Martin Sloane by Michael Redhill Page A

the bed. His hand is in mine and he’s making me tremble. I tell him I have to get the nurse, but he won’t let me, and his eyes are rolling in his head and he’s breathing only every ten seconds or so, these huge gasping intakes of air that sound like someone forcing him to breathe through a tiny hole. And now I’m crying. I’m crying Don’t die! Because I think, if a boy my parents have come to love — because I think it’s love — if a boy my parents love can die … then …
    Jesus.
    And he dies. He dies with his hand in mine. And I draw the sheets back over him, and I get into my bed and I turn away and lie awake for the rest of the night. And no one else has woken.
    He leaned back against the headboard and let go of my foot, which slid down along the inside of his leg. I lay there motionless, staring at him. That’s it? Some of that is false?
    Yes.
    It’s the end, isn’t it? That no one else woke up.
    No.
    I sat up and the sheets and the newspaper went flying. But it’s all true! I said. You’ve told me this story before!
    A boy died in the bed beside me, it’s true. But I never woke up. It all happened in the middle of the night. We woke up, all of us in the ward, and a boy had died.
    I dropped my hands into my lap and stared at him. My god, I said. That’s sick. You made all that stuff up about him dying in your arms? All that, that pus and shit?
    You never said what we could make up. I know that’s what happened, though.
    How?
    That’s how we died. That’s what got us, the tubercular ones.
    I settled back down into the sheets. Don’t tell me any more stories about tuberculosis or polio, okay? I feel like I’m in bed with Little Dorrit.
    Your turn.
    No. Let’s not play again. Let’s go out.
    He sat there, watching me. He’d told the story without so much as a shake of the head for that dead boy. Although the boy had really died. Sometimes it felt as if there was a colour inside him that could not be altered. Not by his own tragedies, nor by anyone else’s. I wanted to test that, I realized, and I relented and took my turn.
    All right, I said. This is one of my stories. When I was a baby, my mother used to garden a lot. It was the thing she loved most apart from me. She’d put me in a hammock surrounded by pillows and while away the afternoon tending her vegetables and flowers. I think my first memory is of the tops of the maples swaying quietly back and forth across the sky. Then later, when I was five — I guess Dale was a baby then — she decided to start something new. I came home one day from kindergarten and she’d dug up the backyard, turned some peat moss and black earth into it, and she told me she was going to start growing berries. For money.
    I see where your entrepreneurial streak comes from.
    She had a friend in Ithaca who’d started her own business. She wasn’t much of a fruit-grower at first, but she’d salvage what she got the first couple of summers and make some jams and maybe a pie, but then after about three years, her canes started to take. She’d had problems with bugs and birds, but she’d laid some mesh over the plants, and on a tip, she bought a box of ladybugs for the aphids. That’s another of my earliest memories. Watching ladybugs fall from my hand into a patch of leaves.
    So she started selling her berries at roadside in the late summer, and then she expanded to small groceries in nearby towns. My dad bought her a Ford with a big flatbed when I was seven and gave her a pair of driving gloves, light green leather driving gloves. And then she got serious. She read books, she went to conferences for fruit-growers. She brought back white bags full of powder that she mixed into the soil. It was fascinating to watch her, my dad and I would stand in the kitchen window watching her empty great big bags of fertilizer into the soil. We’d all try to help her in the garden, Dale mainly tottering down the aisles trying to eat as many berries as he could. I guess