A July afternoon

The call rang through the house at about two in the afternoon. It was a bright July day, in the middle of a heat wave. The kids were playing in the pool, while I sipped my beer. I put down my Labatt 50 and ran to the phone. I picked up on the fourth ring, just before the answering machine would do it. It was my brother Regent, his voice choked with emotion, who told me the news. My father had died.

It wasn’t too hard to tell the kids the news, after all. Of course, David will miss the huge bowls of three-color ice cream, the baseball tips, that sort of thing. But they didn’t seem too devastated. They didn’t see him that often, all in all. I quickly packed my suitcase, the bare necessities, and headed to Montreal.

I knew it would eventually catch up with him, all those excesses. This need to quench an endless thirst, to numb the pain. A little artificial comfort in a hard, arid, hostile world. I can’t blame him, actually.

I was thinking about all this when I arrived at the apartment. Jean-Paul lived in a half-basement on 13th Avenue, near Masson. When I parked, I saw Regent leaning against the white door of the building, his eternal cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his hands in his pockets.

“Hey brother.”

“Hey.”

“I’m warning you right now, there’s a lot of cleaning to be done in there… I didn’t have the heart to start all alone…”

I sketched a semblance of a smile as an answer.

His eyes were puffy, his complexion gray. God, he looked like dad…

A subtle smile appeared on his face: “Before I came, I went through the bottom of my old box. I found his green cap, you know, the one he wore when we went to Birmingham with him? Do you remember that?”

Do I remember? How could I forget… My father, a misunderstood hero in my eyes as an eight year old, a trucker by trade, somewhat by accident, had driven from Birmingham to Montreal and back in his big Western Star, with a clutch that didn’t cooperate at all. I can still see him, with both feet on the dashboard, pulling like crazy on the gearshift to get out of the truck stop. In my memory as a proud daddy’s boy, on that day, he had fought the infernal machine, and he had won.

We entered the apartment in silence. The smell of cigarettes was omnipresent. The garbage my father had left behind told me bits and pieces of his last days. Everywhere were empty boxes of “Au Coq” - he delivered chicken. And empty beer bottles. A few bottles of vodka, also empty, and three or four overflowing ashtrays completed the picture. He kept this diet until he was over 60. That’s quite a feat, when you think about it.

They found him in his shower. He hadn’t shown up for his delivery shift. That never happened to him. The job called his ex-girlfriend. She came to check on him. When there was no answer, since she still had the key, she went in. His inert body lay at the bottom of the shower. From the state of the bathroom, he must have had something in his stomach, or intestines. Blood and feces everywhere. Heart failure, apparently. The pain was too much, the heart gave out, it seems.

I have to say he didn’t have it easy…

* * *

1951.

Regent was not even two years old, I was seven months old. Louise, our mother, had not yet been discharged from the hospital since the delivery. A heart problem, thrombosis, or something like that. I never knew exactly.

She died on November 24.

It’s easy to forget, but that was before public health insurance. Six months was tens of thousands of dollars.

My father found himself in his twenties, with two young boys on his hands, and an insurmountable debt. Welcome to the adult world.

He did a lot of things to try to rise above the fray… Distribution of natural gas before it was a good-paying idea, bought in the end by Gaz Métropolitain. Bar owner, to combine work and passion, business with pleasure. Trucker. Then chicken delivery man.

He never recovered, I think, from this financial black hole. A lifetime of fighting the interest machine. And this time he lost.

All in all, we found eight dollars and fifty-seven cents in change in a pocket of his pants, probably what was left of the previous day’s tips, and two dollars and twenty-five cents in the cracks of the brown couch. No bank account, no credit card. A few worthless trinkets. A couple of important mementos, jewelry that belonged to Louise, the cufflinks he wore at his wedding. A lifetime of hard work that fit in a small box.

* * *

The little office of the funeral arranger corresponded rather well to the image I had formed of it: gloomy, brown, cold, with hints of death…

The short, stocky man had given us a rote speech about the impeccable care they were giving to our deceased loved ones on their last “trip” - it would have been better if there had been some care beforehand, I thought.

He offered us his array of caskets, from the cheapest that worms would get the better of in no time, to the chrome Cadillac that, he said, would keep our father in a very acceptable state for at least 100 years.

Then he suggested cremation. My brother almost choked:

“Are you crazy? With what he drank, he will burn for three days!”

Jean-Paul had a prepaid arrangement for the cheap casket. The worms will be happy.

* * *

Something had to be done with his old wreck of car. The rust had eaten away most of the bodywork, and it was making quite a racket as it drove along. Since we were thinking of refusing the inheritance - he must have had debts, Jean-Paul - we decided to sell the car to the scrap yard ourselves. 30$ wouldn’t hurt. The guy at the scrap yard looked skeptical as he looked successively at Jean-Paul’s driver’s license, and at Regent’s face:

“1926, huh?”

“Yes sir!”

“Well preserved, for 62 years…”

“That’s what happens when you lead a good life!”

“…”

In the end, the guy gave us the money without too much trouble. It was none of his business, after all. Probably a death thing, he must have thought.

With the $30, we stopped to buy him a new shirt at Croteau. Eight dollars. A pair of white socks. Three dollars. There was an acceptable pair of pants and clean shoes in his closets. That would do for the funeral parlour. It was Regent who worried about his look: “We’ll comb it the way he liked it, the wave towards the back with the Dippity-do.

In the car, Regent had another bout of nostalgia.

“Do you remember the bailiffs, Alain?”

“Which ones?”

“You know, the ones we fought off with the rifles?”

I burst out laughing:

“Ah, yes, we were so young…”

“I was eight years old, you were six…”

I laughed until I cried, but I’m not sure where they came from, those tears…

“My God… They were so surprised to see two young rascals with guns!”

“Where was Jean-Paul?”

“Working, I guess.”

“Anyway, it worked, they left without taking anything!”

But we moved in a hurry two days later…

I had forgotten about that, before Regent mentioned it. I remembered heroic battles, stubborn resistance, the rough brotherhood between Regent and me; but not the misery, the poverty, the lack. It seems that Jean-Paul had done OK with us.

* * *

After a sober funeral service, the funeral home was painful, as always. Even though I know it’s important for mourning, I always found it strange to parade in front of an inanimate, bloated body, filled with strange substances to make it look a little real. I guess you wouldn’t want to remember someone you love in their final demise.

We went back to Regent’s after the funeral home. Just him and me. Of the 10.82 we had found and the $30, we had a grand total of $28.82 left. Enough for a 12-pack and a pizza.

We ate without speaking, in a rather heavy silence.

Regent suddenly smiled, then said to me, “Thinking about it: we’re eating and drinking our inheritance!”

We burst into a long laugh, tender and rough like Dad’s love, and finished the 12-pack, reminiscing about his glories and setbacks.