Goodnight, Mr. Knight, page 18
“I’m eighteen now, Martha. My frontal cortex is beginning to register hurtful insults.”
Damn. I was so busy thinking about other stuff, I forgot to give him his birthday personal care kit.
On my hands and knees, I cleaned up the mess. I could hear Mr. Knight telling Sister Charlotte and Peter a story about a pig-farm scam where the farmer sold about two thousand piglets over the internet, and when you went to see your piglet, the farmer showed you one with your number on its ear and said, “This is your piglet.”
Except he only had about fifty piglets and was showing the same fifty piglets to about ten million people.
Mr. Knight said, “Guess what happened when the piglets got big enough to get hung up by the hind legs and turned into a McDonald’s BLT?”
Sister Charlotte said, “Is this like a pig walked into a bar…?”
Then, although there were no special lights in the living room, no sun through the window, the room seemed to fill with crematorium shadows. They continued to talk, and when Owen glanced at me, I knew he’d already picked up that they were talking about giving Sister Charlotte her terminal bud on my coming birthday. Sister Charlotte, who was attempting to keep a sharp watch on us, tried to level a glare that would back us out of earshot. When she motioned for me and Owen to go off somewhere, like she was throwing water at us, Mr. Knight got up. He came over to look down at me, still on hands and knees on the floor with a rag and a bottle of Mr. Clean and a bucket of tap water.
He bent close. “Sister Charlotte wants you to be with her for her final hour.”
I thought, staring up at Mr. Knight from this angle, he looked like a bottle of Mr. Clean on a top bathroom shelf. I thought that if I could look at his reflection in the mirror of this bathroom, I would see that the Mr. Clean on the shelf could still be mixed with tap water but the Mr. Clean in the mirror had already been mixed with sewer water. I don’t know why I had those thoughts, but I think they came from listening to Sister Charlotte’s ramblings about sewer water. And holy water. And marrying Satan in the Presbyterian church.
Chapter 45
OWEN
I sprayed the bathroom mirror with Windex. I wiped the mirror clean, wiping away the old me and creating a new better me for Martha’s birthday. Or for Sister Charlotte’s death day. I wasn’t sure. This was like Martha putting on makeup, tarting herself up until she looked ready for the birthday and then taking it off, untarting herself for the death day. It was like sitting in your living-room chair, listening for the knock on the door, waiting for the occasion to arrive but not knowing which one it would be: the birthday or the death day.
I wanted to take one more look around at Big Joe’s for Shelly. I think that’s a foster care thing. The closer you get to being sent out on your own, the more you want to hang on to where you’ve been.
I took the subway and stood behind the tree and peeked left and right. I walked past Big Joe’s pickup and I stood at his workshop window. Through the glass I saw Big Joe dressed in his plaid shirt and baseball hat, wearing his aviator sunglasses, the ring of keys hanging from his belt loop rattling and jangling as he sorted his tools, all but the hammer. I heard his footsteps creaking on the floorboards, crossing the shed and coming back as he tidied and arranged, stopping finally to stand at the inside corner of the window at almost the exact spot I stood on the outside. He was looking toward the street, I don’t know, maybe knowing someone was coming.
It had begun to rain. The base of the shed was high enough off the ground that I could slide underneath. I removed a piece of lattice and, through the resulting hole, I wriggled under the joists. On my back, I squirmed my way across the dirt. I looked up through cracks in the floorboards, but all I could see was the rafters directly overhead, one wide beam spanning the length of the shed and a second shorter beam supporting the ridge.
Looking out from the darkness through the wooden web of lattice to see if anyone had arrived, I noticed that the sky, crisscrossed like the lines for x’s and o’s that Martha and I played, had become overcast and heavy. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. I heard the tap-tap of rain. I saw the leaves of nearby bushes begin to shiver, and the branches of nearby trees begin to tremble. From above, I heard shuffling and scuffling and the harshness of grunts.
More scuffling as I slid out, pulling myself free, scrambling around to the front of the shed. But by then, Big Joe was dangling from the overhead rafter, one end of a slip knot around his neck. As I watched, he jumped and jerked six inches above the floor, his feet trying to find the stool now lying on its side. My first thought was to hoist him up from hanging at the end of the noose and place his feet on the stool. I stepped forward. Big Joe was smaller now and me bigger, strong enough that I could have easily lifted him off the end of the rope. But as it seared into the skin of his neck, he thrashed about so violently that his work pants and boxers slipped from his waist to his knees to land in a pile on the floor, exposing his hairy belly button like that cyclops eye of the pope. I backed away to the door of the shed and watched as he reached one hand over the rafter. Unable to support his weight, he clutched at the rope, yanking and pulling, drawing the slip knot tighter, gradually strangling his sputtering struggles into weak groanings, which grew faint and thin and ended, finally, at last, somewhere inside his black barge heart.
I ventured into the shed and approached him from behind, thinking if I couldn’t see that eye, I’d be able to put my arms around him and, careful not to touch his naked parts, hoist him up and unfasten the rope and lay him on the floor. But when his legs began again to jerk in spasms, I shrank away.
I picked up his aviator sunglasses and his ring of keys, which had been kicked into one corner. I hurried outside and looked around in case there was a neighbour nearby or someone passing in the street who could have seen who did this. No one around, I returned to the shed. Now Big Joe was hanging quietly, his feet pointing down, twitching a little, his chin twisted down on his chest, one arm dangling at his side while the other reached out, maybe for a glass of water.
I would have liked to dial 911. I would have liked to listen to the police sirens in the distance. I would have liked to watch the paramedics cut down the body and the ambulance beep-beeping backward, positioning itself to collect the bagged body when the police were finished.
I put my hand into my pocket and brought out Big Joe’s keys. From my shirt pocket, I took Big Joe’s aviator sunglasses. That time he hammered my Air Hogs Remote Control Thunder Trax, Big Joe made me hold his keys because they got in the way of his swing. When the hammer slammed down on the bench, he jumped a little hop, and his aviator sunglasses slipped off his nose, and his keys fell to the floor.
As I navigated the street to the corner to the opposite sidewalk listening to the keys that dangled jangling from my index finger, the question ran through my mind: Is there a special prayer I should have recited as he died? I think yes. So I said, “Oh, for Heaven’s sake. Give a body nosebleeds, hanging from the rafters like that.”
Chapter 46
MARTHA
It used to be, as me and Owen and Timothy walked the cemetery laneways, the pigeons pecking and cooing in the gravel flew off, afraid of us. But sometimes they would immediately flutter back to peck in the dirt close by, stretching their necks, watching us warily, first with one bright eye then the other. As they got to know us better, they just hopped to one side. Sometimes they were so busy pecking and cooing, and we were so busy walking and talking, neither paid the other much attention. Finally, the pigeons learned to ignore us completely as they pecked for weed seeds, breadcrumbs, whatever.
If Sister Charlotte were with us, she would have sat on Peter’s bench. She liked to sit and look at the pigeons perched high up on the three crosses, and they liked to look down at her. They seemed able to see Sister Charlotte everywhere she went, and wherever she stopped, they flew down and gathered at her feet. Every time, she asked in a little-girl voice, the same question of the pigeons: “How come God never says anything about you in his Bible? There are sparrows and doves and goats and sheep and lambs but no pigeons. Didn’t Noah take any of you with him in his boat that time? I bet Father Small wouldn’t tell me to stop feeding the pigeons if they were in his Bible. And how come Noah only took two of everything? What if one fell overboard? The other one would be lonely.”
We noticed the white homer, Amelia, standing off to one side, eyeing the others. When we approached, she flew off to the chapel roof. From there, she flew off again and pulled sharply upward, lifting herself with a single wing flap to glide on a wind current, circling like a tiny white cloud against the blue of the sky before landing on one tall spire. She was looking for Sister Charlotte.
Timothy, who could run the fastest, went for Sister Charlotte to see if she was awake and functioning. When they returned, Amelia flew down and landed on Sister Charlotte’s shoulder.
“She’s been flying for a long time. I can tell by her weight,” Sister Charlotte said. “Probably delayed by bad weather. Her owner will be worried, wondering what happened to her.”
We sat in the grass. Sister Charlotte stood in the lane holding the pigeon and stroking her head and letting her rest. “If it’s a short flight, she doesn’t stop but flies straight home. If it’s a long flight, like five or six hundred miles, she’ll stop for a rest. The crosses above St. Mary’s are her landmark. She uses them if she can, but she doesn’t need to. She’s got a built-in compass pointing the direction, sixty miles an hour all the way home. She’s trained to fly straight into the coop. The first thing her owner does is hold her and stroke her head, like I’m doing now, and talk to her and say, ‘Welcome home.’ They live in coops, like little houses, with their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. Other birds don’t like to fly in the rain, but homing pigeons close their feathers and fly above the clouds. That’s how bad they want to get home. They want to get back to their families.”
Sister Charlotte didn’t seem to know much of anything except religion, but she knew about pigeons, and being with them transformed her. And she seemed to have a special connection with Amelia.
“Amelia’s been coming here a long time,” Owen commented. “How long do they live?”
“This isn’t Amelia. This is Emma, her daughter. For a while, they came together. But the last time, Emma came by herself. She’s got a leg band with a phone number, so I phoned. I wanted to know what happened to Amelia. The lady who answered told me that she and her husband travel all over the country with their flyers. I should come for a weekend and get to know the other flyers and go with them flying.”
Tears were streaming down Sister Charlotte’s cheeks and falling in drips on the cupped fingers that held the flyer. Finally, after drying her eyes with the back of her hand, she continued, “‘So where’s Amelia?’ I asked. I knew something was wrong because the lady kept talking about the other flyers and about flying and about raising the babies and not answering my question. ‘Amelia is dead,’ she said finally. ‘Someone found her on the side of the road. We don’t know what happened.’”
I don’t know what happened to make me do it but I put my arm around Sister Charlotte’s shoulder. I felt her side against mine and I felt the warmth of her leg against mine. I felt my bones unthaw and felt my feelings for Sister Charlotte grow warm. But not for long, for when I felt through the cotton of my thin t-shirt the hands of the grief she had brought into my life creep up from somewhere —below it felt like, but maybe from above, I don’t know — to crawl along my spine like those nighttime shivers, I moved away. But at least for a minute I had felt genuine and honest warmth for Sister Charlotte, and I felt good about that.
Sister Charlotte reached over and placed Emma in my lap. “Hold her, Martha. She’s still a baby. Let her get to know you, for when I’m not here, you can look after her and then she can look after you.”
The pigeon flew off and Sister Charlotte left. Timothy lit a cigarette. I watched his jet of smoke curl into white fluffy clouds that seemed to hang over us for a minute before rising up and floating off to join the heavy black smoke from the crematorium chimney. Timothy said, “I hope Big Joe won’t be cremated.”
“They’re calling it suicide,” Owen said. “It’s on the internet: do-it-yourself death, a manual of instructions for leaving planet Earth. Pretty cool.”
I gave him a look. He shouldn’t have said it that way.
Timothy asked, “How’d he do it, man? Rig up some kind of a pulley thing, like a clothesline? Big Joe was a handyman so he’d know how to lubricate the pulleys and stuff, fasten the ropes, tie a weight to one end, then stand on a chair and jump.”
I gave Timothy a put-a-sock-in-it look, but he wasn’t finished.
“It feels like Big Joe took me out to his workshop and smashed my screwdriver with his hammer.”
Chapter 47
OWEN
The clerk stood at the counter at the back of the hardware store, filling out some sort of form. Behind him, cans were lined up in a row. To his left was a contraption with cylinders for mixing the paint. While I waited, I scanned the chips, all the colours in the spectrum arranged in order from light to dark.
“A long-handled Phillips number three,” the clerk said in answer to Timothy’s question. “Aisle four.”
Friday afternoon at two o’clock, the Joe Radley funeral was held at St. Joe’s Catholic Church in Little Italy, where he’d grown up. This I learned from the photographs of Little Joe on a table near the entrance. It informed me of all sorts of things: Little Joe riding his bicycle; Little Joe going on camping trips with a buddy; and so on.
I didn’t think Big Joe could have a Catholic burial if he committed suicide, but there he was, laid out not in a pine box but in an expensive cabin cruiser, top open revealing interior off-white satin upholstery, exterior shiny brown with black trim and gold handles, floating in solemn and silent splendour at the front of the church. Pretty cool. To the left of the pulpit, next to the organ at which a woman in a red gown played a hymn, sat the flowers. Pretty nice.
To my disappointment, Shelly was not there.
The pews to the left and right were empty, except for an older woman who got up to lead the way down the aisle for three others, followed by three more, relatives maybe, all wearing the same dresses and hats. They didn’t immediately sit but went straight to the coffin to pay their respects, so I knew I should do the same.
To hide the burns and the bruises around his neck and to cover the discolouration of the pasty skin, the undertaker had applied a layer of powder and rubbed a smear of red on each cheek. He had dressed Big Joe in his church suit. Okay. But he had arranged what hair was left in a combover part on the side, laid down flat so now he didn’t look like Big Joe or Joe the Hammer or Mr. Radley. The hair should have been different, and a plaid shirt and t-shirt might have been better. He should have had his aviator sunglasses in one hand and his ring of keys in the other, which I didn’t think to bring. Big Joe was a Jekyll and Hyde, but neither was in the cabin cruiser.
Didn’t matter. It was whose heart was in there.
I took a seat in the front pew next to Timothy and Martha. A priest dressed in long robes came from a door behind the altar and stepped up to the pulpit. The music stopped. Staring at some invisible point at the back of the church, the priest began: “God’s finger touched him, and he slept. God’s hand touched him, and he slipped away to Heaven. Let us pray.”
As I knelt, wondering about God’s hand, I saw Timothy’s hand slip under his t-shirt. While everyone was seated and bowed, heads lowered, eyes closed, reciting Our Father, Timothy stood and, at the precise moment the priest raised his finger in what looked like some kind ceremonial gesture meant to send off Big Joe from his cabin cruiser, Timothy walked calmly to the coffin and raised his hand. But the priest’s garments, fanned out by the raised arm, blocked my vision, so I couldn’t tell if Timothy had plunged the eight-inch, green-handled Phillips into both of Big Joe’s hearts or into only one. And if only into one, would Timothy have plunged the screw driver into the left or the right side?
“Amen,” I said, hoping I would not have to help Timothy dig Big Joe up to do the deed again.
Chapter 48
OWEN
I went downstairs and opened the deadbolt twist lock of the front door. The iron bar sprang out with a thwunk. I turned the iron bar into the door and pushed it shut. I turned the dead bolt again. The iron bar thwunked into the door frame, and the door was locked. I unlocked it and went outside and shut the door. I turned until the iron bar thwunked out and the door was locked.
“Sister Charlotte, he’s playing with the doorknobs again. Guess what I’m doing? I’m washing windows, wiping counters, cleaning floors, polishing silverware, vacuuming carpets, dusting furniture, washing the car, hosing down the front steps, and shovelling the sidewalk. What is Owen doing?”
“After you finish shovelling the snow, do the bathroom mirrors and the sinks, and check the toilet paper. Don’t forget, it has to roll down from the front, not the back.”
Martha said, “Duh. Guess what, Sister Charlotte? It’s September. There’s no snow.”
Like when I was little and I found the brushing of teeth soothing, at eighteen I found the repetition of mechanical things soothing. It was the over and over of the exact same predictable pattern, like loaves of supermarket bread that came off a mechanical slicer, always twenty-four.
I moved past the doorways and up the stairs with my broom, counting my quick firm strokes along the bare boards of the hall, working my way from door to door to the office. I slipped in my key and the iron bar thwunked out, and the door was unlocked. I reversed the key, and the door was locked.
Five minutes later, when Mr. Locke, a social worker from CFCS arrived, I set my broom aside and sat on the floor. That wasn’t his real name. That’s what his wide jaw and straight thin lips looked like to me because I’d been playing with locks. Sister Charlotte limped Mr. Locke upstairs to the office. When they were settled inside, I went out my window and hunched low on the roof to peek through the slice of air under the office window. Mr. Locke was sitting opposite Sister Charlotte at the desk. He folded a little pocket pad to a clean sheet, took out his pen, and wrote something on the top. It seemed everyone who came to see Sister Charlotte had a little pocket pad jotting down what she said. To compare notes, I guess.
