Daddy Lenin and Other Stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Author:Guy Vanderhaeghe [Vanderhaeghe, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7710-9915-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-04-20T16:00:00+00:00

Three days later, Donny was back home, a brass urn full of Bob’s ashes cradled to his chest. Placing all that was left of his brother on the kitchen table, Donny collapsed in a chair, dropped his head in his hands, shoulders shaken by an earthquake of grief. Anne confessed to me she had never seen her husband in such a state. Donny had always locked his sorrows in a vise of self-control that verged on the unnatural. When their little boy, precursor to the two girls, had arrived blue and lifeless at birth, Donny had never shed a tear, had walked through that terrible time granite-faced.

“But now, Mr. Fenton …” Anne said to me, her voice fading away to nothing. Referring to me as Mr. Fenton is one of Anne’s “tells,” a signal to me that she’s feeling very blue. Otherwise, she just calls me Joey. Sometimes Pal Joey.

Everyone who heard Anne compare Donny’s reaction to the death of their baby to the death of his brother, something she repeated often to friends, detected a thread of resentment running through it that I must say is not the least bit typical of her.

I find it strange that Anne isn’t able to realize that Donny’s guilt and grief have reached such a pitch because he feels he failed his brother. After all, Bob had never failed him. It was Bob who made Donny’s boyhood bearable, made him his school lunches, who brushed his mop of unruly hair into submission each morning, who let him crawl into his bed whenever his little brother woke howling in the grip of yet another nightmare. Donny had no one else to lean on. His useless mother spent mornings in front of a blaring TV, a bottle of beer in her lap, graduating to gin in the afternoons. Her husband was nearly as feckless. True, he managed to stay sober during his eight-hour shift at the mine, but when he got home he made up ground fast; after an hour or two of hard, committed drinking he was as stupefied and blotto as his wife.

The Peel family lived in a forlorn trailer court sprawled on the edge of town, their mobile home little more than a tin shoebox that banged and teetered even in the mildest wind. Mr. Peel’s wages would have been sufficient to support a family, but most of his paycheque was spent on booze, although occasionally Bob succeeded in shaming a few dollars out of him to buy Donny shoes or a winter coat.

By the time Bob was ten he was delivering newspapers to earn a little cash. Because Donny couldn’t bear to let his security blanket out of sight, he tagged along with Bob while he made his rounds. In those days, it seemed to the town that the Peel boys lived on the streets; if they weren’t lugging newspapers up and down them, they were aimlessly, endlessly tramping them. When it got nasty at home, when their parents began to shriek and shout accusations at each other, Donny would start to unravel.

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