TWO
■

 

coming back into Nova Scotia after being away for any length of time is always a shock. From the moment we turn off the 104 highway at the Advocate/Trenton exit, I begin to brace myself for the sameness of it all. My mother and Aunt Jeanette are always complaining to me on the phone how everything is always changing, but I see no evidence of this. The first building as we pull off the highway onto Trunk #7 is the Farmer’s Co-Op with its tall, cylindrical steel silo jutting up a hundred feet. There are pickup trucks parked irregularly in the yard. Beyond that, the Irving truck stop and small industrial mall, and the Veinot’s paper shop, before we turn onto the upper end of River Road and begin the slow sojourn past the Indian reserve and along the river into town.

It is a short jaunt, without time for reflection. Aunt Jeanette chatters the whole way. She picked me up at the airport wearing, typically, a pair of sneakers, faded jeans, and a baggy white t-shirt with NO WAR printed on it. Her greying hair is pulled into a bun. She drives hunched over the steering wheel like an old woman, which bothers my mother, who says she looks like she is preparing for an accident. My aunt’s driving makes me nervous, too. After she fills me in on all the details of Advocate, she tells me there are several gay men living in town now. I should try to meet them when I’m home.

“Don’t tell me you’re trying to set me up?”

Jeanette laughs. “It’s about time you found someone.”

“I’m home for my grandmother’s funeral and you’re going to play matchmaker?”

“Not her funeral,” says Jeanette. “She’s just very sick. It could be any day. Or it could be a month.”

“I can’t stay a month,” I say. “And how do you know Grandnan won’t get better?”

Jeanette shakes her head. “Not at her age, Jake. She’s got pneumonia. Her heart is failing.”

I hate to think she better hurry up about it, but I do. I don’t say this to Jeanette. I won’t say this to anyone.

“Anyway,” says my aunt. “If you do happen to meet someone, you should get to know them.”

“And what if you’re wrong and they aren’t gay?”

Jeanette shrugs. “No harm, no foul.”

By the time we pull up to the house on Tenerife Street I’ve absorbed the few changes she pointed out to me. A shop or two. A couple of benches down by the river, that the town council had re-christened Veteran’s Memorial Park. It had been known as Founder’s Park for years.

My grandmother’s formidable brick house always looks the same.

The grass is neatly mowed and bright strips of azaleas, pink and white hostas, petunias, and geraniums are planted neatly in horizontal beds on either side of the front steps. My grandmother chose the flowers and my mother and Jeanette planted them.

A strange car sits in the driveway. A blue, older model Volvo. Boxy. Sensible.

“The homecare nurse,” Jeanette explains. “She was watching your grandmother while I was gone to the airport.”

“Right,” I say.

Jeanette shuts off the car engine and sighs. “Don’t expect too much.”

I am, in fact, expecting nothing at all, but I don’t say this. We retrieve my things from the car and go inside. I have the disturbing sense the house is swallowing me, that I am being drawn back into the dysfunction — the years of arguments and complaint, the religion, the battling perspectives and opposing principles.

I am not prepared for it.

The nurse, a forty-ish, overweight woman with a name tag that reads Judy and wearing a blue uniform that matches the Volvo, meets us in the hall. “She’s had her medication,” the nurse says. “She’s sleeping soundly now. Everything is fine.”

Jeanette thanks her. I unload my suitcase next to the living room door in the hallway. I avoid the staircase. When the nurse is gone, Jeanette asks if I want to go see my grandmother.

“Why don’t we wait until Mom gets home?” I say.

Jeanette looks at me and tilts her head to the side, the way she does when something bemuses or annoys her. “Aren’t you at least going to take your things to your room? I’m sure you know where it is.”

The problem, and I think Jeanette knows it, is this reminds me too much of other times in this house. I suggest to her instead we just leave everything and have a drink.

Jeanette shrugs. “Suit yourself,” she says. “I’m going up to check on Mom.”

She takes my suitcase with her when she goes.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

when i was a boy, my best friend was Cameron Simms. He lived on the Protestant side of the river, which made my grandmother suspect he was United, but he assured her he was not. His mother taught biology at the high school. His father was a chemical engineer at the heavy water plant in Trenton. They were, he told my grandmother, both atheists.

It is a testament to the perverseness of my grandmother’s beliefs that it was better to be an atheist than a Protestant.

My favourite place to go was Cameron’s. His parents were always nice to me. We didn’t need to worry about bullies. And if he sometimes became pedantic it wasn’t his fault. He was taught that way and I learned a lot from him. We would sit in his backyard and talk, or play Lego blocks or video games in his room. We played Risk, though I usually got beat — Cameron had a five-star general’s grasp of strategy — and I could usually wrangle myself an invitation to supper. Then we’d have another hour after to mess around before Cameron decided he needed to get his homework done, and it might be seven or eight o’clock before I was forced to go back to Tenerife Street.

But I didn’t see a lot of Cameron in March of 1984. It was cold, with “lots of weather” as my grandmother put it, and for the last two weeks it snowed almost every day. She would often want me home after school to shovel. My grandmother hired her man to shovel out the driveway, but expected my mother and Aunt Jeanette to shovel the paths to the front door and from the back door to the shed. My job was the stoops. My grandmother had assigned me this, along with a few other small chores, to earn my allowance, though she in fact did not pay it. My mother did. But work instilled discipline, and everyone in the house had to have something to do. I didn’t mind my job. It took thirty minutes to do each stoop and sometimes I would help my mother and Jeanette with the paths if they were out at the same time.

I didn’t mind the snow, but the winters seemed long, and when spring came to Advocate and the house on Tenerife Street, it came as a benediction. The year my uncle returned from Toronto it came early. The first week in April the temperature had risen dramatically to fourteen or fifteen degrees and the snows melted. My grandmother said she could not remember an earlier spring in her lifetime, and she began preparing her yard and her gardens. She removed the burlap from the perennials and bushes. She brought out the wheelbarrow for the rocks that had been forced up through the ground by the frost, picking them up and depositing them behind the backyard shed.

I helped her, simply glad to get out of the house in anything less than a heavy winter jacket and gloves. My grandmother asked me to trim the privet hedge that ran between our property and the neighbour’s house to the north. Some days, when they were not working, Aunt Jeanette and my mother would help, too, and the four of us would be out there in our light jackets and boots, raking and turning soil.

April also marked the beginning of what my Aunt Jeanette called our annual “midget convention” — the placing of my grandmother’s variety of little garden gnomes and ceramic angels in the yard. She had a passion for these sculptures and she infested her property with them. There were dozens of these — cherubs in tiny fountains or leaning on walls, gnomes with shovels or red pointed caps — which she sprinkled throughout her azaleas and geraniums and petunias and marigolds. She didn’t defend her choices. It was her property and she could do with it as she liked.

When I was younger I liked the placing of the statues, but my grandmother was afraid I might drop them so I was only allowed to consult on the best places to set them. She did let me place them myself when I got older, and when I turned ten she handed the whole business over to me. By then I had outgrown them. They were no more to me than ugly little plaster statues, and I viewed placing them as much a chore as hauling rocks. I never said this to my grandmother, though. She had entrusted me with something she cared about, which was rare enough, and she was still interested enough to come out and inspect my placement and give me a statue-by-statue editorial. “That little man is looking too much towards the front step, don’t you think?” she’d tell me. “Shouldn’t we turn him a little bit to the north?” Or, “I think the fountain angel should be in the very front of the yard this year. He just feels like he should be closer to the road.”

The times we placed statues are the only ones I remember, in all my childhood, of having some kind of intimacy with my grandmother. It was our project. We consulted on it. We worked together. I don’t remember her once unduly criticizing my choices. When it came to garden gnomes, as in no other area of her life, she became a diplomat. It is a testament, perhaps, to how much I craved a relationship with her that I continued to do this and feigned enthusiasm for it long after the work itself ceased to interest.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

one afternoon in late May, while my mother and Jeanette were at work, my grandmother received a phone call.

I paid no attention at first. I was at the dining room table doing homework for geography class. I had to identify all the continents, and at least three countries and their capitals within each. I had an atlas. It was easy work, and boring. I was eleven, in grade six, and the year was nearly done.

My grandmother didn’t like me sitting at the dining room table. It was antique, left to her by her mother-in-law. It had eight chairs with the likeness of Queen Anne carved in the back. Those chairs were some of her most precious possessions. My deceased grandfather used to say, or so I’ve heard, that those chairs were “A good place for the arse of a Scot. In the face of a queen.” My grandmother was afraid they would break if sat on, so we ate our dinners at the kitchen table, even though it was crowded with the four of us.

I couldn’t use the kitchen table for homework, because my grandmother never stayed quiet long enough to let me concentrate, and I found my room too small and oppressive. There was more room in the dining room. I could spread my books out on the mahogany surface and get comfortable. But I was only able to use it if my grandmother wasn’t paying attention. Eventually she would catch me and chase me back up to my room. “Good heavens,” she’d say. “Don’t you know those chairs are priceless heirlooms?”

I heard my grandmother answer the phone and talk into it, though I couldn’t hear what was said. A few minutes later she came into the dining room. I knew she was distracted because she didn’t mention me being there. She said, “What time is your mother getting home from the diner?”

“Five o’clock,” I told her.

“That late?” said my grandmother. “I thought it was three.”

My grandmother knew perfectly well what time my mother got off work. I knew it must have been the phone call upsetting her but when I asked her who it was she wouldn’t say.

“Just never you mind,” she said. “And get up off those chairs. How many times do I have tell you, Jacob Owen McNeil, those are valuable antiques and not for sitting on?”

Reluctantly I gathered up my books and carried them to the kitchen, hoping my grandmother would tell me something about who had been on the other end of the line. I had inherited a streak of nosiness directly from her, and a part of me — albeit a small, naïve part — thought it might have something to do with my father. The man who had sired me. The man I had never met and who had decided, I was told by my grandmother, not to marry my mother. It was a shame my grandmother had to bear — a pregnant nineteen-year-old daughter and a bastard grandson who had not been christened because my mother wanted me to make up my own mind when I was old enough. How she ever explained this to her fellow Catholics, to whom decency, marriage, and childbirth were sacrosanct, we never knew. She never mentioned my father. She never mentioned her eldest daughter was an unwed mother.

All I know about my father is he was an itinerant worker who worked on a tree-cutting crew in the county for a season in 1971. My mother fell in love with him, and by the time she knew she was pregnant, the season was over and he was gone. She was never able to find him again.

My grandmother didn’t speak to me while she cooked supper. She was roasting beef and was busy basting it and getting it ready to put back in the oven. She muttered to herself all the while, but I could make nothing out. My grandmother did not have a poker face. We always knew what she was thinking by her expression or the way she held herself, and whatever news she had received was not good.

I was determined to wait until my mother came home, when the story would come out. I finished geography and went on to algebra. I was a good student, thorough and conscientious about my work. I hated to make mistakes, and I liked to line my figures up perfectly on the paper so large equations could be distilled magically down to one final and irrevocable number equal to a variable of x or y.

By the time my mother got home, my grandmother had finished her cooking and I had finished my homework. I was still to be disappointed. My grandmother wanted to speak to my mother in my grandfather’s den. I stayed seated at the kitchen table, not bothering to strain to hear because the door was shut.

Suddenly I heard my mother squeal.

Someone’s dead, I thought.

Less than a minute later my mother came running out of the den, through the living room, and into the kitchen. “Your Uncle David is coming home!” she cried.

“Uncle David?”

I’d never met him. I sometimes forgot he even existed, though my mother and Jeanette talked to him on the phone occasionally, and once in a while they passed it to me. They had not told me much about him. Only that he and my grandmother did not get along, and he left home a long time ago. My grandmother never talked about my uncle.

No wonder she was upset. She was also annoyed her daughter should be so excited over news she found so disconcerting. “I don’t know what you’re getting in such a fuss about,” she said. “It’s only for a visit.”

“Did he say how long?”

“No,” said my grandmother. “I presume a week. Any longer and we’ll be put out. I shouldn’t agree to it at all.”

“Why not?” said my mother. “We’ve got scads of room.”

“It’s not just the room,” said my grandmother. “It’s the extra food and the extra washing. This house is bursting at the seams as is.”

My mother ignored my grandmother’s grumbling. She called Jeanette at the diner and told her the news. She acted like the screaming, giggling girls in my sixth grade.

I did not share my mother’s excitement.

I didn’t know my uncle.

I also wasn’t used to disruptions at the house on Tenerife Street. I couldn’t begrudge my uncle a meal or a bed, like my grandmother did, but I had never seen my mother, usually so cool-headed over everything, get so excited. It bothered me. This Uncle David was an interloper, a rival for my mother’s affections, and I resented his intrusion already.

One thing my mother forgot to ask in all the commotion was when my uncle was coming.

“In two weeks,” my grandmother said. “By train.”

“We’ll all go to the train station to meet him,” said my mother. “Won’t it be great?”

“I certainly won’t be going. It’s a Saturday, and Saturday is my bridge day, and the church auxiliary meets Saturday night.”

“Surely you can miss those things for one day,” my mother said.

“I most surely cannot,” said my grandmother. “The world may stop for you, Caroline, when someone comes to town, but it doesn’t stop for the busy and beholden.”

“It’s not just someone,” said my mother, her mood dampening. “It’s your son.”

“Makes no never mind,” said my grandmother. “I’ll see him well enough when you get home from the station. Though why the man would pick now to come see us, when he hasn’t been home in a dozen years, I’ll never make out. And what happened to the rest of his school year, I want to know? Doesn’t high school go into June in Ontario?”

My grandmother went on, but my mother and I tuned her out.

We went for a walk up Tenerife Street instead, then down to the water along River Street. It was sunny and reasonably warm. She told me about my uncle, but not why my grandmother was so dead-set against seeing him. I was surprised. This was the woman who told me the secret of menstruation at the age of seven when I first began to notice thick white strips of padding in the bathroom garbage can upstairs. I found it interesting that women bled from secret parts of themselves while men did not. My grandmother was horrified that my mother explained it to me. “My heavens!” she cried. “You’ll ruin the boy by the time he’s ten!”

My mother was not as forthcoming about Uncle David as she was on female reproductive biology. As to why he left home so long ago and never came to visit, she said only that shortly after her father died in 1969, David and my grandmother had an argument and she asked him to leave.

“Why?” I asked.

“Just because,” said my mother.

“What kind of because?”

“Your grandmother didn’t like the things he did,” said my mother.

“What things?”

“Just things.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I said, with the inherent logic of a child. “You got pregnant out of wedlock and Grandnan didn’t kick you out, and Jeanette told me she smoked so much reefer she threw up all over the living room and she didn’t get kicked out. Why should Uncle David be any different?”

I could see I had bewildered my mother. It was an effect I could occasionally produce on my teachers and Jeanette or even on my grandmother. “The questions!” the latter would cry. “The poor boy’s tongue flaps at both ends!” But I was determined not to let up on her. I was relentless, tenacious, in pursuit of the truth, as any good mathematician — as I already considered myself — should be.

Finally my mother said, “Your uncle is different from most people.”

“Different how?”

“Just different,” my mother said. “He’s a wonderful man, really. It’s just that he’s never gotten married and your grandmother doesn’t like that.”

I knew, or sensed, the situation was more complicated than that, and my mother wasn’t telling me everything. She told me when uncle David came I could ask him myself.

“Ask him what? Why he’s not married?”

“Yes,” said my mother, “if you want to.”

“But why don’t you tell me?” I was eleven now. Not the eight-year-old who found the boxes in the closet.

When she saw she was not going to get away with a euphemism, or a vagute generalization, or even a good old-fashioned bait and switch, my mother told me the truth. “Your Uncle David is a homosexual,” she said flatly. “And your grandmother hates the fact. When she found out she told him never darken her door again.”

“A homosexual?” I said, pronouncing the word very carefully, as if it were loaded with explosives. Which, in a sense, I suppose it was in our house. “What does that mean?

“Jacob,” said my mother softly, but sternly. “That is something you’ll have to ask your uncle. This information belongs to him. It is not mine to tell.”

“And so that’s why Uncle David never visits? Because of Grandnan?”

“That’s why,” said my mother.

“Grandnan has trouble getting along with people. There’s a kid in my school, Scott Findlay, who’s like that. Our home room teacher says he’s obstreperous.”

My mother laughed, as we turned on off the river road and up Fartham Avenue back toward Tenerife. “That is a perfectly fine description of your grandmother.”

But I was still not satisfied. I had exhausted my mother with questions, so knew asking more would not yield extra information. I swore to look up the word homosexual in a dictionary to find out exactly what it meant before my uncle arrived, but I never did.

 

2

 

the year before Uncle David came home, when I was ten, my grandmother had a shower installed in the upstairs bathroom at the end of what she called the “north hall.” Jeanette and my mother had been arguing for a shower in the upstairs bathroom for years, ever since they were teenagers. The bathrooms hadn’t been remodelled since the house was built. They had not installed a shower. Practically every house in Advocate had one, according to my aunt and mother, and it was just silly, in their view, not to have this most common of conveniences in the last half of the twentieth century.

I do not know my grandmother’s reasons for having only a bath and not a shower. But I do know whenever my aunt or mother would pester her for one, she would only say a shower was useless and a bath was not.

“A woman’s got to soak her parts,” she said.

I was too young to understand this argument, but my Aunt Jeanette and my mother seemed to.

“That’s medieval,” Aunt Jeanette said. “A shower is just as good as a bath. Better, because it doesn’t take so long. Look at us now when we have to go anywhere! The three of us and Jacob having to scramble to get in the tub, leaving soap scum everywhere.”

“There would be no soap scum if you cleaned up after yourself,” said my grandmother, who never missed an opportunity to instill a lesson.

“If you don’t do it,” Jeanette said, “I’ll hire a plumber and have one installed myself.”

The argument continued for years.

Because we didn’t have a shower, and a bath was such a time-consuming ordeal, I was forced to wash, not every day, but only twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday night. As I watched tv with Aunt Jeanette in the tv room next to my grandfather’s den, my mother would come in and tell me it was bath time. She would have drawn the water and pulled out my favourite inflatable toys. I would stay in there an hour, until the bubbles disappeared and a white scum of soap lay on top of the water like an oil slick, and the water was tepid. Usually it was also black from the dirt that had been on my body.

When Jeanette supervised me, she would always look into the tub and cluck. “See how unhygienic that is?” she’d say, as if making another argument to my grandmother. “How can someone get clean in that?”

After years of resistance my grandmother gave in, though Jeanette did pay for it, as promised, on her meagre wages from the diner. What made my grandmother decide a woman no longer had to “soak her parts” I never knew. Only that one day Jeanette told my mother she had convinced “the old woman” and the plumber would arrive on Monday.

My grandmother refused to use the new shower. She complained about the amount of water being wasted now that Aunt Jeanette and my mother and I were taking showers far more than we bathed.

I lost my Wednesday night bath — my mother said I could just take a shower Thursday morning before school instead — but I insisted on the Sunday night one. Even at the age of eleven I secretly liked the toys, and the bubbles, and the quiet of the bath with only the occasional drip from the faucet marking irregular time.

My mother still took baths occasionally too, by candlelight, with the radio sitting on the toilet seat tuned to an fm classical station. She did not particularly like classical music, she said, except when she was in the bath.

I understood.

At eleven, I should have been more interested in skateboards and bicycles and firecrackers than plastic toys. But I always had my rubber ducky and sailboats in the bath with me. I reverted to some supremely ideal age. I was never a particularly secure boy, despite the efforts of the adults around me to make me so, but I felt perfectly safe and secure in the bath. Enveloped by cool air, silence, and warm water, I was more at peace with myself than I was anywhere else.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

aunt jeanette had a habit of spending twenty minutes or more under the showerhead, driving my grandmother to distraction and forcing her to say Jeanette was draining half the Atlantic and driving the power and water bills into the “elemental stratosphere.”

The “elemental stratosphere” was a favourite expression of my grandmother’s for defining excess. She had a host of others.

The shower was a source of ongoing tension for them. Whenever Aunt Jeanette emerged from the bathroom and my grandmother berated her for staying in so long, she always said the same thing. “I was spraying my parts.”

The Saturday morning my uncle was due to arrive at the train station at eleven o’clock, Jeanette stayed in longer than usual, perhaps because she wanted to be particularly refreshed for her brother’s arrival. My mother and I had awakened late.

My grandmother was up at six, as she always was, but neglected to call us. Jeanette accused her of doing it on purpose. “Why on earth would I do that?” exclaimed my grandmother. “I don’t care what time you get out of bed. Sleep until noon if you want to!”

This was not entirely true.

It annoyed my grandmother that, on their days off, her daughters sometimes slept in. She considered the hours between six and nine to be her most productive, and anyone who did not get out of bed to take advantage of this was being lazy, wasting half the day. She would never roust us out of bed directly. My grandmother did not enter our rooms, except occasionally to see if they were clean. Instead she would decide to vacuum outside our doors at seven a.m., or turn the radio in the kitchen so loud we heard it upstairs.

But that morning, not a peep, which was why Jeanette thought she was playing tricks, trying to make it difficult for us to get ready in time to meet my uncle’s train.

My grandmother’s mood was not improved by the fact her bridge game that afternoon was cancelled. Hazel McLeod from down the street had an attack of gout, and called my grandmother to tell her to find another fourth. But there was no other fourth. It was too short notice.

She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea when my mother and I came in for breakfast. Aunt Jeanette was still in the shower.

“That’s great,” said my mother. “Now you can come to the train station with us.”

“It’s not ‘great,’” said my grandmother sourly. “And I’m still not going. I have things to do around here.”

My mother poured me a bowl of cereal with milk. Usually on Saturday my grandmother would have breakfast prepared for us — fried eggs and bacon or ham, cooked tomatoes, sometimes even sliced and fried potatoes. But this morning there was nothing.

For once, though, she did not complain about Jeanette being in the shower too long.

My mother did. It was almost ten o’clock and she and I had yet to clean up.

“What’s the point?” said my grandmother. “You’re only going to the train station. It’s not like the Pope is coming.”

“It’s an occasion,” said my mother. “We should all look nice for him. And smell nice too.”

“I smell fine,” said my grandmother. She sat, drinking her tea, with a bitter look on her face. She resented the fuss. She resented the bother. I’m sure if she could she would have closed up the house and put a “You’re Not Welcome” sign on the door.

▪ ▪ ▪

 

jeanette climbed out of the shower at ten fifteen, and my mother was cross with her.

“There’s hardly time for me to get ready, let alone Jacob,” she said.

Jeanette wore a yellow sundress. My grandmother reminded her it was a train station, and not a cotillion, they were going to. “I know,” Jeanette said. “I still want to dress up.”

My mother went to the bathroom, and I asked for another bowl of Corn Flakes. Jeanette started working on my grandmother to come to the station. They argued. I took my cereal into the tv room. I was not allowed to eat in any part of the house but the kitchen because my grandmother was afraid I’d drop something and spoil the rugs. But she was too busy arguing with Jeanette to notice. I could hear them from the tv room, so I turned on the television.

Spider-Man was on.

I loved Spider-Man.

I sat on the sofa and watched the show and finished my cereal. I tried to ignore Aunt Jeanette and my grandmother bickering in the kitchen.

In the end my grandmother decided to go to the station. I’m not sure how Aunt Jeanette convinced her. She could be tenacious; my grandmother said she could argue the boots off a stone statue. Or maybe, her bridge game cancelled, my grandmother decided to go for some obscure reason of her own. Whatever the cause, when I came downstairs changed out of my pyjamas, having time only to comb my hair and wash my face, the three of them were waiting for me in the foyer.

My grandmother wore the same floral print housedress she had on earlier, and she was putting on grandfather’s threadbare black greatcoat she sported around the yard in the fall. On a normal day, she would not be caught dead downtown in such an outfit. It was as if she was deliberately dressing down for my uncle. I might be meeting you, that ensemble said, but you aren’t anything special.

My mother and Jeanette were smart enough not to mention her getup. Later Jeanette said she looked like a cross between Diefen-baker and an old charwoman. They dressed up, Jeanette in the yellow sundress with a ladies’ summer coat that met up perfectly with the hem of her dress and left her legs bare, and my mother in a pair of tight jeans and a white cable-knit sweater. Jeanette looked like a debutante, my mother a sorority girl.

“All ready?” my mother asked.

“Let’s get this over with,” my grandmother said. “I might not have bridge today, but I do have the auxiliary meeting tonight. And I’ve got a busy day. Did you start the car, at least?”

Jeanette had, and we all went out and fit ourselves into it. It was a fine day; sun and blue sky, hardly a cloud. My grandmother fastened a clear plastic kerchief over her head to keep her hair in place, though there was no wind. She also called shotgun, though not in those words.

My grandmother disliked Jeanette’s car, a Pinto that rode close to the ground and always had something wrong with it. This time it had a loose fan belt that screamed like a child being axe-murdered and gave my grandmother the creeps. “Why don’t you get that fixed?” she asked Jeanette. “The whole vehicle is likely to fly apart at any minute.”

“It’s fine,” said Jeanette. “The belt just needs to be tightened.”

My mother and I got in the back seat. I was fine because I was short for my age, but my mother, who was reasonably tall for a woman, struggled for legroom. My grandmother thoughtlessly shifted her seat all the way back so my mother’s knees were pressed up against it, but my mother never complained.

No one had given a thought to how we were going to fit Uncle David in the car. My grandmother realized, at the same time I did, there was not going to be enough room. “Just you should have went, for heaven’s sake. The rest of us could have seen him when you got home ten minutes later.”

“It’s a homecoming,” argued Jeanette. “We all have to be there when he steps down from the train.”

Despite Aunt Jeanette’s long shower, we arrived at the train station early. Everything I knew about homecomings I had learned from tv. In those shows there are always dozens or hundreds of people waiting anxiously on the platform for the train to arrive. There are shouts and kisses and exclamations. I was not prepared for the desolation of the station, the single ticket agent behind the counter who gave my mother the arrival information, the funereal wasteland of the wooden platform outside as we stood, the only ones there, and waited for my uncle. My grandmother wanted to stay inside. Nobody argued with her. But when we all opted to stand on the platform she stayed with us and sat on a bench.

Aunt Jeanette and my mother talked excitedly. “I wonder what he’ll look like,” said my Aunt Jeanette.

My grandmother, with less vinegar than usual, had an answer for every question. “He’ll look just like he did the last time you saw him,” she said. “Only older.”

“Maybe he lost his hair,” said my mother. “Like Dad did.”

“You went up to visit him three years ago,” said my grandmother. “Had he lost his hair then?”

“No,” admitted my mother.

“Then he’s unlikely to have lost it now.”

I went over and sat beside my grandmother.

“I fail to see,” she said to me, “what the big mystery is. They talk to the boy almost every week on the phone. They know as much about his life as they do about mine.”

It was true my mother and Jeanette talked to my uncle a lot. When they put him on the phone with me I had nothing to say to him. To his credit, he didn’t baby talk me, as some people do when they are talking to children they’ve never met. He usually asked me in an adult voice if I was doing well in school and looking after my mother and what were the names of my friends.

I had not seen a picture of my uncle.

I had no idea what he looked like.

My grandmother and I were aligned, she because she resented my uncle for whatever reason, and I because I was jealous.

The wait for the train seemed to take hours.

At quarter after eleven Jeanette stamped her foot once on the platform and cried out, “What is taking so long?”

My mother agreed to go in and ask the ticket taker. She came out five minutes later and said she had been told the train was usually a few minutes late.

“Blueberry Special,” said Jeanette. That was the Advocate County nickname for the route from Halifax all the way down to Yarmouth. It was a joke. The train rumbled along so slowly, it was said, you could hop off and pick blueberries and then hop back on again when you were done.

At just that moment we heard a sound from the north, and though we couldn’t see the train beyond the bend in the tracks, we could hear it. I stood up, more to see the train than in any anticipation of my uncle’s arrival. My grandmother stayed seated. Jeanette and my mother began to jump up and down like schoolgirls.

I was disgusted with them.

So was my grandmother. “I’ve raised a pair of infants,” she said.

The train rounded the corner, crawling slowly but evenly along the tracks. It was silver, long, and sleek. I was expecting, I realize now, a steam train, with billowing smoke and pistons and a horn. The train pulled into the station and rolled to a halt. There was no lifting of fog, no immediate disembarkation of passengers. It just sat there. No one wearing six shooters and a gallon hat got off. I was disappointed. I had watched too many westerns, too many old movies with my grandmother.

In the end the doors slid open and three people got off. One was a young girl with a single small suitcase. She didn’t look much older than me, though she must have been, for there was no one there to greet her. Another was a middle-aged, portly man with a satchel and a suit bag slung over his shoulder. He looked like a travelling salesman. The third got out of the last car. He was a tall, thin man with a stoop and more suitcases than he could carry. The porter on the train passed them down to him. He just stood there, helpless.

Jeanette and my mother scanned the faces.

The train did not dally. Apparently there were no passengers to board, for it immediately pulled away.

Jeanette was devastated.

The girl — she reminded me of Anne of Green Gables, though she did not have red hair and a wincey dress — and the salesman walked by us into the station. The tall thin man stayed down at the far end of the platform amidst his bags.

“He didn’t come,” Jeanette said.

“It must be an error,” said my mother. “Maybe he’ll be on a later train.”

“There is no other train today. This was the only one.”

My mother asked my grandmother if this was right, but she was staring intently down the platform at the man on the other end of it. Mother asked what she was looking at.

“I’m not sure,” she said, “but I think you better go down and help your brother.”

Jeanette slowly shook her head. “It’s too thin for David. Isn’t it?”

Before Jeanette could argue further, the man left his bags and started walking up the platform towards us. He lifted his arm in a wave, and Jeanette screamed. She and my mother began to run down the platform. Jeanette had worn high heels for the occasion, and they fired on the wooden planks of the platform like shots.

My grandmother and I stayed put. She was studying my uncle carefully from her place on the bench. She was the oldest of us, but there was nothing wrong with her eyesight, or her inner sense. She knew, she said later, there was something wrong with my uncle the minute he stepped down from the train.

3

 

the kissing and the hugging that took place between my uncle and my mother and Jeanette seemed to go on for hours. My grandmother stayed on her bench. I stood beside her and watched my mother and aunt fawn over my prodigal uncle. I didn’t leave my grandmother’s side in case I got pulled into this love fest.

My grandmother eyed, suspiciously, the four suitcases still sitting at the far end of the platform. “That’s an awful lot of baggage for a short visit,” she said. “I hope he doesn’t plan on staying the month.”

Eventually the three of them returned up the platform, my uncle in the middle and Aunt Jeanette and my mother on either side of him with an arm around his waist.

“Oh brother,” said my grandmother. “It’s like Old Home Week.”

My grandmother could be extremely caustic. Jeanette said once that the woman did not have an ounce of sentimentality in her.

I watched my uncle warily, and scanned my mother’s face for signs she had completely forgotten who I was. When they reached us, they stopped, separated, and my uncle looked at my grandmother.

“Hello, Mother,” he said.

“Hello, David,” she said. “That’s a lot of luggage you’ve brought. You planning on a long stay?”

David shrugged, and Aunt Jeanette shot her a look. My grandmother still had not risen from her bench, and when my mother suggested she get up and greet my uncle properly, she claimed her thrombosis was acting up and she didn’t dare stand.

“Does that mean we have to carry you to the car?” asked Jeanette.

“I’ll manage,” said my grandmother wryly.

I watched my uncle’s face for his reaction to my grandmother’s coolness. There was none. He only wore a tight little grin. He was a handsome man, if a little anemic. I stared at him until my mother remembered I was there and introduced me.

“So this is Jacob,” he said, bending down and reaching out a hand.

I shook it. I was not used to shaking hands and my uncle’s was damp. I fought the urge to wipe my own off on my pants. Unlike my grandmother, I was taught by my mother and the town to hide my displeasure.

“You’ve lost weight,” my grandmother said to him. “Are you not eating well up there in Toronto? And you’re pale too. Seems like you’re not looking after yourself.”

Everyone ignored her, and my mother suggested she and Aunt Jeanette go down and retrieve the bags.

“I can help,” said David

“No,” my mother said. “You stay here and keep Mom company. We can manage.”

I went with them, and as we were walking away I heard my grandmother nattering at her only son. No doubt he’d have to go through the third degree with her. She didn’t like him. That was clear. But that still wouldn’t exempt him from a thorough interrogation of his life.

On the way down the platform my mother asked what I thought of him.

“He’s okay,” I said. “He’s tall.”

“You’ll like him,” Aunt Jeanette said. “Once you get to know him.”

“Then why doesn’t Grandnan like him?”

Jeanette grunted, almost like a pig, and said “Grandnan doesn’t like much of anybody.”

My mother told her to be quiet. “You just have to give it time,” she said. “They haven’t seen each other in a long while.”

This was not an answer. It was another way of saying it was none of my business.

I was given the lightest bag to carry. My mother and Jeanette struggled with the other three. I resented that. The least my uncle could have done was relieve us of one of them. We eventually got them all into the hatchback of the Pinto, and I had to crawl in back in between my mother and David. I was angered even further. I did not want to be close to him, our legs touching. He offered to sit me on his lap if it would make me more comfortable.

“Gee, can I?” I said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster. I’d been good at that from an early age, inadvertently instructed by my grandmother. My mother pinched my thigh, and I stayed quiet.

My grandmother was annoyed because Jeanette could no longer see out the rearview mirror. The bags were piled too high in the hatchback, and she had long ago lost her driver’s side mirror when she scraped it off on a building backing into a parking space. “This is a recipe for an accident,” my grandmother said. “David’s visit will be over before it starts.”

We got home without incident and climbed out of the car. My uncle stood in the driveway and looked up at the house.

“Not a thing has changed,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said my grandmother. “The shutters are green, not blue. The roof’s been reshingled. We’ve kept it perfectly since …”

My grandmother was about to say, “since your father died” but for some reason stopped herself. Instead she marched, tight-lipped, into the house, leaving us to carry the bags. This time my uncle did help. We then went through the ordeal of my grandmother designating him a room. She could have done this before; in fact she probably had. But she wanted to go through the show of it to illustrate what an inconvenience David’s visit was.

Eventually she settled on the guest room next to Jeanette’s room. This was the first time I became aware that this was David’s old room. There were no mementos. There was no trace of occupancy in the last fifteen years. It was as featureless and sterile as a hotel room. I wondered if there ever had been mementos. I knew my room screamed me: Star Wars posters and model robots and a red ribbon from a science fair in school. Maybe David had taken all this stuff when he left, or maybe he’d never had any.

He told my grandmother it would do fine. After his bags were stored and he had showered and changed, dirty as he was from such a long train trip, he came down to the pancake brunch being prepared for him. My grandmother opted out. She said she was going over to Hazel’s to see how she was feeling. Jeanette offered to drive her, but my grandmother said she would walk. No one mentioned that just a half hour ago she was stricken with thrombosis.

After she left my uncle said, “She hasn’t changed much.”

“No,” said my mother. “Still the same as ever.”

“It nearly killed her to give up a spare room,” Jeanette said. “She might have to do a little extra laundry. Even though Caroline and I do it all.”

My uncle smiled over his pancakes. “I’m sure,” he said, “there’s more to it than that.”

I paid attention, but no more was said. Eventually I left them and went upstairs to my room and played video games, shutting the door behind me because I didn’t want to hear the voices drifting up from below.