Come, Thou Tortoise Read online

Both are acceptable according to the Weather Network.

  I like when the Weather Network says Ceiling Unlimited, says Jim. That is a good day.

  Byrne Doyle puts a hand on my shoulder and asks where my uncle is.

  At the airport, meeting someone. No flights today, surely.

  I tell him that actually, yes, there are flights today and they are all on schedule.

  Byrne shakes his head. Pilots are braver than they used to be, what.

  Pilots are too big for their breeches is what, says Jim.

  Don’t listen to him, says Byrne.

  Jim Ryan’s driveway is already shovelled. Byrne Doyle’s is not. I can smell sweat, which I deduce is Jim’s. Please, I say as they both hunker down to tackle the driveway. Please don’t bother.

  They wave me back.

  Byrne Doyle’s coat is totally impractical. It’s a wool straitjacket.

  Your uncle, he says, already breathing hard. Has shovelled my driveway on more occasions than I can count.

  Wish I had a shovelling arm like that, Jim says.

  Which I think is bordering on inappropriate.

  For years Uncle Thoby has been shovelling Byrne Doyle’s driveway to make up for my dad not voting for him. Politics in the Flower household is complicated. Or I guess it became complicated after Uncle Thoby got to know Byrne Doyle. Before that, it was simple. We voted orange. Orange was how you voted if you cared about other people. But now here was a problem: How did you vote if you cared about a blue candidate.

  I remember meeting up with Byrne Doyle on the Wednesday Pond path when he was running in an election—a provincial one, I think. He liked to walk around the pond, deep in campaign thoughts, accompanied by a little dog who was not deep in campaign thoughts. Uncle Thoby was walking me home from school and we stopped to chat. Or rather Uncle Thoby stopped to chat while I played with the dog, Bellhop. Bellhop had solid black eyes that you could only see if you parted his bangs.

  Anyway, Byrne Doyle had said something about the Poles not liking him, and afterwards Uncle Thoby said he felt bad. He was sure Byrne could tell we didn’t vote for him by the colour of Uncle Thoby’s gloves. The orange gloves were a recent gift from my dad, and boy were they bright against the igneous rock.

  Byrne Doyle’s gloves were, naturally, blue.

  We carried on around the pond and Uncle Thoby said, Poor Byrne Doyle.

  Why is he poor. Because the people in Poland don’t like him.

  What.

  Scrooooooooge, I bellowed.

  Ssh, Oddly.

  But he looks just like Jacob Marley.

  I know. But keep it down. Then he sighed and said, People with dogs. As a rule. Are sad.

  Sad! But I could still feel the wagginess of Bellhop in my arms. He seemed so happy.

  Oh, Bellhop was happy.

  Then I understood. Byrne Doyle kept his happiness outside him. Because he was so busy on the inside with worry about elections and whether the people in Poland liked him. All his happiness was stored outside him in a woolly dog.

  Later that night my dad said, You want me to vote for Jacob Marley.

  It might be the orange thing to do, I said.

  Which infuriated him. Out of the way, he said. Even though I wasn’t in the way.

  We were making supper. Macaroni and cheese. Not from a box. The real thing with three different kinds of cheese you grate yourself (or Uncle Thoby grates himself) and bits of lobster mixed in.

  Why are lobsters freckly like my shoulders.

  No answer.

  I arranged my alphabet magnets: VOTE FOR BYRNE DOYLE AND BELLHOP.

  My dad opened the fridge. He paused. Who is Bellhop. Does the man have a porter.

  I thought this was a democracy, said Uncle Thoby.

  He had a point. We were supposed to be a democracy within a democracy. Uncle Thoby couldn’t vote in Canada, and I was too young, so my dad’s vote was supposed to be tripartite.

  Tripartite, I said to the fridge.

  Outside, snow had started falling heavy and gold in front of the street lamps. The wind was blowing through the range hood. My dad made his usual comment about the B-flat and waited for Uncle Thoby to counter with his A-sharp. Uncle Thoby didn’t counter.

  Uh-oh.

  Supper went on longer than usual. My dad had already put his knife and fork in the eight o’clock position, which signalled that he was ready to read, but he did not reach for the book. We were supposed to be reading a biography of Marconi, the man who received the first passenger seagull on Seagull Hill.

  This Marconi is some good, I said, stabbing a noodle. I mean macaroni.

  No response. Fine.

  From what I gathered, our voting options were as follows:

  a) Vote for the blue candidate because he’s your neighbour and he looks like Jacob Marley and the Poles have not been kind to him. Plus, he has a dog called Bellhop.

  b) Vote for the orange candidate, but stop wearing orange gloves in front of your blue neighbour.

  c) Make it clear to the blue candidate that only one person in the Flower household is eligible to vote, and although his vote is supposed to be tripartite, it no longer is. Democracy in the Flower household is dead.

  d) Vote for the orange candidate because you care about other people, but shovel the blue candidate’s driveway when he’s up late at night burning the midnight oil, as is his wont, trying to get elected.

  We eventually settled on the last option. Well, Uncle Thoby did. And he even managed to get the whole Flower family out there on several occasions, shovelling (or whacking flower prints) in Byrne Doyle’s snow.

  Jim Ryan is waxing on about his driveway. How it’s a crescent, of which he is very proud, but it’s a bitch to shovel. There’s a lot of crescent. Still, he would not go back to a linear driveway for all the world. Crescent is where it’s at. Never have to back in, never have to back out. Pull in forward, pull out forward.

  We get it, says Byrne Doyle.

  The amount of time you spend mowing your lawn, says Jim, pointing his shovel at Byrne, is not equal to the additional time I spend shovelling.

  What, says Byrne. What.

  I ask Byrne about the election.

  Oh my child, he says.

  Yes.

  There’s no end to it.

  God help us, says Jim.

  No end to the work, he amends. The election itself will of course end.

  I whack a few flowers.

  Down the street there’s a low rumble. We all stop and look.

  Oh shit, says Jim.

  Aha, says Byrne.

  What, I ask.

  The plough.

  Fuck, says Jim. And he vaults across our lawn into his crescent.

  He’s going to defend it now, says Byrne, amused. That’s the trouble with a crescent, see. You can’t defend two entrances. And when you’re ploughed in, you’re ploughed in doubly.

  The plough comes slowly down the street, pushing its frozen wave. I love how Jurassic it is. Also how cosy. The guy inside smiles benevolently down. He’s wearing a T-shirt in there! He toasts me with a Tim Hortons coffee. Did you see that, I yell over my shoulder to Byrne Doyle.

  Stand back there love.

  Next door Jim Ryan is whacking a snowbank, and not to make pretty patterns but to release negative energy.

  Uncle Thoby Northwest Shoves the front door open, and I try not to hug him but I can’t help it. Hi, he says. He smells cold and sweet.

  You’ve been gone for hours. Hours.

  He bends over to untie his boots and spends a long time untying them. When he straightens his face is flushed. Hey! Did I see some flowers in the snowbank.

  You did, you did.

  I’m holding on to his sleeve. He looks at me, touches my ponytail—Odd—and then he wobbles. Reaches out for the banister.

  Steady.

  I’m going to take off my coat now.

  Right. I unclench my fingers. How did he take it, I ask.

  Who.

  The e
xecutioner.

  Uncle Thoby rubs his forehead. I wish you wouldn’t call him that.

  Was he mean to you.

  No.

  We heat up some chicken soup Byrne Doyle brought over. Uncle Thoby leans against the counter and says he thinks he has a fever. Me too, I say, stirring.

  He looks skeptical. Since when.

  Since you said you had one.

  That was just a second ago.

  I didn’t know that’s what I had until you said it, but fever, yeah, that’s what I have. Feel. I tilt my head back.

  Have you eaten since the orange, he says.

  A little WD-40.

  He nods and gets two bowls out of the cupboard, a regular bowl for me and the fly bowl for him. The fly bowl has a fly painted on the rim.

  So Byrne Doyle, bless his heart, brought soup, he says.

  I nod. And he helped shovel the driveway, I add.

  Man’s a saint.

  I serve the soup. This is from scratch, I say. You can tell.

  It’s delicious.

  Imagine making soup from scratch.

  Man never sleeps.

  Byrning the midnight broth. Hey, you’ve got a fly in your soup.

  We are speaking our secret family language. I love our secret family language.

  Uncle Thoby’s glass slides a few inches to the left. Why is the table slippery, he says.

  Bread, I offer.

  Please.

  And then from the wrong side of the room Uncle Thoby says, Are you there. The phone is ringing. Do you feel like answering—

  I smoosh the loaf to my chest.

  I know, says Uncle Thoby, getting up. I feel the same way. But your dad loved it. Hello.

  It’s Toff.

  I watch Uncle Thoby’s face remain neutral and his eyes refuse to meet mine.

  If you want to know how kind someone is, here is a little experiment. Try to make eye contact with him while he is on the phone. If he is kind, he will avoid your eyes. Because eye contact is a betrayal of the person on the other end, who can’t see. It is like having a blind person in the room. Would you make eye contact with a seeing person while talking to a blind person. Not if you are kind. Not if you are Mr. Earnest. If you are Mr. Earnest you turn off your eyes when you are on the phone. Because you are intent on the person you can’t see. You never show irony with your eyes unless everyone has an equal chance to be in on it.

  Can irony exist in a world where everyone has an equal chance to be in on it. I don’t know. Food for thought.

  Uncle Thoby confirms lunch for the next day. Then he turns to me and says, Yes. Do you want to talk to her. I shake my head and shove a wad of bread in my mouth. For a second he looks into my eyes. Then he says, earnestly, Actually she’s chewing. It could be awhile.

  After he hangs up, and I swallow, I say, Do we have to see him tomorrow. Can’t we wait.

  For what.

  A long time.

  He smiles at me. I do not smile back. I put the bread, smooshed, on the table.

  I don’t think you understand how much has to be ironed out, he says.

  Let’s not talk about ironing yet.

  We’re going to talk about it tomorrow at lunch, okay.

  I nod and disappear my spoon into my soup. Has Uncle Thoby heard the new usage of the word disappeared.

  What new usage.

  As in, some Canadian aid workers were disappeared in Iraq, I say. It’s pretty scary. Just try it in a sentence. I can’t think of—

  Okay. Here’s one. My dad was disappeared.

  His spoon stops.

  It’s worse than murder, I say quietly. Isn’t it.

  He doesn’t answer. So I nod for him.

  In cartoons, you can tell the bad guys by their eyebrows. If the eyebrows make a V on the forehead, you know you’re in trouble. Conversely, if the eyebrows make an accent circonflexe, all will be well. Just look at the word bientôt. Look how happy and hopeful those eyebrows.

  This is a beautifully simple formula and why should it not apply to the world beyond cartoons.

  For instance, Uncle Thoby has accent-circonflexe eyebrows. Even when he’s sleeping. My dad also has, sorry had, accent-circonflexe eyebrows, except when he first woke up. When he first woke up he had a grognard face and who knew how long it might last. He didn’t want to hear about your dreams anyway. Can we be quiet while I finish my coffee. But his eyebrows never made a V. I guess they were sort of straight like Bert’s. Whereas Uncle Thoby’s are like Ernie’s. That’s a good analogy. I mean, you trust Bert, you love Bert, but you’re careful around him in the morning.

  A grognard is someone who has just woken up and is not yet happy about it.

  I used to marvel at how different my dad’s grognard face was from his later-in-the-day face. Sure, I was a grognard in the morning too. My eyes were smaller. But my dad’s eyes were smaller and his eyebrows were darker and his whole face was harder to break open in a laugh. And when he did laugh, the laugh looked tight, like it hurt.

  Every morning we walked to school together. No matter the weather. The car was for heavy car-go loads only. He said I should never take the weather personally. You sally forth, he said. Remember you’re waterproof.

  I am.

  You could stand in the rain for hours and you wouldn’t fill up with water, would you.

  My hair would.

  Cut it off then. Like me.

  My dad had short, straight, stand-up hair. I had a ponytail, which I loved, and which I would never cut off. My dad called my ponytail my question mark. Cut off that question mark!

  Whereas Uncle Thoby did take the weather personally. If there was snow or freezing rain, he said, Why don’t we call Clint. And quite often Uncle Thoby, whose job it was to collect me from school, would arrive in a Clint’s cab. But my dad, never. My dad walked me to school, and then he walked himself to the university. Always. Rain or snow. Sidewalks or no. That was his rule.

  No Clint for me, my dad said.

  No Clint for me, I echoed.

  If the wind picks up, you just hold on to a rock, he said.

  Right.

  Or me, if I’m there.

  When we said goodbye at the GOLEM gate, he still had the grognard face. A bientôt, I said hopefully.

  A bientôt.

  My eyes get bigger at night and look prettier. This is because we are mammals and once upon a time we had to do all our business at night while the dinosaurs slept. It was important to look our best for these transactions.

  My favourite moments were at night when we were all around the table and there was candlelight because it was a special occasion—say Christmas or my dad and Uncle Thoby’s birthday—and all our eyes were big black dots.

  Or maybe it was a power outage and Wedge was allowed on the table because my dad had rigged up a light bulb to his wheel. The light bulb glowed faint brown and flickered like a candle. It did not give off much light, but hey, we were eating by the light of Wedge!

  Then my dad would read from a biography about someone with the good eyebrows. Although sometimes he read about someone with the bad. And then the book became a whole other kind of treat because we had an enemy we could all share, even Uncle Thoby, who didn’t believe in sharing enemies unless the enemy had been dead for a long time and was in a book.

  All of which brings me to Grandmother and Toff and my first encounter with real-life eyebrows of the bad variety. They arrived the summer after Uncle Thoby had come to live with us. From the moment they got off the plane they were sporting big Vs on their foreheads. They did not like our airport. They did not like our cheerful baggage carousel which was called a BAGGAGE CAROUSAL.

  Does that sign say what I think it says, said Grandmother, squinting.

  Hello Mum.

  Grandmother kissed my dad. Then she kissed me, hard, on both cheeks. You’re taller, she said.

  You’re sharper, I said.

  It was the second time I’d seen her. The first had been in England for my grandfather’s f
uneral. She had been blurrier then.

  Her bag had gone astray. She looked like she would very much like to kick that bag. No doubt it’s off carousing, she said.

  Uncle Thoby, who used to be a baggage handler at Heathrow Airport, said (eyebrows maintaining triangularity) not to worry. It would turn up on the next flight from London.

  Which is when, said Grandmother. Next month.

  Behind her, wolfish Toff made eye contact with my dad and said he needed a cigarette.

  Toff’s beard got caught in the car seatbelt buckle. His beard was incredibly long. So was he. He had to fold himself into three sections to get into the car. Grandmother crammed herself into the back seat with me and Uncle Thoby. I perched on Uncle Thoby’s knee and he made his long arm a seatbelt. I stared at Grandmother’s floppy hair, which stayed in place like a hat. She lit a cigarette. So did Toff. They did not stop smoking after that. When they smoked, they tilted their heads back and their eyebrows assumed an even steeper slope.

  Our house was different with Toff and Grandmother in it. Smokier. But something else. Downcast. Or maybe I was just tired. I’d given up my room to Toff and was sleeping in a cot at the foot of my dad’s bed.

  It is exhausting, watching your dad sleep. I don’t recommend it. You should not have to witness your dad’s absence while he is in the room. I tried very hard to fall asleep before he came upstairs to bed, but invariably I would only have had a quick montage before he opened the door.

  Still awake, old goat.

  Goddamn it. I sat up in my cot. It was red metal and it squeaked.

  Can I turn on the light.

  Yes. I put my hands over my eyes. Dad.

  Hm.

  They’re not staying forever, right.

  Audrey—

  Because Uncle Thoby stayed forever.

  I peeked out through my hands. The room was bright yellow.

  My dad sat down on the edge of the bed. But you’re not sorry Uncle Thoby stayed, are you.

  No! No. I couldn’t explain. Okay. For one thing, I didn’t like sleeping in my dad’s room with his bare feet pointing at me. I didn’t like seeing his bare feet. He never had bare feet. Could he wear socks to bed please.

  Why.

  Could you!

  Yes, okay.