A Complicated Kindness (4 page)

five

A
fter supper me and Travis drove around town and ended up at the pits. Saturday nights you’d have a hundred or more kids down there drinking, dropping, smoking, swearing, screwing, fighting, swimming, home-made-tattooing, passing out and throwing up right up until an hour or so before church the next morning when everyone would be back in the pew with Mom and Dad wearing nice (ugly) dresses and buttoned-up shirts flipping through Deuteronomy and harmonizing to “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Me and Travis were parked on the windmill side of the pits staring at the water and listening to the radio. We both reached out to turn up the volume at the very same time when the guitars kicked in in a Cars song. That means we’re meant for each other, I said. We had a conversation that resulted in a fight. I asked him what he was thinking about and he said nothing. No, what, I said. Well, he said, about floating around in a kind of, you know, vortex of sleeping, drinking and fucking—never quite coming into consciousness. I said oh (we’d never fucked) and he asked me what I was thinking about. Horses, I said. Getting a small horse I can ride but not be scared of. I like to have fun but not fun mixed with fear. I guess it just bugged him that I was thinking about horses while he was thinking about
consciousness and fucking and he said he was going to get out and walk over to the diving-board side of the pits to see if The Golden Comb or Eldon was hanging out over there and he’d be back in a bit. Great, I said, because I like sitting alone in a truck staring at gravel. Which was the unsarcastic truth. After he left I got out of the truck and wandered over to the water and saw Sheridan Klippenstein standing there. He wore a Ludwig drum shirt with cut-off sleeves and camouflage pants. He had square brown hands and very thin wrists and a little muscle definition beginning in his upper arms. He cupped his cigarette against the wind and spit a lot.

He and I used to be neighbours before a series of deranged events befell his family. He was also the grandson of this old woman whose leg wounds my mother used to dress. Her name was Mrs. Klippenstein. She lived in a big old farmhouse out on Garson Road. I once wrote a short story about her house and Mr. Quiring corrected me about some detail in the kitchen and I asked him how he knew about old Mrs. Klippenstein’s kitchen and he told me that he’d once changed some fuses for her, that he was a friend of the family. Small towns.

In the summer Sheridan and I ran like giant biped mice on spools of hydro wire that were kept in a yard next to his house. In the winter we slid off the roof of his bungalow in shovels. In junior high we kind of lost track of each other.

What are you doing here, I asked him. He told me that his dad had left home to play bass in a cover band from North Dakota. Not a cover band, I said.

I know, said Sheridan. He gathered up a mouthful of saliva and horked it far across the water. It got caught up in a gentle breeze and hung suspended in mid-air. It sparkled in the sun like a tiny chandelier before it dropped softly and disappeared.

He left me an adding machine, he said.

Get out, I said.

No, it’s true, he told me. He said he won’t know where he’ll be for a while.

That’s it? I asked.

Okay, he said, I also inherited an umpire ticker. Obviously his dad had enjoyed keeping track of things other than himself. The last time I saw him he was juggling pickled eggs in the rain outside the Kyro, a bar on the other side of the town limits, beyond the reach of Jesus, Menno “Sexy” Simons and Uncle Hands. The not-so-mellow triumvirate. My dad had said don’t look, but I’d already seen him. Pickled eggs are the Devil’s snack.

Remember when you climbed door frames in your bare feet, I asked him. I looked at his feet. He was wearing Greb Kodiaks. Everybody in town wore Greb Kodiaks, as though we were a people in need of a serious grip, perpetually on the verge of falling to the ground without a sound. Divided we fall politely and modestly.

So what are you doing these days, I asked him. He said on weekends he worked in the Sandilands at Moose Lake.

Yeah? I said. Do you like it?

He said it kind of gave him the creeps because that was where his mom had killed herself years ago. But you know, he said, there are fun things to do there too…fishing, hiking, waterskiing. I nodded. She hadn’t been aware of her options. I vaguely remembered his mom. She was the first person I’d ever known with highlights in her hair. She owned toe socks. She called Sheridan her little man and made us Nestlé’s Quik with extra powder. She taught us skipping rhymes. When she was sweeping and we were in her way she would say get out of my road. She once told me she liked the freckles on my shoulders, they were like stars in the sky. And she let us draw all over the drywall in the basement.

We talked a bit about how we used to say goodbye in all the languages we could remember and some we made up. That
was bent, he said. He spit some more and offered me a drag. We’d stand by our front doors yelling stuff like
shalom
and
Faloma
and
nice aroma let’s build a snowma
in the dark, we’d just go on and on, in early Menno rap style, until his dad asked him if he wanted a smack. A smack attack jack? Get back on track! He didn’t mean it. He was a gentle guy with Brylcreemed hair. We’d hear him laughing his head off somewhere in his house. We’d see Merv Griffin’s face reflected in the living-room window. Sometimes we’d hear his dad arguing with his demons in the old language of our people.

What made him go into hogs, I asked. Sheridan shrugged. I thought about how he used to stick his shoulder blades out like little wings.

Hogs, covers, he said. He was right. What difference did it make? I knew his dad had been excommunicated for something but we didn’t talk about that. Nobody in town ever talked about that.

When it happened, years ago, Sheridan’s mom went nuts. Trudie had told me and Tash that she thought Sheridan’s dad should have left town to save his mom the pain of having to pretend he was dead. She’d really loved him. They’d had a lot of fun together when he wasn’t too drunk.

But now Sheridan and I were older and staring at the water and sharing a cigarette. I told him I hadn’t seen him in school lately and he told me he’d had an entire bottle of Swedish oil poured over his head in woodworking for falling asleep and after that, after being lacquered, he couldn’t muster up the energy to come back. I told him that in grade seven science I’d been strapped repeatedly on the hand with a wooden ruler in front of everybody for talking about something other than tuning forks.

We talked about our old expressions like
monkey-doer, wordy
and
I don’t give a care.
Remember bubble language, I
asked him. He said yeah, but he couldn’t remember how to do it any more. We talked about pouring hydrogen peroxide into the blisters we got from playing tag on the monkey bars at Ash Park. And we talked about the stupid things we’d scratched into the metal of the bars like who loves whom forever.

Then I heard the truck start up and some music, some 10cc…something about dying…playing on the radio and the horn honking and I told Sheridan I had to go. Let’s meet here every five years to catch up on our lives, he said. Yeah, okay, I said, and waved goodbye.

six

W
hen we were little, Tash and I would sit in the darkened dining room of my grandmother’s farmhouse, listening to the funeral announcements. They came on after supper, on the local radio station we were allowed to listen to because the elders knew that it was better for little children to listen to the names of dead people being read out in a terrifying monotone than the Beatles singing all we need is love. Afterwards my grandma would tell us: They have gone home at last. Praise the Lord. Then we would play this game called
Knipsbrat
with each other until our middle fingers were sore. It was one of the few games we were allowed to play. Golf was another one because it consisted of using a rod to hit something much, much smaller than yourself and a lot of men in this town enjoyed that sort of thing.

When I was a kid I stood in fields pretending I was a scarecrow. It was a sin to pretend we were something other than what we were but I have always enjoyed standing very still in fields. And often, when sin is used in the name of farming, Mennonites look the other way. Farming is very important to us. And I’m talking very important. When I was a kid we played a game in Sunday school, although we didn’t call it a game, we called it a pod. Our teacher played the roles of
different people in a skit. First, she was Professor Knuf, and she couldn’t get on the heaven train. Then she was Rockin’ Rhonda, also not allowed on the train. Then the next Sunday she was Slugger Sam and again was denied access to the heaven train. Finally she was Farmer Fred and she was allowed onto the train because she had Jesus in her heart. It was a fun game. We all clapped for Farmer Fred and afterwards drew pictures of the other three people crying at the gates of heaven and Farmer Fred just sailing on by, with spokes of light coming off him. I enjoyed drawing very short shorts on Rockin’ Rhonda and a lipstick-stained cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. I drew Slugger Sam next to her, about to slam her over the head with his bat, and a word bubble coming from his mouth that said Jezebel! I didn’t quite get why Professor Knuf didn’t make the cut, unless it was because he was a professor of science and believed in facts. I considered giving Farmer Fred a word bubble that said Fry, Knuf, fry! but then I realized that that would be gloating and farmer or no farmer, you don’t gloat on the heaven train.

One afternoon when I was standing still in my grandma’s sugar-beet field I noticed two black dresses, the ugly Fortrel kind that many old women in our town wear on a daily basis, flying around like large crazy birds way up in the sky near the water tower. I hadn’t realized, right then, that they were dresses but I figured it out after a while. I stood and watched as they flew all the way over to my grandma’s yard. I was amazed that they were flying so close together and I thought it was great because they were dancing all over the place, seriously shaking it in this crazy, free, beautiful way until finally one of them fell onto the roof of my grandma’s barn and the other one coasted in for a spectacularly gentle landing right at my feet. It was one of the best things that had ever happened to me, watching those dresses dancing wildly in the wind.

I didn’t touch the one lying on the ground beside me, it seemed like some kind of sacred object, but I kicked a little dirt over it and then put a rock on top of the dirt. I said goodbye to it like I was a little kid who didn’t know the difference between a dress and a person and I completely ignored the dress that had dropped onto the barn roof. It might still be there. I should check one of these days.

Travis and me just got back from driving around. We drove around and around, not on Main Street, like Bert and his girlfriend do in Bert’s Red Phantom, but on country roads with a six of Old Stock between us and some reasonably good shit on the radio. We get dusty when the windows are open but we swelter to death if they’re not. I put my bare feet up on the dash and Travis gets bugged when I leave toe prints on the windshield. I can work all the knobs on the radio with my feet and even change the tape and put it back into its case.

Sometimes we race farm dogs, but I don’t enjoy that very much because I’m always afraid they’ll get caught up under the car wheels. It hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes we stick messages of protest onto cows, with wide black electrical tape.
HANDS OFF, FARM BOY.
Things like that.

Today we climbed a solitary tree in the middle of a field and took turns jumping from higher and higher branches. We saw a gopher that looked exactly like the old guy who bags groceries at Tomboy. Same expression. We thought a flock of crows was plotting to kill us like in the movie
The Birds
which we had never seen but
knew
about and then remembered that a flock of crows was called a
murder.
We threw pieces of dried-up dirt at them and they flew away. We accidentally broke a bottle in the field and spent half an hour picking up all the little pieces so that the cows wouldn’t step on them and then
another half-hour burying them deep in the dirt. Then I taught Travis how to braid long pieces of grass and we made a little tiara and placed it on the head of a cow that was just lying there and didn’t seem to care at all. After that we just sat in the shade under the tree and I asked him if he’d donate one of his kidneys to me if I ever needed it and he said yeah and I said good, thank you, and then he said wait, will having only one kidney affect how much I can drink? And I said probably, and he said then, hmmm, he’d have to think about it.

On the way home I asked him if we could stop at my grandma’s old barn to see if the dress was still up there. He asked me what I wanted to do with it and I said nothing, I just wanted to see if it was still there.

My grandma died in the fall while watching a Blue Jays game on TV. Her feet were up and her hair was in curlers and there was a can of tomato soup simmering away on the stove. Now her house was used for missionaries to live in when they were home on furlough.

Travis and I drove up into the driveway and got out and stared at the barn. We went inside it to see if there was a ladder somewhere but there wasn’t so we drove his truck around to the back and then he stood on the cab part and I climbed up onto his shoulders and then up onto the roof. The dress wasn’t there. I had really been hoping that it would be and when I couldn’t find it I felt tired and pissed off and hot and stupid.

Where do you think it went, Travis asked. And I said I didn’t know. I don’t know where anything goes, I said. Don’t be sad about stuff like that, okay, he asked me. He put his arm around my shoulders. I said yeah, okay, I wouldn’t be. He picked some dandelions that were poking out of the dirt next to the barn and handed them to me and I said thank you and held them the whole way back to my place. At least if I couldn’t have one of his kidneys I could have weeds.

He had to go do some stuff for his dad. Did you have fun today, he asked me. I nodded and smiled and hugged him. He said he’d call me later and then he lifted me up off the ground.

My parents had their first date at church. It consisted of walking side by side for three whole beautiful blocks to the gravel parking lot where my father said to my mother: Well. And my mother said: That’s deep. They cracked each other up. Thank God I wasn’t there. English wasn’t their first language, so jokes were a particular type of achievement. Their mother tongue was an
unwritten language
. How do you write things down, I’d asked Trudie. We don’t, obviously, she said, not in that language anyway. The stories are passed around. They come to us.

Should we go inside? That was my dad wondering. He often wondered. Of course, said my mom. We’ve come all this way. Three blocks only, said my dad. He, like the doomed Professor Knuf, enjoyed specificity. He liked to take note of irrefutable facts. In fact he liked to take
hold
of irrefutable facts as though they were life rafts. Things, unlike wives and daughters, that would not go away. I think he would have walked forever with my mom if she’d suggested it. They’d be walking still. They could be in New York by now.

He had a hard time making decisions. It was tough. The guy arrives at his pre-planned destination with his girl and then wonders if they should go
in.
It seems…he said. It seems what, my mom had asked. He didn’t know. Take off your jacket, she said. It’s so warm. It’ll be hotter than stink in the sanctuary. Normally, when my mom made a suggestion, my dad followed through. But not when it came to his suit jacket. It was like Batman’s cowl or Samson’s hair. No…no, he said. I’d better leave it on.

They went inside. They split up to go to their respective sides of the church and listened as the elders, one by one, cast their votes. At the end of the evening, there were three fewer members of the church.

That’s all I know about that, my mom told me when I was a little kid. I don’t know what they’d done.

Jesus H., Tash said, your first date was a shunning? What did they do, I’d asked my mom. Oh, brother, I don’t know, she said. I never really paid any attention. But I pressed her. I was six or seven. What did they do, I asked. Just guess. Well, she said, they may have been fooling around, I don’t know. Fooling around how, I’d asked. Oh, she said, misbehaving. Kissing. Just fooling around. And then what happened, I’d asked. They couldn’t be a part of the church, she’d say. That’s right, Mom. And then? Their families weren’t allowed to speak to them, she said. And? I’d ask.

This was a bedtime ritual. I dug the shunning story. I couldn’t wait to hear it. What a gem. It completely reinforced my belief system of right and wrong. And everyone had to stand up in church and publicly denounce them. Yeah! I’d say. Denounce them! I’d always loved the sound of that.

And everybody was sad, I’d say. Right? Yes, everybody was sad. It was a very difficult position to be in not only for the person who was shunned but for the people who loved them. God especially, I’d say. Right? Yes, God especially. I loved that hook. Even though he was the ultimate punisher, he got no satisfaction from it. It hurt him, but it had to be done. I thought that was damn heroic.

But Nomi, she’d say, there was always the possibility of forgiveness. Remember that. I didn’t like that part. It muddied my crystal-clear waters. But probably not, I’d say. Probably not.

One night my mom said she’d had enough of that story. She didn’t like it any more and wanted to tell another one. And
they lived like ghosts in their own town, right, I’d ask. No friends, no family. Floating around. Bound for hell, right? Crying all the time? Hey, Mom! For fooling around? Right? She’d make up excuses to leave my room. Oh, Dad needs help choosing his shirts for next week, she’d say. And gently close my door.

My mom had told me about the table trick. How if, say, your wife was shunned, you weren’t allowed to sit at the same table as her but if you put two tables together, with an inch between them, and then put a tablecloth over them, it would seem like you were at the same table, which would be nice, but you
wouldn’t
be at the same table, so you wouldn’t be breaking any rules.

Tash often threw me out of her room with the words
I shun thee!
She didn’t take things as seriously as she should have. Like my uncle, The Mouth of Darkness, said, there were eternal issues at stake. And when discipline is properly applied, the one under it needs the humility to come home.

My uncle’s name is Hans Rosenfeldt. He is the pastor of our church. He is my mother’s brother. Tash once said The Mouth of Darkness has pulled up onto our driveway. Shall I let him in? From then on she and I called him The Mouth, which, if not smart or funny or anything like that, is apt.

There is a woman in this town who was shunned for adultery but didn’t leave. She’s one of the ghosts. She has health problems and sometimes she just faints on the street, usually in front of Tomboy. People will leave sausages or cheese next to her sometimes but that’s as much as they can do. Although I did once see an older woman give her skirt a tug after it had ridden up above her knees.

My mother once told me that her blackouts had to do with stress, which fascinated me. That you could collapse on the spot and wake up a few minutes later feeling ready to go on.
I wanted to be able to do that, although I think my minutes would stretch to days or possibly even years. My mother once told me that there were no adults in our town. But what do you mean by that, I’d asked her. What do I mean by that? she answered. I was never amused when my questions and her answers were the same thing. When she washed the dishes she’d have conversations with invisible people. I’d watch her from the dining room, shaking her head, moving her lips, shrugging, flicking her hand periodically to punctuate some imaginary point. Who are you talking to, I’d ask and she’d look at me and laugh, of course, telling me she didn’t know who she was talking to, or what did I mean, or talking? Was I talking? Yeah, I’d say, you were and you seemed ticked off. I did? she’d say, all innocently. That’s strange, she’d say. How odd. She’d try to compensate, afterwards, with an abundance of fake enthusiasm that literally felt like an attack. It stung my skin and I’d usually leave the room after enduring a few direct hits of
good cheer
. I wanted to know who the hell she was talking to in the first place.

You know how some people, I’m not sure which people, say that something that happens on one part of the planet can make something else happen on another part of the planet? Usually, I think, they mean some kind of geological event, but I’m sure that my mother’s silent raging against the simplisticness of this town and her church could produce avalanches, typhoons and earthquakes all over the world. But there is kindness here, a complicated kindness. You can see it sometimes in the eyes of people when they look at you and don’t know what to say. When they ask me how my dad is, for instance, and mean how am I managing without my mother. Even Mr. Quiring, the teacher I am disappointing on a regular basis, periodically gives me a break. Says he knows things must be a little
difficult
at home. Offers to give me extensions, says he’s praying for us. I don’t mind.