “I know things have been a little strange around here lately,” she said. “They’ll straighten out soon.”

“Okay,” I said.

“My little boy is turning out to be not so little anymore. Have you thought about what you’d like to do for your birthday?”

“I’d like to have a party,” I said.

“Really?” said my mother. “You never wanted a party before.”

It was true. I never considered I’d had enough friends for one, and inviting bullies and students from school did not seem an appealing option. But I was suddenly thinking I could invite Deanny and Cameron to the bowling alley below the iga on the Protestant side. I didn’t tell my mother about Deanny, but I did tell her about Cameron and bowling.

“Done,” she said. “Your birthday falls on a Saturday this year. I’ll get the time off and we’ll do it that day.”

“I’ll tell Cameron.”

My motivations were twofold: to bring Deanny into the clan, and to force Cameron back into my acquaintance. He liked to bowl, and he couldn’t refuse to see me on my birthday. After all, I had gone to Halifax with him on his birthday to see the Nova Scotia Museum. With this simple logic in place, I went to sleep.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

about my birthday party at the bowling alley, Cameron was evasive. For a week after I told him, he wouldn’t give me a straight answer. So the Friday before my birthday, I cornered him in the town library. I’d watched him slip in there when he saw me coming down Main Street. I sat down beside him at a table and asked again about bowling on my birthday. He closed his book and looked at me.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m busy.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?” I said. “It’s my birthday!”

“You didn’t let me finish. We’re going to see my aunt that day.”

“You’re always going to see your aunt,” I said. “Is she sick or something?”

“No,” said Cameron, going back to his book. “She just wants to see us a lot.”

“So, we’ll change it,” I said. “What day are you available?”

The town library was deserted. We sat at the centre table, whispering. The librarian, Mrs. Frail, was at her desk. She glanced up occasionally from her papers to make sure we were being quiet as a nun. While nice in all other respects, she was a demon about preserving the acoustic integrity of the room. No loud talking. Nothing above a whisper. It was like being a prisoner of war in there, which is why a lot of kids didn’t go.

Cameron didn’t glance up from his book. “The thing is, I’m not really available any day,” he said. “I’m pretty busy with stuff at home. So I guess I’ll have to miss your party.”

“What’s going on?” I cried.

Mrs. Frail looked up sharply. “Jacob McNeil,” she said. “This is not a basketball court, or a hootenanny. It’s a library. Accordant tone, please.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Frail.” Then, more softly, to Cameron, “Are you mad at me or something?”

Cameron, by this time pretending to be fully back into his book, shook his head without looking at me. “Busy is all.”

“You lie,” I whispered. “You’re a liar.”

It was the one thing I knew would get to him. He prided himself on always telling the truth, no matter what the cost. When I got a higher mark on a test, he would tell me, seemingly without guile, it was because I got lucky, there was no way I was smarter than he was. It was a principle of his mother’s he’d inherited. Liars, she said, both degraded themselves and the people they lied to. It was the worst kind of semantic treachery, and on par with murder or stealing. One of the reasons Cameron often got beat up at school was because he refused to lie to the bullies and tell them what they wanted to hear. Instead of saying he didn’t have time to do their homework when they asked, he’d say he would rather be shot and pissed on than help them achieve something they didn’t deserve. This commitment to honesty would get Cameron in a lot of trouble in his life. But he would rather be hurt than accused of lying.

I really did think he was lying then, and I couldn’t understand why. He had always been my friend. Now here he was avoiding me. Without Cameron I had no one. I’d forgotten about Deanny. All I could think of was a birthday party of one. I needed to understand what was going on. Had his mother finally decided I was not worthy to play with Cameron? That I was not good enough for her son? Was it something I had done? Something I didn’t do?

Cameron closed his book and set it on the table. He looked over at Mrs. Frail to make sure she was not listening and then leaned in towards me, whispering even lower than before.

“It’s your uncle,” he said.

“What?”

Cameron nodded. “My mother says I’m not supposed to hang out with you anymore. Because of your uncle. I’m not supposed to tell you this. I was supposed to let you down easy. But you were my friend, so I can tell you. But you can’t tell anyone else okay?”

“My uncle?” I said, confused. “Is it because he’s a homosexual?”

He shook his head adamantly. “My mother says it’s not that. She doesn’t care about that at all. It’s the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

Cameron just looked at me. Studying me. He looked much older than eleven then. Even I could see he was struggling with whatever he was trying to tell me. For a minute, it looked as if he might cry.

“Mom says when it all blows over we can be friends again. It’s only now we can’t. She says we don’t even know how it’s transmitted. It could be airborne, or through touch. We just don’t know.”

“Cameron? What are you talking about?”

“Jacob,” Mrs. Frail warned. “If you don’t keep your voice down I’m going to have to ask you to leave the library.”

“Sorry Mrs. Frail.”

“The disease,” Cameron said. “The thing your uncle has.”

“Meningitis?” I said.

“No,” said Cameron. “That’s not what he has. He has aids.”

Mrs. Simms, being a biologist, was familiar with it. Of course she would know. Of course she would be one of the first to figure it out. From this perspective of time and place, her concerns that Cameron might catch it seem incredibly naïve for such an educated woman. But it was a different time, and she was right about one thing. We knew nothing about it.

Cameron explained to me that he couldn’t be around me anymore. I would just have to find someone else to invite to my birthday party. Then he went back to his book.

It was my turn to cry. My vision blurred as I left the library and my best friend. I was in a kind of shock. Is this what all the whispering had been about? Is this what I had to look forward to the rest of the summer?

I didn’t want to stay downtown.

When my grandmother saw me she asked what I was doing home. Shouldn’t I be out playing with Cameron on such a beautiful day? I told her I didn’t feel well, and went to my room. My uncle was scheduled to come home the next day. I was depressed. I stayed in my room all afternoon, and when my mother came home at five, she immediately came up to check on me and ask me what was wrong.

I wanted to tell her what happened, but something kept me. It was not loyalty to Cameron and my promise that I would not tell. He had deserted me, so I had no allegiance to him any longer. Perhaps I just didn’t want to know the truth.

I lied to her. For once I had no qualms about stretching the truth.

I told her I had a stomach ache.

My mother made me some tomato soup, and sat with me in the kitchen while I ate it. As I said, she had an uncanny knack of knowing when someone was lying. She asked me if something happened that day.

I told her nothing had.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” said my mother. “I know I’ve said this a thousand times, but if you ever need to talk to me seriously about something, you can. You’ll never get in trouble if you bring up the subject first.”

“Okay,” I said.

The phone rang. My grandmother was upstairs and answered it in her bedroom. She came to the head of the stairs and shouted for my mother. “It’s Cameron’s mother,” my grandmother said. “She said she needs to speak to you immediately.”

My mother looked at me. “Did you and Cameron have a fight today?”

“No,” I said, and this time it didn’t feel like a lie. We had witnessed the end of our friendship, but it wasn’t because we had fought. My mother told me she’d be right back and took the call in the living room. My grandmother came downstairs. She asked if I was sure there had been no disagreement.

I told her what I had told my mother.

“Odd,” said my grandmother. “I don’t think Mrs. Simms has ever called here before.”

It was the first of many calls, of many odd things.

My falling out with Cameron was just the beginning.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

as far as I could make sense of it later, Cameron went home and told his mother he had told me why he could not be around me any longer. His mother berated him. She called and told my mother Cameron had been insensitive and needlessly cruel, and I did not need to hear what he told me.

“But was it true?” my mother asked. “Did you ask that Cameron not be around Jacob anymore because of David?”

My mother was a waitress. Though she had finished high school, and could read, write, and do basic arithmetic, she hadn’t done very well in school. She was not interested in academics, either as a career or pastime. She was no match intellectually for Sharon Simms. But when it came to defending my interests, she was a powerhouse. I do not know what was said, but as I understand it, she swept aside all of Mrs. Simms’ well-reasoned, articulate, and intelligent arguments for why Cameron and I should be kept apart.

When Jeanette got home from work, my mother told her about it. “They make assumptions,” she said, “and act on them like they’re gospel truth. She has actually convinced herself she’s doing Jacob a favour!”

“What did you say to her?”

“I said she was as superstitious and as ignorant as everyone else in this town, and if those are the values she teaches her son, I don’t want Jacob hanging out with Cameron anyway.”

“Why did she call?” said Jeanette.

“To apologize,” said my mother. “Can you believe that? For the insensitive way Cameron told Jacob the truth. Which is that they’re afraid of David. And these are some of the most educated people in town. What happens when the rest of them find out?”

“Maybe they won’t,” said Jeanette.

“They will,” my mother said. “Some of them already suspect.”

If these events weren’t enough, something else happened. After my mother’s call to Mrs. Simms ended, she realized I wasn’t really sick. She made me eat supper with the rest of them. Everyone was quiet. There was much clinking of forks against plates and the silence was oppressive. The grandfather clock in the dining room chimed six. It had a solemn, lugubrious effect on an already depressing meal.

My grandmother stayed particularly silent. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, she dropped her fork and said, in surprising distress, “I can’t take it! He’s coming home tomorrow, and this is just the beginning!”

“The beginning of what?” asked Jeanette.

“Don’t you see?” said my grandmother. “The Simms are right. Who knows what this means? Jacob is here. We don’t know if it’s even safe! We don’t know what to do. I can’t take it, I tell you! It’s not tolerable!”

And then my grandmother did a remarkable thing. Something I had never seen her do before. She began to cry. For the second time that day, I was in a state a shock. My mother and Jeanette did their best to calm her down, but in the end she left the table and went to her room. My mother checked on her and then came back down to finish her dinner with us. But no one was hungry.

“What’s going on?” said Jeanette. “Is the whole world going crazy?”

“Not the whole world,” said my mother. “Just Advocate.” She looked sympathetically at me. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe we should tell him,” Aunt Jeanette said. “What Cameron hasn’t already said, that is.”

“Soon,” my mother said. “Let’s let things settle down first.”

We didn’t finish our meals. We scraped them into the garbage and did the dishes. My grandmother wasn’t there to rinse so I did it for her. I was grateful for something extra to do. While we worked in the kitchen, the grandfather clock in the dining room ticked with more authority than I had ever noticed before.

2

 

how the news broke in town about the nature of my uncle’s illness was never revealed to me, not even later when we began to talk about it openly. Perhaps my grandmother, once she figured it out the night she smashed her Depression glass bowl, mentioned it to a bridge partner. Perhaps his string of illnesses, coupled with his known proclivities, was enough. David himself had told my mother and Jeanette. Dr. Fred admitted afterwards to my mother that he had surmised David’s condition on his first visit, shortly after he arrived home. Still, there was no clear explanation how the town knew.

Only that it was increasingly obvious they did.

Uncle David was kept in isolation in the hospital. He told my mother that every nurse who came into his room was gowned and gloved. They seemed terrified, and never stayed long. He was not allowed to use the bathroom, but was given a plastic bedpan that was removed by a man in a Hazmat suit. He slept on worn sheets and was given threadbare towels; he suspected these were burned after his use. The only person not dressed as if he were in a radiation zone was Dr. Fred. But he was not my uncle’s doctor in hospital. He could only visit, and express his displeasure at the way my uncle was being treated.

The first sign something was amiss in the town at large came the day my uncle returned from the hospital. That Friday afternoon, my grandmother’s bridge tournament was cancelled. One after another her bridge partners called and begged off with some ill-prepared excuse. By the time Hazel — who lived down the street and was one of her closest friends — called, my grandmother was resigned.

“Perhaps you could find a fourth from your list, Millicent?” Hazel suggested.

“I think,” said my grandmother dryly, “the list wouldn’t do me much good today, Hazel.”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

my grandmother made certain to be out of the house when my uncle arrived. She still held the faint hope he would get an apartment in town, and kept calling around for places to let on his behalf. She was always told nothing was available. The man who had offered my uncle the apartment on the Protestant side rescinded shortly after David went into the hospital. No one questioned why.

The bout with meningitis, and whatever else my uncle had, took a lot out of him. When he returned from the hospital, he was not able to walk on his own. Jeanette had borrowed a wheelchair from the hospital to bring him from the car up the walk, but he insisted on standing up and making his way up the front stairs and through the door. I stood in the front hall and watched, fascinated. He was hardly the same man. He was pale, gaunt, and exhausted, weaker and thinner than before he had gone. He held on to the doorjamb to ease himself in to the house, then rested for a while in a kitchen chair.

When he said he would make his own way up the stairs to his room, I was surprised that neither my aunt nor my mother offered to help. As much as they loved him, they were refusing to touch him. After he was up, and his door was closed, they sat over coffee at the kitchen table. They said nothing, and occasionally looked at each other in some wordless communication designed, I was sure, to exclude me. I was baffled. My uncle was home. They should have been happy.

Dr. Fred came by later that afternoon to see how my uncle was doing. He was remarkably free from the hysteria of the nurses and support staff at the hospital. After a little research, he was confident the disease my uncle had, the underlying illness, was sexually transmitted.

My grandmother refused to believe it. She still wanted David away where it was safe; she warned me to stay away from him and not to go into his room. My mother didn’t challenge my grandmother’s proclamation. Though she claimed to believe what Fred said, she must have had some lingering doubt.

While he was in hospital, my uncle had developed two purple spots, one on his cheek and one on his neck, each about the size of a dime. My mother and Jeanette asked Dr. Fred what they were. He said they were a rare form of cancer called Kaposi sarcoma, not uncommon in patients with aids. There were no treatments. Uncle David also had a bacteria in his cerebrospinal fluid normally found only in the feces of birds.

Dr. Fred showed himself to be a consummate physician. By his own admission, he knew little about aids. There was precious little written about it. There was no one local he could consult, and there were no reported cases in Nova Scotia besides my uncle. He contacted my uncle’s physician in Toronto to ask him about it, but the man knew little more than Dr. Fred, and as of yet there were no treatments. So Dr. Fred treated each opportunistic infection separately, with antibiotics and antivirals.

“I don’t understand how he could be so sick,” my mother said in the living room, while I eavesdropped from the stair. “In June he was just fine. A little thin, maybe, but …”

“He wasn’t fine,” Dr. Fred said. “David has been symptomatic for over a year. The weight loss is simply part of it. All the other illnesses I have mentioned to you, with the exception of the meningitis, were diagnosed before he came home.”

“And so you’re telling us …”

“Yes. I’m telling you.”

“Hold on,” my mother said. Before she said more, she got up and looked into the hall, where she found me sitting there. “Jacob,” she said. “Would you excuse us a minute? Go up to your room while Dr. Willis and I talk.”

I did so, resentful that I was being excluded. I passed the closed door to my uncle’s bedroom. Over the next few months, I would get very used to that closed door, and tiptoeing past it so as not to disturb him.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

if deanny mcleod ever understood exactly what my uncle had, or if her parents had heard the rumours now virulently sweeping the town, she never mentioned it.

I still hadn’t told my mother about Deanny or where I was going. Not because she was from the wrong side of the tracks — I knew my mother and Aunt Jeanette would not care about that, though my grandmother would — but because everything was too weird at my house to invite friends over. So I kept her a secret.

We met at the mill when she could get away. We broke every window in every abandoned vehicle, investigated the old buildings and machinery so much they were stripped of their intrigue and mystery. Deanny got bored. We had done pretty much everything we could there, and looked for somewhere else to play.

She invited me to her house on Meadow Pond Lane.

I had been to Meadow Pond Lane on several occasions. When I collected bottles and cans for Christmas money, my aunt drove me to the depot to cash them in. But I had never walked through it. Poor neighbourhoods, like rich ones, seemed exclusive. Deanny’s house, with a weedy, scrofulous lawn, was small, pink, and unadorned, except for one plant dangling under an eve, undeniably dead, its brown stalks and leaves collapsed around the rim of its white plastic hanging pot, an exhausted spider. Everything about Deanny’s place was impoverished, even the two twisted spruce trees growing behind the outhouse.

The first time I was there, Deanny did not invite me in. She was as foul-mouthed as she’d been at the mill, and spoke in a loud voice. I kept waiting for someone to come out and see who I was, but no one did. I suspected either her parents weren’t home — belied by the presence of a rust-eaten blue Dodge Charger in the driveway — or they didn’t care. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that she was an only child.

I liked Meadow Pond Lane.

I shouldn’t have. It was so disordered, so small, so derelict compared to what I knew. But that was the reason I liked it. I never had to worry about sitting on an antique chair or breaking a Depression glass punch bowl. On Tenerife Street I could get away with nothing, for if I did something untoward either my grandmother would see me or one of her friends would call her up and rat me out.

Deanny didn’t once ask to go to my house to play. She was content to stay at Meadow Pond, and to educate me in its ways. Freed from the suffocating rationalism of Cameron and math class, and the domestic rules of my grandmother, I went to town. We lit matches and set off caps and firecrackers. No one blinked an eye. We walked on the hoods of abandoned cars and tried to smash windshields with rocks and slashed up the vinyl on seats with jackknives. I was not a physical boy. This was the closest I’d ever come to delinquency and it was exhilarating. Deanny showed me the ropes. She told me what to do and how to do it. She took satisfaction in corrupting me.

From the time my uncle returned from the hospital, until my birthday, Deanny completely transformed my life. It’s no wonder I paid little attention to the dramas playing themselves out in my house. There would come a time when I could no longer ignore them. Until then I was content to play and unshackle myself from academic expectations and social pretensions. Deanny taught me how to be a child, at a time when I was being asked to grow up too quickly.

3

 

my mother was confused about why my uncle was not bouncing back from his illness. In her experience, people got sick and then they got better. David was thin and pale when he went into the hospital, it was true, but there was no reason, she felt, he shouldn’t get his strength back. He seemed to be feeling better, making his way around without assistance. But he was feeble. Dr. Fred explained that the meningitis had beaten down my uncle’s immune system, and the underlying condition would not let it bounce back. Other illnesses, like the bird virus and the purple spots, had taken more serious hold, and, as usual with patients with aids, my uncle David seemed to get seriously ill seriously fast.

My mother and Aunt Jeanette suspected David stayed in his room to spare my grandmother. She claimed she couldn’t stand the thought, let alone the sight, of him. When they begged him to get out of his room, he would only say that he would rather stay in. He made no requests to go out. He’d made no requests for anything. So they spent time with Uncle David in his room, and continued to bring him meals on trays. My grandmother began to live on the phone in her room, talking to her old bridge partners even though they would no longer come to her house. I spent most of my time at Deanny’s.

This state of affairs continued until Dr. Fred told my mother that David had to get out more. “He’s rotting away up there,” he said. “This disease is as hard on the mind as it is the body. He needs some relief from it.”

My mother didn’t say anything. In his room, David was barricaded from the prejudice of my grandmother. My mother also wanted to shield him from the ugly truths playing themselves out beyond his door.

Uncle David didn’t know, for example, that I had been asked to stay out of the town library. One afternoon, when I had walked in to get a book, Mrs. Frail told me I would have to stay away for a time, until this thing with my uncle straightened itself out. My mother was incensed. She called Mrs. Frail, who prevaricated. I was being prevented, she said, from entering the library due to a town ordinance.

“What ordinance?” asked my mother.

“I don’t remember. Perhaps you should contact the mayor.” Mrs. Frail would say no more.

At dinner my mother said if she wasn’t so angry she would be forced to laugh. “Don’t these people hear themselves? Don’t they know how ridiculous they sound?”

Jeanette nodded.

My grandmother stayed silent. She had overheard when Dr. Fred said David needed to get out more. After he left, she asked what the mechanics of such a venture might be. “Surely you know you can’t just waltz out the front door with him,” she said. “The neighbourhood would never allow it.”

“I’m tired of what the neighbourhood will and won’t allow,” said my mother. “I’m sick to death of having to dance around their ignorance.”

“Mark my words,” said my grandmother. “Trouble will come of it.”

“I don’t care,” my mother said. “If Dr. Fred says it will be good for him, then we’ll do it. Who would you rather keep happy? David? Or a bunch of gossipmongering cowards with not a drop of sense or understanding?”

These were unusually harsh and vicious words for my mother, who normally didn’t speak poorly of anyone. But she was angry, and I think Dr. Fred’s gentle remonstrance had made her feel slightly ashamed. She had allowed the reaction of the town to dictate her own behaviour, and denied my uncle some comfort and relief because of it.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

on the day of my twelfth birthday, I got up at eight and went downstairs, forgetting for the first half hour I was actually twelve. I only remembered when I glanced into the living room and saw the gifts wrapped in brightly coloured paper and stacked high on the living room sofa. I always got a lot of gifts on my birthday; in a way, it was better than Christmas, because there were no socks or pants or running shoes among the lot. They were always toys, and things I had specifically asked for. Even my grandmother usually went all out and bought me three or four things. This year I asked for a Commodore 64 to replace my old Vic-20, and was anxious as to whether or not I had received it. The Commodore was an expensive gift, and though usually there was no limit on what I could ask for, I was not sure the Commodore fit my grandmother’s dictum of “within reason.”

I was tempted to check the size and heft of the presents for the most likely candidate, when I heard scuffling of slippers in the kitchen behind me. I expected my mother, but when I stepped inside I saw it was my uncle standing in front of the fridge with the door open. He was looking for something. This was the first time since he had come home from the hospital I had seen him outside of his room, except to go to the bathroom.

As my uncle reached one bony hand into the fridge he became aware of me.

“Hello Jacob,” he said.

He looked worse than usual. I almost didn’t recognize him. But his voice sounded exactly the same. Calm and measured. It was strange hearing my uncle’s voice coming out of this very sick man.

“Hello, Uncle David.”

“Can you find the margarine for me? I can’t seem to locate it.”

Nobody else was around. My mother and Jeanette had taken my grandmother to town at exactly eight so she could beat the rush at the grocery store. He stole these few moments to emerge from his prison on the second floor and get some toast and tea. I’m certain, in retrospect, he hadn’t known I was there.

I found the margarine for him. He poured the tea. I poured cereal for myself.

My uncle asked me to sit with him. I was suddenly as fearful as the rest of the town of catching whatever it was my uncle had. This was only natural. I was only twelve, and for weeks I had been hearing concerns about his infectiousness, mostly in regards to me. I had not given it much thought before because I barely saw him. His disease remained mysterious and remote. Yet here he was this morning. I imagined those purple flowers blooming on my own face. My own hands so elongated and thin. My own eyes so sunken in their sockets. I shrank away from my uncle’s every movement, even when he reached forward to dip his knife in the margarine, which he did several times.

He must have noticed this. After he had finished only one piece of toast he said he guessed he would take his tea and go back upstairs. He had difficulty carrying it. The hand with the cup shook. As he passed the doorjamb he held on to it for support. The cup was shaking so badly I thought it would spill.

I should have offered to help him. But I didn’t. God help me, I didn’t.

At that moment I was as guilty as everyone else in the town in thinking my uncle was a doomed pariah.

It was a terrible tone to set for my birthday.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

by ten o’clock, everyone had come back from the grocery store. I asked my mother if we could go pick up Deanny. I had only told her the night before that Deanny was coming, and my mother was delighted, though she was worried about Cameron not being present. Deanny was to be my only guest. My mother knew better than to invite anyone else. Besides the fact I didn’t have any friends from town, none of their parents would let them come.

My grandmother used this as another opportunity to state what an effect this whole affair was having on me. “The boy can’t celebrate properly,” she said. “I hope you realize what a toll this must be taking on him, Caroline.”

My mother had the decency not to answer.

She agreed readily it was time to pick up Deanny. By then I had spoken of her a few times, but not much. My mother knew she lived on Meadow Pond Lane. My grandmother did not. I was afraid to tell her about Deanny, in case she viewed the arrival with all the enthusiasm of having a leper, or another case like my uncle, over for the afternoon. I knew what she thought of Meadow Pond Lane and those who lived there.

I was a little worried, I admit, about Deanny spending any amount of time with my grandmother. She swore more than any kid I’d ever met. Since I hadn’t seen her in the presence of adults, I didn’t know if she toned it down for them. My grandmother did not like swearing. She did not allow it. She was currently not talking to Jeanette, who had called her a bitch the day before over an argument about my uncle. Bitch was barely in Deanny’s vocabulary as a mild curse word. She preferred cunt and fuck to practically any others. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to my grandmother if she heard those coming out of Deanny’s mouth. A heart attack, or an aneurism. She might banish her from the house never to return, and forbid me from ever stepping foot on Meadow Pond Lane again.

Because my mother didn’t drive, my Aunt Jeanette picked up Deanny. I went with her. My mother stayed home to ice my birth-day cake and get ready for the party. Although I didn’t realize it, both my aunt and my mother were prepared to love Deanny, if for nothing else than because she was allowed to come to our house when everyone else was being warned to stay away.

Even past the point where her parents must have known what was going on, Deanny was never asked to stay away from Tenerife Street. If she was, she never listened. Her parents were either completely indifferent, or more educated than the rest of the town. I tend to think the former. Deanny’s father was always drunk, and Deanny’s mother was so busy trying to hold the impoverished household together she didn’t have time to inquire after her.

Deanny herself was never afraid of my uncle’s “cooties.” She told me before the party she was kind of excited to see him. “Is he all gross?” she said. “Like sores and stuff?”

“Some sores,” I told her, thinking of the little purple spots. “And he’s kinda thin.” I told her about the bird infection in his brain.

“A bird brain,” Deanny said. “Cool.”

Deanny had made an attempt, I realized as soon as she came out of the house, to dress up. She didn’t have much fashion sense, nor money to adhere to one if she did. Most of her clothes were hand-me-downs or bought from Frenchies in town. She rarely wore jeans, mostly pull-on polyester slacks and largish tops that hung too far down. Today the slacks were canary yellow, the top lime green. The same old filthy sneakers. Her hair was still wet from her bath. She came to the car, not smiling, and climbed in the back seat.

I turned around and introduced her to my aunt. Then I held my breath. Anything at all could have come out of her mouth at this moment.

But all she said was “Hi.” She scowled and looked out the window.

My aunt said hello, it was nice to meet her, and backed out of the driveway. She tried to engage Deanny in conversation the entire way back into town, but my friend wouldn’t respond. She only looked out the window with that fierce, angry expression on her face. I would learn, over the years, this was Deanny’s default look, one she assumed in times of uncertainty or shyness. It was a self-defence measure. It was easier to look mad and have people leave her alone than look vulnerable and have them attack her, or worse, pity her. She would come around, eventually, as the day wore on. But for the first few hours it was uncomfortable. Even to my grandmother she would give barely more than a word.

My grandmother, for her part, acted with shocked surprise when she saw her. “Good heavens,” she said, as soon as Deanny was out of earshot. “Who dresses that child?”

“Mom!” hissed my mother. “Cut it out.”

“She looks as if she just stepped from Barnum and Bailey’s.”

Deanny was suitably impressed with my grandmother’s house, which would have, on any other day, perhaps made her more favourable in my grandmother’s eyes. My grandmother loved it when guests complimented her decorating skills, or the carefully designed interior of her home. As soon as Deanny stepped in the front door, behind me but ahead of my Aunt Jeanette, she said, “Holy shit! Look at this place. It’s a mansion!”

Unfortunately, my grandmother was in the kitchen and heard every word. She came into the hallway wiping her hands on a dishtowel and said, “We don’t talk that way here, little girl. This is a house of God.”

“No kidding,” Deanny said, completely unperturbed. “It’s like a church in here.”

I suppose, to Deanny, who lived in a rundown shack on Meadow Pond Lane, the house on Tenerife Street did seem grand. There were bigger houses in town, but Deanny had not been in any of them.

This was her first introduction to Advocate society, though I did not think of it that way. One of the benefits of growing up with two waitresses as influences was that I was not a snob. This despite my grandmother’s best efforts to make me one. I didn’t look down on people for where they lived or what they did for a living or how much money they had. I never thought of the house I lived in as particularly impressive or grand. It was a house.

If Deanny had any thought about tearing through it the way we ran through her yard my grandmother soon set her straight. She laid down the law. “You can’t go into the living room,” she said. “I’ve spent too many years collecting what’s there to have it all broken in an afternoon. And the study is out, and the same for all the bedrooms except Jacob’s. You can play in the tv room, but not the dining room. It’s filled with my china. And if you go outdoors stay away from my flowers and my gnomes.”

Deanny stared up at my grandmother, who had, perhaps unconsciously, hunched over my little friend like a witch from a fairytale. I stood there, embarrassed for both of them. Jeanette came to the rescue. “Geez Mom,” she said. “Give her a break. She just got in the door.”

“Just going over the dos and don’ts,” said my grandmother. “Now run along and play until we’re ready for you. And remember what I said.”

I took Deanny up to my room.

“Goddamned,” she said. “It’s like living with Hitler.”

“Worse,” I said. “Hitler didn’t have fine china.”

Deanny laughed. That was the first time I remember Deanny laughing at one of my jokes, and it felt good. Cameron didn’t laugh at anything I said. He rarely laughed at all. Deanny and I played in my room for an hour, until my grandmother called us down for lunch — hotdogs and french fries — after which my official birthday party was to begin.

It would just be my family, and Deanny. I wasn’t excited.

Deanny was, though. She was hoping she would see my uncle.

“He won’t be there,” I told her. “He hardly ever comes out of his room.”

“Can we go in and see him?”

“Not allowed,” I told her. “I haven’t been there in ages.”

“Dammit Jacob! This place is like a fucking prison!”

“Don’t let my grandmother here you talk like that. She’ll kick you out.”

“That’s the thing,” said Deanny. “You can’t kick people out of a prison. You can only keep them in.”

Deanny was smart. Smarter even than I had given her credit for.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the thing i hate most about birthdays is the singing of the dreaded song. It’s not that one person is always off-key — I am not that much of a puritan — or that it is copyrighted and a royalty should be paid to the patent holder every time it is sung, and that a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr. was unavailable for many years because the song was sung in it and the film couldn’t clear copyright. No. I hate the song because its singing is tinged with moments of supreme embarrassment, where every eye is upon you, you don’t know what to do with your hands or what expression you should wear on your face — outright mortification generally considered to be unacceptable — and you just want to find the nearest set of floorboards and slither down the crack between them.

I knew nothing about copyright laws when I was twelve. I only knew I was dreading the moment when the cake would come, the embarrassment, and the blowing out of candles that would follow.

Deanny seemed to enjoy my discomfort. She sang directly into my face, and her breath smelled like spearmint gum, which she had been chewing all morning to mask the smell of smoke on her breath. My mother and Aunt Jeanette and my grandmother kissed me, and then we set to opening presents. The cake presentation and attendant musical humiliation took place in the kitchen, but my grandmother thought it safe, now that refreshments were taken and there was nothing to spill on the carpet, to retire to the living room. I was seated on the floor with gifts piled up around me like a fortress, and I opened them one by one.

I got the Commodore 64.

It was one of the first presents I opened. Being from my grandmother, it was the most expensive gift. Deanny was impressed by the sheer number of presents. She didn’t know what the computer was and I had to explain it to her. I opened the rest of my gifts — toys and books and games — and everyone oohed and awed over them. At the end of it, after my grandmother had cleared up the wrapping paper, my mother surveyed me on the floor surrounded by a mountain of gifts and asked if I was happy.

“Yup,” I told her. “Can I go set up my computer?”

“I don’t see why not,” said my mother. “We’ll go to the bowling alley at three.”

Deanny and I went into my room to hook up the computer. I had received several games compatible for the system. I loaded one, Adventure Quest, for Deanny. It was a game I had played many times at Cameron’s. She was puzzled by it, and admitted to me she had never played a video game before. In this respect, I considered her hopelessly uneducated, and did my best to show her the fundamentals. She thought it was boring — moving a bunch of stick figures around on a screen — and wanted to go outside instead. But I was already a child of the virtual. I had moved into this electronic world, and I insisted we stay inside and play.

Deanny chewed gum, snapped it, and looked around my room for something to do. Unfortunately, she found the Easy-Bake Oven and other assorted girls’ toys in my closet. “Are these yours?” she asked.

“No,” I answered quickly. “They’re just there.”

“Liar,” Deanny said, grinning maliciously. “I think you play with them. What, are you a fag or something?”

I ignored Deanny’s question, and asked if she wanted to go outside.

“I hope you don’t play with girls’ clothes too,” Deanny taunted. “Jacob in a little dress. Jacob with high heel shoes.”

“Quit it,” I said. I wanted to be mad at her, but I couldn’t. That she was taking an interest in my life, even if it was a negative interest, pleased me. I suggested we go for a walk downtown and spend some of my birthday money. I had raked it in that afternoon, almost thirty dollars in cold hard cash.

She had opened her mouth to answer, when my door opened — slowly, as if a ghost was entering.

In a way, it was a ghost.

It was my uncle.

He was no longer in the blue bathrobe. He was wearing jeans and a white sweater, even though it was warm outside. Despite his attempts to dress himself up, the effect was ghastly. The clothes he had brought with him were now too big, and dangled off his frame. He had combed and wetted his hair, but hastily, so that licks of it stood up here and there. His face was marred with purple spots as it always was and his breathing was shallow. He was deathly pale.

“Jacob?” he said.

Deanny was still in my closet, so he did not see her as he came into the room. In one hand he held a small wrapped gift. He cleared the door and looked at me, where I stood in front of the computer, and smiled.

“I brought you a present,” he said. “Happy Birthday.”

Deanny stepped out from the closet. She had to, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to see my uncle. She was drawn, despite herself. The general wheeziness of his breath, she said later, frightened her. Deanny admitted to being frightened by very little. But the image in her mind’s eye of my wasting, physically dissolute uncle needed to be matched with the reality.

As soon as he saw her, my uncle asked, “Who’s this?”

When I introduced him, Deanny said a timid hello. I had never heard her be timid before, and I was as fascinated with that as I was with my uncle’s arrival. He had not been in my room since he had grown really sick, and I had not expected to see him. I made no move to retrieve the gift, and my uncle was forced to make his way over — he looked as if he was walking on glass — to hand it to me. I realized then my uncle was probably, at that point, even sicker than he looked, and he was dressing up and pretending he was all right for my sake.

The present was wrapped in plain purple paper with no bow. Almost the colour of my old Easy-Bake Oven.

“You don’t have to open it now,” said my uncle. “I just wanted you to know I was thinking about you. Did you have a good birthday, Jake?”

I nodded. Suddenly I felt like crying. Part of it was seeing my uncle with Deanny in the room, for the first time seeing him through someone else’s eyes, so tired and thin and sad. Another was the gift he gave me, so small and inconsequential compared to the sheer volume and size of the other gifts I had received, but one he must have wrapped himself and made such an effort to come down the hall and give to me. I was so overcome that, not wanting to cry in front of my friend, I tore the paper off the gift and let it fall to the floor.

As I suspected, it was a book.

“It’s used, I’m afraid,” said my uncle. “I could have given your mother money to pick me up something, but I wanted to give you something of my own. I hope you’ll read it. It’s my favourite novel.”

My uncle’s favourite novel was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

I had never read it.

That is no longer the case.

That book is now my favourite novel, and though I didn’t know it then, my uncle had given me his most prized possession. It was a first edition, signed by the author herself: “With Best Wishes, Harper Lee.”

It was worth about two thousand dollars in 1984 and much more than that now.

My mother had no idea what he gave me, and he did not tell me what made the book so special or that it was worth so much money. He only told me that I was to look after it. “It means a lot to me,” he said. “And I hope someday it will mean a lot to you.”

I should have hugged my uncle. But he seemed to understand I couldn’t and he turned to go. He told Deanny it was nice to meet her. She, speechless for a change, only nodded. She was being confronted by the Great Presence. Years later, when we were both adults, she would tell me meeting my uncle that day was one of the most significant moments in her young life. “Death has a way of cutting through the thin veneer of daily living,” she said, “and forcing you to consider how things really are, and not how you want them to be. Seeing your uncle like that made me kind of scared and excited at the same time. I think it was the first real thing I had ever witnessed, like the first time you have sex and realize the power of the everyday. I’ll never forget it.”

Deanny and I went downstairs. We played in the yard, and after that my mother took us bowling.

4

 

my mother and Jeanette had decided that the afternoon of my birthday would be a good day to take my uncle outside. The weather was fine and we could all go together. But I did not want to go on a walk with my uncle. I did not wish to show him off for Deanny and the neighbourhood. He was a human being, not a sideshow exhibit or circus freak. At twelve I had not much developed in the way of moral philosophy or ethics, but I still did not think it right to accompany my uncle just so Deanny could see the spots on his face. Upon receipt of his gift, I had discovered a new and strange kind of sympathy for him. I did not want to feel sorry for him in front of my friend or mother.

Deanny beat us all at bowling. She threw the ball at the pins as if they had done her personal injury. Whenever she knocked any down, she shouted, “Samurai!” My mother and Aunt Jeanette got a kick out of this. When I bowled, Deanny would try and psyche me out during the set-up. “Sucker!” she’d call out. “Watch out for the gutters. They’ve got your name on it!”

When I complained Deanny was being a bad sport and breaking my concentration, my mother told me to hush. “She’s your friend, and your guest,” she said. “Let her have her fun.”

I was glad when bowling with Deanny the Samurai was over

When we got home, my mother went upstairs to get my uncle. Aunt Jeanette took the wheelchair from the garage and wrestled it open and into place on the front walk. I told Deanny I was not going on the walk. I wanted to stay home and play video games instead, and I thought she should do the same. She whined about it.

“But I want to go,” she said. “Maybe your uncle needs the company.”

Deanny no more wanted to provide company than I wanted to provide moral support. Our friendship was still new, but I “laid down the law,” as my grandmother would have it. “You can go if you want,” I said. “But I’m staying here.”

She nodded, and went outside. A few minutes later my aunt came to my room and told me I was coming along, that I was not to leave my friend alone for the sake of a video game. I was mad at Deanny for going over my head, but I couldn’t refuse. My aunt so rarely gave me orders.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

my grandmother said she did not want my uncle walking in the neighbourhood because he might catch cold, get pneumonia, get sicker than he was. This was a lie, designed to make her opposition more palatable to her daughters. It was not that she wasn’t concerned with the health of her only son; she was, or she would never have relented and let him stay with us. My grandmother believed beyond the point of reason the disease was contagious, and she knew for certain the town believed it.

Walking past her bedroom, I noticed my grandmother’s door was still shut. I thought I heard her talking in there, and assumed she was on the phone. Later we would find out she was — to Hazel, her bridge playing partner and the town gossip.

That afternoon, however, we were all unaware my grandmother was setting us up. We busied ourselves getting my uncle in the chair and down the walk, which proved to be no easy task. He could walk around the inside of the house, but he did not have the stamina to take a walk down the street any distance by himself. No matter what he thought of the wheelchair, he had to use it if he wanted to go outside. There would soon come a time when he couldn’t get to the bathroom without help from a walker or his sisters, but at this stage my mother left the wheelchair outside and let my uncle come down the stairs and out the front door on his own. He did so slowly, still wearing the jeans and the sweater. My mother asked him if it wouldn’t be too hot for him.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m feeling a chill today.”

Despite my mother’s contempt for my grandmother and her irrational fears, she had a few of her own. No one was allowed to touch David. As difficult as it was to watch him make his way slowly down the stairs, holding on to the banister with both hands, we were not to help him. Her directions for me were clear. Don’t go into his room. Don’t touch him at any cost. Deanny and my aunt waited outside and my mother and I stayed inside to watch, making sure he didn’t fall. If he had, I don’t know what we would have done. Perhaps my mother would have got rubber gloves — something she actually did later on, when he got so ill he needed to be helped out of bed — or called the ambulance, leaving him shattered and broken on the floor, the way my grandmother’s bowl had been.

But my uncle made it, and when he reached the bottom, panting for breath, he smiled. “This walk will kill me, I think,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said my mother. “It will be good for you.”

Another few minutes and he was out the door. Once outside, and down the front steps, he sat in the wheelchair and Aunt Jeanette pushed him down the walk. We all took up our places. Jeanette pushing. Deanny beside the chair, remarkably close to my uncle. My mother on the other side of the chair. Me, trailing behind.

“What a wonderful day!” said my uncle. “I’d forgotten what the outdoors was like.”

“Let’s experience it then,” said my aunt. “Ready, David?”

“I’m ready,” said my uncle.

My aunt pushed him slowly forward and our little caravan began to proceed north on Tenerife Street and away from the embedded silence of my grandmother’s house. I felt glad for my uncle suddenly, glad that he could get out, that he could feel the warmth of the sun on his face for the first time in over a month. It was a fine day, as all the days that summer were. The upcoming school year held promise, I felt. Despite losing my best friend and being banned from the library I would get through this. Perhaps my uncle would even get better, and life would go back to the way it had always been.

This optimism would be short-lived. The town, and my grandmother’s phone call, would make sure of it. Later, when my mother asked her why she had done it, she said it was because “people had a right to know. To be safe in their own yards.”

“Safe!” my mother had cried. “What on earth is going to put them in danger?”

My grandmother didn’t answer. We all knew what she thought, and my mother knew how ridiculous it was. We were trying to give David some sunshine and hope, and my grandmother was acting like we were bringing Typhoid Mary to town.

“I hope you know what you’ve done,” my mother said finally. “You’ve ruined a perfectly good day for him.”

“I can’t help it,” my grandmother said. “I’m only doing what I think is right, Caroline.”

My grandmother was so often doing what she thought was right, only to discover days and years down the road it was wrong. But she never admitted this. One of the chief characteristics of my grandmother’s personality is she could never admit to a mistake. She could act it, by being contrite in certain situations or mellowing for a time. But she’d never admit to one directly.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the strangest thing about Tenerife Street was its name. It was, for a hundred years, called Maple Street, until the nineteen sixties, when the town went on a spate of renaming streets and parks to make itself seem more exotic. The experiment was doomed. Advocate has never been alluring. It is practical. Prosaic, and utilitarian to the extreme. Set fifteen miles inland, it is a mill town with nothing to offer tourists except a small museum and a picnic park by the river. But the municipal council thought that by simply changing a few names, they could make it a destination.

When it came to my grandmother’s street, it was because a man on the council had just returned from a trip to the Canary Islands and thought “Tenerife” sounded suitably romantic. He proposed the name change at one of their meetings, and residents of the street were given a chance to speak on the subject.

Both my grandmother and grandfather spoke against. Yes, Maple Street was a misnomer. There were no maples — it was lined with oak and chestnut trees. But my grandmother did not think this justified naming her street after some city on some island she had ever heard of. “You might as well name it German Street. Or Egypt Avenue,” she said. “All of them make about as much sense.”

Despite the impassioned pleas, the name was changed, though for years my grandmother refused to acknowledge it. Eventually, though, because of mailing addresses and giving directions, she was forced to capitulate. She still complained. “Naming a street after a foreign town makes about as much sense as naming a pig after a barn.” She called it Maple Street in her conversations with old friends, and she never forgave the family of the man who first proposed changing it. Several times Grandnan’s friends suggested she run for council, but she always turned them down. She was content with criticizing rather than affecting any change. It was safer that way.

The rest of us never thought of Tenerife Street as anything else, even though my mother, Jeanette, and David were old enough to mark the change. Jeanette liked it. She said though it didn’t add any spice, at least it wasn’t xenophobic. “Nigeria Street would have been better, I think.”

Uncle David had been to the actual Tenerife. He told my mother and Jeanette this as we walked on the afternoon of my birthday.

Deanny was silent, but kept stealing looks at my uncle, as if surprised such a rational, semi-normal voice could come out of so sick of a man. Because we were wrapped up in my uncle’s story it took us a few minutes to notice something was not quite right. My mother saw it first.

“It’s quiet as a ghost town,” she said. Indeed, whereas on any other fine Saturday men and women would be on their lawns and in their gardens, there was nothing. The lawns were immaculate and empty — as devoid of life as the tundra. No children. No husbands puttering and waving. Nobody in windows. No dogs. No cats.

We all noticed it.

“Seems like there’s something good on tv,” said my uncle.

“Or something bad outside,” said my aunt.

My uncle reacted — his head moved slightly back and to the side, as if trying to see Jeanette — but then he stopped and focused forward. He must have known what my aunt was thinking. He must have been thinking it himself. His shoulders didn’t slump, though. There was no sign of capitulation or defeat.

“Who cares?” my mother said. “Let’s just enjoy our walk.”

But Jeanette wasn’t listening. “What do they think? They’re gonna get it just by being outside?”

“That’s exactly what they think,” said my uncle. “As hard as it is to believe.”

“Damn ignorance,” said my mother. “I wish they’d all go to hell!”

My mother rarely said things like this, and it took us all by surprise. She was to the left of my uncle, and didn’t see what I saw. He reached out to take her hand, then thought better of it, and pulled it quickly back into his lap.

“Don’t worry about it, Caroline,” he said. “It’s not their fault. They just don’t know.”

“But getting it from the air? Can they be that stupid?”

Deanny and I were both confused by this sudden turn in the conversation. I kept silent, but Deanny spoke up. “Get what?” she said. “Your cooties?”

Our trip that day could have been ruined — would have, I think — if it wasn’t for Deanny. My uncle broke into great peals of convulsive laughter. He laughed so hard he had to lean forward to recover. He began coughing. Jeanette stopped pushing the wheelchair and she and mother grew concerned. He waved them away. “Cooties?” he said to Deanny. “That’s what you call this?”

Deanny just shrugged. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Deanny,” he said, and though I was behind him I could sense the smile on his face. “It’s cooties. A bad set, I’m afraid. But I like that word the best of all I’ve heard. Thank you for telling me.”

“No prob,” she said. “And if anyone says anything to you about them, I’ll take care of them, Dave. Leave it to me.”

“I’m sure you will, Deanny,” my Uncle David said. “I don’t doubt that for a second.”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

tenerife street runs straight for six blocks and then curves off before it ends on Fartham Avenue. Our plan was to go to Fartham and then see how my uncle felt. We no longer discussed the absence of neighbours, or Tenerife.

Aunt Jeanette and my mother and David started the remember game, which they often did, about various incidents from their childhood. They recalled the time when they were little more than toddlers, and David had got hold of a pair of scissors and cut all their hair. Unfortunately this happened the day before my grandmother had scheduled a family portrait to be taken, and she had to take them all to the hairdressers to have it fixed.

“They did the best they could,” Aunt Jeanette said, “but we still looked awful. In those photographs we look like Larry, Curly, and Moe.” My mother and uncle laughed. Deanny didn’t laugh, but she did start to skip alongside my uncle in the wheelchair. This was the only feminine trait she had, and one I did not dare make fun of.

When we came around the corner, Deanny’s skip died, as did the laughter. There, in front of John Collins’ house, not twenty yards from us, was gathered a small knot of people. Most of them men, and all of them from the neighbourhood. The two women with them stood behind, and when we turned the corner one of them pointed. The men, who had been talking together, turned to face us. So surprised were we by this impromptu gathering of people on the sidewalk that we stopped.

“What’s going on?” said Jeanette. “A fire?”

Her supposition was understandable. Usually gatherings like this only took place on the street when there was something wrong in one of the houses. We assumed there was something amiss in John Collins’ house, but before we could ask, Collins himself stepped forward. He was a short, bald, stocky man of about fifty who had lived in the neighbourhood fifteen years — still a new neighbour, in my grandmother’s eyes. “Hello!” he called out, even though we were close enough to hear if he talked normally.

“Hello,” called my Aunt Jeanette back. “What’s wrong? Is there a fire?”

Collins smiled, but it seemed forced. My Aunt Jeanette must have thought so too, for she just stood there, her head cocked to one side, puzzled.

“No fire,” said John. “I was wondering if I could talk to one of you for a minute?”

My aunt shrugged, and began to push my uncle forward. He, for his part, said nothing. I think he knew what this was about long before Jeanette and my mother figured it out.

Collins raised his hand. “Not all of you,” he said. “Just you Jeanette, if you don’t mind. Please leave David behind.”

The first clue. My aunt looked at my mother.

“Go on,” my mother said. “Go see what they want.”

“You come with me,” Aunt Jeanette said.

It was the strangest thing. We had known these people for years. They had been to my grandmother’s house and we to theirs. They had eaten our food, sat beside us at church, driven past us a thousand times and waved. And now suddenly they felt, if not dangerous, then at least worthy of caution. I knew nothing of lynch mobs then. If I had, I would have realized this is what they felt like. Not that they were going to hang my uncle from a tree. Not exactly. But when my mother and Jeanette said they would be right back and went over to talk, and the crowd gathered close around them, I felt a sudden, seemingly irrational fear in the pit of my stomach. Surely I had nothing to fear from people I knew as well as this, but the sensation persisted.

I started to step forward, but my uncle reached out and grabbed my arm to stop me. I forgot at that moment I was not supposed to touch him, and I guess he forgot he was not supposed to touch me.

“Easy Jacob,” he said. “Let’s just see what all of this is about.”

It started calmly enough. At first my mother and Jeanette were just talking. No one touched them. There were no reassuring hands laid on unreasoning shoulders. Then Jeanette, who was fully obscured by those surrounding her, could be heard over the low voices of the others. “You’ve got to be kidding!” she said. I could not hear my mother, but I could see her. Her expression was one of supreme annoyance melding to anger. I had seen her wear it only when in the throes on an unwinnable argument with my grandmother. Someone was standing beside her, and I could tell, far from being angry with her, they were only trying to reason with her. But my mother wouldn’t listen.

The scene being played out was obvious, even to me. Jeanette and my mother were getting a talking to for bringing my uncle out into the street. They told my mother and Jeanette all kinds of nonsense. That aids was transmitted through the air, and through mosquitoes, and even that it crawled over grass. That bringing my uncle out in daylight and in fresh air put the entire neighbourhood at risk. That no one knew anything about this disease, and that our family had no right, no right at all, to play with the lives of others.

“It’s a judgment from God,” said one.

My aunt screamed, “If it was a judgment from God, you’d all have it!”

“Oh Christ,” my uncle moaned from his chair.

Eventually my mother stormed back over to us. She was enraged. “You’ll never guess …” she began, but my uncle interrupted her.

“I know,” he said. “Let’s just go home.”

“Go home!” cried my mother. “How long do you think it’ll be before they ask us to move! How can we let them get away with this?”

“I’m tired,” said Uncle David. “I don’t have the energy or the will to fight them, Caroline. Let’s just leave.”

Jeanette gave another screech and started walking towards us. The knot of people had drawn even closer together now, more unified. She turned halfway and shouted back at them. “I don’t know how you live with yourselves! You’re superstitious, uneducated, mindless fools! Every single one of you.”

She too tried to tell my uncle what had happened, and once more he asked to be taken home instead.

“But if we do that,” Jeanette said, and I could see she was nearly in tears, “they win.”

“It’s not about winning or losing,” Uncle David said. He was not near tears. He was too sick, and too used to such displays, to be much moved by them. “It’s just about maintaining a little dignity. And the only way I can do that now is to get back to bed. I’m very tired.”

There was nothing more anyone could say. They agreed to go back.

No one had noticed Deanny. She had been standing beside my uncle’s chair, clenching and unclenching her fists, watching the scene play out before her. Of all of us, I think now, she was the most affected by it. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because of her family, of having to deal with little knots of opposition all her life. Or perhaps she had some empathy for my uncle. She knew what it was like to have cooties, and to have no one want to play with you because of them.

The men and women on the other side of invisible line were talking together and looking furtively over at us. Deanny stood still, staring violently back at them. Then she took two steps forward and let out a stream of invective so powerful that it took my breath away. Deanny was always a master at swearing, but nothing I had seen in her to date matched this. She called them everything she could think of, including some words and phrases I’m sure had never been heard on Tenerife Street. Before she was halfway done, she had the mesmerized attention of every man and woman in the opposing camp. My mother, Jeanette, and my uncle tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She kept shouting until the band of people, under such an onslaught, began to disperse.

Under any other circumstances she would never have gotten away with it. They would have spoken back. Taken her in hand. Tried to teach her a lesson. A dozen other clichés on how to discipline a child. But they didn’t.

When Deanny was done, there wasn’t a single person left. They had all gone back to their homes. She cursed the last one in the door. After she finished, she turned to us. Her expression was vague. No one knew what to say to her. She had done what we could not. She had chased them away, and because they had gone without so much as a word of protest, she had proven to us, and to them, that they knew they were wrong.

My aunt only told her to come along. My mother put a hand on her shoulder. My uncle asked her mildly where she had learned the word cooties.