Quality Channel

((Part one) (concerning the old Painter,
Anton Evens, and the Grand Children)

The Painter, a short old man clean shaven, had some difficulty in getting to sleep. The windows alongside of his house in which he lived were low and he could look out them at his lilac bushes when he awoke in the mornings, or paced the living room floor in the afternoons. Several workmen came to fix the house he had just purchased on Cayuga Street (1958), a carpenter, electrician, plasterer, and a furnace man, and Earnest Manning, his neighbor, and daughter's boyfriend.

Quite a lot of commotion was made about the affair in getting the house ready to live in, for the old man, his daughter and two grandchildren. The old man, Anton, had been a soldier in the Great War, came into the country in 1916, from Russia, raised a family, wife died at thirty-three years old, in 1933, he was now sixty-three. The painter had cigars lying about and he smoked a pipe likewise.

For a time the two men-Anton and Earnest, talked of painting the house inside and then outside, and then they talked of other things. The old man got on the subject of the war. Ernest in fact led him to that issue. His son, Wally, had once been a prisoner in Germany-a POW they called him back then, during World War Two, and he also had a son who had died in that war, Frank, in Italy, in 1945. The son had died of an explosion, and when that part of the story came up he had wet eyes.

Earnest, liked the old painter, had a wide face, and when he smiled he wrinkled up his eyelids and forehead, and the wide face move up and down. The sad old man with the pipe in his mouth was perhaps seriously comical at times. The plan he had for the house was mostly done his own way, the teenage grandkids, had their bedroom in the attic, and his and his daughter's on the first level.

In his bed the painter often rolled about this way and that way, but more than often laying quite still most nights. For years he had been weighed down with notions concerning his affair with a younger woman (although he was a widower and she was not married). He was lonely, hard at times to get along with, and had three children by the young woman, his heart fluttered for her.

The idea had never occurred to him, his grandson would find this affair out, it never even came into his mind, and he would die unexpectedly and unknowingly, that his one grandson knew, and the grandson, always knew when he got into bed he thought of that person, he even found photos of her, naked photos hidden in the side of his sofa chair. It did not distress the boy. The outcome in fact was quite a unique thing and he knew it would not be easily explained by his grandfather if indeed confronted but it really was not his business and therefore left it be, but told his mother. Perhaps it made him more energetic, thought the boy, younger at heart, for he had met the woman, and the kids, invited into her kitchen one afternoon, when he was fifteen-years old. There he sat perfectly still as he listened and learned more about his grandfather than anyone would have ever guessed, who might have thought, this old man, his body was too old and not of much use any more, yet something inside him was altogether young. He was like a teenager, only that the thing inside him was not a really a teenager but an old lonely man. No, it wasn't a youth, it was that he needed a woman, young, and lovely and slim, he was to her, his knight. It sounds bizarre, you see, to try to tell what was inside the old man as he lay in that bed each night, lonely, and sometimes a little tipsy, his heart fluttering over her. The thing to get at is what the old man did for her, the young thing within his heart, he bought her that house she lived in, paid her bills, and supported them kids, and nobody knew, nobody but the grandson.

The old painter, like most of the folks around the world, had got, during his long life, a great many ideas in his head. He was at one time quite handsome and had been married twice, and other woman had been attracted to him. And then, of course, he divorced his first wife, who drank too much, and his second died of an illness. He had owned a restaurant, and had gotten to know people, a lot of people, in peculiarly this young woman, intimately, and perhaps in a different secret way that was different from the way in which you and I get to know people. At least that is what the old man must have thought and the thought pleased him to keep her a secret from his six daughters and one son. Why quarrel with them concerning his money, upon his death bed, whenever that day occurred? And he knew that would have been the case.

In the bed the old man had a dream that was not necessarily a dream, perhaps more likened to a vision. As he grew somewhat sleepy, for several weeks, often still conscious, shapes began to appear before his eyes, demonic shapes. He imagined, and told his grandson, they were near indescribable, other folks he told-and there were only a few of them-said such things within himself were simply nightmares, unreal, something old folks get (especially now at eighty-three years old), but they were digging a long tunnel into his basement from afar-off, the old man said, in a procession, and these shapes were waiting for him. And he added, "True or not, I see them."

You see the interest in all this lies in the shapes that went before the eyes of the old painter. They were all demonic. Most all of children of the painter had now become concerned about his health, and where he hid his money, some even threatened him.

The picture was a little grotesque and seemingly turning out horrible, the young grandson confronted, told the relatives, to back off, not to threaten the old man, or they'd have to deal with him. The old man didn't know this but his mother did. Some were even amusing to the now twenty-seven year old karate expert, and Vietnam Veteran (it now was 1974), and he didn't want anyone to hurt the old man, not even the shapes. When he talked, he asked the boy on a few occasions to scramble him some eggs, and the grandson would make them for him. He felt perhaps the old man with all his unpleasant dreams, was not eating right, and had perhaps indigestion.

In the latter days, before he died, for hours that procession of grotesque shapes passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although his heart was throbbing, his hands quivering, he crept out of bed and went to the bathroom, it was late afternoon. Someone within the group of the shapes and shadows had made a deep notion on his mind and he wanted to avoid it, perhaps wake himself up more.

Sitting on the edge of his bed the old painter thought for an hour. In the end he knew his time was short "The shapes have busted through the wall in the basement" he told his grandson, Chick. It was never mentioned other than this one time, but I heard him say it that once and it made a permanent impression on my mind. The old man had one central thought during those last days that is very bizarre and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The reflection involved is a simple statement of which would be something like this:

That in the beginning when we were young, and the world was young to our minds, and we had many thoughts and very little pretense, but no such thing as illegitimacy. And part of this truth was that Man made the reality himself around him, and each reality was a fuse that lead into a great many more, in not vague at times thoughts. All about his world were these new forming facts-what were implied facts, and they were all beautiful if not some strange in the beginning, during formal reasoning, and beyond when our minds are still impressionable.

Now that he was an old man he had listed-mentally listed those facts, and truths, and realities, as if in some kind of unwritten book he kept in his secret chamber in his mind-threw pretense away, he had kept it for so long, he even questioned what was real and what was not. I will not try to tell you of all of this, There was a truth of God for him, but only in nature, now this new truth, fact, reality, obsession, haunted him: the truth of these demonic shapes and shadows, if they were who they were, then beyond nature, there must be the opposite, a real god, it is the opposite, like wealth and poverty, black and white, truth and lies, thrift and wastefulness. Perhaps if there was a message here, and if it was for him, this was the message, the last message he'd ever get from God himself. Thus, he opened the door for him to see his demons before they dragged him away: who's to say?

And then the relatives, the sisters and his son came along. Each as they appeared snatched up whatever they could, that also was a fact, a truth, a reality, a dozen times during those last days of his on earth.

It was the fact, the reality of it all that made the shapes so real, like people to the old man. He had not quite or elaborates theory concerning the matter. It was his view that the moment the demonic figures, dug through the last morsel of dirt, they'd take him into the tunnel, and seal it back up, once and for all, this was his reality, his truth to me, to himself, called it what you want, he could not live his life any other way, he became a slave to the shapes before the shapes embraced his soul and spirit and mind.

It is not hard for one now to see, for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his adult life thinking one way, was now filled with doubts, would start to page through masses of new possibilities concerning other thoughts on what was and what was not reality within his world, his mind. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a shape. He didn't, I suppose ever think this a reality, for the same reason that he never took the time to examine his mind's overall chamber of hidden content, what his Christian wife had told him time after time after time-that Christ was real, a fact not, just like now, the shapes and shadows were real and a fact, and both were truths he had learned were truths, when he was ten years old, but new facts took over his mind thereafter. If anything was going to save the old man, it was to throw pretense to the side, to go back to when he was very young, put back inside him that part he threw out, save the old man could.

Concerning the other characters in this story, I only mentioned them in passing because they, like the old man, are what are called very common folk, and they become, like the old man, the nearest thing to what is desirable and lovable to all the shapes and shadows-the demon-God's creation.

No: 571 (1-17 & 18-2010)

See Dennis' web site: http://dennissiluk.tripod.com