A Quality of Light (4 page)

“And this other son was just as important to the story. He stayed. He was loyal to the farm, to the land, to the family. When his brother took his share of the family money and walked away, he was angry. Angry because, well, he saw that as a thumbing of the nose at his father, his family and the farm. So he stayed and his anger stayed too.

“When the prodigal blew his riches on wine, women and song, and came back with his tail between his legs, broke, hungry and dirty, his father threw a big celebration for him. A welcoming,” he said and winked broadly at everyone. An embarrassed titter of laughter dribbled through the group around us.

“Why? Why? That’s what the other son asked his father. And his father said that we should
all
celebrate when a lost one returns. Like shepherds do. Like farmers. Take care of them all, especially when they can’t take care of themselves. Be here for them. Help them find their roots again.

“And the other son’s ashamed. Ashamed because he knows, all of a sudden, that there’s more than one way to be a prodigal. One’s by leaving — like Ben — and the other one’s by staying and not being true. By not being willing to take care of all of them, by judging and putting down, letting suspicion and hearsay keep you from celebrating the returnings when they happen.

“That about right, Mother?” he said, looking straight across the verandah at my mother, who’d appeared from the kitchen where she and a handful of other ladies were preparing the buffet.

“Yes,” she said, smiling proudly. “That’s about right. Now, all of you, come ’round back and meet your neighbors.”

We moved together out onto the lawn and around the house in a raggle-taggled bunch like the herds we tended. The Gebhardts stood together outside the opened doors of their battered old ’57 Mercury in the fight-or-flight position I recognized in the half-wild barn kittens we found each spring. A small orange U-Haul was hitched behind their car, and the back seat was piled high with blankets and boxes and a huge black Philco radio. A rusted orange Schwinn bicycle was tied on the top. Harold Gebhardt came down the porch steps as slowly and solemnly as Ben Gebhardt shook his
hand once he reached him. The woman beside him smiled weakly at the process, and the thin-shouldered boy beside her swept his timid, blue-eyed gaze over all of us from beneath a mop of shaggy hair. They were dressed much like the rest of us, in the pressed and creased Sunday best sort of outfits we all try to appear comfortable in. Harold exhaled deeply and then clasped his bony arms around his son, whose face contorted at the sudden intimacy. Eventually he laid his hands limply on the old man’s shoulders, patted distractedly a few times and then disengaged himself.

“My, uh, wife,” he said to Harold, hooking his thumb towards her. “Ellen. Ellen this is … my dad.”

She came forward almost mincingly and extended a thin, pale hand that trembled slightly and earned her the sympathy of all the women in the background. “I’m glad to meet you. Finally,” she said quietly and threw a worried glance at her husband. “This is our son. John. He’s ten.”

Harold bent down on one knee in front of him and tousled his hair. John Gebhardt stood there, straight shouldered, rigid. His hands were curled tightly at his side. He was as pale as his mother, fine boned and fragile looking.

Harold said softly, “Well, John Gebhardt, it’s nice to meet you. I’m your grampa and these people behind me are friends of mine who came here just to meet
you.
Whaddaya think about that?”

The boy’s eyes darted over all of us and he swallowed hard. “Fine, sir,” he said quickly and looked at the ground.

“He’s like that,” Ben explained. “Don’t talk much. Kind of a dreamer, you know?” He smiled weakly around at us.

“Well, we’ll soon have him talking about those dreams, all right. Lots of good kids around this town to help him with that. In fact, one of them’s here tonight. He’s ten, too. Joshua? Come here, son.” Harold waved me over with one hand while rubbing the boy’s shoulder with the other.

My dad nudged me forward and winked encouragement. There was a flicker of surprise in John Gebhardt’s eyes as I approached and then they settled back into a spot on the ground.

“John, this here is Joshua Kane. Him and his folks live about five miles out of town. Joshua, this is my
grandson
, John Gebhardt.”

The hand that reached out to clasp mine was thin and meatless. Moist. Soft. Girlish, almost. My own were callused from forking and lifting, and the muscled forearms of the farmer were already bunching along the young lines of my arms. My grip surprised him. He looked up and the depth and clarity of his eyes shocked me. It was like falling through the sky. He stared at me hard, and for the briefest moment I felt the life force within his slender frame radiating outward in a roiling, churning wave, hard and insistent, like the feeling you get when you lay your hand upon the flank of a calving heifer. It startled me. And then it was gone. You could see it retreating. The energy folding in upon itself and moving backwards, down and in, leaving those crystal-clear eyes as languid, placid as troutless ponds.

“Hey, John,” I said, shopping wildly for any bargain conversation. “Welcome. You’ll like it here. It’s nice. Town, I mean. Maybe you can come out to the farm sometimes. Wanna?”

“Corn,” he said so quickly I almost missed it.

“What?”

“Corn,” he repeated, still looking at the toe of his right foot, which was now doodling a small, loose circle. “You grow corn. Squash.”

“Well, no. We grow cows mostly, chickens, a few pigs. My ma, she grows vegetables in the garden.”

“No corn?”

“No. Well, yeah, some. A few acres, I mean. For the cows.”

He looked at me puzzled, and then lowered his head again. I was lost for words. The adults were standing frozen like mannequins around the back stoop and only the faces of my parents were animated.

Harold looked at the two of us and smiled, patted me firmly on the back and pushed us both towards the house. “You boys head on in there and dig into some of that good food these ladies have brought for this shindig! Joshua, introduce John around to the other kids, will you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on, John. Eats.”

We threaded our way through the grownups and the kids scattered through them. Most just looked at us, but my mom and dad stepped forward to meet us.

“Well, well, so this is John Gebhardt. Hello there, John,” my dad said and stretched out a big, worn hand to shake with him.

“This is my father. His name’s Ezra,” I said. “And this is my ma. Martha. This here’s John Gebhardt.”

“Hello, John,” my mother said in her quiet way. “John’s a strong name. We’re really happy to have you with us. Welcome.”

He performed the ritual perfunctorily, hands extended then retracted with the barest of contact with either of my folks. He simply offered a purse-lipped nod and pocketed his hands, shifting from foot to foot, while all of us searched for something more to say.

“Eats,” he said finally.

“Yeah. Eats,” I said, grinned at my parents and headed into the house. “Come on, John.”

“Those were your parents?” he asked as we entered the house.

“Yeah. Nice, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Nice.”

And that was that. John was introduced around to the rest of the kids and he was as tight-lipped and nervous as before. His parents seldom spoke at all, to each other or to anyone, and Harold made the rounds as the proud, gregarious host, as happy and comfortable as small-town shopkeepers generally are when surrounded by those they know, trust and count on. There was a world of difference between him and his son. Harold with the ruddy face of health and optimism, and Ben so sallow and tired looking that you wondered who was really the sick one. Mrs. Gebhardt remained as mousy and retiring as she was on her arrival, merely nodding in agreement through most of the evening and offering little or no return of chatter. We kids played hide-and-seek, and although I noticed that John was particularly adept at disappearing, there was nothing in his manner besides his silence and curt return of questions to mark him as any different from the rest of us.

The night passed in the flurry of childhood with nothing extraordinary to remember, no alteration to the rhythm of things. I guess the significant moments in life are like that. They come and they go in such random anonymity that their gravity and consequence are lost upon us. They’re masked in simplicity, in the slouching, casual day-in, day-outedness of our lives, so that you greet them in an unfeigned openness. Because they’re simply moments. Yet they lay on the highways and byways of our lives like stones, singing their histories, clamoring for the comfort of our attentions, the nurturing of our remembrances. And when we return to them, well traveled and wiser with years, cradle them patiently in our hearts and minds, feel the lives within them, then, then we realize how very much of the people we have become, lives within the stones we ignore.

Y
ou know the old joke about men crying when we come out of the vagina and then sixteen years later, crying because we want back into it? Well, I cried because I wanted back in right away. My ma said I cried all the time and I believe it’s because I really didn’t want to be here. Not with them anyway. You only ever saw their public faces, the eerie little social minuet they performed for propriety’s sake. Her, all caked in the ghoulish makeup she used to hide the bruises, and him, sober out of the fear of being found out, all cranked on the morphine he scored from an old army buddy. He said it was for treatment of the Wound. What a joke. No one ever saw the Wound, of course. I never. But he talked about it all the time. He’d be drunk and stupid, telling tales about the virgins in Pu San or some such place, or the fist fight in camp the night before the assault on Hill 68, and he’d get all teary, saying it would have all been different except for the Wound. He’d have been a hero except for the Wound. He’d have held a civilian job except for the Wound. He needed to drink or needed a shot of morphine because of the pain of the Wound. After he died I learned that the Wound was caused by his being drummed
out of the army for drunkenness and that he’d never been to Korea at all. He was a desk jockey who filed the papers that sent guys there and shipped them back. That’s how he knew all the names of places and battles. He typed them all the time. He couldn’t stand being a soldier without a war, so he made our lives one. Nice, huh? I was never a son. I was a prisoner of war.

So, needless to say, I was glad to get out of Toronto. Not that coming to a place called Mildmay was my idea of a good move, but any place was going to be better than those sorry streets. And actually it’s not the streets themselves that I hated. It was the me that walked them. And my life. I lived all my life learning how to shift gears. I’d be coming home from school or the library (where I did my living) and I’d be feeling pretty good. I’d just spent a few quality hours in a book and I’d be on fire with new ideas, information or some story. I’d feel like a real kid, motoring in the passing lane of life. Then I’d get to the door of wherever it was we were living at the time. My hand would pause just as it was about to grab the doorknob, like reaching for the stick shift. I’d scrunch up my eyes and heave a deep breath before I opened that door. Downshifting into neutral because I never knew whether I’d have to make a sudden getaway or if I could park and idle for a while. He’d either be passed out, drunk and slobbering, drunk and ranting, slapping my mother, drunk and crying, hung-over and sick or even, on occasion, sickeningly lovey-dovey and wanting to hug me with his drinker’s breath and tobacco stench. Wonderful. So I guess part of me held out hope that a new town would change things, change him, change us.

And my mother? Well, they say that love is blind but in her case it was totally insensate. Her idea of protecting me was to tell me not to disturb him. Great. He’s got a choke hold on me, feet off the floor, and she’s telling me not to disturb him. He’s passed out in a puddle of puke on the kitchen floor and it’s “Don’t disturb him.” She’s got another ice bag on her face and “Don’t disturb him.” She was in love with his necessary fiction, the soldier he created for the world because he couldn’t tell them what a loser the real one was. Or maybe, in their first days, he showed her a side of himself that I never saw, something that swam under all the bullshit drunkenness that she alone could see, and maybe she held on because she thought that it would break the surface one of those days and
he’d be the man she needed. But I wish, just once, just once, she’d have stuck up for me the way she stuck up for him. I could never understand how you could love someone you always had to lie for. And me, hell, I would have even settled for that.

Yeah, I couldn’t wait to get out of Toronto.