Alec, when he detected Daniel spying on him, said with dignity, “You promised.”
“I thought it was a joke. Honest I did.”
“You promised, and I got nobody else to take me.”
“There’s always Stutz,” suggested the boy.
“Stutz,” said his grandfather, scorn surfacing in his voice. “Stutz’s kept busy acting as banker and handyman to your mother. He’s got no time for me. No, I’ll leave Stutz to the kind of company he prefers.”
His stubbornness only succeeded in exasperating Daniel. “I don’t get it,” he said sharply “Where is it that you’ve got to go all of a sudden? What is it you’ve got to see? And what’re you doing with those stupid-looking flowers? Who are they for? You got a ladyfriend or something?”
“Earl,” said Alec. “The flowers are for Earl.”
Daniel’s surprise at this answer drove any other questions out of his head for the moment. In the ensuing silence he became aware of the ferocity of the wind’s assault upon the truck – he could feel it rocking and jarring beneath him. The sloppy swaying of the chassis and the intense, fixed gaze of his grandfather through the windshield produced a queer sensation in the boy; he fell prey to the illusion that the truck was actually travelling down a road he could not see, a road hidden from him but clear and plain to his grandfather’s staring eyes.
Unable to understand what he had been told, Daniel asked, doubtfully, “Earl? Do you mean to say you want to take these flowers to Earl?”
“Yes,” said Alec. His eyes remained trained down the long, straight street. “That’s right. To Earl.”
Daniel was confused. He tried to remember how his grandfather had answered his last questions as to Uncle Earl’s whereabouts. Finding his Uncle Earl’s name scratched on the yellow wall had made Daniel curious about him. He had wondered if it wasn’t possible that the two of them, uncle and nephew, might not share some profound family resemblance. Daniel could recognize little of himself in either his mother or grandfather, and the desire to find himself in another was strong. For a time he had been full of questions about Earl, questions that his grandfather seemed to wish to avoid answering. The last thing he had learned about Earl was that he was in the States, working on an oil-drilling rig. That was what his grandfather had told him.
“So Earl’s back?” Daniel inquired innocently. “Back in Canada?”
The old man’s head snapped furiously around.
“Back?” His voice was grating, harsh. “What the fuck are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about – back? Earl’s dead. He’s dead.”
It sounded like an accusation. As if his grandfather was accusing him, Daniel, of murdering Earl. But what he was saying had to be wrong. “Dead?” said Daniel. “He can’t be dead.” Then a possibility struck him. “Has there been an accident? Tell me, did Uncle Earl have an accident on his drilling rig?”
“He’s been dead since July 21, 1948,” said the old man in a dull voice, spent now of its earlier fury, earlier passion.
“What’re you talking about, dead since then?” demanded Daniel fearfully. Was his grandfather really crazy? “Not Earl. You don’t mean Earl. You’ve mixed him up with somebody else. Maybe somebody whose name sounds like his. Talk sense. Think. Just a couple of months ago you said he was working in the States. That’s what you told me, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you?”
“It was July 21, 1948 Earl died,” said his grandfather wearily. “Died in that goddamn hospital full of nurses and doctors and not one of them – not one – ever did him an ounce of good. I should have kept him at home for all the good was ever done him there.”
“But that can’t be!” Daniel objected, incredulous. “That was twelve years ago. Twelve years? I mean -” he fumbled, attempting to express himself, “I mean people aren’t dead twelve years and nobody knows.”
“Stutz knows. I know. Now you do, too.”
But Daniel didn’t want to know. Not this. “It’s crazy what you’re saying. How could Mom not know? His own sister. His own sister would have to know. She’d have to know.”
“I don’t quite understand how it happened myself,” said his grandfather quietly. “I didn’t plan it. One thing led to another and somehow it got away on me, I couldn’t turn back. It started the summer – it was the summer Earl came down with his nervous trouble – I mean to say, well, his nerves got bad and they said he’d have to go away to the hospital. Stutz and me figured at most he’d be gone a couple of weeks, no more, that they’d get him rested up and we’d have him home again in no time. So I didn’t see any point in upsetting your mother with that kind of news. Especially as we looked on it as… as temporary, I didn’t think she’d ever need to hear about it. Anyway, well,” he said, stumbling as he explained himself, “if she heard how it was with Earl she was likely to put the blame on me for it. Your mother and I weren’t on the best of terms at any rate, so I didn’t think there was any percentage in stirring things up. Let sleeping dogs lie, I thought to myself.
“The problem with all my figuring was that Earl was gone a long time longer than I had counted on. The thing was – he’d stopped talking. The doctors in that place were determined to get him talking, but no dice, he wouldn’t. Mostly he just sat. He sat through the fall and he sat through the winter and he sat through the spring and not a word out of him. The fucking doctors couldn’t fix him. Then come summer in that place he came down with the other – the spinal meningitis. How was it he caught a disease in a hospital where nobody was really sick? They couldn’t explain that one to me. Had an explanation for everything else wrong with him but not for that.
“Then he talked – with the spinal meningitis he talked. The doctors couldn’t make him talk but the meningitis could. Fever had him talking the whole of the day before he died. It isn’t something I care to remember… him talking in this stuffy little room with the flies buzzing and dancing against the window screen and the meningitis curling him up on the sheet. He just curled and curled like something drying up maybe, a leaf or something. And there was a smell in the room, I remember this smell – and somebody shouting down the hallway and Earl curling up.”
He stopped, rubbed his forehead slowly and deliberately with his fingertips. “Stutz had to take me out when he died. It was me shouting then. By Christ, yes. I was telling those doctor bastards what I thought. Shouting how come it was that you went into their hospital with one thing and went out in a box with another.” He laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I had plenty to tell them. It was different when it came to your mother. I had nothing to say to her. How was it going to look me not notifying her of how things had stood with her brother for eleven months and then suddenly writing that he was dead, all the how and when and where of it? All of that which has to be explained at such a time. Because people are full of questions then, it’s natural. I knew she’d never forgive me, that it would finish it with us. I kept thinking that if I could get face to face with her then I could explain it the way I couldn’t in a letter, make her see that I meant the best for him, did my best for him – that it wasn’t my fault.
“Because I did do my best for him,” said Alec, beginning to speak more emphatically. “It’s God’s truth that I did. I visited him once a week over bad roads in every kind of weather – a hundred and twenty miles there and a hundred and twenty miles back. I made sure they kept him nice in there. Every visit I brought him a new shirt, or pants, or sweater, or shoes. Something so he’d know. And I kept bringing them until the doctors and nurses said I should stop. That’s why I quit it. They said it was making the other patients jealous how he was dressed. It was causing trouble. They had started stealing his things, or maybe he was giving them away. Two of them dividing up his clothes had got in a fight. I seen the doctors’ point. What they said was true, I suppose. I seen it myself, a fellow walking around on the ward bold as brass in a shirt I’d bought for Earl. Earl’s shirt he was walking around in.