The eye of the chicken, p.12
The Eye of the Chicken, page 12
Salty moved his chair aside. Father Sutcliffe came from the kitchen.
Donkey Man said, “What do you say, Salty? You get yourself cleaned up and maybe I’ll have a word with that girl in the park. Maybe she likes big guys with beards. That way you wouldn’t have to flog your poodle every night.”
Salty couldn’t stop the words. “Give me her ring and her watch.”
Donkey Man glanced at Father Sutcliffe, who had his cell phone ready. “I’ll tell you what. If you forget about the ring and the watch, I’ll forget about your dog running loose. That dog I was telling you about? He had this bad habit of humping everyone’s knee. I’d invite a girl to my place and the first thing he’d do when she sat down was hump her knee. Finally, I got tired of pulling him off people’s knees. So on garbage day, I put the dog in one of those industrial dumpters. You can get rid of almost anything now with those big dumpsters. Dead dogs, people even, no one knows the difference. So, if you forget about the ring and the watch, I won’t put your dog into a dumpster.”
Father Sutcliffe held up his cell phone. “Your choice, Donkey Man. Shut the front door or I phone 911.”
Donkey Man turned and left. Salty left by the back door where the dog was waiting. The dog following along at his heels, Salty went up the alley to the street where Pavements was waiting. Pavements followed Salty across the street to sit on Caps’s bench. Salty saw that Pavements had fixed the daisies all around.
A city worker on a ride-around John Deere was cutting back and forth at the far end of the park. Pavements said, “I know him. His name’s Merv. I could go over and ask him, if Salty and me held Donkey Man down, would he run over his legs with his lawnmower.”
Salty remembered that Eli had had a John Deere tractor that he’d kept in the same field as the sheep.
Pavements said, “It wouldn’t need to be a special trip. We could carry Donkey Man over to where Merv is cutting and lay him down with his legs in its path. It’s got a thirty-six-inch blade that would take his legs off up to the knees.”
Salty looked around and saw the girl coming across the park on her way to the library. It was like looking out a big picture window at a little girl walking across a green field.
Pavements said, “I was planning to go over anyway to ask Merv if we could nail Caps’s name in beer caps along the top board of this bench.”
The dog saw her. His head went up and his ears went up and Salty knew the dog was reading in the air who the little girl coming across the green field was. The girl saw the dog and knelt down. The dog trotted forward and sat for a handshake. The girl stroked him and hugged him. When she got up, he followed her as far as the sidewalk.
Pavements said, “Father Sutcliffe might give us the money to buy the beer.”
Salty watched two women come out of Soapy Suds Laundry carrying garbage bags which looked like they were full of clothes. The other day Pavements had done his laundry in Soapy Suds, sitting there all cleaned up reading the Bible he’d stole from the library. Salty had felt more comfortable sitting next to the old Pavements, who used to smell like he lived in the same dumpster Salty had put Lee Ann in. It made him feel secure, knowing from the smell that she was still in there. Now Pavements’s smell, like that stuff Lee Ann used for cleaning the bathtub, was making Salty nervous, like she had got out of the dumpster and come back to life to do a final clean-up. And his shirt was the same colour as that blue stuff she put in the toilet before asking, would it kill you to put the toilet seat back down, Harold?
Pavements said, “I’ve been thinking about borrowing a shovel and digging up the dirt around the bench and planting some daisies. Then they’d come up year after year for Caps to look at, up there above the bridge, floating around in the warm sunny summer sky. How are things up there, Caps? ‘Not too bad, Pavements. Lots of time up here to ponder.’”
The girl was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for a break in the traffic so she could cross. The dog was looking both ways, stop, look, and listen, like he was guiding her across the street the way he did for Caps. The dog crossed halfway with her and waited to make sure she reached the other side.
Chapter 20
Sylvia
Now all Sylvia could think about was this homeless man called Salty who had tried to catch the jumper but who had not tried to prevent her from being robbed. The crazy thing was, none of this would have happened if she hadn’t been using the library on Bridge Street to research a summer school paper on Hemingway. Even crazier was that Salty looked like Ernest Hemingway. It was like some subliminal message had come from some dark corner of her brain into her mind and directed her to choose an online course on Hemingway. Some subliminal message in the library had directed her hand to a book containing photos of Hemingway, many of him standing beside the fish he’d caught. Then this subliminal messenger had directed her hand to a book with Hemingway’s boxing photographs. These triggered memories of her father’s flattish nose and she remembered his line, “See you next round.” Sylvia did not want to see her father next round. So whether or not Salty was her father did not matter.
But when she saw Salty and the dog sitting side by side on a bench covered with daisies, a strange thing happened: she changed her mind. It was not changing her mind after thinking about it. It was a spur of the moment, no-good-reason change of direction.
She expected to see homeless men gathered around the front door of The Daystar, some passed out on the sidewalk, others leering at her from behind a tree. But there was no one outside. She knocked on the front door.
Father Sutcliffe was wearing jeans and a “Staff” T-shirt. In his right hand, he had a paperback book. He said, “Why, hello. The girl from Caps’s funeral. Is that proper terminology? ‘Girl?’ ‘Young woman’ might be better.”
“I think ‘girl’ is fine.”
He led her inside. The living room, dining room, and kitchen looked neat and clean, almost homey. But there were no pictures on the walls, no end tables or plants or decorations of any sort. The floors were bare wood, no carpets or scatter rugs. His office had no plaques or bookcases or filing cabinets. The only way anyone would know it was an office was the desk with the black leather swivel chair behind it, and a plain wooden one in front. There was no way of knowing he was a priest other than his manner, which reminded her of Eli, the Mennonite farmer. In fact, everything about The Daystar reminded her of the austerity of her childhood Mennonite neighbours. With a gesture of his right hand, he invited her to sit. He pulled up the swivel chair and they faced one another.
She said, “Some long-haired homeless character with snakes covering his arms robbed me of my money, my watch, and my ring. Does he live here?”
“I know who you mean. No, he doesn’t live here.”
“The one they call Salty was sitting on a bench covered with flowers. He did nothing.”
“It’s the law of the street: avoid trouble.”
“Does Salty live here?”
“He’s not one of mine. I have four permanents that have managed to survive my rules, so with six bedrooms I usually have one or two available for transients. But no, Salty is not one of mine.”
“What is the name of the man who robbed me?”
“One of my rules is I don’t give out names. I respect everyone’s right to privacy.”
“The one they call Salty. He saw it happen. He might know his name.”
“He might, but he won’t say.”
The priest leaned back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. He asked, “Did you know Caps?”
“No. Not at all. But I was there when he jumped. It got me thinking about, you know, life, the homeless, about reaching an unhappy end.”
She felt comfortable with this priest. She wanted to tell him she had this crazy idea that Salty might be her unwanted father. She said, “What can you tell me about Salty?”
Father Sutcliffe shrugged, “He comes and he goes. He stays out of trouble, minds his own business, bothers no one.”
“And now he has Caps’s dog.”
The priest swiveled the chair half a turn from the desk, tilted himself back, and stared at the opposite wall. He said, “I watched Caps fall. Salty had his arms out for him. Caps was a skinny little guy. Salty could have caught him easily. I know the newspaper said he was blinded by the sun. But what it looked like to me, somehow in mid-flight, the dog and the man either intentionally traded places, or their places were intentionally traded, making sure the one to land in Salty’s arms was the dog.”
Sylvia thought, here comes the religion, the hand of God stuff.
She said, “He is big enough and strong enough to catch a man, but not big enough or strong enough to prevent that snake character from robbing me. He just sat there and watched.”
Father Sutcliffe swiveled into a leaned forward position and placed his elbows on his desk. “If you tell me what your interest in Salty is, I might be able to help.”
“I was five years old when my father abandoned me. I had no contact with him until three weeks ago. I got a message saying he was living with the homeless in Silver Park. Then, when I saw Salty, I had this feeling that it was him.”
“But you think you could be mistaken.”
“Yes. I probably am.”
“What if you’re not?”
“I don’t want a homeless man for a father.”
“What if he needs your help?”
“The same answer. I don’t want a homeless man for a father.”
Father Sutcliffe was staring at her, reminding her of the Mennonite messenger who had said, “How can you not care about your father?”
Father Sutcliffe said, “You see the wall behind me? It’s blank. Look around, up and down. All the walls are blank. What answer is written on a blank wall?”
Sylvia shrugged. “I guess no answer.”
“No questions. No answers.”
“So you’re saying that’s how I should leave this father question? Blank?”
“They leave family and friends for one of two reasons: they don’t want to go back, or they can’t go back. Blank walls mean no judgmental slogans in this church. In this church, you are accepted for what you are, not for what someone else is suggesting you should be.”
“I’m not saying he should be some other way. I’m saying I don’t want him to be my father. Especially if he sat there and watched me get robbed.”
“You were at Caps’s funeral. Did you wonder if Caps was your father?”
“Of course not.”
“But you think Salty might be. Our thoughts become our reality. Now that you’ve asked the question, you won’t be able to let it go until you find the answer. What we ask determines what we do.”
“Not always, no. I’ve made up my mind.”
“I have noticed, twice now, that your left hand reaches up to rub along your cheek. Why is that?”
She dropped the hand. “Under the makeup is a scar. But now that you mention it, I think I just started doing it. It’s from a childhood thing, memories coming back to me.”
“Tell me about your childhood. Your mother, for example.”
This was a question easily answered. “She died when I was five.”
“Then what?”
Sylvia thought, then what? This is where this conversation should end. But, crazy thing, now that he’d gotten her started, she did not want to stop. “When I was little, the Mennonite farmer next door had a dog the same as Caps’s, now Salty’s. Amos, his name was, after the prophet in the Bible. Every day, I would go to the field to pet him and tell him stories — about myself, of course. I look at Salty’s dog, and the way it looks back at me, I don’t know, it feels like it’s asking me to finish my story. I keep picturing it, me with Amos, so clearly. It feels like I’ve come back to that field to finish my story.”
“They call him Whisper. Are your feelings coming to you like in whispers?”
“Sort of, yes. At first. But now in recollections, like Salty sits on that bench with the flowers carving with his pocket knife. A fish, I think. And I saw him one other day. He was looking at a letter and, I think, a locket.”
“So you’ve been watching him.”
“Not really. I cut across the park to the library.”
“So you’ve been watching him.”
“Well, okay, yeah. But not watching. It’s more like looking at a photograph of yourself when you were little, like you’re there, but not really. I know if I went up to him and looked closely, I would see through the bushy beard and the long hair and the ragged clothes that this man is a complete stranger.”
“But your father is a stranger.”
She nodded. “Yes, more a stranger than a father, that’s for sure. My first foster father wasn’t religious, but he thought I should get religious instruction, so he sent me to Sunday school. Protestant, not Catholic. It was closer. The Sunday school teacher gave every kid in the class a bedtime prayer and said that when we prayed, our guardian angel would fly up to heaven and tell God what we wanted. I believed him. I didn’t have a real mother or a real father, so my guardian angel was like a mother looking after me. So every night I prayed for my father to come back. And that always made me feel better. For a while, anyway.”
His eyes, full of understanding, were drawing out her story she couldn’t help but finish.
“I was abandoned when I was five years old. I don’t remember much, but the few things I do remember are that I wore print dresses, and my father worked in construction, and next door lived Amos the sheepdog. Every single day, I went across the field and patted Amos, and then I asked Amos if I could pat the lambs and he would bring me one.
“But my father. For a long time, the only thing I remembered about him was that he read me a story and played his guitar and he sang me this song: ‘Everything’s going to be alright, rock-a-bye, rock-a-bye.’ He would put me on his knee and we would sing the song together with me plunking the chords: ‘Everything’s going to be alright rock-a-bye, rock-a-bye.’
“I got my face cut when I was five.” Sylvia traced it with her finger. “I cover it with makeup so it’s hard to see. My first foster parents adopted me and gave me their last name, Evans, and then they split. So, I went back into foster care. After that, no one wanted me permanent because of the scar. It seemed to get bigger as I got older. So I went into revolving door.
“I lived for a while with different foster parents. One foster mother was nice, she meant well, but was sort of phony, like the way she dressed, dyed her hair. But all their furniture was cheap and junky and I had to wear cheap, junky clothes from Walmart because she spent all the money the CA gave her on clothes for herself. That’s how foster care works. They do it for the money.
“Then I lived with a lady who pretended she was my aunt. I had to call her Aunt Katie. She didn’t want her neighbours to know she took in foster kids. She took me to the movies every Saturday. That was the good part. The bad part was that the apartment was on a long street of low-rise government apartment buildings, you know, like they want to build here in the Thorn. They were all dirty inside and there was garbage all over the place. There was one superintendent for every three buildings, and he didn’t do anything. The little kids peed in the halls and people left their garbage all over, so there were cockroaches all over the place. That was the worst place I ever lived.
“One day, I was about nine, I think, someone told me my father lived in a little place called Cedron, so I took the bus to find him. I just sort of hung around, hoping I’d see him. There wasn’t much there, just a church and one restaurant and a bowling alley. I didn’t know what he would be doing there. He worked in construction. I stayed there for quite a while, wandering around, but he wasn’t there so I went back home.
“Lately, I’m remembering all kinds of things. My father had a scar on his forehead. He had this way of walking, like a boxer. He’d say, ‘I’ll see you next round.’ And he had spare change in his pocket, that’s what I remember.”
The words rushing out were draining her. She shifted from a slump and sat up straight. She drew one leg up underneath her. “When I climbed up on his knee, the change rattled in his pocket. He was good with his hands and liked to carve fish. ‘They’re always swimming upstream, like myself,’ he’d say.
“I remember his strength. I remember him being big and strong, with big hands. But I was little, so that doesn’t count. But mostly, I remember his eyes were soft, and... I don’t know, they just were. The reason I remembered that was that they were like the eyes of the farmer next door. Eli his name was. Kids remember strange things. I guess that’s why I couldn’t believe he left me. There had to be a bigger reason, like caring for someone else besides me. That is what I used to tell myself. Then, when I got older, this changed to anger at him for never coming back.”
“And that’s where you are now.”
With her left hand, she traced the scar.
He said, “The scar, you’re reading and rereading it like Braille.”
She dropped the hand. She said, “It’s like I’m unzipping it, one stitch at a time, like a coat needing to be taken off and thrown away.”
He said,“Or donated to a homeless man.”
He said, “Or mended and put back on.”
He said, “Sylvia. Why don’t you just go up to him and ask him?”
“I’ve already thought of that. I’m a foster kid. I know how it is when an abandoned kid turns up in your life. That is when the big lies start. I know all about the little lies. I watched parents lie to social workers, and social workers lie to one another, and parents lie to each other, and all this time the child is standing there wanting nothing more than to be wanted by someone who doesn’t tell lies. The little lies were bad enough. I’m not interested in getting into the big lies.”
“But what if he is your father?”
“A homeless alcoholic? I know all about alcoholics. My third foster father was an alcoholic. Have a drink after a hard day. I deserve it. Have a cold beer for a hot afternoon. Have a hot toddy to take the chill off the cold night. My wife is unfaithful and my life is empty so I have a drink to take it all away. I’ll have one now but not another until five-thirty. I’ll take sips rather than gulps so the drink will last longer. And so it goes, hot for the cold and cold for the hot and full for the empty, the covert agenda of the alcoholic mind. A homeless alcoholic? No thanks. I don’t want to be lied to. I don’t want excuses. I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want games.”
