His Whole Life

Elizabeth Hay

First published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 2015
Published in Great Britain in 2016 by

MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Editions Limited
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Hay

Map © Emily Faccini

The moral right of Elizabeth Hay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook ISBN 978 0 85705 543 9
Print ISBN 978 0 85705 545 3

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Also by Elizabeth Hay

FICTION

Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989)

Small Change (stories, 1997)

A Student of Weather (2000)

Garbo Laughs (2003)

Late Nights on Air (2007)

Alone in the Classroom (2011)

NON-FICTION

The Only Snow in Havana (1992)

Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (1993)

For my son and daughter, reluctant Canadians,
with love and gratitude

. . . It was cold

Was the point of the dream

And the snow was falling

Which must be an old dream of families

Dispersing into adulthood

George Oppen

Author’s Note

This novel has close to its heart the 1995 referendum on Quebec independence that came within a hair of succeeding. It wasn’t the first of its kind in Canada. In 1980 René Lévesque and his sovereigntist provincial government asked Quebecers if they wanted to leave the Canadian federation. The campaign was dramatic and corrosive, and to Lévesque and his followers heartbreaking, for they lost by a wide margin to the federalist forces whose main champion was the Canadian Prime Minister, and another Quebecer, Pierre Trudeau.

What followed was a long series of political and constitutional manoeuvrings that in the end only increased the level of alienation in Quebec. And so in 1995, finding themselves once again in power in Quebec City, the sovereigntists launched a second referendum. This time the two sides battled to a photo finish.

The Quebec question – all the arguments for leaving, all the arguments for staying – has permeated Canadian life for decades. How these arguments work on the level of the imagination, how they shape our thoughts about ourselves, was much on my mind as I watched my characters contemplate separations of all kinds.

The First Summer and Winter

1

FROM THE BACK SEAT OF THE OLD CHEVETTE, HEADING north, the boy asked his question into the restless air. He had on a T-shirt big enough for a big man and he was being cooked by the late-August sun streaming in on his side.

He asked, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

There was a moment’s pause, during which his father kept silent behind the wheel and his mother turned to face him in the back. “Well,” she said, “there was that murder I committed last year.”

He smiled for a fraction of a second, then waited.

How small and by himself he looked to her, wedged there between the hot window and a pile of pillows. He needed a haircut, that crazy thatch of coppery hair. And a towel draped across the window to block out the sun. And a mother whose mind was not so far away. A different mother, she thought, shifting her gaze to whatever answer she might find beyond the windows.

They were moving through beautiful country. The landscape opened up and closed in, opened up into valleys then closed in with mountains, but she was somewhere else now, on the back roads of the heart. Into view (dimming the green hills and valleys and turning them grey) came that article she had edited to make someone rich and successful look vain, poor slob; occasions when she had shaken her children and squeezed their young arms as hard as she could; abusive, scalding things she had said to her husbands, including the one beside her; and friends she had hurt. And then there was the secret she had kept. But whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, a best thing or a worst, she had never been able to fathom.

“I’ll have to think about it, Jim,” she said, turning to look at him again. She was a small woman, sinewy, strong, at times indolent, who tanned easily except for the shiny scar in the middle of her forehead. Anyone could have told her something else she didn’t know: her steady eyes were exactly like his.

*

Leaving the highway, they took a less travelled road into farmland and woods. The trusty white Chevette had a bullet hole in the back passenger door, easily one of the best things in Jim’s life. It came from having parked the car on Amsterdam Avenue a few months ago only to discover in the morning bits of metal and flakes of white paint on the floor inside: a source of puzzlement until his parents thought to examine the door and there, not far below the window, was the deadly puncture. The bullet itself they found in a very strange place. Occupying the back seat at the time were twenty-three Encyclopaedia Britannicas sitting in boxes, a complete set from his grandmother’s. The bullet had drilled a hole through eight volumes and partway through the ninth, stopping on Fencing, “‘the art of defence or offence with a sword’,” his mother had read out in an awestruck voice, “‘when life or death may be decided by’” – and here parts of words were torn and so she had to guess – “‘may be decided by’,” she said, “‘the movements of a blade’.”

She had saved the bullet in a wooden cigar box of old coins, baby teeth, paper clips. It looked like the dented tip of a tiny circumcised penis, the miniature lead penis of someone who lived under a toadstool.

His father broke the silence. He had no trouble choosing the worst thing he had ever done. It happened when he went to camp one summer. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said, his eyes on the road and not a trace of doubt in his voice. “Maybe I’d been picked on so long by my brother that when I saw a chance I couldn’t resist.”

Jim knew which brother he was talking about: the pushy uncle who had hated everybody’s jokes except his own. Kevin, not Martin. He waited for his father to go on. From here, directly behind him, he could see the plastic-tipped arms of his father’s glasses curving behind his ears and the pink plug of his hearing aid poking out a little.

“I was eight,” his father said. “I couldn’t stop tormenting a certain kid. All week long I was mean to this kid, who just kept asking me to leave him alone. Then, on the last day, I punched him in the mouth and his lip bled.”

“I hope he punched you back,” his mother said. She directed her voice at his father’s ear and spoke clearly so as not to have to repeat herself. “Or did you get away with it?” Everything she said, even the funny things, sounded as if she meant them.

“I got away with it.” Shaking his head in disbelief. He was back in that mosquitoey cabin, back with his famous temper, which had vanished somewhere along the way, along with much else.

They were passing fields now and a few grazing cows. Jim asked his mother, “So have you thought about it?”

She turned to look at him again. He was her interesting, persistent ten-year-old son, a book-loving boy without many friends and she wondered why. “It seems to me the worst things are my thoughts, not things I’ve done.”

Then she said, “What’s the worst thing you’ve done?”

“I don’t know.” And he looked down at his hands.

*

They have been making this trip every year since he was born. They go north in late August and stay for a week with the Canadian side of his family, at his mother’s brother’s place on the lake of many bays. Last year the dark woods were suddenly brighter because the hemlock loopers had arrived in force. By late August the trees were covered with tea-stain moths, little ones, dainty, hatched from thousands of caterpillars guilty of feeding on the needles and causing them to dry out, turn the colour of rust, and shed. This time Jim was picturing a bandaged forest. His uncle had told them about painting strips of butcher paper with something called Tanglefoot paste and wrapping them around the trunks, hoping to keep the caterpillars, which hatched in the ground, from climbing up into the foliage. Tomorrow they would see exactly how many caterpillars the sticky rings of paper had trapped.

A bullet hole in the side and on they went, travelling through New York State. “Are you alright?” Jim said to his yawning father. “You’re not sleepy?” His mother had switched places with him, taking a turn in the hot sun, and he was beside his father now. “I’d slow down on those curves if I was you. You should slow down on those curves.”

He was a boy who kept a weather-eye open for disaster.

Soon they found themselves behind a red pickup truck that his father kept trying to pass and it reminded her of her childhood, his mother said from the back, when you pulled out to overtake a car only to duck back into your lane to avoid the vehicle looming up, and when you were forever rolling your windows shut against the clouds of rolling dust. Her voice had that reminiscing quality Jim liked so much. He had waited forever to turn ten years old. Now he could say that ten years ago he had done such and such, and gone here or there, the way his parents were always saying that ten years ago or twenty they had done this or that.

While he was thinking these thoughts, the pickup ahead of them drifted left, like a red leaf, into the next lane and met a yellow car head on with a sickening crunch of metal. Jim saw it all. The car spun around and rolled over twice, the pickup sailed into the ditch and flipped. They slowed down in the Chevette. Nothing but hot wind came through his window.

His father pulled the car over to the side of the road and swivelled his head around. “Did you see that? Did you see it? Now what are we going to do?”

They were all looking back, gaping, horrified.

His mother got out of the car and so did Jim, coming around to stand beside her on the gravel shoulder. She made a fist of her hand and pressed it against the scar on her forehead, then started to grind the side of her fist around and around in the same spot as she stood there, looking back. Jim knew she wasn’t aware of it. He leaned against her and she put her arm around him. Inside the car his father was talking to himself in that distressed, scattered, nervous way he had. “Should we drive to the next town and call the police? We should get hold of the police. What’s the next town anyway? How far is it?” He had pulled maps from the pocket-sleeve on his door and was flipping through them, dropping and spilling them. “The old guy had white hair. In the truck. Did you see?”

It was like a ghost, that accident. As fleeting as a deer appearing out of nowhere. Around them the fields were dazed.

Other cars were pulling over. Then a truck. Two men got out of their cars and walked across the road to where all was still. Before long they heard a police siren in the distance and knew the truck driver had radioed for help.

Those men knew what to do, thought Jim, they weren’t fiddling with maps. They were walking around the vehicles, peering inside, speaking to each other. Meanwhile, his mother stroked his head, pushing her fingers through his thick, resistant hair the way he liked. He felt a tug in his chest, an urge to cross the road, but leaned his head into her hand instead.

“The gods sweep down and change things, Jim.”

He turned and looked into her face, into the thoughtful eyes that did not need glasses, and felt instantly one hundred per cent better. They were a very small family on the side of the road staring at disaster in a helpless way. But other things were going on, he knew, and she knew, invisible things that had been going on for a long, long time.

They got back into the smelly old Chevette and pulled out onto the road and drove on. His father was saying the poor guy behind the wheel had probably dozed off, like his father. This was the old story of the car crash that had taken his father’s life and smashed his mother’s legs, and injured his young nephew Paul so badly, when his head hit the dashboard and split the windshield, that he died in the hospital two nights later.

From the back seat his mother said, “Accidents of death and birth. They change everything.”

Jim only half listened. Mostly he was seeing the red truck drift across the road and the yellow car spinning like another leaf. And for a moment he felt that back-to-school, September panic in the pit of his stomach. Yet here they were, without a scratch. Unreal, he thought. Like a dream.

And suddenly he was dying of hunger. All the sandwiches were gone and no, she was sorry, there wasn’t any chocolate, there weren’t even cookies. “You didn’t bring anything sweet? Nothing sweet? I can’t believe it.” He stared out the front passenger window in a mounting rage. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring anything sweet. No dessert. That sucks.” And under his breath, “Idiots, jerks, stupid, stupid, stupid.” He kept it up until his mother leaned forward and said, “I’m getting angry.”

“Well, too bad. I’m already angry. I beat you to it.”

She laughed and soon she leaned forward again. “George, pull into that place.”

His father turned off the road and parked in front of a diner that looked like a silver mobile home with a big blue-and-white awning. Inside, Jim slid into a booth and happily studied the menu until his mother showed him the children’s section, which offered either a hamburger or spaghetti, and suggested the hamburger might be good.

“I’m sick of hamburgers.”

“Then spaghetti.”

“I don’t want spaghetti. I don’t like spaghetti. I want chicken.”

“So,” she said, “we’re here because you’re hungry, you’re in agony you’re so hungry. But you won’t order from the children’s menu, you have to have more expensive food. Why is every meal so unpleasant? Why is it so hard? Why don’t you just take a gun and shoot me?”

That’s the sort of mother she was. “Why don’t you take a knife and cut out my liver,” she said. “And mince it up and serve it raw to the gulls. To that gull.” She pointed out the window. “Hughie over there.”

They came to these wrathful impasses and then they were laughing. They didn’t have enough money, she said. And then she relented. They ordered one meal of chicken to share and that was actually cheaper than the other way.

She unfolded her smile at the waitress. “I would love a glass of water. And so would the young gentleman.”

*

That evening they camped outside Boonville, upstate. They built a fire in the firepit and sat around it and grew calm. Jim saw the stiffness go out of his father’s neck and the irritability leave his mother’s face. She, far more than his father, loved the simplicity and rough luxury of camping. To have everything you need at hand, to be always outside in the soft air. Broken now by the sound of mowing, the smell of hay.

“Mosquitoes!” he suddenly railed.

“They’re not bothering me,” his mother said.

“That’s because your blood is bitter and cold, and mine is hot and joyous.”

How she loved this surprising and amusing boy, whose long bare arms, wrapped around his knees, were offering themselves up to the mosquitoes. Would he wear a sweatshirt if she got him one? Probably. She went to the car and got a sweatshirt and he put it on. What a moody stripling he was. Christopher Robin as Job, she thought, combining in one temperament her own father’s mournfulness and flash-anger with her mother’s loving spirit and attachment to family – to her and his father and his half-brother, Blake – her son from before and a source of continuing heartbreak. Into her mind came the memory that was never far away of Blake climbing onto that Greyhound bus with his suitcase full of religious books, heavy ones, as he set off for the evangelical school in Philadelphia, while she stood behind the filthy plate-glass window in the bus terminal, beset by so much emotion that she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It was nearly dark when they walked down the dirt road to the small public toilets. Moths were batting against the screen door and against the light bulbs inside and out. Jim and his father brushed their teeth on the men’s side; she brushed hers on the women’s. Through the thin wall Jim heard the faucet, her brushing, her spitting, the faucet. Then together they walked back to their grassy campsite. In the tent she stretched out beside him on top of her sleeping bag while his father tended the fire outside, and in the light of her flashlight she found the illustrated page where they had left off and picked up the story: after twenty years Odysseus returning home, where nobody knows him except his ancient dog. She stopped reading and said, “That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever done.”

“What?”

“I gave my dog away.”

“Stan?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to him?” He wanted to hear it again, this story of misfortune.

“He was hit by a car.” And because she knew he liked her to repeat stories from her past, she carried on and told him the rest of it. How when her first marriage ended they gave Stan away to friends who wanted him – they had asked if they might have him – and he was having a good life with these kind people out west, who already had a dog named Buddy, and so Stan had company. Then several years later, as he was running beside the road, he was hit by a car and killed. Afterwards Buddy missed him a lot.

“Why did you give him away?”

“I wanted to travel, Jim. I went away for a long time.”

*

Her son was asleep beside her now. George had stretched out on her other side and was grumbling about how bumpy the ground was. “Nancy, I’m on a rock heap.”

She closed her eyes. This marriage was nothing to write home about either, that was a fact, and she couldn’t help blaming George for not generating the love she wanted to feel. She knew the blaming was unjust. Indeed, this might be the worst thing. The words had lodged in her head and she wanted an answer as badly as Jim. In the dark warmth of the tent, the day swam up, the endless road and fields and hills. She wondered if Kevin used to pick on Martin too. Her husband’s brothers were of enduring interest to her, especially Martin, the tall, slender, younger brother with the swan neck who years ago had moved to South America and never come back. She imagined meeting him, at George’s funeral, say. “Here I am. I’ve been waiting all this time.”

“George,” she said aloud, “did Kevin pick on Martin too?”

“Both of us picked on Martin. It’s what happens when you’re the youngest.”

“And the nicest?”

“That’s your fantasy,” George said.

So she was that transparent. Behind her lids everything flickered with light and movement. Pine boughs, expanses of water, the chrome of passing cars, the accident, the contours of her son’s face – they all unspooled in their silent-movie way. Long car rides draw things out of us that hang in the mind for hours, like a ball slowly turning, a snowball gathering to itself new snow, old snow, grass, gravel, dirt as it builds its rolling life on slopes and sidewalks and backyards until it comes to rest in a cool woods, hidden away from sunlight and summer and self, biding its time.

Tomorrow she would be back in Canada and her eagerness was offset by regret at how long she had lived away.

She had become an expatriate without meaning to. Canada beckoned to her, such a stable and reasonable country. Yet always on the verge of coming apart, it had to be said, because Quebec was so unhappy.

As unhappy as I am in my marriage, she thought, startled by the turn her mind had taken. That she was like Quebec in her unhappiness.

*

The next morning was hot and still. The smell of cut grass and sweet white clover, the sun beating down on the lemon-yellow tent. They slept late, locked in uneven dreams on uneven ground, their heads close together, their faces relaxed. When Jim woke up he didn’t hear pigeon wings in the airshaft sounding like the beating of chopsticks, or the clicking of false teeth, or a commotion of ballpoint pens. He heard his parents building a fire and soon afterwards came the swoosh of coffee inside their little espresso-maker and their murmurs of joy.

“Jim,” his mother said through the tent door, “are you hungry?”

That morning they crossed the wide river into Canada and all of his worries fell away.