The Yellow Leaves

We were staying at my grandparents' house; my days were spent playing hide-and-go-seek with the few neighbourhood children, and my parents toured around their childhood home. Through some sad circumstance my Uncle Jim lived in the house next door. He was really my great-uncle, but that was a hard moniker to spit out at tens years old. Uncle Jim he was to both my parents and I.

I was sent to bed earlier than the adults, and from my makeshift cot in the rec room I could hear the clinking of glasses and the cheerful chattering of my elders. Uncle Jim came over rarely; when he did the conversation was quiet and stilted, Uncle Jim becoming upset if he took too much to drink.

There was bad blood in my family. I'm sure that there are disagreements in every family, but that is small comfort to the child who lies awake and listens to the awkward silences and the subdued shouting from down the hall.

I asked my father about Uncle Jim once.

"Let it be," he told me, "Uncle Jim isn't a bad guy. He just gets carried away sometimes. Your grandfather puts up with it, and I guess we can too. I guess your grandfather feels that he owes Jim something." He wouldn't say anymore than that, and I was too young to do anything but take it at face value. I'm not sure anymore questions would have been answered anyway. Sometimes families don't ever tell secrets within their own borders, either because of some instinct to protect, or because of some thought of shame. It is a question I have often asked, but like all other I will have to live with the fact that there are sides to my elders that I will never see.

Uncle Jim came early for Thanksgiving dinner. He made a nuisance of himself in the kitchen, following my grandmother around and drinking too much brandy. At one point, he broke down.

"Things should have been different," he said. "I wasn't meant to end up like this." My grandmother looked at him with great pity in her eyes, and patted his hand tenderly.

"I miss you," he said.

Dinner was tense. My grandmother had prepared a feast of turkey, ham, potatos and a mutlitude of vegetables, but almost nobody ate much. Jim ate like a pig, spilling his food and drinking wine by the bottle. His language wasn't openly abusive, but even I, at ten years old and with a mouth full of turkey, could tell that he was angry at my grandfather.

As I lay in bed that night I could hear my parents speaking in hushed tones, nad on the other side of the house my grandparents were watching the news in silence.

The eavestroughs of my Uncle Jim's house were bright yellow, filled with fallen leaves. Jim had a bad leg. Not so bad that he walked with a limp, but bad enough that he couldn't climb a ladder to clean the leaves out.

When I woke up the day after Thanksgiving, I walked in on my grandmother telling her husband to try and heal the rift between him and his brother.

"As a peace offering," she said. "You know you'll wind up doing it anyway. Why not just go now and stop this pointless grudge? What's done is done. I wouldn't go back on it for the anything, and neither would you, but he has to understand that it was to hurt him. Go and make peace."

My grandfather grumbled, but he went. I watched out the window as he walked over to Jim's house. He knocked on the door, and Jim jerked the door open and let him in. I went out to play in the backyard.

Laying on the ground in the backyard I watched yellow leaves tumble down against the backdrop of a slate-grey sky. My back was getting wet, and the leaves on the grass were already leaving their bright-coloured marks on my clothes. I must have lain there for a good half-hour, watching the spiraling, bright leaves fall like snowflakes, when I heard my grandfather yell.

His voice took all thought from my mind, and I ran to the front of the house in time to see Jim rushing out the door; my grandfather lay on the ground, unmoving.

"Run and get yer dad," Jim said to me, "and have someone call a doctor."

I bolted into my grandparents house and screamed for my dad, and maybe I told them to call a doctor, I can't quite remember. If I didn't, someone had the presence of mind to call one anyway, because an ambulance arrived shortly.

My parents drove my grandmother to the hospital to sign the necessary papers. The ambulance would meet them there. jim stood behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. I could feel the tension in his hands and his arms. He gripped my shoulders tightly once more, and then patted me once, on the back.

"Lets go and offer your grandmother some comfort," he said. There was no sadness in his voice.

As we got into the car, I noticed that Jim had left his second-storey window open, and the ladder my grandfather had been using when he fell was still propped up next to it. I have been uncomfortable around Jim ever since.