Gerald Lynch
Christmas Comes Again
From my basement unit’s window, I looked out at him daily. In the housing project’s communal garden he presented the picture of devoted puttering as he tended what remained of his late potatoes, bowing to rub velvety leaves between thumb and fingers like taking the texture of cloth for a new suit, watering from a green tin can that looked like it had come through the wars with its ragged spout like a broken poniard. I’d seen him go down in the dirt once to break off a pea pod and pop it into his mouth unwashed. After he disappeared, I recurrently dreamt that I’d also witnessed him on his knees chewing the white blossom of a potato plant, his jaw working the pasty petal behind a shielding hand, like someone hiding a mouth of rotten teeth. But hiding from what? The worms?
One steamy May day a pile of black topsoil had been dumped, fulfilling the city’s “Agri-Outreach” to its “least fortunate citizens.” Only he had disturbed the fuming mound, transporting all of it spade-by-spade, spreading it in painstaking patches across his plot, like quilting an earthen shroud. There was something acridly rank in that dirt, a sinus-scouring smell that stank to high heaven. It was October now, and I’d thought the frost would have killed his potatoes, and the smelling-salt power of what I’d learned was sheep shit. Yet, miraculously, nothing had died back.
He never changed his gardening clothes: scuffed black brogues, charcoal-grey dress pants, dark-green plaid shirt buttoned to the top, and a brown straw hat secured under his chin with a black kerchief. He was tall and beginning to enfold with age.
Likely because he thought no one was watching, he mumbled to himself constantly, rhythmically, even liltingly. It wasn’t singing, more like chanting (but again: for the worms?). After some fierce listening, and going from his adenoidal burr, I determined he was Irish. My father had been from Belfast, and he’d always corrected people, insisting he was English. Like anyone cared.
I turned away from the window, wondering what trouble I could do that day, to myself or others, it hardly mattered.
A piece of mail was mis-delivered to my box, addressed to “Occupant,” though clearly bearing his unit’s number. It had an Irish stamp, “Éire,” bearing a man’s picture.
I stood at his door knocking and knocking, then pressing the button repeatedly, hearing the buzz echo inside like a jail’s signal of lock-down. I thought of my basement unit at the end of a similarly narrow hall like a trick in vanishing-point perspective … Wondered what the hell I was doing. Then started banging with my fist—caught myself.
I returned to my place, stood inside with my forehead against the closed door, chilled sweaty and breathing hard, wondering again why I’d bothered. That had become a preoccupying question with me: Why bother?
But for no good reason I decided to go out to him in his garden, with the envelope held before me like an introduction.
He barely tilted his head in acknowledgement of my throat-clearing, remained kneeling alongside a freshly dug furrow. A flick of his chin called me over like I’d been next in some line-up. I didn’t like navigating the mess from his recent watering, the muck, the disturbed insects finding refuge under my clothes, the spiky weeds raking my ankles, the stink of the revitalized manure. He could have come out to me from the mess.
As I explained the mail mix-up, he remained kneeling with palms pressed on thighs, his head bowed. He finally unfolded and creakingly cranked himself upright, groaning like answering an unwelcome call. He loomed over me, with a pained look on his long mug. He continued peering warily for a spell as if I’d come to confiscate his straw bonnet or something. As his mouth pursed more and more with the bother of it all, I heard myself babbling.
He took the envelope and without looking, stuffed it into a pocket.
“Was there anything else, Norman?”
As if expecting no reply, he turned to sifting dirt from potatoes on a pitchfork. It was late afternoon, and he’d been spreading the last stunted spuds in blunted light. It made me think of disinterring a mass grave. In the freshly turned earth, worms like fat lips wormed away like nothing.
When I looked up, he was waiting for me. He smiled slowly, and it was like seeing the lower of a rock-face crack open.
“Something troubling you, son?”
“No.”
“Every day you’re at that basement window watching me. Don’t you work, Norman?”
“I work, I’m a teacher, ESL … well, part-time anyway.”
“Are you now?” Not really a question but that Irish way of teasing denial.
“You know my name.”
Through mouth only I filled my lungs full of dankness like a foretaste of my own grave. Fit to burst I just had to let it out, I don’t know why.
“I don’t know your name despite the fact that we’ve both been living in this hellhole, like, forever!”
He puffed a snort of mild derision. “What’s bothering you, son?”
“What? … Nothing, uh, like I said. … I thought … I mean, I thought I could go on living like this, but it feels these days like … I don’t know. Like my bones are dissolving or something, like I’m disappearing. I’ve, uh, I’ve even thought about, like … well.”
“Tch-tch. … Sean. Sean Foyle, surnamed for my hometown Derry’s river. I’m told myself I’ve not much longer to live, Norman. A buggeration of cancers. It would seem to be a condition, this mortality business.”
Again, I have no idea why: “Death.” I snorted like a fool because I am one, blurting like that to a perfect stranger.
He straightened further, bending backwards under the straw hat with its cracked bead cinching the black kerchief tightly to his chin, palming his lower back like a pregnant woman. He drew a different bead on the wan but warm autumn sun, staring directly, his narrow eyes cloudy with cataracts, a pained look … Yet something strangely joyful in his face too, like he’d forgotten me entirely, perfectly.
“Cataract surgery is nothing these days, you know, uh, Sean?”
He returned. “You’re a desperate man, Norman, I can see that. We have little enough time between us, you and I, what with my days numbered and you talking suicide!” He took me for a joke. “No time for small talk then, I agree. Try this on for size then, boyo: death isn’t.”
“Death isn’t? … Okay, I’m game. What is death then?”
“The word for nothing.”
“Death is just the word for nothing?”
He hocked and spat, a perfect splat pattern in the dirt, like random impact on some dusty moon.
He nodded once at it: “Nothing we can ever know.” He jigged his head back with a small smiling snort: “But nobody said just the word for nothing.”
I met him: “Death is the perfect word then, the word for nothing. Because, uh, every other word is for another word, like.”
“Or death is not a word.” He grinned at the sun. “You’re a man after my own heart, Norman, with your halt and lame linguistics. Did you know I was a priest once upon a time? Jesuit—surprise.”
“Do I have to call you Father?”
He crouched gingerly and broke a spud from its root, rose and commenced rubbing off the clumps of earth. He kept rubbing with slow then rapidly circling thumbs, like some loser at a phone, till he’d cleared a couple of larval-pale potato eyes. The potato took a human shape, his own head, even his face. I was stunned.
I snapped out of it. The potato was just a potato again. A distracting trick, I told myself, standing there suddenly half beside myself with inexplicable rage.
“How’d you do that?”
When he didn’t answer, I pointed to the pocket where he’d stuffed the envelope: “For a second there that potato looked like the mug on your Irish stamp.” I snickered like the fool I am.
With the potato he touched the pocket: “I’m afraid they’ve found me.”
“What? Who?”
He glanced at it then held the potato toward me. “Speak of the devil, Norman, but I do believe you’re right: Seamus Heaney’s likeness, the man himself!”
“I don’t follow?”
He let the potato drop. Then smiled and snorted gently. “Ireland’s late great bard. He was a light. The day of his death was a dark cold day.” He looked at me quizzically, and when I didn’t respond he said, “You said you’re an English teacher, Norman?” I didn’t deign to answer. He continued: “I heard Heaney read once at Queen’s, the Belfast University. We talked briefly about the Troubles. I was mad at the time, and your man pulled no punches himself. By the way, he has some beautiful poems about digging and peeling potatoes! … Call me what you want, Norman.”
“Poetry?”
“Don’t say it like that, son. Sure, poetry makes nothing happen”—again with the quizzical look—“and it may well be God’s own tool for feckin with us. But poetry, the real thing, is something like Mother Church, the true miracle these desperate days, always saying the wrong things even when she’s right, don’t I know it!”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But his lovely un-ironic laugh beamed down warmly on me. “As I expect you already know, Norman, death really does come for us all, it’s not just a rumour, so don’t go looking. Cast a cold eye … aah, to hell with it!”
Again with the piercing eye on me? Why was I sweating buckets in the austere cool of that Fall late afternoon?
“I wish I were a poet—the bard of nothing!” And snickered again like a jackass, because I am one. Why can I never be serious, even when I’m most serious?
He took me seriously. “It’s a big job, son. I suspect you have too many words, and probably not the best ones.” His sudden laugh startled me. “But I have faith in you still, Norman!”
“Faith.”
“Now-now—”
“And death is and is not a word?”
Mock-loweringly he looked me in the eyes and placed a sod of a hand on my shoulder: “Mind now you don’t quote me on that, son—they’d lock up the two of us!”
And roared a lovely laugh.
By the night he left or was taken away (I never did learn which), I’d visited his monk’s cell a few times: comfy couch and recliner, plain Ikea table for a desk, piled with books, no pictures on the walls, only a cot in a bedroom like a prison cell—and no TV. The paint on every wall was still the Project’s eggshell primer.
He was a fierce listener himself, like he might snatch into your lungs for things you’d never breathe. His talk was a concert, varying from gardening to cosmic black holes to the forgotten value of recitation (“You should have our new Canadians memorize and recite some Al Purdy—not to go all Don Cherry on you!”). It was salted with the word bogsmacked, his Irish version of the English gobsmacked. And boy did he hate the English, and not just for Ireland; throughout history and all over the world, he was bogsmacked by the British Empire.
“I suppose I’m just dispositionally contrary,” he laughed, catching himself in a full raging flight over some Bloody Sunday or other. “But the eternal and infernal cojones on them Tans! I’m near pleased to see the ould Muslims bringing the Crusades home to them.”
“But not really?”
He struggled for reserve.
A few times we talked through the night till the patient sun brightened the unlighted room in which we’d sat comfortably, sometimes silently. He was a lapsed Catholic himself and, as he’d confessed at our first meeting, a former priest from Ireland’s Derry (Londonderry). He wouldn’t say why he’d emigrated. Although we talked freely about everything and nothing, he’d done things he would not speak of.
“But in retaliation,” I prompted.
He bowed his face into his palms, his temples crinkled.
“Confess, priest!”
He snorted a sort-of laugh but didn’t remove his face from his palms. At last, with his mouth an inch or so from cupped hands, his rumbling voice echoed resignedly:
“Retaliation, yes. I expect it sustains Satan himself. … Feckin feckin feckin eejit!” He smacked the heels of his hands to his temples, and it was no priestly Confirmation tap.
I hurried: “But now you believe in nothing, and that death is just a word for nothing.”
“Oh, I still believe …” Unabashed he turned his flushed face to me. “And Norman, I want you to promise me you’ll keep talking with someone when I’m gone.”
“Gone? Where the hell are you going?”
“The very place!”
He was tearing up and smiling at the same time, like the sun washing down a rained-on cliff face.
In my mailbox that cold and snowy December day of his disappearance I found the envelope that had brought us together, scotch-taped and addressed neatly in magic marker across its cellophane window: Norman.
Inside was one of those old-fashioned holy cards, the kind Catholics give a child after First Confession and First Communion. This one presented an especially Semitic-looking St. Joseph (stout and dark, dangling ringlets, bulbous nose), wearily resigned and leading as tired a donkey bearing a hunched blue-and-white bundle through a desert landscape. The Flight into Egypt, I remembered, though it wasn’t labelled. It could as well have been Joseph obeying the Romans’ ordered census, as no baby Jesus was visible, just the slumped mound of Mary. So maybe the slouching Blessed Virgin painfully big with child and on the way to Bethlehem for the birth? Weird, what you think you've forgotten.
He’d filled the back of the card in a cramped black hand:
Christmas Comes Again
It’s cold tonight, you watch your breath
The money says that snow means death
The many beggars beg you to believe
it’s better to give, forgive, and receive
But the odds are stacked against it
even on Christmas Eve
How could a heavenly star just appear?
How without causing cosmic fear?
How many sins can a sinner grieve?
How could a virgin conceive?
Oh the odds are stacked against it
so roll God’s dice like you meant it
even on Christmas Eve
We ache to achieve
what we cannot conceive
We open our hearts and believe
Into our lives a child is sent
again and again without leave
And though the odds are stacked against
again the gift we receive
You didn’t know I was a poet, Norman!
Neither did I! Move over, Seamus!
Peace, Love, and Forgiveness,
Sean
I keep that card fixed to my fridge with a tacky shamrock magnet I picked up at Dollarama. It’s kept me going.
Gerald Lynch was born in Monaghan Ireland, where he frequently visits, and grew up in Canada. The Dying Detective (2020) is his seventh book of fiction and the completion of a trilogy. In 2017 Signature Editions published Omphalos, and in 2015 Missing Children. These novels were preceded by Troutstream, Exotic Dancers, and two books of short stories, Kisbey and One’s Company. A Professor at the University of Ottawa, in 2017 Gerald published the co-edited Alice Munro's Miraculous Art: Critical Essays. He has edited a number of other books and published many short stories, essays, and reviews, and has had his work translated into a number of languages. He has also authored two books of non-fiction, Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity and The One and the Many: Canadian Short Story Cycles. He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the gold award for short fiction in Canada’s National Magazine Awards.
Website: http://geraldlynch.weebly.com/