THREE
■

 

bernadette mcleod, or “Deanny” as I came to know her, was from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Not just the middle class neighbourhood called Mechanicsville, down by the second bridge, but the area behind Mechanicsville, near the old gravel pit called Meadow Pond Lane.

There was more than just a lane at Meadow Pond. There were several deeply rutted dirt roads that criss-crossed each other and around which a shantytown had sprung up like a collection of toadstools after the Second World War. There were no businesses to speak of, except a rundown bottle depot at one end. The houses in between were small, unkempt structures with no paint, or paint that had faded to the colour of old crepe paper. Yards were overgrown and marred with the rusting hulks of cars and bicycles and overturned tricycles. Ragged curtains and sheets hung in windows. No one knew what, if anything, Deanny’s father did. It was assumed they lived on welfare — the worst sin, according to my grandmother, next to apostasy.

At the end of May, my friend Cameron’s mother decided he had to “buckle down” and focus on his homework, and that I should stay away from the house while he studied. Cameron and I were only in grade six. We didn’t have final exams. But Mrs. Simms believed that work habits, especially when it came to academics, should be formed early. She was preparing Cameron for his certain future as a student in university. I was a blatant distraction.

Cameron did not complain. He followed his parents’ direction with an almost cult-like obedience, and I was forced to wander the neighbourhood by myself each night after supper without him. My own mother did not enforce rules around homework. She barely ever asked if I had finished it. She was permissive and laissez-faire about child-rearing. If I had homework, I would do it, and if I didn’t, I would reap the consequences.

There were no kids my age in our neighbourhood, and even if there were I suspected they would not want to play with me. I could have stayed at home, but since my uncle arrived I no longer liked being inside. I would rather be outside alone than listen to the adults in my house reminisce and ignore me entirely. If the evening was nice I would walk up Tenerife Street, then up and back across Primrose Street. Often neighbours were out clipping hedges, preparing gardens, and mowing lawns. They usually waved to me. I did not wave back. I had money in my pocket, but no desire to go to the stores on Main Street to see what I could buy. I was usually full from supper.

On Thursday night, June 16, I decided to go to the old mill. This was the only place in town besides the Indian reserve that was off-limits to me. It was dangerous, I was told. Twenty years before, it was a chipping and lumber mill that had employed about a hundred men from the town. Then, my mother said, a newer, more efficient mill opened near Trenton, with better equipment, higher wages, and faster production. The old mill had trouble keeping men, and lost contracts to the new mill. They shut it down, sold what equipment they could, and left the rest. My grandmother never liked that the old mill was there, derelict and less than a mile and a half behind her neighbourhood. She said the town should buy the property, level it, and turn it into a park.

So far no one had listened to her.

There were two log ponds at the mill: one in front of the old planer mill, and the other where the lumberyard used to be. You’d have to be crazy to swim in them. They were dark and turbid, with the bark of old logs and bits of plastic and unidentifiable jetsam floating in them. You could imagine that if the light struck them just right, new life would arise — that some sickening, amoebic thing might sidle out of the water and try to absorb you.

It was a fair barometer of my mood that this was the place I chose to go. When I came here before it was with Cameron, whose parents never forbid him from going there. They had a child-rearing policy — I had heard them expound it — of never forbidding anything, and letting Cameron find out on his own what was and what was not safe to do. In Cameron’s case this worked. He was, if anything, more physically timid than I was. He would no more have ventured into the old buildings or gone near the ponds than he would wear a dress. He was tempted by the planer mill, however, and he kept looking inside to see if he could figure out what the old equipment was for.

Several times I suggested we go inside and look, but he always turned me down. “Those danger signs aren’t there for fun,” he said. “A kid could get seriously hurt in there.” And because I was a follower, and had no temerity of my own, I had not ventured in.

The mill was deserted, or so I thought. I’d already checked out both ponds and the chip silo. I wasn’t aware there was anyone in the mill with me that night until I heard a voice — distinctly female, but hoarse and almost ageless. I stood at the mouth of the planer mill, staring into its dark interior and the hunched brooding shoulders of machinery shrouded in shadow and dust, trying to work up the courage to enter. I didn’t like darkness. I thought of the possibility of enormous spiders spinning webs, or snakes. I was beginning to think maybe I wouldn’t go in; that I had proved myself enough just by walking up here.

I was startled when I heard the voice again.

“Hey asshole,” she said, shocking me out of my deliberation. “What the fuck ya up to?”

I spun around and was presented with the strangest looking creature I’d ever seen. She wore red and black checkered pants, a bright sky-blue top, and sneakers that may once have been white but were now almost black. Besides the colourful, clownish clothes — I was wearing clean jeans and a white button-down Chaps shirt, another reason not to go into the mill — she had the thickest mop of curly black hair I’d ever seen, and utterly filthy face and hands. Whatever Deanny had been doing before she met me, she had been doing it well. I was very particular about dirt. I didn’t like any on me. She just stood there, legs apart, hands at her sides and curled into fists — though not, I thought, threateningly — looking at me with a mix of curiosity and suspicion. I found out later she’d been watching from behind an old log, to gauge whether or not I was safe. Her head was cocked slightly to one side, and her eyes, as black as her hair, were taking me in, sizing me up, evaluating me. Finally, she said, “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to speak to me? You asshole.”

I was not used to swearing. There was no swearing in our household, and none in Cameron’s. Neither of us were used to it. Unfortunately, I told Deanny this.

She smiled. It was not a friendly smile. In no way could it be called nice. It was more carnivorous than anything. Then she let off a string that took my breath away. She achieved a certain poetic intensity, and by the time she was done I was in awe. She smiled again, and this time it was graceful and genuine. “You gonna play with me or what?”

“I guess,” I stammered.

“Come on then,” she said. “I haven’t got all goddamned fucking day.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“I got ideas,” Deanny said. “If you can keep up.”

I didn’t know if I could. Deanny ran us all over the mill, and objections I had to any activities were quickly brushed aside in favour of her primary motivation: to do things because we could. We tried things to figure out if they were fun. Just because something was dangerous or illegal did not count as a bona fide excuse, not in Deanny’s world. She smoked, and derided me when I wouldn’t take one from her pack. I had never smoked, nor did my mother. Jeanette did, occasionally, but only outdoors. My grandmother wouldn’t allow lit cigarettes inside her home.

We crawled our way up the conveyer belt to the mill silo, me in a half-terror of falling, until we got inside. It was full of chips and smelled of pine, urine, and old rot. Deanny pushed me down into the chips immediately, before I’d even had a chance to recover from the ordeal of the climb.

“What did you do that for?” I asked, still lying on my back.

“Because,” Deanny said. “I’m the king of the mountain, and you’re the dirty rascal.”

Each time I got up, Deanny would push me down again. She was strong, and I was not a fighter. I could hardly believe I crawled all the way up there to be beaten by a girl.

“Quit it,” I said. “I want to look around.”

“Forget it,” said Deanny. “There’s nothing in here. Let’s go someplace else.”

By the time she was done with me I was dirty and exhausted. She’d forced me into the chip silo, and the planer mill, and my clothes and face ended up as smeared with grease as hers.

A rusted, rundown “pettybone,” or forklift, sat unclaimed in the old lumberyard. Deanny insisted we try starting it. The key was in the ignition, but the battery was dead. She wanted to smash the glass in the cab with rocks.

“Why?” I said. “That’s destruction of property.”

Deanny looked at me with ill-concealed contempt. “Are you that pansy-assed?” she said. “No one uses it. It’s a hunk of junk. Who cares if we break a few windows? And even if they do, who’s to say it was us?”

And so we broke windows — on all four sides of the cab. They were thick and took many attempts to do so. There was a certain satisfaction in destroying something just for fun. I had never done anything like it before. Cameron and I had a thoughtful, logical, constructive relationship. Deanny was wild and unpredictable; there was a certain crazed anima about her I’d never experienced before. I had to admit it was exhilarating.

After two hours, when it was starting to get dark, I told Deanny I had to go home.

“Mama’s boy,” she said. “Have to be in before the sun goes down.”

“Yes,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

Deanny — filthy and glistening, her hands still balled into fists — looked at me and said, “Go the fuck home then.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

Neither of us moved.

“So you want to meet up again tomorrow?” Deanny said first. I had forced her to, by nature of my diffident and restrained personality. I don’t know how much it cost her, if it came naturally or not. It was the only concession she made to me all evening. If she hadn’t, who knows when we would have seen each other again?

“Where?” I said.

“Here. Where else, fuckwad?”

I went home happy.

When my grandmother saw me she had a fit. “My heavens! Look at you! Your clothes are ruined! Where have you been?”

I lied to her. I told her I’d fallen down into a slough hole by the river. She complained to my mother I was going through clothes like a common labourer and I’d ruined the shirt she had bought me for Christmas. My mother forgave me, and said it was an accident. What could she do? She told me if I was going out at night maybe I should wear older clothes so it wouldn’t matter if I got dirty. I agreed. I figured if I was going out again with Deanny I’d better wear coveralls and a hardhat. I wanted to tell my mother about the girl I had met, but something stopped me. I didn’t know anything about her or her family or where she lived or what her father did. My mother wouldn’t have cared about any of this, of course. She would just be happy I’d made a new friend.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

my grandmother could never be accused of being an aesthete; her tastes ran from the banal to the outright clichéd or hideous. But in the kitchen she came closest to operating with some kind of grace. She believed in slicing carrots because it added not only to the function of the food but its presentation. The way a food lay in a dish was just as important as how it tasted. The smell of sliced meat determined the quality of its taste. The right seasoning to a soup, and whether it was folded or stirred, could make the difference between a triumph and a disaster. The rules were both subtle and complex, and my mother and Jeanette failed miserably at mastering them. They were content to let my grandmother make most of the food, and simply eat what was allotted to them — and not without effusive praise. To my grandmother compliments could be as delicious as a delicately spiced slice of ham.

In some ways, though, she was a typical old-fashioned cook. She had a horror of exotic spices and any dish that smacked of ethnicity. I don’t think my grandmother was as racist in her culinary habits as she was in real life. She just never learned to cook outside a certain framework, and many of the spices and exotic recipes common later on were not available when she learned to cook as a girl. She was simply out of her element when it came to them and so, as many people do when confronted by the strange or unfamiliar, she denigrated. Curry was not allowed in the house. It stank, and excreted through one’s pores. Chinese food was all right from a restaurant, but it had no place in a woman’s kitchen. And Thai? Whoever heard of cooking with coconut milk?

As for me, I thrive on making these dishes. They have become my specialty. Whether this is natural for a man who lives in a multicultural city, or I am simply rebelling against my grandmother’s narrow habits in the kitchen, I do not know. Deanny, for one, appreciates my cooking. When she comes to Toronto I often have her over for Indian or Thai. Unlike Cameron, we have stayed in touch over the years. She is a lawyer. The fact a girl from her background would end up being a lawyer, and a good one too, is either a testament to inherent equality within the system or a paean to Deanny’s tenacity. I tend to think the latter. In high school she worked hard and earned scholarships. She attended Dalhousie and earned more. My grandmother even gave her some money for tuition when she was accepted into law school. Deanny McLeod was my grandmother’s favourite example of what a poor person can do when they “pull themselves up by the bootstraps.”

Deanny likes my grandmother, now that she is an adult. She’s never understood my resentment towards her.

“You didn’t have to live with her,” I say.

“Your grandmother’s old,” Deanny says. “You should make allowances.”

It is always amazing to me how Deanny has completely reinvented herself. Out of that foul-mouthed little waif I met all those years ago at the mill, she has become a smart, educated, sophisticated woman. I sometimes tell Deanny this. She shrugs.

“We’re all two people,” she said to me once. “The people we are, and the people we want to be. It’s a matter of will and perseverance to turn one into the other.”

“Very few people can do it,” I said. “You should be proud of yourself.”

Deanny handles most of the pro bono work for her firm, which frees up the other lawyers for billable hours. She loves it, and would not, she says, have it any other way. The majority of her clients are the working poor. It’s no coincidence that Deanny handles cases that suit her own background. She hunted around, she told me, for a firm with a pro bono policy that pleased her.

Occasionally, Deanny will get a case that, in accordance with the policy of her firm, helps someone living with hiv. I told her once it was strange we should both end up doing the same work.

“Not strange,” Deanny told me. “Destined.”

“I don’t believe in destiny,” I said.

“You wouldn’t,” she said. “Mr. Mathematics. Mr. Logical.”

“I just mean it’s strange how our past affects our future.”

“Only if we let it,” Deanny said. “My past has affected my work, but it doesn’t cripple my life. I don’t allow it. When the day is done I go home to my apartment and cook dinner and watch tv.”

I have been home less than a week when Deanny drives down from Halifax to see me. The first thing she does is go and pay her respects to my grandmother. She is in there a half hour or more. I consider going and asking what is taking her so long. My grandmother is comatose. It’s not like they can have a conversation. I am surprised to see when Deanny comes downstairs that she has been crying. She dabs the corners of her eyes with a Kleenex and takes a seat beside me on the sofa. When we were kids this is the only room we were allowed in besides my bedroom. We can sit anywhere we want in the house now, with my grandmother incapacitated. Old habits die hard.

“So,” Deanny says. “Tell me about your life.”

I start to tell her all about the outreach centre, and she stops me. “I said your life, not your work.”

“My work is my life,” I say.

“Sad,” said Deanny. “Still no boyfriend?”

“I don’t have time.”

“When are you gonna get out there and start meeting some people? Your mother is worried. She thinks you’re alone too much.”

“Mothers worry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Your grandmother is going to die,” Deanny said. “Soon, you know. You should be prepared.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m home for the funeral, aren’t I?”

“Not just about that,” Deanny said. “About other things.”

“What other things?”

But she enjoys being cryptic. It’s possible she knows something I don’t; she came down to visit my grandmother a lot. And my mother said that unlike me and her and even Aunt Jeanette, my grandmother always recognized Deanny.

“I must be stored in some accessible neuron in an active part of her brain,” Deanny said of it. “She still calls me her little urchin, sometimes. Her little waif.”

I offer to take her out to dinner, but Mom comes into the room just as I am asking and insists we have dinner at the house. She cooks, and the four of us crowd around the table in the kitchen and have roast chicken and corn on the cob. Deanny, by her very presence, elevates the mood somehow and we are all laughing and talking and entirely forgetting there is an old woman in a coma upstairs. Deanny quit smoking years ago, but my Aunt Jeanette has not. The three of us go outside to the stoop and Aunt Jeanette lights up.

Deanny says she has to go. “I’ll be back down in a couple of days,” she says. “I want to see as much of Mrs. McNeil as I can before she goes.”

I feel this is directed at me — a criticism, a wake-up call.

It doesn’t work.

Deanny can afford to be magnanimous towards my grandmother. She has been here for it all, but she is not related. She has made forgiveness an art, and I suppose if she can forgive her own father — a drunk, a reprobate, and a man who kept their entire family insolvent throughout Deanny’s childhood — before he died, she can forgive anyone.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

every time i meet her, Deanny has a new boyfriend. I have met some of them. Without exception they are quiet, intense, intellectual, and often bespectacled. Her latest is a writer. He has won several awards, and the Internet is lousy with his name. Deanny often dates writers and artists. She is attracted, she says, to the artistic temperament, possibly because she has no artistic ambitions of her own. She likes inspiring people, but she isn’t inspired by them for very long. She never tells me what happens. The next time I see her, the guy I met last time is nowhere to be found. This time she’ll be dating a painter, or a musician.

I have no right to criticize. As much as Deanny seems engaged with a lifelong experiment in serial relationships, I barely have any at all. I am not, despite Deanny’s grumbling, an out-and-out virgin. When I first moved to Toronto I had a few encounters, most of them fumbling, awkward affairs that ended badly for me, for him, or for both of us. I was always afraid of sex. Not just because of aids, but because of the massive intimacy required. I just do not feel comfortable opening myself up to strangers, and my job keeps me too busy to date and get to know anyone before we jump in the sack together. Faced with this dilemma, I content myself with books, drinks with my colleagues, and my job. I cook, watch television, and occasionally go to a movie or play. It is not a bad life, even if it is not an easy one.

Deanny tells me she wants me to meet her latest, Richard, and to cook curry for them. She also tells me she is inviting another “friend” along for me to meet.

“This isn’t you playing matchmaker again,” I say. “That never turns out good.”

“But this guy is different,” says Deanny. “He’s the perfect match.”

“In what way?”

“He’s Russian, for one,” she says, as if that makes him instantly desirable.

“So?” I say. “There’s a whole country full of those.”

“He’s a schoolteacher.”

“I know nothing of teaching. I know nothing of schoolteachers.”

“He teaches high school math,” says Deanny. This is her pièce de résistance. “Surely that will give you something to talk about.”

“You expect us to have dinner with you, and talk about non-linear equations?”

“I don’t know what that is,” says Deanny. “But I bet Pavel does. That’s why he’s the perfect date for you.”

“Pavel?”

“Russian for Paul.”

“Okay,” I say. “But I’m not sure I want to meet anyone.”

Every time I come home Deanny invites me to Halifax to have dinner and tries to set me up. I rank them by profession. There have been doctors, lawyers, an engineer, an actor, a pharmacist, and an occupational therapist. We rarely made it to the next date.

I am not a traditionally good-looking man. I’m on the thin side, and my nose is too big. Calling it aquiline would be stretching it. Ski-slopish would be more accurate. I inherited it from my grandmother. And I have skin problems. Not acne, or eczema. Just a slight peeling around my nose and above my eyes. I apply a cream each night before bed, not unaware that my grandmother applies a similar mask as part of her nightly ritual.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the men Deanny picked for me to live the rest of my life with were not audaciously, universally handsome. I didn’t know where she found them. It was as if she had an Abercrombie and Fitch for professionals and intellectuals. I was usually so stricken by the looks of these men that I had no idea what to say. Dinner, whether out or in Deanny’s apartment, was awkward, and I was always quite surprised when they expressed interest and wanted to see me again.

Each man gave his number, but I never called. Deanny always complains about this. She says I will die old and alone and my body will be mauled by cats for a week before anyone finds me. I remind Deanny I don’t have any cats. That I hate them, in fact.

“You know what I mean,” she says.

In the end, I agree to another dinner, as Deanny can be tenacious and will not give in until I concede. It is this, I imagine, that makes her such a good lawyer.

“Wear something nice.”

“I don’t have anything nice,” I say. “Jeans and short-sleeves all the way. Unless you count the suit I brought for Grandnan’s funeral.”

“Just don’t sabotage it, is all I mean.”

“Do I ever?” I say.

“Very funny,” says Deanny. “Just try this time. Pavel is a good friend of Richard’s. He’s the most amazing person, Jake. I really think you’ll hit it off. So does Richard.”

“Richard has never met me.”

“He knows what I told him. So we’ll see you Saturday?”

“Yes,” I say, sighing.

My mother is in the kitchen with me, drinking a coffee at the table, and has heard the entire conversation.

“So you’re going to Deanny’s?” she says, when I hang up.

“Yes. Saturday. For a meal.”

She smiles. “And she’s fixing you up?”

“Again. She just won’t quit.”

“She’s just concerned about you. We all are. We think you spend too much time alone up there in Toronto.”

“I’m not alone. I have my co-workers, and clients. Some days it seems like all there is is people.”

“Deanny is concerned about your personal life. You’re not getting any younger, Jacob. You should start think about settling down.”

I’ve had this conversation, or one similar to it, a hundred times in my life. It is the ongoing theme of the continuing saga of the Life of Jake McNeil, as told by his family and friends. I hate it. I tell my mother I am tired, and she gives up, sighing as loudly as I had with Deanny on the phone. But she lets it go, and I go up to my room.

 

2

 

one little garden sculpture was a source of tension every year in our home. It was of a little black boy sitting on a wall, fishing. My grandmother always placed it dead-centre on the front lawn. She placed it herself, because my mother forbid me to do it. My mother did not want anyone to see me putting it there. Both she and Aunt Jeanette thought the sculpture thoughtlessly racist; they thought my grandmother should smash it and have it done with.

She refused.

“What’s racist about it? It’s just a little boy.”

“A little black boy,” said Aunt Jeanette.

“A little black boy then,” said my grandmother. “What harm is there in that? Little black boys exist, don’t they?”

“Surely they do,” said my mother. “And little black boy statues exist only on the lawns of white people. Black people don’t have them.”

“I fail to see,” said my grandmother, “how you two can find this offensive. No one has ever said a word to me about it.”

“Perhaps,” said my mother, “if there were some black people in town, you’d hear more about it.”

“And perhaps you’re forgetting,” said my grandmother, “about Henry Hennsey? He lives in town, and last time I checked he is as black as the ace of spades.”

It was true. Henry Hennsey was black, and he did live in town, in a small, butter-yellow house on Carfax Street in Mechanicsville. The Hennseys had moved there in the fifties from Halifax. At the time, according to my grandmother, it had caused quite a stir. There were no blacks — or any other person of colour, for that matter — in Advocate, besides the Natives, who had been neatly deposited on the reserve a hundred years before. Henry’s parents had died years ago and left him the house. No one knew how he supported himself because he didn’t have a job.

“Welfare,” said some.

“Life insurance,” said others.

One of the ways Henry made a living, albeit a small one, was to pick up items from the liquor store for those in town who did not want to be seen buying it. Henry would get it for them, deliver it to their house, and be paid a small stipend for the service. He would go walking up and down Main Street and across the bridges in all kinds of seasons and weather, a forty-year-old, slightly plump man with a wicker basket on his arm.

The basket was to carry food and bottles in. He’d been carrying it since he was a boy, before he was old enough to go to the liquor store. It was said young Henry started doing this when his mother would send him to the grocery store and found the cashiers would not pack his groceries for him. They didn’t want to waste a bag on a “nigger.”

I was fascinated with Henry when I was boy, and not just because he was the only black face in our town. There was something beautiful about him, with his cocoa-coloured skin and opalescent teeth. The first time I saw a statue of Buddha I was reminded forcibly of Henry. He rarely ever spoke, and when it did it was a quick word of greeting or something practical related to his errand. He always wore green work pants with suspenders and a plaid shirt, and in winter an over-stuffed blue jacket and black and yellow rubber boots. Whenever I walked by he simply turned his pale eyes in my direction, nodded once slowly, and strode on. Occasionally he walked up Tenerife Street, and my grandmother always cooed and delighted in this, for this meant he was delivering booze to one of her friends or neighbours. I never saw him once look at our little black boy on the lawn.

Years before my uncle left home, he had struck up a friendship with Henry. My mother or Aunt Jeanette had not known about it. Neither did my grandmother.

To her frustration, she was also unable to get any information out of David about Toronto, or why he had decided to come home after all these years, or what he did when he went to town or why he was missing the last two weeks of school. Surely he had to oversee final exams. Mark papers. Draw up report cards. She knew he was going for coffee at the diner, because mother or Jeanette served him. But she didn’t know what else he was up to.

I think my grandmother was afraid he had a lover. She never said as much — I can’t imagine the circumstances necessary to force those words from her lips — but she asked him an undue amount of questions about where he was and who he was with, and she said to my mother and Jeanette he was “up to no good.”

“What on earth could he get up to in this town,” asked my mother, “that he couldn’t get up to in Toronto?” Both Jeanette and my mother knew Uncle David had a lover there, though he refused to talk about him. Nor did he talk about Toronto or his job.

“I don’t know,” said my grandmother. “But I don’t like having anyone living under my roof who refuses to give a complete account of himself.”

“Welcome to Gulag Tenerife,” said Jeanette. “I hope you find your stay comfortable.”

“I’m not running a prison, but neither is this a southern resort. I expect you all to carry your weight, and be responsible. And that includes letting me know what you’re up to.”

Jeanette had no response for this; later she told my mother, within my earshot, she was surprised my grandmother knew what “Gulag” meant.

David, for his part, ignored my grandmother. When Aunt Jeanette and my mother were at work, he’d stay in the tv room or his bedroom, reading and avoiding my grandmother until they came home. Then we’d have dinner and they’d sit and drink tea and talk. Otherwise he’d wander the streets.

It was Jeanette who saw him with Henry Hennsey when she drove down Carfax Street. She was going to get her hair done at Ilene’s Salon on Joseph Street — she always cut down Carfax to get there — and spotted him on the steps of Henry’s yellow house. Later that night, at dinner, she asked David about it.

“I used to visit him occasionally,” my uncle said, a forkful of mashed potatoes hovering near his mouth. “When I was younger. I quite like him.”

“What’s he like?” asked my mother. “I mean, I’ve said hello to him on the street, but I’ve never really talked to him.”

“He’s an interesting and intelligent man,” said my uncle. “Do you know he’s memorized, for every year since 1600, a single important event that changed the world?”

“What nonsense,” said my grandmother. “No one can know that many things.”

“He does,” said my uncle. “I quizzed him.”

“What did he know?” asked Aunt Jeanette.

“I said ‘1692,’” said David. “He told me, quick as a flash, ‘Salem witch trials began. Fourteen women and five men hanged in that year. It was also a leap year.’”

“That’s amazing,” said my mother.

“That’s nothing. He can do it for any year. You should try it with him next time you see him.”

My mother laughed. “I can just see myself. Running into him, saying ‘Hi Henry. What happened in 1717?’”

“He reads a lot,” said Uncle David. “We have that in common.”

“I don’t see what else you have in common,” said my grandmother, moodily silent for most of this exchange. Everyone looked at her. “Well, don’t stare at me,” she said. “I’m not referring to his colour. Henry Hennsey delivers booze. If people see you at his house they’ll think you’re buying liquor.”

“So what if they do?” said my uncle. “I care not what people think.”

“You don’t live here,” she said. “You just come and muddy the waters.”

There was much clicking of cutlery against plates and shifting in seats, but very little other sound. After dinner, David went up to his room. Grandnan went to the sink to rinse dishes, my mother cleared the table, and I took clean dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the counter for Jeanette to put away.

My mother asked Grandnan why she had to be so difficult.

My grandmother shook her head. “I’m not being difficult. I’m speaking the truth. I don’t care if you like it.”

“You don’t have to be so cruel. He’s having a hard enough time as it is.”

“What hard time? Seems to me he has it easy! Home on vacation. Free room and board. Not a worry in the world!”

“Something’s wrong,” my mother said. She stopped moving dishes and stood in the centre of the floor. “Don’t you know that by now? He would never have come home otherwise.”

“What then?” my grandmother asked. “I don’t hear him saying anything.”

“He will.”

“Well, until then — and after, for that matter — I’ll say what I want in my own house. If you don’t like it, you can look for alternate arrangements. How many times have I told you girls that?”

“You’re impossible,” my mother said.

“I know,” my grandmother said. “You’ve told me countless times.” And with that she marched out of the room, the last of the dishes rinsed and set in the sink for me to place in the washer.

A few minutes later my uncle came into the kitchen to steep a cup of tea. My mother and I were finishing the dishes. She apologized for my grandmother’s comments.

“No need,” said my uncle cheerfully. “You didn’t make them.”

“I’m curious,” said my mother. “What else do you and Henry talk about? Does he ever say what it’s like for him to live in Advocate?”

My uncle was rummaging around in the cupboard above the dishwasher for the Tetley. My mother edged him out and found it for him. “Not really,” said Uncle David. “We just talk about books, mainly. And history. He’s really quite a remarkable man. I went to school with him, you know. He was a grade or two ahead of me.”

“Did he say what was the most important, world-shaking event of 1984?” my mother said, smiling. “Was it that David McNeil moved back to the town of his birth?”

He didn’t look at her. Instead he busied himself with the kettle and cup and saucer in front of him. “I didn’t ask,” he said.

My mother’s smile melted. I knew the look she gave my uncle. She has this talent, inherited from God-knows-where, of always being able to tell when a person is lying. Many times if I had told a fib I would see my mother grow still and serious all of a sudden and just stare at me gently until I told the truth. It works on Aunt Jeanette too, who has been known to be less than truthful about certain minor things if the need suits her.

I could see my mother knew David was lying about something.

She said only that she was going to watch tv, and told David to meet her there when his tea was made. He said he would.

At seven o’clock my grandmother came down to watch Dallas, her favourite show and the only one she watched regularly. Jeanette and my mother hated it, but stayed to watch it with her if only to be near David, who had never seen it.

“What do you mean, never seen Dallas?” said my grandmother. “It’s the best show on television.”

“I don’t watch tv as a rule,” said my uncle.

“Neither do I,” said Aunt Jeanette. “It’s an idiot box, as far as I’m concerned.”

“You only say that because you’ve never lived in a time without it,” said my grandmother. “If you had, you’d appreciate it more.” This had a certain weird logic no one bothered my grandmother over.

It was an unusually peaceful evening, given my grandmother’s comments at dinner. No one mentioned Henry Hennsey the rest of the night. At bedtime my uncle put his head through the doorway to wish me goodnight. I had not warmed up to him since he had come home, which he didn’t seem bothered by. But I was stricken with curiosity about Henry Hennsey. I wanted to ask my uncle questions, trapped between my dislike for him and my fascination with Henry.

My uncle saw this, and stepped into my room. “What is it Jacob?”

I cleared my throat and asked him, softly, why he didn’t ask Henry Hennsey what the most important event of this year was going to be.

“He’s not a prognosticator, Jacob,” David said. “I can’t ask him what hasn’t happened yet.”

“A prognosti-what?”

“A fortune teller. A seer of the future.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It’s likely the most important thing of this year hasn’t happened yet. It’s only June after all.”

And suddenly my resentment towards him was forgotten, at least for the moment. “So of all the things that happen in a year, how do you tell what’s most important?” I said.

“That’s a good question,” said my uncle. “I suppose it depends on your perspective.”

I didn’t understand this very well, mostly because I didn’t understand the concept of perspective. Very few eleven-year-olds do, because when it comes right down to it we don’t have any. At that age, everything is filtered through the self.

As usual when I didn’t understand something, I reverted to numbers. “Henry has memorized 482 facts about the world,” I said. “And if he memorized every leap year too, and you count that as a fact, then he’s memorized 602. That’s a lot of information.”

My uncle smiled. “You like numbers, don’t you,” he said.

“I guess,” I said. “The square root of pi is 1.77245385091 and so on.”

My uncle’s smile broadened. “You got me there. I can count to a hundred and that’s pretty much it.”

“Will you take me to meet Henry sometime?”

His smile disappeared. Not rapidly, but quizzically. “What for?” he said.

I shrugged. “I just want to.”

I couldn’t tell my uncle that I was interested in Henry because he was black, and because he seemed to me to be the most enigmatic, serene person I had ever seen. I couldn’t even explain these things to myself. I just wanted to meet him.

“I’ll ask him,” said my uncle. “And we’ll see what he says. How about that?”

“Okay.”

As soon as my uncle left my room, I convinced myself I didn’t like him again. But I was excited about possibly meeting Henry.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

my uncle’s full name was David Owen Angus William McNeil. It was a mouthful. He was the only member of our family besides my great grandfather to have more than one middle name. This is because, said my mother, he was the first born, and male, and my grandfather wanted to fulfill the Scottish custom of naming his son after every ancestor he could think of. The Owen in my uncle’s name was my great grandfather’s. The Angus was for a famous great uncle, and the William for William Wallace, the great Scotsman, from whom my grandfather claimed our family was directly descended. I didn’t know until later this is a common claim among the Scots, and we were most likely no more related to the great William Wallace than a flower is to a tree.

It was my uncle’s first name that was the most unusual choice. My grandmother, after having named half of Scotland in the middle, wanted it to be something from the Bible. John and Paul were “too Anglo” according to my grandfather, and Matthew and Mark “too soft.” No one wanted a baby named Ezekiel or Zebedee. So they settled on David.

David was then, and still is, a common name for boys. There is one in my office in Toronto, who is a decade younger than my uncle would have been today, had he lived.

The biblical David was a hero — a giant-killer, the King of Judea. But my grandmother would remind her oldest son, when she was angry with him, that David was also the murderer of Bathsheba, and a census taker. According to her, the name had its baggage.

My mother told me once that Uncle David hated his excess of names, and when he got older had them shortened on his birth certificate to David Owen McNeil. My grandmother was incensed. “You don’t go changing your name just because you feel like it,” she said to him. “It’s not yours to change. We put a lot of thought in that!”

My grandfather calmed her down. “That name is a handful,” he said. “The boy is only trying to make his life more manageable. Besides, he still has them. Just not officially.”

Where my uncle was concerned, said my mother, my grandfather was always permissive. Always understanding. And he kept my grandmother in line — until, of course, he died, and David was banished from the house.

Years later, when I asked my mother why Grandnan had let him come home in 1984 after all that time she had no answer. “Maybe he caught her in a weak moment. It had been years since they quarreled. Perhaps she figured it was time.”

Whatever the reason, my grandmother did not want to keep my uncle for long.

In the latter part of the first week, he came down with a cold. He slept a lot. He went to bed early, got up late, and looked sweaty and flushed when he came downstairs for breakfast. My mother was convinced he had a fever, and she insisted he go see Dr. Willis, our family doctor who we most often called Dr. Fred.

“It’s not serious,” my uncle said. “I’ll be fine.”

Everyone except my grandmother worried about him.

“I don’t see why the two of you are making such a fuss,” she said. “You don’t get half as concerned when I come down with a head cold.”

“Do you have a head cold?” asked Aunt Jeanette.

“Of course I don’t,” said my grandmother sharply. “You know as well as I do I’m as fit as a fiddle.”

“Well if you do,” said Jeanette, “we’ll take care to worry after you, too.”

My grandmother harrumphed.

I was in school most days. My uncle, because he was a teacher, was interested in my school work. He asked what I was learning and from whom, and I told him enough to get him off my back. He often asked me about math, and what I liked about it. To that I shrugged. I didn’t know. The neatness of it. The resolution of equation into answer. The fact it was impossible to equivocate with numbers. I couldn’t put any of this into words, nor did I want to. I just liked it.

He was making an attempt to get to know me. Twice he came into my room while I was reading and sat on the edge of my bed and talked to me. I was hostile to his advances. I answered him in monosyllables and wouldn’t look him in the eye.

This didn’t seem to bother him. He talked anyway, and told me stories about my mother and him when they were children.

One Saturday, after my mother and Jeanette had just gone to work, he caught me playing with my Easy-Bake Oven. I wasn’t baking any cakes — I had run out of mixes — but I was cleaning the burnt cake mix off a pan with a toothpick and running the oven to clean it. My bed was unmade, but my uncle — still wearing his housecoat — sat on it anyway and watched me on the floor. I was mildly embarrassed he caught me playing with girls’ toys, but he told me not to worry about it, that he himself had a few dolls when he was a kid. “They were paper and you put cut-out clothes on them. I used to play with them all the time.”

I knew, though didn’t say, this was likely the same doll set that sat in my closet. I said, derisively, “I thought those belonged to my mother.”

My uncle looked thoughtful. “They probably did. But I think I played with them when I was around your age.”

“Grandnan says that I shouldn’t play with girls’ toys or I’ll turn out like you.”

It was bold, but I didn’t like my uncle, and I wanted him to know it. I watched him carefully for reaction to my pronouncement.

He only smiled, slightly, and said, “Turn out like me how?”

“Like a girl or something,” I said. “A homosexual.”

My uncle looked surprised. “You know that word?” he said.

I shrugged. “Mom told me before you came. She never said what it meant though. But Grandnan says if I play with girls’ toys I’ll turn out like you. And now you’re here and Mom and Jeanette hardly talk to me anymore and Grandnan is in a bad mood. We’re all wondering when you’re going to leave.” This was the most I’d said to my uncle since he’d arrived.

I had lied to him. Only my grandmother and I were wondering when he was going to leave. My mother and Aunt Jeanette were hoping he would stay forever. But I wanted to be mean to him. I wanted him to know there was substantial resistance to his presence, and it didn’t just come from my grandmother. I had never considered myself a mean boy. I didn’t pick fights. I never taunted or provoked. But I took a small pleasure in lashing out at my uncle.

He only smiled at me, and didn’t seem at all offended. His smile was vaguely sad.

Eventually I gave him my very limited definition of the word homosexual, culminating in my belief that he was so offensive to grandmother because he wouldn’t get married.

My uncle laughed, though I honestly did not see what was so funny. When he saw I was offended he stopped. But he couldn’t remove the smile from his face. “Me not getting married,” he said, “is the least of your grandmother’s worries.”

“Then what are her worries?”

“I’ll tell you,” my uncle said. “I know your mother wouldn’t mind, because we’ve already discussed it, but I wouldn’t mention this to your grandmother if I were you. Sparks might fly.”

Sparks always flew when it came to my grandmother, but I promised my uncle I wouldn’t.

He launched into an explanation. It wasn’t harsh, like my grandmother’s elucidation of things would often be, and it wasn’t vague, like my mother’s. My uncle had his own style. Measured, calm, and assured. He was revealing great secrets, but he did so with the confidence of a seasoned teacher. I listened to him in fascination as he spoke the truth.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

when my mother came home on a ten o’clock break to get her watch, she found my uncle and me in my bedroom talking.

“You two seem to be getting along,” she said from the doorway.

“Uncle David likes boys,” I pronounced. “Grandnan thinks it’s because he played with dolls when he was my age.”

My mother raised her eyebrows and looked at her brother. He nodded, and my mother looked back at me. I was sitting beside Uncle David on my bed by this time, the Easy-Bake Oven forgotten. “What do you think of that?” she said.

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I don’t see what the big secret was.” I knew what a fag was. I’d heard the word on school grounds frequently and had often been called one myself. I had no idea anyone could actually be one, however. I really believed it was a figure of speech. Just an insult.

“It’s a big deal to some people,” said my uncle. “To your grandmother it’s a big deal.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s contrary to what she believes is written in the Bible.”

“What’s written in the Bible?” I asked.

“A bunch of trash,” said my mother.

My grandmother would’ve been horrified. But I was feeling okay. My sexual education was becoming complete. I was being taught eternal truths, forbidden fruit of the grown-up world. I finally knew what was wrong with my Uncle David, and it wasn’t so bad. Other kids might have been turned off or been sickened by that truth, but I was not. I didn’t care who my uncle had sex with, and just knowing the truth about him made me warm up to him more.

It still did not entirely explain to my satisfaction why my grandmother had not wanted to see him for fifteen years. As abhorrent as his homosexuality must have been to her, it still seemed, somehow, out of proportion to her response. But I had a young and logical mind.

After my mother left, Uncle David asked if I wanted to join him for lunch and then a game of Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders, my mother must have told him, was my favourite game. I liked it for its unpredictability. You never knew who was going to win.

 

3

 

uncle david had been home over a week without making any noises about leaving. My grandmother said a day was an imposition, a week was taking advantage, and two weeks were a species of outrage. She suggested to my mother, twice, that she better ask my uncle what he was up to. Was he broke? Was he in some kind of trouble? Did he plan on staying forever? But my mother refused. So my grandmother did it herself. She asked him for a receipt from his bank account, to make sure he wasn’t “pounding on the poorhouse door.”

He showed it to her, over Jeanette’s and my mother’s protests. That settled her mind on that subject. “Money’s not the problem,” she confided in me, simply because there was no one other than me to talk to. “So it must be something else. But I’ll be darned if I can find out. It’s my house. You’d think the three of them were my mortal enemies, they’re so close-lipped around me.”

I ignored my grandmother, though I too was still unhappy my uncle was staying so long. But if there were alignments to be made, I chose with those against my grandmother, out of habit.

On Saturday, July 7, my uncle told us he was staying in Advocate “for good.” I remember the day specifically because my grandmother had allowed us to eat brunch in the sunroom overlooking the backyard. She didn’t do this often. It was carpeted in white, and if we spilled something she would have “the devil and witch of a time getting it up.” But that morning she relented. We set ourselves up at the white wicker table, overlooking the beds of peonies and petunias in the backyard.

For days, because of his cold, my uncle had worn nothing but pyjamas and a robe. This morning, however, he had dressed. Though he still looked pale, he was smiling. He had filled his plate up to heaping with eggs, bacon, bread, and a healthy dollop of my grandmother’s crabapple jelly. He made sure everyone had begun eating when, with a clearing of his throat, he announced he had something to say.

Everyone looked at him. You could tell, whatever it was, it was important. At that moment my uncle reminded me of my grand-father, even though I had never met him. Perhaps it was because he was now the only male member of the family. Perhaps it was because, despite appearing weak and tired, he sat there holding the attention of everyone at the table. Whatever the reason, I saw my uncle differently for the first time that day — as he might have been, perhaps, in front of a classroom.

He said, “I have decided I’d like to move from Toronto and live here in Advocate. If it’s okay with you.”

In all the arguments, discussions, cajoling, tantrums, and speeches that followed, my uncle did not repeat his request. I suppose, in my business, we would call it a very healthy approach to the situation. Perhaps it was because he knew it wasn’t necessary. For the next while, his request would be stated and restated over and over for him.

Like with most major announcements, and one so unexpected, the initial reaction seemed mild. My mother and Aunt Jeanette professed to be delighted. My grandmother said she was surprised and wondered about his job.

“I’ve quit it,” said David.

“Quit!” parroted my grandmother.

“Retired, then,” he said. “Money is not a problem, as you know, and I just didn’t feel like working anymore.”

“No one feels like it,” said my grandmother. “It’s a duty, and a responsibility!”

“Mother,” said my mother, though I could see she was concerned too. “Are you sure this is what you want, David?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “I want to start a new life. Here. With you.”

“But where will you stay?” asked my grandmother nervously.

“Why here of course!” said Jeannette. “In his old room.”

My grandmother opened her mouth to counter this, when my uncle said, “No. I’d like to get an apartment in town. Like I said, money is not an issue. And I might pick up some substitution work if I get bored.”

To this my grandmother could say nothing, though it was obvious she was disturbed. “But why?” she said. “After all this time? There’s nothing here in Advocate for you, is there David?”

“My family is here,” David said. “Isn’t that enough?”

“It wasn’t enough for the last fifteen years,” said my grandmother. “I don’t see why it should be now.”

My mother could see what was coming: an argument. They were as obvious, with my grandmother, as a fire truck racing towards a brick wall. She suggested we just all enjoy brunch and talk the whole thing over later. My uncle had lost that magical authoritative stature he had drawn in my mind a few minutes ago. He looked tired. He hadn’t touched a thing on his plate.

Once brunch was finished, my mother, Uncle David, and I stayed at the white wicker table. We could hear my grandmother talking to Jeanette in the kitchen. My mother asked him if everything was really all right — if he hadn’t, as my grandmother suggested, got himself in some kind of trouble in Ontario.

He told her he was fine.

“I just need to rest,” he said. “And I’d rather do it here than anywhere.”

“Even with her around?” my mother asked.

“Yes,” said my uncle. “Even with her. I’d put up with her as long as I can be around the two of you. And Jacob.”

“Okay,” said my mother. “Don’t worry. We’ll work on her. I’m sure you’ll be able to stay in the house if you want.”

“I don’t,” David said. “I’m serious about the apartment. I don’t think I could live with her.”

“We’ll find something,” soothed my mother. “I’m just glad you’re coming home.”

“We’ll have to make arrangements for my things,” said my uncle. “They’re all in storage in Toronto.”

“In storage?”

“Yes.”

“Then you knew you were moving home all the time?” My mother left it at that, and David went back upstairs to his room. She went out to the kitchen to take some of the heat off Jeanette. The two of them argued quietly with my grandmother about my uncle’s announcement.

“He’s in trouble,” my grandmother said. “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.”

“It’s as plain as nothing,” said my mother. “David’s finally moving home after all these years. I’d think you’d be glad.”

“Glad? I’d be glad to get to the bottom of all this. That’s what I’d be glad of.”

“You’re impossible, mother. I hope you know that.”

“Me?” said my grandmother. “I’m not the one turning everything upside down here. Rump over kettle. A man just doesn’t up and quit a perfectly good job, money in the bank or no, and turn around and move back to a town he’s seen neither hide nor hair of for fifteen years, expecting us to all take it lying down like we were rugs under his feet. There’s something wrong here, I tell you. Seriously amiss, and if you two don’t have the gumption to find out what he’s up to, I do.”

“Don’t go starting anything,” my mother warned.

“Mom,” said Jeanette. “If you go off half-cocked ...”

“Seriously wrong,” said my grandmother again. “A world of ever-loving trouble.”

▪ ▪ ▪

 

the day deanny and I are to go shopping for the ingredients for our Indian meal, she meets me in her lobby. Richard is writing, she says. He can’t be disturbed.

“So he’s living with you?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Deanny. “For about a month now. The apartment’s big. There’s plenty of room. I gave him one of the spare bedrooms for a den.”

This surprises me. Of all Deanny’s amours, she never let one live with her before. Perhaps this is serious then. I want to ask her, but I know I won’t get a straight answer. As invasive as she can be while infiltrating my life, she is often very private about her own. I never complain about it. It is just one of those Deannyesque inconsistencies I have to accept about her.

I drive. Jeanette loaned me her car.

We go to an Asian grocery on Quinpool Road. It is small compared to some of the shops in Toronto I frequent, and it is more expensive. It takes a half hour to buy the ingredients and it is only noon.

I figure Deanny and I will spend the afternoon at her apartment while I cook, but she wants to give Richard a few more hours. “He finds it almost impossible to write when there is anyone in the apartment. It took him a month to get used to me.”

So we decide to go to Citadel Hill. It is a beautiful summer day. Hot, but not too hot. It will be cooler by the water. For all the times I come to Nova Scotia I rarely spend time in Halifax. Deanny usually comes to see me. If I come to see her, we stay at her place and cook or go to a nearby café for lunch.

Halifax is small compared to mammoth Toronto. The traffic and pedestrians on Spring Garden Road are quaint; most parts of the city are within walking distance of each other. I’m reminded of the days I thought Halifax was big, when my mother, Jeanette, and Grandnan referred to it as “the city,” as if it were some great metropolis. My grandmother still thinks of it that way, and she rarely accompanied Jeanette and my mother on their occasional shopping trips.

“I get enough crush, fuss, and bother in downtown Advocate,” she said. “I don’t need the stink and noise of it all.”

That my grandmother would ever consider tiny, contained, genteel Halifax as busy or crushing seemed very naïve to me. That I could have once thought of it thus seemed almost as naïve. I was a denizen of Toronto now. The big smoke. My own neighbour-hood, near the gay village, has more people in it than downtown Halifax. In the crush of Dundas Square a person really is in the midst of my grandmother’s “stink and noise.” I think I like Toronto so much because no one notices me. I am as faceless and nameless as the concrete in the streets, the blocks of stone in the buildings.

Going to Citadel Hill is Deanny’s idea. In college, she says, she’d often come up here at night before a big exam. Gazing down on the lights of the city and the boats in the harbour comforted her.

“I don’t know how you stand Toronto,” she says. “Whenever I go there for my work I can’t wait to get out. It’s not solely because it’s big, though that’s part of it. Everyone is so tired-looking, and cynical. And all those skyscrapers. Toronto is built to make people feel small.”

“Toronto gets a bad rap,” I say. “If you like plays, and art, and music, it is the best place in the country to be. Energy. All the time. Everywhere you look. Each corner of the city is another story.”

“And how many plays and concerts do you go to?”

I don’t answer. She knows very well I don’t go to any. I go to work. I stay home. The most adventure I do is shop the ethnic groceries on Gerrard Street East.

We reach the top of Citadel Hill. Halifax’s downtown lies below us. Its few tall buildings, tiny compared to Toronto, bristle in a bunch to the north against the flat blue of the harbour. Sailboats dot its surface, tacking and heeling in every direction. Toronto has a harbour too, and sailboats in the summer. But the one area where Toronto cannot compete with Halifax is its waterfront. Halifax has a magnificent harbour, and a strong clear line to the sea. Toronto has a dirty lake. I tell Deanny this, but she is no longer listening.

“I want you to try with Pavel today,” she says. “Get to know him. Don’t cross him off your list before he has a chance to speak.”

“I will,” I say.

“That’s what you always say, and then you turn to stone.”

“I’d just rather meet people in my own way,” I say.

“Right,” Deanny says. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t meet anyone at all. Richard is at least expecting you to be nice to Pavel.”

“I’ll try.”

Deanny sighs. “It would be nice to be on the water today.” She says we should be getting back. “We can start dinner, and Pavel will arrive in an hour. Remember. Be nice.”

It is my turn to sigh. I am always nice to the men Deanny tries to hook me up with. And they are nice to me. It’s just that we rarely find anything in common to talk about. My only subjects are poverty, hiv, and homelessness. What they are interested in often seems remote, academic, and pointless.

Once, Deanny told me I had been damaged by the world. “You have seen the absolute worst of life,” she said. “You hold everyone and everything up to that. By that measure, nothing can compete with your sorrow.”

She was right. I knew she was right, which is why I at least tried to strike up some kind of conversation with the men she introduced me to, if only for an hour. Yet we both know that in the end I will reject them, or they will reject me, or both. I only go along because I don’t want to hurt Deanny’s feelings. She has far more invested in these meetings than I do.