Free The Second Son by Bob Leroux Page B

anchors on them and light blue stitching around the lapel, and a white shirt with a bow tie stuck on with metal clips. And short pants, grey, I think, with braces. How I hated those short pants and the long itchy socks that went with them. I remember wandering through the downstairs rooms, bumping into legs and knees, looking for my brother. I remember noisy hubbub buzzing above, dried-up old faces bending over me, and waves of old ladies’ perfume — lilac and lily of the valley — filling my nose. And my mother asking me if I wanted to see my grandfather. And me asking, “Where is he?”
    She took my hand and led me to the parlour and the prayer bench in front of the first coffin I had ever seen. She asked me if I wanted to kneel and say a prayer. They had started taking me to church by that time so I suppose I had a vague idea of what was meant by a prayer. At least I knew enough to put my two hands together and make a steeple. When I knelt down I couldn’t see anything but this big box of shiny wood, so I stepped up onto the prayer bench to look inside. I was startled to find my white-haired grandpa, lying there in his good suit with his eyes closed and his big rough hands clasped around a rosary of sparkling black beads. “Why is Grandpa sleeping?” I asked. “When is he getting up?”
    “He isn’t, dear. He’s having his last sleep.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s getting ready to go up to heaven.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s going to see God.”
    “No he isn’t. He’s gotta get up.” I reached down to shake him but she pulled my arm away.
    “Wake up, Grandpa,” I insisted.
    “He can’t hear you, dear. He’s on his way to heaven.”
    I was not convinced. I started yelling at him, “Get up, Grandpa. Get up! There’s people here.”
    I guess at some point I realized he wasn’t about to get up and this was not the same as sleeping, because I remember starting to bawl and being led past all those legs and knees out to the front porch where I sat with my mother on a bench while we both cried.
    That’s all I remember about the event until after the funeral was over and we were back at Grandpa’s house. We were upstairs with Mom and Grandma — I didn’t know then that Grandma Bessie wasn’t my real grandmother. Anyway, they were looking at some of Grandpa’s things. I guess Mom was going to get some keepsakes to remember him by. It was Andrew who asked Mom which room had been hers, when she was a little girl. She told us this wasn’t her home when she was a girl. She said that someday she would take us to see the place where she had grown up.
    Soon after, she got Dad to drive us up the Eigg road and down a long laneway to the haunted house. That’s what Andrew and I called it after that, because she took us back there other times, when we’d be taking a drive through the country or looking for a place to pick berries. And a couple of times Andrew and I rode all the way out there on our bicycles. But the first time I remember was after my grandfather died.
    Nobody lived there. The original owner had sold it years before to a neighbour who worked the land and used the barn, but never bothered to rent the house. You couldn’t see the house at all until you came out from under the brush that was crowding in on both sides of the laneway. I remember my dad cursing the potholes and calling it the road to nowhere. My mother gasped when she first saw the old house. The back porch had fallen in and the west side was almost invisible under the crush of lilacs gone wild. The house had been painted yellow once but there wasn’t much left of the paint. Or the windows. Most of them were broken or missing. My father forced the front door open, wide enough for us to squeeze through — the floor was warped and kind of slanted one way. I guess the roof had leaked, because the ceilings were stained with dirty brown patches, and strips of washed-out wallpaper hung from the walls.
    We took a quick tour, upstairs and