Free Homesick by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

using whisky to light a fire in his belly against the encroaching darkness.
    Drunk he was a different man, a lunatic. Stumbling and ranting,he would kick in the pickets of the front fence, rampage through the garden, tearing up all the stalks of new corn, roaring that winter was coming, get the corn in, even though it was only June. One night he wrenched all the cupboard doors off their hinges, trampled them to splinters under his boots, and fed them into the woodstove. With the stove lids left off, Vera was sure the house would catch. Every time a gust of wind whistled down the chimney and twisted its way through the tin pipes, the fire blazed up roaring and spitting sparks. As she tried to push the stove lids back into place with a broom handle, leaning back from the flame and heat, Vera thought she heard her father whisper, “Let’s see her slam the sonofabitching cupboard doors now, Earl.”
    These things were terrible but worse were the nights when Monkman stood swaying at the foot of the stairs, clinging to the banister and shouting for Earl to get himself dressed, they were going for a ride. Those nights his daughter wished him dead.
    Vera did all she could to prevent him taking Earl. She offered herself in her brother’s place. “Take me, Daddy,” she would coax. “You don’t want Earl. Take me.”
    He never listened. “I want my boy!” he bellowed up the stairs. “Goddamn it, Earl, get up and get yourself dressed! I want some company for a drive!”
    “You’ll kill him, Daddy, driving drunk. Don’t,” Vera pleaded. “One of these nights you’ll roll that old truck and kill him.”
    Her father could not tell her that he took Earl because he knew that with Earl in the cab he would not permit himself to swing the wheel off the road, hard into the ditch and the racing darkness. Instead, he said, “Earl and me are different from you, Vera. We’re alike. We’re sad and we need each other.”
    “ You’re not sad. You’re just sorry for yourself and drunk. That’s all.”
    “Your daddy is as sober as a judge, Vera.”
    Her father carried Earl off at any possible hour – midnight, one in the morning, two. In such a state he was no respecter of anyone’ssleep. All that mattered to him was the headlong rush down a country road, the old truck pressed to the limit, the speedometer needle shaking like a trembling finger. Earl sat beside him rigid and glassy-eyed as any rabbit locked in the glare of oncoming headlights. The noise was deafening. The cab of the truck rattled and groaned and squealed. Stones spurting up against the floorboards made a crazy, ragged drumming, a drumming punctuated by the steady slap slap of the glove compartment with the broken catch flapping up and down on its hinges. The sight of the dark, flat land spinning by on either side robbed Earl of the power of speech. Even when a tire caught loose gravel and the truck lurched violently from side to side, the fields suddenly swinging towards him heavy and full of menace, he couldn’t holler – only lock his knees and brace his arms against the dashboard, while in his mind’s eye he imagined the truck hurtling over and over, the gas tank slopping gasoline, the windows showering glass.
    It was out of fear of darkness that Alec drove. In the beginning of his crazy drives, when he was drunkest, he lost the fear, knew only abandon, release. Ever since the death of his wife the oppression and misery of night had lain heavy on him. Night work was not cure enough. When darkness fell, he grew anxious. He fidgeted, could not keep still. Everything drew in on him, shrank. It was like being squeezed and choked in a tight black suit cut for a smaller man. Monkman feared to see the world of day recede, people and buildings shut off from view. Hated the withering away – to a street, to a house, finally to one lighted room in which he sat with a ticking clock. It started him drinking, the thought of the darkness eating up the world, gnawing it