Watercolours

When I was eight years old, my parents worked full time. My elementary school was only a few blocks away from my grandmother’s house, so I’d walk there after school just about every day. She lived in a small house with a large backyard dotted with peach trees and blackberry bushes. Grape vines scaled the sides of her brick garage at the end of the property. She had a rectangular patch of soil in the middle of the yard where she’d plant tomatoes and carrots. She taught me to always plant the basil right next to the tomatoes. She said it was because they got along so well.

My grandmother didn’t drink a lot, but in a thick oak cabinet in her kitchen, she kept a bottle of vodka. The cabinet had wide doors near the bottom with brass handles. The rest was wooden shelving covered by glass panels on hinges that swung outward when you opened them. You could look through the glass and see everything on the shelves. That’s how I knew there was a bottle of vodka inside; I never saw my grandmother open the cabinet herself. 

One evening after dinner, my grandmother was in the living room playing the piano. I had been sitting in the hallway scattering Legos across the floor, trying to think of something to build. By that point I was pretty bored and anxious for something new. I knew it would be a few hours still until my parents would come to pick me up, so I got up and wandered into the kitchen. The first thing that struck my eye was that bottle of vodka. My grandmother’s house was built so that each room was connected by a circular hallway. I knew she wouldn’t be able to see me from the living room, and as long as I still heard the piano plunking away, I knew I was safe to snoop around.

I got up on my tip toes right beneath the shelf where the bottle sat and stretched up to reach the handle. I got it open and slid the bottle silently into my hand. I just stood there and looked at it for what must have been a couple of minutes. I was mesmerized. That was the closest I had ever been to alcohol in my life. My hands were shaking and my heart was thumping in my ears. The next thing I knew, the piano stopped and I froze up. My grandmother was standing in the doorway into the kitchen, looking down at me, smiling. She simply took the bottle from my hand and put it back in the cabinet. She wasn’t angry. She led me into the living room, sat me down on the couch, and I prepared for what I thought was going to be big trouble. But the way she was still smiling told me I wasn’t going to be reprimanded. Instead, she told me a story. This is the story she told me.

When my grandmother was twelve, she still lived on an acreage with her father and mother. Her father was a mechanic who fixed all the farmers’ tractors and trucks in the area. He was a very large man with a thin face and light brown hair that was greying around his ears. He wore a downy moustache that hung over the top of his mouth so that when he talked, you couldn’t read his lips. But you didn’t ever need to. He spoke loudly and sternly and always looked you right in the eye. The way my grandmother tells it, he was an uncomfortable man to be around.

One summer day the family was invited to the Campbell’s house for supper. They lived a couple kilometers down the road so my grandmother and her family dressed up and packed into the station wagon. It was Sunday afternoon and her father had spent all day drinking, but he drove. He always drove. That’s the way it was. When they arrived, her father drank all evening with Mr. Campbell. By the end of the night, he was pretty well lit.

My grandmother told me that alcohol has a way of calming you down, but that it was only that way with certain people. She said her father wasn’t one of those people. He was scary when he was drunk. Around nine o’clock, her father reached into his pocket and grabbed his keys. He would pinch one key and jingle the rest below his hand. “Time to go,” he said. That was all he said. Then his wife would take care of saying goodbye, exchanging pleasantries, smoothing over any tension her husband had caused. That was always her job: cleaning up after her husband. 

It was pouring rain when they got outside. They all loaded into the car and before my grandmother had her door closed her father had the engine started and was pulling out of the driveway. He was going about eighty kilometers an hour by the time they reached the dirt road. From the back seat, my grandmother watched the windshield wipers struggle to clear away the water. Her father couldn’t see where he was going so he kept ploughing through pot holes, rattling everybody’s teeth. The whole time her father was cussing the rain and the windshield wipers for not keeping up. After each pot hole he would yell and pound the steering wheel with his hand, but he would not slow down. Then, out of nowhere, her father slammed on the breaks and began bashing the windshield with his bare knuckles. Just as the glass began to split down the center, he stopped and held his raw, bleeding hand to his stomach and screamed into the steering wheel until he couldn’t breathe. By this point my grandmother was crying and her mother had reach over and was half cradling her in one arm, rubbing her back up and down. Then her father got out of the car, slammed the door, and started trudging home through the mud. They stayed in the car all night and her mother drove it home in the morning.

By the time they got home her father was at the other end of the field, all bandaged up. It was Monday morning so he was banging away on a tractor, already covered in grease. My grandmother said that’s the way it always was. Whenever he had one of his outbursts you could be sure to find him, hours later, nailing together pallets for the neighbour or hauling tree prunings from the orchard. Whenever there was something to fix in the family, he’d go and fix something else. Then by supper, the understanding was that everyone had forgotten about it.

My grandmother didn’t want to be around her father that morning; at least until supper, that is. So while her mother scrubbed the blood out of the front seats, she decided to take a walk into the woods that bordered their property. The railroad ran through the woods, and on the other side of the train tracks was a small lake surrounded by trees. This was my grandmother’s favourite spot. In particular, her favourite spot was this one bent over poplar tree. She said it naturally grew that way, all bent out of shape and leaning diagonally over the lake. She would sit on the trunk and dangle her toes into the cool water on hot days.

But on that particular day, as she stepped over the tracks, she noticed someone sitting on her tree. It was a young boy about her age. She stopped and watched him for a while, knowing he hadn’t seen her yet. He was holding what she could tell was a bottle, and he was sniffing the mouth of it and looking around anxiously. Finally, he noticed her. He jumped frantically and quickly threw the bottle in the grass by the edge of the water. My grandmother says she went over and talked to him. He calmed down quite a bit after he realized she wasn’t going to tell on him. What he had done was stole a bottle of whisky from home. He thought the woods would be a safe place to take a taste of it. She and the boy talked most of the day, but when they realized it would be supper soon, they said goodbye. They made a promise to meet there again the next day at the same time, and they did, day after day until the end of summer.

My grandmother told me that was my grandfather she met by the trees all those years ago. I never knew my grandfather very well, though. He died when I was three years old. But I’ve heard stories that make me wish I was around in his time.

Many years after she told me that story, I was helping her move into her new apartment. After all the boxes were sorted out and the furniture was moved around, we sat down on the edge of her bed. We were sifting through knickknacks when I opened up a plastic bin filled with paintings. None of it was framed so I assumed she had done it. But when I held one up to the light, I noticed she was looking at it too. Her face twisted up and then she looked away. 

“You can have all of that,” she said, looking back into one of the boxes.

“Did you paint all of this? They’re beautiful,” I said, pulling more out.

“No, grandpa did,” she was still looking down. “Take it all. I can’t look at it anymore.”

I put the paintings back in the container and sealed up the lid. I did as she said and took the artwork home. I spent an afternoon looking through all of it. Most of it was landscapes of the country side or big, colourful scenes of pine forests or mountains. It was incredible how much he painted in his lifetime. But one painting stood out more than the others. It was much smaller, done on a thin piece of poster paper. It was a watercolour of a lake bordered by a railroad track, and sitting on a bent tree by the water is a little girl.