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DEATH BY OMISSION

(sequel to CITY TRACKS)


Josef stared at his son in his creaky camp-cot bed, his neck wrapped hugely in an old wool sock that Josef had worn long ago in the woods.
Ben's gaze thumbed the half-drawn curtains of his bedroom, the spitballs adhering to the ceiling, the postered wall that led to the door, as if seeking escape, and finally he looked back at his father. "But what if I don't get better?," he croaked, repeating the question.
"But I told you, you will get well. It's just the mumps."
Ben's eyes filled with tears and this alarmed Josef. In all his ten years Ben had cried perhaps a dozen times and it was serious behavior when it happened. Josef wanted to sit on the bed for closeness, for comfort, for understanding, but it would have collapsed beneath him. Ben had found it alongside the dumpster of the apartment building and it was one of his most loved possessions. Instead, Josef squatted beside the cot. Once he could perch like this for hours, waiting, watching, but that had been long ago in the wilderness. This time his bones groaned.
"What is it, my son? Tell Papa." In the same way, in the old country, his father had soothed him.
The tears rivered down Ben's cheeks. "Jacko said I wouldn't be able...that mumps made a man...that I couldn't... Oh, Dad- "
Ben flung himself at his father, upsetting the cot, upsetting Josef, and ending up himself on the floor on top of his dad. Josef hugged his son in the tangle and managed to smooth the stiff mop of hair. Into Josef's shoulder Ben murmured, "I want my-, I want my-."
What Ben was asking for he could not give him so Josef gave him what he could. "Jacko is a dumbcluck and if he is going to cause such trouble with such misinformation he will not be allowed to visit with the rest of your friends." It had seemed a good idea to let the three or four boys come by for a very short visit. Ben had been cooped up in the apartment with the flu and then an eye infection and now the mumps. It had been a very long spring.
"What did he tell you - that you would not be able to make babies -" Josef chose the less serious side-effect, at least from a man's point of view, that he recalled was related to mumps, and at Ben's nod, went on," well, that does not apply now. That was in the old days when people weren't given shots, vaccinations. You have the mumps now but once they are over there will be no after effects. This is like an extra shot of immunity." He had no idea of the accuracy of his words. He needed an instant antidote to the grief. And he got it.
Ben started to giggle, the humor of the present situation taking precedent. Josef responded, untwisting them both, righting the cot, helping Ben back into bed. He had just gotten him all settled when Ben said, "I need to go to the bathroom."
"Of course, why not, exactly on cue as I finish tucking you so neatly back into bed. Go. Go." Josef pointed. And Ben went, chuckling.
"That's exactly what you used to do when I had put on your coat and mitts and hat and scarf and extra socks and boots," he called to his son who was moving with the unsteady gait of illness down the hall.
When Ben was back in bed he called out to Josef who was in the kitchen doing breakfast dishes, "Tell me about when I was born."
"You heard it all before a million times."
"Tell me again. Please, Papa."
He could still hear Ben's, "I want my, I want my."
"Let me get something to work on," Josef called back to him, "You can be a lazy layabout but your poor Papa has to work to pay the rent."
"You're rich, you got all that money in the bank,' his son sang out.
It made Josef nervous to hear his son state this. It was true. He knew how to earn and he knew how to save, how to invest. But from an affluent childhood he had become a refugee with nothing and he never felt he had quite enough to relax.
He brought a kitchen chair into Ben's room along with a barley twist bridge lamp. Ben's only seating offering was a beanbag which Josef had tried once and from then on declined. Sitting on the chair he cradled the lamp on which he'd raised a fur with a light coat of water and would patiently draw out the heart of the wood with diminishing grades of sandpaper. Grandma's Giveaways down the block already had a customer waiting on the lamp once Josef had restored its soul.
He preferred not to work while he talked: he preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But he felt the need to do something with his hands as a distraction if he was going to wander into "I want my-," territory.
"Well, now where will I start?"
"With how you went to the woods because of the war after you escaped across the ocean and became a hunter and lived all alone and then my mother came and she was a burglar and then you had me."
Josef made length of a pause to fish in his shirt pocket, take out his glasses, inspect the lenses, put them on the better to see his work, peer over them to better see his son.
"I have no need to tell you anything. You know it all."
"No, tell me. Please. When you tell it I can see it."
Josef drew in breath and let it out in a sigh. It troubled him to remember, but it also felt good. Irony of life.
"Your mother came to - "
"Hilary," Ben interrupted, rolling the three syllables around in his mouth.
"Yes, Hilary - "
"It's a nice name," Ben interrupted again, with his own sigh. "And she was very beautiful." Josef had described her many times to Ben.
"Yes, Hilary - very beautiful Hilary - came to the woods deciding she was no longer going to be a lawbreaker and -"
This time Ben stopped his father's words by coming up slightly from his pillow and staring. Josef responded by staring back and then shrugging.
"Well, she came to the woods - career on hold. And she came to my cabin and she thought it was funny and wonderful and awful how I lived."
"And you never got married," Ben put in. Lately he had been working out something about this: he seemed intrigued and proud rather than critical and Josef had overheard him tell a friend, "My parents weren't married either."
"No. But we loved each other very much." His hand was stroking the lamp gently.
"She thought I was cancer," Ben put in with a grin and a nod.
"Well, not exactly. She didn't expect to ever get pregnant - no, not from having mumps, I don't know why - and so she was surprised and looked for other reasons. She thought she might have the flu or possibly a growth."
"And it was a growth and it was me."
Josef remembered the curiosity and interest and yes, dismay, with which she had watched the changes in her body. He swallowed some emotion before he could speak again. At times he regretted telling Ben any of this. And each time he seemed to tell him more and more, to have a need to relive the past.
"We didn't think you would be born until the autumn -"
"And she never saw a doctor."
" - but in the summer, one night, you started to be born."
"And you helped her have me and cleaned me all up and I didn't even cry and she called me Ben."
Ben snuggled lower into his pillows, a smile on his face. He had taken part in a program at school called Boys And Babies and a film of an actual birth had much sparked his interest in his own arrival, particularly the personal, unique aspects of it. Josef suspected the filmed birth had been very different from Ben's. He would not at all want a recording of that event.
Hilary had actually not named him: she had called him Your Boy in the short time until she left. Josef was not sure why he had told Ben that his mother had named him but having once done so he had to live with the lie.
"And you took me out and showed me to the sun."
Josef had walked through that experience many times in memory. He had wrapped the baby in a soft flannel shirt. "He's all yours now," Hilary had said in exhaustion, turning toward the wall of the cabin. That had been their agreement.
He had carried his son outdoors into the early morning that seemed so incredibly normal after such a night. Nothing had equalled his feelings before or since. In spite of his more than fifty years at that time, his three years alone in the wilderness, he had never seen anything born. Hilary was as unprepared as he. They had planned to go into the nearest city, with a hospital, closer to the time they expected the baby to be born. Birthing might be natural but it was also scary and painful and messy and he felt that they had been lucky. He'd tied the cord with strips of leather and washed the newborn in rainwater warmed in a bucket.
Holding that brand new human being, a part of him, gave Josef a glimpse of something he did not understand but which changed him. The baby skin was like moss after a rain, the eyes so dark and knowing, a tiny perfect mouth that had opened in a tiny perfect yawn. Josef, who also seldom cried, had wept deeply holding his son. And then he realized he had wet the baby's hair, even then black and stiff, and he hoped it a fitting baptism. He shared a part of this now and Ben stared at him with those same dark eyes but Josef kept his sight on what his hands were doing. Ben's tears over the mumps had prompted him to admit that he, too, could cry.
They were both silent for a time.
"Then she - went away ..." Ben said. He thought his mother had died. He seemed to be wanting more details this time.
Josef got to his feet, the lampstand silky under his arm.
"Sleep now, my son. I've got to go out and do some errands but Miz Shouldoon said she'd come by and be here in case you needed anything."
"I don't want Miz Shouldhavedone again, Dad. She fusses. I'll be fine on my own."
"If you are sure. But I'll put the phone by your bed so you can phone her."
He found the resident manager in the lobby watching as a lock was replaced on one of the mail boxes. "I should have known that man would use force instead of common sense. Look how he pulled the door off his butter container in the frig instead of sliding it out. I should have thought to tell him," Miz Shouldoon told both him and Alf who was acting custodian now that Mr. Bellecourt the former janitor and, surprisingly, the owner, had been killed several months before.
"Still no word on what is happening to the building," she said to Josef in a quiet aside as she walked him to the door after he had told her Ben was fine on his own. "It's all tied up in the courts or something to do with inheritance and his kids." She knew he was interested but too courteous to inquire. He had been a good tenant, he and his son, across the five or six years she had been managing the building.
Josef walked along a street lined now with flowering trees. Their leafy autumn splendour had been one reason, likely a major one, that he had chosen the apartment when he and the baby had come to the city a decade ago.
He finished his errands quickly and was walking back to the apartment when he stopped and entered a small parkette. He put his two bags on the ground and sat on one of the benches, leaning back, closing his eyes and turning his face to the sun.
Ben's ongoing bouts of sickness had affected him as well and he felt drained.
Someone passed in front of him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then sat beside him. He felt an irritation at the intrusion and kept his eyes firmly shut. Then some instinct shot through his body. It was a scent, a feeling. He could taste her on the air.
He prepared his intellect to prove him wrong as he finally opened his eyes and turned his head. His inner knowing was validated.
"Hilary," said Josef.
He had spoken of her this morning. Her son had asked for her, about her. Now here she was. Such coincidences astonish but seldom overwhelm: it is as if we know they are about to happen.
"Where is he? What has happened to him? " She did not turn toward him.
"I have him. I have cared for him as I promised."
"I know that." Now she did turn to face him. "But I 've not seen him for a month. What has happened?"
"He's been ill. But he's fine now. Have you been around all along? Have you been watching us?"
She slumped on the bench and took a couple of deep breaths. "I only now realize how upset I 've been now that I 'm so relieved. I thought something had happened to him."
He waited on the answer to what he had asked. He had learned patience in the woods.
She turned her face to him. "I have been living in this city for the past eight or nine years. Have you also?"
He nodded, responding to the astonishment behind her distress. "I didn't know. I only saw you both at New Year's, across the street. I followed you and yes, I have been watching you ever since."
"You still have the boy page," he said to delay asking what he really wanted to know.
"The what?" She saw he was looking at her hair. "Oh, page boy. No, usually I wear it differently. When I thought the boy - well, whatever, - I cut it this way again."
She also did a leap of avoidance of worry about her son with a memory, "I remember how you went into the town and found those huge scissors because the little ones I had were not very efficient. And you cut my hair and they were so sharp and you cut too much across the bangs."
"You cried and cried."
"Yes."
"Why?"
They both knew what he was asking.
"I went back to the cabin but you had gone."
"When did you go?"
"September. Two days after I left. I couldn't...... I still had milk. I was going to -"
"But you came no further." It was a statement with a hope of a question.
"I was told you had gone back to your own country. I thought you had gotten in touch with your father and gone back to him. She didn't even know what country that was. Nor did I. Josef, how did I live with you for more than a year and not know that?"
"Who told you I had gone back to my old home."
"The girl in the store where you sold your furs. The daughter, I think of the owner."
"Susie?"
"I don't know."
"But I told her, I told her, if you ever came back, I told her where I was going and then I sent her my address when I found a place for Ben and me."
Her face opened into a wide smile. "Ben? His name is Ben?"
"So you never knew. You would have tried to find us?"
She faced forward again and did not answer.
They sat in silence, digesting information, shuffling years into a different perspective.
"I want to see him," she said finally, quietly but very definitely.
"He thinks you are dead."
She bolted upright. "Dead? You told him I died?" Her face had gone white.
"No, I never actually said so but he assumed you died after he was born and I let him think it."
"You have killed me, Josef. As surely as if you raised a gun and shot me. He has grown up thinking I am dead." Her anguish smothered her and she fought to surface in anger. "How could you?"
"You never got in touch. You may as well have been dead. It was easier and kinder to let him think this. I did not know you went back." His anger was tempered by regret.
She slumped again. He stared at her. At last she turned and looked at him again.
"You will have to resurrect me. We will explain."
"And what then? What then, Hilary? You have left him once."
"Yes." She was silent, her gaze going past him and his stomach clenched. If she had been angry or apologetic he would have seen it as a sign that she would not leave again. And he was dealing with a sudden glimmer that her presence again in his life would cause complications and he was content with simplicity. He was afraid to ask for reassurance. Afraid she would not give it. Afraid that she would.
She looked at him sideways under the shelf of her hair. "I will not hurt him. I will - explain. There are things to be explained." She paused and moue'd her lips as she did when considering. "Are you with someone?"
"With my son."
She gave him a look he could not decipher. He did not ask if she were on her own and she did not answer his unspoken question.
Afraid she might, he stood up suddenly. "He has the mumps."
"Don't forget your bags."
"Maybe I should go and prepare him first."
"I cannot wait any longer."
"He thinks you named him Ben."
"Oh. Well, I might have."
They were walking now, out of the parkette, along the street toward the apartment building.
"You called him Your Boy. Over the years I have thought of him, at times, as that. Thought, I wonder what Hilary would think of Your Boy now."
"Yes, I realize now I have continued to think of him as Your Boy." She laughed, richly, and he knew the joyous sound was not just over his name."
Miz Shouldoon nodded to him as he went through the lobby with Hilary. He did not stop to introduce her. Miz Shouldoon raised her eyebrows. "Ben must be fine, he has not phoned me," she called out as he and Hilary got on the elevator.
" She is surprised because I bring home strange women every day but usually they are blondes," he teased Hilary when they were on the elevator but her return smile was distracted. He wondered at her thoughts, her feelings.
"Dad, I threw up again," Ben sang out when he heard Josef enter the apartment. "It must have been that squash you made me eat last night for supper."
"We have company, Ben," he called to warn him and stop any more embarrassing disclosures.
"Bet it's Nose," he started to say, naming a man who scouted objects for Josef to refinish but then he saw Hilary behind his father.
Across his face flashed curiosity and then awareness, then a brief astonishment replaced by an almost goofy expression as he recognized the hairdo Josef had described to him and he mouthed the words, "Boy page." Josef could hear Hilary behind him murmur, "Page boy."
Then there was confusion and when emotion finally caught up with realization Ben grabbed at anger to protect himself from possible hurt and hugging his knees to his chest he turned his face to the wall.
Josef was about to say something - he was not sure what - when Hilary squeezed past him and perched on the kitchen chair at the end of the cot. She could wait up a storm. She had come to the woods with patience: it was not one of the things she had learned in the wilderness.
Now she gave Josef a reassuring look. He couldn't think what to do or say so he went on to the kitchen with the groceries but paused in the hallway as he heard his son say, his voice muffled from his face being still pressed into his knees, "I got the damn mumps and we got your damn lock pick, and I thought you were dead." Josef grimaced at the language: what kind of upbringing would Hilary think he had given their son.
"Oh." Hilary sounded startled. Then she laughed. "Well, it must be a real nuisance having the mumps. And a lock pick is not the usual keepsake of a son from his mother. And I am sorry you thought I was dead - this was a misunderstanding. I knew you were very much alive. I've thought about you every single day."
Silence. Then the creaking of the camp cot. Ben must have turned to face his mother. Still silence. Josef continued on to the kitchen. Likely a staring contest. Likely bonding.

 

(sequel to CITY TRACKS)


Josef stared at his son in his creaky camp-cot bed, his neck wrapped hugely in an old wool sock that Josef had worn long ago in the woods.
Ben's gaze thumbed the half-drawn curtains of his bedroom, the spitballs adhering to the ceiling, the postered wall that led to the door, as if seeking escape, and finally he looked back at his father. "But what if I don't get better?," he croaked, repeating the question.
"But I told you, you will get well. It's just the mumps."
Ben's eyes filled with tears and this alarmed Josef. In all his ten years Ben had cried perhaps a dozen times and it was serious behavior when it happened. Josef wanted to sit on the bed for closeness, for comfort, for understanding, but it would have collapsed beneath him. Ben had found it alongside the dumpster of the apartment building and it was one of his most loved possessions. Instead, Josef squatted beside the cot. Once he could perch like this for hours, waiting, watching, but that had been long ago in the wilderness. This time his bones groaned.
"What is it, my son? Tell Papa." In the same way, in the old country, his father had soothed him.
The tears rivered down Ben's cheeks. "Jacko said I wouldn't be able...that mumps made a man...that I couldn't... Oh, Dad- "
Ben flung himself at his father, upsetting the cot, upsetting Josef, and ending up himself on the floor on top of his dad. Josef hugged his son in the tangle and managed to smooth the stiff mop of hair. Into Josef's shoulder Ben murmured, "I want my-, I want my-."
What Ben was asking for he could not give him so Josef gave him what he could. "Jacko is a dumbcluck and if he is going to cause such trouble with such misinformation he will not be allowed to visit with the rest of your friends." It had seemed a good idea to let the three or four boys come by for a very short visit. Ben had been cooped up in the apartment with the flu and then an eye infection and now the mumps. It had been a very long spring.
"What did he tell you - that you would not be able to make babies -" Josef chose the less serious side-effect, at least from a man's point of view, that he recalled was related to mumps, and at Ben's nod, went on," well, that does not apply now. That was in the old days when people weren't given shots, vaccinations. You have the mumps now but once they are over there will be no after effects. This is like an extra shot of immunity." He had no idea of the accuracy of his words. He needed an instant antidote to the grief. And he got it.
Ben started to giggle, the humor of the present situation taking precedent. Josef responded, untwisting them both, righting the cot, helping Ben back into bed. He had just gotten him all settled when Ben said, "I need to go to the bathroom."
"Of course, why not, exactly on cue as I finish tucking you so neatly back into bed. Go. Go." Josef pointed. And Ben went, chuckling.
"That's exactly what you used to do when I had put on your coat and mitts and hat and scarf and extra socks and boots," he called to his son who was moving with the unsteady gait of illness down the hall.
When Ben was back in bed he called out to Josef who was in the kitchen doing breakfast dishes, "Tell me about when I was born."
"You heard it all before a million times."
"Tell me again. Please, Papa."
He could still hear Ben's, "I want my, I want my."
"Let me get something to work on," Josef called back to him, "You can be a lazy layabout but your poor Papa has to work to pay the rent."
"You're rich, you got all that money in the bank,' his son sang out.
It made Josef nervous to hear his son state this. It was true. He knew how to earn and he knew how to save, how to invest. But from an affluent childhood he had become a refugee with nothing and he never felt he had quite enough to relax.
He brought a kitchen chair into Ben's room along with a barley twist bridge lamp. Ben's only seating offering was a beanbag which Josef had tried once and from then on declined. Sitting on the chair he cradled the lamp on which he'd raised a fur with a light coat of water and would patiently draw out the heart of the wood with diminishing grades of sandpaper. Grandma's Giveaways down the block already had a customer waiting on the lamp once Josef had restored its soul.
He preferred not to work while he talked: he preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But he felt the need to do something with his hands as a distraction if he was going to wander into "I want my-," territory.
"Well, now where will I start?"
"With how you went to the woods because of the war after you escaped across the ocean and became a hunter and lived all alone and then my mother came and she was a burglar and then you had me."
Josef made length of a pause to fish in his shirt pocket, take out his glasses, inspect the lenses, put them on the better to see his work, peer over them to better see his son.
"I have no need to tell you anything. You know it all."
"No, tell me. Please. When you tell it I can see it."
Josef drew in breath and let it out in a sigh. It troubled him to remember, but it also felt good. Irony of life.
"Your mother came to - "
"Hilary," Ben interrupted, rolling the three syllables around in his mouth.
"Yes, Hilary - "
"It's a nice name," Ben interrupted again, with his own sigh. "And she was very beautiful." Josef had described her many times to Ben.
"Yes, Hilary - very beautiful Hilary - came to the woods deciding she was no longer going to be a lawbreaker and -"
This time Ben stopped his father's words by coming up slightly from his pillow and staring. Josef responded by staring back and then shrugging.
"Well, she came to the woods - career on hold. And she came to my cabin and she thought it was funny and wonderful and awful how I lived."
"And you never got married," Ben put in. Lately he had been working out something about this: he seemed intrigued and proud rather than critical and Josef had overheard him tell a friend, "My parents weren't married either."
"No. But we loved each other very much." His hand was stroking the lamp gently.
"She thought I was cancer," Ben put in with a grin and a nod.
"Well, not exactly. She didn't expect to ever get pregnant - no, not from having mumps, I don't know why - and so she was surprised and looked for other reasons. She thought she might have the flu or possibly a growth."
"And it was a growth and it was me."
Josef remembered the curiosity and interest and yes, dismay, with which she had watched the changes in her body. He swallowed some emotion before he could speak again. At times he regretted telling Ben any of this. And each time he seemed to tell him more and more, to have a need to relive the past.
"We didn't think you would be born until the autumn -"
"And she never saw a doctor."
" - but in the summer, one night, you started to be born."
"And you helped her have me and cleaned me all up and I didn't even cry and she called me Ben."
Ben snuggled lower into his pillows, a smile on his face. He had taken part in a program at school called Boys And Babies and a film of an actual birth had much sparked his interest in his own arrival, particularly the personal, unique aspects of it. Josef suspected the filmed birth had been very different from Ben's. He would not at all want a recording of that event.
Hilary had actually not named him: she had called him Your Boy in the short time until she left. Josef was not sure why he had told Ben that his mother had named him but having once done so he had to live with the lie.
"And you took me out and showed me to the sun."
Josef had walked through that experience many times in memory. He had wrapped the baby in a soft flannel shirt. "He's all yours now," Hilary had said in exhaustion, turning toward the wall of the cabin. That had been their agreement.
He had carried his son outdoors into the early morning that seemed so incredibly normal after such a night. Nothing had equalled his feelings before or since. In spite of his more than fifty years at that time, his three years alone in the wilderness, he had never seen anything born. Hilary was as unprepared as he. They had planned to go into the nearest city, with a hospital, closer to the time they expected the baby to be born. Birthing might be natural but it was also scary and painful and messy and he felt that they had been lucky. He'd tied the cord with strips of leather and washed the newborn in rainwater warmed in a bucket.
Holding that brand new human being, a part of him, gave Josef a glimpse of something he did not understand but which changed him. The baby skin was like moss after a rain, the eyes so dark and knowing, a tiny perfect mouth that had opened in a tiny perfect yawn. Josef, who also seldom cried, had wept deeply holding his son. And then he realized he had wet the baby's hair, even then black and stiff, and he hoped it a fitting baptism. He shared a part of this now and Ben stared at him with those same dark eyes but Josef kept his sight on what his hands were doing. Ben's tears over the mumps had prompted him to admit that he, too, could cry.
They were both silent for a time.
"Then she - went away ..." Ben said. He thought his mother had died. He seemed to be wanting more details this time.
Josef got to his feet, the lampstand silky under his arm.
"Sleep now, my son. I've got to go out and do some errands but Miz Shouldoon said she'd come by and be here in case you needed anything."
"I don't want Miz Shouldhavedone again, Dad. She fusses. I'll be fine on my own."
"If you are sure. But I'll put the phone by your bed so you can phone her."
He found the resident manager in the lobby watching as a lock was replaced on one of the mail boxes. "I should have known that man would use force instead of common sense. Look how he pulled the door off his butter container in the frig instead of sliding it out. I should have thought to tell him," Miz Shouldoon told both him and Alf who was acting custodian now that Mr. Bellecourt the former janitor and, surprisingly, the owner, had been killed several months before.
"Still no word on what is happening to the building," she said to Josef in a quiet aside as she walked him to the door after he had told her Ben was fine on his own. "It's all tied up in the courts or something to do with inheritance and his kids." She knew he was interested but too courteous to inquire. He had been a good tenant, he and his son, across the five or six years she had been managing the building.
Josef walked along a street lined now with flowering trees. Their leafy autumn splendour had been one reason, likely a major one, that he had chosen the apartment when he and the baby had come to the city a decade ago.
He finished his errands quickly and was walking back to the apartment when he stopped and entered a small parkette. He put his two bags on the ground and sat on one of the benches, leaning back, closing his eyes and turning his face to the sun.
Ben's ongoing bouts of sickness had affected him as well and he felt drained.
Someone passed in front of him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then sat beside him. He felt an irritation at the intrusion and kept his eyes firmly shut. Then some instinct shot through his body. It was a scent, a feeling. He could taste her on the air.
He prepared his intellect to prove him wrong as he finally opened his eyes and turned his head. His inner knowing was validated.
"Hilary," said Josef.
He had spoken of her this morning. Her son had asked for her, about her. Now here she was. Such coincidences astonish but seldom overwhelm: it is as if we know they are about to happen.
"Where is he? What has happened to him? " She did not turn toward him.
"I have him. I have cared for him as I promised."
"I know that." Now she did turn to face him. "But I 've not seen him for a month. What has happened?"
"He's been ill. But he's fine now. Have you been around all along? Have you been watching us?"
She slumped on the bench and took a couple of deep breaths. "I only now realize how upset I 've been now that I 'm so relieved. I thought something had happened to him."
He waited on the answer to what he had asked. He had learned patience in the woods.
She turned her face to him. "I have been living in this city for the past eight or nine years. Have you also?"
He nodded, responding to the astonishment behind her distress. "I didn't know. I only saw you both at New Year's, across the street. I followed you and yes, I have been watching you ever since."
"You still have the boy page," he said to delay asking what he really wanted to know.
"The what?" She saw he was looking at her hair. "Oh, page boy. No, usually I wear it differently. When I thought the boy - well, whatever, - I cut it this way again."
She also did a leap of avoidance of worry about her son with a memory, "I remember how you went into the town and found those huge scissors because the little ones I had were not very efficient. And you cut my hair and they were so sharp and you cut too much across the bangs."
"You cried and cried."
"Yes."
"Why?"
They both knew what he was asking.
"I went back to the cabin but you had gone."
"When did you go?"
"September. Two days after I left. I couldn't...... I still had milk. I was going to -"
"But you came no further." It was a statement with a hope of a question.
"I was told you had gone back to your own country. I thought you had gotten in touch with your father and gone back to him. She didn't even know what country that was. Nor did I. Josef, how did I live with you for more than a year and not know that?"
"Who told you I had gone back to my old home."
"The girl in the store where you sold your furs. The daughter, I think of the owner."
"Susie?"
"I don't know."
"But I told her, I told her, if you ever came back, I told her where I was going and then I sent her my address when I found a place for Ben and me."
Her face opened into a wide smile. "Ben? His name is Ben?"
"So you never knew. You would have tried to find us?"
She faced forward again and did not answer.
They sat in silence, digesting information, shuffling years into a different perspective.
"I want to see him," she said finally, quietly but very definitely.
"He thinks you are dead."
She bolted upright. "Dead? You told him I died?" Her face had gone white.
"No, I never actually said so but he assumed you died after he was born and I let him think it."
"You have killed me, Josef. As surely as if you raised a gun and shot me. He has grown up thinking I am dead." Her anguish smothered her and she fought to surface in anger. "How could you?"
"You never got in touch. You may as well have been dead. It was easier and kinder to let him think this. I did not know you went back." His anger was tempered by regret.
She slumped again. He stared at her. At last she turned and looked at him again.
"You will have to resurrect me. We will explain."
"And what then? What then, Hilary? You have left him once."
"Yes." She was silent, her gaze going past him and his stomach clenched. If she had been angry or apologetic he would have seen it as a sign that she would not leave again. And he was dealing with a sudden glimmer that her presence again in his life would cause complications and he was content with simplicity. He was afraid to ask for reassurance. Afraid she would not give it. Afraid that she would.
She looked at him sideways under the shelf of her hair. "I will not hurt him. I will - explain. There are things to be explained." She paused and moue'd her lips as she did when considering. "Are you with someone?"
"With my son."
She gave him a look he could not decipher. He did not ask if she were on her own and she did not answer his unspoken question.
Afraid she might, he stood up suddenly. "He has the mumps."
"Don't forget your bags."
"Maybe I should go and prepare him first."
"I cannot wait any longer."
"He thinks you named him Ben."
"Oh. Well, I might have."
They were walking now, out of the parkette, along the street toward the apartment building.
"You called him Your Boy. Over the years I have thought of him, at times, as that. Thought, I wonder what Hilary would think of Your Boy now."
"Yes, I realize now I have continued to think of him as Your Boy." She laughed, richly, and he knew the joyous sound was not just over his name."
Miz Shouldoon nodded to him as he went through the lobby with Hilary. He did not stop to introduce her. Miz Shouldoon raised her eyebrows. "Ben must be fine, he has not phoned me," she called out as he and Hilary got on the elevator.
" She is surprised because I bring home strange women every day but usually they are blondes," he teased Hilary when they were on the elevator but her return smile was distracted. He wondered at her thoughts, her feelings.
"Dad, I threw up again," Ben sang out when he heard Josef enter the apartment. "It must have been that squash you made me eat last night for supper."
"We have company, Ben," he called to warn him and stop any more embarrassing disclosures.
"Bet it's Nose," he started to say, naming a man who scouted objects for Josef to refinish but then he saw Hilary behind his father.
Across his face flashed curiosity and then awareness, then a brief astonishment replaced by an almost goofy expression as he recognized the hairdo Josef had described to him and he mouthed the words, "Boy page." Josef could hear Hilary behind him murmur, "Page boy."
Then there was confusion and when emotion finally caught up with realization Ben grabbed at anger to protect himself from possible hurt and hugging his knees to his chest he turned his face to the wall.
Josef was about to say something - he was not sure what - when Hilary squeezed past him and perched on the kitchen chair at the end of the cot. She could wait up a storm. She had come to the woods with patience: it was not one of the things she had learned in the wilderness.
Now she gave Josef a reassuring look. He couldn't think what to do or say so he went on to the kitchen with the groceries but paused in the hallway as he heard his son say, his voice muffled from his face being still pressed into his knees, "I got the damn mumps and we got your damn lock pick, and I thought you were dead." Josef grimaced at the language: what kind of upbringing would Hilary think he had given their son.
"Oh." Hilary sounded startled. Then she laughed. "Well, it must be a real nuisance having the mumps. And a lock pick is not the usual keepsake of a son from his mother. And I am sorry you thought I was dead - this was a misunderstanding. I knew you were very much alive. I've thought about you every single day."
Silence. Then the creaking of the camp cot. Ben must have turned to face his mother. Still silence. Josef continued on to the kitchen. Likely a staring contest. Likely bonding.

DEATH BY OMISSION

(sequel to CITY TRACKS)


Josef stared at his son in his creaky camp-cot bed, his neck wrapped hugely in an old wool sock that Josef had worn long ago in the woods.
Ben's gaze thumbed the half-drawn curtains of his bedroom, the spitballs adhering to the ceiling, the postered wall that led to the door, as if seeking escape, and finally he looked back at his father. "But what if I don't get better?," he croaked, repeating the question.
"But I told you, you will get well. It's just the mumps."
Ben's eyes filled with tears and this alarmed Josef. In all his ten years Ben had cried perhaps a dozen times and it was serious behavior when it happened. Josef wanted to sit on the bed for closeness, for comfort, for understanding, but it would have collapsed beneath him. Ben had found it alongside the dumpster of the apartment building and it was one of his most loved possessions. Instead, Josef squatted beside the cot. Once he could perch like this for hours, waiting, watching, but that had been long ago in the wilderness. This time his bones groaned.
"What is it, my son? Tell Papa." In the same way, in the old country, his father had soothed him.
The tears rivered down Ben's cheeks. "Jacko said I wouldn't be able...that mumps made a man...that I couldn't... Oh, Dad- "
Ben flung himself at his father, upsetting the cot, upsetting Josef, and ending up himself on the floor on top of his dad. Josef hugged his son in the tangle and managed to smooth the stiff mop of hair. Into Josef's shoulder Ben murmured, "I want my-, I want my-."
What Ben was asking for he could not give him so Josef gave him what he could. "Jacko is a dumbcluck and if he is going to cause such trouble with such misinformation he will not be allowed to visit with the rest of your friends." It had seemed a good idea to let the three or four boys come by for a very short visit. Ben had been cooped up in the apartment with the flu and then an eye infection and now the mumps. It had been a very long spring.
"What did he tell you - that you would not be able to make babies -" Josef chose the less serious side-effect, at least from a man's point of view, that he recalled was related to mumps, and at Ben's nod, went on," well, that does not apply now. That was in the old days when people weren't given shots, vaccinations. You have the mumps now but once they are over there will be no after effects. This is like an extra shot of immunity." He had no idea of the accuracy of his words. He needed an instant antidote to the grief. And he got it.
Ben started to giggle, the humor of the present situation taking precedent. Josef responded, untwisting them both, righting the cot, helping Ben back into bed. He had just gotten him all settled when Ben said, "I need to go to the bathroom."
"Of course, why not, exactly on cue as I finish tucking you so neatly back into bed. Go. Go." Josef pointed. And Ben went, chuckling.
"That's exactly what you used to do when I had put on your coat and mitts and hat and scarf and extra socks and boots," he called to his son who was moving with the unsteady gait of illness down the hall.
When Ben was back in bed he called out to Josef who was in the kitchen doing breakfast dishes, "Tell me about when I was born."
"You heard it all before a million times."
"Tell me again. Please, Papa."
He could still hear Ben's, "I want my, I want my."
"Let me get something to work on," Josef called back to him, "You can be a lazy layabout but your poor Papa has to work to pay the rent."
"You're rich, you got all that money in the bank,' his son sang out.
It made Josef nervous to hear his son state this. It was true. He knew how to earn and he knew how to save, how to invest. But from an affluent childhood he had become a refugee with nothing and he never felt he had quite enough to relax.
He brought a kitchen chair into Ben's room along with a barley twist bridge lamp. Ben's only seating offering was a beanbag which Josef had tried once and from then on declined. Sitting on the chair he cradled the lamp on which he'd raised a fur with a light coat of water and would patiently draw out the heart of the wood with diminishing grades of sandpaper. Grandma's Giveaways down the block already had a customer waiting on the lamp once Josef had restored its soul.
He preferred not to work while he talked: he preferred to focus on one thing at a time. But he felt the need to do something with his hands as a distraction if he was going to wander into "I want my-," territory.
"Well, now where will I start?"
"With how you went to the woods because of the war after you escaped across the ocean and became a hunter and lived all alone and then my mother came and she was a burglar and then you had me."
Josef made length of a pause to fish in his shirt pocket, take out his glasses, inspect the lenses, put them on the better to see his work, peer over them to better see his son.
"I have no need to tell you anything. You know it all."
"No, tell me. Please. When you tell it I can see it."
Josef drew in breath and let it out in a sigh. It troubled him to remember, but it also felt good. Irony of life.
"Your mother came to - "
"Hilary," Ben interrupted, rolling the three syllables around in his mouth.
"Yes, Hilary - "
"It's a nice name," Ben interrupted again, with his own sigh. "And she was very beautiful." Josef had described her many times to Ben.
"Yes, Hilary - very beautiful Hilary - came to the woods deciding she was no longer going to be a lawbreaker and -"
This time Ben stopped his father's words by coming up slightly from his pillow and staring. Josef responded by staring back and then shrugging.
"Well, she came to the woods - career on hold. And she came to my cabin and she thought it was funny and wonderful and awful how I lived."
"And you never got married," Ben put in. Lately he had been working out something about this: he seemed intrigued and proud rather than critical and Josef had overheard him tell a friend, "My parents weren't married either."
"No. But we loved each other very much." His hand was stroking the lamp gently.
"She thought I was cancer," Ben put in with a grin and a nod.
"Well, not exactly. She didn't expect to ever get pregnant - no, not from having mumps, I don't know why - and so she was surprised and looked for other reasons. She thought she might have the flu or possibly a growth."
"And it was a growth and it was me."
Josef remembered the curiosity and interest and yes, dismay, with which she had watched the changes in her body. He swallowed some emotion before he could speak again. At times he regretted telling Ben any of this. And each time he seemed to tell him more and more, to have a need to relive the past.
"We didn't think you would be born until the autumn -"
"And she never saw a doctor."
" - but in the summer, one night, you started to be born."
"And you helped her have me and cleaned me all up and I didn't even cry and she called me Ben."
Ben snuggled lower into his pillows, a smile on his face. He had taken part in a program at school called Boys And Babies and a film of an actual birth had much sparked his interest in his own arrival, particularly the personal, unique aspects of it. Josef suspected the filmed birth had been very different from Ben's. He would not at all want a recording of that event.
Hilary had actually not named him: she had called him Your Boy in the short time until she left. Josef was not sure why he had told Ben that his mother had named him but having once done so he had to live with the lie.
"And you took me out and showed me to the sun."
Josef had walked through that experience many times in memory. He had wrapped the baby in a soft flannel shirt. "He's all yours now," Hilary had said in exhaustion, turning toward the wall of the cabin. That had been their agreement.
He had carried his son outdoors into the early morning that seemed so incredibly normal after such a night. Nothing had equalled his feelings before or since. In spite of his more than fifty years at that time, his three years alone in the wilderness, he had never seen anything born. Hilary was as unprepared as he. They had planned to go into the nearest city, with a hospital, closer to the time they expected the baby to be born. Birthing might be natural but it was also scary and painful and messy and he felt that they had been lucky. He'd tied the cord with strips of leather and washed the newborn in rainwater warmed in a bucket.
Holding that brand new human being, a part of him, gave Josef a glimpse of something he did not understand but which changed him. The baby skin was like moss after a rain, the eyes so dark and knowing, a tiny perfect mouth that had opened in a tiny perfect yawn. Josef, who also seldom cried, had wept deeply holding his son. And then he realized he had wet the baby's hair, even then black and stiff, and he hoped it a fitting baptism. He shared a part of this now and Ben stared at him with those same dark eyes but Josef kept his sight on what his hands were doing. Ben's tears over the mumps had prompted him to admit that he, too, could cry.
They were both silent for a time.
"Then she - went away ..." Ben said. He thought his mother had died. He seemed to be wanting more details this time.
Josef got to his feet, the lampstand silky under his arm.
"Sleep now, my son. I've got to go out and do some errands but Miz Shouldoon said she'd come by and be here in case you needed anything."
"I don't want Miz Shouldhavedone again, Dad. She fusses. I'll be fine on my own."
"If you are sure. But I'll put the phone by your bed so you can phone her."
He found the resident manager in the lobby watching as a lock was replaced on one of the mail boxes. "I should have known that man would use force instead of common sense. Look how he pulled the door off his butter container in the frig instead of sliding it out. I should have thought to tell him," Miz Shouldoon told both him and Alf who was acting custodian now that Mr. Bellecourt the former janitor and, surprisingly, the owner, had been killed several months before.
"Still no word on what is happening to the building," she said to Josef in a quiet aside as she walked him to the door after he had told her Ben was fine on his own. "It's all tied up in the courts or something to do with inheritance and his kids." She knew he was interested but too courteous to inquire. He had been a good tenant, he and his son, across the five or six years she had been managing the building.
Josef walked along a street lined now with flowering trees. Their leafy autumn splendour had been one reason, likely a major one, that he had chosen the apartment when he and the baby had come to the city a decade ago.
He finished his errands quickly and was walking back to the apartment when he stopped and entered a small parkette. He put his two bags on the ground and sat on one of the benches, leaning back, closing his eyes and turning his face to the sun.
Ben's ongoing bouts of sickness had affected him as well and he felt drained.
Someone passed in front of him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then sat beside him. He felt an irritation at the intrusion and kept his eyes firmly shut. Then some instinct shot through his body. It was a scent, a feeling. He could taste her on the air.
He prepared his intellect to prove him wrong as he finally opened his eyes and turned his head. His inner knowing was validated.
"Hilary," said Josef.
He had spoken of her this morning. Her son had asked for her, about her. Now here she was. Such coincidences astonish but seldom overwhelm: it is as if we know they are about to happen.
"Where is he? What has happened to him? " She did not turn toward him.
"I have him. I have cared for him as I promised."
"I know that." Now she did turn to face him. "But I 've not seen him for a month. What has happened?"
"He's been ill. But he's fine now. Have you been around all along? Have you been watching us?"
She slumped on the bench and took a couple of deep breaths. "I only now realize how upset I 've been now that I 'm so relieved. I thought something had happened to him."
He waited on the answer to what he had asked. He had learned patience in the woods.
She turned her face to him. "I have been living in this city for the past eight or nine years. Have you also?"
He nodded, responding to the astonishment behind her distress. "I didn't know. I only saw you both at New Year's, across the street. I followed you and yes, I have been watching you ever since."
"You still have the boy page," he said to delay asking what he really wanted to know.
"The what?" She saw he was looking at her hair. "Oh, page boy. No, usually I wear it differently. When I thought the boy - well, whatever, - I cut it this way again."
She also did a leap of avoidance of worry about her son with a memory, "I remember how you went into the town and found those huge scissors because the little ones I had were not very efficient. And you cut my hair and they were so sharp and you cut too much across the bangs."
"You cried and cried."
"Yes."
"Why?"
They both knew what he was asking.
"I went back to the cabin but you had gone."
"When did you go?"
"September. Two days after I left. I couldn't...... I still had milk. I was going to -"
"But you came no further." It was a statement with a hope of a question.
"I was told you had gone back to your own country. I thought you had gotten in touch with your father and gone back to him. She didn't even know what country that was. Nor did I. Josef, how did I live with you for more than a year and not know that?"
"Who told you I had gone back to my old home."
"The girl in the store where you sold your furs. The daughter, I think of the owner."
"Susie?"
"I don't know."
"But I told her, I told her, if you ever came back, I told her where I was going and then I sent her my address when I found a place for Ben and me."
Her face opened into a wide smile. "Ben? His name is Ben?"
"So you never knew. You would have tried to find us?"
She faced forward again and did not answer.
They sat in silence, digesting information, shuffling years into a different perspective.
"I want to see him," she said finally, quietly but very definitely.
"He thinks you are dead."
She bolted upright. "Dead? You told him I died?" Her face had gone white.
"No, I never actually said so but he assumed you died after he was born and I let him think it."
"You have killed me, Josef. As surely as if you raised a gun and shot me. He has grown up thinking I am dead." Her anguish smothered her and she fought to surface in anger. "How could you?"
"You never got in touch. You may as well have been dead. It was easier and kinder to let him think this. I did not know you went back." His anger was tempered by regret.
She slumped again. He stared at her. At last she turned and looked at him again.
"You will have to resurrect me. We will explain."
"And what then? What then, Hilary? You have left him once."
"Yes." She was silent, her gaze going past him and his stomach clenched. If she had been angry or apologetic he would have seen it as a sign that she would not leave again. And he was dealing with a sudden glimmer that her presence again in his life would cause complications and he was content with simplicity. He was afraid to ask for reassurance. Afraid she would not give it. Afraid that she would.
She looked at him sideways under the shelf of her hair. "I will not hurt him. I will - explain. There are things to be explained." She paused and moue'd her lips as she did when considering. "Are you with someone?"
"With my son."
She gave him a look he could not decipher. He did not ask if she were on her own and she did not answer his unspoken question.
Afraid she might, he stood up suddenly. "He has the mumps."
"Don't forget your bags."
"Maybe I should go and prepare him first."
"I cannot wait any longer."
"He thinks you named him Ben."
"Oh. Well, I might have."
They were walking now, out of the parkette, along the street toward the apartment building.
"You called him Your Boy. Over the years I have thought of him, at times, as that. Thought, I wonder what Hilary would think of Your Boy now."
"Yes, I realize now I have continued to think of him as Your Boy." She laughed, richly, and he knew the joyous sound was not just over his name."
Miz Shouldoon nodded to him as he went through the lobby with Hilary. He did not stop to introduce her. Miz Shouldoon raised her eyebrows. "Ben must be fine, he has not phoned me," she called out as he and Hilary got on the elevator.
" She is surprised because I bring home strange women every day but usually they are blondes," he teased Hilary when they were on the elevator but her return smile was distracted. He wondered at her thoughts, her feelings.
"Dad, I threw up again," Ben sang out when he heard Josef enter the apartment. "It must have been that squash you made me eat last night for supper."
"We have company, Ben," he called to warn him and stop any more embarrassing disclosures.
"Bet it's Nose," he started to say, naming a man who scouted objects for Josef to refinish but then he saw Hilary behind his father.
Across his face flashed curiosity and then awareness, then a brief astonishment replaced by an almost goofy expression as he recognized the hairdo Josef had described to him and he mouthed the words, "Boy page." Josef could hear Hilary behind him murmur, "Page boy."
Then there was confusion and when emotion finally caught up with realization Ben grabbed at anger to protect himself from possible hurt and hugging his knees to his chest he turned his face to the wall.
Josef was about to say something - he was not sure what - when Hilary squeezed past him and perched on the kitchen chair at the end of the cot. She could wait up a storm. She had come to the woods with patience: it was not one of the things she had learned in the wilderness.
Now she gave Josef a reassuring look. He couldn't think what to do or say so he went on to the kitchen with the groceries but paused in the hallway as he heard his son say, his voice muffled from his face being still pressed into his knees, "I got the damn mumps and we got your damn lock pick, and I thought you were dead." Josef grimaced at the language: what kind of upbringing would Hilary think he had given their son.
"Oh." Hilary sounded startled. Then she laughed. "Well, it must be a real nuisance having the mumps. And a lock pick is not the usual keepsake of a son from his mother. And I am sorry you thought I was dead - this was a misunderstanding. I knew you were very much alive. I've thought about you every single day."
Silence. Then the creaking of the camp cot. Ben must have turned to face his mother. Still silence. Josef continued on to the kitchen. Likely a staring contest. Likely bonding.

City Tracks

CITY TRACKS

(originally published Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/Aug 2001

"Dad, I need your help."
Josef had not heard this often from his son across their ten-year acquaintance. It did not sound like an emergency but he put down his oily rag and peered at the boy over the top of his glasses.
"I want to find out who killed Mr. Bellecourt. I need you to open his apartment for me."
Well, had Josef not learned that the infrequency of Ben's requests were often coupled with their startling aspects. He removed his glasses, taking care not to get his tung-oiled fingers on the lenses.
"I have no key," he said simply.
"You don't need a key," his son reminded him. The boy took a breath and relaxed a bit. He had thought he could count on his father to hear him out and help him but this was a rather unusual thing to ask, even he could see that. Good old Dad. A year or so ago Ben had looked up from doodling on a piece of paper to announce, "Hey, Good Old Dad spells God!" Josef had never forgotten that. He was on the shadiest side of religious but this faith of his son had affected him.
"Explain."
Ben knew it was not the issue of the key that was being questioned - they both knew from whom Josef had acquired the skill of getting past a locked door - and he was ready for this.
"I liked Mr. Bellecourt. He was a nice man and a good caretaker and he lived in this building, like family. I feel I must try to honour his death." The old country rested lightly on Ben's Canadian shoulders but he could pull it around him like a cloak when he wished and he knew it influenced his father.
Josef put his glasses back on, picked up his cloth and made some desultory movements across the seat of the fine oak chair Ben had found in a dumpster and which, now stripped of paint, looked like honey under the oil. "What do you want inside his apartment for? Have the police finished there?"
"Of course. I just want to look around."
"But, Ben, the police will have found anything there is to be found."
"I need to do something. Please, Papa."
So, he was to bring out the full range of his arsenal, was he, this son of his. Papa, even. Josef sighed and then he nodded. "This afternoon, when Miz. Shouldoon is out shopping."
"Thanks, Dad."
* * *
Josef opened the locked door swiftly and silently, then pocketed the compliant little tool, all too aware of Ben's eager eyes. It was Ben's mother from whom he had learned this procedure, kept back this tool with some hope, perhaps, of changing her, and he was afraid the boy had inherited more than just curiosity. He had used it on two occasions when locked out of the apartment and regretted having shown it to Ben.
Ben sidled up to the window and looked out and down. "Oh no, Miz Shouldhavedone is down there talking to that woman across the way. What if she comes back and decides to come up here?"
Josef resisted an urge to laugh. "That's not likely but I'll stand lookout," he said mildly and stood where he could see the apartment manager in conversation six flights below. He wondered if she was peppering her sentences with, "I should have stayed home" or "I should have done my groceries yesterday" which is why she came by the name adjustment
Mr. Bellecourt might work in the basement, might have been killed in the basement but he lived on the top floor in what in a grander apartment block would have been called the penthouse suite. There was no access to it by the elevator but by an out- of- the-way stairway from the fifth floor. Most tenants did not know the apartment existed or that the caretaker lived there. He'd been there ever since Josef moved in nearly a decade before.
"Don't touch anything," Josef said.
"Dad," Ben said, using three scornful syllables.
Ben walked around the suite and when Miz Shouldoon had moved off down the street, definitely on her way shopping, Josef gave his attention back indoors as well. Many years ago he'd learned the benefits of focusing on one thing at a time. Now, as he wandered visually around the apartment, he was surprised.
"Nice stuff," said Ben, summing it all up.
Mr. Bellecourt looked like a custodian, dressed like a custodian, talked like a custodian. His home did not look like him at all. Everything was fine, very fine indeed. Quality beyond a custodian's wages. Josef wondered his suspicions. But he said nothing.
He followed Ben into the bedroom, watched as his son got down on hands and knees and looked under the bed, said nothing as he used the tail end of his shirt to open the door of the bathroom, walked back with him into the kitchen. When the boy dropped down and, flat on his stomach, stared under the refrigerator and stove, Josef did give a chuckle.
"There's something under here," Ben hissed into the floor.
"What?"
"I can't tell. Hand me something to swish it out with."
Josef opened a couple of drawers (using his knuckles on the outer edge instead of fingers on the handle, giving himself a wry grin at the action) and when he found a long wooden spoon he handed it to Ben. Ben swished and sneezed as he dislodged dust and then a lump of something shot out and across the floor, coming to rest under the table. Josef stretched under his foot and kicked out a lint-covered cat toy, a catnip mouse. Ben got up off the floor and they both stared at the object.
"Mr. Bellecourt did not have a cat," Ben said in almost a whisper. "This could be important."
Josef did not risk nudging Ben's fantastic imagination by inquiring how a felt mouse could figure in a murder. Instead he said, "I think he looked after Mrs. Wall's cat the time she went to Hawai."
"I don't remember that."
"That might have been the year you went to summer camp."
Ben made a huge grimace at the memory.
"I still think it could be a clue. Somehow."
Josef did not answer. He was wiping off the spoon, dust and possible fingerprints, and returning it to the drawer. Ben was staring at the mouse, wondering if he should take it with him. Finally he kicked it back under the frig and shrugged in answer to his father's look.
"Thanks, Pops. I guess I've seen all there is to see." He walked back to the door. Josef followed. Pops, he said to himself. Pops!
Ben went off to the scene of the crime - "seen of the crime, s-e-e-n, I'm going to see what I can see, get it Dad?" Josef got it.
He went back to his refinishing on the little terrace at the side of the building. He made an adequate living uncovering the soul of furniture people brought him or which he came by in various ways, like Ben's regular perusal of the local dumpsters. It was amazing what people threw out. "Just some old thing I've had around for ages," was music to Josef's ears. In the old country he had been destined for law, his father's choice, but the war had changed many people's life plans, his own included and he had escaped west. He was not sorry.
The Chinese man who minded his two grandsons trotted onto the terrace and the trio took their usual seats on an old bench. Josef and he nodded and smiled but they shared not a word in a common language. All three of his audience watched solemnly and if he would have preferred not to have their rapt attention of his every movement he had learned to keep his concentration on his task. He wanted his energy to flow undistracted into the wood.
Mrs. Pendergast stuck her head into the enclosure but with a slight sniff did not come in because Mr. Lee and the two kids were there. Josef was glad. Mrs. Pendergast had no problem with verbosity. Josef suspected she was lonely and drank to fill the hours. He also suspected that Miz. Shouldoon was gladly reaping the rewards of her kindness in allowing him the use of this outdoor space as a work area because he was available to those tenants who would otherwise presume on her time.
When he had applied sufficient oil he took the chair from the terrace space, nodding and smiling a farewell to the Lee's as he left, and carried it carefully up to his own balcony to dry. Then he would polish it, over and over, make the patina shine. Grandma's Giveaways down the street would sell it. Grandma's Giveaways were anything but.
Ben exploded into the kitchen as Josef was making himself a cup of coffee.
"Dad, I thought you were downstairs, I can never find you when I want you, you know that guy who took over Mr. Bellecourt's job, you know what he told me?"
"Has 'that guy' not got a name, Ben?"
"He never told me. You know what he told me? He told me Mr. Bellecourt owned this building. And maybe more apartments, too. He was the owner, Dad. Not the janitor. I mean he was the janitor, too, but ..." Words finally failed him and he collapsed on a chair at the table and stared at his father. Josef stared back.
"This is very important news," Josef said.
"But what does it mean?"
"I don't know."
"I can see someone killing a caretaker but I can't see someone killing someone who owns a big apartment building like this. I mean not in the basement like he was nobody. I mean..." Ben stopped, puzzled and confused, the facts playing havoc with his preconceptions. He dragged himself off the chair and went down the hall. Josef could hear the creaking of the old army cot, another found object, that Ben insisted on using for a bed. He'd taken this knotty problem to his own particular haven and if he didn't solve it immediately he would likely fall asleep.
The owner. Josef did some pondering of his own. That far more explained the quality of the penthouse. Of course - a penthouse. He had thought the custodian's wage might be augmented by drug dealings. This ownership put a whole new slant on it. But who had killed him and why. Coffee finished, Josef started back down to the terrace, glancing into Ben's room as he passed. Ben was not asleep. He raised his eyebrows at Josef.
"There's some salmon in the frig. And if you're going by the store we need milk."
"Not hungry."
Nose was on the terrace, looking at a bureau someone had, sadly, stored in a basement. "Handles are worth more than the piece," he said, peering into the drawers and grinning at the coffee grounds Josef had scattered there to try to get rid of the musty smell: he thought it a useless effort.
His name was Alan but everyone called him Nose. Why, Josef had never inquired. His breathing apparatus was not a noteworthy feature. Ben, with great delight, claimed it was because the man made his living as a picker, a person who went around to sales and answered advertisements and often just snooped around and would ask someone if he or she wanted to sell that old desk he could see in the garage or possibly something in the cellar that was in the way or likely rotting away with unhealthy mould.
"Nose is a picker, get it, Dad?" Ben had said. Josef just rolled his eyes at him.
"Got anything for me today?" Josef asked after they had both admired the dozen bakelite handles on the dresser.
"Nope. Just came from the auction. Too many dealers there today. They can outbid the middleman every time. Hey, I heard ol' Joe owned this place, eh? And that maybe one of his kids did him in for the inheritance."
"Who told you that?"
"Heard two guys talking in Mac's"
"You should have been called Ears."
* * *
In the middle of the afternoon, while he was fixing two of the drawer runners on the bureau, Mrs. Pendergast came by and he listened to her monologue for half an hour or so but then his patience wore too thin and his concentration suffered. He straightened and stretched and excused himself. She continued to talk but he knew she would eventually realize he was gone and wander away herself.
He intended to idly amble around the parking lot, giving himself a bit of exercise, mentally smiling at how much he had changed: now he considered this exercise - for a while in his life a walk of ten miles - and back - would have been how he got his mail. And not on cemented ground.
As he passed his truck, parked in a corner of the lot, he glanced into the back Then stopped. Someone had stood on the blue tarp that he had loosely thrown on the empty bed. There were no clear footprints, merely indentations.
Josef had spent three years in the northern wilderness, alone. His natural power of observation had become finely tuned when so much of his survival depended on it.
He stood and stared thoughtfully at the telltale signs on the tarp. The woodsman skills he had acquired itched out from their dormant state. Under normal circumstances he would have registered the information and perhaps checked the truck for any signs of tampering: there was nothing to steal in the flat bed. But a man had been killed a day or so earlier. This was his own 'catnip mouse' and he was not about to kick it out of sight.
He was not aware of it but his posture altered as he began to sweep his eyes around, looking for other signs. In the city his body had adjusted to pavement and noise and many other humans, his stance was straight and rather stiff. Now he relaxed into the posture of the wilderness, resilient, open, directing awareness outward rather than closing it down to cope with too much urban input
Josef wondered why someone had stood in the back of his truck facing the cement wall that led into the area where the garbage cans were kept. If he could track the next movements of the person it might show a purpose. He had not had the truck out for a week or more. It had not rained. He walked slowly around the truck looking at the ground but it told him nothing. The cement block between truck and bushes had been used to climb up onto the truck bed, he could see the slight scraping away of city grime on its edge by a foot pushing off from it. Hands must have been covered because there were no prints on the dust of his truck but there were dusted spots.
And the person had not simply walked across the tarp and climbed onto the cab roof. She or he (the experience with Ben's mother had altered his pronoun priority with regards to law breakers, or law benders, Hilary's term for her way of life) had stood there long enough to leave a definite imprint on the tarp into the soft surface of sawdust below, the leftovers from hauling a storm-fallen tree he'd sawed, collected and sold.
The trail was obvious - at least to him - over the roof of the cab and down onto the hood. It must have been made at night or the person would have realized he was 'dusting' a path, not to mention the possibility of being seen. Wouldn't he? Josef felt that man was far less aware of making tracks than a non-human was.
He had thought perhaps a child had needed the block for access but the imprints in the tarp and the size of the smudge marks in the dust across the top of the truck told him it was likely a short, heavyset adult. At times, in the woods, he would get such a clear image of the cougar or moose he was trailing with regards to height and weight that the actual sight of the animal was like the development of a photograph from a negative. Few surprises.
And sometimes he also was forewarned of character, the marks showing friskiness or stealth, nobility, age.
The woods had taught him more than his home had, more than formal schooling, more than the two contrasting societies in which he had lived. The woods had required him to become still and then what he wanted or needed to know would come pouring in to him. And at the end of those three years of solitude Hilary had come into his life and his learning had continued.
He left the front of the truck and walked around the cement wall into the utility area. Joe Bellecourt had been struck down a few feet from here, inside the area of the basement that led to the storage rooms.
Josef stared up at the wall from this angle. Down at the wall. Slight skid marks of toes sliding until the entire body length was reached - the person was short - and then ending as he dropped. He looked at what he could see so plainly and wondered if the police could, or would.
Back around the wall again and this time he stood on the hood, carefully, non- intrusively, and surveyed the wall. Teeny grey pieces of fluff were caught in the rough surface of the top. Some wooly article of clothing had 'shed' as its wearer climbed across.
Before coming down from the hood he paused and looked around. Why had someone gone over the wall instead of around it? Why had someone stood on the truck bed? What senses were being attended to? He could see easily over the wall but he was tall: a shorter person would just clear eye level, he thought. Josef hunkered down eight inches or so and was just able to see over the wall directly into the area leading to the storage lockers, the garbage chute for papers, the recycling bins. But would not a person be in full view if his intent was to spy. Maybe not at night.
Josef wondered at the acoustics. So often in the woods he had depended on his hearing, on his ability to listen deeply and sort through the various levels of sound. He gathered up some small stones, climbed back into the truck, threw the stones over the wall one by one and listened. Yes, he could hear them as they dropped in the passage.
And then he noticed movement on one of the balconies and realized he was being observed. A tenant he did not know was watching him so he gave a casual wave - the man looked embarrassed and went back inside. At nighttime the area was not well lit. But still, to climb up on his truck and stand there required courage or desperation or both. And why climb over the wall. Perhaps someone had come into the parking area and the quickest exit, up and over, was needed. He could read the signs clearly but how well could he interpret what he saw. And he needed more information.
Best, for the moment, to just follow the trail, see where the person had gone. Or where he had come from. Was it possible after two days. Such a cold trail. And in the city.
He stood there longer, relaxing, opening. He began to smell the sawdust, to feel the subtle wind and identify its direction, to sense what a man might do next. To think with the body and feel with the mind.
Josef spent the next hour patiently tracking the one who had likely killed Joe Bellecourt. He had no idea of motive. Animals seemed to kill from a far more basic need and Josef was often disturbed by his race's behaviour in this regard. Perhaps Mr. Bellecourt had done nothing more than catch a glimpse of a restaurant kitchen help spitting into the soup pot like had happened last month where the youth had tracked down the man who saw him and tried to knife him.
Around the parking area, the perimeter, the central drive, the two paths between the stalls he walked, almost crouched, depending almost entirely on vision and the instinct that comes when intent is so focused. In the woods he would be tracking a fresh path and his nose or his ears might give him a clue. But not here. Not after two days. Still he persisted. Soon people would be returning from work and the parking lot would fill with cars.
He went out onto the street, around the block, stood at the bus stop and then in the shelter, waved on the bus that stopped for him and shrugged an apology to the driver's "make up your mind, buddy," glare. The bus, he supposed, could have been an exit or an entrance for the killer. Mr. Bellecourt had been hit with something like a hammer. Maybe there wasn't much or any blood. But this was all speculation. He needed visible signs.
Returning to the apartment grounds he realized how limited the choices of trails were in the city. In the wilderness an animal, human or otherwise, had almost limitless directions. Mountains could be climbed, streams forded, rough terrain negotiated. If you were willing and able to navigate you could go almost anywhere. In the city, passage between the buidlings was easy, on straight, flat avenues. But the choices were limited.
Back in the parking lot Josef now walked between the cars, glancing into each one. He almost missed it. A tiny grey piece of fluff on the trim above the driver's door as if someone had perhaps put a coffee cup on the roof of the car and retrieved it, a sleeve brushing the trim, a piece of the fabric caught on the roughness. The blue compact belonging to the couple in 416.
It was not some kitchen help who had killed Joe Bellecourt. Josef suddenly had an image of the short, rotund man in 416 wearing an old grey cardigan, the sleeves rolled but occasionally falling past his wrists. They could be pulled over hands to protect, to disguise, to smudge.
He did not touch the fluff. Josef went back up to his apartment and thought about phoning the police. He had pulled the bead on his prey and he was sick at heart. Familiarity between hunted and hunter had disturbed him once or twice before but that was when the characters were man and beast. He had never tracked his own species. It was devastating.
Ben was not there so he got out his pipe for a rare smoke and went onto the balcony. He let himself think of Hilary. She had been hovering on the edge of his consciousness and now he let her in.
They had first exchanged a few words in the store where he took his furs for sale and trade and the next day she had shown up at his cabin. He had not been too surprised.
She was a professional thief, a break and enter artist, a fun-loving, complicated, restless individual who took pride in her work - "it's not everyone I can brag to about it, of course," - and was taking a little holiday when they met. "Thought it prudent to cool my heels for a bit, far, far from the crowds."
They had spent a year together in the wilderness. He had shown her a way of life as foreign to her as a new country; she had been both attracted and repelled. And, in some strange way he still didn't understand, she had healed the hurt he had been unconsciously carrying at having to leave his native land.
They had ridden on the happiness of the thrill of discovery, she of the situation both good and bad, he mostly of self.
Her pregnancy came as a shock - "I was told I couldn't have children and I never have," she said in initial disbelief. "It's likely just the flu. Or maybe some sort of growth."
"Wait and see," Josef had been courteous in his laughter and when she decided he was right in his assessment of her symptoms she agreed to have the baby if Josef would take care of it.
Neither of them expected the child to be born so swiftly and suddenly. Josef had delivered his son. The experience was a precious gift. And it had given him something to hold when Hilary left. But it had brought him from the wilderness to the city.
Ben thought his mother was dead and Josef let him think that. For himself he did not know but he felt she must be or she would have been in touch over the years. He had watched her face as she tended the baby for that first while.
If she were in prison then she might as well be dead because he could not imagine her living with any reality in a cage. She was, in a way, far wilder than the animals he had come to know, and if he had provided a sanctuary for her, he had never felt he had tamed any part of her.
Ben should be home anytime.
Josef knew who had stood on his truck, climbed the wall, gone into the basement, hammered the life out of Mr. Bellecourt. He hadn't been able to work forward to an apartment but he had worked backward to a car. To him the trail was clear. He would wait to call the police until Ben came home. He had some notion of preparing his son. Perhaps he was preparing himself.
He liked Bill Price, had known him across three or four years. Why in hell had he killed Joe Bellecourt? It would make far more sense if he had killed his wife. Josef did not like Missus Price, could never remember her name. Bill always called her, "the missus." She could slice a person up with her tongue and she had whittled Bill down to a sliver. Josef felt sorry for him and more than once had to turn away from the look in Bill's eyes as his wife belittled him in public. Who could say how she treated him in private.
Once the Price's apartment had flooded and Bill had asked Josef's advice on a cabinet that had gotten wet but he had not invited him to see it. Later Josef had wondered idly to Miz Shouldoon how someone could let their bathtub overflow like that in the middle of the day.
"That's how she heats the place," Miz Shouldoon had informed him.
He had peered at her, puzzled.
She explained. "The hot water comes with the rent so in the cold weather she keeps filling the bathtub and sinks with hot water, buckets too, I expect, and the water heats the rooms."
Miz Shouldoon had laughed, then, at Josef's silent astonishment. "It takes all kinds," she said, "and I should have seen them all."
He thought about all this now. Perhaps Bill Price had finally freed himself. But at what cost. One prison to another.
Josef did not have to call the police. He would find out later that they had followed their own trail.
Ben once again shot into the apartment, eyes enormous. "Dad, the police, the police were here. They got the person who killed Mr. Bellecourt."
Josef felt a wave of sadness.
"They just took her away. She was screaming, Dad. And swearing. They had her in handcuffs, Dad."
"She?" Josef stared a frown.
"You know who it was, Dad. Mrs. Price."
"Mrs Price?"
"She was yelling that he was a - " Ben gulped and swallowed the adjectives, " - a bastard and had laughed at her and she got even. It was awful, Dad, she was laughing and crying at the same time."
Josef gathered his son into his arms and rocked him.
Animals had never shocked and surprised him like his fellow beings did. Mrs. Price? Wearing her husband's sweater? Designs on the caretaker? Maybe she knew he was the owner. Scorned? But - murder?
He sighed and felt a bit afraid of living in such close proximity with other humans.
And into this feeling came a new awareness. He found in himself a need to share with his son what he had learned from the wilderness, to go back to it, if only for awhile. Maybe to restore his faith, somehow. He only now realized how much it had meant to share it with Ben's mother. Perhaps in the winter he'd take Ben to the country, introduce him to the weirdly wonderful feeling of snowshoes, go where it was clear enough to smell the snow.
He had not forgotten his woodsman skills but already he had straightened and stiffened, his son still in his arms. This was, after all, the city.

 

(originally published Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, July/Aug 2001

"Dad, I need your help."
Josef had not heard this often from his son across their ten-year acquaintance. It did not sound like an emergency but he put down his oily rag and peered at the boy over the top of his glasses.
"I want to find out who killed Mr. Bellecourt. I need you to open his apartment for me."
Well, had Josef not learned that the infrequency of Ben's requests were often coupled with their startling aspects. He removed his glasses, taking care not to get his tung-oiled fingers on the lenses.
"I have no key," he said simply.
"You don't need a key," his son reminded him. The boy took a breath and relaxed a bit. He had thought he could count on his father to hear him out and help him but this was a rather unusual thing to ask, even he could see that. Good old Dad. A year or so ago Ben had looked up from doodling on a piece of paper to announce, "Hey, Good Old Dad spells God!" Josef had never forgotten that. He was on the shadiest side of religious but this faith of his son had affected him.
"Explain."
Ben knew it was not the issue of the key that was being questioned - they both knew from whom Josef had acquired the skill of getting past a locked door - and he was ready for this.
"I liked Mr. Bellecourt. He was a nice man and a good caretaker and he lived in this building, like family. I feel I must try to honour his death." The old country rested lightly on Ben's Canadian shoulders but he could pull it around him like a cloak when he wished and he knew it influenced his father.
Josef put his glasses back on, picked up his cloth and made some desultory movements across the seat of the fine oak chair Ben had found in a dumpster and which, now stripped of paint, looked like honey under the oil. "What do you want inside his apartment for? Have the police finished there?"
"Of course. I just want to look around."
"But, Ben, the police will have found anything there is to be found."
"I need to do something. Please, Papa."
So, he was to bring out the full range of his arsenal, was he, this son of his. Papa, even. Josef sighed and then he nodded. "This afternoon, when Miz. Shouldoon is out shopping."
"Thanks, Dad."
* * *
Josef opened the locked door swiftly and silently, then pocketed the compliant little tool, all too aware of Ben's eager eyes. It was Ben's mother from whom he had learned this procedure, kept back this tool with some hope, perhaps, of changing her, and he was afraid the boy had inherited more than just curiosity. He had used it on two occasions when locked out of the apartment and regretted having shown it to Ben.
Ben sidled up to the window and looked out and down. "Oh no, Miz Shouldhavedone is down there talking to that woman across the way. What if she comes back and decides to come up here?"
Josef resisted an urge to laugh. "That's not likely but I'll stand lookout," he said mildly and stood where he could see the apartment manager in conversation six flights below. He wondered if she was peppering her sentences with, "I should have stayed home" or "I should have done my groceries yesterday" which is why she came by the name adjustment
Mr. Bellecourt might work in the basement, might have been killed in the basement but he lived on the top floor in what in a grander apartment block would have been called the penthouse suite. There was no access to it by the elevator but by an out- of- the-way stairway from the fifth floor. Most tenants did not know the apartment existed or that the caretaker lived there. He'd been there ever since Josef moved in nearly a decade before.
"Don't touch anything," Josef said.
"Dad," Ben said, using three scornful syllables.
Ben walked around the suite and when Miz Shouldoon had moved off down the street, definitely on her way shopping, Josef gave his attention back indoors as well. Many years ago he'd learned the benefits of focusing on one thing at a time. Now, as he wandered visually around the apartment, he was surprised.
"Nice stuff," said Ben, summing it all up.
Mr. Bellecourt looked like a custodian, dressed like a custodian, talked like a custodian. His home did not look like him at all. Everything was fine, very fine indeed. Quality beyond a custodian's wages. Josef wondered his suspicions. But he said nothing.
He followed Ben into the bedroom, watched as his son got down on hands and knees and looked under the bed, said nothing as he used the tail end of his shirt to open the door of the bathroom, walked back with him into the kitchen. When the boy dropped down and, flat on his stomach, stared under the refrigerator and stove, Josef did give a chuckle.
"There's something under here," Ben hissed into the floor.
"What?"
"I can't tell. Hand me something to swish it out with."
Josef opened a couple of drawers (using his knuckles on the outer edge instead of fingers on the handle, giving himself a wry grin at the action) and when he found a long wooden spoon he handed it to Ben. Ben swished and sneezed as he dislodged dust and then a lump of something shot out and across the floor, coming to rest under the table. Josef stretched under his foot and kicked out a lint-covered cat toy, a catnip mouse. Ben got up off the floor and they both stared at the object.
"Mr. Bellecourt did not have a cat," Ben said in almost a whisper. "This could be important."
Josef did not risk nudging Ben's fantastic imagination by inquiring how a felt mouse could figure in a murder. Instead he said, "I think he looked after Mrs. Wall's cat the time she went to Hawai."
"I don't remember that."
"That might have been the year you went to summer camp."
Ben made a huge grimace at the memory.
"I still think it could be a clue. Somehow."
Josef did not answer. He was wiping off the spoon, dust and possible fingerprints, and returning it to the drawer. Ben was staring at the mouse, wondering if he should take it with him. Finally he kicked it back under the frig and shrugged in answer to his father's look.
"Thanks, Pops. I guess I've seen all there is to see." He walked back to the door. Josef followed. Pops, he said to himself. Pops!
Ben went off to the scene of the crime - "seen of the crime, s-e-e-n, I'm going to see what I can see, get it Dad?" Josef got it.
He went back to his refinishing on the little terrace at the side of the building. He made an adequate living uncovering the soul of furniture people brought him or which he came by in various ways, like Ben's regular perusal of the local dumpsters. It was amazing what people threw out. "Just some old thing I've had around for ages," was music to Josef's ears. In the old country he had been destined for law, his father's choice, but the war had changed many people's life plans, his own included and he had escaped west. He was not sorry.
The Chinese man who minded his two grandsons trotted onto the terrace and the trio took their usual seats on an old bench. Josef and he nodded and smiled but they shared not a word in a common language. All three of his audience watched solemnly and if he would have preferred not to have their rapt attention of his every movement he had learned to keep his concentration on his task. He wanted his energy to flow undistracted into the wood.
Mrs. Pendergast stuck her head into the enclosure but with a slight sniff did not come in because Mr. Lee and the two kids were there. Josef was glad. Mrs. Pendergast had no problem with verbosity. Josef suspected she was lonely and drank to fill the hours. He also suspected that Miz. Shouldoon was gladly reaping the rewards of her kindness in allowing him the use of this outdoor space as a work area because he was available to those tenants who would otherwise presume on her time.
When he had applied sufficient oil he took the chair from the terrace space, nodding and smiling a farewell to the Lee's as he left, and carried it carefully up to his own balcony to dry. Then he would polish it, over and over, make the patina shine. Grandma's Giveaways down the street would sell it. Grandma's Giveaways were anything but.
Ben exploded into the kitchen as Josef was making himself a cup of coffee.
"Dad, I thought you were downstairs, I can never find you when I want you, you know that guy who took over Mr. Bellecourt's job, you know what he told me?"
"Has 'that guy' not got a name, Ben?"
"He never told me. You know what he told me? He told me Mr. Bellecourt owned this building. And maybe more apartments, too. He was the owner, Dad. Not the janitor. I mean he was the janitor, too, but ..." Words finally failed him and he collapsed on a chair at the table and stared at his father. Josef stared back.
"This is very important news," Josef said.
"But what does it mean?"
"I don't know."
"I can see someone killing a caretaker but I can't see someone killing someone who owns a big apartment building like this. I mean not in the basement like he was nobody. I mean..." Ben stopped, puzzled and confused, the facts playing havoc with his preconceptions. He dragged himself off the chair and went down the hall. Josef could hear the creaking of the old army cot, another found object, that Ben insisted on using for a bed. He'd taken this knotty problem to his own particular haven and if he didn't solve it immediately he would likely fall asleep.
The owner. Josef did some pondering of his own. That far more explained the quality of the penthouse. Of course - a penthouse. He had thought the custodian's wage might be augmented by drug dealings. This ownership put a whole new slant on it. But who had killed him and why. Coffee finished, Josef started back down to the terrace, glancing into Ben's room as he passed. Ben was not asleep. He raised his eyebrows at Josef.
"There's some salmon in the frig. And if you're going by the store we need milk."
"Not hungry."
Nose was on the terrace, looking at a bureau someone had, sadly, stored in a basement. "Handles are worth more than the piece," he said, peering into the drawers and grinning at the coffee grounds Josef had scattered there to try to get rid of the musty smell: he thought it a useless effort.
His name was Alan but everyone called him Nose. Why, Josef had never inquired. His breathing apparatus was not a noteworthy feature. Ben, with great delight, claimed it was because the man made his living as a picker, a person who went around to sales and answered advertisements and often just snooped around and would ask someone if he or she wanted to sell that old desk he could see in the garage or possibly something in the cellar that was in the way or likely rotting away with unhealthy mould.
"Nose is a picker, get it, Dad?" Ben had said. Josef just rolled his eyes at him.
"Got anything for me today?" Josef asked after they had both admired the dozen bakelite handles on the dresser.
"Nope. Just came from the auction. Too many dealers there today. They can outbid the middleman every time. Hey, I heard ol' Joe owned this place, eh? And that maybe one of his kids did him in for the inheritance."
"Who told you that?"
"Heard two guys talking in Mac's"
"You should have been called Ears."
* * *
In the middle of the afternoon, while he was fixing two of the drawer runners on the bureau, Mrs. Pendergast came by and he listened to her monologue for half an hour or so but then his patience wore too thin and his concentration suffered. He straightened and stretched and excused himself. She continued to talk but he knew she would eventually realize he was gone and wander away herself.
He intended to idly amble around the parking lot, giving himself a bit of exercise, mentally smiling at how much he had changed: now he considered this exercise - for a while in his life a walk of ten miles - and back - would have been how he got his mail. And not on cemented ground.
As he passed his truck, parked in a corner of the lot, he glanced into the back Then stopped. Someone had stood on the blue tarp that he had loosely thrown on the empty bed. There were no clear footprints, merely indentations.
Josef had spent three years in the northern wilderness, alone. His natural power of observation had become finely tuned when so much of his survival depended on it.
He stood and stared thoughtfully at the telltale signs on the tarp. The woodsman skills he had acquired itched out from their dormant state. Under normal circumstances he would have registered the information and perhaps checked the truck for any signs of tampering: there was nothing to steal in the flat bed. But a man had been killed a day or so earlier. This was his own 'catnip mouse' and he was not about to kick it out of sight.
He was not aware of it but his posture altered as he began to sweep his eyes around, looking for other signs. In the city his body had adjusted to pavement and noise and many other humans, his stance was straight and rather stiff. Now he relaxed into the posture of the wilderness, resilient, open, directing awareness outward rather than closing it down to cope with too much urban input
Josef wondered why someone had stood in the back of his truck facing the cement wall that led into the area where the garbage cans were kept. If he could track the next movements of the person it might show a purpose. He had not had the truck out for a week or more. It had not rained. He walked slowly around the truck looking at the ground but it told him nothing. The cement block between truck and bushes had been used to climb up onto the truck bed, he could see the slight scraping away of city grime on its edge by a foot pushing off from it. Hands must have been covered because there were no prints on the dust of his truck but there were dusted spots.
And the person had not simply walked across the tarp and climbed onto the cab roof. She or he (the experience with Ben's mother had altered his pronoun priority with regards to law breakers, or law benders, Hilary's term for her way of life) had stood there long enough to leave a definite imprint on the tarp into the soft surface of sawdust below, the leftovers from hauling a storm-fallen tree he'd sawed, collected and sold.
The trail was obvious - at least to him - over the roof of the cab and down onto the hood. It must have been made at night or the person would have realized he was 'dusting' a path, not to mention the possibility of being seen. Wouldn't he? Josef felt that man was far less aware of making tracks than a non-human was.
He had thought perhaps a child had needed the block for access but the imprints in the tarp and the size of the smudge marks in the dust across the top of the truck told him it was likely a short, heavyset adult. At times, in the woods, he would get such a clear image of the cougar or moose he was trailing with regards to height and weight that the actual sight of the animal was like the development of a photograph from a negative. Few surprises.
And sometimes he also was forewarned of character, the marks showing friskiness or stealth, nobility, age.
The woods had taught him more than his home had, more than formal schooling, more than the two contrasting societies in which he had lived. The woods had required him to become still and then what he wanted or needed to know would come pouring in to him. And at the end of those three years of solitude Hilary had come into his life and his learning had continued.
He left the front of the truck and walked around the cement wall into the utility area. Joe Bellecourt had been struck down a few feet from here, inside the area of the basement that led to the storage rooms.
Josef stared up at the wall from this angle. Down at the wall. Slight skid marks of toes sliding until the entire body length was reached - the person was short - and then ending as he dropped. He looked at what he could see so plainly and wondered if the police could, or would.
Back around the wall again and this time he stood on the hood, carefully, non- intrusively, and surveyed the wall. Teeny grey pieces of fluff were caught in the rough surface of the top. Some wooly article of clothing had 'shed' as its wearer climbed across.
Before coming down from the hood he paused and looked around. Why had someone gone over the wall instead of around it? Why had someone stood on the truck bed? What senses were being attended to? He could see easily over the wall but he was tall: a shorter person would just clear eye level, he thought. Josef hunkered down eight inches or so and was just able to see over the wall directly into the area leading to the storage lockers, the garbage chute for papers, the recycling bins. But would not a person be in full view if his intent was to spy. Maybe not at night.
Josef wondered at the acoustics. So often in the woods he had depended on his hearing, on his ability to listen deeply and sort through the various levels of sound. He gathered up some small stones, climbed back into the truck, threw the stones over the wall one by one and listened. Yes, he could hear them as they dropped in the passage.
And then he noticed movement on one of the balconies and realized he was being observed. A tenant he did not know was watching him so he gave a casual wave - the man looked embarrassed and went back inside. At nighttime the area was not well lit. But still, to climb up on his truck and stand there required courage or desperation or both. And why climb over the wall. Perhaps someone had come into the parking area and the quickest exit, up and over, was needed. He could read the signs clearly but how well could he interpret what he saw. And he needed more information.
Best, for the moment, to just follow the trail, see where the person had gone. Or where he had come from. Was it possible after two days. Such a cold trail. And in the city.
He stood there longer, relaxing, opening. He began to smell the sawdust, to feel the subtle wind and identify its direction, to sense what a man might do next. To think with the body and feel with the mind.
Josef spent the next hour patiently tracking the one who had likely killed Joe Bellecourt. He had no idea of motive. Animals seemed to kill from a far more basic need and Josef was often disturbed by his race's behaviour in this regard. Perhaps Mr. Bellecourt had done nothing more than catch a glimpse of a restaurant kitchen help spitting into the soup pot like had happened last month where the youth had tracked down the man who saw him and tried to knife him.
Around the parking area, the perimeter, the central drive, the two paths between the stalls he walked, almost crouched, depending almost entirely on vision and the instinct that comes when intent is so focused. In the woods he would be tracking a fresh path and his nose or his ears might give him a clue. But not here. Not after two days. Still he persisted. Soon people would be returning from work and the parking lot would fill with cars.
He went out onto the street, around the block, stood at the bus stop and then in the shelter, waved on the bus that stopped for him and shrugged an apology to the driver's "make up your mind, buddy," glare. The bus, he supposed, could have been an exit or an entrance for the killer. Mr. Bellecourt had been hit with something like a hammer. Maybe there wasn't much or any blood. But this was all speculation. He needed visible signs.
Returning to the apartment grounds he realized how limited the choices of trails were in the city. In the wilderness an animal, human or otherwise, had almost limitless directions. Mountains could be climbed, streams forded, rough terrain negotiated. If you were willing and able to navigate you could go almost anywhere. In the city, passage between the buidlings was easy, on straight, flat avenues. But the choices were limited.
Back in the parking lot Josef now walked between the cars, glancing into each one. He almost missed it. A tiny grey piece of fluff on the trim above the driver's door as if someone had perhaps put a coffee cup on the roof of the car and retrieved it, a sleeve brushing the trim, a piece of the fabric caught on the roughness. The blue compact belonging to the couple in 416.
It was not some kitchen help who had killed Joe Bellecourt. Josef suddenly had an image of the short, rotund man in 416 wearing an old grey cardigan, the sleeves rolled but occasionally falling past his wrists. They could be pulled over hands to protect, to disguise, to smudge.
He did not touch the fluff. Josef went back up to his apartment and thought about phoning the police. He had pulled the bead on his prey and he was sick at heart. Familiarity between hunted and hunter had disturbed him once or twice before but that was when the characters were man and beast. He had never tracked his own species. It was devastating.
Ben was not there so he got out his pipe for a rare smoke and went onto the balcony. He let himself think of Hilary. She had been hovering on the edge of his consciousness and now he let her in.
They had first exchanged a few words in the store where he took his furs for sale and trade and the next day she had shown up at his cabin. He had not been too surprised.
She was a professional thief, a break and enter artist, a fun-loving, complicated, restless individual who took pride in her work - "it's not everyone I can brag to about it, of course," - and was taking a little holiday when they met. "Thought it prudent to cool my heels for a bit, far, far from the crowds."
They had spent a year together in the wilderness. He had shown her a way of life as foreign to her as a new country; she had been both attracted and repelled. And, in some strange way he still didn't understand, she had healed the hurt he had been unconsciously carrying at having to leave his native land.
They had ridden on the happiness of the thrill of discovery, she of the situation both good and bad, he mostly of self.
Her pregnancy came as a shock - "I was told I couldn't have children and I never have," she said in initial disbelief. "It's likely just the flu. Or maybe some sort of growth."
"Wait and see," Josef had been courteous in his laughter and when she decided he was right in his assessment of her symptoms she agreed to have the baby if Josef would take care of it.
Neither of them expected the child to be born so swiftly and suddenly. Josef had delivered his son. The experience was a precious gift. And it had given him something to hold when Hilary left. But it had brought him from the wilderness to the city.
Ben thought his mother was dead and Josef let him think that. For himself he did not know but he felt she must be or she would have been in touch over the years. He had watched her face as she tended the baby for that first while.
If she were in prison then she might as well be dead because he could not imagine her living with any reality in a cage. She was, in a way, far wilder than the animals he had come to know, and if he had provided a sanctuary for her, he had never felt he had tamed any part of her.
Ben should be home anytime.
Josef knew who had stood on his truck, climbed the wall, gone into the basement, hammered the life out of Mr. Bellecourt. He hadn't been able to work forward to an apartment but he had worked backward to a car. To him the trail was clear. He would wait to call the police until Ben came home. He had some notion of preparing his son. Perhaps he was preparing himself.
He liked Bill Price, had known him across three or four years. Why in hell had he killed Joe Bellecourt? It would make far more sense if he had killed his wife. Josef did not like Missus Price, could never remember her name. Bill always called her, "the missus." She could slice a person up with her tongue and she had whittled Bill down to a sliver. Josef felt sorry for him and more than once had to turn away from the look in Bill's eyes as his wife belittled him in public. Who could say how she treated him in private.
Once the Price's apartment had flooded and Bill had asked Josef's advice on a cabinet that had gotten wet but he had not invited him to see it. Later Josef had wondered idly to Miz Shouldoon how someone could let their bathtub overflow like that in the middle of the day.
"That's how she heats the place," Miz Shouldoon had informed him.
He had peered at her, puzzled.
She explained. "The hot water comes with the rent so in the cold weather she keeps filling the bathtub and sinks with hot water, buckets too, I expect, and the water heats the rooms."
Miz Shouldoon had laughed, then, at Josef's silent astonishment. "It takes all kinds," she said, "and I should have seen them all."
He thought about all this now. Perhaps Bill Price had finally freed himself. But at what cost. One prison to another.
Josef did not have to call the police. He would find out later that they had followed their own trail.
Ben once again shot into the apartment, eyes enormous. "Dad, the police, the police were here. They got the person who killed Mr. Bellecourt."
Josef felt a wave of sadness.
"They just took her away. She was screaming, Dad. And swearing. They had her in handcuffs, Dad."
"She?" Josef stared a frown.
"You know who it was, Dad. Mrs. Price."
"Mrs Price?"
"She was yelling that he was a - " Ben gulped and swallowed the adjectives, " - a bastard and had laughed at her and she got even. It was awful, Dad, she was laughing and crying at the same time."
Josef gathered his son into his arms and rocked him.
Animals had never shocked and surprised him like his fellow beings did. Mrs. Price? Wearing her husband's sweater? Designs on the caretaker? Maybe she knew he was the owner. Scorned? But - murder?
He sighed and felt a bit afraid of living in such close proximity with other humans.
And into this feeling came a new awareness. He found in himself a need to share with his son what he had learned from the wilderness, to go back to it, if only for awhile. Maybe to restore his faith, somehow. He only now realized how much it had meant to share it with Ben's mother. Perhaps in the winter he'd take Ben to the country, introduce him to the weirdly wonderful feeling of snowshoes, go where it was clear enough to smell the snow.
He had not forgotten his woodsman skills but already he had straightened and stiffened, his son still in his arms. This was, after all, the city.

Bubbles, bubble structure and clowning.

 

If you wet a flat surface like the kitchen counter or ledge in the bathtub and then blow bubbles onto it, they will sit there and not break. 

In the kids section of the library (a good place to start when browsing for information) I came across Experiments with Bubbles by Robert Gardner that explores the whys and wherefores of bubble behaviour.   Richard Flaverty's  and Tom Noddy's books were more playful.

All of the books alert you to the wonderful fact that if you wet a straw with bubble solution and stick it into an existing bubble - the bubble does not break!
And if you blow into the straw - the bubble gets bigger............

..........and bigger

If you dip the straw in bubble solution and 'load' it and then stick it into the bubble structure and blow - you can blow bubbles inside of bubbles inside of bubbles....   A bubble sculpture.  Fleeting.  Beautiful. 

My 'sister' in Toronto reminded me that wonderful bubbles can be blown using wet hands and a bar of soap and fingers in a circle for the wand.  Thanks, Olga!

What expanded upon a lifelong interest in bubbles and turned it into a fascination was, many years ago, taking a clowning workshop at the Y here in town.  It did, indeed, release the inner clown that all of us are said to have, and led to taking a bubble workshop.  A clown is allowed -heck, encouraged! - to check out all the nifty things of play, like bubbles.  And juggling.  And make-up and costumes.  And balloon modelling.

You discover things about yourself when you discover your clown character.  I would have thought the wig and face-paint and zany clothes offered a disguise.  It is quite the opposite. 

If you have any attraction toward clowning - look into it.  The workshop was the key for me.

I am not actively clowning at the moment (at least not in costume), and were I to do so again I would assume a different personality.  But the experience enhanced my life.

If you wet a flat surface like the kitchen counter or ledge in the bathtub and then blow bubbles onto it, they will sit there and not break. 

In the kids section of the library (a good place to start when browsing for information) I came across Experiments with Bubbles by Robert Gardner that explores the whys and wherefores of bubble behaviour.   Richard Flaverty's  and Tom Noddy's books were more playful.

All of the books alert you to the wonderful fact that if you wet a straw with bubble solution and stick it into an existing bubble - the bubble does not break!
And if you blow into the straw - the bubble gets bigger............

..........and bigger

If you dip the straw in bubble solution and 'load' it and then stick it into the bubble structure and blow - you can blow bubbles inside of bubbles inside of bubbles....   A bubble sculpture.  Fleeting.  Beautiful. 

My 'sister' in Toronto reminded me that wonderful bubbles can be blown using wet hands and a bar of soap and fingers in a circle for the wand.  Thanks, Olga!

What expanded upon a lifelong interest in bubbles and turned it into a fascination was, many years ago, taking a clowning workshop at the Y here in town.  It did, indeed, release the inner clown that all of us are said to have, and led to taking a bubble workshop.  A clown is allowed -heck, encouraged! - to check out all the nifty things of play, like bubbles.  And juggling.  And make-up and costumes.  And balloon modelling.

You discover things about yourself when you discover your clown character.  I would have thought the wig and face-paint and zany clothes offered a disguise.  It is quite the opposite. 

If you have any attraction toward clowning - look into it.  The workshop was the key for me.

I am not actively clowning at the moment (at least not in costume), and were I to do so again I would assume a different personality.  But the experience enhanced my life.

Bubbled

Bubbles observed; from the inside and out

Some of life incidents leave a shimmer in memory and when they recur in mind the body responds deeply with the feeling. Maybe all of life is like this, on some level, but some events are just, well - more shimmery.

Being encased in a bubble was one of these. I can't remember details of the situation now - it might have been a clowning workshop and the experience of having once been a clown  - but I do remember standing in a pool of bubble solution. Inside a hoop. The hoop was then drawn up in a smooth swoop; a bubble came with it; I was inside the bubble. Looking out.

There wasn't the mesmerizing sight of reflections on a sphere, the breath-holding fact of fragility, that one has when looking at a bubble floating in the air. No. This was quite different. Heart-stopping in a different way. I almost wanted to close my eyes and just feel the bubble as it surrounded me but it was just too exciting to miss seeing so I think I even forwent blinking.

I don't think we were given the chance to experience it more than once, seems to me there were people lined up, waiting. It only lasted a few seconds but those few seconds lasted an age. You know what I mean. There was also a scent. It wasn't soap. It wasn't anything I had smelled before or since. Maybe it was the fragrance of magic.

Comments

Some of life incidents leave a shimmer in memory and when they recur in mind the body responds deeply with the feeling. Maybe all of life is like this, on some level, but some events are just, well - more shimmery.

Being encased in a bubble was one of these. I can't remember details of the situation now - it might have been a clowning workshop and the experience of having once been a clown  - but I do remember standing in a pool of bubble solution. Inside a hoop. The hoop was then drawn up in a smooth swoop; a bubble came with it; I was inside the bubble. Looking out.

There wasn't the mesmerizing sight of reflections on a sphere, the breath-holding fact of fragility, that one has when looking at a bubble floating in the air. No. This was quite different. Heart-stopping in a different way. I almost wanted to close my eyes and just feel the bubble as it surrounded me but it was just too exciting to miss seeing so I think I even forwent blinking.

I don't think we were given the chance to experience it more than once, seems to me there were people lined up, waiting. It only lasted a few seconds but those few seconds lasted an age. You know what I mean. There was also a scent. It wasn't soap. It wasn't anything I had smelled before or since. Maybe it was the fragrance of magic.

Bubbles observed; from the inside and out

Some of life incidents leave a shimmer in memory and when they recur in mind the body responds deeply with the feeling. Maybe all of life is like this, on some level, but some events are just, well - more shimmery.

Being encased in a bubble was one of these. I can't remember details of the situation now - it might have been a clowning workshop and the experience of having once been a clown  - but I do remember standing in a pool of bubble solution. Inside a hoop. The hoop was then drawn up in a smooth swoop; a bubble came with it; I was inside the bubble. Looking out.

There wasn't the mesmerizing sight of reflections on a sphere, the breath-holding fact of fragility, that one has when looking at a bubble floating in the air. No. This was quite different. Heart-stopping in a different way. I almost wanted to close my eyes and just feel the bubble as it surrounded me but it was just too exciting to miss seeing so I think I even forwent blinking.

I don't think we were given the chance to experience it more than once, seems to me there were people lined up, waiting. It only lasted a few seconds but those few seconds lasted an age. You know what I mean. There was also a scent. It wasn't soap. It wasn't anything I had smelled before or since. Maybe it was the fragrance of magic.

Summertime Egg Cosy

 

Summertime egg cosy

We are in the midst of a heat wave and I got to thinking that an egg cosy in a linen yarn would be more suitable than wool.

So I knit this one.  

Tomorrow  is my Eldest Son's Birthday  and he gave me a cute little egg  cosy on my birthday many years ago.... which I still have.    

Happy Birthday,  Kaz!

 

 

We are in the midst of a heat wave and I got to thinking that an egg cosy in a linen yarn would be more suitable than wool.

So I knit this one.  

Tomorrow  is my Eldest Son's Birthday  and he gave me a cute little egg  cosy on my birthday many years ago.... which I still have.    

Happy Birthday,  Kaz!

 

We are in the midst of a heat wave and I got to thinking that an egg cosy in a linen yarn would be more suitable than wool.

So I knit this one.  

Tomorrow  is my Eldest Son's Birthday  and he gave me a cute little egg  cosy on my birthday many years ago.... which I still have.    

Happy Birthday,  Kaz!

 

Sunflower seeds

 

Feat with sunflower seeds

Grandkids can remind us of things we forgot we could do.  Such was the case with sunflower seeds and how to open them without needing to use hands.

I forget what inspired the discussion - we tend to gladly embrace tangents and follow them where they will lead - but I told them how I could put a bunch of  sunflower  seeds  in my mouth and let my teeth and tongue do the work of shelling the seeds, spitting the shells out, eating the seed that had been shelled,  while keeping the rest in mouth and choosing the next one to be shelled and eaten.

They looked impressed and wanted to see me do it.  The only sunflower seeds I had were the all black ones purchased for the birds which are not meant for humans; likely something to do with sanitation.  So the show and tell had to be put on hold.

A few days ago I spotted these in the grocery store.  I can still do it!   I can hardly wait to share with the grandboys. I imagine  contests will ensue to see how far we can spit the shells.  

And I will tell them about riding on a bus in the States where the driver had a bag of sunflower seeds on the floor by his feet and a paper bag beside this and what he would do was pop a handful of the unshelled seeds in his mouth and work them around his teeth and tongue and then, a few minutes later, open his mouth and put all the shells into his hand and dispose of  them in the paper bag.  He then seemed to eat the shelled seeds so maybe he stored them in his cheeks like a chipmunk.

Grandkids can remind us of things we forgot we could do.  Such was the case with sunflower seeds and how to open them without needing to use hands.

I forget what inspired the discussion - we tend to gladly embrace tangents and follow them where they will lead - but I told them how I could put a bunch of  sunflower  seeds  in my mouth and let my teeth and tongue do the work of shelling the seeds, spitting the shells out, eating the seed that had been shelled,  while keeping the rest in mouth and choosing the next one to be shelled and eaten.

They looked impressed and wanted to see me do it.  The only sunflower seeds I had were the all black ones purchased for the birds which are not meant for humans; likely something to do with sanitation.  So the show and tell had to be put on hold.

A few days ago I spotted these in the grocery store.  I can still do it!   I can hardly wait to share with the grandboys. I imagine  contests will ensue to see how far we can spit the shells.  

And I will tell them about riding on a bus in the States where the driver had a bag of sunflower seeds on the floor by his feet and a paper bag beside this and what he would do was pop a handful of the unshelled seeds in his mouth and work them around his teeth and tongue and then, a few minutes later, open his mouth and put all the shells into his hand and dispose of  them in the paper bag.  He then seemed to eat the shelled seeds so maybe he stored them in his cheeks like a chipmunk.

Feat with sunflower seeds

Grandkids can remind us of things we forgot we could do.  Such was the case with sunflower seeds and how to open them without needing to use hands.

I forget what inspired the discussion - we tend to gladly embrace tangents and follow them where they will lead - but I told them how I could put a bunch of  sunflower  seeds  in my mouth and let my teeth and tongue do the work of shelling the seeds, spitting the shells out, eating the seed that had been shelled,  while keeping the rest in mouth and choosing the next one to be shelled and eaten.

They looked impressed and wanted to see me do it.  The only sunflower seeds I had were the all black ones purchased for the birds which are not meant for humans; likely something to do with sanitation.  So the show and tell had to be put on hold.

A few days ago I spotted these in the grocery store.  I can still do it!   I can hardly wait to share with the grandboys. I imagine  contests will ensue to see how far we can spit the shells.  

And I will tell them about riding on a bus in the States where the driver had a bag of sunflower seeds on the floor by his feet and a paper bag beside this and what he would do was pop a handful of the unshelled seeds in his mouth and work them around his teeth and tongue and then, a few minutes later, open his mouth and put all the shells into his hand and dispose of  them in the paper bag.  He then seemed to eat the shelled seeds so maybe he stored them in his cheeks like a chipmunk.

Breathing in the sun and the breeze

                                             
When you do this......

....you can't help but reach out and gather that sun-warmed, breeze-blown towel into your hands and bury face in it, breathing in the fragrance.

 

                                             
When you do this......

....you can't help but reach out and gather that sun-warmed, breeze-blown towel into your hands and bury face in it, breathing in the fragrance.

Hat?Oh Summer Version

Hat?oh! Summer version

Unfinished needlework projects are not uncommon fibre archeology finds unearthed at thrift stores and this was one.  The center had been finished and the background, in a cream,  barely started.  The back is as lovely as the front with all the ends woven in and I suspect the person who started to fill in the background was different from the one who did the flowers but gave up after two or three rows.  I am touched by the amount of time and work and decided to 'rescue' it, honour it,  by turning it into a hat?oh!

It was cut into a 15 inch diameter circle,  zigzagged around  the circumference,  sewn to a 15 inch  circle of linen,  turned right side out,  edges left free.

Bring on the sun!

Unfinished needlework projects are not uncommon fibre archeology finds unearthed at thrift stores and this was one.  The center had been finished and the background, in a cream,  barely started.  The back is as lovely as the front with all the ends woven in and I suspect the person who started to fill in the background was different from the one who did the flowers but gave up after two or three rows.  I am touched by the amount of time and work and decided to 'rescue' it, honour it,  by turning it into a hat?oh!

It was cut into a 15 inch diameter circle,  zigzagged around  the circumference,  sewn to a 15 inch  circle of linen,  turned right side out,  edges left free.

Bring on the sun!

It's Summer and here is a Haiku

HAIKU SUMMER EVENING

Moon is a slice of
Honeydew on indigo
Plate! Stars are the seeds.

 

Moon is a slice of
Honeydew on indigo
Plate! Stars are the seeds.

Joshua and His Gang. Chapter Ten: An End and a Beginning

Chapter Ten: An End and a Beginning

John walked away humming to himself. It was one of the tunes his mother used to sing to him as a baby and it made him feel good when he was feeling bad. First Sam in a tizzy and now the whole gang. He thought it might take a great deal of humming to make him feel okay again.

As he turned onto Mr. Ray's street he saw the Hermit come out of his gate and walk up the other way. He was carrying the string bag that he used for vegetables and fruit so John knew he was going to the Market off Talbot Street.

When John got to Mr. Ray's house his feet somehow took him up the path and along the side and into the backyard. Then he found himself sitting beside the log he was carving. It calmed him to run his fingers over the wood he had shaped.

And as he sat there, stroking his creation, the humming reminded him of another part of his childhood and he let himself remember. He wasn't sure if it had really happened or if it were a dream. He was only three when it had happened so it could have been either.

His two brothers, who were much older than he was, had cut wonderful wings out of heavy cardboard in an attempt to fly. It had not worked. And when Leonard tried jumping off the tool shed roof with the wings on and had sprained his ankle as he fell, the boys left the wings in the yard. John found them.

He did not know that wings were supposed to have the narrow end by your shoulders and the wide ends by your hands. He put them on upside down. Wrapped the elastic strap around his fat little tummy. Pushed his arms through where his hands were supposed to go. Then he ran madly across the yard toward the ravine and as he fully expected to, he began to fly. Once over the ravine, past the old railway tracks, back around the dried creek bed, and again across the ravine.

It was not easy to fly because he was not a bird. He was a human in flight and he had to work to keep moving smoothly. He thought that it was like the one time he had ridden his cousin's little two-wheeled bike and would have crashed if his brother hadn't been running along side and holding it. You had to keep pedaling hard to keep it going. The same with flying. It was fun but tiring. He liked being able to see the world from up high. He liked the feel of the wind on his body. He liked how it felt to glide and catch a little puff of air and sort of hiccup in the sky. He would have liked to fly higher, to fly all over the town, to see how high he could go.

But John was tired and hungry so he swooped back over the ravine into his own backyard, dropped the wings, and went in to supper. He never flew again. But somehow he knew he could if he wanted to.

***

John walked by Ingrid's house and looked at it but he did not see her so he continued on. It never occurred to him to call on her; no one ever seemed to call on Ingrid; she called on other people. It never occurred to him to wonder why.

Ingrid saw John walk by but she kept behind the curtains of her bedroom window so he did not see her. Then she flopped backward onto the perfectly made bed. She was tired and her head hurt a bit. It was partly the thought of school and the new teacher who was said to be strict but mostly it was the gang being so out of sorts with each other. Whatever had possessed her to say what she did about them never coming to her house. They didn't but that wasn't the point. And now she had been in Hugh's house; easy as pie he had shown them his room. Or at least where his room would be. And he was going to have sleepovers. She raised her arms and legs and let them fall onto the bed with a loud groan. Life was just too complicated and getting worse, she started to think and then her mother startled her by asking, "What's wrong?"

"Don't you know it's impolite not to knock on a closed door?" Ingrid said, but not aloud. "Nothing." is what she said out loud. "I mean I have a bit of a headache."

"I could hear you groaning. Get your feet off the bedspread with your shoes on. You know better than that." Ingrid was kicking off her sneakers as her mother was speaking. "And if you're going to lie on top of the bed in the middle of the day don't forget to make it smooth again when you get up."

"Why? I'm just going to muss it again when I go to bed," Ingrid asked, but again she did it silently. The unspoken words added to her headache.

Her mother looked at her daughter and walked over to stand beside the bed. She put her hand on Ingrid's forehead. "You are a bit hot. Do you want an aspirin? I don't want you to get sick and miss school."

Ingrid sighed and something about the sound caused her mother to stare at her for a moment. "It's not easy growing up," she said as she turned and walked toward the door and for a moment Ingrid wondered if she had just imagined that she heard her mother say this. Her mother never said things like this.

"Maybe you should invite some of your friends over for a visit to make you feel better," was the next shocking thing her mother said just as she was about to leave Ingrid's room.

"They'd mess things up and you'd be mad and maybe tell them off," Ingrid said and she was horrified to realize that this she had said out loud.

Her mother stopped and looked back at her. She wasn't looking hurt or angry as Ingrid was expecting but quite surprised.

"I am a bit of a neat and tidy freak, aren't I?" she admitted.

She didn't say anything else but she did give a bit of a shrug and a sort of grin before softly closing Ingrid's door and walking down the hall.

Ingrid's head now began to pound. Well, at least her mother hadn't said, "Those friends of yours" in that tone of voice that made Ingrid feel awful because she thought she knew exactly what friends she meant and why she said it. John and Piya and Sam. Then Ingrid wondered if she was mistaken, if her mother had ever said this or was it just that the one time her aunt did, her visiting aunt, that it had been such an upsetting occurrence that it had caused a spreading stain.

And Hugh was going to have sleepovers. The girls wouldn’t be asked, she knew that. Hugh was a boy. She’d never thought of boys as boys before.

Oh, life was just too complicated. She yawned. If she went to sleep, had a bit of nap, she wouldn't have to think.

She was just dozing off when there was a knock at her bedroom door.

"Come in, Mom," she said, wondering what now and how weird that her mother had knocked.

But it was Lucy.

Ingrid was so surprised she sat straight up, flung her legs over and off the bed and began to put on her sneakers to cover her confusion.

"You mom said for me to come on up. She told me what room was yours. Hey, it's neat." Lucy was looking around at the pink ruffles and pretty pictures and fluffy bedside rug. "You even have your own desk. Sometimes I wish I were an only child like you and Hugh," she was saying.

Ingrid was no longer the least bit tired.

"Sometimes I wish I had a sister or brother," she replied.

She started to neaten the bedspread and Lucy walked around the bed and helped her.

"Oh, your mom said to tell you that she wasn't going to put down papers for me to walk on, whatever that means."

Ingrid opened her mouth in surprise and then she laughed. "Oh, she's a neat freak. She says so herself."

It felt good to say this but she didn't really feel all that comfortable discussing her mother so she leaped from the frying pan into the fire and asked, "Say, who do you think Hugh will have over for his sleepovers."

Lucy shrugged. "I don't know. Is that a real music box? Does it wind up? What does it play?"

Ingrid sighed, but to herself. "Look, I'll show you." she said. ***

Lucy knew darned well that Ingrid wanted to talk about Hugh; she had seen her blush and she remembered the look on Ellen's face when they first met Hugh and he had looked so foolish being introduced to Ingrid. And since then Lucy realized that Ellen did not want to talk about Hugh but she was interested to hear anything about him. Even after he had kidnapped the widow's dog. Lucy thought that once the girls went boy crazy that was going to be it for the gang. She knew Piya really liked Joshua but this wasn't the same: she seemed to like him in a motherly sort of way.

Lucy could do two things at once, she could think two things at once. So one part of her was being interested in the music box and other things in Ingrid's room and the other part of her was wondering what things would be like if suddenly the boys were BOYS and not just boys.

It made her scrunch up her face and when Ingrid asked if she was alright she said yes she was and wow, did Ingrid ever have a lot of books, almost as many as Ellen and they started to look through the bookshelf beside the desk while Lucy thought about Hugh and wondered if there was something wrong with her because she didn't think of him as a BOY at all.

For one thing she thought it was silly that he was mad at his parents for moving and didn't just tell them but acted weird. And to find out that Ellen had done the same thing by hiding her braces when they moved and pretending they were lost was something she was still feeling very nervous about. How could Ellen do that? How could, she, Lucy, not know about it? They were not only sisters, they were twins, for goodness sake.

For another thing she hated the goofy look Hugh got when he looked at Ingrid. Lucy hoped no one ever looked at her like that. She'd gag if they did; she was sure of it.

And half the time she couldn't understand what he was saying. Well, it was getting easier but you had to really listen when he spoke or you'd get confused.

And he had his own room.

She sighed, quietly (Ingrid was showing her her new school shoes), and thought maybe it was just Hugh, not all boys, and maybe some boys might be BOYS for her.

So she considered Joshua. No - he was definitely a boy. He wasn't what he seemed to be, or maybe he seemed to be what he wasn't, or maybe that was the same thing. Maybe he one day would be that - whatever that was.

Lucy decided he had potential. Piya pronounced it podenchill and Lucy had not ever corrected her (Ellen said it was rude of her to do this when she did it and Piya cried easily so she avoided upsetting her if she could) but Lucy did wonder if Piya would ever get it right. Too bad she didn't have an aunt who was an English teacher.

She thought about Sam and almost giggled. Sam! He would always be a little boy to her even when he got big, she was sure of it.

John? No, he was too different. And she knew there would be other problems here although she would not put them into words, even in her head.

Bill? He was nice, she guessed, but she didn't really know him or know about him. She knew he was a fusspot but he was big and strong and he had a way of listening to people when they talked that appealed to Lucy. And he had a wonderful laugh. Maybe there was BOY material here.

Lucy rolled her eyes slightly and decided that she was just very particular about BOYS and there was nothing wrong with her.

Ingrid broke into her secondary thoughts by saying, "I don't really think you're paying attention, you're making all sorts of faces, let's go and find the gang."

"Okay," Lucy agreed. "Sometimes I just pay attention elsewhere as well as here," she added by way of explanation.

"Oh, I see," Ingrid said, but she didn't really. She looked back at her bed just as they were leaving the room and saw that it was in perfect order again.

***

Sam was sitting on his bed with his back against the headboard, a red scarf with white polka-dots tied around his face and over his mouth.

His sister came in to get something from the drawer she rented from Sam in his dresser, noted his presence and smiled, but did not say anything. She sat down on his bed and began to go through the dresser drawer for the notebook she was wanting. Sam leaned a bit sideways and put his head against her back.

"Not feeling well?" she asked.
"I talk too loud." he said.
"Oh, I wondered if you had a toothache. Or were planning to rob a bank." Sam giggled and then he sighed. "I talk too loud." he said again.

"You do," she agreed.

"People don't like me when I yell."

"I guess not."

Sam snuggled closer against his sister's back. "They want to make a map and just put important places on it. My place is important."

His sister didn't say anything.

"Well, it is!" he said.

"I know." she replied.

"Hugh has his own room."

"You'd like your own room."

Sam rubbed his face against his sister's back; her sweater was soft and warm. He thought he would like his own room but he couldn't really imagine it.

"I talk too loud," he said again.
"You're not talking too loud now," she said.
He didn't say anything but she could feel him nodding his head in agreement.

***

Snookums was wriggling contentedly and wagging her tail as Ellen petted her. Ellen had seen the dog staring at her hopefully from the old wicker laundry basket where she sat and watched the world on a no-longer-used clothesline stand in the Widow Jenkins backyard and she had stopped and let herself in by the gate and sat on the stand and was now cuddling the dog.

She had been worried that Snookums might have been upset by being kidnapped - dognapped, as Lucy had corrected her - but she seemed to be fine. The Widow Jenkins had no idea Snookums had gone missing. Joshua had returned her before she was missed. It felt good to sit with the warm little dog and try not to think about the gang.

"Oh, I didn't see you out there," Snookums’ owner suddenly called out and Ellen looked to see the Widow Jenkins at the back door; she looked like she was tangled in yarn.

"Do you want some cookies? I think I have some left in the tin. My grandkids were here last week and they know where to find them."

Ellen put Snookums down and the dog took a moment to decide between following Ellen into the house or returning to her laundry basket where she could watch the world of her neighbourhood. She chose the basket.

The Widow Jenkins did have wool wound around her neck and down her front like a long necklace. "I'm untangling this darned mess," she explained, pulling a bunch of tangled yarn out of her dress pocket. "It was in a nice neat ball, I wound it as I undid a sweater that had holes in the sleeves but was good in the body of the sweater, but that darned dog got playing with it when I wasn't looking." She laughed and Ellen knew she was not all that mad.

When Ellen was sitting at the kitchen table with crackers and peanut butter (the cookie tin was empty: the grandkids had eaten them all) the Widow Jenkins continued to untangle the mass of wool and drape the straightened length around her neck.

Ellen picked up one of the knitting needles that was on the table and twirled it in her fingers like she had seen a magician do at a show at the library. You could sit quite comfortably with the Widow Jenkins and not talk. Ellen found it peaceful. Lucy said she found it nerve-wracking.

"Would you like to learn to knit?" the Widow Jenkins asked Ellen, not understanding the 'magic' of her twirling.

"I sort of know how," Ellen explained. "My grandma taught me but I didn't want to make potholders."

"I knit socks," the Widow Jenkins said and pointed to one half done on the counter where the phone was. "I knit when I talk on the phone."

It didn't look like a sock to Ellen. It looked like - a ballet slipper. "Could you teach me how to knit a ballet slipper?" she asked.

The Widow Jenkins thought about this for a time. She always gave a question careful thought. "I don't think a knit ballet slipper would be a good thing," she finally said. "Not stiff enough in the toe and too slippery on the sole. You taking ballet?"

"No, but my sister is. Sort of." Ellen said.

"Well, I have a pair of ballet slippers that my niece grew out of and left here in case my neighbour's girl could use them but she decided she wanted to be a majorette instead. I think I saw them in the hall closet. I'll go see."

She came back with a lovely pink pair of ballet slippers. "Do you think they will fit Lucy?"

"I don't know. My feet are bigger than hers." Ellen slipped off her sneaker and put on the shoe. It was a bit tight. It might be perfect for Lucy. She said this.

"Well, take them and see. I hope they do. No sense having them dance for no one in the closet." She laughed and Ellen chuckled as well.

"There she goes now," the Widow Jenkins said, who, from her kitchen window, had as perfect a view of the world as Snookums from her laundry basket.

Ellen looked out the window to see Lucy and Ingrid walking along the street.

"Hey," she called out the door and they stopped and waited for her as she thanked the Widow Jenkins for the crackers and the shoes.

"I got you some shoes for your ballet," Ellen said to Lucy showing her them. "And I got you a book on magic - Ingrid said you could borrow it."

The twins smiled at each other. Ingrid wasn't thinking as she usually did when she saw the twins together that she wished she had a sister. She was thinking of getting to Joshua's and seeing who might be there.

"Let's go," she said.

"Where?" Ellen asked.

"We're going to Joshua's. See if the gang is there. It's awful being out of sorts."

The twins hooked themselves one each to a side on Ingrid's shoulders and she put her arms around each of them and the three walked giggling and lopsided down the street.

***

Bill and his brother were sitting on the floor of the side porch folding newspapers into neat cylinders so they would more easily fit into the delivery bag and be easier to toss onto doorsteps. Bill and his brother weren't saying anything, at least not in words, but their expressions to each other said a lot.

They were listening to their mother having a phone conversation with her sister. She was in the hallway and there was an open window so they could hear clearly. They were quiet so she wouldn't know they were there.

"Well, of course she would think that, now wouldn't she," their mother was saying. They had to imagine what their aunt was saying some of the time but most of the time it was obvious. "I mean he hasn't been home early three nights last week and two already this week."

She then said a few "Mmm-mmm"'s and Bill and his brother looked at each other and raised their eyebrows. She was talking about Mr. and Mrs. Sanderson just down the block.

Bill had once heard his mother say that it wasn't gossiping if you didn't say anything bad about a person and since then he realized she skillfully skirted the issue. Mr. Sanderson hadn't been home late, she hadn't said that, she had just said he hadn't been home early. It was confusing but it sort of made sense. It worried him that this was so. But he didn't seem to mind this kind of worry.

Then she said, "Oh, they're both fine" and Bill and his brother cut their eyes to each other. Now she was going to talk about them. At least they hoped so. They didn't believe eavesdroppers never heard any good about themselves. She was a braggy sort of mother.

"Well, no, he hasn't been told yet, but they think the middle of September, that was the earliest they could do the surgery."

Bill and his brother immediately stopped folding papers and stared at each other. Surgery? What surgery? On which one?

For awhile their mom just kept saying, "Uh-huh, mmm, yes, well, no, I don't think so."

Then she said, "Oh, you'd better go and see who's there, then. Talk to you later." And she hung up.

Bill and his brother started to fold papers again but very slowly.

"What do you think she was talking about?" Bill asked his brother.

His brother shrugged.

"I don't need any surgery. Do I?" He would have bitten his nails without worrying what his mother would say if his hands hadn't been occupied folding papers.

"Likely wasn't talking about us at all," his brother, who seemed not to worry, ever, about anything, said.

They thought their mother had gone back into the kitchen but she was, in fact, still sitting in the hallway untangling the phone cord and she heard her sons talking. She knew how Bill would continue to worry (she wished Ken had half more of the worrying knack and Bill half less) and she knew she could ease it this time.

"We were talking about my brother and his son, Agnes had asked how they were doing," she called out so they could hear her, "and their dog is going in to the veterinarian to have its, um, operation so it won't roam around so much."

Bill and his brother did not say anything, just looked at each other with guilty grins. "You're welcome," their mother called out into the silence.
"Thanks, Ma," they both said. And Bill scooted away.
***

When Piya walked home she went by Joshua's house, as she always did, but she did not see him and wondered where he had gone after they all left Hugh's. She had stopped at Kresge's to see how the guppies were doing - they seemed to be fine; the babies were definitely growing bigger. And Mrs. Mabel had commented on her earrings, the shavings Piya had forgotten to remove.

She hated it when the gang argued. She hated to see Joshua upset.

She stopped in front of her house and stared up at it. Suddenly she had the thought that she would be able to see Joshua's house very clearly from the attic in her house. His house was on the street that jutted into her street but from up high it should be visible.

The trouble was she had no idea how to get into her attic. But there had to be a way.

Her mother was in the garden doing something so Piya went straight upstairs and started looking at the ceiling for an opening that she might not have seen before because she hadn't been looking for it. Her aunt the doctor said people often didn't see what was right in front of their noses until it was pointed out to them.

There were no openings in the hall or any of the bedrooms or the bathroom. Next she tried the closets. No luck there, either. The only thing left was the linen cupboard in the hallway. Nothing there. She sighed and was backing out from there when her skirt got hooked on a nail or sliver of wood and as she was freeing it she happened to glance up and it was then she saw the small door in the wall, not the ceiling, high up, in front of the shelves.

For an adult to get in there they would have to take all the sheets and blankets and towels and boxes off the shelves and get a ladder. Or maybe just get a ladder - there might be space enough in front of the shelves.

Piya thought for a moment and then she simply climbed the shelves like a ladder and lifted the latch on the door and pushed it forward and open.

Yes - the attic. She had to lean forward and brace her arms on the floor of the attic and then take a deep breath of bravery and sort of let go with her feet and pull herself into the attic space with her arms. But she did it.

She then gave a huge sigh of relief and almost sneezed in the dust.

There were things in the attic she had never seen before and decided they were from the people who had owned the house before her parents did. Likely her parents did not know this was up here. They certainly wouldn't think Piya was up here. She giggled softly to herself and walked over to the window that looked toward Joshua's house.

Yes! She could see his house clearly now. The whole front of it and part of the side. And far along the street. The window was dusty but it opened easily and she knelt on the attic floor and leaned her head and shoulders through it.

Now she could watch Joshua from her very own house. She settled contentedly and began to watch. Oh, there he was now. On his verandah. He must have been home when she walked by but inside the house. She waved at him but did not call out. It was more fun to secretly observe. Maybe she was going to be a detective when she grew up. Sadly she did not have an aunt, or an uncle, who was a detective.

***

Joshua looked around the verandah. It looked awfully empty with no one there.

"Mom," he yelled.

"What?" she answered from somewhere in the house.

"I need some lemonade. I think the gang is coming over. We're going to make a map of the neighbourhood."

"That's nice," she said. "But you are going to have to make it yourself. I'm busy."

Oh well, he thought. Mostly she could be counted on. Today he would have to do it. He went into the house, into the kitchen, read the directions on the Kool Aid packet, found the jug, poured in water, poured in the Kool Aid powder.

The sugar bin was empty.

"Mom," he yelled.

"What?"

"We're out of sugar."

"No we're not. We're never out of sugar. There is another bag in the cupboard beside the stove at the back beside the extra vinegar."

He found it and added a cup to the Kool Aid lemonade. Then he added a bit more. He liked things sweet. Some sugar got on the floor, he could feel it grit under his sneakers. He took the dish cloth and swiped it like a broom until the grittiness was gone.

"Joshua!" was shouted from the front door and he went to see and it was Ingrid, holding her new school coloured pencils and Ellen with ballet slippers and Lucy with a book on magic.

"I made lemondade," he said and the girls helped him carry it and the glasses to the porch.

"You'll need nine glasses," he told Lucy. "Don't forget Hugh."

"As if I could," she thought, thinking of Ingrid and Ellen. Then she sighed. Maybe he would move back to British Columbia, if not England. And she sure wanted to know what a Colonist was.

Bill showed up and then Sam. Then Hugh. Joshua looked around at the nicely crowded verandah.

"Where's Piya?" he asked.
The gang lined up on the porch and looked along the street. No Piya.

Then, for some reason, Sam opened his mouth and shouted, "Piya!" considerably startling the rest of them and at the same time Bill looked along the street toward the street where Piya's house was and saw her in the window of her house way up high.

He motioned and they all looked. Piya was looking back, partly hanging out of the window.

Joshua motioned for her to come join them. She waved her hands at them, side to side, palms up.

"I think she's stuck," said John who seemed to have appeared from nowhere and who was good at reading hand signals.

"No she's not, the window is open wider than she is," Sam said and it wasn't very shouted so that most of the gang looked at him.

"I'll go see," said Lucy and Ingrid and Ellen went with her. Five minutes later they were back.
"She was stuck," Ingrid explained.
"In the attic." added Ellen.

"She couldn't get back out of the attic opening, too far to the shelf." Lucy finished.

"What did you do?" Bill asked.

Some of the gang were trying not to laugh. They couldn't tell from Piya's face if she found this at all funny.

"I backed out of the hole and stood on Ingrid's shoulders and then sat on top of the towels," Piya said and started to giggle and so the whole gang knew they could laugh and not hurt her feelings or have her cry or go home.

"Let's make the map," Joshua said. He was about to yell for his Mom and tell her they needed paper - Sam had not brought any - but he decided to get it himself. He wanted the good paper in his Dad's desk and thought it best not to tell his Mom he was taking this. He got it and didn't tell her.

Hugh opened the paper bag he had brought and took out a package of potato chips. The gang loved potato chips.

"Crisps," he said.
"Chips," shouted Sam.
Hugh passed around the bag for sharing and then they began to make their map.