Swing Low Page 3

  The heel of my shoe caught between the slats of the railing, and in an effort to pull it free I lost my balance and fell on my stomach. The pie, perched precariously on the rickety railing, fell too, right onto my back, face up, intact and still perfect. But irretrievable. As my brother stood beside me laughing, I frantically tried to grab at the pie burning a hole into my back.

  My shoe was still caught, preventing me from rolling over, and anyway, if I had rolled over the pie would have slid off my back and been ruined and at that point I was still hoping to eat it.

  Reg, I hissed, get the pie off me! I’ll share it with you, I promise. Please!

  I was in agony. I imagined the skin melting off my back and the pie dropping into a cavity next to ribs and kidneys and whatever else was in there. My brother, however, was thoroughly entertained and had no intention of ending the show by helping me out.

  Please, I begged him. I could have wriggled on my stomach and the pie would have fallen off but still I harboured a faint hope that the pie would be mine and I didn’t want to pick pieces of it off the dusty wooden floor of that old porch.

  Just then Mrs. Unger, the pie-baker and owner of the property on which I lay twitching and smouldering and begging for mercy, opened her back door and stepped onto the porch.

  Reg shrieked and fled and Mrs. Unger ran back inside for oven gloves. Seconds later she had removed the pie, then hammered my foot out from between the slats, sat me down at her kitchen table, and was preparing a soothing ointment of aloe vera and something else to pack on my smoked hide.

  I cried, shamelessly, and her old husband held out his stiff handkerchief. After treating my back, Mrs. Unger gave me a large piece of that apple pie with ice cream and after that she gave me another, smaller piece. I ate very slowly and she asked me, in Low German, if I needed to stay away from home for a while.

  I told her no, no, that in fact I must return immediately, that I had a lot of work to do, and my parents would be wondering where I was. Mrs. Unger told me that she had often seen me running, was I training for the Olympics? she asked. Then she added that if I ever needed a destination, her door was always open. Her husband piped up and said he would put a sign up over the door that said Finish Line. The three of us chuckled and in all the years to follow, never once spoke of my attempted pie theft.

  The word “home” induces such nostalgia these days it makes my head hurt. I imagine that I am massive and hovering somewhere in the sky with a bird’s-eye view of Canada. Gradually my vision narrows and all I can see is the province of Manitoba, all the way from Hudson Bay through the Inter-lake, down to the prairie farms and towns of the south. But then my vision narrows again and all I can see is the town of Steinbach, my town, with its many churches and cars and split-level stucco homes, and then the vise grip again and all that appears is my home, what used to be my home, and then even that disappears and all I can see is my kitchen table, where my daughters and my wife are seated and having an animated conversation, and then zoom, the only thing I see is her, and then — this happens very quickly — we’re face to face, I would like to give her a kiss, but just at that moment I drop from where I’ve been hovering in the sky, and I’m falling to the earth so fast my eyes are forced shut and the wind is screaming like a runaway train and … it makes my head hurt, like I said. Like I think I said, the idea of home.

  I think I will lie down again and try to get some sleep. It’s almost five in the morning. I can see now how the sun might rise. Often in the darkest middle part of the night it seems impossible. But at this hour there are signs. I’m very tired, too tired to soak my feet as I had planned, too tired to undress, too tired to check on Hercules, too tired to think of the call, too tired even to crawl under my blanket.

  four

  It is 6:12 a.m. I’ve been dreaming of a 1948 Oldsmobile. I’m sitting next to Elvira. She’s fifteen years old and driving her dad’s car without a licence. Now I’m not so sure it was a dream. I think it is a memory and that in fact I haven’t been sleeping at all. I’m sorely tempted to get up and look out my window to see if perhaps there’s a ‘48 Olds idling in the parking lot, ready to take me away from here. Elvira and I and several of our friends had borrowed her dad’s car for a trip to Winnipeg. She and I shared a bag of sunflower seeds and just for dumheit she drove home from the city through the dry ditches of the countryside instead of on the Trans-Canada Highway. That big Olds handled the culverts well. Our friends were in the back seat, and we all had a terrific time! Until the police stopped us and confiscated her father’s car and threatened us with farm labour, which is what juvenile delinquents did in my day. I mentioned to the police officer that I was up to my neck in farm labour at the present, which made my friends smile anyway. I felt the sting of his knuckled backhand across my face.

  Elvira leapt into the fray and shouted at the police officer, How dare you, or How could you, or something along those lines. She and I weren’t dating at that point, but it was at that moment following her defiant outburst that I fell in love with her. And furthermore I realized that I would need a girl like her if I were to survive. At the time, however, it wasn’t so much a conscious realization, but more of an instinct.

  Seeing as the car was confiscated anyway, we spent the rest of the day bowling and in the evening we all split the cost of a cab back to Steinbach (forty miles). I sat next to Elvira in the back seat, and my legs shook so badly from nervousness that they knocked over the bag of sunflower seeds she had balanced in her lap and I spent the rest of the drive home picking seeds off the floor of the cab, apologizing intermittently, and shaking.

  Unfortunately, I have tracked blood all over the floor of my room. My blisters have opened up again and I’m not sure what to use to wipe it up. A nurse will enter soon and sigh. Have placed several sheets of notepad paper on the floor to soak up the blood. Have placed my feet in the large blue container beside my bed. Will wait for nurse.

  Once, after Elvira and I had started dating, I borrowed her father’s car to pick her up in the city. I parked it in front of her dormitory (she was in nurses’ training. How I wish I were her patient now!) and went inside to meet her. She wasn’t in her room, however, and when I returned to the spot where I had parked the car, it was gone! This was the brand-new 1952 Oldsmobile of the man I had hoped would become my father-in-law. I ran wildly up and down the street in search of the car, berating myself for being such a country bumpkin as to leave the keys in the ignition, plotting my own mysterious disappearance, imagining the inevitable breakup between Elvira and me, bracing myself against my mother’s icy disapproval and my own abject shame, calculating the number of chicken heads I’d have to hack off for my father in order to make enough money to buy another 1952 Olds, when who should drive past as casually as can be, elbow sticking out of the window and a bright yellow scarf tied up around her shiny black hair, but Elvira. It took her a good half an hour before she could speak without erupting into raucous gales of laughter.

  I agreed with her, eventually, that it had been an excellent practical joke, and even conceded to having the story told, in detail, to her girlfriends back at the dormitory, to her brothers back in town, to her father, who enjoyed it immensely, and to all of our friends.

  I’ve decided to go for a walk! Have just realized in the same instant that my feet are bleeding. Never mind, I’ll try. The nurse came in and asked me what I was doing. I said I was going for a walk and I’d be back in time for breakfast. She gave me some pills and asked me to wait for a few minutes while she “cleared it.” Rather kind of her to play this game with me, I think. Pills taking effect, no walk.

  It is 6:46 a.m. I have been unable to move. I did not go out as planned. I had hoped this wouldn’t happen. My optimism soars to such a peak that just as suddenly it plummets off the edge. The edge of … that place where optimism plummets. (I’m sorry.) I’m trying to be precise. I’m trying to write down the facts. Perhaps if I rest briefly … it’s still quite early. More later …

 
It is now 7:32. I’m afraid that if I give in to sleep there will be no end. I’ll have wasted this opportunity to clarify things. I’ll have failed. I will force myself to begin again.

  I recall a day. A large sparrow blocked the small entrance of the birdhouse I had built for a family of wrens. The sparrow was too big to get through the hole. My daughter Miriam (she was five or six) and I stood at the kitchen window and looked at the sparrow. Inside the birdhouse, we knew, were six or seven baby birds waiting hungrily for their mother to return with food. The sparrow, by blocking the entrance, was preventing the mother wren from returning home to feed her babies. We watched as the mother wren flew over the birdhouse, around and around, unable to land.

  But why? asked Miriam. What good does it do the sparrow? I didn’t know either, and not knowing bothered me. I had assumed until that day that it was the circumstantial misery of human beings that made us enjoy the suffering of others. Or if not enjoy, exactly, then stand complacently by and allow it to happen. But if birds did it too, I thought, then perhaps it was a baser instinct that arose naturally from all life. This thought depressed me horribly. I felt there was no hope for the world, that evil would inevitably triumph over good, and that there was, therefore, no point in striving for goodness. And yet I also felt that the struggle to be good was the purpose of life. Certainly of my life.

  But never mind. Elvira, at the precise moment of what my older daughter at the time would have called my existential crisis, came to join my younger daughter and me at the window. What’s so interesting out there? she asked. We told her and in a flash she had grabbed a broom, run into the backyard, and shooed that sparrow away. The mother wren quickly flew into the birdhouse and, presumably, all was well again. Elvira came inside and told us, my daughter and me, that if the sparrow returned, we should simply do what she had done and foadich met de zach (a Low German expression meaning “be done with it”). Then, as though nothing significant had occurred, she cheerfully began to make supper.

  Shoo the sparrow away and get on with supper. This is the first part of my new life strategy. Will worry less. I hope I don’t ask my next visitor for a broom, as a form of greeting. Why can’t I say hello, simply? I’m forgetting the basics. My brother popped in for a cameo a few minutes ago and said, How’s my big brother? and I said, pointing to the brochure, Those houses are all facing east, why do you think that is? It’s hard to backtrack after that. I mean hello, I’m fine, yourself? How goes the business of running hospitals in rural Manitoba? My feet keep bleeding, I don’t know why. That sort of thing. The wife and kids.

  Well, the day has definitely begun. I hear the vacuum cleaner approaching from down the hall, and I imagine that the maid, or not the maid, and I will go through some type of scenario in which she offers to clean my room and I politely decline the offer. I can’t let her see the blood. In the meantime I absolutely must mobilize the troops and begin!

  I have just remembered my money problems. I am down to $141. How will I pay for this room? How will I remove the stains from the floor? I am beginning to panic, but not terribly so.

  Sure enough, the maid is cross with me. You gotta have your room cleaned and re-towelled sometime, she hollered at me from outside the door. Why, I asked her, why must I? Because it’s my job, she said. Yes, but if I’m happy with things exactly the way they are, then why must you clean? Why must I have fresh towels? You don’t understand, she said, you don’t get it. Fair enough, I answered, but I don’t need clean towels. Thank you and good luck. Why I wished her good luck I haven’t a clue. The nurse came in then and apologized to the maid for me. This is not a hotel, Mel, she said kindly. We have to clean your room.

  Very well. Jarring, mind you, but not the end of the world. I don’t know why I’m so reluctant to have the maid clean my room. I’d prefer a harmonious relationship with her, there’s no doubt of that. In any case, I can’t have her discovering the bloodstains on the floor, and now, as well, the paper I used to soak it up is ruined. Must remind daughter to bring more. And pens.

  I can no longer make out the sound of the vacuum cleaner. She must have gone to another floor. I will make a sign for my doorknob that reads: C’mon in, patient is already disturbed.

  I’ll just spend a few minutes looking out my window at my late brother-in-law’s house, directly across the street from the hospital. Births of family members in this hospital: my parents, Elvira’s parents, all of their children including Elvira and myself, our daughters. Deaths of family members in this hospital: Elvira’s parents, my parents, Elvira’s brother, who used to live across the street. His wife still does. I’m looking at her house. She has come to visit me many times. She is an angel, truly. (Will not tell me the truth about E.) On one of these visits I told her I had seen George in the corridor. No, no, honey, she said in Low German, George died several years ago. Don’t you remember? You wrote the obituary. Yes! I said, grateful to her for having reminded me, and he always wanted it longer. That’s right, sweetie, she said, that’s right. Occurred to me that he had wanted to make love to her one last time before dying. Almost made the mistake of asking her if he had.

  five

  What I have seen: sunshine, house, trees, car, pavement, fountain.

  I have always enjoyed the sun’s warmth and I feel, as I write this, that the sun is the last reminder of my good life on Earth. This is so ridiculous as to be embarrassing, but I feel as though the sun were my friend! Do you remember those books we used to read when we were very small? Where the young protagonists enjoy close imaginary relationships with planets and stars to the point where they are greeting them by name and, in their minds, bringing them into their homes and telling them their deepest secrets, hopes, and dreams?

  That’s how I feel! The sunlight makes me feel at home, as though I own it, that it’s mine exclusively, that I’ve invented it, or that it’s a member of my family. The sun helps me remember the good times, and in remembering the good times I can then safely say that in fact I’ve had good times. How’s that for my next non-greeting to visitor: In fact, I’ve had good times! or how about, The sun is my friend! (Is there no activity room in this place? Ping-pong or something?) I’ve begun to count the beats between my greetings and my visitors’ replies. Number of beats that passed between my last greeting of “I said I didn’t need any more towels” and visitor’s reply of “I didn’t bring towels, Mel”: four.

  A construction site is barely visible (is it the housing development?) through my window and I have watched the men at work, marvelling at the level of skill and cooperation such a large-scale venture must require. I remember the house we built on First Street, a solid project, a cozy home for Elvira and me to begin … to begin.

  In my files you’ll find old black-and-white photographs with serrated edges that capture the work in progress, the building of the house, from empty lot to finished product. A wide grin on my face, a nail in the corner of my mouth, a hammer in my hand, proud and slightly overwhelmed by the turn my life has taken, new wife, new home, baby on the way, and a job I love. In the evening my students would stroll past the house in progress and invariably lend a hand for an hour or two. In this photograph I weigh only a hundred and forty pounds, drowning in an oversized lumber jacket and wool cap, flaps and all, Elvira in a nightie, also smiling from ear to ear, her dark hair a little messy, the morning sun pouring in through the windows of our brand-new kitchen. Elvira is wearing the First Nightgown! Every year I bought her a nightgown for Christmas, some sheer and flimsy, others prim and flannelly, depending, I suppose, on my mood at the time of purchase. Okay, where’s my new nightie, Mel? she would ask as we sat around the tree opening gifts. It became a tradition for Elvira to parade around our house on Christmas Eve in her new nightie as the girls and I looked on admiringly.

  In the photograph we appear, almost, to have been taken by surprise, and years later she and I would try to remember who the photographer was and whether he or she had caught us off guard, or whether surprise was simply a permanen
t expression on our faces in those early years when so much was new.

  One May evening a student of mine got caught in the rain on his way home from a softball game. He knocked on our door, drenched and dripping, wondering if he might come in out of the rain. Of course we invited him inside, even though we were both in our housecoats and ready for bed, and Elvira offered to dry his clothes in her new dryer. What would he wear in the meantime? he asked. Elvira rushed off to our bedroom and brought out one of my suits.

  This student of mine was big for his eleven years, tall and stocky, and my suit fit him to a T! Oh, how Elvira laughed and laughed as I stood next to this boy trying to explain concepts of long division. Eventually she left the room but the boy and I could hear her muffled laughter from the kitchen and we exchanged nervous looks. Later, after the boy had gone home in his own clothes, I asked Elvira why she had laughed so hard, and she told me, through fresh laughter, that the boy, in my suit, looked as old as I, and that I, in my housecoat, looked like an eleven-year-old boy.

  For some reason I took exception to this (oh, for that to be my biggest beef now) and remained silent for a time until at last, around midnight, I said to her, Well, you’re young looking yourself, you know. And wouldn’t you know, this set her off again. I was concerned that the neighbours would be awoken by Elvira’s laughter. I leapt from the bed and closed the window and begged her to stop laughing. She wouldn’t though and insisted that I begin laughing, until eventually I did emit a chuckle or two and the two of us went to bed happy. We were young, twenty-one years old, learning how to live with one another, and filled with wonder.

  Filleted with wonder. Wonder-filled. I’d like to apologize to someone for killing my wife. (Wife would be first choice, but of course wouldn’t mean much.) Will wait for opportunity. In the meantime …