BY MITCHELL TOEWS
Copyright is held by the author.
Marty and Frederick on the Way to Victoria
FATHER AND son stood in a hard-packed dirt barnyard, facing the end wall of an old dairy barn. The smell of cows still permeated the air. It was sweet, fetid and oddly appealing — the kind of smell that was at first unpleasant but that, over time, one grew accustomed to. After a while, it was as if your nose craved it. Marty had always found that strange but undeniable. He wondered if Frederick felt that way too.
The tall teenage boy sniffed and peaked his eyebrows.
“Same smell,” he said, answering Marty’s unasked question.
“Yeah, there hasn’t been a cow here for six years, but . . . ” Marty’s words trailed off as he tilted his head up to relocate the familiar scent.
The yard was packed hard as asphalt. On the flaking clapboards above the barn’s entrance was a painted plywood sheet. Attached to it was a steel basketball rim. The white backboard bore several muddy handprints, their impressions left so distinctly that you could almost hear the slap on the flat wood.
“Highest jump gets to drive to the ferry terminal,” Frederick said, holding up a dirty palm to point at the backboard and illustrate his meaning. Marty hated to be the passenger. He felt so anxious with his son driving; speeding and tailgating slower drivers in the passing lane.
“You’re on, kid. Remember, I was born in a leap year,” Marty said, hopping up and down and wind milling his arms to warm-up. He was glad he had worn runners that day. He was glad too that Fred had asked to come to the old farm before he went away to school.
“Nice Dad joke, Dad.” Frederick ran over to the door and pulled it open. Just inside was a bushel basket containing four or five chewed-up basketballs. He picked the two likeliest and flipped one to his father.
They shot around for a few minutes; two skinny, broad-shouldered Mennonites. Their arms were bony and the knuckles of their large hands red, as if from scrubbing with too abrasive a brush. They did lay-ups until Frederick dunked, the rim sounding off like the springboard at the Abbotsford public pool. Without saying anything, Marty moved to a large flat, oval stone set flush into the dirt surface. It was like meeting an old friend. He clapped his hands and Frederick fired a pass to him. His shot was off in an instant, the ball back-spinning and falling without a sound through the naked hoop.
Their familiar competition began. Frederick reared back like a high-jumper, then raced forward and made a feline leap, reaching with a long arm. Slap! Like a screen door slamming.
Marty eyed the backboard beside Frederick’s mark. He approached from the left side, swooping under the rim and shedding years as he leapt.
“You got me by an inch, Old-school,” Frederick said, crouching down into a squat with his hands spread out on the packed clay, a playful look on his face. Then he stood near the rim and with one sudden step bounced up and spanked the backboard with his palm, leaving a gray imprint. The game continued until it was time to leave for the ferry terminal.
***
They were in the truck, rolling down the new highway beside the Fraser with Johnny Cash on the radio. The two kidded about the jumping competition. Frederick was clearly proud of his dad.
“Did you ever do a jump-off like that with Grandpa?”
“No, he could never even dunk, big as he is,” Marty said. “He had played some soccer goalie back in grade school, but he always said the farm was his sport. He worked every day and quit school when Opa figured he had enough education to run the farm — reading and writing and math, pretty much. I expect he would have made an excellent engineer.”
“He sure loves basketball though.”
“Yeah, he came to all my games and he never missed one of yours from grade six on.”
Frederick thought of the big man standing on the top row of the bleachers, bellowing relentlessly at the refs and the other team. Then he would plead in a loud voice for Frederick’s team to, “Pass it to Freddie, he don’t miss!” Frederick secretly loved the attention — Grandpa stomping his cow-shit spattered boots and leading the chant when the score clock ticked down.
“We used to be out in that yard shooting until midnight,” Marty said, his thoughts back in the barnyard. “He would stand under the hoop, rebounding and whipping the balls back out to me. ‘Again!’ he’d yell, over and over.”
A light rain began to fall and they were quiet for a long while as they drove west. Frederick started school at UVIC in two days and the last of his gear — bag, backpack, and bike — was under a tarp in the truck box.
Lurching forward in his seat, Frederick turned down the volume of the radio and spoke, breaking in on Marty’s thoughts.
“Dad,” he said with his voice just audible above the hum of the tires, “I want you to know something.” He fussed with the settings on his phone.
“Yes?”
And that is when Frederick told his father he was gay. Just like that.
Marty had sometimes wondered how people react when they were told this by one of their children. He did not say much, holding back words — caught off-guard but not otherwise feeling a lot of emotion. Frederick just laid it out, quietly and without fuss and so it took a minute to penetrate. Marty had been scared at first, fearing the worst and an ice-cold wash of adrenalin had flooded down his spine when Freddy started to speak. At first he thought maybe his son was sick with cancer or some other awful thing, but that didn’t make sense. He would know if anything serious like that was wrong. Or something criminal? No, that was so out of character as to be impossible. Still, “Click go the pliers,” as his father would say when they neutered bull calves in the old barn. Big things can happen without fanfare or preparation.
The quiet rested on them there in the cab of the truck as Marty considered what Fred had told him.
“A few times,” Marty said to Frederick who sat still in the passenger seat, “I thought about it a few times… I wondered just a bit.” Marty recalled — no girlfriends except a second-cousin for grad; too busy with basketball for dates or dances or other teenage conquests. For Frederick, it was always basketball, school, family and the farm.
As they drove, Marty watched a tugboat towing a boom of logs on the Fraser. The logs flowed down the inexorable river, riding the current. Frederick noticed Marty studying the boom and said to his father, “That one is huge. Look how many separate booms are strung together.”
The log boom was like a pause button and they both reached for it. “At least three,” Marty said as he pulled the truck over on the shoulder. They sat together and watched the tug as it guided the immense weight of the logs past the pilings of the Alex Fraser Bridge.
“The boom is going downstream, so it’s controllable, I suppose,” Marty said. “But I guess you still have to be pretty careful and plan your course with care.”
“Do you think it’s harder to tow them upstream?” Frederick asked, glancing at his dad, his eyes glassy.
The kid is sharp, was the thought that came into Marty’s head. Open hearted as hell. Shit!
The logs don’t pick the direction, he thought. He wanted to say that to him, but it sounded too pat — made the whole thing a bit theatrical. It was a good thought, and true, and it made him stronger and helped him to cope with his own feelings, which were loose and rambling in his head, but he did not say the words.
“I think the tug captains like it when the current and the tide cancel each other out; when the water is basically still,” Marty said, taking an easier way.
He remembered what a towboat captain friend had told him, “The challenge is to move the logs fast enough to make good time but slow enough so that the booms are not pulled apart and logs lost.”
Frederick had his gaze fixed on the floating logs.
“Ok, Fred,” Marty said. “Tell me everything you want me to know and I’ll explain it to Mom.”
“Mom knows,” Fred said, his voice thin. “But maybe you can tell Grandpa?”
“I’ll tell him,” Marty said, as he shoulder-checked and pulled out into the flow of traffic. He thought about his wife Arlene, and he was surprised she had not said something to him. Freddy probably swore her to silence. He swallowed hard, wiped a moist palm dry on his jeans.
“I guess I knew too, Fred. I guess I did, if I’m honest. I just — you know — just didn’t dwell on it much. There’s no, uh, rulebook — ”
“Sure, Dad. That’s kind of what I thought,” Frederick said, staring down at his hands as he spoke.
“I’ll talk to Grandpa, but… Fred, you two are close — more than me and him in many ways. Wouldn’t he rather hear it from you?”
“Not this, Dad,” Fred said, “not this.”
***
Martin Gerbrandt Senior
Martin Gerbrandt had run this farm most of his adult life. He had been sent by the family in Smithers, years ago, to come to the Fraser Valley and find a way to improve their lot. Their aging dairy had been flooded out three years running and they were on the edge of failure.
Martin was sent to gather a herd, and begin a new life for the family. He had done wonderfully, but his health and his stamina were spent with the effort. When he felt the time was right, Martin passed it to his three sons who moved the Gerbrandt dairy herd to a new, modern complex a few miles away. Martin senior asked them to leave the old barn standing so he could still use the workshop and store his travel trailer and a few other things. They had been happy to accommodate him.
In the weeks after he told him about Frederick, Marty became concerned about his father. Every day he drove to his parents’ house and each time his mother told him the same thing: “Where else? He’s at the old barn,” she said. “I think he has fixed every broken tool and tinkered with every gadget we own. He is in a foul mood. Expect a fight.”
***
On a freezing morning, before dawn, with sleet obscuring the window panes, Martin Gerbrandt took the axe down from its place on the shop wall. The stone of the sharpening wheel whirled and pulsed in its greased traces, making a hollow, scraping noise that echoed throughout the empty barn. The grating sound unsettled the swallows that nested there. He drank a third of a bottle of Crown Royal while he sharpened the axe with the foot-treadled grindstone in the workshop.
“It’s okay birds, simmer down. Relax,” he rumbled as the tiny creatures darted through the still air.
Martin lifted the axe, feeling it for balance. It was the last thing he could think to do except for the task he had come to take care of. Already drunk, he opened a tall can of beer and drank half of it. Then he placed the can on the workbench, putting it next to the other thing — the brutish thing; malevolent and oily.
He felt in a few pockets, then brought out a cellophane wrapped package of Players cigarettes. He opened it, wadding the inner foil in his hand; his red-skinned fingers braided from arthritis. Smelling the tobacco, he traveled back fifty years in an instant. He saw himself shouting at the cement truck driver and tugging at a hoe in the wet concrete as they poured the footing for the barn he stood in now. Martin lit a cigarette, tasting the burnt brown sugar and sweet caporal flavour, the same way he did that day so long ago.
“The best cigarette was always the first one in the morning, with prips, just before milking,” he said aloud, talking to his herd as if they were still there. The cows back then would smell the tobacco and the coffee and know their urgent pain would end soon, knew that he was there to relieve them.
Martin smoked and thought back to how it used to be. He thought of those mornings, the cows stirring and lowing in their stalls. He would make his plans for the day in those peaceful moments. All those uncles and cousins and brothers up north — all counting on him to get things going. He needed those quiet moments, just to shed the worry and think of other things.
He flicked the cigarette away and picked up the envelope from the workbench where it stood propped against the vice.
“To My Family” was written in his schoolboy hand, written with his old fountain pen, the one his father passed on to him. He stuffed the letter in his pocket.
Standing still, he inhaled, straightening his back. There was the good dairy barn smell and he lingered on it for the last time. “Forgive me, God,” he said as he picked up the dark sinister thing in his free hand and hefted it. It fit the form of his palm and he could feel the sharp, cross-hatched ridges of the handle grip. The steel was cold and it drew the heat from his hand like a wick.
A moment later it was quiet again and the swallows resumed flying in the yard, near the open door where the tall man had dropped.
***
Marty found his father. It was close to suppertime. He had become concerned when there was no sign of him at any of his regular haunts and Mom had no clue either. He’s been a mess since finding out about Fred, he thought. With all of his health issues, feeling like an outsider on the farm he built, and then not knowing what the Hell to do about the Grandson he loved so much. Dispossessed, Marty thought. Maybe even betrayed is how Dad must have felt.
Marty held his phone in his hand. He wasn’t ready to call 911 or tell his mother. Or tell Fred. He delayed by driving the truck slowly through the valley, listening to western ballads on the radio. He circled back past the overgrown ball diamond in Yarrow and southwest to the old powerhouse where his father had liked to sit and look out over the valley towards the hills that bounded the Fraser. He stopped there and opened the letter from his father.
Finally, with the sky darkening, he knew what to do and how to do it. It was as if he had been preparing himself and the process of sharing the news — of how to be factual and frank and kind — came to him without difficulty. He returned to the barn, hoping but knowing he would not find things different than they were earlier. Wishing he would find the old man cussing about some crooked politician or a stupid trade the Canucks had just made. But instead, of course, he found his father, crumpled and alone on the floor.
Marty and Frederick in the Aftermath
Father and son stood in front of the barn in their funeral suits, casting long shadows against the old barn wall. The backboard and its many rain-streaked handprints stood above their heads.
“That was quite a day,” Marty said, looking up, motioning at the backboard.
Frederick stared at the handprints on the basketball backboard. He wandered towards the door.
“I want to see the place.”
Marty noticed the boy’s stride — slightly pigeon-toed — copying his own awkward waddle.
That’s what they taught us, Marty thought, remembering his high school basketball coach on the bus, explaining. “There’s so little room in the key, down low. So many big feet… you’ll trip less if you turn your toes in. Fewer ankle sprains too.” Marty, then the enthusiastic rookie, adopted the toed-in stance and he walked that way still and his son did too.
“Drink as little water as you can during games — it improves your wind. Toughens you up. You can re-fill after the game.” Marty thought back to what his college coach down in Bellingham had said. It was irrefutable then, the accepted wisdom.
Not everything we were taught was right. Not everything was good for us, he mused.
Frederick went to the doorway where his grandfather had stood and opened the door. A squeal came from the rusted triangular hinges. When Marty looked up, Frederick caught his eye and pulled his shoulders back like his grandfather used to. He scowled like Martin Senior would have and mimicked his voice and accent.
“Quit complaining, you hinges, vee all got shit to deal vit,” Frederick said. He swung the door the rest of the way.
“Someday, you gonna be bigger den me, Grandpa always told me,” Frederick said, thinking of his grandfather — a loving, baggy-eyed giant. He looked down at the concrete inside of the doorway where the floor was scrubbed and whitish. Bleach had been used to clean away the dried blood.
Even his blood is stubborn, Marty thought. He joined Frederick in the doorway and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders.
“Like the poem Aunty Agnes read at the funeral, One more is gone. Out of the busy throng. Remember the good in Grandpa — there was a lot,” Marty said in a whisper.
“He never could get over it, could he? Me living in Victoria with Graeme… ”
“That’s not so, and please don’t think it. Grandpa was very sick. His back hurt him every day and he had chronic bronchitis and diabetes. His heart was weak and he had started smoking again, on the sly, but Grandma and I knew. He had hardly any feeling in his feet and the doctor was talking about possible amputation. Can you imagine that? My God! Grandpa had not been right for a while. His body abandoned him at the end,” Marty said. He felt Frederick shiver.
“Grandpa had been strong his whole life before that — he had to be — and he wasn’t any more,” Marty continued. “He felt cheated. Cut off from the rest of us. He was lost without the family looking to him to lead and — being who he was — he wanted to control things. So that’s what he did. Your news was just one more piece in the puzzle. He would have gotten used to it in a big hurry and then challenged anyone who thought different to a fight.” He paused, then stepped forward to face his son. “Seriously, there would have been fist fights at the Tim Horton’s up on Lickman Road. Sure as Hell.”
Frederick smiled, thinking of his fearless grandpa, testy and self-assured as he scrapped and pushed his way through life. He loved that part of the man so much and a wave of hurt overcame him for a second.
“Put ‘em up, put up yer dukes,” Frederick said, and his father nodded, his breath coming out in a hitch, sorrow running through him and tears bursting.
They were quiet for a time. Frederick shared Marty’s hanky, each blowing their nose until the little square of cloth had no more dry left in it.
Marty thought with guilt that since his son’s birthday almost a year ago they had not shot any baskets together or competed in any way. They used to do something like that together almost every day.
“Listen, Fred,” Marty said. “The night I told Grandpa about you coming out, he was upset. He was a mess.” Marty remembered the old man in the farm shop, the little wood stove crackling — spitting boiling resin as it burned. Martin Senior’s face was dark and horrible; he prowled was like a caged bear. Tears of frustration rolled down his blood-veined cheeks.
“When I told him, Grandpa said, ‘Never! Freddie is like me and like you — he’s the same!’”
“I told him that you weren’t the same but that it was okay, that it didn’t matter. Then I asked him if he remembered when the small barn burned down, years ago when I was a boy. I asked him, ‘Do you remember what you said to me that night, with all those cows dead and the insurance a big jumble and everything so awful? So ruined?’”
Martin paused, waiting for Frederick to look up.
“Grandpa said to me, that night after the fire, he said, ‘Marty, this changes everything and this changes nothing.’”
Then Marty pulled off his suit jacket and wiped his eyes. He grabbed one of the old basketballs. “And listen,” he said. He made his tone firm and did not let his voice waver. “Grandpa had some struggles with you being gay. Let’s not pretend about that. But like I said, he would have come around. And remember this: God,” he paused knowing how his son’s faith, like his own, had been tested these last few weeks. “God is holding you now, holding you tight. Holding us all. He’ll continue to. He is holding Grandpa too and held him through everything. We were not created only to be cast aside. Believe that.”
Marty looked down and bounced the basketball hard on the packed earth. Spreading his fingers wide on the pebbled surface he thought to add a last promise.
“And the other thing is… For Mom and me and all the rest of the family, and I mean everyone, it won’t make a difference,”
Frederick broke in, “Well,” he said, a faint smile showing in his clear gaze.
Marty acknowledged, smiling back, “Okay, you’re right. It’s not gonna be exactly the same, but everyone is open to it, open to the change. We might screw up, but we’ll get it right eventually. Heck, you want me to march with you right down Yarrow Central, in a pair of satin hot pants, I’m in! Fuck it!”
“I’d pay to see that!” Frederick said, a wide grin on his face, fresh tears on his cheeks. He took the basketball from his father’s hands and slung it behind his back, from one hand to the other. “C’mon,” he said, dribbling the ball, “there’s one thing that for sure hasn’t changed — you still can’t beat me at a game of 21!”
*“One more is gone. Out of the busy throng.” The opening two lines from the poem, The Funeral Bell, by Henry David Thoreau.
***
Mitchell Toews is a Canadian writer from Manitoba. While he does not claim to be “one to watch,” he does point out the many puck dents on his garage door. Mitch’s full-time literary fiction career began at age 60 in 2015. His first book, Pinching Zwieback (At Bay Press, 2023), is out, a second is under contract, and a third MS is being queried. He has 137 published pieces to his name.
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