End of the Tiger and Other Stories

End of the Tiger

I saw Tiger Shaw the other day. He didn’t recognize me. There’s no reason why he should. When he was going with my big sister Christine, I was just one of the swarm of little brothers and sisters who knew enough not to get too close to him or you’d get a Dutch rub with those big knuckles.

I saw him in a narrow street in town, unloading a truck into a warehouse, tattoos on his big meaty arms, his belly grown big as a sack of cement, all of him looking sour and surly and dispirited. It seemed too bad, because he was a beautiful young man back when he was one of the best athletes they ever had in the high school. He lasted a year in college before he got into a scandal about throwing games, and they let him go into the army.

Christine and Tiger were a pair of beautiful people that summer.

There were seven of us children in all. Now there are six, and when we all get together with all our wives and husbands and kids, we think of Bunny and are saddened, because he was the littlest one of all and dear to us. The times of getting together are rare because we’re scattered now. Christine’s husband teaches at the University of Toronto. Her eldest is twelve. All the marriages are pretty good. Mine is fine.

And when we get together, one of the things we always do is to tell grandfather stories. There are a lot of them. He raised us — he and our mother. He was a big wild random old man, very partial to dramatic scenes. At least half the things he did made absolutely no sense to us as children. He never explained. He just lived according to his unpredictable instincts. But it is strange how, as time goes by, we begin to see how some of the nonsense things made sense.

Until the day he died, I don’t think we all ever really forgave him about the goose. Yesterday, when I saw Tiger Shaw, I wished that my grandfather had at least tried to explain about Gretchen. That was the name of the goose.

That May, the summer Christine and Tiger were in love, Nan, the youngest sister, bought the baby goose from a farm up the road for ninety cents saved out of her allowance. For about three days it belonged to her, and then it belonged to all of us and owned the pond out in the side yard. We kids were all her fellow geese, and she plodded along behind us, making small nervous sounds about all the dangers the world holds for an unwary goose. She was blazing white and took excellent care of herself with that clever serrated bill. Anybody who rowed the skiff around the pond had Gretchen aboard before they could even launch it, standing in the bow, honking her pleasure.

By July Gretchen was of pretty good size, and she was enchanted with Christine’s long golden hair. Christine would sit, and Gretchen would preen that hair, never tugging or hurting, making little chortling sounds in her throat. We all learned Gretchen’s likes and dislikes. She could be patted a little but not very much. She was nervous about the night, ignored cats, despised dogs, and would bow very low in ceremonious oriental greeting when anyone approached.

Tiger was at our place a lot that summer. He was a hero, of course, huge and golden. But we quickly learned wariness. He was quick and he knew the places that hurt. And he would roar with laughter, and we, out of pride, would laugh with him, though eyes might be stinging.

I remember those long summer dusks after the evening meal before the littlest ones had to be shooed off to bed. We’d all be out in the side yard, and on the side porch, and Gretchen would come padding up across the yard from the pond giving oriental greetings.

One of the grandfather stories we don’t tell is about Tiger and the goose.

Gretchen was wary of Tiger Shaw, and it seemed to be a plausible instinct. As I remember that evening, Tiger was going to take Christine to some sort of barn dance just over the county line. Christine had on a blue dress with little white flowers. Her hair was brushed to a soft gleam. In the country fashion, Tiger had to stay around for a little time before taking her away into the gathering dusk, going down the road with her in that car of his that made a snarling sound that faded into the distance, sounding as it died away like a bee buzzing nearby.

We kids were fooling around in the yard. Sheila was acting wistful. She was near to her dating time, when the young men would be coming for her. Our grandfather was on the porch in the rocker, and off in the east, by the far hills, there was darkness and a pink inaudible pulse of lightning.

Tiger and Christine were sitting a few feet apart, and Gretchen plodded up behind them, behind the low bench, and with a big whack of her white wings made an awkward hop up onto the bench, leaned the adoring curve of her neck toward Christine, and began, with little chucklings, to preen the fine strands of the golden hair.

We were all watching it, thinking uneasily that Gretchen was uncommonly close to Tiger Shaw. He was very quick for such a big muscly person, quick without looking quick. And he was seldom without a cud of gum in his jaws. That is one of the memories of him, the knots working at the jaw corners and the smell of spearmint.

He reached and took Gretchen high on the neck with one hand, slipped the gum out of his mouth with the other, and when she opened her bill to yawp her protest, he thumbed the wad of gum up into the hollow of the top of her beak. He released her at once and began to roar with laughter.

We all laughed. It was so ridiculous. Gretchen closed her bill and it stuck. She looked astonished. She began to shake her head the way you shake your hand to shake moisture from your fingertips. She shook herself dizzy and fell sprawling off the bench. Then she began to run in circles in the yard, wings laboring, trying somehow to run away from this terrible impasse. Our nervous laughter turned shrill, climbing toward the edge of hysteria.

Above it all, above Tiger’s laughter and our shrillness, I heard the grandfather laugh, the drum-deep bellowing of him as he came down off the porch. Soon, in terror, Gretchen began driving that precious bill against things, against posts and stones, against places where the ground was hard. Then we were all howling in a shared panic, in heartbreak and concern. Because we all knew what that bill was to her — knife and fork, comb and brush, weapon, tool, sieve, bug-catcher.

So we tried to run to catch her, but my grandfather swept us back with his huge arms, laughing, bellowing at us that it was funny. I hated him then. I hated the three of them — my grandfather, Tiger, and Christine.

Because, you see, Christine was laughing, too. She stood up, hunched over, laughing. Grandfather and Tiger beat each other on the back and roared with delight at the deranged scrabbling terrorized creature, telling each other how funny it was. Christine moved slowly toward the steps, shrieking laughter, and as she hobbled up the steps it changed to a keening, wailing sound, the tears running down her face.

My grandfather’s roaring laughter stopped abruptly as the screen door banged behind her, and he turned quickly away from the still hilarious Tiger.

Following grandfather’s orders, we caught Gretchen, wrapped her firmly in burlap, and took her to the porch. Grandfather gently pried the bruised bill open and, holding Gretchen’s head against his thigh, skillfully worked the sticky mass out of the concavity. Tiger stood watching, chuckling reminiscently, while we hiccuped in the aftermath of tears. When she was as clean as he could get her, my grandfather put her down and took the sacking off her. She scrambled to her feet and went headlong for the safety of her beloved pond, half running, half flying.

Tiger said it was time to go and sent Sheila in to get Christine. Sheila came out in a few moments and said Christine had a headache and couldn’t go. Tiger hung around for a little while, acting sort of ugly. And then he went off, and the snarling drone of his car faded quickly. We went down to the pond. Gretchen was soiled and she had some broken feathers, but she looked unapproachably white there in the blue dusk, floating out in the middle, making no sound for us.

There were no more boat rides, no more preening the golden hair of the big sister, no more chuckling sound behind us when we walked across the yard, no more visits in the dusk. We told each other that if grandfather had let us help her before she became too terrified, it might have been all right, and we might have kept her trust.

We never quite forgave our grandfather for that. Maybe he wasn’t interested in our kind of forgiveness. He was a wild and random old man, and sometimes he made no sense at all. But when I saw Tiger the other day, I suddenly realized that if we’d helped Gretchen quickly, then it might have been just one of Tiger’s little jokes, and Christine would have gone off with him that night and other nights, and the world might be quite different for her now. By delaying us, grandfather showed her Tiger’s kind of laughter, of which there is often too much in the world.

But he never explained.