From the Novel Call It In the Air
The Promise
By: Gregory Light - Jul 29, 2026
(Ottawa 1962)
Joey promised Gary that he would not let him die.
'I promise you, Gary,' Joey said softly in the cemetery. Then he paused. He was alone. Everyone had gone home. After Gary's funeral, he cycled back to the cemetery to make his promise. Then he started his promise again. As he made it, tears streamed down his face; millions of them, more tears than he had experienced before; more tears than he believed possible. They continued for an hour. Oblivious and trembling, he let them fall. At first in shuddering waves and then in deep pools.
'Gary,' he began, 'I promise you that everything I do, everything I see, or hear or feel, or—’ His breathing stopped his words. He was kneeling now. ‘It will be yours too. Everything.' He made the promise to last for ten years. Until they were both twenty-one. Until they were both grown up. That was the age they had agreed and shaken on; to remain best friends until they were twenty-one. It had seemed an eternity. 'I won't ever let you die, Gary,' Joey said, trying to hold back a sob rising from his stomach and expanding into his chest. 'You can be me.’ Then he paused a second time. Reality began to descend. ‘I will have to call us Joey because no one else will understand. Okay?'
Joey was quiet for a moment to let Gary answer. After a moment, Gary agreed. And that is when his tears overwhelmed him. When he heard Gary speaking to him again.
Far back across the wide field of grey and black gravestones, Sarah could see his Joey’s body shaking, both hands squeezed up over his face. She had followed him to the cemetery but now stayed. She recalled her feelings eleven years earlier at her husband's funeral, and she understood the pain Joey was holding in him.
'Thanks, Joey,' Gary had replied and then, after a short pause, had said, 'I miss you, too, Joey. I really do.' And then Gary started to cry, and Joey's slender body convulsed into large sobs and wails that could be heard throughout the cemetery as he tried to contain the weeping of the two boys within his chest. When she heard this, Sarah was unable to restrain her tears. Holding her hand to her mouth, she instinctively started up the path toward her grandson.
'Promise me you won’t let me die,’ Gary said.
'I promise,' Joey said. He took Gary's left leg with his right hand and shook it the same way they had always done their secret handshake.
When Sarah reached Joey, he had fallen on the short grass beside Gary's grave and was weeping soundlessly. She sat down by him and stroked his hair. Joey did not move. He knew it was his grandmother's hand. Sarah did not have to say anything. They sat there together, not speaking, each moment deep in their separate memories. Sarah thought about her daughter Elizabeth; about Joe bent over the kitchen table after Elizabeth's death; about the penny; about Joe's letters from Europe. Despite her tears, she was glad of the renewed contact. After a time, she and Joey stood up and quietly held one another. Then she brushed bits of grass from his face and clothing.
'He'll always be with you, Joey.' Joey turned and kissed her,
‘I know,’ he said.
For the past week, Joey had felt bitterly alone. The sheer senselessness of Gary's death had drained his life of the comfort and security that the adult world had promised. In retrospect, he now regarded his mother's proffered arms as a frail, aspirin-like gesture of hopelessness. He despised the impotence and deception. His mother's final response to the ultimatum delivered by the physical world she and his father had pretended to control for the last eleven years had been shallow brine dribbling feebly from her eyes. For all its display of care and tenderness, for all its spectacle of love, it was not enough.
His father had also succumbed. He arrived home early, the new reality, the new order of things already consumed and digested. No resistance offered. He had surrendered outright, quickly beginning to clean up the mess. He contacted Gary's mother and offered to help, taking charge of negotiations with the funeral director and organizing all the bits of business in the chapel and at the cemetery. The floral tribute was splendid. And in the cemetery, he carried one end of the coffin. With disgust, Joey marvelled that his dad hadn't worked out a plan for Gary's paper route.
The signs of Gary's life were rapidly phased out; reduced to a collection of smiles in his mother's photo albums.
Immediately after the events of this "obliteration" had begun, Joey began to flip his penny obsessively, the thudding copper on the surface of his varnished desk tolling with the sound of powerlessness. Even when he correctly guessed the outcome, he knew it was only due to the cynicism of chance. Nevertheless, despite the penny's capricious temperament, he spent every available moment flipping and re-flipping it, the pages of his notebook quickly filling with black scrawls. The day before Gary's funeral, he pushed the total up to ten thousand.
That night Joey woke up abruptly. His body was trembling and slipping in an oily, humid sweat. On his cheeks and about his eyes the sweat beaded with tears. It was the first time he had cried since Gary's death, and it infuriated him. After seeing his mother's tears, he had promised both himself and Gary that he wouldn't cry again; ever!
'Not ever!' He tried to scrub away the dampness on his face with his sheet, but it lay twisted and tangled tightly around him. 'Never!! Never, never, never, never!!' he pounded the bed wildly with his fists, then turned and threw his swollen cheeks into his pillow.
Ten minutes later he rolled over on his back and sucked in the quietness of his room. 'Ten thousand, Gary,' he whispered. There was a tenuous kind of hope in the words. 'Ten thousand,' he repeated, his rage slowly evaporating on the pillow. He reached out and picked up the penny from the night table, holding it above him, flat between his two open palms. It felt warm. Closing his eyes, he imagined the darkness that surrounded it—the same black that would shroud Gary. Fixed on his refusal to admit the cancellation of his best friend, his mind slid into this darkness. The penny grew and soon seemed larger than himself. He could feel the outline of the two maple leaves curving along the perimeter, partially encircling the words denoting the penny's value: one cent. He crawled onto this side, tails, and lay down, his head resting on the 1936 date at the bottom.
After a minute, the metallic touch of the coin beneath Joey faded. In the black sheath encasing him, the sound of his breathing grew louder, doubled and slowly split. He became aware of another set of lungs breathing beside him. He was now inside Gary's coffin, nestled comfortably, both boys lying on their backs, staring upwards, their eyes slowly adjusting to the absence of light. For a long while, neither stirred nor spoke. The closeness of their two bodies was enough. When words did finally appear, the coffin was gone; he and Gary were outside in the backyard, both stretched out on the cool grass, a few branches of the birch tree hanging over them. In the black patches floating between the branches, he picked out the small dots of stars and pointed up at them.
'I betcha there’s a million stars up there,' he said, nervously trembling in the short pause that followed.
'A million, million,' Gary said; and Joey's body shook with elation.
Then after a moment, he said, 'I love you, Joey.'
Joey hesitated, inspecting Gary's face. Neither had used the word "love" before; not to describe their friendship. It had a weird ring to it which they both instinctively avoided. But here, under the sky, looking at Gary, it seemed to have another meaning—of beginning. 'I love you too,' Joey answered. The two boys turned and hugged. 'Best friends forever.'
'Yeah, forever,' Gary said, turning his eyes back towards the sky. 'Like the universe.'
'Like infinity,' Joey said.
They were both satisfied with the description. The words didn't have to make sense. Gazing at the freckles of light hovering above them, they had a perfect visual picture of it.
'Like to the end of infinity,' Gary thought aloud. They would be best friends until the end of infinity.
‘I promise,’ said Joey.
To make the promise, they stood up for their secret handshake. Once up and wide awake, neither was going back to sleep. It was the middle of the night. Joey tied his bathrobe tightly about his middle and slipped his running shoes on without unlacing them. Suddenly he felt giddy. The cool rubber and cloth against his bare feet reminded him of the times he had been to the beach and had waded into the water with his shoes on.
'C'mon, Joey.' Gary was already in a “commando” position, crouched next to the birch tree.
Joey crawled up beside him, dampness soaking into the knees of his pyjamas. 'Where are we going?'
'On a mission.’ Gary whispered. ‘We'll take the backyard route.' He climbed over the first fence and jumped down into the neighbour’s rock garden. The "backyard route" was an obstacle course that he and Gary had devised to get between their houses without going on the street. It had to be done quietly so that no one detected them.
'Oww!!' Joey cried, his foot skidding off a sharp rock as he landed in the neighbour's garden.
Gary turned around and caught Joey by the shoulders. 'Listen, Joey. If we're going to do this, you have to be strong.' That was all that had to be said. Joey quickly confirmed his commitment. The discomfort of his foot made the "commando" experience real. They had a mission. Joey picked up a couple of fair-sized rocks and put them into the pocket of his bathrobe. 'What are they for?' Gary asked.
'They're grenades.'
'We're not using grenades on this mission.'
Joey wasn’t sure. He kept one rock in case. 'You always have to have a plan B,' he said. Gary nodded, easing himself between a cedar hedge and a spruce tree and sliding into the next yard. Joey followed, the scent of cedar filling his nostrils.