Remembrance

Remembrance

The haunting call of a loon echoed across the lake and appeared to carry through the fire-like leaves that swirled upwards in unseen eddies along the shore. Autumn’s dankness, its sweet smell of decay, filled Isaac Taylor’s lungs with the quiet loneliness of the season. A creeping mist pressed upon the water and he was reminded of those nights when, as a boy, he and his grandfather had camped out in this very spot and the old man had fed his imagination with stories of native canoes, English red-coats, or Viking longships moving silently through the fog. The old man’s face was there again, as clear as yesterday, imparting his wisdom, the history of the area, fly fishing, how best to cook a trout, books to be read, and numerous other subjects. The campfire would warm them and make the ideal setting for a seven year old boy curled up in his sleeping bag listening to Grampy.

By comparison his campfire was a poor substitute for those times that appeared so dreamlike now, and so far away from the cold reality of roads taken that should have been avoided.

Where was Grampy’s wisdom now? he wondered

A bitter twist to his mouth only highlighted a furrowed sense of emptiness and failure

that filled his heart.

He hadn’t counted it, but estimated that there was at least seven, maybe eight

thousand dollars in his gym bag. Closing his eyes he could still hear the gunshot, the shrieks of the bank staff and the one remaining customer, Mrs Kinsman, cowering beneath the counter while clutching at her handbag. Looking at the old Webley service revolver that had been his grandfather’s, he felt ashamed. The trigger was far more sensitive than he’d realized. Or perhaps he’d just forgotten a lesson the old man had once taught him.

The bank hadn’t been busy, which for a Friday morning had worked in his favour. As he scanned the faces of the customers waiting in line for the one available teller, he only recognised Mrs Kinsman - the retired high school librarian, though he doubted she would remember him. The teller was a temp, a stranger, but the manager might know him by sight and could possibly identify him to the police, and there were of course the security cameras. As he waited he felt his hands sweating, shifting the gun in his jacket, gut churning, moving down the line slowly as customers took care of their banking needs then departed. Two more ahead of him yet...The sweat was moving from his armpit down his side in long slow dribbles, and he had almost convinced himself of perspiring beads on his forehead that might make him look suspicious or guilty. Only Mrs Kinsman ahead of him now. She had struck up a conversation with the teller about the weather, lingering longer than was necessary. Delaying the inevitable. He felt his breathing getting heavier, a shortness taking over. Mrs Kinsman finally left the teller as he moved slowly forward giving the elderly woman time to exit. But as he reached for the gun and simultaneously pulled down his tuque - which now became a ski mask, Mrs Kinsman suddenly turned on her heel to ask the teller another question. It was her sudden movement that prompted panic, and the revolver discharged, blasting a bullet into the ceiling, making everyone shriek and jump. He yelled:

“This is a robbery! Nobody move!”

And nobody did. Then he dumped the gym bag in front of the terrified teller and told

her to empty the cash drawers. Mrs Kinsman had slumped to the floor, and for a moment he wondered if she’d been hit by a ricochet or was having a stroke. But no, she hadn’t been hit, just collapsed out of instinct or maybe plain fear, whimpering near the counter with wide frightened eyes. The manager, Mrs Ellis, hadn’t moved since the bullet hit the ceiling and debris had fallen down on her from the broken tiles and plaster. She looked petrified, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. As the teller went about filling his bag with the cash her shaking fingers rifled from the drawers in fist-like clumps, he bandied the gun between both women without having cocked it, and said no more than:

“Hurry up!”

Then the bag was in his hands with no sign of an alarm being sprung. Taking off out

of the bank like a charging bear, almost knocking over an elderly gentleman impeding his getaway who hadn’t moved quickly enough away from the main doors. Maybe he shoved the old man outta the way, but he couldn’t clearly remember, things were moving too fast then. By the time he started up his old rustbucket Honda, he could hear police sirens coming from the direction where the RCMP detachment was down on Main. He had seconds, not minutes, to get away. It had been a whirlwind of movement that even now, in the stillness of his surroundings, he found hard to believe. Adrenalin had kicked in and everything just sped up into a heightened sense of reality and, ultimately, a false sense of hope.

Hope?

He grimaced at the word that had stained his thoughts so mercilessly.

The sound of a chopper somewhere out there in the blackness took his eyes skyward momentarily. Its powerful searchlight raked the forest off to the west. He wasn’t surprised. He knew they were on his trail.

Holding the Webley he checked the chamber, but already knew there were only two bullets left. A black and white photograph entered his head and stared back at him as he remembered that young officer with the Royal Canadian Dragoons, his grandfather, in Holland in 1945. It was a photograph of a group of soldiers standing beside their armoured vehicle. They were all smiling. The old fella had kept it, with his service revolver and beret, in a steel box under lock and key. It was also where he kept his medals. Isaac had never asked him why he didn’t display them like so many other soldiers had theirs proudly framed and hanging on a wall. As he ran the cold barrel of the gun across his cheek he wondered if the old man had ever shot any Nazis with it. Like so many returned soldiers, his grandfather never talked about the war if he could help it. It was the only time he could recall his grandfather ever getting short with him after he’d asked question after question about what he’d done in the war and if he had killed any Germans with this gun. A seven year old boy’s fertile imagination caught up in all those B-grade movies he’d seen on television depicting war in all its sanitary absurdity. But what his grandfather may’ve not wished to relive in conversation he made up for in his dreams, his nightmares. Even out here, in the beauty of this place, the old man rarely slept peaceably. It wouldn’t be the first time when one of their weekend fishing trips brought out the witching hour of his ghosts and memories of Holland. Some nights he’d just stare into the fire without saying a word, but even then Isaac knew that the old fella was elsewhere. Back there. Somewhere in some Dutch village on the road of war.

As he thought about his grandfather again he knew the old man would be ashamed of him, the desperado he had turned himself into. Glancing toward the bag of stolen money he wondered how in hell he’d fallen so far from a lineage he used to be so proud of. But that was yesterday, and those days don’t count any more. Such had he convinced himself that it was heat or eat. His wife Marcie and their young son, dear little Mitch, seemed so far away from the love and happiness he felt he was owed, or even deserved. That he, as the provider, had been forced to make a choice between heating their home or putting food on the table. The monthly visits to the local foodbank weren’t cutting it any more. Every day was becoming a struggle to just get by. His minimum wage job at the fish plant barely covered the rent. Increases in fuel costs, running a car, to soaring grocery prices had trapped his relationship within a snarling dog-like to and fro of survival that had eroded what was left of the love they had once shared. This erosion of care had made him feel lesser as a man and there were days where he felt he was being strangled by that collar called fatigue: where getting out of bed every day to go to a job that was as much hated as it was necessary ate away at his core like rust on a car that hadn’t been undercoated. His promises to Marcie and Mitch about making things better never evolved any further than the hopeful wishes they had erupted from. In the end all was vacuous and meaningless. There was no green hill far away, at least not from where Marcie stood. She had given up on his promises, the falsity of her husband’s dreams. Then one day he came back to the dead quiet of an empty apartment; an apartment that had never really felt much like a home anyway. It was in truth only ever a place of existence with poverty, the bailiff, forever beating on the door. He’d sat at the kitchen table for hours as he wondered where his wife and son might have gone. Marcie’s mother lived in Charlottetown, so it seemed the most logical of sanctuaries she would end up in. But his telephone calls went straight to voicemail, and the ringing in his ears continued long after he had hung up leaving another pleading message for her to call him back.

It was while at the kitchen table where he started thinking about stealing money to help save what was still clinging to the cliffs of a living, a relationship. A bandaid solution to a problem he never thought through properly nor considered the ramifications of such rash action. Need became the driving force, leaving rationale biding its time in a cold prison cell. He started to chuckle as he wondered what the hell had pointed him into even thinking about robbing the local Scotia bank.

He must’ve been out of his friggin’ mind.

The loon called out again and he glanced toward the incoming mist drifting across the lake in its phantom-like carpet that crept over the threshold of the soul like a waiting spider feels its silken chords for any sudden movement.

He was certain he could see flashlights moving through the forest now. They’d be here soon enough. It was over. He knew that.

His grandfather stood before him again. There he was in his green waders fly-fishing, casting toward where the trees shaded the lake, those darker pools where the trout might be hiding from the heat of the day. And more often than not he hauled one in. Landed, netted then clubbed, he would add onion and butter to a skillet already warming on the embers, and they would eat fresh rainbow trout that never tasted so good like it did out here in the open air.

Once, he asked his grandfather why he had gone to fight in a war he was only just learning about at school as Remembrance day loomed ever closer, rocking, as it did every year, the national conscience lost in those platitudes of ‘Lest we forget’, but already forgotten before the sun touched the yardarm. All the poppies disappearing for another year in rain-drenched streets surrounding Legions from country towns to city cenotaphs. Gutters of dead soldiers, each one whisked away from lapels and wreaths, with so many names of the fallen in ‘the war to end all wars’ carved on brass plaques few bothered to read about any more. His grandfather didn’t attend Remembrance day services, and he’d never asked him why. However, he’d not forget the response to his question. They were eating the trout he had just cooked in the skillet, and the old man had looked at his grandson whilst chewing his fish, then pointed toward the lake, the cornflower blue sky, the forest, and the food on their enamel plates.

“All this, Isaac. All this. That was why I went.”

Then he smiled at him, ruffled his hair, and returned his gaze to the beauty of the day without another word.