“We need to make a clean break from the past,” she said, and realizing her words cut both ways, she pulled into an empty parking lot and shut off the car. We looked at each other through salt tears that tried to cleanse our eyes but they only stung us deeply so neither of us could see where we’d ended up.

  Monster

  HE GROWLED WITH every spade of the front yard flower bed he turned over. His brows were heavy beneath a floppy black newsboy cap that was worn to threads around the edge of the peak. He dressed in cheap, black canvas work clothes of the kind the hostels gave to men who needed to prove their way in the world through the sweat of hard work, and he squinted when he stood up and the sun traced the lines on his sunken cheeks. His shoulders were more than a yard across. Boar-bristle hairs protruded from his ears. He could have been a child’s idea of Frankenstein’s monster had he not rolled his own cigarettes and sat and smoked them on the edge of the street gutter when he took a break for a few minutes after every three hours of work.

  The kids on the block taunted him. They called him ‘Monster.’ When he bent over, they threw pebbles at his back. Jacob saw it happen. The man didn’t deserve that. His feet were swollen, and their tops almost protruded through the laces. The man was not well, but said he needed the work.

  “I’d put him in his late seventies,” Jacob’s grandfather said. “He’s odd. Sometimes if I ask him a question, he just turns away. He doesn’t trust anyone. I’ve asked him about his past and he never answers. He’s a bit like an animal who was beaten too often.”

  “I asked him a question,” Jacob said as they sat eating their lunch. Jacob’s grandfather had fallen on a rickety escalator, the oldest in the city, and the resulting back injury had left him unable to tend his garden. “His name is Lawrence and, if you call him sir, he will talk to you. He likes tea. I asked him. He said he likes it in a good china cup. I want to bring him some.”

  “Not in my good china, you won’t,” his grandmother said. “He’s an itinerant. You don’t know what a man like that might do, and we know nothing about him.”

  Lawrence spoke with a heavy working-class English accent. Jacob’s grandmother surmised the labourer may have been a Bernardo boy from the Midlands, Manchester possibly, a child of the Victorian slums who had been scooped up and brought Canada. “There were such terrible slums in that city.” The Bernardo children had been taken away from their families. The boys, especially the boys, would turn to crime if they grew up poor in England. Most were nothing more than cheap, child-labour, and when they suffered and broke under their masters, they were buried in a farm’s back-forty, or worse, fed to the hogs. Jacob wondered what it was like to be homeless. The family barber his grandfather, father, and Jacob visited every two weeks had been one of the “rescued” slum boys. He’d run away from a farm and done errands in Toronto until he saved enough money to go to barber school. Lawrence hadn’t been that lucky. Fred the barber was part of the community. Lawrence was living at the Sally Ann.

  “Can’t we ask him in for tea?” Jacob asked.

  “He’s a labourer who came to the door looking for work one day. We can’t ask him in,” the grandmother said. “We don’t know who he is. I agree with your grandfather. Lawrence is an odd chap. He’s had a hard life but I don’t want to know about it.”

  “He’s been all right,” the grandfather said. “Since my fall, Lawrence has done all right for us. He works hard. He never complains. I think we can ask him in.”

  The labourer sat at the kitchen table. Jacob’s grandmother laid a plate of sandwiches before the man, some egg, others ham, and set a pot of tea on the enamel topped table and stepped back to watch from the other side of the kitchen. Lawrence blinked as if stunned and then squinted. The sandwiches disappeared two at a time. Lawrence looked at the tea pot. “May I have it in a cup? I haven’t had tea in a proper cup in years.” Jacob’s grandmother poured the tea into an old metal measuring cup. He stretched out his feet so one leg protruded beyond the table and bent over and rubbed his ankle. He winced.

  Jacob asked Lawrence why his feet were swollen.

  “Ay? My feet are bad. They’ve never been good. Wish I didn’t have them, but I need them,” he replied and shoved the remaining quarter sandwiches in his mouth and washed them down with a single gulp of a cup. He leaned across the table and poured himself more tea as Jacob’s grandmother stood against the sink and wiped her hands on her apron.

  When the tea and sandwiches were gone, Lawrence went back to digging. As the blade delved down in the ground, the labourer turned over the shovel and groaned. Jacob’s grandmother set off with her bundle-buggy behind her to do some shopping on the main street. Jacob’s grandfather went upstairs to have a nap on the daybed of the study. Jacob leaned against the window frame in the dining room and watched Lawrence who was in the backyard now, turning over clods of mud, bending to pull weeds, and growling whenever he stood up.

  Jacob went to the back door, stopping in the kitchen to haul a cauldron out from the lower cupboard where his grandmother kept her heavy canning pots, then filled the cauldron, put it on the stove, and after a few minutes, before it became too hot, the boy opened the back door and set the cauldron at the foot of the porch.

  “Lawrence, I have something to help your feet.” Lawrence stood up, drove his spade into the flower bed, put his hand to the small of his back, and squinted. “Come here. This will help.”

  The labourer shuffled across the garden and sat down on the second step from the bottom of the back porch.

  “Take off your shoes and socks and soak your feet for a moment.” The Englishman looked confused, then nodded and undid his shoelaces. The feet did not want to come away easily, and Jacob had to tug to free the left, then the right shoes. The socks were rank. The sharp odour stung Jacob’s nose. “When was the last time you changed your socks, sir?”

  “Can’t recall.”

  They stared at the man’s feet. As the socks came off, so did layers of skin. The nails were long and green. He had the feet of a monster. Jacob noticed the man’s fingernails. They were green and brown and long as well. Maybe the kids from down the block were right.

  “Put them in the cauldron quick,” Jacob said. “Does that feel better?”

  Lawrence nodded. The socks smelled of decay. “Lawrence? You can’t wear those socks. They’re awful.”

  “All I have.”

  “I’m going to take them and bury them in the garden. My grandfather has a pair of green argyles. He never wears them. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead in green argyles. Do you mind if your socks are green?”

  The labourer looked at Jacob and squinted as if he didn’t understand.

  “I’ll get you new socks.” The boy went up to his grandfather’s room, opened the sock drawer of the haute bois, and pulled out a paddy green pair of argyles that had been gathered into a ball. They smelled of sweet cedar. As he passed the linen closet in the upper hall, he found the oldest, rattiest, towel in the cupboard, and brought it downstairs with him.

  “Dry your feet now, Lawrence, and put on these socks.” Lawrence held up the socks and smiled. Jacob fetched the shovel and carried the old socks to the back of the garden where he dug a hole and dropped them in before turning the soil on top of them. By the time he returned, Lawrence had dried his feet, and had his feet in the socks. “Are they pinching?” Jacob asked as he did up Lawrence’s laces. The man shook his head.

  “The feet feel better,” Lawrence said as if they were not his feet but someone else’s. “Thank you.”

  The cauldron had cooled off. The surface was floating with bits of scum as the boy tilted the water onto the walkway and watched it flow into the grass.

  Jacob’s grandmother appeared on the porch. She stared at the boy and the man. “What are you doing?” she asked abruptly. “Aren’t those my husband’s socks?”

  “Gran, I gave them to him. His feet were in awful shape. I washed his feet for him. He could hardly stand up.”

  The grandmother glared, not knowing what to make of the situation. “What made you do such a thing? And you, what made you sit there and let my grandson do that for you?”

  Lawrence squinted up at the woman. He reached down as if he was about to remove the socks and give them back to her. “They don’t match me trousers,” he said.

  “Please, let him keep them, Gran. Grampa doesn’t wear them. He told me how much he dislikes argyles. Lawrence needs them, and I buried his old ones because his feet were still partly in them and they smelled worse than death.”

  As she turned to head back up the steps into the kitchen, the woman paused, looked at her grandson, and shook her head. “Charity begins at home, and I guess you think you live here,” she said, looking at the boy. “As for you, Lawrence, get back to work. I’ll put the kettle on for a fresh pot of tea.”

  Sadness

  KING SAID NOTHING should have that look of sadness in its eyes, not a person nor an animal nor even knots in a pine board, but Billgo had it. He was staring straight ahead when we found him the next morning. He’d been standing at the freezer door, staring into the small rectangular window his breath had fogged over and covered in a jack-frost pattern of ice. It was a look that pleaded for an answer yet at the same time faced the truth of the situation. King said things should never look that sad, but I’d seen the look before when Billgo had me pull the noose around the necks of the cows we slaughtered in back before cutting them up and hanging them in the freezer. And it was my fault that Billgo was dead. I was the one who’d shut him in the cold, thinking he’d already gone home.

  It was an accident and all, but I probably shouldn’t have been working there. I was only fourteen and there are laws that say a fourteen-year-old shouldn’t be working in an abattoir, home of the fresh-killed cutlet, but Billgo owed my father a favour or two and my old man decided he didn’t want me sitting around the house all summer or getting up to no good behind other people’s stores. I was brought into Barley’s because Billgo told my dad I could learn a thing or two about life by being there. I had strong shoulders. I didn’t have a strong spirit.

  The first morning on the job, Billgo took me into the slaughter room, as he called it. There was a brown heifer there. Billgo said it had stopped milking and the best it could do for its owner was a quick turn-around to the table. The animal stood docile. It stank of barn and urine even after I washed it down. I wanted to speak to it, but when the first words left my lips, Billgo looked up from the grindstone where he was sharpening his knife and said: “No, no! It’s all business here.”

  It was my job to hold the heifer’s head still so Billgo could apply the bolt to kill the animal instantly. It was supposed to be humane for the animal. King was out front dealing with a restaurant owner who’d come by to hand-pick his steaks from the freezer and to dicker about the prices. King was good at dickering. I hadn’t learned how to do that yet.

  Billgo looped the noose around the heifer’s neck and, after it was tightened, he told me on the count of three to pull hard. I made the mistake of looking in the cow’s eyes. They were brown and round and trusting, yet they were sad. The creature knew that something was not right. Animals read people’s feelings. My dog knows when I am sad, and since the morning when we did the heifer I haven’t been able to play with Sandy, not like before, when I would throw her a stick and she’d retrieve it and we’d roll together on the grass and she’d look at me with her big round eyes that told me she loved me.

  The heifer’s eyes didn’t say they loved me. They looked at me with a “what now?” expression, as if it wanted to know what would come next, as if I held the answer to what it would see or know or learn. And I wasn’t strong enough. The rope noose merely irritated the creature and she bellowed a disgruntled groan, not a moo, but a moan and shook her head as the cold steel of the bolt machine touched the top of her head and snapped into work.

  I wanted to cry. Billgo saw the look in my eyes and said: “Hey kid, this’ll learn you life and make a man out of you.” The cow’s eyes stared in disbelief for an instant. I wanted to turn away, but I kept looking, kept wanting to give the beast an atom of love or reassurance or hope—and all hope fails in an abattoir—that the world was not a cold, indifferent place, that its life had been a life spent among all the things a beast might love—the suck of a calf at its teat, a new trough of fodder, the blinding sunlight of the yard and the pasture beyond as it stepped from the barn after a long cold night on the threshold of spring. Then its eye balls rolled, and its whites appeared like sunrise as it knelt before me, its front legs buckling, then its hind legs, and the lids fluttered as if it could not see and wanted to see as the sadness left it to look through the veil of a glassy stare.

  I ran to the concrete sink and threw up. Billgo laughed. King stood in the door.

  “Hey kid, it’s like that,” King said, slapping his hand on the doorframe. “This is what puts food on the table.” Cold, indifferent, but true: This is what puts food on the table.

  The chickens and turkeys I got used to. Billgo ordered me to come into the slaughterhouse every time he had a new arrival. And after the deed had been done, after King had raised the animal up on a hook and cut its length so the purple and pink and bloody entrails poured out, and after I had shovelled the unwanted parts into the steel hamper and hosed down the floor, I kept thinking of what I had just done and I felt a shame before the world that hung around me like a shadow.

  By the end of the summer, I was praying every night that something might be different, that I might find a way out of the job that would not shame my father or tell Billgo and King I was afraid, or that I suffered a death inside me with every animal they brought down.

  The last week in August came and I was thinking about going back to school, though I was uncertain if I could stay in school, if I could cut open a splayed frog on a wax-bedded tray or dissect an earthworm, let alone sit through conjugations of verbs, each one expanding its subjects until everyone was culpable of the action at its root. I probably wasn’t paying attention when I thought I heard Billgo saying he was leaving early because it was his kid’s birthday or that King said he’d lock up and told me to go to the back and shut down the freezer.

  I wasn’t aware that there was anyone in there when I turned off the light. I hadn’t thought, as I usually did when asked to shut down the freezer, of bending down and looking under the sides or between the shelves where we kept the steaks and cutlets in boxes. It just didn’t occur to me. I flipped the switch, closed the door behind me, and pushing the chrome lock handle into place, told King that the freezer was secured and followed him out the door as he turned to lock it.

  Around midnight my father woke me and asked if Billgo had been down the day before. Usually when Billgo was feeling “under-the-weather,” as he put it, he would go to the local bar, the Milepost, and put back a few. It wasn’t like him to miss his kid’s party, especially when he was bringing home the best steaks for the adults’ barbecue. No one thought to look back at the shop. My old man and I drove up and down the streets, slowly, peering in every alley and doorway in case Billgo had fallen down drunk.

  The next morning, I met King at the door of the shop. We stood for a couple of minutes, looked up and down the street, as if expecting Billgo to show up. Instead, King got out his key and went to turn the light on in the slaughterhouse while I was sent to open the freezer, and there was Billgo.

  He was still wearing the chain mail glove on his left hand, the holding hand, and in his cutting hand were five large T-bones. He was staring straight at the window, patiently, as if he was certain someone was coming, as if he thought it was all a joke or a mistake—which it was—and that when the door opened he would fire whoever was standing on the other side. But as the hours passed, he must have realized that his patience was not going to be answered, and that his eyes were brown, and round, and sad, with crystals of ice around them, his cheeks pale, his mouth slightly open, and a look of realization on him for which I have never found an answer.

  Racket

  I WAS GIVEN an old Slazenger that had been my Dad’s. When he was growing up in the Thirties, kids must have had arms of steel because the racket weighed about ten pounds out of the press. A racket had to have a press. The frame was made of wood and the pressure of the cat-gutting strings could cause a frame to warp with moisture or time. I caught hell from my Dad when he saw me strumming the strings like a guitar. I was never sure if the strings were made from real cats or not, but when I strummed them, they played a G. It would have been easier to play tennis with a guitar. Guitars are lighter. With the press, the racket weighed more than ten pounds. Tennis took a lot of effort for a kid. I begged for one of the new rackets, which were slightly lighter.

  My father had been an athlete. Not just an athlete. He had been captain of his high school tennis team. He could return a volley like he wanted to kill the person on the receiving end of it. The first time we played tennis, I had to duck. He told me I was a coward. I tolerated that. Cowards don’t die with a tennis ball between their eyes.

  The day I gave up tennis and I put the Slazenger in its press and tucked it in the back of my closet was the day my arm almost had to be amputated. I’d gone up to the public courts in our local park with a school friend named Mark. Our mothers played tennis together.

  He was no good either. If we were lucky, we’d toss the ball into the air and it would make contact with the picture-frame around the gutting, and the ball would drop dead at the net. Once, I started screaming with joy because I got the ball over to Mark’s side of the court. Mark called me a suck. I was being a suck. On my next serve, I launched a toss into the air and wound up for my serve. The ball struck the tip of the racket and went off at a ninety-degree angle. It lodged at the base of the net in the next court.