A Jest of God - Margaret Laurence [31]
“I don’t blame you,” he says offhandedly. “Damn this car. Something’s the matter with the ignition.”
Finally it starts.
“I’ve got to trade this old wreck in,” he says, “before it gets any worse. It’s depreciating God-knows how many dollars every hour – every second, probably.”
“It doesn’t seem like an old wreck to me. But I don’t know anything about cars.”
“Neither do I. That’s why I always get rooked on them. Never buy another secondhand car, I tell myself. But I go on doing it. I’m more like my old man than I think, I guess.”
I don’t see his father at all any more. The milk is delivered by someone else, a hired man, these days. But when I was a child – I’d forgotten until this moment – Stacey and I used to cadge rides on Nestor Kazlik’s sleigh in the winter, a big wagon-sleigh drawn by two horses, and all the milk bottles were carefully covered with a tarpaulin so they wouldn’t freeze and burst. We would grab hold of the back and be pulled along dizzyingly, as though skiing or flying, until our arms nearly broke and we dropped off on to the hard rutted snow of the road. He used to be a big man, a great bear of a man, with a moustache thick as an untrimmed hedge.
“How do you mean?”
“He still won’t have a car. He says he has the milk truck and that’s plenty. Anything more would be an indecent expenditure. It took about ten years of persuasion before he would even get the truck instead of a wagon. He still can’t believe that he isn’t on the verge of penury and hasn’t been for quite a few years. You talk cars to him and he starts muttering proverbs or something – you know? Extolling thrift. You got to learn to be careful, he tells me, or you won’t have enough money to pay for your own funeral. I don’t care about my own funeral, I tell him. What a disgrace, he says, a teacher and they can throw him in a field and let the crows eat his eyes for all he cares – what kind of man is this?”
“He doesn’t mean it, though.”
“He means it,” Nick shrugs, “and also doesn’t mean it. He never feels any need to be consistent. He took my mom to Banff last summer on a holiday, and that’s what they went in, this little van-type truck with Kazlik’s Dairy Manawaka Manitoba painted on the side. He made Jago get out the old wagon to deliver the milk, so he could take the truck. My mom wanted to go by bus, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He actually took her to the Banff Springs Hotel. My God, what a crazy man he is. My mother wrote me about it. He’s not in the market for even a secondhand car, but all at once he decides he’s a prince. The best, he tells her. For once, the best. My mom is horrified, but she can’t bear to tell him, because he’s enjoying himself so much. So they go bowling in, with Kazlik’s Dairy truck, among all the herd of Cadillacs and Lincolns. My mom creeps around amid the fashion plates like some kind of stout silent tortoise, you know? Massive retirement into the shell. But not him. Hell, no. The first night, he disappears. Before dinner. At ten he still hasn’t turned up. There is nothing to eat in the room, not even a chocolate bar. My mother is sitting there in the middle of the Banff Springs Hotel, starving to death. Imagine it. Finally he comes blasting in with about ten new acquaintances. They are all wealthy oil men from Alberta, but never mind – now they have learned all about how to start a dairy farm, right from the word go. Should the oil business ever fail, you understand. I don’t know what the hell the point of this story is, Rachel, or how I got started on it.”
He’s easy to listen to. Easy as well, it almost seems, to reply to. If only it could be that way.
“Cars. It started with cars. I think he sounds wonderful, your father.”
Nick gives me a quick sideways glance.
“Yeh. I get quite a kick out of him, myself.”
He is suddenly withdrawn. What did I say wrong? He thinks it sounded false, or even worse – gushing. Is that it? Or what?
“Here we are,” he says.
The Roxy Theatre has never been a theatre, as far as I know, except for the occasional minstrel show