Tag: Bourgon

BY GORDON RAY BOURGON

Copyright is held by the author.

IT WAS my father who first pointed out the tree to me. I was 13, he was 41. That was a year before his death. At the time, I did not know it, but he must have known, the cancer riddling his body was not going to allow him to live another year. He took me for a drive, to see the soybean fields, the dried, emaciated fields of corn waiting to be taken off, the Red-tailed hawks perched on the tops of hydro poles, and the tree, bare, crooked, alone in a line of maples along the county road ditch.

He wondered, excitedly, if the tree was left to stand, dead after many years, for a reason. Did the farmer who owned the land think it was a joke to have it stand in the shadows of vibrant maples? Did he — the farmer — love the tree and could not bear to bring it down?

The tree looked like a hand clawing its way to the sky. Desiccated, grey, weathered, petrified even. I admired its perseverance.

We lived two county roads down from the tree, my mother and I. We passed it every time we drove to town for our groceries, passing it twice.

One day, mother said something about the tree.

“Every time I see it, I see your father. Some days, I hate it, wish it would just fall down already. Some days, it reminds me I’m still alive. I can move on.”

My mother loved two men. My father. And Jack Telfer, a man she invited into our lives not even two years after my dad died. They knew each other from the Salvation Army Thrift store where they both worked. Mom was in receiving, and Jack drove the truck that brought items to receiving.

I never heard his name mentioned until dad died. Then it was all Jack this, Jack that, Jack’s coming over for dinner tonight.

Dad’s death, for me then, hung around like unfinished business. Like he wasn’t dead but left us, left my mother, because he needed some time away from his family.  I had noticed my mom watching him like he was a stranger in the house. I thought it unfair. He’s dying, he’s going through some changes. I’m sure his mind was telling him to look at life differently, not like the man he was before he got sick.

Mom’s inviting Jack Telfer over for dinner was a blatant display of her having an affair behind dad’s back.

He showed up at the house in his growling Dodge pickup, a clean pair of blue jeans and a red plaid shirt. Covering a massive bald spot on the top of his head was an outdated F— Trudeau! cap stained with dark imprints of his fingertips.

Jack was a hockey player. Made it to Senior “A”, had to quit because of a knee injury, but went through life still thinking he was a hockey player because his dreams would not let him forget it.

Whenever he came over to the house, he and my mother made a good show of loving each other. They kissed, embraced, as if they needed the other’s body to breathe. Mom made matters worse when she told me dad had stopped kissing her even before he got sick. She’d said it plainly, no disdain or sadness in her voice, like she was telling me it was going to be a cool and rainy day.

Mom had this detachment from dad, after he died. His absence in our lives made it seem like he never existed, for her. When he was alive, she loved him. I’d heard her cry in her room after she returned visiting him in the hospital. I’d heard her mumbling and giggling in the kitchen as though he were there sipping his morning coffee at the table and not staring blankly at an IV attached to his arm.

When Jack started living with us, I rode with him to town every day in his growling Dodge. He took me to school, dropped me off at the same yellow fire hydrant out front. He smoked in the truck, drank from a thermos of Tim Hortons coffee mom brewed at home because there wasn’t a Tim Hortons out where we lived. The cab of the pickup had that permanent cigarette-coffee-foot odour-stale fart smell.

Jack talked like his opinions mattered, even though, he didn’t know, they lacked specifics and forethought. Like everyone, he complained about our Prime Minister and the President of the United States like both men were cut from the same cloth. He complained about being stuck behind a slow-moving harvester, or manure spreader, or baler on the county road as if they had no right being on it.

Dad loved driving slow behind them. He said it gave him more time to think, and enjoy the scenery. “Look at that tree,” he’d say, pointing to our bare, crooked tree. “It either doesn’t have a sense of time or knows more than we do about it.”

Jack never noticed the tree. Or if he did, had nothing to say about it because it was just a dead tree beside the ditch.

Jack always had this look like he was guilty of something. I wanted him to feel guilty about moving in on my mother not even two years after dad died. I wanted him to think about why he never talked to me like I was half his age — which I was — but like one of his buddies. I didn’t care about the Leafs, or the F150 found burning in a field, or someone’s big idea of running town water lines out into the county and charging residents way too much for the service.

I didn’t really care he thought his relationship with my mother was the best thing that ever happened to him, because I knew his time with us was impermanent.

Jack died a year and a half after he moved in with us. He and mom had a fight, he roared his Dodge out of our laneway, spinning tires like a final insult, and barreled down the county road without a care for other traffic. Apparently, he passed a harvester moving too slow, and crashed head on with a truck full of Toronto garbage on its way to a landfill site north of town.

Three days after his funeral, mom told me about their fight. “It was about you.”

“Why would you fight about me? What did I do?”

“Jack had it in his head you didn’t like him. That true?”

It was true, but I could not say the words to my mother.

“He said some unfair things,” mom said. “I’m not saying what. I must have said something about him playing hockey. Not being able to chase his dream. He didn’t like that. Stormed out of here.”

“It was more about him, then,” I said. “The fight.”

“We argued about you mostly. The stuff about his hockey playing was like me slapping him in the face before he left.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” I said.

My mother looked at me. It bothered her, what I said. I assumed she blamed herself for getting Jack so riled up he drove like a maniac, passed that harvester when he shouldn’t have.

Looking at her looking at me, I realized I did not know who she was. I didn’t know the depths of her love for Jack Telfer. I didn’t know where her mind went when she thought about dad being dead. I didn’t know what she thought of me.

I stood for I don’t know how long without saying anything, and watched my mother slowly turn her head, her gaze, away from me. So slowly, as if she were afraid I would object, or ask why she wouldn’t look me in the eye. But then I further realized maybe this act of turning away was her way of blaming me for Jack’s death. If I would only have liked him, then they would not have argued about me. I know, now, how ridiculous that sounds. But at the time, I was sensitive to my mother’s looks, her silences. We hadn’t talked much about dad.

After a while, when it was time for me to leave home and get my own place, my mother said she needed me around, because the house needed fixing. It was like I blinked and she got old. It had been three years since Jack Telfer died, almost nine for dad.

Like a lot of young men around here, I worked at VanDykstra’s Furniture factory. I cut lumber mostly. Around here, you either worked the farms that have been in your family for generations, became an insurance broker or real estate agent, worked for the County Works Department, left for the city, or worked in the furniture factory.

I told my mother I would stay. I was thinking I could save enough money living at home to buy one of the trailers at White Pines, where thirty or so double-wide trailers were homes for retirees, seniors, and singles with no one in their lives except for their pets. White Pines was just past the east side of town, and would only be a ten-minute drive for me from the factory.

Six months, tops, I thought. Then I could afford my own place. I never thought how old my mother would be then, or how much she would need me around.

One night, a storm came out of nowhere. My dad used to say storms never come out of nowhere. They come from two weather fronts colliding, or some say from the hand of God. They can come up all of a sudden, but they always come from somewhere.”

Mom and I finished supper, and sat on the front porch to watch the storm roll in. In a matter of minutes, the wind, rain and the nearby lightning strikes forced us inside.

“A night like this calls for whiskey,” mom said. “Don’t you think? Bottom shelf in the bureau.”

I knew where the whiskey was kept. I’d finished half the bottle on my own, nipping here and there when I came home from work and mom was already in bed.

My mother and I had never shared a whiskey before. I’d seen her drink with Jack Telfer, at the kitchen table till the early hours of the morning, and that was beer.

My mother cleared her throat. There was a reason she wanted us to drink whiskey together.

She brought her tumbler of whiskey to her nose for a sniff, tipped it slowly and had a sip. She smacked her lips and looked at the booze as if it was a new drink not only to her but to the rest of the world.

“Remember I told you your father stopped kissing me? Before he got sick. Remember?”

“Yes.” Already I was uncomfortable. I had wanted to talk about dad, but I did not know what my mother was getting at.

“Well, there’s more,” she said. “I should say less. There’s less. As well as the kissing, there’s the talking. The sharing of our life. We stopped — he stopped — sharing things. Little things, like bits about the weather, or elections, or the deer coming out of the woods out back. Your father became this silent . . . presence in the house. Oh, I know he loved me. We loved each other.

“I tried talk to him. He never seemed interested in what I had to say.”

She took another sip, and waited for me to say something. I was wordless, voiceless, like maybe my father was. Mother was getting to the heart of the matter, but she needed me to participate.

“It bothered me, at first,” mom said, “that he was changing, seeing life differently, and I wasn’t. I wasn’t involved. Wasn’t asked to be. Thought your father was a selfish man doing what he was doing.

“Then, it hit me. I wasn’t interested in what he was doing. That old saying: you do you, I do me. I don’t know if it’s old or not. But that’s the way it was between your father and me. I had to forget about the kisses and hugs. They weren’t coming.

“So.” My mother sniffed her whiskey again. “I wanted to tell you this so you’d understand why I took up with Jack. I don’t want to say it was because I was lonely. I was alone. Empty. And, honestly, I wouldn’t think your father would have minded about me and Jack even if he was alive.

“They were two kinds of men. Your father had become this child, not quite immature, but boyish. Jack took life seriously. He still hadn’t admitted to himself that his dreams lied to him. His stubbornness made him immature, but not in a fun way.”

A crack of thunder shook the walls. Gusts of wind thrashed windows with rain hard as nails. I could hear the roof rustle as though it was made of leaves.

My mother finished her whiskey, nodded for me to pour another.

“I loved two men,” my mother said. “And that’s not a bad thing. One of them became quiet and still, like a dead tree in a forest. The other was full of life. I loved them both.”

She got up from her chair and handed me her untouched second glass of whiskey. “Here, you finish this,” she said. “I’m going to bed. I’ve always liked falling asleep to the sound of storms. Put a fire on before you go to bed. It’ll be damp in the morning.”

The next morning, a Saturday, I drove down the county road to assess the after-storm damage. Usually, you would see shredded corn stalks, litter, something like wet tumbleweeds, signs of cars or trucks skidding off the road. I did see some of that. But when I came up to it, I knew something was wrong.

The bare, crooked tree. Dad’s tree, as I’d begun calling it. It was split in half. Almost straight down its centre. Its exposed insides were rotted and white as snow; not solid. The maples near it looked as if some giant hand had tussled their branches all night long.

Dad would have questioned if the bare, crooked tree had felt anything being torn in half. He would obviously have known the answer but would ask it anyway, for fun. To keep the wonder alive.

If I had been sitting next to him in the pickup, he would have made me look at the tree, and said, “Would you look at that. That tree doesn’t know when to give up, does it?”

***

Gordon Ray Bourgon has had short fiction published in Canada, the U.K. and the United States. He writes a column for The Sarnia Journal, and is currently working on a Diesel-Punk novel. He lives in Sarnia, Ontario with his wife and two sons.