“There you are!” Bernice chirped from the kitchen.
“My handler found me up in Charlie Abbott’s forest,” Harry groused. “Well, in the mural version of his forest. Saved me from getting lost like Hansel and Gretel in the dark, dangerous wood.” He made a spooky face and whoo-whooed to emphasize his point.
“I’m so glad to hear your story had a happy ending, dear,” she played along. “I do hope you brought back some treasure. You two make yourselves comfy in the living room. Lasagna’s in the oven, and the table’s set. I’ll ring the dinner bell in a moment.”
Buddy was about to protest, but before he could speak up, she added, “Would you like a glass of wine, Buddy? Harry and I don’t usually indulge before dinner, but that shouldn’t keep you from whetting your appetite.”
“That’s okay,” he said, trying not to sound frustrated at being corralled for dinner. Reluctantly, he followed Harry and took up his place on the pink sofa opposite the hearth.
Harry’s Globe & Mail and magnifying glass were on the table beside his chair, but the old man didn’t even glance at the day’s headlines. He looked content and at ease with himself in Buddy’s company, which made Buddy uncomfortable. What’s he thinking? he wondered.
“So,” Harry said at last, “Bernice tells me you’re not just a journalist. That you’ve set out to write a book.” When Buddy didn’t respond, Harry prodded. “What’s it about, this book of yours?”
Buddy sighed. “I wanted to try my hand at fiction,” he said. “I guess forty years of covering the daily grind left me a bit jaded. I wanted to write stories where I got to make up the characters and endings.”
“Happy endings, you mean?”
“No. Endings that make sense.”
“Ah!” Harry nodded.
“There comes a point in your life when you crave meaning, don’t you think?” Buddy explained. “I mean, something beyond the short—term objectives we set ourselves, crawling up corporate ladders, buying houses in suburbia, living up to the advertising glitz? I thought, maybe, I could get beneath all that and reveal some deeper human, perhaps even humane motives.”
“Family?” Harry suggested. “Friends? Community? That sort of thing?” When Buddy didn’t answer, he carried on, “Religion? Philosophy? Physics? Do you want to hear the Big Bang or something?”
He laughed at that. Buddy obliged, joining in.
“You’re going to be a hundred years old in 2020,” Buddy said. “You caught the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, lived through the Great Depression, fought the Second World War, then prospered with most everyone else in North America through the post-war boom. You lived all that before I was even born, then experienced everything I have since…
“Does any of it make sense to you, Harry? What will you be celebrating on your hundredth birthday?”
Harry frowned. “When you put it like that, I have to say, I don’t know.”
He leaned forward, holding Buddy’s gaze. “For a long time after I retired, I didn’t think at all about that sort of stuff. Day-to-day seemed good enough, then I’d be dead and nothing would matter anymore. There was the kids, of course, and Bernice, but beyond that…?”
“Then Bernice made me look into Mural #1. That day everything changed—like an earthquake had shifted beneath the surface of things. The world looked the same after that, but it wasn’t, if you know what I mean?”
Buddy frowned, trying to understand.
“The walls we build, the forests that surround us? They’re real, but not as real as we’d like to think is all I can say about it.”
“What’s it like?” Buddy asked. Then added, when Harry looked puzzled, “Being inside the murals?”
Buddy would often wonder afterward how things might have gone if Bernice hadn’t stepped into the living room at that precise moment. She took in the situation right away, realizing Harry and Buddy were deep in conversation, and stood there trying to suss things out.
I think her inquiring glance triggered something in Harry.
“Bernie,” he said, “could you go get my journal?”
It took a moment for the request to register, then she glanced at me, amazed, before brusquely turning to leave the room.
“Everything I have to say about the meaning of life is bound up in that journal,” Harry continued. “It’s my book of fairytales, I guess. Grown—up fairytales. I can’t really describe what it’s like, being inside a mural, anymore than you can describe what it’s like being inside this here and now. It’s that real. They’re simply places I enter, like you walking into a room, then leaving when it’s time to move on.
“Sure, I can describe the settings, the people, what I’m thinking, but there’s always something more I can’t put to words… know what I’m saying?”
Buddy nodded dutifully.
“But you, being a man of words, might be able to help, eh?”
“You’re asking me to…?”
“To help me write these stories, yes,” Harry affirmed. “Or at least to have a look at them and let me know if it’s worth the effort.”
Bernice returned with a big blue ring binder, thick with pages, which she plunked down on the coffee table angrily. “There you are,” she said. “Now, before you open that up, Buddy Hope, I’m here to tell the two of you dinner is ready and to ask this curmudgeon to explain to us before dessert why he’s letting you read something he’s forbidden me all these years.”
“Oh, stop your bellyaching,” Harry growled. “You’ve been leafing through those pages for as long as I’ve been writing ’em.”
“Of course I have, when you leave the bloody thing sitting on our dresser every night. But it would have been nice to have your blessing.”
“Consider yourself blessed,” he smiled, a pantomime of angelic bliss.
“I’m serious, Harry Sanderson. Why’ve you made me sneak peeks at your journal instead of inviting me in?”
Harry gave her a pained look. “Because, my love, I didn’t want to talk about the things I’ve been writing before now.”
“And why all of a sudden are you opening your binder up to Buddy?”
“Because now’s the time, and he’s—excuse me, Buddy, but I have to say it—he’s a stranger, and a writer, and he’ll have a more, uh, detached view of things, dear. Don’t you think?”
She stared hard at Harry for a second; he stared right back. Then, with a deep sigh, she nodded. “I guess,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it or agree. Your stories are mine too, after all. Aren’t they?”
“Til death do us part, and then some,” he grumbled, wrestling himself out of his armchair and following her. He stopped before leaving the room, turning to face Buddy with a solemn look. “I need you to promise me something,” he said. I watched, waited. “I want you to read the stories one at a time and not go on to the next ’til I say so. Okay?”
Buddy gave a curt nod.
Left alone with the journal, he flipped open the cover. MURAL #1 – STEAM DONKEY AT WORK, said the title, printed in block letters that tilted like a decrepit row of houses at the top of the first page. They were followed by the barely legible scrawl of Harry’s shaky handwriting.
Oh gawd! Buddy sighed, trying to make out the first sentence. What the hell have I got myself into?
Next: Baked Lasagna