sometimes, retreating into the formality of it as though to guard from Colie his truer self; but Tsi’Umberto then would have to strain to understand, his silence seeming to suck the air from the room.
The tension surrounding Colie’s visits grew more palpable. The days and hours before them were filled with a grim expectancy; the visits themselves grew more awkward. We seemed to have lost all spontaneity, unable somehow to make a place for him any more, even my aunt’s sarcasm grown feeble as though she were merely struggling to play her role. I expected an argument, something to break through the tension and show what lay beneath it, and yet we merely continued on as always, the tension like a thing without source, that couldn’t be fought against. It was as if the house itself was rejecting Colie, was slowly turning him out simply because he didn’t belong to it.
“I guess I won’t be coming by much for a while,” he said toward midsummer. “There’s the planting in the greenhouses and all that, we’ll be pretty busy.”
“It’s just as well,” Aunt Teresa said. “We have the tomatoes coming on outside now.”
“Yes, of course.”
He seemed to want something more from her, some sign, some way back, but she wouldn’t relent.
“I guess maybe I’ll call you or something,” he said.
But already it was as if he had never been part of us, even then before the weeks had passed and we’d heard nothing more of him. A sullenness settled over our house as after a death, no mention made of him and yet our silence only seeming to keep him constantly before us, to prevent us from simply getting on with our lives. We attended a party on the Labour Day weekend, an inauguration of the new club the Italians had built on the lakeshore, all pomp and circumstance though we appeared to sit the whole meal in brooding expectation, awaiting the person who didn’t come; and afterwards Aunt Teresa sat out the dance with the older married women at the back tables, what we had not yet been ready to admit seeming made plain now in her evening desertion.
In the next weeks we passed through a kind of penance for what had happened, in the arguments that flared up at the slightest thing between my uncle and father; and in the midst of them Aunt Teresa herself seemed almost forgotten, closed off in her own private hurt as if she’d withdrawn suddenly from the family. The arguments followed the usual pattern, my uncle’s provocations, my father’s blind lashing out: it was as if my uncle had been the one who had suffered some affront for which he wanted retribution now, trying to extract it somehow from my father as the wellspring of all our troubles. Yet these squabbles seemed to bring my uncle no solace, left him merely irritable and grim as if he were in the grip of some emotion he couldn’t quite find a way to turn to advantage; and then finally we had settledback again into what seemed our usual bearable calm, with only a lingering throb of failed hopefulness and then silence.
In the New Year a salesman came by the house one evening to talk about building another greenhouse. My father and Tsi’Umberto and Aunt Teresa sat around the kitchen table while he spoke, a family again, plotting the contours of our future.
“The way he talked you’d think it was like going to the office,” my father said afterwards. “I’ll bet he’s never set foot in a greenhouse, with that suit of his. He probably sleeps in it.”
But Tsi’Umberto kept coming back with a grimace to the figures the salesman had written out on the back of a catalogue.
“I don’t see where we’re going to get that kind of money,” he said.
“
Mbeh
, if it comes to that,” my father said, “you can tell the Farm Credit you want to buy into the farm, they’ll give you twice that much. Any kid with fifty cents in his pocket can get money from them, there’s no reason you can’t.”
Tsi’Umberto nodded gravely, seeming filled for the moment
The tension surrounding Colie’s visits grew more palpable. The days and hours before them were filled with a grim expectancy; the visits themselves grew more awkward. We seemed to have lost all spontaneity, unable somehow to make a place for him any more, even my aunt’s sarcasm grown feeble as though she were merely struggling to play her role. I expected an argument, something to break through the tension and show what lay beneath it, and yet we merely continued on as always, the tension like a thing without source, that couldn’t be fought against. It was as if the house itself was rejecting Colie, was slowly turning him out simply because he didn’t belong to it.
“I guess I won’t be coming by much for a while,” he said toward midsummer. “There’s the planting in the greenhouses and all that, we’ll be pretty busy.”
“It’s just as well,” Aunt Teresa said. “We have the tomatoes coming on outside now.”
“Yes, of course.”
He seemed to want something more from her, some sign, some way back, but she wouldn’t relent.
“I guess maybe I’ll call you or something,” he said.
But already it was as if he had never been part of us, even then before the weeks had passed and we’d heard nothing more of him. A sullenness settled over our house as after a death, no mention made of him and yet our silence only seeming to keep him constantly before us, to prevent us from simply getting on with our lives. We attended a party on the Labour Day weekend, an inauguration of the new club the Italians had built on the lakeshore, all pomp and circumstance though we appeared to sit the whole meal in brooding expectation, awaiting the person who didn’t come; and afterwards Aunt Teresa sat out the dance with the older married women at the back tables, what we had not yet been ready to admit seeming made plain now in her evening desertion.
In the next weeks we passed through a kind of penance for what had happened, in the arguments that flared up at the slightest thing between my uncle and father; and in the midst of them Aunt Teresa herself seemed almost forgotten, closed off in her own private hurt as if she’d withdrawn suddenly from the family. The arguments followed the usual pattern, my uncle’s provocations, my father’s blind lashing out: it was as if my uncle had been the one who had suffered some affront for which he wanted retribution now, trying to extract it somehow from my father as the wellspring of all our troubles. Yet these squabbles seemed to bring my uncle no solace, left him merely irritable and grim as if he were in the grip of some emotion he couldn’t quite find a way to turn to advantage; and then finally we had settledback again into what seemed our usual bearable calm, with only a lingering throb of failed hopefulness and then silence.
In the New Year a salesman came by the house one evening to talk about building another greenhouse. My father and Tsi’Umberto and Aunt Teresa sat around the kitchen table while he spoke, a family again, plotting the contours of our future.
“The way he talked you’d think it was like going to the office,” my father said afterwards. “I’ll bet he’s never set foot in a greenhouse, with that suit of his. He probably sleeps in it.”
But Tsi’Umberto kept coming back with a grimace to the figures the salesman had written out on the back of a catalogue.
“I don’t see where we’re going to get that kind of money,” he said.
“
Mbeh
, if it comes to that,” my father said, “you can tell the Farm Credit you want to buy into the farm, they’ll give you twice that much. Any kid with fifty cents in his pocket can get money from them, there’s no reason you can’t.”
Tsi’Umberto nodded gravely, seeming filled for the moment
Similar Books
