The worst was Daniel couldn’t give ground. Not while the old man was operating on him with that smile. It was like an eye-balling contest. You better not look away because that means you haven’t got the nerve. So he acted like the old man was a bad smell that ought to blow away. But it was tough watching your ears turn red in the mirror and this sort of pitiful sneer edging on and off your lips because you couldn’t hold it. So in the end he did lose his nerve because he couldn’t take any more of that smile.
“You waiting for this mirror or something?” he asked.
“Well, I had it in mind to shave,” said the old man. “But you just carry on. Beauty before age for this one time only. Besides, I never had a chance to see one of those complicated hairdos get built before.”
His mother had been after him for over a year to lose the greaser look but she hadn’t been able to get him to budge. Now he’s considering a scalping, a brushcut, just so the old man doesn’t ever google him like this again.
In this house there’s no fooling yourself that being different could be like it is in the movies. In the movies, no matter what kind of shit you’re taking from people up on the screen, there’s always the audience that knows the truth about you, is hoping for you, even admires you. There’s no audience in this house. In this house it’s too hard to be a rebel.
It can be an interesting place to live, though, Daniel has to give it that. The people who are always dropping by make it so. Mostly they come to play cards and borrow money. Except for Huff Driesen, the old diabetic who can’t bring himself to give himself a needle. His daughter usually does it for him but when he goes off on a toot he doesn’t dare go to his daughter’s because she’ll read him the riot act and spoil his fun by going on about how a sick man like him shouldn’t be drinking. So whenever he’s been hitting the sauce he brings his needle over and Daniel’s grandfather gives it to him. Daniel has seen it, right in the kitchen. Huff with his shirt pulled up, his eyes screwed tight so he doesn’t see what’s going to happen to him, and his mouth squinched so tight he appears to be trying to swallow his own face. And the old man taking aim at his big white belly like he’s getting ready to fling a harpoon.
Mr. Stutz says the other ones, the borrowers, come to his grandfather because he’s the only man of their kind who has money. The doctor and lawyer have educated money, which is a different thing all together. If you asked them for an interest-free five dollars they’d likely try to determine if it was going to a worthy cause. Your grandfather, says Stutz, isn’t like that. With him it isn’t necessary to humble yourself for five dollars. You just say, “Can you spare me five until I get my old-age pension cheque?”
And some five dollars, Daniel could tell, weren’t loans at all but hand-outs, even though the borrowers insisted on scribbling I.O.U.’s on the backs of envelopes or cigarette boxes. “No, no,” his grandfather would say, “not necessary. A man’s word is his bond.”
And the man might say, “But, Jesus, Alec, this is proof of my good intentions. Legal, so you’ll know you’ll get your money back.”
His mother doesn’t have a very high opinion of his grandfather’s friends. She declares they’re taking advantage of an old fool who’s deluded himself into thinking he’s lord of the manor. It’s pathetic. Some lord, some manor. A manor run by the peasants, she says.
At least they’re interesting peasants. In a way he’s grateful to them, as grateful can be. Because if his mother wasn’t worked up about them, she’d be worked up about him. He’s tired of being picked on. He remembers something his mother once told him. “Don’t forget,” she said, “that it’s the tallest tree in the forest that attracts the lightning.” Well, he’s been the tallest tree in his mother’s forest for long enough and it’s good to see somebody else catch the lightning for once. It’s why he wanted a brother so badly, somebody to take a fair share of the bolts that were always jolting him. Finally, he’s getting some relief. You’d have to be blind not to see who the tallest tree in the forest is now. His grandfather. He’s fairly fried already. And what lightning he doesn’t catch gets spread among the scroungers – for tracking in dirt, slamming the screen door, sitting on chairs with grease on their pants, and timing their visits around meal times or whenever there’s anything good on TV. If the truth were known, Daniel feels as if he’s on vacation.
Daniel enters Main Street. It’s wide and empty, stores locked tight, blinds drawn to protect the goods in the windows from the sun. It makes him feel proud that the two biggest buildings on the street, the hotel and The Palladium theatre, are owned by his grandfather. At this hour there’s not a sign of life stirring anywhere, not even any vehicles parked outside the door of the hotel beer parlour. This is because the law requires the beer parlour to close for the supper hour. Mr. Stutz says it should be supper hour all the live-long day then. He’s death on drinking. The only one of his grandfather’s businesses that Mr. Stutz refuses to work in is the beer parlour, because he says it goes against his principles to sell men what robs them of their senses.
At The Palladium there’s no activity either. Over the summer, when the farmers are so busy, the theatre only opens for twice nightly showings on Friday and Saturday. It’s one of the things that Daniel misses about the city, the choice of movies and movie houses. Connaught is so deep in the sticks the movies they show are at least a year old. This weekend they’re screening The Young Lions, which he and his mother saw months and months ago in Toronto. His mother never misses a war movie. She has a thing about the war.
Daniel has decided that just to see Montgomery Clift again he’ll spend the money he earned hoeing the old man’s garden. Clift was great as the guy who everybody picked on in the barracks. Daniel could identify with that, it wasn’t much different from living with his old lady.
Montgomery took it all pretty quietly until the four biggest goons in the company stole the twenty dollars he’d been saving to buy his wife a Christmas present. That severely pissed off old Montgomery. Enough was enough. It didn’t matter that he was a skinny, 120-pound weakling, he challenged them to fight. Four nights in a row he took them on, one a night. Even though he always got the snot pounded out of him he was back the next night, ready to fight. Dean Martin kept telling him he was nuts but he just kept coming back. By the last night he looked like death warmed over. His lips were split and one eye was swelling out of his head, black and blue, but none of that counted against principles. Daniel wondered if he’d ever have the guts to do something like that, for honour.
The reason everybody picked on Montgomery Clift was because he read books and was a Jew. Daniel knows his father was a Jew. His mother told him. He doesn’t know what that makes him.
At the end of the street he turns left. Across the road and on his right the railway track runs. The whitewashed stock pens which usually hold cattle for shipment to the slaughter houses in Winnipeg waft a stink of manure and piss-damp straw to his nostrils. This evening the pens are empty but some nights when they are full the cattle can be heard bawling clear across town, hour after hour, late into the night. Daniel passes a barbershop, a vacant lot of weeds wreathed in discarded popsicle wrappers and bits of cellophane, a lumberyard stacked with planks smelling of sawdust and resin.