HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR THE RAIN ON THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, Ben Kerne would likely not have seen his father when he went to Pengelly Cove. But because of the rain, he’d insisted upon driving his mother back to Eco-House from the Curlew Inn at the end of her workday. She’d had her large three-wheeler with her, upon which she daily pedaled to and from work without too much difficulty despite her stroke in earlier years, but he’d insisted. The tricycle would fit into the back of the Austin, he told her. He wouldn’t have her on the narrow lanes in bad weather. She shouldn’t be on them in good weather either, if it came down to it. She wasn’t of an age?let alone in the physical condition?where she should be out on a tricycle anyway. To her carefully enunciated, poststroke words, “Got three wheels, Ben,” he said it didn’t matter. He said his father should have the common sense to purchase a vehicle now that he and his wife were old.
Even as he said this, he wondered at the evolution of parent-child relationships in which the parent ultimately becomes the child. And he wondered without wanting to wonder if his own fragile connection with Santo would have mutated in a similar fashion. He doubted it. Santo seemed at the moment as he would be forever: frozen in an eternal youth with no chance to move on to things more important than the concerns of randy adolescence.
It was the thought of randy adolescence that plagued him throughout the long night that followed his visit to Eco-House. Yet when he drove down the deeply rutted lane towards the old farmhouse, that was the last subject upon which he would have thought his mind would lock. Instead, he followed the rises, falls, and curves of that unpaved lane, and he marveled that the passage of years had done nothing to release him from the fear he’d always harboured towards his father. Apart from Eddie Kerne, he did not have to consider fear. Nearing him, it was as if he’d never left Pengelly Cove.
His mother had sensed this. She’d said in that altered voice she had?God, did she actually sound Portuguese? he’d wondered?that he’d find his father very much changed in the years he’d been gone. To which he’d replied, “He didn’t sound any different on the phone, Mum.”
Physically, she’d said. Now there was a frailty about him. He tried to hide it but he was feeling his age. She didn’t add that he was feeling his failure as well. Eco-House had been the dream of his life: living off the land, in harmony with the elements. Indeed, he’d planned to master those elements so that they worked for him. It had been an admirable attempt at living green, but he’d bitten off too much and he hadn’t possessed the jaws to chew it all.
If Eddie Kerne heard the Austin drive up to Eco-House, he didn’t emerge. Nor did he emerge as Ben wrestled his mother’s tricycle from the back of the car. When they approached the wreck of the old front door, however, Eddie was waiting for them. He swung it open before they reached it, as if he’d been watching from one of the filthy and ill-hung windows.
Despite his mother’s warning, Ben felt the shock when he saw his father. Old, he thought, and looking older than he actually was. Eddie Kerne wore old man’s spectacles?with thick, black frames and thick, smeared lenses?and behind them his eyes had lost much of their colour. One of them was clouded by a cataract, which Ben knew he’d never have removed. The rest of him was old as well: from his badly matched and badly patched clothing, to the places on his face that his razor had missed, to the corkscrew of hairs springing out of his ears and his nose. His gait was slow, and his shoulders were round. He was the personification of End of Days.