Once You Break a Knuckle Read online

  But that’s summer for you. Or, that’s summer for me. These nights are short, and some evenings I sleep and wake and dream, here on this porch, until the sun lifts over the mountains. Bellows was the only guy who ever bared his teeth for me. Even my dad, rest him, never had the stones. When night recedes and the dawn turns cobalt, I shuffle inside and put music on to make it sound like there’s somebody home. I pour myself a drink. There are probably a few things left unsaid between me and Bellows, but that ship, as my dad used to say, has run aground.

  This is how me and him say goodbye: on the eve of his departure we climb into the Camaro and blaze around the gravel pits with the headlamps dark, and we bawl and laugh and hug and skid donuts until we’ve kicked up so much gravel it’s like a sandstorm passing in our wake.

  THE MATHEMATICS OF FRIEDRICH GAUSS

  I’ve never been very good with my hands. Sure, I can swing a wood axe or heave on a pry bar, but ask me to pluck a suture or shuck an oyster and I start trembling like a man afraid. My doctor told me it could be nerve damage to the wrists – I got jackknifed in the birth canal – but I’m more inclined to believe I just never learned dexterity as a kid. My dad could’ve spun a few stories about how dangerous I am with a chop saw, or a hockey stick, or his prize fillet knife that once tasted the grit of human bone. It’s why I became a math teacher. Clumsier than a stiff clutch, my dad used to say.

  My wife knows the truth of it. She’s the only reason I can walk into the bar here in Invermere and not get snickered at, the reason I can smoke salmon and pull-start a chainsaw, the reason I can, but rarely do, heft a firearm. She has red hair, darker than mine, but she knows how to wear it. In summer her skin turns statue-bronze and her veins push to the surface like a boy’s. At rest, her curls tease the divot on her chin where, as a child, she barrelled into a brass doorknob. She’s got excess bone on her hip. One earlobe hangs a quarter-inch shorter than the other, and in the evenings when she thinks I’m dozing she’ll stand naked before our bedroom mirror and examine her body’s faults. It’s as if she worries that somebody expects something more. But I’ve always loved her nicks and notches. I am a fan of her inadequacies. Like Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics, I am in love with a woman who outclasses me by spades. Behind every great mathematician, and all that jazz.

  It’s 1994, the International Year of the Family, but my wife has left town to hike the Rocky Mountains. She’s gone to muck her way to an unnamed peak southwest of the valley, where she’ll pitch camp and listen to elk bugle below her and where she’ll sip the homegrown chamomile tea she’s packed among her clothes. It’s a chance for her to get some distance from Invermere, B.C., from the people who mutter for hours about our scabby streets and all the driveways kibbled by snowplows. It’s a chance for her to remember that the world exists somewhere else.

  Me, I’m building a heliotrope. My son’s idea. He drew a list of supplies and found a diagram in his science textbook, and now I’m expected to piece the thing together for him. There’re two reasons he chose this device. First, because it’s April, the end of term, and his grade four teacher, Barry Rogers – who everyone calls Wingnut on account of his ears – decided to go small-town-America and host a science fair. Second, because a heliotrope looks not unlike a laser rifle, my son wanted it mounted in his tree fort. It’s a survey device, actually, used to reflect light great distances. Gauss, my hero, invented the heliotrope and used it to triangulate the border of northern Germany. Nineteenth-century surveying involved men of uncertain sobriety waving paper lanterns in the night, and Gauss loathed to see things set aflame. The heliotrope’s a simple design: tripod base with a mirror and two monocle lenses that you beam sunlight through, to make a signal that is visible for miles. The whole contraption affixes to what could pass for a telescope – the old, bronzy type that colonels sidearmed during the American Civil War.

  My son and I are not alike, at least not physically. Colleagues crack jokes about mailmen and the uncertainty of my loins and I do my best to not let suspicion eat me. I’ve got fibrous red hair and a jaw tapered like a rugby ball. In my prime, I once benched a hundred and forty-four pounds, which, within acceptable variation, I’ve weighed since grade twelve. My son, though, he’s got a working man’s brown hair and this scar from earlobe to eyebrow where, as a toddler, he sliced himself on a nailhead. Takes after his mother, and that’s alright, except for his disposition toward fighting shows, which he comes by quite honestly from me. Each day he and the neighbour’s boys blitz home to watch the Power Rangers on my forty-two-inch rear-projection TV. This happens at three-thirty, Monday through Friday. I bring them some Coke they split amongst themselves and a bowl of dill pickle chips. On commercial breaks they gossip as though running out of time: there’s a new kid in town whose dad’s a cop; the Cooper children wear patched-up jeans because their parents can’t even afford heat; some teenager got arrested on the playground for selling parsley to the elementary schoolers as dope. And I sit in the kitchen and eavesdrop. I do it because sometimes it’s hard for a dad to understand his boy, but also out of loneliness and a sense that nobody has friends like those we cause mischief with as kids. It’s a chance to feel my own childhood, a chance to think about just how unhappier I could be.

  I’ve heard misery skips a generation. My dad was a heavy-duty mechanic who got his thumb jammed in the door of a Peterbilt Class 8. It took two miles for the driver to notice him running alongside, if you’re to believe what my dad had to say. He called that kinked thumb the rachet because it tended to buckle out of joint in fifteen-degree stutters. Gimped or not, he was one hell of a mechanic. Once, he used crochet thread and two bulldog clips to jury-rig a Volkswagen Beetle that’d snapped its accelerator hitch. Another time, on the highway to the Prairies, I watched him repair our Ranger’s exhaust pipe with leftover ringwire and a good helping of machismo. I’m pretty sure he wished I’d wear a boilersuit alongside him, but handiness with machinery is one marble I did not shoot. Dad used to say I’m a few knockouts short of a punch, whatever that means.

  I’m writing a biography on Gauss, because I like to think our lives are similar. Gauss’s father was a stonemason named Gerhard who planned for his son to wield a beechwood mallet and slop his hands with mortar. Gerhard dreamed of founding a man-and-boy masonry called Steinbrecher und Sohn. In the evenings, he imagined, he’d drink Roggenkorn and bicker with Gauss over geschäft. That’s all the German I speak. No pictures remain of old Gerhard, but with a name like that you can bet safely on a square jaw, handlebar cheekbones, and an ocular ridge with more angles than the Grand Canyon. Gauss stood five-foot-two and stocky like someone accustomed to hauling brick. A workman’s build. His father’s son. In letters, his colleagues always mention Gauss’s blue eyes. Portraits of him show an unremarkable, squat man with chops a frontiersman could abide. His nose is stout and curved at the end like a knuckle. One thick eyebrow arches, tantalizingly, and he smiles like a man who has discovered a secret we’re all dying to know but don’t quite have the nerve to ask after.

  Anyway, it’s the end of April here in Invermere, which means, among other things, that the frost has turned to dew and the lake has thawed and somebody has won a couple hundred bucks guessing the day the ice went out. It means evening light shallowing toward the horizon, the mountains casting long shadows across the valley. Kids, like my son, sense the approach of summer and get antsy from a winter spent too long indoors. Teenagers discard their shirts too early. Firepits are re-dug and lawn chairs trawled from toolsheds and for the first time in months the neighbourhood smells like woodsmoke and hotdogs roasted over open flame. Wives complain about too many coat hangers unbent to sausage spits, but not much can be done about that.

  I’m in my backyard with a couple empties and the salvaged scraps of a weathervane. I’ve got a grade four science textbook spreadeagle on a cinderblock. My wife’s toolbox yawns atop our picnic table, red and blastworn like a fire hydrant. This year, as I said, is the International Year of the Fam
ily, but my son is out of town on a class field trip to Banff. I’m building him a heliotrope anyway, because I’m bored and because I’m a good father. The sun has slunk toward the Purcell Mountains and its light scatters through the planks of my lumber fence. My wife built the fence – it took her a whole evening just to trowel holes for the posts. I offered to help, but she said I was a schoolteacher, not a fence builder, so I stayed indoors and drafted lesson plans and watched her through the slatted bedroom blinds. She wore a muscle shirt with sweat-stained ribs and jeans faded in great smiles at the thighs. Each time she shovelled, her lips peeled over her gums and I imagined the breath that trilled between her teeth. Back then, I knew the sounds she could make. Periodically, I mixed rye and Coke and gave it to my son to ferry out to her. She told him: —You could show your dad a thing or two about how to treat a lady. He repeated that line around the house for days. He was four years old then, and wouldn’t have known what she meant. Nor would he have noticed the tension each time he said it, or the way my wife cringed like a woman who had come just shy of having the life she dreamed of as a girl.

  IN 1805 GAUSS MARRIED his first wife, Johanna Osthoff, a tanner’s daughter he’d known since childhood. As kids, the two of them built hideouts among the sweet-gums and peat bogs feeding into and out of the river Elbe. Some nights they snuck from their homes. Johanna helped Gauss climb trees – he was a short boy, but he had strong arms – and Gauss guided her gaze around the night sky. As an adult, Johanna liked to read and she liked her own fierce individuality. Her favourite novel was Ardinghell and the Blessed Isles. If she were living right now, she’d open a used bookstore across the street from Chapters, she’d sip chamomile tea with friends named Chakra and Peaceflower, and while her husband crunched numbers and found the dimensionality of fractals, she’d lead protests and rear a family whose politics would shape our future. She had the hands of a woman who would know how to operate a belt sander. When clean, she gamed with the scent of wild animals. Her fingernails were chewed to beneath the quick, and Gauss, to a friend, would one day confess that he looked upon those gnarled nails with a sense things had come and gone. When he knew her as a child – even, perhaps, when they first became romantic – he remembered her hands as lithe and delicate as a babe’s. But Johanna’s hands were never soft; for years she’d helped her old man at the tannery, bucking leather and scraping rawhide with a scud. You see, what Gauss remembered was how he’d imagined her hands to be. When we’re young, we overlook our lovers’ inadequacies, and the true test of companionship comes when we must weather those inadequacies through eyes grown wise by age and disappointment.

  I met my wife at a lake near Saskatoon when she was nineteen and fleeing. I’d just dropped out of university because of a girl named Austin who had tar-coloured hair and a droopy eyelid that always made her look tired. My wife was cross-legged on the beach with a bottle of rye speared in the sand, a box of matches on her knee. She’d sparked a fledgling campfire. I had a messed-up head and a 1969 GTO that reeked of early-twenties angst. I asked my future wife if I could help her set up camp. At first she said nothing, just tied her hair in a crimson ponytail that caught the sun’s light like a bottle. Then she sent me for kindling, and I chopped wood until my shoulders pearled with sweat, until the sun hung like a dollop on the horizon and the tarry Saskatchewan dirt was gummed beneath my nails. We built the fire and hit the rye and didn’t say a whole lot.

  That was sixteen years ago. Things worked out. I spent a year pouring forms and wrestling concrete and after doing that in the howling Regina winter I’d had my fill of the workforce. I graduated with honours in mathematics, returned for a teaching certificate, and eventually landed a job here, in Invermere, heart of the Kootenay Valley, far from the maddening prairie flats. But it’s been a learning curve – I was a city boy, unversed in the nuances of rural life, the divide between rednecks and bluecollars, the gestures and conventions everybody takes so seriously but won’t spend a minute to explain. Kids use words like “ratbag” and “minkstuffing.” Men shrug, unworried, when their sons learn to drift at the gravel pits. Fights break out in the school parking lot, and the more robust among us wade into the throngs to haul the combatants apart. My wife, bless her, has dragged me through it. Sixteen years now I’ve sped along in her wake. She’s managed to start her own renovation gig, and together we’ve raised our son to be someone into whose care you could entrust a belonging.

  I am thirty-eight years old. My wife is thirty-three. It’s 1994, the International Year of the Family, but, while I rig this heliotrope in the backyard, my wife has left town to see a trade show in Calgary. She’s gone to admire Hilti watersaws and the latest in laser levels, to visit a couple cowboy bars and grind across those skid-marked floors in snakeskin boots. She’ll be wearing her red hair so it dangles to her shoulders, and she has this way of pulling it behind her ears to expose a mole on her collarbone. It’s all a means for her to let off steam – I’m not exactly the portrait of an Adonis. Every now and then I put her on edge: she’ll groan at the way I drink my coffee; she’ll lock the bathroom door when she showers; she’ll come home from work smelling of sawdust and exertion, but no coaxing can lure her to bed. Lately, I haven’t seen her naked much, and she’s always exasperated when I do, as if I shouldn’t be so excited, as if we were a goddamned teenage couple without all the benefits of being teenagers.

  But the heliotrope. The science fair. Like I said, it was my son’s idea. Most of his classmates have opted for traditional science fair gigs: his friend Duncan has concocted a baking soda volcano; another boy, Richard – who has a glass eye – is doing a spinning Cartesian diver; one kid, apparently, plans to build a replica particle accelerator that smashes marbles together like atoms. If my son were here he might have a shot at convincing me to do something more grand, something to be proud of, like a small-scale homopolar railgun. I’m not too upset that he’s away. I don’t like him to see me drink, and I’ve had one or two tonight, I’ve had one or two one or two times. He’s out of town, with his mom or with his soccer team, it doesn’t really matter.

  Gauss would have known where his children were, every hour of the day. He had six in total, two-thirds of whom survived to adulthood. For a man of his accomplishment, he sought modest futures for his offspring: marry a good woman, have good children, be a good dad. He abhorred the thought that they follow him into mathematics, but not for selfishness or even underestimation of their intellect; rather, Gauss foresaw the rise of the working class, of people like my neighbours who respect jobs that build things, jobs with a weight you can test against the strength of your arm. Only his eldest, Joseph, took this advice. The others fled to the new world, the frontier, to carve their way among the prodigal sons and daughters who waged war on the Confederacy.

  A week ago my son had his first real run-in with the locals. I mean the hicks – the right-wing gun toters who exploit our unemployment system, who pop welfare cheques on dope from the Native reserve, who think beef jerky and Coke constitutes a decent lunch to pack their kids. Their children are the type who shatter Kokanee bottles on semi-trailers, who pelt windshields with clumps of clay big as potatoes, who find genuine humour in the suffering of others.

  It was recess, and a group of these cockroaches had trapped a grain-thin boy in the school’s red spiral slide, and they were taking turns battering into him boots-first. Well, my son walked by and my son stepped in. The hicks administered him a lesson in numbers. It marked the first time he reamed a blow off his forehead, the first time a nurse at the brick hospital had to sew him up. My wife removed the sutures three days later – I’m a tad clumsy – with a delicacy I didn’t know her tradeswoman fingers could muster. She braced her hand on his forehead, wrist across his cheek, and I knelt nearby for encouragement. She smelled like drywall and the hemp-oil salve that labourers knead into their palms. After she plucked the last stitch from his eyebrow, she swabbed iodine on her thumb and massaged it over the gash like mothers do in movies from the
fifties. —There, she said, grasping him at both shoulders. —You’re fixed up.

  We stayed up late that night, my wife and I. I had marking to do, and a new assignment to concoct, and together we soaked our worries. It felt as though we’d come out of a bath. You might call it a dark hour. Invermere, despite the blaring inadequacies, for a long time had been our haven, and I don’t think either of us felt ready for the approaching weight of our son’s adolescence. My dad used to say they toss the manual out with the placenta, but I sense even that joke is a relic of time slipped by. Nowadays, you’d get a manual drawn in the multilingual cartoon way you see in aircraft safety leaflets. I’m only half kidding: what good will the values my dad beat into me do against a generation unfazed when one of their own ODs on PCP, against kids who pawn their parents’ electronics for coke money, against the advent of meth labs and pushers who market it as a good way to stay thin? These are the things that loiter on the horizon. You don’t have to be a mathematician to put two and two together.

  My wife sat beneath a hotel blanket. She had a rye and Coke on the bedside and she clutched at our ancient tortoiseshell tabby. I had a few Kokanees – comfort beer. My wife looked old. In the incandescent light her red hair was yellowed as though by cigarette smoke, and the creases at the corner of her eyes were deep and rigid. All the wrinkles around her mouth curl downward. She has, through no fault of my own, spent much of her life frowning. Like all of us, she has a past: when her dad died, she thumbed it, penniless, to the Prairies, and you can guess how she paid her way; her brother took the family car on a joyride to a logging camp in northern Manitoba and hasn’t been heard from since; she has an ex-husband – a marriage that lasted sixteen days, one for each of her years. She only tells me these details when she drinks whiskey, and she only drinks whiskey on occasions like Christmas or a long weekend or the day that could have been her anniversary.