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2 | (continued) It actually appeared that it was only his lack of imagination that prevented the poor thing from taking his own life. He remained listless and without a trace of joy until the day he died. Knowing the cause, I could never look at him without feeling a kind of sadness I found almost unbearable —I had never known that a dog could grieve for years on end, and the sight of it filled me with a painful yearning to restore him to his love, the joy of his youth. It was only with difficulty that I could admit that my life was in that sense inferior to his—I had never known even so simple a time of happiness myself, and probably never would. It’s agonizing for a proud man to envy the love-affair of a dog, but I couldn’t help it. To see him in that state was often more than I could bear: I had long since learned to hide what he could not hope to conceal, and I could not so much as glance at him without feeling mortally exposed in my failure to live a single day of my life in even so simple a state of love as his.
From the moment I moved into the garage, it was imperative that I find some other place to sleep. Several times I mentioned to Boss my desire, once the weather warmed up and the ground dried out (it was then May), to set up camp in the woods across the field—woods I had gazed upon longingly every day since I had first seen them. I cannot tell you with what smiling eagerness these words were greeted. Boss and Wife were undivided in declaring those woods to be “government property,” therefore open to the public. “Crown Land,” the usual Canadian term for government property, had for some reason been supplanted, in this household, with the American equivalent. Too much television, I suspect. As might be expected, B&W were only partly right: a thoroughly invisible line ran through those woods, dividing the Crown Land Reserve along the river from the Alienated Land being leased back to the farmers. While I was camped there, I never saw a single marker showing where this line lay, and I’m sure that only a professional surveyor could have found it. Hence I never knew then, and only recently learned, which parcel of land I was camped on. It appears that I had been on Crown Land. Still, as far as B&W were concerned, I could camp in those woods indefinitely, no restrictions whatsoever. “Come over for drinking water? Hell yes, all you can carry!” (Drawn from a shallow well in the side yard; percolated through landfill; atrocious taste. Wife said she tried it once when they moved in, and hadn’t consumed a glass of the stuff in eight years. Boss was astonished when I told him this. She’d never bothered to mention it.) “Just put the hose back up on the hanger when you’re through, and try not to wake up the dogs, if it’s late. And by all means, don’t be a stranger. It’s just that… well, we only have one bathroom… and… you know… we value our privacy. We promised ourselves that when the kids were grown, we’d relax. And that’s very important to us. You understand.” I made what I thought was a genuine effort to understand this, but I’m afraid I never quite succeeded. Nor have I yet, I’m afraid.
The field of which I speak, between the house and the woods, was, as I say, one of the expropriated ones, leased back to the original owners, in this case two elderly brothers, one of whom—the nicer one, who was a bit hard of hearing, as I am—lived on the route between Boss’s house and the woods. The field began just beside Boss’s garage, to the south, and connected with another acreage farther south, which reached to a single railroad track as it curved south-west toward a short river-crossing, headed for Toronto. The two fields totaled about 25 acres, planted, that year, to soybeans. “WE’VE BEEN IN CORN ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS,” the nicer brother told me one day, in a voice that annihilated all ambiguity. “I FIGURED IT’S ABOUT TIME WE GOT INTO SOYBEANS.” I should say so. And not a moment too soon, from what I hear. But he was a sweet man, and I have fond memories of his benign presence, he being the polar opposite of his unmarried brother, a born crank, who lived on the other side of the tracks, to the southeast. The only thing the Crank and I ever agreed on, though we never got a chance to discuss it in detail, was the underlying character of Boss. On this subject, the Crank’s acerbic pessimism was right on target. |
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