Twenty-Six Read Online Free PDF Page B

seeing the Pope dumping out holy water. You’d better cross yourself or you’ll go straight to hell.”
    “Now I’m telling you, boy,” Ennis said. “You get the fuck out of here if you’re going to talk to me like that. Maybe I can’t throw you out, but I got a thirty-thirty upstairs that’ll get your arse moving, I bet. I’m nice enough to keep you here when your own wife won’t have you. You’d get one hell of a shock if you woke up one night with a mouthful of the end of that goddamn rifle. NowI’m telling you to get out of my sight, and I’m telling you to do it right now.”
    Arvel put the last piece of toast into his mouth and drank a warm drink of milky tea to soften the toast. “I gotta get up to that grave, anyway.” He walked into the porch and put on his parka and heavy boots. He stopped at the door and turned to face his father, who stood backlit and grim-faced in the doorway to the kitchen.
    “You ever point a gun at me, old man, it better be loaded and you’d better pull the trigger. That’s just some advice.”
    Arvel left.
    Ennis turned back to the kitchen. He swung up his leg to kick the side of the fridge. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, he could have knocked the fridge on its side with a single kick. This blow didn’t even land. His sock slipped up the slick enamel of the appliance, and as his foot was coming down, the heel jammed onto the top of the handle of the fridge door. It felt like someone had driven a nail into his foot, and the next thing he felt was his tailbone smacking the floor.
    Dunya was in the doorway: “Ennis! Ennis!” she cried. Ennis had his eyes closed in shame and anger.
    After he’d got up from the floor, he’d taken two painkillers and a nitroglycerine and chased them down with a big drink of rum and Pepsi. He’d gone into the bathroom, taken off his shirt, and examined the scar down the middle of his chest. The wide pink line was like a pair of tightly pursed lips. It had been over a year since the operation, and the doctor said the incision was fully healed, but any time he suffered a bump or a shake, Ennis expected the place where he’d been ripped open to explode, his bloody heart to flop out onto the floor.
    Bypass surgery was becoming routine, his doctor had told him before he’d gone to Halifax, but once they got him opened up on that table and had a look inside him, they’d pronounced his heart inoperable. They’d closed him up without having done the work and the surgeon signed the papers for him to draw on his long-term disability insurance.
    “The heart is a queer machine,” the surgeon had said afterwards. They sat in his oak-panelled office in New Glasgow. The leather padding of the chairs they sat in squeaked when they shifted their weight. Ennis looked at the framed degrees and certificates on the walls, and thought, “
A queer machine.” Is that the best that all this education can come up with?
    “You’ve got some bad arteries in there,” the surgeon said. “They may never cause you trouble. On the other hand, you might just go out one day like that,” he snapped his fingers. “Like switching off a light.”
    His foot hurt when he paced, but the pain in his tailbone kept him from sitting for very long. He was thinking about Arvel, about how much he loved him, and how all that love had somehow got twisted around into hate. He knew that whatever had gone wrong in their relationship, it could only be his fault. The boy had only learned whatever he’d taught him. But how could the best intentions have got so far off track?
    He’d meant to come home and ask Arvel how the organization drive was going since they’d switched to the Auto Workers. Everyone assumed that Ennis – who’d played a major role in the organization of the steel mill, the railcar plant, the pop plant, the Sobey’s warehouse – was playing a major role in what his son was doing at Eastyard coal. When the first effort by the United Mine Workers failed,