Free Man Descending by Guy Vanderhaeghe

his legs thrust stiffly out in front of him, eyes fixed on the street where the dark ran thickest and swiftest under the elms.
    “You should cry,” suggested her sister-in-law. “Nobody would mind.”
    “I would. I did all my crying the first year we were married. One thing about him, he’s obvious. I saw it all the first year. Forewarned is forearmed. But if he blows that horn he can go to hell. If he blows it . I never hit him before,” she said softly.
    They sat for a time, silent, listening to the moths batter their fat, soft bodies against the naked bulb over the door. It was Brian who saw him first, making his way up the street. “Mum,” he said, pointing.
    They watched him walk up the street with that precarious precision a drunk adopts to disguise his drunkenness.
    “He won’t set foot on this place. He’s too proud,” said Edith. “And if he sits in the car I won’t go to him. I’ve had it up to here.”
    Cosgrave walked to the front of the property and faced the house. For the people on the verandah it was difficult to make him out beneath the trees, but he saw his wife and son sitting in a cage of light, faces white and burning under the glare of the lightbulb, their features slightly out of focus behind the fine screen mesh. He stood without moving for a minute, then he began to sing in a clear, light tenor. The words rang across the lawn, incongruous, sad.
    “Jesus Christ,” said Bob, “the man’s not only drunk, he’s crazy.”
    Edith leaned forward in her chair and placed her hand against the screen. The vague figure whose face she could not see continued to sing to her across the intervening reaches of night. He sang without a trace of his habitual irony. Where she would have expected a joke there was none. The voice she heard was not the voice of a man in a cheap black suit, a man full of beer and lies. She had, for a fleeting moment, a lover serenading her under the elms. It was as close as he would ever come to an apology or an invitation. Jack Cosgrave was not capable of doing any more and she knew it.
God save our gracious Queen ,
Long live our noble Queen ,
God save the Queen .
Send her victorious ,
Happy and glorious …
    Edith Cosgrave was not deluded. Not really. She was a Stiles, had been born a Stiles rather. She got to her feet and took Brian by the hand. “Well,” she said to her brother, “I guess I can take a hint as well as the next person. I think the bastard is saying he wants to go home.”

How the Story Ends
    C ARL Tollefson was what people, only a short time ago, commonly used to refer to as a nice, clean old bachelor . In any event, that was the manner in which Little Paul’s mother, Tollefson’s niece, chose to characterize him to Big Paul while their guest unpacked in his room upstairs.
    “I was so pleased to see he was a nice, clean old bachelor ,” she said, buttering toast for her husband, who refused to go to bed on an empty stomach. “Most old men get awful seedy if they don’t marry. And I really had no idea what to expect. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl – I couldn’t have been more than ten. Eleven maybe.”
    “Christ, Lydia,” said Big Paul, “don’t you think they keep them clean in that T.B. sanatorium? They don’t have no choice about bathing in a place like that. They make them. Sure he looks clean. Now.”
    “Did you notice he wears elastic sleeve garters to keep his cuffs even? When was the last time you saw somebody wear sleeve garters, Paul?” She slid the plate deftly in front of him. “I think it’s real cute.”
    “You make sure he has his own plate and cup,” said Big Paul, who was mortally afraid of illness. “And make sure it’s a different colour from the dish set. I don’t want his stuff getting mixed with ours. I’m not eating off no goddamn T.B. plate.”
    “You know better than to talk such ignorance,” his wife answered him. “He’d die of embarrassment. Anyway, he isn’t contagious. Do