“Harry?”
He didn’t move. Sat there, staring at the wall with wide, unblinking eyes. Just like Bernice had described it, sitting on his walker in a lane off Willow Street, between a place called the ‘Snack Shack’ and the ‘General Store’, where Buddy had been dispatched to find him.
“Harry might be there in body,” Bernice she had warned, “but you can’t ever be sure where that man is going to end up when he’s out gazing.”
“Gazing?”
“Yes,” she gave me a should-have-known kind of look. “Harry is well-known about town as the Mural Gazer.”
“The Mural Gazer?”
“Yes,” she nodded, her glance flitting out the window, then back.
“He parks himself in front of one of those murals you see all over town and sits there, staring,” she explained. “For hours at a stretch sometimes. That’s one of the reasons I wanted a handyman-companion in the first place, and one of the reasons I took you on, even though you probably don’t know which end of a nail to hit with a hammer… to go find Harry when he’s in one of his trances and bring him home.”
She sat down at the kitchen table and sighed, gesturing for Buddy to join her. “I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you, Mr. Buddy,” she lamented. “I just thought you’d turn around and walk right out that door if I did.”
“He goes into trances?”
“Says he ‘goes into the murals’, that he somehow leaves his body and actually enters the pictures—that the people in the murals come to life. I’m worried that one of these days he’s not going to come back—that I’ll find him sitting there, with the spirit gone out of him, if you know what I mean.”
Buddy placed his hand on hers. “Thanks for not telling me, Bernie,” he consoled. “Cause I might have walked, coward that I am, and missed getting to know two of the most interesting people in the world.
“How long’s he been doing this?”
She held him in a long, grateful gaze. “It started maybe ten years ago. It’s my fault, really.”
“How’s that?”
“I got tired of him moping about the house all the time after he lost his driver’s license and couldn’t get around much anymore. Before then, he used to join his mates at The Willow for coffee and a yak. Or he’d go fishing up Chemainus Lake. Not that he ever caught anything, mind. Or off to the seniors’ centre for snooker and companionship. Harry was always out-and-about.
“But he couldn’t do most of those things now, even if he was allowed to drive,” she continued. “Can’t keep up with conversations most of the time, or get a boat into the water, or shoot a cue ball straight. That’s why he’s so grouchy. Before he started his ‘quest’, he couldn’t even get himself uptown behind his walker, but now he’ll trudge up hill and down to look at a mural.”
“And how are these ‘trances’ down to you, Bernice?”
“Oh!” she flustered. “I forgot what you’d asked.” She paused a moment, collecting her thoughts. “Like I said, I was getting on at him about being stuck in the house all the time, so I suggested, on a whim really, that he go out and follow those yellow footprints around town. I was thinking he could take his time, get some exercise, and maybe enjoy some of the scenes from his own past.
“He didn’t want to, of course. Never really got over the closure of the big mill and Chemainus’ remake as a tourist town. Instead of accepting the facts and thanking the mural society for resuscitating the place, he blamed MacBlow for putting him out of work before he was ready to retire and the mural society for turning the logging town where he grew up into ‘fantasy land’.
“Oh, he was bitter!
“Anyway, I more or less forced him to go take a look at a mural, Mural #1 it was, Steam Donkey at Work. It’s uptown, on the wall this side of the credit union where I do my banking. I gave him an ultimatum. Told him to study that damned mural the whole time I was in there, doing my business, and let me know what he thought about it when I came out, or else! Well, it took me ten minutes or so to make sure our financial empire wasn’t collapsing, and I expected to find Harry snoozing by the time I left the bank. But…” again, she paused, lost in her memory of the incident.
“I couldn’t roust him when I got back,” she pushed on. “He wasn’t sleeping. He was gone. It’s stupid, I know, but I remember being mad at him for up and dying while I was in there doing my banking.” She shook her head, a wry smile turning up her lips.
“His body was there, slumped in his walker. His eyes were wide open. But he was gawking at that mural like a dead man, staring at the last thing he’d seen this side of eternity. Oh! He gave me such a fright! I shook him hard and yelled, I was that mad. That woke him up.
“Didn’t tell me where he’d been till after supper. From that day on, he’s been ‘going into the murals’, as he calls it, every chance he gets. Sometimes he tells me what he’s seen inside those walls, but most often he’s mysterious and secretive about it.
“I never know how long he’s going to be gone when he dodders off on one of his ‘sorties’. I know he does keep a journal, but he’s never let me or anyone else look at it.”
Buddy didn’t know what to say. Bernice obviously needed someone to confide in, and that someone turned out to be me, he thought. But the picture she’d drawn didn’t match up with Buddy’s version of the man he was gingerly getting to know in his role as handyman-companion. It was like trying to plug a European kettle into a North American electrical socket to make yourself a cup of tea.
“And will he be in one of these trances when I find him today?” Buddy asked.
“I expect so. Lately, he’s been fascinated with Mural #36 – The Hermit, and that scares the bejesus out of me.”
“Why?”
“You go fetch him, and if he’s there, have a look at that mural before you summon him back into the land of the living,” she said. “Then ask yourself what it means for a hundred-year-old man, give or take a few months, to be walking with Charlie Abbott up the Hermit’s Trail. You tell me what you think it means for my Harry to be so fixated on that painting.”
When I found him, Harry was just as Bernice had described, slouched in his walker, staring into his trompe-l’œil, lost to the world. Seeing him there, fixated on the image of Charlie Abbott taking his long walk down his tree-lined avenue into eternity, I understood Bernice’s uneasiness.
“Harry?” Buddy coaxed. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
Harry didn’t move. Buddy squeezed the old man’s shoulder, wary of what might happen when his touch sent its electricity shooting along the axions, leaping the synaptic gaps to wherever Harry happened to be or not to be.
Next: Eyes wide open