Confession - Hardcover

Lee Gowan is the author of the Going to Cuba, a collection of stories, and the novels The Last Cowboy and Make Believe Love, which was shortlisted for the Trillium Award. An award-winning screenwriter, he is the coordinator of the Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. He lives in Toronto.

One

Eight years since I’ve seen my parents’ graves, and if I haven’t visited it’s a safe bet that neither has anyone else. Maybe a few of the curious, assuming that anyone is still curious about such things. Not a week goes by that I don’t think of them there, under their shared granite slab. They died a day apart, my mother the one day and my father the next, so one stone seemed appropriate and more cost-effective. Not that I paid. I just mean that it must have seemed more appropriate and cost-effective to the man who did pay for the pretty pink rock and the engraving and had them buried side by side. They’re within reach, but they never touch. How so like the world of the living.

You don’t entirely appreciate how alone you are until you’ve lost your parents.

In the beginning, we piled stones on graves to stop wild animals from digging up the remains of our loved ones. I suppose those rough mounds served as markers as well, but the principal reason we piled them so high and wide was because we didn’t want to come back to find our parents’ bones strewn around like any other animal’s. Nowadays, with coffins and fancy fenced-off graveyards in the middle of the city, you don’t have to worry about anything eating your dead parents. We’ve almost completely run out of things to worry about. I’m kidding. I wouldn’t even mention it, but down east here, people tend not to know when you’re kidding.

My mother’s father was a baker, and he was not a kind man. That was about all she ever said about him. There was an empty place in my mother that couldn’t be filled up with any amount of love or nastiness, and I was always pretty sure it had something to do with her father, but there was no way of getting at what he might have done to her. It was like she spent her whole life hiding from him, always glancing over her shoulder. One time, when I tried to get more out of her (I was probably seven or eight years old), she told me he was like the giant that Jack meets at the top of the beanstalk. I guess my father was Jack. He met her at a meeting in a Denver basement in 1964. She was seventeen years old and he was over forty. It was the monthly gathering of the Secret Society, an anti-communist cell operating in Denver. She had been hired to dance and take off her clothes for them. (She told me this when I was sixteen, after she’d pulled out my bottom drawer and found a magazine full of young women who had taken off their clothes. She said I could keep the magazine, but I couldn’t stand the thought of her knowing it was there, so I burned it.) The Secret Society didn’t pay her much to take off her clothes. The man who hired her, a friend of her father, said it was for the cause of freedom.

The morning after the last performance of her dancing career, she was heading north in my father’s pickup truck. He was the most exciting man she’d ever met, a war hero from an exotic northern kingdom. Queendom. He’d lost his arm fighting the Nazis, and she was escaping with him from the giant and from Denver and from the United States of America, and she would never be unhappy again.

Nine months later I was born.
I’m only twenty-nine years old. People generally think I’m older. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ve suffered more than most in twenty-nine years, and that’s made me act or appear older than I am. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no pride in my claim of suffering. Mostly I suffer from shame, and there’s not much percentage in being proud of your shame. I’m a janitor here at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada, and I’m also a bit of a philosopher. The thing that marks me most is my unusual relationship with God. I’ve killed for Him, and He, in turn, has killed for me. That, I believe, is an unusual relationship.

I like being a janitor because it’s plain and simple, one of those jobs that’s never noticed unless it’s left undone or not done well enough. When somebody compliments me on my work, it’s most often because she wants to feel good about herself for noticing. I’d just as soon not be noticed. The highest compliment is when they forget you exist. If they can’t see right through you, you’re not using the right window cleaner. This afternoon, for instance, I happened to be emptying the trash barrel in the corner of the schoolyard when I heard the voice of this lawyer’s son, a boy I have not gained a good opinion of. I turned to see that he had another kid cornered.

“Give me the ball, you little faggot.”

These kids were both in grade four, the same grade as Caroline. There’s no way he’d have let a teacher hear him say that, but he didn’t take any notice of the janitor. I was of no more consequence than a rat rooting around the garbage. Less, in fact. A rat is far more deserving of attention than a janitor. And if the cornered kid hadn’t been a friend of Caroline’s, I’d never have got myself involved. I watch out for Caroline and her friends. Caroline is my daughter.

“I said, give it here, you faggot. Why don’t you go play with your girlfriends? Maybe they’ve got a Barbie doll for you.”

Caroline’s friend has more backbone in him than little Mussolini expected, and he shook his head and wouldn’t give up the ball. Didn’t say a word, though, and you could see he was pretty scared.

“Give it here, faggot!”

“Watch your mouth,” I said.

The lawyer’s kid spun around to look at me. Caroline’s friend was gaping at me too, but he looked just as scared as before I stuck my nose in, like he thought I was on his case for not watching what he wasn’t saying. For a second there, they were equal: two scared little boys.

“I don’t like to hear that kind of talk,” I said.

By this time the lawyer’s kid had realized I was only the janitor. “Mind your own fucking business, freakoid.” He turned back to Caroline’s friend. “If you don’t give me the fucking ball –”

I picked him up by his shirt collar at the scruff of his neck, as if he were a kitten, and turned him around to face me. “I told you, I don’t like to hear people talking that way.”

He started wriggling, and for a second I thought he was going to take a swing at me, even though I had him by the back of the neck. The laying on of the hands wasn’t what made him drop his fists. It was my eyes. He could see something in my eyes that made him hang still and pee his pants. He could see me wondering whether God wanted him dead. Caroline’s friend saw too, and he ran.

I set the boy down and walked away.

Caroline’s friend went right to the teacher in the playground and told her. I’m not sure which teacher, because I’d gone down to hide under the stairs in my room with the red door. Had a coffee. What could be safer than drinking coffee in a room under the stairs behind a red door? A knock came, and I opened up to see that the principal herself had come for a visit. She looked me over for signs of chaos and depravity.

“How are you, Jonathan?”

“Fine. Just having a coffee. Would you like a coffee?”

“One of the students said you were involved in an altercation in the playground.”

I knew I should not have lifted him off the ground. Less than three months on the job. They could get rid of me for less.

“Just now? Oh. Yeah. A couple of boys arguing and I told them to stop. Hope I didn’t scare them.”

She studied me and I looked at the floor.

“Did you touch him, Jonathan?”

“Touch? No. I don’t think so. No.”

“What happened?”

“The one called the other a name.”

“What name?”

“I don’t remember.”

“It’s better if I know what name.”

I looked around to make sure no one else was listening. “Faggot.”

“You see, Jonathan, that’s important. There’s a strict policy against that kind of thing. But you have to come to me immediately. And you’d better not have touched him. We’ve had to deal with his father before. You’d better tell me the complete truth about what happened so that I know what I’m dealing with here.”

I shrugged and then, because it was obvious she wasn’t buying, I added, “Just dealing with garbage.”

I smiled and she shook her head, not appreciating the humour of a janitor dealing with garbage.

“I need to know, Jonathan,” she said. “I need to know exactly what happened.”

“Never touched him,” I said. “I told him to watch his mouth, and the kid he was tormenting ran away, so I left.”

She looked me in the eye and I forced myself not to look away.

“That’s strange,” she said. “The boy you helped was under the impression there was some kind of physical intervention involved.”

“That is strange,” I said. “Maybe he wished it were so.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“It certainly makes for a better story.”

She studied me some more and waited. She has eyes so blue that even in the basement they make you remember the sky.

“I like this job,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything that would mean I could lose it.”
Caroline looks like her mother. Like her mother and like my mother. It’s hard to put a finger on the particular resemblances. My mother’s eyes and mouth, for sure. Her mother’s nose and chin and cheekbones. The resemblance goes beyond th...