VIOLET-GREEN SWALLOWS
He has just drilled in the hole and is sure it is the perfect size. Finally he is going to finish this abandoned project, left behind a growing pile of scrap lumber in the basement. Fifteen years ago he began making this birdhouse. His son, Jeremy, must have been five at the time. This was how they spent their Saturdays together, father and son once Jeremy was bored with watching cartoons and cereal and toy commercials on TV. Yesterday was his son’s twentieth birthday. They were not able to celebrate it together. He has no other children. The birdhouse is for swallows, but not just any swallow. Frank loves birds and now that he has more time he is trying to learn more about them. The swallows have always enchanted him. In the spring and in the summer, while walking across the fields of Trout Lake Park the swallows swoop down on sabre wings, circling him. He can see that they are not black as they often appear at a distance but blue, as with the barn swallows—an enchanting shining and iridescent twilight blue. The smaller ones are green with purple lights, the violet-green swallows. He likes to think that the swallows fly circles round him as a blessing, as a gift from heaven, or a sign. He knows really that it is the tiny insects flushed from the grass by his footsteps and he can sometimes hear their beaks snapping them up. He still feels gratified that he can help sustain them.
It was on such a Saturday morning in May, twenty years ago, while the swallows surrounded him, more than usual, when Frank returned to the house to see Kathy his wife propped against the kitchen counter, her face contorted with pain. “It’s time, Frank,” she said, pressing her free hand against her enormous stomach. She was that night delivered of nine and a half pounds of Jeremy and he knelt weeping by his wife’s hospital bed as she held their newborn son.
They are going to visit their son this afternoon. He is in a medium security facility and this will be their second visit there since he was sentenced two weeks ago. Their son has never been in trouble with the law before. Kathy still breaks down every day and weeps. So does Frank, but he is careful to wait till he’s alone in the basement, as he is now. He has just finished a crying jag. His wife doesn’t know that he cries. Jeremy is his only son.
Frank has taken early retirement from his job. He is in his fifties and his back can no longer survive his trade as a city gardener. His back still hurts in the evenings but it’s become bearable. It was much worse last year when police tracked down his son as a person of interest. Jeremy, still eighteen, was out on the town for the night with his friends. They had been drinking. The next day it was in the news: two young gay men swarmed and beaten by four youths for walking down the sidewalk holding hands. They were holding hands. Gay marriage had already been legal in this country for almost four years. Frank and Kathy had always taken the greatest care to instruct their son to treat all people with respect. They had never specifically meant gays, but surely Jeremy as well as they must have known that they were included by implication.
He sands smooth the edges of the entrance hole. He has decided he is not going to paint it. The chemicals might harm the birds. He has read this somewhere. He lays aside the sandpaper and goes upstairs. Kathy is in front of her laptop at the dining room table. He knows not to bother her. She hates being disturbed when she is in front of the computer, or reading, or on the phone, or watching TV. He will speak only if spoken to. She is doing a search for support groups. Reaching into the fridge he pulls out a pitcher of lemon-aide.
“Should we go somewhere for lunch on the way out?” Kathy asks from the dining room.
“White Spot?”
“Where else do we go?” They never used to eat out. Only in the past year, since organizing their days around court appearances. It has become convenient, and they no longer complain about the cost. Now they have found that they enjoy it. It feels almost as if they are dating again.
“How’s the birdhouse coming?”
“Almost finished. Want some lemon-aide?”
“I’m okay. I’m almost done here.”
He isn’t going to ask her about it. This is something for her to mention if she wants to. It is for her alone. He can’t see himself participating. This self-revealing in front of near-strangers is not for him. He has a couple of buddies still from work. Every month they get together for a couple of beers. They are too courteous to talk about his son, and he never brings him up, but Frank never has to second-guess their support of him. They could be talking about the Canucks or the Whitecaps, or the atrocious Conservative government or the best way to mulch and it is still all the same. The words are simply filler. They are there for each other.
The birdhouse is finished. Tomorrow morning he will mount it up in the maple tree. Upstairs he can hear Kathy getting things ready for the trip. He knows she is preparing their son a care package for his birthday. He is giving him his own wristwatch. Jeremy had mentioned in their last visit that knowing what time it was made his time a little less intolerable. He will be out in eighteen months. They tried for a suspended sentence but the judge was strict. He could have been put in longer, which is he supposes a small blessing. His son on the day of his conviction read aloud a letter of apology to the victims. Then he broke down and wept. Frank had never seen his son cry in many years, not since long before his voice broke. Only Jeremy was caught. The others remain at large.
In the White Spot Kathy is eating a pasta dish with primavera sauce and Frank is putting away a burger. They come here every week now. It somehow helps them remain focused on their son, whom they otherwise speak little of. He has always looked more like his mother, with the same ash coloured hair and pale blue eyes. The same smile. But neither Kathy nor Jeremy are much for smiling. Frank seems to be the only one in the family with a good robust sense of humour. With his buddies from work alone is he really free to let down his guard and laugh. The beer helps.
The visit lasted less than an hour. Their son looked pale and wan. He didn’t say much. He never has been very talkative. Not since shortly after Frank had begun making the birdhouse fifteen years ago. He never said much about school, though his grades were adequate. He talked little about his friends, whom he never invited over. Frank doesn’t even know if his son has ever had a girlfriend. Surely at least one. He’s a good-looking boy. He thanked them dutifully for the gifts, the sweater, the watch, the cookies and the cake. The boy seemed to freeze when his mother kissed him. From Frank he accepted a rather limp handshake. How could this boy have remained so many years locked up inside himself? How could someone so gentle even think of harming another person? He was with his buddies, three young men Frank and Kathy had never met. They had been drinking. They had just been watching an ultimate fighting championship. They had spent the evening watching almost naked, buff and good-looking men beating each other up and locked in prone embraces. He didn’t want to take the thought any further. They were walking down Davie Street, their home turf, holding hands. This would never have been dared when Frank was a young man. He had hardly known that homosexuals even existed. He had never known any. Nor had he ever said anything to his son about them. It was rumoured that a boy he had known vaguely in high school might have been one. He was beaten up a couple of times. He had never actually met the two gay guys—somehow he could not refer to them as a couple, and certainly not as men—whom he had seen day after day in court. They both seemed normal enough. Not bad-looking either, if Frank had any skill at all in judging a man’s looks. The day after the verdict he phoned their lawyer. It was easier to arrange than he had thought. Kathy still knows nothing about this and he does not plan on ever telling her or Jeremy.
He is downstairs again in the basement reviewing his handiwork. The birdhouse is finished and tomorrow morning he is going to put it up in the maple tree. He forgot to tell Jeremy about it. Kathy is upstairs doing another Internet search for a support group. Frank just may change his mind and go with her if she finds anything. He might even reveal to them the visit he had with the two young men last week. They were going to meet in a Starbucks but they invited him to their home instead. It was a nice apartment, a one bedroom near Stanley Park. Pleasantly furnished, clean with a view of the park from the living room. They were casually dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts. There seemed nothing abnormal or unusual about these men who weren’t even thirty yet. Nothing “unmanly.” They had lived together for the last two years and this summer they were going to get married. The coffee they served Frank and their lawyer was delicious, and as he sat, facing them, seated side-by-side on their love seat with the view of the forest of Stanley Park behind them Frank stammered out his apology, his shame over what their son and his friends had done to them, the suffering that had been visited on them and how thoroughly inept and unable he felt at making reparation for his son. They both looked at him, one was Italian or Spanish looking with short dark hair and soft brown eyes. Frank marveled that a guy with such well-muscled forearms couldn’t have taken care of himself. But he remembered it was four against two. His broken jaw was healed now and he now wore a small scar above his left eyebrow. His partner seemed more reserved, slender and blond with intelligent blue eyes. He learned that like his wife, he is a schoolteacher, and the dark-haired one, like Frank, is a gardener.
The plan was for Frank to leave alone. They were very gracious. They smiled and saw him to the door. They each warmly shook his hand. He suddenly wanted to reach out and embrace them both, but held his arms securely pinned to his sides. When he arrived home Kathy was still at work. He went down into the basement and began to search through the scrap lumber. After he had allowed himself time to sit quietly and weep he pulled out the half-finished birdhouse which he had not touched in fifteen years.
The stepladder is secure enough for him to stand on as he fastens the birdhouse with a hammer and nails to a crotch in the tree. The leaves are still fresh and pale green from having just recently unfurled in the new spring. In a vintage old bird book his mother had given him when he was ten years old Frank has just read about the violet-green swallow. They love feathers, lots of soft feathers with which to line their nests. He has gone inside for a glass of lemonade, then hears their familiar song. He noticed their arrival again this spring, towards the end of the first week of April, soaring and swooping high above like tiny bomber jets. In the basement there is a pillow that Kathy has wanted to get rid of. It is old and tattered and leaking chicken feathers. With a knife he carefully cuts open the casing and pulls out a handful of feathers. Outside, like the man in the bird book he holds up the feathers while violet-green swallows are already swooping across the yard to inspect the new house, like first time home buyers. Like a crazy man, or like a figure he has seen in a dream, Frank gently tosses feathers into the air and the little swallows swoop down and catch them and carry them into the birdhouse he has just made for them. Suddenly he is smiling as the morning sun warms his cold grey skin and suddenly he feels youth return to his tired aging body. He tosses up some more feathers. A swallow catches one. Some more, and her mate grabs another. One of them even plucks a feather from his fingers. When he is finished he looks down at the recently bloomed red and yellow tulips he planted two years ago, his wife’s favourites. Next week when they go to see Jeremy their son in prison he is going to tell him all about the birdhouse. And that’s all he is going to tell him. He returns into the house, pours a glass of lemon-aid then reaches for the bottle of rum he keeps under the sink. With his homemade cocktail Frank sits out on the back deck looking at the maple tree as the two violet-green swallows fly back and forth into their new home. Their sweet singing reminds him of the fragility of life and he takes a slow and measured sip from the glass. The melting ice cubes feel very cold against his lips. He returns inside the house and begins to make a sandwich. Kathy is still at church. Next Sunday he might join her.
THE ENGAGEMENT
“No you turn left at the viaduct. I’m sure he said left.”
“Yeah.”
“And then left again.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“That lands us in Chinatown. He didn’t say nothin’ about Chinese.”
“We turn right up here.”
“Are you sure?” Jimmy said to his wife Ethel.
“Of course I’m sure. I know the restaurant. It’s very nice.”
“Huh! In this part of town?”
“In this part of town. They’re starting to build it up nice.”
“If you say so.”
“Aren’t you looking forward to meeting our future daughter-in-law?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope she’s pretty. I’m sure she’s pretty. Michael wouldn’t pick just any girl.”
“Let’s hope you’re right.”
They found a parking lot and left the car. They were an elderly couple, long retired. Michael, their only offspring had been born late in life for Ethel and Jimmy who were both in their forties when their son was conceived. Slowly they trundled along the sidewalk then in through the restaurant door. It was a quiet, well-upholstered establishment with a discreet half-light affluence that provided still a fine and expensive menu in spite of the dated décor. They saw their son seated in a back table at a booth with another young man unknown to them. Michael spoke first:
“It’s about time you two got here. We were about to send out a posse.”
Jimmy was always put off whenever his son adopted this tone. He sounded more like an indignant matron or an upper class auntie than anyone he might identify as his son. They filed into the booth, Ethel seating herself next to her son and Fred next to his wife. He was very careful not to look much at his son though his son’s friend kept holding his attention.
“Ryan”, said Michael to his companion, “I would like you to meet my father and mother, “Jimmy and Ethel Walters”
Ryan seemed younger than Michael, and wore a pale turquoise blue shirt made of a soft shimmering fabric that was open at the throat and upper chest with rolled up sleeves. He was slender with a beautiful fawn-face and shining black eyes. Smiling while shaking their hands he said, “How do you do?”
Jimmy scarcely allowed the soft young hand to touch his. His wife seemed a little more welcoming, asking him warmly how he was and if he had lived long in this city. Soon the waiter, who appeared to be on friendly terms with Ryan, came by to take their order.
“It’s very nice of your friend to come as well,” said Ethel, half way through buttering her bread. “But tell me please Michael, where is she now. She did say she was coming after all and that you wanted us to meet her.”
The two young men glanced at each other. Michael broke his slice of bread in two, buttered a piece then handed it to Ryan who reached over and kissed him full on the lips. The kiss lingered for just a couple of seconds, sending a tender erotic charge into the air. Ethel stared at her son in disbelief and her husband, looking down, fumbled with his crumbling bread.
“Mom, Dad, here is your son-in-law-to-be.”
Ethel and Jimmy exchanged glances ever so briefly, replied nothing, and went straight to the food. Silently the old man and the old woman suffered together through their soup, their salad, and both seemed to have difficulty eating their mains. Meanwhile the two young men had been contentedly chatting with each other like two pigeons cooing from a shared roost.
“What do you do for a living, Ryan?” asked Ethel, looking up from her barely touched coquilles St. Jacques.
“I own this restaurant. This is where I met your son.”
“Here in this restaurant?”
“Yes.”
“How long ago did you two meet?”
“It’s been—what?” said Michael, “Three years?”
“Almost four,” replied Ryan.
Jimmy could hardly touch his steak. He could only stare down at the uneaten meal on his plate, wishing for he did not know what, but wishing for it to come now, to happen quickly and to not delay. For dessert, the two young men were tucking into chocolate mousse while the old people settled for watching their uneaten food go cold right under their eyes. Suddenly he looked up at his son, impaled him with a darting glare and said, “Okay, Mike, so when is she showing up, already?”
“When is who showing up?”
“Her. The girl. Your fiancée. My future daughter in law.”
“I am your future daughter-in-law, Mr. Walters,” said Ryan, smirking nervously.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Dad”, Michael said, putting his spoon down then folding his hands on the table in front of him. “It’s like this. Ryan and I are getting married in three months and now we are planning our wedding.”
“You two are not getting married. How do you think I raised you?”
“Why, to do the best and to be the best that I could,” said Michael.
Jimmy felt his stomach rebel, thought he might have to dash to the Gentlemen’s for a quick vomit, but remained in his seat, trying not to respond to his son’s glare, the very penetrating pale blue stare he had inherited from him.
“Son, this is not a joke.”
“No, Dad, it isn’t. I suppose I owe each of you an explanation, but I thought you already knew.”
“Already knew what, dear?” his mother asked timidly.
“That I’m gay.”
“Son, that cannot be. I raised you.”
“Well, you brought home the bacon, I suppose, but no Dad, you weren’t really there a lot. Mom did almost all the work, you know.” Michael smiled at his father defiantly, then, aware of how this was hurting his mother, reached over and gently squeezed her hand. She began suddenly to weep.
“See, look! You’ve upset your mother!” he snapped. Ethel whimpered noisily into her clutched white handkerchief, then slowly her voice ascended into a piercing inconsolable wail. He reached over and caressed his wife’s hand. The two young men looked on, paralyzed.
“I hope you’re proud of yourself, Son. Or should I say ex-son,” Jimmy said.
“Why is this such a shock to you!” he blurted. “I came out to both of you years ago.”
“Huh?” Jimmy said as though seeing something then trying not to see it, then pretending that he had never seen it before convincing himself that it had never even existed.
“When I was in university. Christmas Eve ten years ago. How could you forget?”
“You didn’t tell us nuthin.’”
“You pretended you didn’t hear me!” Michael replied, almost yelling. Ryan touched him tenderly on the shoulder. “This should be one of the happiest moments of my life and here you’ve both ruined it for me. Didn’t you know that gay marriage is legal in this country? What cave have you two been living in!”
Ethel, wiping her eyes, and calmer, looked sadly at her son and said regally, “Michael, it isn’t that I want to begrudge you your happiness. And your friend, Ryan, is such a lovely handsome young man. And I think you already know that I am much more tolerant than your father. But, love, you see, it isn’t quite so simple. We are old. Your father is almost eighty and I’m not too far behind. And we were hoping that we could live long enough to see our grandchildren.”
“Mom,” Michael said, “Ryan and I are planning kids.”
“And how do you propose to do that?”
“There’s this lesbian couple we’re friends with. They want to have children too. So we’ve agreed that both of them will carry two children each, and Ryan and I each will donate the sperm. We’ll raise two and they’ll raise two, and we’ll raise them all sort of together in a big sort of family and—“
Jimmy waved his hand sternly and said, “That is enough! Come Ethel, we’re going.”
“Dad…Mom…”
His father took out his wallet and threw down a small pile of bills for the dinner and led his aged wife by the hand out of the formerly fashionable restaurant.
“Mom…Dad…” Michael tried to get up to follow them. Ryan gently restrained him with his hand on his shoulder.
“Mikey, let them go. They’ll both come around. They are your mom and dad. They’ll be okay.” Michael suddenly burst into tears and Ryan wrapped his arms around him and held him while he wept.
Jimmy and Ethel drove silently home to the neat bungalow house in the suburbs where they had raised their son Michael. The house was bought and paid for long ago on Jimmy’s earnings as a construction foreman and part-time pastor in the little fundamentalist church that they still attended. Such behaviour, such…homosexuality…would send his son directly to an eternity in hell. He knew this, and how could he make his son know this as well? But he was sure that Michael knew and would one day come around, would one day return to the faith of his fathers. When they parked in the driveway, he opened the car door for his wife and gallantly assisted her up the steps into their home. They passed through the dark livingroom without turning on the lights into the kitchen where he poured them each a tall glass of cold water. They sat at the kitchen table.
“So that’s our son, now,” Ethel said, sipping noisily.
“That’s our son.”
“His friend is very nice-looking, wouldn’t you say?”
Jimmy abruptly returned his empty glass to the sink and said, “I’m going to bed.”
At precisely two-fifteen Jimmy woke up with an urgent need to pee and a mild sense of shock that he was alone in bed. On the way back from the bathroom he looked into Michael’s bedroom. They had kept it exactly as it was when he was a boy, and he always slept there when he visited overnight. He saw his wife curled up under the covers, her eyes wide and staring.
“Ethel,” he said. “Come to bed.”
She gave no answer.
He approached the bed. “Ethel.” He feared the worst.
He sat down on the edge.
“Oh, Jimmy.”
“Was I snoring?”
“I was just missing our son, I guess.”
“Will you come to bed?” He sidled next to her.
“There’s room here for two,” she said.
“Seems a bit tight, if you ask me.”
“Oh, come now,” she said pulling him down beside her. “Lie down here next to your old wife.”
He put his arm around her and stroked her hair. She reached up and kissed him.
His wife was still asleep in their son’s bed when Jimmy got up to make breakfast. This would be the first time they had actually made love in years. He couldn’t remember how long it had been, or how badly they had been missing each other’s sagging bodies. Well, who said you could ever be too old, especially with your own wife? But it didn’t feel for him as though he was making love to an old woman, but to his wife, his wife Ethel who in the perfection of youth lay there in his arms, channelled through the aging but receptive and pliant body of Ethel the wise, sad and mellow crone. He thought of Abraham and Sara, ninety-nine years and ninety respectively in age, and even then Sara conceived their son Isaac, the progenitor of the Hebrew people. He didn’t expect that Ethel would conceive. He laughed subtly at the thought while mixing the pancake batter, whistled a snatch of a tune he had just heard on the radio, then poured the batter into small cream coloured disks onto the hot skillet. While going in to wake his wife he thought suddenly of the story of David and Jonathon: David declaring the love of Jonathon as better than that of a woman. Then he saw in his mind’s eye his son and his son’s partner, this beautiful youth named Ryan. Could it be, might it be…? He abruptly dismissed the thought as heresy, as bad theology. It was against nature, against the Bible, a dreadful awful and horrible sin. But didn’t they look good together? He dismissed the thought. Disown his son? But he was his son. His only son. Hang him up to dry for a while? Ethel would not hear of it. And she had so gently and prettily received him last night in their son’s bed. In their son’s bed. An involuntary shudder seized hold of him. He looked in the bedroom, then realized his wife would be in the bathroom. He returned to the kitchen where he flipped the pancakes.
Checking the computer in the next room he saw an e-mail from Michael:
“Dearest Mom and Dearest Dad,
I am so, so sorry that things ended up so badly last night. I just want to say that I love you both and that I know that in time things will heal for us. Ryan sends his love and would love to see you both again.
Your son, with love,
Michael”
It was Ethel’s fault, but also his own. Michael was right. He had been scarcely present for his son, being too busy with his job, with his church, with making a living, with guarding his flock. Ethel had done everything, and she ruined their son in the process. Their son, spoiled and babied and sissified and feminized till whatever manhood might have flowered in him wilted before these ugly noxious weeds of…of…he couldn’t bring himself this time to even think that word. And, he their son, didn’t think it was good enough for him to follow in any of his long-suffering and hardworking Dad’s footsteps. No, he had to go off to university and not to any university but to what’s its place in England where he had won several scholarships. He was smart, that son of his. Too smart. What did he study? Art History, surrounded by limp-wristed pansies and was it any wonder that he should turn into… he still wouldn’t bring himself to think that word again. But the worst insult, the greatest injury to how brutally the Devil had snatched from him his own son, was that he looked exactly like his father when he was a young man, but with a slender refined grace that could only have come from, could only have derived from…he couldn’t name it.
While his wife carried out her ablutions Jimmy sat and stared at the computer screen and read his son’s e-mail a second time, then a third, and then a fourth. On the fifth read he smelled the pancakes burning and ran in the kitchen to rescue them. Ethel would know what to say, and she would know what to answer. He got to the pancakes just in time, and as he dished them onto a plate that he slid into the oven to keep warm he was thinking how good-looking his son’s fiancé, Ryan was. Not simply good-looking. The boy was beautiful and every bit as beautiful as his own wife on their own wedding day. Jimmy could not remember having ever seen any creature, male or female, so completely, overwhelming and mesmerizingly beautiful as this Ryan, who was destined to marry his son. When Ethel sat down at the table for their breakfast of pancakes she looked up at her husband, still smitten by this vision of beauty as he muttered docilely, “They shall be neither male nor female but as the angels of heaven,”and said, “Why are you smiling like that?”
“Smiling like what dear?”
“Did you know that you forgot to make coffee this morning?”
“I didn’t, did I?”
“Jimmy! What am I going to do with you? What would you ever do without me?” She got up from the table and began to make coffee.
“By the way, Ethel,” he called to his wife, before realizing he had forgotten to kiss her, “we have an e-mail from our son.”
“An e-mail?”
“I saved it for you to read. Here, never mind sweetheart,” he gently removed from his wife’s hand the package of coffee, set it on the counter, and tenderly kissed her full on the lips. She put her arms around her husband in a grateful embrace. “Go read it honey,” he said. She paused before leaving the room. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the coffee. Go read Michael’s e-mail.”
While Ethel sat down at the computer Jimmy, her husband of almost fifty years scooped six measures of fragrant ground coffee into the filter, snapped the cone into the machine then poured in the carefully measured water. He still was held in though by the vision of the beauty of his future son-in-law, and found himself wondering if he would also be this beautiful on the day he would be marrying their son. He stood by the coffee maker, holding vigil as the water gurgled through the coffee grounds forming at the bottom of the pot its dark aromatic brew. Ethel seemed to be a long time reading so short an e-mail. He thought of calling her, but decided not to. He nearly went in to see her hunched over the keyboard tapping out a reply to their son. He knew better. The coffee sputtered its finale into the pot and Jimmy continued to wait for it all to settle, and he stood waiting still by the freshly brewed coffee as his wife, Ethel, emerged into the room her face shining for just then he saw her as radiant as a goddess. She was wearing her blue dress, the same pale shade of turquoise sky blue that Ryan their son’s fiancée wore the previous night. It was her best dress for church, since this is where they were headed after breakfast. He wondered what he would tell them, their friends at church. Then, as he kissed his wife again on the lips before they sat down to breakfast he decided, or rather accepted what had already been decided. He would officiate at his son’s wedding, then he would voluntarily leave the church if they couldn’t accept it. Or they would rent a hall and have the wedding there. It didn’t matter. His son was getting married and his son had chosen well. He longed suddenly to see Ryan, his future son-in-law, he longed to look in his face, to be touched and gently soaked as in a sudden golden baptism in this much unanticipated vision of beauty. He savoured and wrung from this sudden vision all that he could hold, for Jimmy knew that it would again fade, this beauty, and that again he would be faced with his doubts, his fears, and the dread of losing not only his son but his very own fragile and uncertain soul into the Lake of Fire.
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