The theory of crows, p.8
The Theory of Crows, page 8
His parents’ second house was the one Matthew had grown up in, the one he was walking up to presently. They had painted the door red before doing anything else, before they’d moved one thing inside of it. When Matthew was a toddler, a kid around his age was kidnapped a few blocks over, and Matthew’s mother became a block parent. All the parents on their street told their kids that if they were playing outside and saw the big blue van that had been described by police, they should “Run to the red door.” The red door meant safety—even Dorothy said so. Before that, she’d not been a fan of it, said that it was an eyesore. Dorothy had been so mad about it that she tried to, as his father described it, “racist it away,” so that his parents would paint it another colour.
“That’s a good colour for you and your boy,” Matthew had heard her say to his father once.
His father didn’t acknowledge the comment, just replied, “Your lawn’s looking nice today, Dorothy.”
His father had told him that Dorothy’s lawn was as patchy as her skin.
“Your skin,” he’d said to Matthew, “is perfect, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
Matthew opened the screen door, raised a trembling hand, and knocked three times. He didn’t have to wait long before it swung open, sending a breath of heat across his body. Standing in the entryway, awaiting his arrival, was his father.
“You knew I couldn’t make it on my own, right?” Matthew said.
“It’s not that.” His father shook his head. “Everybody needs somebody sometimes.”
Matthew thought back to his youth, the nights where he’d find himself wandering the hallways, wandering the empty rooms, staring out the front window, feeling crushed by infinity, realizing that he was not significant. He thought of how he’d crawl into his parents’ bed. His father would be awake. His father would be waiting for him. His father would help him breathe.
“Well, thanks,” Matthew said.
His father looked worried, which was disconcerting, because he was usually unflappable. It was in his eyes, which were wider than normal, and his eyebrows, which were slightly cocked.
He had his hands in the pockets of his navy slacks—Matthew had never seen him wear jeans in his entire life. He was wearing bear paw moccasins, a pair he’d owned for decades. They’d been made authentically by his sister, Matthew’s auntie. He had a white T-shirt on underneath a light-grey V-neck sweater that matched his salt and pepper hair. His glasses had fallen to the tip of his nose.
Matthew did his best to hide the panic, because it was still present, coursing through his veins like blood. He was inside, in the warmth, but felt shaky. There was a cold sweat across his forehead. His heart was thumping just as hard as it had been in the parking lot at work; he could feel it in his neck and chest.
“So, what’s for lunch?” he said, forcing a smile because it was nowhere near lunchtime, but trying to ignore the awful sensations that were taking up space in his body.
He wanted to sit down at the kitchen table with his father, eat whatever he’d make, talk about shit that didn’t matter, and then he’d feel better.
But his father wasn’t so easily fooled.
“We can eat in a bit,” he said.
He guided Matthew over to the couch on the opposite side of the living room, the one he sat in to watch sports, or do his crossword puzzle in the morning. Matthew sat down in the middle of the couch, directly underneath one of the many paintings that decorated the walls of the house, each one of them created by an Indigenous artist. The one Matthew sat under now was of a mother holding a baby in her arms, and both mother and child were reaching toward something that was out of sight, somewhere off in the distance, far from the canvas. You were left to wonder what they were reaching for, the mother and the child. You were left to wonder what they needed that they didn’t already have.
Matthew’s father sat down beside him and groaned in relief, as if he’d come to rest after a marathon. He didn’t ask what was wrong. His father was about to do what he always did, no matter what had worked Matthew up to the point of panic—a kid stealing his toy on the playground, nobody attending a party he’d planned in grade four, the police bringing him home because he’d set fire to a garbage can, his first serious girlfriend cheating on him while she was at an outdoor festival that he’d not been allowed to attend, the principal suspending him from school for three days because he’d had the shit beat of him for no reason other than he was a “dirty savage.” Half the school had yelled war cries while Curtis Gill pummelled him like an MMA fighter. Whatever the trigger, the manifested panic felt the same each and every time. Matthew, sitting beside his father, couldn’t decide what was better: panic or numbness. The kind of detachment that didn’t allow you to care if you almost drove off an overpass onto a set of train tracks.
“Just hold still, son,” his father said, reaching toward Matthew’s stomach cautiously and quietly, as though there was something there to swat away.
Could anxiety be shooed away?
Matthew did as he was told. He watched his father’s hand inch closer toward his stomach in complete silence, and noticed in the process how his chest was rising and falling rapidly, but not so much his stomach. Then his father placed his hand flat against Matthew’s abdomen.
“I want you to stop breathing into your chest, and start breathing into your belly,” his father said.
These were instructions that Matthew had heard on several occasions, but they always felt new. It could’ve been because he’d tried to calm himself on his own previously, but had never been successful. It was as though his father had to be part of the process. Having panic attacks at home sucked, infrequent though they were, because his parents lived too far away, and so Matthew would be forced to wait them out. Take a Xanax. Drink a shot or two of whiskey.
Was there really much of a difference between calm and numbness? It was the nomenclature of panic.
Still, Matthew much preferred this. He’d taken a pill, but his father was able to ease him out of panic faster than Xanax, and without giving him a buzz.
Following his father’s instructions, Matthew focused on not breathing into his chest, but into his stomach, making his father’s hand rise, then fall, as if riding on the crest of a wave, like the snowdrifts covering the front yard. Matthew imagined the snowdrifts moving as he watched his father’s hand rise higher with each passing moment, until Matthew noticed that his breathing had evened, the sweat on his forehead had dried up, his hands had stopped trembling, and he could no longer feel his heartbeat. He sighed, then looked from his father’s hand to his father. They met eyes. His father had tired eyes; he’d seen Matthew through this many times before.
“That’s better, eh?” his father said.
“Is it that obvious?” Matthew said.
“Fight or flight,” his father said.
His father had a way of being cryptic and simplistic at once; Matthew always felt the need to decipher what he meant. Fight or flight. Matthew had come into the house feeling like somebody had a gun to his head. You experience a certain brand of terror when a gun is held to your head, not that he’d ever had a gun held to his head, but he had almost driven off an overpass onto a set of train tracks and figured that if he had, it would have done as much damage. When the fight or flight response is over, when the threat is gone, naturally you look more at ease. How could you not?
“I don’t know how you do that,” Matthew said.
His father put his hands on his knees and, with an assist from Matthew, got up from the couch. He looked outside at the snowy waves rolling across the front yard, at snowflakes whipping off the white surface like a dust cloud, at a man trudging down the street, holding his arm over his face to protect himself from the wind and cold.
“We don’t really need to eat lunch, you know,” Matthew said. “It’s not even ten.”
“How about brunch, then?” his father asked.
“That either.”
“Why don’t we have something and take a walk before you have to go back to work?” his father said. “I didn’t really have breakfast.”
“Neither did I,” Matthew said. “But, Dad . . . take a walk?”
He looked outside and wondered if his father had seen a different world than he had. This was possible. He knew that his father had lived out on the land during the winters when he was a child, and as a result, the cold had never been as intimidating to him. He was getting older, he was getting frail, his hair was turning grey at an alarming rate, he was almost at the point where he would need to use the cane with the bear’s head, but at the same time, he was a different kind of tough. That old-school “I walked fifty miles to school in the winter, uphill both ways” kind of tough.
What could Matthew say?
His father made his grilled cheese special: two pieces of bread slathered with butter, two slices of cheese, and between the cheese, fried Klik. To Matthew, Klik tasted as though somebody had eaten several hot dogs and then puked them up into a can, but he knew that it was comfort food for his father, so he ate it without complaining. He’d had worse. There were few things that made his father look more content than when he was eating Klik, and it was a rare treat, because Matthew’s mother didn’t typically allow his father to have it.
“Do you know those old commercials with the egg, where the narrator would say, ‘This is your brain,’ and then the egg would get cracked and start frying on a pan, and the same narrator would say, ‘This is your brain on drugs,’ or something like that?” his mother had said one day when she’d come upstairs from sorting the laundry and saw Matthew and his father eating, appropriately, over-easy eggs with a side of Klik that had been fried in butter.
Because Matthew liked to get a rise out of her, he did his best to look as though he were eating his favourite food as he chewed a forkful of Klik, and said, “Actually, isn’t it some settler white dude who fries the egg? He takes the egg from the carton, says the thing about the egg being your brain, then points to the pan and says that the pan is drugs. Then he cracks the egg and—”
“You get my point,” his mother said.
“Anybody watching that commercial who liked fried eggs probably went out and bought an ounce of weed,” Matthew said.
His father, usually quite stoic and reserved, almost spat out his food.
“What I’m saying is that this”—his mother pointed to the Klik—“is a visual representation of a heart attack.”
“So, you’re saying if they’d made a commercial about the dangers of Klik, the egg would’ve been your heart, the pan would’ve been Klik, and the fried egg would’ve been a heart on Klik?”
“Oh, shut up and eat your lunch,” his mother said, smiling, before leaving the kitchen.
Matthew chased her down and lifted her off her feet with an enormous bear hug.
On the trapline, his father and his family never ate Klik. They ate what they caught, like fish and muskrat and prairie chicken, or picked berries. The only things they ate that weren’t right off the land were sugar, lard, and flour. His father would spend the better part of the year on the trapline, the one he wasn’t sure how to get to anymore, and come home for two months in the summer before heading back onto the land. When he was home in the community, Klik was a delicacy to him, but only when fried.
Matthew tore through his sandwich and the side of beans his father had cooked, while his father picked at the food and ate only a few bites. They cleaned up after themselves and then bundled up for the walk. Matthew borrowed an old coat of his father’s that was too big for him now, because Matthew’s jacket wasn’t the kind for walking through a blizzard.
“You can keep it,” his father said while Matthew was slipping his arms into the coat.
With their jackets zipped up, their hoods on over thick toques, scarves tied across their faces all the way up to their eyes, and their hands protected with mitts his auntie had made, Matthew and his father stepped out into the cold.
They reached the end of the front walk and turned to head up the sidewalk in the direction closest to an intersection, where Matthew planned to have them turn back, because he knew his father was too old to walk far in weather like this, no matter how tough he was. Almost to prove Matthew’s point, his father struggled to find his footing his first couple of steps, as if he were walking on thin ice and had to be careful not to fall through. Matthew’s hands were already sweating, which was remarkable given that the weather reminded him of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. Only a few steps farther and he’d be looking for a tauntaun to cut open and sleep inside. The mitts were made traditionally, like his father’s moccasins were, constructed with great skill out of moosehide and rabbit fur. He had gloves from Mountain Equipment Co-op that weren’t nearly as warm. It was further testament to his auntie’s handiwork that while Matthew had also borrowed a pair of Sorels, not bothered at all that he had to scrunch his toes up so that his feet could fit inside the boots, his father hadn’t changed out of his moccasins.
“They’re warmer than anything else I could put on my feet,” his father had said at the front door before leaving, when he saw Matthew staring at the leather footwear.
After another few feet, his father cleared his throat and spoke. “What’s bothering you, my boy?”
Matthew didn’t respond right away. His father became unsteady, and Matthew had to put his hand around his father’s biceps. He wasn’t sure what to say about how he’d been feeling for as long as he could remember. His father and mother had already noticed something was wrong, but they weren’t sure why, because Matthew had never been able to articulate it. How could he talk about what an asshole he’d been to Claire? Texting with Jesse from work. Not quite sexting, but definitely flirtatious enough to warrant the crumpled-up tissues on the bed beside Claire. What could he say about how he’d been acting around Holly? The word Sorry was still on his phone, unsent. Sorry for what? For pushing her away, like he’d pushed Claire away? How do you articulate something you don’t understand? Why had he started texting with Jesse and withdrawn from the people who really mattered?
He gave up trying to make sense of it and said, “I feel like nothing matters. I feel small. We’re all so small. We’re just on this rock spinning into infinity.” He shrugged. “It makes me feel empty. Empty and afraid.” His father stopped walking, and so did Matthew. He looked Matthew straight in the eyes with the sort of intensity that only a father could muster, and it made the cold, the wind, the snow, fall away. It was only them. They were all that mattered in the moment.
“How do you feel all of that, and empty?” his father said.
Matthew couldn’t think of a response. The admission had surprised him; he’d not intended to say those words. He’d not been aware that he felt that way until he heard himself speak, as though he were outside of his body, watching, and there were two Matthews. Maybe that wasn’t far from the truth. He’d always felt detached from reality but, at the same time, trapped within it. He’d learned how to function despite how this had haunted him, to just hold all the confusion and emptiness in when people were watching, then dwell on the questions he had, the unresolvable questions, alone at night. During the day, he pushed those questions down to the pit of his stomach, like a seed planted in the dirt. But over the years, the seed had grown, and whatever it was, it came to its maturation and exploded within his body, and he was no longer able to put on an act for others. For Claire and Holly.
Because of this, he had pushed them away and, instead, pulled somebody else closer. Now his daughter wouldn’t talk to him, and if she had a choice, Matthew was positive that Claire wouldn’t either. But having a child seemed to mandate some form of communication between parents.
Matthew tried to explain all of this to his father, only stopping short of telling him about Jesse and the troubles he’d caused with his wife. That was a shame he wasn’t willing to disclose, even to his father. At some point during Matthew’s rambling exposition, they started to walk again, out of necessity more than anything; standing still in the cold invited more of it, and by now, their eyelids were coated like hoarfrost on blades of grass, and even moosehide was having trouble warding off the freezing temperature. The stop sign looked as though it were a mile away, but they carried on, Matthew holding his father tighter with each passing step.
Matthew used his tendency to drink lately, which wasn’t a lie, as a proxy for Jesse and his inappropriate text exchanges. He’d dipped into the liquor cabinet more and more in the preceding months and, even without his father’s counsel, thought that his drinking and the texting were somehow related. He thought that discussing one issue with his father might help him understand the other and, in so doing, help him understand what the connection was.
“It feels like, all that drinking, maybe . . . I don’t know . . .” Five words—It makes me feel empty—had come without a thought before, but now his subconscious offered no help.
Luckily, he had his father, who, as part of being an ordained minister, had trained as a counsellor. Finishing Matthew’s sentence, his father said, “You’re trying to fill that emptiness you’ve been feeling.”
“Yeah,” Matthew said. “Yeah, I guess so.” He pulled his scarf up so that it covered half his eyes; it had slipped under his mouth. “And it’s like I want to stop having to drink in order to feel . . . something. I want to be able to say sorry to Hallelujah, and to Claire, for . . .” He stopped himself from divulging the information he’d withheld from his father. “For being so distant. I feel like I’ve left them behind in this fucking . . . sorry . . . in whatever this is.”
