The Wrong Path

  I left school cutting through the fence at the back of the playground that had been torn open to the field. Mrs. Bottrell had kept me after my Grade Four class for some offense I could not remember. She was big, thick, and old, and she was my favourite teacher.

   Dad would not be happy. It was his way. Sometimes hugs, sometime angry, always a smell of alcohol and aftershave.

   The field was coming onto Barton Street. It was getting dark quickly. It was only a quarter to four. No, it was after six now. Why was I so late? I turned down Reid Avenue but there were all these new built condos. It was getting colder. I was going to the wrong house. Reid was the house when I went to kindergarten.

   I got back to Barton. I went to the park. The swings were empty. I wanted to use the public restrooms but the lights were off, and I wouldn’t go in them when the lights were off. I did up my jacket.

   I got on the Lakeshore Road heading for our new house. I saw the digger at the end of the road. I had climbed on it when I was in Grade One on a dare. I wet myself when the workmen caught me. They were almost as angry as I expected my dad to be. But my dad forgave me that time. He had bathroom problems of his own.

   Before I reached the Lakeshore house I stopped to look down at my feet. My boots were gone. I wasn’t wearing my boots anymore. How did I lose my boots? I found my way back to the field behind the school. The boots must have come off in the field. But it wasn’t muddy. Why did my boots come off? I changed my sneakers to my boots at school before I left. I remembered putting my sneakers in my locker, but did I put my boots on? Did I leave without putting on my boots? Had I been walking in my socks all this time?

   I kept pushing the grass down in the field to help look for my boots. The field was muddy now. It didn’t seem muddy when I walked on it before, but it was muddy now. It was eight o-clock. I had no watch but I knew it was eight o’clock. Now I knew dad would be angry.

   My feet were soaked. My pant legs were dirty. I found a hole in my coat. My dad warned me, “You can wear whatever you want but it has to be clean and no holes.”

   I was getting too muddy. I went back to the schoolyard, then out the front way. The field was too dark for me now and it scared me too much. I stayed on the sidewalk. The houses were closed curtained and the streets lights were lost in the fog. I started running.

   The front of the house had big sunflowers. Other people lived their now. That was Grade three. That was another house. That was another school.

   Beyond the fog I could see the lights for the General Store. The one on my corner, beside my house. Our house. I started to slow down.

   I reached the store and went inside. It was opened, and that meant it wasn’t nine o’clock yet. I wanted to catch my breath. I wanted to be somewhere with light for a minute before I went home to dad. When I got inside the clock overhead against the back wall said eleven. The lights were off and there was only a little light coming from the pop freezer near the front cash register. I don’t know why the store wasn’t locked. I don’t know why it looking brighter when I first saw it.

   I didn’t know where the Happyman was. He was the owner. My dad always called him the Happyman because he always smiled when he saw us. But the Happyman wasn’t there.

   I left to go around the corner down the sloping street to our house. Our house. The only one on a little side street behind the store. Across was the train tracks, and on the far side was only fields.

   It was over a hundred years old. It seemed three stories high, and had as many rooms as a mansion. It was overgrown with bushes and hedges that you couldn’t see out of and no one could see into. It had a gravel drive and an old barn.

   My feet hurt on the gravel, but we didn’t use the front door. Only the back. The lights were out. Sometimes dad would turn out all the lights. He always warned everyone to turned the lights off when you leave a room. He might be sitting now in his chair, the dark, sipping his drink. I couldn’t go in.

    I froze at the back screen door. I looked sideways to the living room window to see if I could see dad’s shadow in his chair. It was too dark. The screen door was closed, but the inside the porch door was open, but there was no light. It was too cold for the porch door to be left opened. Dad would be very upset for someone letting in the cold air.

   I looked back to the barn but it wasn’t there anymore. Only the shadows of fire blackened beams on the ground.

   I ran away. The gravel poking into my feet and spitting out behind me. I ran down our road without sidewalks almost sliding into the ditch. I ran through the field beyond. I used the train tracks as a guide and kept running.

   I had to get home.

   “Jordan?”

   I woke to Lindsay telling me it was time to go to the Ceremony.

   “I found your cuff links. You can wear the nice shirt.”

   I was in my home now with Lindsay. I had graduated long ago.        

   When we got to the Ceremony they asked if I would say a few words about my dad. I explained that his sponsor had died in the past year so I had come to congratulate my dad on his twenty-eight years of sobriety. I hugged him.

   He has a lot more hugs than anger these days.