straight down instead of curving over. He sharpened this one with a file until it was so keen it could easily slice off a toe.
Mooshum’s battle array stood ready in the back entry through October. When the first snow fell, he put on his galoshes. Clemence had glued sandpaper of the roughest grade to the bottoms. Every other night or so she changed the paper and let the boots dry on the radiator. Mooshum’s galoshes fit over his rabbit-fur-trimmed moccasins and insulated socks. He wore work pants lined with red flannel and a puffy, fluorescent orange parka that Clemence had given him so that he could be found if he got lost in the snow. Moosehide mitts lined with rabbit fur and a brilliant blue stocking cap with a wild pink pompom concluded this outfit. He went out every single day in his flamboyant gear and labored with incremental ferocity. He was antlike, he hardly seemed to be moving. Yet he shoveled trails to the garbage cans, cleared the snow not only from the walking paths around the house but completely off the driveway and away from the sides of the steps. He kept the snow scraped down to the ground and the concrete and never allowed it to accumulate. When there was no new snow and only the glare of ice, he hacked away with the lethal ice chipper. During the time when everything melted but the ground could not yet be prepared for the garden, he again ate constantly, putting back the flesh he’d lost to his winter war.
Spring and summer involved weeds that grew with vicious alacrity, pilfering animals, bugs, vicissitudes of weather. He used the push mower the way most his age would use a walker, but incidentally clipping the yard down to the nub. He tended a large vegetable garden with invisible zeal, rooting out quack grass, pigweed, and hauling bucket loads of water for the squash hills, again without ever seeming to move. He didn’t care much for the flower garden, but Clemence had a raspberry patch gone wild that mingled with a stand of Juneberry bushes. When the berries began to ripen, Mooshum rose at dawn to defend them. A living scarecrow, he sat in his yellow chair sipping his morning tea. To frighten off the birds, he’d also rigged up a clothesline of tin-can lids. He’d pierced the can tops with a hammer and nail and knotted them close enough to clatter in a breeze. He secured these jangling lines all about the garden, and I was always very careful to note where he hung them as the edges of the cans were sharp and a boy who bicycled through the yard too carelessly might have his throat cut.
By means of this ceaseless and seemingly quixotic activity, Mooshum stayed alive. When he was past the age of ninety years, cataracts were removed from his eyes and false teeth refitted to his shriveled gums. His ears were still keen. He heard so well that he was bothered by the periodic judder of Clemence’s sewing machine down the hall and by my uncle Edward’s habit of humming dirges while he corrected school papers. One morning in the June heat I rode to their house. He heard my bicycle while I was still on the main road, but then I’d clothespinned a playing card to a spoke. I liked the cheerful clatter and also the ace of diamonds was good luck. Anybody might have heard me, but no one would have been so happy at that moment to see me as Mooshum. For he had tangled himself in a large piece of bird netting that he had been attempting to throw over the highbush pembina berries, even though they were nowhere near ripe.
I leaned my bike against the house and untangled him. Then I folded the net back up. I asked him where my auntie was and why he’d been left alone, but he hushed me and said she was inside the house.
She don’t like me to use the net. The birds get tangled up and die in it, or lose their feet.
Indeed, from the folds of the net, at that moment, I picked out a tiny bird’s leg, its minute claw still clenched around a strand of plastic webbing. I undid it carefully and showed it to Mooshum, who peered at it and worked his mouth back and forth.