“Not me,” said Stutz, “I only got one eye. The left one’s glass.”
So he had read it as cockiness. But cocky or not he had had to hire him with a war on and a labour shortage. It took him a week or two before he changed his mind and gave it another name than cocky. Sincerity. Yes, there had been something about the bugger. He had introduced himself as Mr. Stutz and it stuck. In the back of the garage on that snowy afternoon he hadn’t troubled to try and sell himself, only waited unruffled and patient for his answer, suitcase hanging on the end of his arm. Take me, or leave me, his face said.
It was Earl, always deathly shy around strangers, who had helped him decide. He spoke to the man. He said, “It was me wrote out the ad for the paper. Dad says I write a clearer hand than him.” Earl had seemed to be laying a claim for some of the credit in bringing the stranger to Connaught.
Suddenly Monkman heard himself saying what he had only meant to think. “Earl’s been on my mind a lot lately. I think it’s because of Vera’s boy.”
Mr. Stutz rose, groaning, from his knees. “I can take that corn off your hands now,” he said.
As the ears thudded on the sink bottom, Alec suggested, “If you got a pot of water on the boil now we could strip a few ears and have them at the pink of perfection.”
Mr. Stutz was the only man capable of discomforting Alec Monkman with a single glance. He discomforted him now. “It’s three o’clock,” he said severely. “I eat corn at three o’clock and it’d have me up and on the toilet before six.”
“Corn was intolerant of Earl the same. But he couldn’t stay away from it or tomatoes. Tomatoes were the hives though. All summer long his mother used to have to watch him. He’d steal corn out of the garden; he’d sneak out with the salt shaker and eat tomatoes warm off the vines. Ate the corn raw and nearly shit himself silly. The boy never had a trace of sense.”
“Now you go easy,” warned Stutz, “or you’ll work yourself into a state again. Remember what I told you before? You got to accept your part in it, Alec, but nobody can say how big that part is. And your part isn’t all of it neither.”
Monkman did not appear to notice what was being said to him. “Vera wants to know where he is. She’s set the boy to spying on me.”
“You know what I think. I’ve told my opinion before.”
“And if I told her, what then? That girl’s flint. I always meant to – when we settled our differences. But I can’t even get forgiveness where I don’t see I done any wrong. You tell me what I did that was so terrible? Asked her to stop at home and take care of her brother. Most girls would have jumped at the chance of such an easy life, keeping house for a man and a boy. She didn’t have enough work to keep her busy half the day, always smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes with her friends in the Chinaman’s. That’s suffering? Most girls that age would have been beside themselves to be free as a bird, a regular allowance to spend as they liked – plus what she stole from housekeeping. The way she milked me she could have been rich as a princess in a few years.
“And I wouldn’t have asked her to do it but for Earl. He needed somebody after his mother passed away. Him going on about hearing Martha moving around the house when he was alone; I figured that for wishful thinking out of loneliness. So I wanted her there at home for him because he was high-strung, high-strung from a baby up. He always showed it.
“And now she wants to know where he is? Did she ever think she’s got no right? Because she walked out on her brother, didn’t she? I’m not just talking about the Army and the war, but after, too. Because didn’t she disappear on him? After the war he never got a letter from her. You think that didn’t upset him? You’re goddamn right it did. No letter until the one she sent to announce she’d got married and that one was too late, he never got it. So sure he was upset. People disappearing on him left and right – his mother, his sister. No wonder he hung on my heels like a stray pup, probably afraid I was going to vanish into thin air on him, too, I suppose. You remember how that was, Stutz? We couldn’t turn ourselves around without bumping into him or tripping over him. He wouldn’t let us out of his sight.”
“His company was no trouble. He was always a pleasant boy.”
“Sure he was a pleasant boy. But you wasn’t the one responsible for him was you? You didn’t have to get him to some point of usefulness, did you?”
“That’s true. It wasn’t me who was responsible.”
“I mean, how long was I supposed to let him continue on that way? Isn’t it natural for a boy his age to want his independence? Instead, he had to trail around after us. Christ, he could’ve been taken for simple. It had to stop. The boy had to make himself suitable, had to find his place. And I tried him every place, didn’t I, Stutz? I gave him his chances, didn’t I?”
“Alec, nobody could ever say you didn’t have his interests at heart.”
“The boy graduated high school and he couldn’t meet the train on time with the dray. He run the projector fine if I was there to watch him but as soon as I left he burned the film on the bulb, or didn’t thread it right, or ripped it to ribbons. All he wanted to do was hang around the garage with us. The boy finished school and all he wanted to do was pass his father tools. He’d have been content to pass me tools the rest of his life if I’d have let him.”
“He done a beautiful job with the garden though. He made you a beautiful garden, Alec.”
Briefly, Monkman’s face lit with pleasure at the praise of his son. “By Jesus, yes,” he agreed. “Earl could garden. That’s what gave me the idea for the farm. A grown man can’t be a gardener but he can be a farmer, can’t he? What’s a farm but a big fuck of a garden? Make him a farmer, I thought.”
He had determined to see it done. A farmer needed a farm, so Alec had bought one; the farm he still owned and Marker rented. It had been a weedy half-section the bank had foreclosed on early in the thirties and since then had installed a series of improvident tenants on. When Alec had made them an offer the bankers had been quick to accept and rid themselves of a load of care and trouble. Alec bought cheap, the way he seemed to get whatever he wanted now that his luck had changed. He had to take a mortgage on the theatre but that didn’t cause him to lose any sleep. Cattle and grain prices were strong and Alec believed that the farm could pay for itself. Along with the 320 acres of land came an assortment of ramshackle, second-hand implements and a small house that was in decline but still reasonably comfortable. Only one thing more was necessary. In the spring Monkman engaged a hired man named Dover to help work the place and teach Earl farming. Nevertheless, when he proposed his plan to Earl, his son had resisted.
“I don’t know if I want to be a farmer.”
“Of course you don’t – until you give her a whirl, give her a try. That’s all I’m asking – that you try.”
“What if you need me here in town?”
“What would I need you for? Stutz and I will manage. What I want to see is you managing too, on your own.”
All he wanted was his son to learn self-reliance, that was what was behind the exiling of Earl. He explained it to him at length, so that the boy would know why he demanded it of him.
“The time has come for you to show you can stand on your own two feet. Dover’s going to take you to the farm and see you stick to it. Don’t come making your way back to town every couple of days because you’re homesick, either. Maybe I’ll just put it to you this way. Don’t bother showing your face around here again until you’ve raised a crop. I mean it, Earl. If somebody has to come to town for groceries, or fuel, or parts, or whatever, let it be Dover. By September we’ll have you weaned of this nonsense and a man. I think me and Mr. Stutz ought to stay clear, too. No visits until you’ve finished your work, done the job you’ve been put out there to do. But the day you’ve got a crop ready to cut, send us word, Earl, and we’ll be there to admire what you done with bells on, me and Mr. Stutz. None gladder to offer you congratulations and shake your hand. That’s going to be my dessert the end of summer, to see the crop my boy raised.”