“What about the steer?”
“To hell with the steer. I don’t care about the steer anymore.”
“I could check the bush in the field back there.”
“No.”
“It wouldn’t take long. No more than twenty minutes,” argued Daniel. “And then you’d know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Monkman irritably. “I don’t care.” He was picking himself off the ground the way a toddler would, braced on all fours, raising his hind end tentatively, by degrees, testing his balance. Then one final effort, an abrupt wrench up out of his stoop and he stood swaying, a little dizzy finding himself upright.
“We come all the way out here and as soon as we get here you’ve all of a sudden got to go. Where’s the sense in that?” demanded the boy peevishly.
“It’s late,” said Monkman, avoiding looking at his grandson. He was angry. By arguing with him the boy made him feel foolish. Yet he knew he wasn’t going to let him set one foot in that bad-luck field.
“It isn’t late.” Daniel glanced at his watch. “It’s not even three.”
“I’m the one who decides whether it’s late or not. So it’s late. Come along.”
“What about my chance for five dollars?” the boy wanted to know. “Have you forgot that?”
“Come.” The old man swung round on his heel and struck out into the summerfallow with awkward, stumbling fury. Anger jerked him like a puppet over the furrows; his boots flicked aside the hot, black, sifted earth; his shoulders see-sawed and twitched.
Daniel stood his ground. “I’m going to look,” he called after him, although without much conviction.
The old man didn’t bother to turn. His right hand snapped up. Pinched between forefinger and thumb something fluttered. When he saw what it was Daniel followed, resigned. The money was something.
10
Vera stood at the kitchen sink with suds creeping up her forearms, remembering Bob the housepainter. Every now and then the ridiculous row about baseball going on between Daniel and her father in the living room reached such a pitch that this became difficult, but Vera did her best to disregard the noise. For the life of her, she could not fathom how nothing made the two of them happier than an idiotic squabble over something of absolutely no consequence. Of course, the old man was a great tease, always had been, and delighted in provoking Daniel. Vera had warned him not to pay his grandfather any mind, but the boy hadn’t profited from her advice and rose to the bait every time. Daniel might learn yet that there was no winning with the old man. Beat him six ways to Sunday and he still would never cry uncle or allow that there was an outside chance of his ever being wrong.
It was a remark of her father’s before dinner which had brought Bob to mind after all these years. Vera had just pointed out to her father that if he wanted to clean the wax out of his ears with a wooden matchstick, maybe the privacy of the bathroom was more suitable for the operation than the dinner table. He had fastened her with a look of calculated pity and said, “You ought to have considered getting married again, Vera. Then maybe you’d have learned how to live with a man.”
Well, she had considered it and it was Bob the housepainter she had considered marrying. Strange to think. Since Bob, she doubted whether she’d had six dates in the past ten years and, if the truth be known, it would have been no loss to have missed any of them. Probably the business with Bob wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did either, if she hadn’t met him a little less than two years after Stanley died, when she still believed she was obliged to find Daniel a father and thought she couldn’t raise a boy on her own. And who could say? Given the way things had worked out, maybe her thinking then had been correct.
The real mistake was going to bed with him. On the other hand, maybe she needed to make up her mind if she could live with him, day in, day out, in that department. There was nothing else to rule him out. After four months of those sedate outings of his – Saturday-night movies, picnics in the park – Vera knew he wasn’t a drinker, a gambler, a ladies’ man, or the sort who had a dangerous temper. Just a solid, dependable thirty-nine year old without much hair who painted houses for a living and was desperately shopping for a wife to settle down with before it was too late. That pretty well summed up Bob. And although that one trial run in the sack made up her mind, she hadn’t realized it at the time. The unfortunate thing was that Bob must have come to the conclusion it was a sign, because not long after he popped the big question. Popped it standing in line at the Exhibition to buy Daniel a ticket for the merry-go-round, popped it holding her kid in his arms.
Vera didn’t handle the situation very well. She should have asked him for time to think his proposal over. Anything would have been better than her flat-out no, given without a second’s hesitation. It must have seemed like a fearful slap in the face coming like that, and awfully humiliating. He probably assumed he was in like Flynn after having done her the dirty. Mostly Vera blamed herself for not having an answer ready for a question she should have suspected was coming. But had she even known what her answer would be until she got taken by surprise like that and had the truth torn out of her?
Aside from turning as white as a sheet of paper and blinking his eyes a couple of times, Bob was taking it pretty well. He said he was sorry and she said she was sorry, too. Then there was a painful silence. “Look,” she said finally, “maybe Daniel and I had better go home.” And she stretched out her arms for the baby.
Wasn’t she taken aback when Bob wouldn’t hand him over? Likely he wanted to prove he could be sophisticated about this; the refusal of a proposal was no big deal to him – plenty of other fish in the ocean. The problem was he couldn’t keep his voice from sounding tight and self-righteous when he said, “I don’t see any reason why we should spoil the little one’s fun.”
Meanwhile Daniel was starting to fuss. The minute he’d seen his mother reach for him he’d held out his arms, clenched and unclenched his fists to show he wanted her to take him. Vera said, “Really, Bob, I think we should call it a day after what’s happened.”
“What has happened?” said Bob a shade belligerently. He was having a time keeping a grip on Daniel while the baby whined and twisted in his arms.
“Let’s not argue about this. You’re upsetting the kid. He wants to come to me. Give him over.”
Bob jostled and shifted Daniel in his arms, struggling to get a better handle on him. The baby stuck out his chubby arms and whimpered. “No, Daniel,” Bob said, “you can’t go to your mother. It’s too hot for her to lug around such a big, heavy boy.”
Vera remembered the merry-go-round lurching into motion behind Bob right then, and a burst of recorded music from a speaker over the ticket booth starting up loud enough to wake the dead. And kids screaming as the ride picked up speed, and the blur of colours as it went round and round. She had felt dizzy and panicked, something inside her giving way, breaking loose, and beginning to spin and whirl heavily and slowly and then faster and faster and lighter and lighter until she thought the top of her head was about to fly off. The second she heard her voice, shrill and brittle, she knew it was all wrong, the wrong voice for a situation like that. “Bob,” she said, “give Daniel to me. Give him to me right this instant.” It was a school teacher’s voice and Bob recognized it for that and got his back up because of the tone. He looked hurt and stubborn at one and the same time. “What? You think I’m going to do something to him? What do you think I’m going to do to him?”
“I don’t think anything. I just want him,” she said.
“Be sensible, Vera. To me carrying him is nothing. He’s light as a feather.”