Oatmeal and Sliced Banana    The Due South Fiction Archive Entry    
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      	  Oatmeal and Sliced Banana 
 by vienna_waits  

 Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters and I am not making money
from this. Just having a bit of fun and then putting them back where I
found them.

 Author's Notes: Written for the Mute Fraser Challenge at ds_flashfiction
(LiveJournal).

 Story Notes: Spoiler: Hawk and a Handsaw

 

 

 Buck didn't so much knock on the door to the cabin as he leaned into it
to get it open, a large box cradled in his arms. He scurried inside, put
the box down, and repeated the operation to get the door shut again.

 "Holy moley, Bob, it's darker than the devil's heart in here! Turn up the
lantern, will you?"

 "Go to hell," I responded by way of greeting, not moving an inch from my
rough bench at the table.

 "I was in town today...so I thought I'd swing by...and bring you a couple
things," Buck puffed as he struggled out of his gloves, two hats, two
scarves, his parka and snowshoes.

 I don't know why this angered me so, but it did. "I don't need your
charity, Buck. If that's what you came for, you can just turn yourself
around and go."

 "Oh, don't worry. I told Miss Granger to put it on your tab at the
general store. She said she'd come after you if you didn't settle up
within the week." A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. 

 Buck put the box down on the table between us and turned up the lantern.
"There's some bread here, flour, sugar, tea, cinnamon, lard, jam,
potatoes, carrots, oats, rice, salt pork, and...proof that spring is
coming...ta-da!" He pulled up a bunch of bananas and looked hopefully over
for my reaction, but his smile dissolved the moment he saw me.

 "Bob, you look like hell!" There was a note of shock in his voice. He
came closer and looked me up and down. "Your cheeks are all sunken in,
your clothes are hanging off you, and you could pull me out of Six Mile
Canyon with that beard. And while we're at it, you smell like a caribou
carcass!"

 It was the normal, familiar way we had always talked, but now it grated,
rubbed off my last patch of paralysis, the last bit of the bubble between
me and the world I couldn't face. "How dare you come here and mock me!
Just shut up and get out!" I roared, leaping to my feet. I actually took a
swing at him--I took a swing at Buck, my best friend and partner, the
brother I'd never had.

 I was so weak that he easily sidestepped the punch. His other hand came
around on my back and shoved me down roughly to the floor. His voice, when
it came close to my ear, hissed in commingled fear and anger. "I know
you're miserable. I know you'd rather be dead. But what's done is done.
You can't bring her back."

 "I know," I panted, "I know. Let me up."

 Buck didn't move.

 "Please."

 "Oh, all right." 

 He let me up, and I brushed myself off. 

 "Sit down," he growled, "I'm not done with you yet. You know, if it were
just you, you could rot like this for months until you eventually pulled
yourself out of it, and I'd let you. You're a grown man. But you have
Benton to think about too, you know." His eyes flicked over to the other
end of the cabin, where the door to Benton's tiny bedroom was closed.

 "He's asleep."

 "I certainly hope so." Buck pushed the box out of the way so we could see
eye to eye, and we sat down across from each other at the table. "How is
he?"

 I scratched my head and looked away, trying to come up with something,
anything. "Well, he seems all right, I guess. He goes to school, plays
outside, does his chores..."

 "'All right'? Has he said one word to you since you slapped him in front
of all those people?"

 "It was a reflex action," I said testily.

 "You decide to lie to your son--" Buck stopped, glanced at Benton's door
once again, and lowered his voice, which was bordering on a shout,
"--about how Caroline died, and then you slap him when he asks you why
'our friend Mr. Muldoon' wasn't there at the funeral?"

 My gut twisted at that, but I wasn't about to admit it, not even to Buck,
so I slid back to the previous question. "He has been kind of quiet since
then," I allowed.

 "I'm worried about the boy. It's not just you he's not talking to."

 "What? What do you mean?" I looked up from the wood grain of the table,
hoping for a bit of reassurance, but Buck's eyes were dull and flat with
concern.

 "I happened to see Mrs. Turner while I was in town. He's not talking at
school either. If she calls on him, he just looks down at the floor and
shakes his head. He spends a lot of time staring out the window at
nothing. He won't talk to the other kids. And she caught him sneaking back
to the coatroom to steal bits of others kids' lunches. After that, she
started bringing him a lunch every day."

 "Oh, God," I moaned, my head sinking into my hands. "He must hate me."

 Buck whacked the table in exasperation. "Don't be ridiculous, Bob. He
*needs* you. He needs you to give him some structure and some guidance.
Even if he gets up at the right time every day and does all his chores
without you reminding him, he's just a scared, lonely little boy who needs
his father."

 I held my hands to my face, pressed hard, to keep myself from tearing up,
or, God forbid, actually crying, and took a few deep breaths to regain my
composure.

 Buck regarded me thoughtfully. "Have you been writing in your journal?"

 "Not really," I sighed. "Just a few lines now and again."

 "You're a pressure cooker. It'd do you some good to get that stuff out of
your system. You could go hike a little ways, away from the river, and
just shout it out. You're out here in the middle of nowhere. No one'd hear
you."

 I snorted. "Now who's being ridiculous? Is that what you think of me?
That your old partner Bob Fraser has finally gone round the bend? Of
course, given that Muldoon made a complete fool of me," I admitted
morosely, "you might not be far off."

 "Listen," and Buck's voice was gentle, "I didn't come here to beat you
up, or to judge you. I came because Benton's a good kid, because he's all
you have left of Caroline, and because he can't get through this without
you."

 I nodded wearily. All these emotions were so damn exhausting.

 Buck nodded too, apparently satisfied. "All right, I've said my piece,
and now I'll go." He stood up from the table and began the process of
getting dressed to go back out into the night.

 He was just turning to leave when I spoke up. "Thank you...for the
supplies."

 "Don't mention it." I couldn't see much of his face anymore, but his eyes
were twinkling. "Oh, and tucked in the box there, Mrs. Turner gave me
something Benton drew the other day in school. I thought you might like to
see it." He paused a moment, apparently deciding whether or not to go on,
and then added quickly, "He adores you, you know." And then Buck wrenched
the door open and was swallowed by the wind and snow. 

 I slid a piece of rough oversized drawing paper, folded in half, out from
between the rice and the side of the box and spread it before me on the
table.

 It was a Mountie on a flat-backed horse, resplendent in his dress uniform
and Stetson. Benton had even remembered the Sam Browne. The Mountie's legs
were as long as the horse's, and his midsection looked like a Sumo
wrestler's, but the Mountie had a big smile on his face. He and his horse
were set close to the left side of the page, as if they were about to race
off the paper in search of desperate criminals, and the horse's tail
fanned out behind him in a big squiggly W. They looked...excited. Happy.

 And then my eyes were drawn to the giant rough red letters at the bottom
of the page: DAD. I looked at the picture again. DAD. And again. DAD.

 The picture became a reddish blur as tears shot to my eyes and refused to
stay put. I quickly put the picture on the bench beside me so I wouldn't
ruin it.

 Oh, God, here come the waterworks, I thought, and then there was no more
thought, just a raging torrent of hurt and grief and rage and searing
sorrow that consumed me, swept though me like a forest fire. I cried in
raw, heaving gasps of torment, barely able to get enough air to breathe,
helpless within the grip of the blackness, the poison, the hatred, the
misery, the yearning all demanding their due at once. As I was wracked
with sobs, I pulled on my hair, yanked at my beard, banged my forehead on
the table, and finally ended up in the fetal position on the floor, crying
for who knows how long. I fell asleep there on the braided rug in front of
the woodstove, not merely exhausted, but utterly spent.

 ***

 The cold woke me. I had forgotten to stoke the woodstove before I fell
asleep, and now each breath left a trail of white in the frigid air.

 I jumped up, rubbing my fingers and toes to make sure there was no
frostbite, and immediately threw in half a dozen logs. Then I lit the
lantern and checked the old pendulum clock on the shelf. Benton wouldn't
be waking up for a good hour and a half. 

 I still felt ravaged, scarred, like a house that had been ransacked and
set on fire, but I also felt lighter, freer. I felt...more alive somehow.

 I was also ravenous. I grabbed the bread and jam from the box Buck had
brought, cut three lopsided slices from the loaf, and slathered them with
a thick coating of jam before cramming them into my mouth. Some of the jam
and bread crumbs got smeared into my beard in my haste, so I went and got
my shaving kit and cut those parts off, and then I just kept cutting and
shaving until all of a sudden, there was a pink-jowled, surprised-looking
man staring back at me from the mirror.

 "Well, what do you know about that," I said to my reflection. And I even
smiled a little.

 Benton needed structure, Buck had said. Well, all right, I could do that.
I gave myself a sponge bath with a washcloth and put on the one last set
of clean clothes I could find, and then I decided to make Benton
breakfast. Some tea and a nice hot bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon and
sugar, maybe. And I'd slice up one of those bananas for him and put it in
the oatmeal. Benton loved bananas, on the rare occasions when he got to
eat them.

 I had just put Benton's breakfast on the table for him, the steam rising
lazily from the tea and oatmeal, and gone back to the pot to get some
oatmeal for myself when I saw which spoon I was using. It was a large
metal serving spoon I had brought back from Whitehorse for Caroline, the
handle stamped boldly with "Kiss The Cook." And indeed, Caroline had
dutifully "made me" kiss her every time she used it. Beautiful, dear
Caroline, her laugh like a chime, my lips on her cheek or neck or her
exquisite mouth...

 I felt the tears streaming hotly down my cheeks once more before I even
knew I was crying, and then I heard the soft slithering sound of Ben's
slipper feet coming into the room. I desperately wanted to dry my tears
before I turned to face him, but I just couldn't stop. My shoulders shook
as I fought to cry silently.

 The feet came closer, and I heard a surprised intake of breath as he saw
the table. There was a pause as he took it all in, and then he came up
right behind me.

 "Dad?" His six year-old voice sounded so small and scared and sad. "Dad,
did you not like my picture?"

 I spun around, wiping my eyes. The picture! I had forgotten to put it
away, and now it was on the bench right next to Benton's place. I went
over to it, and he followed, looking up at me in abject misery, his bottom
lip quivering. "Oh, Benton, no, your picture is very good! It was so good
that Mrs. Turner had Buck bring it over to show me last night. I love that
you put me in my dress uniform with the Sam Browne, and that you gave the
horse such a nice eyebrow. This is a keeper!"

 He lit up at the compliment, which made me feel that much worse for
having been so oblivious to him over the past few weeks.

 I grabbed my handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped my face. "I was
just...because I...because I miss your mother. Very much."

 "I miss her very much too," Benton said solemnly, and then his face
crumpled, and he wrapped his arms around my waist and cried into my hip
for a good five minutes while I held him with one arm and smoothed his
hair with the other.

 Once the sniffling died down, I gave him the clean side of my
handkerchief. "Are you hungry?"

 He thought about this for a moment, then said, "I'm starved," and dried
his tears.  
  

End Oatmeal and Sliced Banana by vienna_waits 

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