“What? Mom? A man?”
“Sure. It was over her brother Earl.”
“Tell me,” said Daniel. “What was it about?”
“It was about Earl,” Alec said. The look on his face testified to the pleasure he took in his own stories. “Earl was always shy and timid from a baby up. Vera used to tease him about it but Lord help anybody else that she caught tormenting her little brother. I remember coming home from work one night and what do I see but your mother, the one who’s the pacifist, boiling down the street after Hansie Beck with a croquet mallet waving above her head like a tomahawk. She was out for blood because he’d done something or other to make Earl bawl. Your grandmother spent half her day negotiating peace with the neighbours because of the scraps Vera got herself in, sticking up for her brother.
“She got herself in a big one Dominion Day. They could have cancelled the evening fireworks because they got them early the way she went off like a Roman Candle. There was lots to see her do it, too. July First was the biggest day of the summer back then. All the farmers came in from the country and there was crowds and crowds of people. It don’t seem much for entertainment now that we got the television but then it was something, the Dominion Day Sports Day. There was a big ball tournament with prize money, a horseshoe-pitching contest, harness-racing at the track, a tug of war between the volunteer fire brigade and the Connaught hockey team – although they didn’t know how to split themselves up because half of them belonged to both – and more food than you could eat in a month of Fridays. All the ladies’ church groups and auxiliaries squared off to out-cook and out-sell one another. United Church ladies wanted to sell more pie than the Catholics and the Royal Purple wanted to plough the Red Cross under. Every organization had a booth with tables and benches and they sold cold pop out of tin washtubs full of crushed ice, and plates of cake and pie and potato salad and ham and cold roast beef and cabbage rolls, and mugs of coffee. It was a treat to have a seat in the booths because the husbands had roofed them for the ladies with poplar branches so it would be all green and shady and so a breeze could pass through them and stir the leaves up. On a hot day it was a cooling place to be. And all over the fairgrounds there were families, mostly country people who brought their own lunch because it seemed to them a crime to pay good money for something no better than they could get at home. They would be picnicking on blankets spread on the grass or sitting on the runningboards of their vehicles, eating. It was something. We wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Earl and me and your mother. Only thing that beat a Dominion Day was Christmas.
“Now on any such day Earl stuck to me like shit to a blanket because he was so shy. He’d hook his hand in my back pocket and hang on tight, like this,” said Monkman, illustrating by raising his hip from the ground and thrusting his hand into his pocket. “You couldn’t have crowbarred him off me. But Vera wasn’t like that at all. She preferred to go off on her own and see what trouble she could get into. Earl was more comfortable back there where he could hide himself behind my legs and take a peek out around my hip every now and then just to see how the world was running, then duck his head back out of sight if anybody happened to catch his eye. He was about five and should’ve been past that but he wasn’t, so that’s how we saw the Sports Day, him hanging on to my pocket for dear life as we went about our business. It was funny, he was like your own shadow, you could forget he was there he kept himself so quiet. Your mother was cut from different cloth. She couldn’t be forgotten. You noticed Vera. Full of questions about this or that and if it wasn’t questions she was trying to jimmy another nickel out of you for more candy. She wasn’t a girl to overlook. But Earl wasn’t like that. He was awful quiet, a thumb-sucker and starer.
“That day, somehow I lost him. I ran into a fellow I knew and we had ourselves a talk and then I walked off without Earl on my pocket. He must’ve let go for just a second, maybe to swap sucking thumbs and I was gone. He couldn’t catch a hold of me because of the crowd and once he lost track of me in all that press of people, him being ass-high to the rest of the world, he couldn’t spot me again.
“Soon as I realized I’d lost him I went back on the run, pushing aside anybody got in my way. Not a sign of him. So there I was running here, there, and everywhere like a chicken with its head cut off trying to find Earl before he had himself a real shit conniption. Then I came on Vera. She was crouching underneath this big cottonwood somebody had hung a set of gym rings on. A bunch of harness drivers who’d been drinking behind the stables were showing off for one another, skinning the cat and chinning themselves. Vera was squatted there watching them like a vulture. She was probably getting ready to make a grab for any loose change they flipped out of their pockets turning themselves over and then run for it.
“I said, ‘Vera, your brother’s lost.’ It was all I needed to say. She knew what sort of state he’d be in, what that meant. She was up and gone like smoke in a wind.
“Back in those days I was a cigar smoker – White Owls – and I carried them in my back pocket because it was cut deep for a wallet. Earl must’ve spent a good deal of his time face to face with that white owl on the package with its big yellow eyes. Now when we got separated, naturally Earl, being Earl, panics. He gallops off this way and that way, looking. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle of all those asses what does he run up against? A White Owl package and two big old yellow eyes peeping over a back pocket. Sure enough, Earl makes a dive for it and rams his hand down in the pocket. Saved, he thinks.
“Wasn’t me, though. Just another White Owls smoker with his cigars stuck in his ass pocket. Vera arrives on the scene and finds this man shaking Earl by the shoulders, yelling. Of course, he took him for a thief with his hand stuffed down to the bottom of his pocket. I arrive on the scene of the crime just as Vera flies onto this character from behind. She tackles him and clamps down hard. She’s got her arms locked around his belly and her legs scissored around his shins and she’s trying to sink her teeth into his back right through his jacket. She only leaves off biting long enough to holler, ‘Run, Earl! Run for your life!’ and then she squeezes down on the fellow and goes back to work gnawing a chunk off him.
“But Earl’s too scared to run. His eyes are the size of saucers, he’s sucking on his thumb so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t pull the nail clean off it, and he’s backing off one step at a time, slow, as this man staggers after him, Vera riding him piggyback, sticking like flypaper and bellering, ‘Run for your life, Earl! Run!’ ”
The old man began quaking with laughter. Tears stood in his eyes. “Jesus, wasn’t that something?” he asked. Suddenly, he threw back his head and roared at the sky. “Run for your life, Earl! Run! Jesus, what a commotion. Run for your life, Earl! Run!” he shouted so that his face darkened with blood and effort. “Run! Run!” Then, as abruptly as he had begun, he stopped. Monkman searched Daniel’s face. “She had the right idea, your mother, didn’t she?” he asked softly.
Daniel shifted his buttocks on the ground. He wondered if his grandfather’s uncontrolled shouting had been heard up at the house. He hoped not. It had given him an odd feeling. So had his grandfather’s question.
“I don’t know,” he said lamely.
“No, I suppose there’s no reason you should. And I’ve gone on and on talking. I should have stopped long ago, before I got to such old stories.”
“I liked them,” said Daniel.
“Well, whether you did or not, they’re finished with now. We’d better be getting home.”