FOUR
■

 

for weeks my grandmother complained bitterly about my uncle’s decision to stay in Advocate. She pestered him daily over meals, and in between, to give her his real reasons. She did not buy that he had just quit his job.

Unbeknownst to my mother and Jeanette, she had found the number for his former school from directory assistance and called Toronto to see if she could get more information. They would give her none, citing Uncle David’s privacy. My mother and Jeanette wouldn’t have known she called at all, if they hadn’t seen the Toronto exchange number on a pad in the living room phone table in my grandmother’s handwriting. Out of curiosity, Jeanette called it and the school answered. She and my mother confronted my grandmother.

“What?” she said. “I told you I would be getting to the bottom of this. And that’s what I’m doing.”

“It’s none of your business,” said my mother. “Leave it alone.”

“The boy is under my roof again. So it is my business! Besides, I don’t think he’s telling us the truth about his position. The man I talked to there said David had resigned, but he had underlying tone. I suspect they let him go. Perhaps he acted inappropriately with a student.”

“Mother!” cried Jeanette and my mother in unison.

But there was no talking to my grandmother. She was on a tear, and there were many sumptuous arguments about it between her and my mother and Jeanette. Practically every day she mentioned pointedly how crowded the house was getting.

This was untrue, of course.

The house had held five people when my grandparents were raising their family. We were five now. But it was not in my grandmother’s nature to let an issue go. She waited and hoped my uncle would get off his duff and do what he had promised by getting an apartment in town. She even checked the Advocate Gazette for places to let, though even she had to admit there was precious little available. Advocate was not a transient town. Most people were there, like my grandmother, to stay. My uncle made a number of calls concerning apartments that first week, but nothing suitable had arisen. He had begun talking about looking for a place in Trenton, to which my grandmother wholeheartedly pledged agreement. This would get him out of the house and thirty miles out of Advocate. Both my mother and Jeanette cautioned him against this. “Just be patient,” they said. “Something will come up.”

Something did.

That Friday, my uncle was not feeling well again. He begged off supper and stayed in his room. We were sitting down to dinner without him when my grandmother announced triumphantly she had found him a place to let.

When the Catholics first came to Advocate in the 1700s, the Protestants, mostly Lutherans, had already begun settling one side of the river. The Catholics settled down on the other. The Irish and Scottish Catholics hated the Lutherans because the British, in an effort to annoy the French by peopling the province with subjects loyal to the crown, had granted them land, even though they were German and spiritually if not genetically related to that spawn of the devil, Luther himself. The town was named back then, when a Lutheran minister preaching against the Catholics peopling the other side of the river told his congregation they must be advocates for the faith. The Catholics tried to name their side of the river Assumption but the Lutherans won out, and the town was incorporated as Advocate in 1811. The division on either side of the river was a ridiculous situation that persisted for more than a hundred years. By the time I was born, there was no longer any name-calling or religious schism, but the old alliances remained. If you came to town and were actively Catholic you bought, built, or rented on the east side of the river. If you were Protestant, the west.

It was telling my grandmother would find my uncle a place in a small house on the Protestant side of the river. It was a place she would never consider living herself. The bottom half of the house, she said, was vacant, as the former tenants had bought their own house in one of the subdivisions. My grandmother had called the landlord just before supper. It was available at the end of July.

“Another three weeks,” she said. “But at least there’s an end in sight, thank goodness.”

My mother and Aunt Jeanette ignored this. “Did you see it?” asked Aunt Jeanette.

“Of course I didn’t,” said my grandmother. “I’m not going to be living there. David is. And you know I never go over there, except to the grocery store.”

“What if he doesn’t like it?” asked my mother.

“He will,” said my grandmother. “He can look at it in a couple of days, when he’s feeling better. I’m told it’s perfectly serviceable, with two bedrooms, one of which he can turn into a den. It’s supposed to be clean, with good sewage and water systems. I’m certain he’ll like it just fine. I’ve already told him about it.”

“Let’s not rush things,” said my mother. “He may not be in any state to move out for a while yet. He’s still sick.”

My grandmother didn’t seem to like this, but she remained silent. My mother and Jeanette began wondering aloud once more, as they had been doing lately, if there was something wrong with David’s health.

“He’s sick all the time,” said Jeanette.

“I don’t like how he looks,” said my mother.

“Why worry?” said Grandnan. “It’s just a cold. If there was something wrong, wouldn’t he go to the doctor like everyone else?”

“He’s already been to see him,” said my mother. “Several times.”

“He most certainly has not,” said my grandmother pointedly. “I would have known about it if he had. Dr. Willis tells me everything, and I just saw him the other day on Main Street.”

“He has, though. I found an appointment card on the table with one scheduled two days ago.”

“Did you ask him about it?” asked Jeanette.

“I didn’t think it was any of my business.”

If it wasn’t anyone’s business, my mother should have thought twice before mentioning it out loud.

My grandmother was instantly stricken with curiosity at why Uncle David would be going to see Dr. Willis — who we usually called Dr. Fred — so often. She told my mother she would ask him at the first opportunity.

“Don’t you dare,” said my mother. “It’s his business. Not yours.”

“He lives under my roof. What he does and where he goes is my business. If there’s something wrong with him, I want to know.”

This was my grandmother’s default argument — that by sheltering us, providing us with shingles over our heads, she had the right to know everything about us and dictate every facet of our lives. Usually it brought on an argument, as surely as mentioning separatism in Quebec, or First Nations land claims. This time, however, it did not. I think, for once, my mother and Jeanette wanted to know as much as my grandmother did why our uncle would be going to see Dr. Fred so often.

After dinner my grandmother went up to Uncle David’s room to ask questions, but came down ten minutes later disconcerted and irritable. “He acts like I asked him how much money he had in his bank account,” she said.

“You did ask him how much money he had in his bank account,” said my mother.

“You know what I mean,” said my grandmother. “How did I raise such secretive children?”

That was no mystery. If we weren’t secretive with my grandmother, we were exposed to her endless criticisms for practically every action we took. We would, in a phrase she often used herself, “never hear the end of it.”

My mother, watching television, asked her what she had found out. My grandmother scowled and said, “He told me some story about vitamins and immune systems and this health diet he was on in Toronto. I don’t buy it for a minute, and I think I’ll ask Dr. Willis about it.”

“He won’t tell you,” said my mother. “Patient-doctor confidentiality. You should know.”

“He’ll tell me,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you know yet, my poor girl, that in this town there is no such thing as a secret?”

About this, my grandmother, as in many things concerning small-town life, would be proved correct.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

one afternoon, when he started feeling better again, Uncle David took me to the diner for cheesecake and a Pepsi. It was an effort, perhaps, to get me to warm up to him. No matter what I thought of him, I couldn’t refuse. Like most eleven-year-olds, I was a slave to my gut.

My mother sat us in her section and served us, then took ten minutes to sit with us. No one interfered with her taking an unscheduled break. The owner, Mr. Byrd, rarely came to the diner. My mother and Jeanette were his senior servers, and managed the place when he wasn’t around.

I talked to my mother, but spoke little to my uncle, cheesecake or no cheesecake. But he talked to me when my mother went back to work. I found myself listening with interest as he talked about his childhood growing up in Advocate. He seemed stuck on this one subject, consumed by it, and I wondered why he was so set on recollection when my mother and Aunt Jeanette rarely mentioned their childhoods.

He recalled the passion with which he went fishing in the log pool, in the river just before Kobetook Lake, looking to catch yellow perch and catfish and slink. These fish my grandmother called “junk fish” because she considered them for the most part inedible. But my uncle said the goal was not to catch something to eat, but to see how many could be caught, and who caught the biggest ones. He called them “fishing derbies” and said practically every weekend there was a derby competition among the town kids. He won a few of them. I asked him what he won.

“Bragging rights,” he said.

“No money?”

“Not everything is about money, Jacob. That’s your grandmother coming out in you.”

On another occasion, as we were coming back from the diner, he pointed to the Carlton Theatre on Main Street as we passed.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “you could get in there with a piece of brass.”

“A what?”

“A piece of brass. You know. The metal? It started during the war, when they were low on metals and instead of charging the nickel to get in the owner would take pieces of brass which they used for bullets. The owner, the father of Milo who runs it now, found he could still make money from brass once the war was over. So if you didn’t have the twenty-five cents to get in during the fifties when I was a kid, you would scrounge a piece of brass from somewhere and pay your admission with that.”

I pretended I didn’t hear, and didn’t respond to his story. And yet, I did think it was cool that, in those dark dim days of my uncle’s childhood, an old piece of metal could get you in to the Carlton. Years later, as a teenager and trying to be smart, I carried a brass pipe to a movie with one of my friends. I explained the tradition to the bewildered ticket seller and said it was a perfectly valid way to buy a movie ticket. She disagreed. So did the owner. The price of movies had gone up, and the value of brass had gone down.

A few days later, over breakfast, my uncle asked if I wanted to go with him to visit Henry on the following Sunday. My grandmother dropped her fork and said she disapproved. When everyone stared at her, she shook her head and said it was not because he was black. Only that it was unseemly to make casual visits on the Sabbath, especially to those like Henry Hennsey who did not attend Mass.

My grandmother was all about Mass. She constantly pestered us to attend with her, with little result. My mother went occasionally, if only to keep the peace. Jeanette attended for Christmas and Easter. David, since he’d been home, refused to go. The only concession he made towards his mother’s religion at all was a St. Jude’s medallion he always wore on the inside of his shirt around his neck. He joked that since he was, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, a lost cause, he might as well advertise it.

But my grandmother wasn’t buying this. “Anyone who lives under my roof,” she blustered, “should be forced to atone for themselves. This is not a spiritual kindergarten, where everyone gets off scot free.”

My uncle, who seemed to be practising some type of psychic detachment from my grandmother until he could move into his own apartment at the end of the month, made no answer. He remained silent but cheerful, ignoring her pointed looks and asking my mother to pass him the butter for his toast.

The next Sunday, Grandnan left for Mass with my mother, uttering a parting shot regarding “generational spiritual decline.” I went to my room and read until my uncle said it was time to go.

Earlier I had called Cameron — he was always home on Sunday — to tell him I was visiting the house of the one and only Henry Hennsey.

“Big deal,” Cameron said. “He’s just a person like the rest of us.”

“I’m gonna ask him what was the big event of 1884,” I said.

“The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published,” said Cameron. “It was also a leap year.”

I knew Cameron had been studying events for each year, ever since I told him Henry did it. He never said so, but I had seen him in the school library a time or two poring over an encyclopedia, and when I asked him what he was doing he wouldn’t tell me.

That was okay. I was doing it too, though I had only made it to 1653.

Henry Hennsey had influenced us without being aware he was doing it. To this day I can remember major events for every year from 1600, though picking events from recent years has been difficult. Sometimes, as my uncle said, it can be hard to see what’s important when you’re so very close to it.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

there were no little black boys fishing on Henry Hennsey’s lawn. Or gnomes. Or angels. The only adornment was a miniature red wooden wheelbarrow heaped with dirt. I could imagine him, in the green workpants and the old plaid shirt he always wore, on his knees spading in tulip bulbs or geranium roots. I pictured him carting off rocks in a real wheelbarrow, like my grandmother, only with a lot less distance to go to round his little yellow house.

My uncle and I walked up the flagstone path to the front stoop and knocked on the door. After a minute Henry opened it, and without a smile or even a nod of greeting asked us to come in. “Tea?” he said to my uncle. “Or something stronger?”

“Tea,” said my uncle. “With two sugars.”

“And for you Jacob?” said Henry. “I’ve got some soda pop.”

I was surprised Henry knew my name. I had never spoken to him, and I thought he had never taken any notice of me. I agreed to the soda, though Henry didn’t say what flavour it was. When he brought it, it was cream soda. My favourite. He told us to go into the sitting room to the left, and my uncle and I did, each claiming a chair across from a small tweed sofa with a painting of a sinking schooner above it. The painting interested me. I had seen many paintings of ships and schooners over the years — there was one of the Bluenose in our library at school and my grandmother had paintings of two others in the upstairs hallway of our house. But I had never seen one that was sinking before. The rigging had let go. The sails flapped violently in a savage wind. The men scrambled fruitlessly on deck for control. I studied it until Henry came back with our tea and soda. He set them on the coffee table and then took a seat on the sofa in front of us, below the painting.

At first no one spoke. Henry studied his pants. My uncle blew on his tea to cool it and I took a sip of my drink. Eventually I drew my eyes away from the sinking ship and looked around the little room. It was perfectly neat and somehow, despite the amount of furniture, did not seem crowded. The hallway ran from the front door only a few short yards down to the back of the house, off which must have been a kitchen, and on the other side a set of stairs climbing back up in the opposite direction. Across the hallway from us was another little room, with a table and chairs and a sideboard similar to my grandmother’s, only smaller.

It was strange to be in such a small house.

I decided I liked it.

I decided when I got old enough I would live in a house like this. And read books and play games and memorize events from every year since 1600.

I noticed there wasn’t a single book to be seen, and yet my uncle had said Henry was a reader. Before I had a chance to check my words, I asked Henry where all his books were. “Uncle David says you have some,” I said. “Do you keep them in a library? We don’t have a library, but grandfather had a den and it’s filled with books. I’m not allowed in there though. Do you have a den?”

My uncle looked at me and smiled. Henry did not change his expression, which could best be described as disinterested. He had a flat face and a wide nose. His lips were thin and dark. I learned eventually that the flat, expressionless face Henry presented to the world belied, as my uncle knew, a fierce passion and deep intelligence. He had learned perhaps to keep his feelings to himself.

Henry did answer me, though. “I don’t have a den,” he said. “Or a library. But I do have a book room upstairs. Used to be my mother’s room. But I don’t believe in storing your books in a place where everyone can see. Kind of like hanging your underwear in the living room, only instead of getting a peek at your drawers they get to look at your brain and what you put in it. Books should be private, Jacob. You should only show them to people you want to see, and not every Tom, Dick, and Harry that comes waltzing in your front door.”

My uncle surprised me with a laugh. “I never actually considered that before, Henry, but you’re absolutely right. It’s the way I felt about forcing students to read Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. If they want to, they’ll come to those books in time and in their own way. Making them read them is kind of like forcing an infant to eat chocolate cake. You spoil the experience for later.”

“Fine books, both of them,” said Henry. “‘O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts. And men have lost their reason.’”

It was hard to square what was coming out of Henry Hennsey’s mouth with how I’d always perceived him — quiet and unobtrusive. No wonder my uncle said he was an intelligent, articulate man. I had not read any of the books they talked about. I looked back and forth between the two of them. Even my uncle surprised me, for I had never seen him talk with such passion as when he discussed these subjects. Soon they moved on to history, and art, and politics. Henry did not get as excited as my uncle. He kept still in his seat, and talked low. But the language and learning were sophisticated. Somehow my uncle had mined him, brought forth what must have always existed below the surface. My respect for uncle David multiplied right there. I was too young to understand much of what they were talking about, but I was fascinated, as the ideas sailed back and forth between them.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom upstairs. When I came back down, and turned into the hallway, their tone was different, the voices lower, more intense. The conversation had changed.

“Have you told them yet?” asked Henry, softly.

I stopped at the newel post.

“No,” said my uncle, equally soft, but still clear to me from where I stood at the end of the hallway. “I don’t know how.”

“You have to tell them soon,” said Henry. “All hell’ll break loose if you don’t.”

“I know,” said my uncle.

Because I could not see into the living room from where I stood, I did not know what expression my uncle wore when he talked of this mysterious thing. I could tell by the low voices and heavy emphasis it was serious. But what came next surprised me. Shocked me even. I heard something I will never, in all my life, forget. A half-sob, half-choke from my uncle.

I have since heard that strangled sound many times since, in the work I do. It is the inarticulate cry of fear, depression, and despair. Now I know, and perhaps I knew then on an emotional level, it was less for the books and knowledge that Uncle David sought out Henry Hennsey, than for someone with whom he could share his terrible secret.

I announced myself carefully with a feigned stamping of shoes on floor and a sniffle, pretending I had a cold, then went back into the room. Whatever had transpired between them during my absence was now gone, and my uncle was smiling, though his eyes looked sad.

“Ready to go?” he said.

“I guess so,” I said, and we made our goodbyes.

On the way home, my uncle was silent. I did not ask any questions.

Have you told them yet? Henry Hennsey had asked.

Not yet, my uncle answered.

What was this horrible thing that made my uncle, usually so calm and happy, actually cry? What secret was he carrying? I was curious, like so many kids my age. But it was beyond me. And as we walked home from Henry’s, from the house of the only black family to live in Advocate in all the long years we had been there, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.

2

 

only a few days after we went to Henry’s, my uncle felt poorly again and refused to go outside, despite the weather being fine. His constant see-sawing between illness and wellness irritated my grandmother, who said no one could be sick that often. She suspected my uncle was prevaricating, faking illness in order to avoid taking responsibility for himself. She had to recant when he came down with a violent attack of what she referred to as “summer complaint,” a mysterious illness of her childhood.

Dr. Fred came to see him at the house. My grandmother’s diagnosis did not sit well with either my mother or Aunt Jeanette. But Dr. Fred did not offer an opinion on it, other than to say that when my grandmother said “summer complaint,” what she really meant was a bacterial infection caused by food or water contamination. This was more common in my grandmother’s day, when food regulation was not as strict and many of the wells were dug instead of drilled and subject to floods or drying up or standing stagnant in the hot days of summer. Dr. Fred told my mother he did not think Uncle David was suffering from bad hygiene or food poisoning, but he would not say what he did think he was suffering from.

My grandmother stuck to her guns.

She knew Uncle David was sick in this manner because of his increasing trips to the bathroom and their unusual duration. The stink, too, was tremendous. She claimed the upstairs hallway was unfit for habitation for hours after he went — and though this was an exaggeration, it was true once David had been in the bathroom, I wanted to wait a bit before waltzing in after him. When he was not on the commode, he was lying on his bed in his robe and pyjamas. He was hot — red-faced and sheathed in sweat — some of the time, and stricken with chills at others. He slept for most of the day, in between bathroom visits. My grandmother grew alarmed.

Dr. Fred came to the house several more times to look at my uncle, and was still vague about what might be the problem.

“A bad flu,” he said one time.

“Perhaps a case of sepsis,” he said another. “A poisoning of the blood.”

In the end my uncle went to the hospital, for two nights. They got the diarrhea under control and gave him medications to deal with the fever. He was sent home, still weak and confined to his bed, and my mother and Jeanette made him soup and tried to get him to eat. They read to him from what books he had brought from Toronto. My grandmother, once she realized David was going to be okay — for a while, when he was in hospital, she acted like she might actually be worried about him — started complaining that not only was the poor boy homeless, he was sick too.

“He’s always been sickly,” she said. “But this is ridiculous.”

“He’s not always been sickly,” my mother protested. “David got sick least of all of us!”

“That’s not how I remember it,” said my grandmother.

The next day, Dr. Fred again came over and diagnosed my uncle with a case, not of summer complaint, but of meningitis. My grandmother had heard of it, but my mother and Jeanette had to have it explained to them in the kitchen after the doctor had seen my uncle in his room.

“Does he need to go to the hospital again?” my mother asked.

“No,” said Fred. “He can stay here. We’ve given him some antibiotics, and you’ll have to keep an eye on him. He’ll be very sick for a while yet, but eventually it will get better.”

“Is it contagious?” asked my grandmother.

Dr. Fred looked at her, as if weighing his answer. “It could be,” he said. “We don’t know what kind of meningitis it is. If it’s bacterial, some of those can be contagious. If it’s viral it isn’t. I’ll have to do more tests. I’ve drawn blood, so we’ll know in a few days. Meanwhile, just be cautious around him. Jacob is in the most danger. Kids are susceptible to it, more so than adults. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You can tend to him as you normally would. But keep Jacob out of his room.”

My mother looked instantly worried. “Should we send Jacob away? To Cameron’s for a few days?”

“No need to be alarmist,” said Dr. Fred. “It’s a tactile contagion, so just keeping him out of the room should suffice. I’ll come back and check on him tomorrow.”

My mother and Jeanette thanked him, and he left.

“Well, this is a fine kettle of fish,” my grandmother said.

“You act like it’s his fault,” said Aunt Jeanette.

“Of course it isn’t,” said my grandmother. “How could the boy be at fault for getting sick? It’s just difficult to deal with, is all I’m saying. He was supposed to move into his new apartment. What happens now?”

“We’ll take care of everything,” my mother said. “You don’t have to lift a finger.” Then she and Jeanette went up to see my uncle in his room.

My grandmother stayed with me in the kitchen. “Don’t lift a finger my eye,” she said. “A contagion in my own house and I’m not supposed to care one whit about it?”

“What’s a contagion?” I asked her.

“A disease,” she said, emphasizing the word as a snake would a hiss. “The boy has probably not been taking care of himself properly. Running around doing this and that as he always did. He got malaria when he was tromping around in those foreign countries. Did I ever tell you that? Almost killed him. He was sick for months. Why anyone would want to go to a hot, filthy foreign place with contaminated water and infectious mosquitoes is quite beyond me. I’ve never seen anyone quite like your uncle with the knack for getting himself into trouble.”

She had lied to my Aunt Jeanette — she was blaming my uncle. You could hear it in every word she spoke. Even I saw how deep her resentment ran.

My mother walked back into the kitchen at that moment. She asked my grandmother what face cloths she could use to soothe my uncle’s head. “He’s burning up,” she said.

“Take the ones under the vanity in the upstairs bathroom,” my grandmother said. “They’re my old ones. You might as well throw them out when you’re done. They’ll be no good after.”

“You heard what Dr. Willis said,” said my mother. “It is only contagious to children. And it might not be contagious at all.”

“He didn’t say it was only contagious to children,” said my grandmother. “He said children were more at risk.” My grandmother had my mother there. That was exactly what Dr. Fred had said.

My mother shrugged and went up to get the face cloths. My grandmother sent me out of the kitchen. She was going to get supper ready. “I suppose I’ll make him some soup. He should be able to get that down at least.”

3

 

the priest at my grandmother’s church was Father Orlis. He was English, and was educated at the Catholic seminary of Allen Hall in London. He had a master of divinity from Oxford. Why such a grandly educated man would end up in such an out-of-the-way place as Advocate was the real question. From what I understood he chose to come to Nova Scotia. My grandmother thought it had something to do with Delilah Smith, who was English, and Catholic, and the wife of the owner of the paper mill, and part of the richest family in town. Father Orlis was in his early sixties, tall, irremediably thin, bald, with pale blue eyes and bushy white eyebrows. The eyebrows gave the appearance of constant disapproval, as if he was judging everything said or done. The strip of white clerical collar and the black vest, or rabbat, didn’t help. He lived with the two deacons in the rectory attached to the back of St. Andrew’s Church. I was told he had, like Henry Hennsey, a great many books, and when he wasn’t engaged in parish business he was busy reading. I couldn’t imagine the books of a priest would be very interesting. If my doctor grandfather was interested only in medical books — there were a host of them in his den from Wilde’s Epidemics in Ireland to Aequanimitas with Other Addresses to Medical Students, Nurses and Practitioners of Medicine by William Osler — a priest would likely only be interested in religious books.

I liked Father Orlis. Despite the eyebrows, he had a soft, reassuring voice. When he spoke it was as if he was giving his opinion and asking for permission at the same time. He was diffident, for a priest, and he sometimes had trouble meeting my eye. But he managed the affairs of the parish with aplomb, and he always declaimed his parts of the liturgy with grand authority and confidence. My grandmother loved him, both because he was a good old-fashioned Catholic priest and yet he was not so self-assured she felt she couldn’t manipulate him. He deferred to my grandmother in a great many things, because she was head of the auxiliary, because she was prominent among the laity, because she was the wife of the dead Catholic doctor. There were three hundred nominal Catholics in Advocate, about half of which were active church members. My grandmother, if not chief among them, belonged to the religious oligarchy, its ruling class. Any good priest or pastor knows in order to survive he must keep this class happy, that it is they who own the church.

Father Orlis was a good priest.

On more than one occasion, he had been to our house for a meal. He visited when anyone got sick — though he was noticeably absent during the period I write about — and he even talked to Aunt Jeanette, asking after her affairs though she refused to attend Mass. Uncle David met him, and despite his being in “the opposite camp,” as my uncle put it, he had not disliked him. “He seems smart,” said my uncle. “One of those men devoted to God as an intellectual experience, rather than an emotional one.”

“He’s devoted to God, period,” said my grandmother. “I don’t think emotional or intellectual, as you say, has anything to do with it.” This was before my uncle got meningitis, and my grandmother was still peeved about him being there.

Uncle David was right about Orlis. He was an intellectual, if a timid one at that. I could easily see him sitting at a desk in the rectory piled high with books and pondering the meaning of God. He was lost in his world of the mind, the importance of the sacraments, the translations of the vulgate, grand cathedrals of theology. He often didn’t notice others in the street when he walked down it. He muttered to himself, and his fingernails were chewed to the nub.

My grandmother forgave him these eccentricities. He was a brilliant man, she said. A perfect parish priest. “An Oxford graduate!” she would say, in an almost sexual ecstasy. In the Mass of the Roman Rite, Father Orlis would recite the Agnes Dei during the breaking of the host. My grandmother would always say afterwards that he delivered the best Agnus Dei liturgy of any priest she had ever heard.

My Aunt Jeanette agreed with my grandmother that Orlis was perfect for a priest, not because of his mellifluous speech in Mass but because he was not the type of man she could imagine being married. He had a stoop to his shoulders and he walked slightly tipped forward, as if bowing under the weight of all that brainpower. Even if he wasn’t a priest, she surmised, he would be a bachelor, perhaps a schoolteacher, like Ichabod Crane.

Orlis’s deacon was Harry, newly appointed to St. Andrew’s Church. He had come from Ontario to serve his last years in the diaconate before being ordained. My mother and Jeanette had seen him in the streets of Advocate, and Aunt Jeanette said he was “cute as a button.”

“Such a waste,” she lamented.

My grandmother was of the opposite opinion, that a life of celibacy and service to the lord was the best use of a life possible. “There’s a few young people around here could learn a lesson from that.”

Harry was younger than my aunt, at twenty-seven, but she fell in love with him anyway. My mother said it was because he was unattainable. Jeanette always fell in love with men who couldn’t love her back. It was defeatist, my mother said, and childish.

Jeanette did not care. “What’s wrong with a little looky-feely?” she said. “I don’t expect the man to drop out of seminary and marry me.”

My aunt, as usual about matters particular to the church, had it wrong. Deacon Harry had already completed his four years of seminary. He was taking his master of divinity from Dalhousie University, to which he travelled one day a week, doing the rest by correspondence.

Living in the rectory with Orlis and Harry was another deacon, Deacon Wilson. Wilson was only a few years younger than Father Orlis. Also a thin, lugubrious, sallow-faced man, he was a “permanent” deacon, which meant he had not gone to seminary and was not eligible to be ordained. He was from Advocate, and technically should not have been living at the rectory at all. He was not paid for his work, and was more like a volunteer to the church. But he had illusions of grandeur and thought he was a priest. Though he didn’t go as far as wearing the clerical collar, he did wear a rabbat and a priest’s frock, and walked and spoke with an air of ecclesiastical authority that rivalled, if not exceeded, Father Orlis’s.

My grandmother did not like Deacon Wilson. She said he had tone with her. On more than one occasion she asked Father Orlis why they just didn’t kick him out of the rectory and be done with it.

“He does no harm,” Father Orlis said. “And he even does some good. He’s a very effective deacon. He knows this community well.”

My grandmother was equally distrustful of the new deacon. Not because he pretended to be a priest — after all, he would be one someday — but because he was so young and handsome. She considered it an unnecessary temptation to her daughter, an invitation to trouble. Jeanette started going to Mass with my grandmother just to lay eyes on him and speak to him when they said goodbye at the door. My grandmother should have been happy something finally brought Jeanette to St. Andrew’s, but she was not. She thought it shameful that her youngest daughter was turning Mass into a “peep show.”

Jeanette only shrugged when confronted with this accusation. “I like him. What can I say?”

“You’re not supposed to like him,” said my grandmother. “You’re supposed to like God.”

“God’s not half as cute,” quipped Jeanette. “And he’s not around to talk to.”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the only part of the church I was interested in was the cemetery. It is one of the oldest landmarks in Advocate. The early Catholic settlers, trying to outdo the Protestants on the other side of the river, planted it with poplars and weeping willows, which gave it a stately, fairy-kingdom atmosphere in spring and summer. I loved the willows, the way their tendrils hung in bunches almost down to the ground. I would wander through them like a green, airy waterfall. The trees seemed to have a personality and a presence of their own that predated the town. They had been there forever, had seen everything, and from my puny perspective — eleven years and four and a half feet — they knew so much more than I did. On days with a breeze their vines rustled and seemed to confer.

But if I was tempted to go into the graveyard to look at old headstones and relax under the trees, I did not do so when my grandmother was there. She visited the cemetery out of respect for her dead husband once a week to lay a flower on his grave, and the few times she caught me she chased me out. “This is not a play yard,” she said. “It’s hallowed ground, and you can’t be running around in here willy-nilly.”

Father Orlis had no such compunctions. Once in a while, I’d seen him going around the church from the rectory side, and when he noticed me he’d give me a wave. He never came over and told me how hallowed and sacred everything was. He never told me to stop sitting under the willows, or playing among their low-hanging branches.

Shortly before my uncle went back to the hospital, Father Orlis asked me if I would come in and help him move the Eucharist table back to its proper place. Some workers had misplaced it when they were sanding the floorboards of the sanctuary and neither of the deacons were available. I was a small kid and was not often asked to do anything physical. We went into the church and moved the table. It was strange being inside that dark, cavernous, richly ornamented space alone. It was open all day, for confession and access to the holy water in the fonts, but I never went in. After I was done Father Orlis asked if I would like to come back to the rectory for a glass of juice and a cookie, a reward for helping with the table.

I agreed.

He gave me the juice and cookie in his office, and chatted to me while I ate and drank. As I suspected, the room was lousy with books and papers. Either he had no housekeeper, or he prevented her from doing any work in there.

If this was a novel, he might have tried to assault me then. Catholics priests have earned such a bad reputation, and their celibacy in community life is supposed to lead to all kinds of transgressions in private, such as sexually assaulting twelve-year-old boys.

Father Orlis did no such thing. He was a decent man, and he knew how to keep his dick in his pants. Deacon Harry, who would eventually become Father Harry, was also decent. No sexual scandals ever rocked our town, thank God. We were spared that at least.

Deacon Wilson was another case entirely. As a lay deacon, he was not required to be celibate. He could have a family or even a girlfriend if he wanted one. But he didn’t want one. No one could even imagine Deacon Wilson in a relationship. You’d have to roam pretty far over the Holy Roman Empire to find one willing to sleep with such a brooding, deliberate personality as Deacon Wilson. And even if you could find one, he would not agree to it. If the priests were celibate, he would be celibate. If they wore rabbats, he would wear rabbats. If they were boiled in oil and hung upside down on crosses, he would be clamouring to be next.

I liked Father Orlis and Deacon Harry; Deacon Wilson terrified me. Whenever he walked by he would flick his eyes in my direction in the barest kind of acknowledgement. I got the sense he didn’t like children. During christenings Deacon Wilson was always there, standing beside Deacon Harry and Father Orlis. I imagined if you turned your back on him he would snatch the baby and sink his teeth into its neck. With his pale long face and widow’s peak and glittering black eyes, he reminded me of a vampire.

I was glad, when I ate my cookie and drank my juice, he wasn’t around. Father Orlis, sitting behind his desk and staring out over a pile of books, asked how my uncle was faring.

“Fine,” I said. “He’s getting better.”

“He’s had quite a run of bad luck, I hear.”

“He’s okay,” I said. “Just meningitis.”

Father Orlis did not have a widow’s peak, or black eyes, and if he did have a pale face it was a reasonably kind one. And he liked babies. But there was something avaricious in his gaze and the way he spoke to me, something that made me uncomfortable. Like he was mining me for information. Priests do this, I know now. They are not just vassals of God, but counsellors to the community. They look for things that might be wrong so they can deal with them when the time comes. I did not know my grandmother had not told Father Orlis about what was going on at home, and that he was trying to get information. He did not come to see my Uncle David, not because he didn’t know my uncle was sick, but because my grandmother had not asked. He respected her need for privacy.

But priests are nothing if not gossipmongers with a divine dispensation to be so. He’d likely hear rumours. I was eleven, so it was okay to pump me for information.

I finished my juice and cookie and told Father Orlis I had to go. He asked me a few more questions which I evaded, and when I finally got away I was relieved.

Unfortunately, I went outside into the backyard of the rectory just as Deacon Wilson was rounding the corner.

“What are you doing here?” he said, surprising me, for he rarely ever spoke. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Father Orlis wanted me,” I explained, wanting nothing more than to run away as fast as my legs could carry me from him.

“What did he want?” Wilson said.

I wanted to say “None of your business” or “Go suck a lemon” but instead I told him about the Eucharist table and the orange juice.

“Fine,” Deacon Wilson said. “Run along now. The rectory is no place for children.”

It was no place for vampires either, I wanted to say. But I ran along.

Deacon Wilson had no authority to speak of. He had no say in church or town matters. So he took it where he could get it. I’m certain he was glad to find me in a place I wasn’t supposed to be, so he could exercise some personal discretion.

I did not go back to the graveyard. Instead I went home. I’d had enough of the ecclesiastic for one day.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

when deanny and I return to her apartment, Richard is still in his pyjamas. It’s because he can’t write in anything else, she says when he goes back to change. No matter the time of day, if Richard is going to write, he changes into them, and then back out when he is done.

I raise my eyebrows, but make no further comment. Writers are weird. Richard is weird. He barely speaks the entire dinner, and when I ask him questions about his books he barely answers.

“Richard is an introvert,” Deanny explains, in front of him. “I’m an extrovert. That’s why we get along so well.”

As usual with the men Deanny picks for me, Pavel is achingly handsome, with a certain casualness of demeanour that makes him even more attractive. It is cliché to say the first thing you notice about a person is his eyes, but this is true of Pavel. They are brilliantly black, swimming with empathy and curiosity. It is impossible not to like him a little. It is true he is a schoolteacher. It also is true he is Russian. He seems to have no problem talking about either, and for much of the dinner it is he and Deanny who keep us entertained. He is voluble, expressive, jovial, and expansive. He laughs at Deanny’s stories, like the time she soaked all the girls’ panty liners in high school in nail polish remover because they made fun of Alison Smith during gym class.

Eventually he turns to me. He has the slightest trace of a Russian accent. Occasionally he will drop articles from his speech, but other than that, his English is perfect and his accent minimal. It is utterly charming. “I hear you are a mathematician?” he says.

“Was,” I say. “I am a social worker now.”

“I heard that too,” says Pavel.

“I took math in college, and got my degree. But it never amounted to much.”

I leave unspoken my thought that Deanny and Richard seem to have prepared Pavel well, for he knows a lot about me. I know nothing about him. I ask him about his work. He complains teaching high school math dulls his abilities. Even the most promising students are at little more than remedial level, and the only class he enjoys is calculus, for the small portion of his grade twelve students going on to higher education in math and sciences. Calculus, he says, is something he can sink his teeth into. He enjoys the discussions of limits and integrals and functions and derivatives. “If I can get my students to understand that calculus is the study of change,” he tells me, “the way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra the study of operations, they will be successful. The key is to get them to be excited about it. Don’t you agree?”

“I’ve never taught,” I tell Pavel. “But yes, I think that would be half the battle.”

“Richard and I are abysmal at math,” says Deanny. “Aren’t we Richard?”

Richard looks at her as if she is an oncoming train. I can see she’s trying to push Pavel and me closer together. I am interested in Pavel’s background, though, and I ask him about that. He explains to me he lived in Russia until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. He came to Canada in 1992.

“Why Canada?” I ask.

“The weather,” he says, and laughs. “It was like Russia. Cold and almost as big. But free. When my country changed all was chaos in Moscow. I wanted stability, and work. It’s strange,” he says. “Before the fall, everyone hated Russians. Then suddenly you loved us. Everyone was hiring us. I had no problem getting work here, as I already spoke English. I heard Nova Scotia was paradise. I came here and found job almost right away.”

He has lived an interesting life. When he was a student, he studied mathematics and international journalism. Anybody who wanted to make something of themselves, he tells me, had to study something to do with foreign relations or the Communist Party.

“They taught us to despise you,” Pavel says, “as capitalist swine. But we were also to study you as much as we could. To find your weaknesses. We all wanted to be part of the nomenklatura.”

“The nomenklatura?”

“The elite,” says Pavel. “Members of the party.”

I am fascinated. I have never met anyone who lived in Soviet Russia before, and Pavel has no issues it seems with talking about his past. I ask Pavel if he has ever thought of us as “capitalist swine.”

“Never,” says Pavel. “That’s why I studied journalism instead of foreign relations or party politics. I knew from early age the assumptions were flawed. That Americans, and Canadians, were likely no different from us. You looked the same. The truth is probably you were the same. When the Curtain fell, I was relieved. I dropped journalism and studied only math. And decided I would come here when I could. I miss my family. My father is an old Komsomol member and wanted entrance into the party, but was denied because of indiscretions of his own great-grandfather during the revolution. He hates the fact I live in the West, and barely speaks to me. Also,” Pavel says, “he is troubled by my sexuality, which I make no secret of.”

He smiles at me, and takes a sip of the latte that Deanny has provided with dessert. I don’t know what to say. Never has anyone been so open with me in an initial salvo. Pavel has spent the last hour telling me his life story, including his sexual orientation and his relationship with his father. I have told him nothing about me. Despite my apparent openness at my work, and my advocacy for people to say who they are without fear of reprisal, I have never been very good at taking my own advice. I am conditioned by my childhood; I rarely tell anyone anything about myself unless they ask directly. I ask Pavel if his sexuality was okay in Communist Russia.

Pavel smiles again. “It was not,” he says. “Marx and Engels did not forbid it, but they didn’t like it. The gay laws were abolished after the revolution as being tsarist, but Stalin put them in place again. They were not repealed until 1993. I left before that happened.”

“But why would you come to such a small city?” I ask. “Why not Toronto or Montreal where you have half a chance of meeting someone?”

“Have you met anyone in Toronto?” Pavel asks, still smiling.

I have to admit I have not.

“It’s not where you are, but how you think. When you are ready, the right person will come along. It doesn’t matter if you live in Halifax or Toronto. That thing will happen if it’s supposed to.”

And then Pavel does a remarkable thing. He winks at me. The lascivious effect of such a handsome man winking at me leaves me completely undone. I drink my coffee and eventually Pavel continues talking.

Shortly after we finish dessert I announce I have to go and Deanny sits up in her chair like she’d been shot. I see her move her leg nearest Richard and imagine that she is kicking him. He looks up slowly from his coffee like a man emerging from a dream. Pavel looks bemused and bewildered. Before I can say any more, Deanny says, “You can’t go yet. We’re going into the living room.”

“Mom will be expecting me,” I say. “They don’t like me to drive after dark.”

“Nonsense. They’d want you to stay out as long as you wanted.”

“Really, Deanny. I have to go.”

“Fine then,” she says. “Pavel, you walk him to his car. I want to talk to Richard alone.”

Richard has gone back to his coffee. He is, really, very childlike at times. Almost idiotic. Most writers are, I’ve found.

It is too late to get out the trap Deanny laid for me. Pavel is already getting up from his seat. She gives me, as we go, a triumphant look. I know it well. It is the same one she used to give me when we were kids and she got something over on me, except back then she also used to stick out her tongue at me at the same time. I can almost see her doing this now. I sigh, and leave the apartment with the handsome Russian schoolteacher in tow.

4

 

father orlis died eight years ago. My grandmother still mourns his loss, but she did come to accept Father Harry as his replacement. She still thinks of him as a terrible temptation to the parish’s younger women, not noticing in her dotage Father Harry has lost his looks. He was always a short, slight man. When he was young and fresh-faced this was charming, but as he got older, it has given him a gnomish appearance, not helped by the fact he wears spectacles. Because he is given to laughter, the skin around his eyes is heavily crinkled, and lines are drawn at either corner of his mouth. He is no more temptation to young girls — what few of them there are, the church is having trouble attracting younger members of late — than would be my grandmother. She never has conceded Father Harry is as good a parish priest as Father Orlis, though she admits his liturgies are “passable.” And she did once say Father Harry gave the host better than Orlis. The old man had a palsy hand, and sometimes missed her mouth. My grandmother has relegated herself to the fact that when she dies it will be Father Harry who presides over her funeral. And though she has never said so, one gets the impression she considers this a great honour bestowed upon him.

One morning, after I’ve been home for a week, Father Harry calls me and asks me to meet him in the cemetery. He remembers that I liked to walk through it when I was a boy. As it is summer now, the branches on the willows are full of tendrils and leaves. We take several turns around the graveyard, and Father Harry asks me if I know my grandmother will be the last person to be buried here.

“Really?” I say.

“Yes,” says Father Harry. “The last reserved spot became occupied last year. The only one left is your grandmother’s. She sold the other plots when your mother and Jeanette opted to be buried beside your uncle. Once she goes, there will be no more burials at St. Andrew’s.”

“She will like that,” I say. “The last of her kind.”

“Agreed,” says Father Harry. He tells me he has already administered Unction — the Anointing of the Sick — to my grandmother, as well as the Sacrament of Penance and the Viaticum. I am familiar with the combination of rituals, better known as the Last Rites; I’ve had history with them. Father Harry knows this history and doesn’t mention it. He is only telling me, he says, because he thinks I might like to know, since it is important to my grandmother. My grandmother had not had confession for a long time, and she wasn’t able to confess then. My mother and Jeanette were present. Jeanette cried. Father Harry anointed my grandmother with blessed olive oil and said, “May the Lord who has saved you free you from sin and raise you up.” He also anointed her hands and said, “Through this holy anointing, may the Lord pardon you of whatever sins you have committed by sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, walking, carnal delectation.”

“What possible sins could a person commit by walking?” I ask him.

Father Henry shrugs. “It’s part of the liturgy. It refers to John’s exhortation that Christians walk in the light.”

“And what on earth is carnal delectation? It’s a wonder Grandnan didn’t wake up and give you a slap for that one, for even suggesting it.”

“Delectation means delight,” Father Harry says solemnly.

“Oh, so you’re not supposed to enjoy yourself? Sounds fittingly Catholic.”

“It was your grandmother’s wish, Jacob,” says Father Harry. “It’s what she wanted.”

“Will you be there when she passes?”

“If at all possible. I told your mother and Jeanette to call me if they even think it’s getting close. I know your grandmother did not like me, at least not as much as Father Orlis. But she has served the church well her long life. I’m certain she will go to heaven.”

Father Harry suggests we go into the rectory for coffee. Whether he inherited Father Orlis’s books is unknown to me, only that the office is as lousy with them as it was when Orlis was alive. He clears off a chair and bids me to sit, then disappears into a back room and comes out with two cups of coffee. “There’s no cream, I’m afraid. I forgot to get it from the store. Is black okay?”

“Fine,” I say.

“I want you to know I did not invite you down here today just to take a walk or tell you about the Last Rites.”

“You didn’t?”

“No,” says Harry. He sits down behind his desk, pushes aside a tall, irregularly stacked pile of books and looks at me. “I want to tell you something. Just before your grandmother became ill, she had a meeting with me to discuss her funeral arrangements. I think she knew she was not well, but her mind was remarkably clear.”

“I suppose she’s planning a real humdinger.”

Father Henry smiles. “She expects fireworks, yes. But she was also very clear on what she wanted done and who she wanted to do it. Your grandmother liked to be in control …”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”

“Well, yes, and I think she was afraid her wishes might not be carried out after her death the way she wanted. So she came to me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I say. “Mother would do whatever it is she wanted. She should know that.”

“I don’t think she was referring to your mother.”

“Then who? Aunt Jeannette? The church auxiliary?”

Father Harry looks at me. I do not understand why he is telling me this. Grandnan is not dead yet. Surely decency demands such a conversation take place after. I tell him so.

“I’m telling you now because your grandmother asked me to. She was very specific about when. If she got sick, and after I had performed the Extreme Unction, I was to let you know.”

“Let me know what?”

Father Harry sighs. “She was afraid you wouldn’t take it well. That you might refuse to do it. I think her conscience bothered her the last few years, Jacob. I think she has had some regrets.”

I am utterly bewildered. Father Harry is talking in riddles. “Just get to your point,” I say.

“She wants you to give her eulogy,” Father Harry says. “And she wanted you to be told while she is alive, to give you time to absorb it. She thought if they told you a few days before the funeral you wouldn’t do it.”

I am stunned. Me? The eulogy? Why on earth would she want that? Here I am afraid of confronting her on her deathbed, and here she is giving me the opportunity to do it in front of the entire town. My reaction is swift, and unequivocal.

“I won’t do it,” I say. “I absolutely refuse.”

“She said you’d say that. She wants you to think about it.”

“What for? Just to tell you in a week or two, when she finally does die, that I won’t and you need to get someone else? Listen, Father. I don’t hate my grandmother, okay? She practically brought me up. And I know, that in her way, she cared for me. But I cannot stand up in front of the entire town and sing her praises …”

I catch myself. I was going to say, when she denied my uncle just as Peter denied Christ, but somehow the stricture about speaking about it in our town is still in place, even for me. And now my grandmother wants me to get up and pretend it never happened.

Or so I think.

Father Harry shakes his head and says, “You misunderstand. She doesn’t want you to sing her praises. She wants you to explain. She wants you to talk about the year your uncle died. She wants the town to know. She was never able to do it in her lifetime. She never had the courage, and the world she lived in didn’t allow it. But she knew the world you lived in did. She chose you, Jacob. She wants you to justify her to the town.”

“Justify her? You’ve got to be kidding me! I can’t justify her. I don’t know what she was thinking. I never did. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so damn angry at her!”

“She thinks you can. She was quite certain of it. So just take some time and think about what she’s asking. Perhaps if she wakes up again you can ask her about it, though I wouldn’t put much hope in that. Even if she does wake up, she’ll be very confused. I’m afraid she won’t last much longer.”

“I —”

“Don’t say anything else,” says Father Harry. “Do your grandmother a favour by considering what she has requested.”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

every spring and fall, and then again before Christmas, my grand-mother cleaned the house from top to bottom. This consisted of waxing all the hardwood floors and shampooing the rugs, dampening down the drapes with a wet cloth, dusting every stick of furniture and every knick-knack and piece of china in the dining room breakfront, and taking all the area rugs to the backyard to be beat on the red fence. She employed my mother and Jeanette and me for these tasks, overseeing most of them, and only saved the more delicate procedures, the china and glassware, for herself.

It was not cleaning season when my uncle was diagnosed with meningitis. My grandmother began to clean anyway. My mother thought she was doing it to distract herself from David’s illness and the fact he couldn’t yet be moved to his own place. She and Jeanette were glad my grandmother was keeping herself busy and tried to stay out of her way.

That Friday my grandmother was in a mood. She said little over dinner. After my mother and Jeanette went upstairs to take a tray up to David, my grandmother decided to take out some of her frustration by cleaning more. Once the dishes were done she asked me to take the duster and dust the picture frames in the hall and the living room. She wiped down the glass bowls and vases on coffee tables and stands. She also switched on the six o’clock news and turned up the volume so she could hear it, wherever in the house she was.

My grandmother was interested in what was going on in the world, but only so she could complain about the godlessness of it later to Jeanette and my mother. Her understanding of world events was limited. She knew the facts, but she didn’t know how to interpret them. Violence in the Middle East was due to an “inherent savagery” in the Arab nature. Starving people in Africa was due to an “inclination” to be lazy and indolent. Economic crisis in the US was due to rich men trying to fit themselves through the eyes of needles. Current events according to my grandmother were a muddle of biblical prophecy and racial stereotype, which never failed to infuriate my more liberal aunt.

As we cleaned, my grandmother occasionally commented on a snippet to me. I knew nothing of world events and cared even less. I was too busy dusting portraits of the pope and wilderness scenes and my grandfather’s medical degrees, which my grandmother had removed from his den when he died and proudly hung in the front hallway so everyone would see. I was not very tall for my age, so I had to stand on a chair to reach the highest picture. This was of a horse — Pegasus flying through the clouds — which had been given as a gift to my grandmother from a member of her church. No one ever mentioned to my grandmother this was a strange gift for one Christian to give another. Pegasus was a Greek myth, a pagan symbol, and was as far removed from Christ as apples are from oranges. My grandmother didn’t seem to notice; if she did, she didn’t care. She hung the painting in a place of prominence, and every year since I had turned nine I was obligated to dust it. It was the only time I noticed it. I thought winged horses were stupid. It meant no more to me than my grandfather’s Latin inscribed medical degrees.

On the other side of the door from Pegasus was a narrow, waist-high table. Upon it rested a large green Depression glass punch bowl. My grandmother loved Depression glass. She had a china cabinet full of it in the dining room. This bowl sat out because her own grandmother acquired it as a promotional gift in 1932, when her grandfather filled up his De Soto at a gas station and got an oil change. It was one of the only family heirlooms she had, and she wanted to display it prominently. Anyone given a tour of the house was first shown the punch bowl, and given a brief rundown of its history — where it had come from, including the name and proprietor of the gas station; the names of her mother and grandmother, who had owned it before my grandmother; and the day my grandmother received it, which happened to be her wedding day.

Children brought into the house were given the same rundown, though not half as friendly. “You see this?” my grandmother would say. “That is very old. Worth both a fortune in terms of its sentimental and dollar value. It is irreplaceable. You hear me? Irreplaceable! You are not to touch it. Do not run, jump, or slide around it. You are to avoid this area at all times. If I catch you doing any of those things around my bowl, I will banish you from this house.”

My grandmother meant what she said. I believed she would have banished me had I broken any of these rules. I was careful to walk around the table and punch bowl, always conscious not to trip and fall into it.

Breaking the punch bowl, according to my grandmother, would be akin to murder.

My mother and Jeanette told her many times she should store the bowl somewhere safer, where it would be in no danger. But she wouldn’t listen. “It needs to be displayed,” she said. “I’m very proud of it. People should just be careful of it. I’m not going to uproot and hide away my heritage just because some people don’t care to watch their step.” And so the bowl stayed.

As I was dusting Pegasus, my grandmother was dusting the bowl. It was a delicate procedure. She dared not move it to the kitchen to wash it, and instead ran a wet cloth around the inside of the bowl. To get to the underside, she had to lift it off its stand, cradling it in one arm like a baby while wiping it. .

We were both startled by my mother shouting at the top of the stairs.

“Mom!” she cried. “Come here. Hurry!”

“What?” called my grandmother. “I’m busy!”

“It’s David! Something’s wrong!”

“What is it this time?” my grandmother shouted. She was cradling the bowl in both arms now, and was about to set it back on the stand.

My mother yelled, “He can’t breathe! He’s burning up! Call an ambulance! For God’s sake.”

“Those two,” said my grandmother. “An hour ago he was fine. Now he’s sick again. God-knows-what …”

She stopped speaking. The tv in the rumpus room could be heard distinctly from where we stood. So far the news had been of the usual suspects — conflict, economy, politics. But just at that moment, as if orchestrated, we heard the announcer talking about this new disease. aids. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

My mother and Jeanette tried explaining it to my grandmother before, when the news first started carrying stories about it. But no one made a connection until then.

My grandmother gave a harsh intake of breath. She shoved the bowl back on its stand. The bowl was not all the way on. I watched in horror as it toppled and fell, detonating like a bomb on the hardwood floor. My grandmother didn’t notice. She turned halfway around and screamed, “Don’t touch him!” with an old lady’s dry and piercing squeal. “For God’s sake! Don’t touch him!” She ran up the stairs as fast as she could. “Don’t touch him!” she screamed. “Don’t touch him, Caroline!”

I stood on the chair, my duster in hand, looking down. Pieces of my grandmother’s precious bowl glittering like jagged emeralds on the dark wood of the floor.