Red Plaid Shirt Read online

  There were other people in and around Balder who were not exactly mental but who were “not right” either. This group seemed quite large considering the size of the town. Most of the people who weren’t right were middle-aged bachelors who looked in women’s bedroom windows at night. They were persistent but inept and so were always getting caught in the act.

  One of these was Charlie Connor. The Connor family was as indigenous to Balder as our own and Charlie had been looking in bedroom windows for years. No one was seriously afraid of Charlie but, as Aunt Clara said, it was best not to encourage him. So she had blinds and brocade drapes on both bedroom windows and we all undressed in the dark. It was also important to leave the bathroom light off if you had to get up in the night. The rest of the townspeople seemed to regard Charlie and the others who weren’t right as unfortunate but unavoidable nuisances.

  Younger people who weren’t right were “slow.” They were mostly girls. This was seen simply as a sadness for the family involved, unless one of the “slow” teenagers began talking about marriage and babies, and then it became a serious scandal, something that someone should put a stop to before it got out of hand.

  Aunt Clara, who knew a lot about such matters and so was my main source of information, seemed to be sorry for and scared of Old Mary both at once. When Angela Carl caught up with Old Mary and got hold of her arm, she would lead her back down the hall to her room. Old Mary walked along passively beside her, holding her hand. They swung their arms between them.

  My grandfather paid no attention to Old Mary. All the nurses told us he was a model patient. I gathered we were meant to be proud of him for this. Actually, I thought he was rather dull.

  Harold, on the other hand, seemed disappointed if Old Mary didn’t make it down to their end of the hall before Angela Carl caught her. He took great delight in tormenting her, bulging out his eyes and opening his mouth wide, imitating her screams without making a sound. If she came too close, he poked his fingers into her matted hair and pulled. Sometimes he rushed down the hall behind her, nodding his head and flailing his arms in time with hers. Aunt Clara thought this was shameful but she laughed at him too.

  Harold spent as little time as possible in their room, preferring to pass the hours in the tv room, where he flirted gently with the caved-in old women who were always knitting and passing out cups of hot lemon tea. Sometimes they bickered over who Harold liked best. He was impartial and said, “The days are so long for the ladies if I don’t go round and perk them up a bit.”

  Every night Harold deposited his boots and his socks in the hall by the door. Every time he said, “Stop a horse dead in its tracks, that smell would. We’d be suffocated by morning if I left them in here. “We all laughed politely.

  My grandfather kept his boots by the bed and he wouldn’t let the nurses move them to the rack behind the door. He always needed to know they were there, right there. Maybe he was expecting a fire in the night, preparing for an emergency exit. My mother told me about the night the farmhouse caught fire and he wouldn’t let the children out till they’d all put on their underwear. My mother said her hair was singed and his moustache too.

  It was an antique moustache, dark red and drooping. When I was a small child, I’d duck my head down whenever he tried to kiss me. Then my mother would poke me and push me toward him. He smelled like whiskey, tobacco, and porridge. He rubbed his moustache all over my chin and down my neck. I giggled because I thought I was supposed to, but it hurt and gave me a rash.

  This was when he still lived with Aunt Clara in Balder. When we stayed there, I slept in the living room on the rollaway bed. I lay awake and listened to dry cricket calls and trains on the main line right across the street. Aunt Clara’s house was on Railway Avenue. When the passenger train came through, it was all lit up, the people inside eating and reading and talking with just their heads showing. I had never been on a train then and I was so impressed by the size, the motion of them, forward, ever forward, headlong. I imagined then that the train must cross the whole country without ever stopping.

  A bed creaked at the back of the house. Then fumbling feet. My grandfather did this every night. He sighed as he stood up. He banged his thigh on the bureau, found his balance, and headed for the bathroom. I could hear the palm of his hand pressed flat against the wall, sliding across one wooden door, around the loose glass knob, over a blank space of much-painted wall, stopping at the open door. Inside. Door shut. Muttering and the sound of irregular splashing into the toilet bowl. A few minutes more and he would come out, go back to bed, snuffling and readjusting himself.

  The summer before he went to the home in Winnipeg he kept falling asleep in the bathroom. Aunt Clara would get up then and lead him back to bed. They didn’t speak. I kept my eyes shut and was embarrassed to be listening — I thought they both must know.

  In the daytime, he fixed himself in the straight-backed chair by the stove. He smoked his pipe, burning the occasional hole in his shirt, and the steam from the kettle curled all around him. Every day at four o’clock he had one shot of whiskey, downed in one gulp right out of the shot glass. Aunt Clara gave the chair to the Indians when he went into the home the next spring.

  This, the last summer that my grandfather lived in the house in Balder, was also the summer I was consumed with admiration for my cousin Lyle. He was four years older than me, the son of Uncle Maurice, my mother’s youngest brother, and Aunt Fay, and he was always in trouble. That whole segment of the family, in fact, was always going through trouble of one kind or another. Their youngest daughter, Charleen, who was my age, skipped school and stole men’s magazines from the drugstore. Their oldest daughter, Roxanne, who was sixteen, kept running away to Winnipeg with various young men. Until she got pregnant, and then she kept running farther away to Saskatchewan with the same young man, who nobody ever referred to by name, but only as “the father.” I thought Roxanne was romantically rebellious and defended her in family discussions for years afterwards.

  They all lived on a farm just outside of Balder. Lyle always said, “I’m bored with this crummy place,” but he made the best of it. On the farm they had fifty head of cattle, a lethargic Saint Bernard who eventually turned vicious and had to be put down, and dozens of angry white chickens who were everywhere, pecking and shitting.

  Lyle knew that I liked him and so he showed me how to catch grasshoppers in a sealer jar. When the jar was half full, all legs and eyes and broken wings, Lyle produced the ball of string which he carried with him everywhere. He had me open the jar slowly while he reached in (I thought he was fearless) and pulled out one grasshopper, pinching it just behind the eyes. Sometimes the head popped right off but Lyle kept fishing around in the jar until he got one that held together. At this point, I was no longer expected to participate, but my presence as audience was essential.

  Lyle stretched out a good length of string, looped and knotted it around the grasshopper’s head. Then, standing on a bale of hay and balancing himself with one arm out, he tied the other end of the string to the clothesline. I could count the mosquito bites on his arm while he did this.

  Once he had strung up a dozen or so grasshoppers, he moved the bale of hay underneath the pulley and sent the clothesline out across the yard and back and out and back. The grasshoppers flapped silently until their bodies dropped off, squirting out eggs or yellow juice. “Tobacco juice,” my grandfather called it, laughing and spitting real tobacco juice across the yard. I thought it quite natural that Lyle was his favourite grandchild.

  By the next summer my grandfather was in the home and I had decided that Lyle was a barbarian.

  This was also the summer I had my first period. I’d been prepared for it by a short speech from my mother and a book, but neither one had mentioned that the blood would be so sudden, so red. Aunt Clara and my mother were excited, as though this were an accomplishment they could somehow take credit and responsibility for. Together, they rushed to the drugstore to get me “just what you need
, dear” and would not let my father in on the excitement.

  Up until this time, the drugstore, Lloyd’s, had been my favourite place in Balder. I was always in there looking through the stacks of elementary and high school textbooks which were piled on a plywood table near the door. In Manitoba, you had to buy your own school books every year; in Ontario, they came with the territory.

  The other books in the drugstore were Harlequin romances displayed on a revolving rack in the back corner. The women on the covers had perfect hair and there was always a dark man or a dark house lurking vaguely in the background. There were twelve new titles every month, which Aunt Clara bought, kept in a stack on her night table, read through in a rush, and then circulated among the other female relatives.

  At the front of the drugstore, next to the door, were the postcards, local landmarks in black and white at five cents apiece. I bought the same ones every summer. The fire station, the new Bank of Montreal, three different views of the Anglican church where Aunt Clara sang in the choir and belonged to the Women’s Auxiliary (which meant going to meetings twice a month and making aprons and pies for their annual bazaar—and every year, cross-stitching, she said, “I don’t know why that Liddie MacAllister even bothers. All she ever brings is a pound cake and they’re so plain … I just don’t see it!”).There were also two postcard views of Main Street, one looking west, the other east, down a line of clean cars angle-parked on both sides of the street. For years I thought the signs said “Angel Parking Only,” and this was one of the great mysteries of Manitoba which did not occur in Ontario.

  After my mother and Aunt Clara rushed back to the house with their (my) box of Kotex wrapped in brown paper, I could think of the drugstore only as an embarrassing place where you went to buy “Sundries.” I thought this was the polite adult word for Kotex.

  I was angry and I said, “I bet the Queen doesn’t have this!”, gesturing wildly at my lower abdomen.

  My mother laughed indulgently and said, “You’re a woman now.” I thought this was ridiculous but didn’t say so. For the first time in my life, I realized there were things about myself that were supposed to be kept hidden.

  Just back from the home one day in July, Aunt Clara said, “He’s losing ground.” She arranged herself at the kitchen table with her mending basket and a cup of tea. She spread my green-flowered blouse, the one with the ripped armpit, in her lap. “This’ll just take me a minute,” she said to me.

  That day, which was my birthday, my grandfather, despite the nurses’ assurances, had seemed much worse. I had complained about going to see him on my birthday—it wasn’t my idea of a suitable celebration. My mother said I was being selfish: “You might never see him again, you know.” This was some kind of threat. I wasn’t sure why it worked but it did.

  He didn’t recognize any of us that day and his eyes seemed to have grown more opaque, covered with a shiny scum that made me think of a raw egg oozing over a white tile floor. He was very pale, even his lips were white. My mother told me this was because your blood gets thinner when you get old. He had been in the home for almost four years.

  When we got back to Balder, we had the birthday cake. As usual, we looked and looked for the candles. Aunt Clara always put them away in a safe place. This time we found them in the cupboard above the stove. They were all bent out of shape by the heat and stood at odd angles around the cake in all the customary colours: pastel pink, blue, green, and white like nurses’ uniforms or bathroom walls. My father lit the candles and then, after I blew them out, my mother cut the cake.

  Aunt Clara dished out the pieces as we arranged ourselves around the kitchen table in the heat. I was wearing my new short-shorts, a present from Aunt Clara, who said I had the legs to pull it off. My thighs stuck to the chair and I thought about the drive across the prairie all the way to Aunt Clara’s. I was stuck to the seat then too and I kept putting my arm straight out the window, feeling the wind. My mother, when she caught me, said this was a dangerous thing to do because the force of the air would suck me right out the window. I thought this was ridiculous and said so. She said, “Don’t be cheeky with me, young lady.”

  The birthday cake was my favourite kind: chocolate layer with boiled white icing. It was growing dark while we ate and mosquitoes made sounds like pins dropping on the window screens. Moths flickered around the outside light.

  Looking out the corner windows, I saw a drunk Indian coming up the sidewalk, weaving but stepping on every crack with some determination. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. There were still some angry days when I jumped fiercely on the cracks with both feet, seeking revenge.

  I looked away from the window with a curdled feeling in my stomach. Maybe if I asked for more cake, no one else would notice him. I knew that the mere sight of him would provoke instant anger in my mother and Aunt Clara. They would sigh and be disgusted and then they would compete grimly with each other for the worst Indian story, the most outraged sensibilities. I was at an age where I could not bear dissension: it made me want to throw up. I was afraid of all kinds of anger. I wanted everyone in the world to get along. I was always running around intervening in other people’s, adults', arguments. I thought I could control everybody if only I worked at it.

  He was still coming closer to the house. He stopped right in front, right where the lawn had been cleverly sloped, carefully landscaped to furnish the family with both aesthetic pleasure and good drainage. His back was toward me now. I could see just the edge of his white underwear above his pants. He kept tugging at the waist of his jeans, he had no belt, no hips to hold them up—had drunk them all away, lost them in a back alley somewhere on the other side of town, or maybe in the all-night truck stop out on the highway. My mother wouldn’t let me go there because she said that’s where all the Indians went to drink coffee and try and sober up, which, she said, was impossible.

  He lay down on the lawn, pillowing his head in one arm. I thought he might have to spend all night there. Maybe he belonged to one of the families who lived across the highway in abandoned cars with dangling headlights and no tires.

  Aunt Clara came up behind me. “Bastards!” she said, so close to my ear that I jumped.

  In a minute, she was gone from behind me and then she was out in the front yard too. She thrashed one arm at a swarm of mosquitoes and carried the broom in the other. Her mouth was moving but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, not through that double layer of safe suburban glass. Like watching the late-night movie with the sound turned off. She poked at him with the broom. He looked up at her stupidly. It was dark now, there was heat lightning in the west, and I couldn’t see the expression on his face, only the quizzical canary tilt of his head. Trying to stand up, he stumbled and Aunt Clara almost put out a hand to help him. But she caught herself in time and snatched it back. Her knuckles were white around the broom handle. He was moving away.

  Aunt Clara came back into the kitchen, squeezing a sliver out of her thumb. She put the broom back in the corner. She and my mother shook their heads together. He had been some kind of threat to them, but his power did not extend to my father, who was in the living room now, reading the paper and having a drink of rum. Aunt Clara said, “There’s more of them every year, they keep moving in from the reserve, we’re losing ground.”

  When the phone rang about an hour later, Aunt Clara and my mother were at the sink, doing up the dishes. My mother was drying, Aunt Clara was washing and saying, “I’ll do them, Iris, there’s only a few, you go and sit down.” But my mother kept hold of the tea towel on which was printed a map of Manitoba with a calendar inside it. She stood her ground and kept on drying the little plates which were painted with blue roses and a trim of gold leaves. I was moving between the kitchen and the living room, not sure whether I wanted to be with my father, who was still reading, or with Aunt Clara and my mother, who were talking about some woman I didn’t know. Aunt Clara was saying, “She may be a breed but you’d never know it to look at her wash … so w
hite, just beautiful.” My mother was agreeing that the state of a woman’s washing was very significant.

  When the phone rang, we all turned and looked at it. It was nearly midnight. Drying her hands on her apron, Aunt Clara said, “Now who can that be at this hour?” I heard my father in the living room shake his paper and mutter, “Well, answer it and find out.”

  We watched Aunt Clara, who was listening into the receiver and nodding.

  She hung up and said, “Grandpa died in his sleep, not a heart attack or anything, he just died. The night nurse found him on her rounds.”

  Everybody was quiet at first and then they said it was a blessing really.

  We went to the nursing home once more after that. We had to gather up his things, sign some papers which would make his death official and legal.

  When we went in past the front desk, the matron was flipping through papers in a manila file folder. She didn’t look up but smiled automatically at the sound of our feet on the linoleum.

  Harold was still there and my grandfather’s bed was already being used by another old man who was asleep in a lump. Harold, who knew something about everybody, said his name was Jack Manywounds and he had been an unsuccessful rodeo cowboy. “Not much fun anymore though,” Harold said.

  No one said anything about Jack being an Indian. I supposed there was either something about this place or something about being old and asleep that removed all that, rendered everyone equally harmless.

  When we left, Harold said he was sorry we wouldn’t be coming back.

  Summers at Aunt Clara’s continued and there were still pilgrimages to be made. We went to the Balder Cemetery now. We went more frequently to the cemetery than we had to the home. These visits were less demanding—no conversation, no diplomacy, no peppermints.

  The names on the headstones were unfamiliar at first but Aunt Clara, like Harold, knew something about everybody and I soon learned most of the names. There was one family who’d lost five children, all of them stillborn. They had five white headstones set in a row, with little sculpted lambs on top. There were also half a dozen suicides, unofficial of course, but Aunt Clara always knew what had really happened. My grandfather’s grave was sealed with cement to prevent erosion and gopher holes. Aunt Clara planted peonies at the headstone.