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M y father disliked sports, combat, the things that stirred my brother Jack and me. We loved boxing and wrestling and hockey fights, Stan Jonathan pounding Pierre Bouchard. He loved gardening and Bach and holy people. Dead French nuns and mossy-bearded monks with names like Ephraim or Nektarios. He went to church a lot.

But he was my father and I found things to be proud about. I loved the wrists and forearms thickened by his boyhood's morning chore of milking cows, on the Tennessee farm where he grew up. The paw-like feet, freakish triple-Es, that swelled his hard shoes into leering shapes. Even the stout, white, hairless legs that snapped wonkily outward as he walked, like a marionette's. He was fat, sure, but I knew this was bound up with special powers, like a comic-book hero's glorious deformity. Like the monstrous orange-rock body of The Thing, my favorite guy in the Fantastic Four. Sometimes he'd make a muscle for Jack and me, the biceps mounding impressively, and we'd try to encircle it with our hands. We'd end by hanging off his arms, one on each side, laughing as he craned us up and down. But he was shy about these muscle-man displays. He only did it because we begged him to.

He supervised our bed-time prayers. He'd stand inside the doorway of our room and his face at night, no glasses on, was different from his smiley day-time face, more stern. Hook-nosed and intense, with forward-tousled hair that gave him, I thought, a cool unruly look. He'd be tired, and his weight would shift wearily from foot to foot as we turned to face the icons that hung above our pillows.

The icons protected us, he said. In the half-dark we could barely see the pictured saints. By day the brown-faced, three-quarter-profile figures semaphored to us mysteriously from their smoggy-looking worlds, with crooked forefingers and raised palms. They were Orthodox icons. My father was Orthodox Christian. The icon was the central piece in the shrines he'd assembled to safeguard us. Palm crosses were there at Easter-time, tucked behind the icon's upper edge, and there were crucifixes looped below. We began with the Lord's Prayer, then called down divine protection on ourselves, our cousins, grandparents on both sides. Tragedies that came near to us, like a classmate's drowning at summer camp or the real-life death of Bonanza's Hoss, occasionally brought new names into the mix: thrilling transpositions from everyday life. But the recited words were less important to us than the sense of insurance this ritual gave. The comforting impression that, through our father's ministrations, we would be protected through the night.

Jack and I weren't pious, though. Church itself bored and baffled us, the formalized discomfort of it all, the itchy clothes and the kneeling. The beseeching words of the texts themselves seemed sucky to our warrior hearts, undignified. "O may I be deemed worthy, O Lord, to lick your toe," Jack would croon disgustedly, out of my parents' hearing. Still, there were afternoons when he or I, after enduring morning service at the local Anglican church, would agree to go with my father to the Greek Orthodox church downtown. He rarely got us both at once; we required individual coaxing. We were most pliable when very young, and capable of mild excitement at the prospect of being given bread. This meant the cubes of sour communion bread that the Orthodox church gave freely to its younger, unconfirmed parishioners. We collected the stuff competitively, like hockey cards. My father didn't frown on this. He got us to church any way he could.

And there was after all an appealing strangeness to the Orthodox service, compared with the usual Anglican one. It was dark, odorous, spectacular. Black-gowned priests with long hair and beards and pillbox hats swung censers shooingly toward the congregation. The melody of their chanting wandered and shifted unpredictably. Stout women in black would topple to their knees in the sloping centre aisle, and press their foreheads to the rug. Sometimes my father joined them there. Occasionally there were visiting bishops, with veils and silken crowns.

I'd glance up at my father beside me, praying with his eyes squeezed shut - praying hard. He stooped and bowed and crossed himself at intervals, in swift securing motions like a wind-shield wiper set on low. I saw that he was bearing down, concentrating, bringing all his supplicating force to bear.

I knew it was my father who protected us.

***

At some point I began to worry about him. By the age of eleven, riding the crowded schoolbus past my house on late spring afternoons, I was afraid. Afraid he might be out in the front yard again, gardening on all fours. He was there once when our bus went by and a couple of kids had seen him. Searcy had seen him.

I'd spotted him myself from a distance as the bus swooped along the S-shaped curve of Elmwood drive. Without turning my head, I watched him. He was shirtless in the near-summer warmth, plunging and prying with the dandelion digger, and with each movement his pendulous white flesh fluttered, a walrus wobble. Black nylon socks, the old dress shoes he kept for gardening in. His legs were crossed behind him at the ankle - very like him, that, in its unselfconscious, infuriating oddity. Like the way he scooped his ears out with the sharp end of a pencil. The way he mimicked in a yodelling voice our childish slang. Those sudden, sniperish farts.

He heaved up just as the bus swung by, sat back on his heels with his left hand clutching his left knee, the snake-tongued digger loose in his right fist. He wasn't wearing glasses, his eyes were narrowed against the sun. His beautiful face looked yearning and severe.

"Lookit that man's got tits!" someone shouted in astonishment. Up ahead there was a boy revolving in his seat with a finger trained like a derringer before his face, pointing out the window. Jerry Brooks. He was two years younger than I was, a grade five kid who didn't know me, didn't know it was my father he was pointing at.

The others turned to look but the bus was moving quickly and the laughs that followed were more for Jerry Brooks himself, for the strangeness of his words and the genuine amazement in his voice, than for the marvellous sight outside. I sat numbly staring ahead. Then I had the calming thought that he was likely out of view by now, screened by the sprawling juniper bush. Hardly anyone had seen him. No-one else would see him.

My stop was next. The bus performed at the usual place its ponderous, body-tugging turn, and as I stood and turned toward the back my eyes settled on Jeff Searcy, sitting alone in a seat next to the door. I'd forgotten he was there. He looked at me and quickly looked away, smiling. His face was flushed, I could see that he'd been laughing.

Most of the time Jeff Searcy was my friend. He had a white sliver of face and a thin mop of silky brown-blonde hair that was parted on one side and cropped straight all around the bottom edge, like the hair of a medieval page. Though he was timid, not a dominating presence in our grade-seven class, Searcy was fashion-conscious, acutely conventional, with a satirist's alertness to absurdity, to difference. He was always laughing at someone or something, and his comic insights passed to me, contagiously.

Usually we laughed together, Searcy and I. But my father's difference wasn't lost on him and he sometimes turned his small, derisive eyes on me. When he learned my father had a garden plot, a rented place on Western Road, Searcy began referring to him as "the Pea-picker." Out of nowhere his shy, cheerful face would change, he would frown and his upper lip would stiffen and curl slightly in the center, in a determined way. Then he would glance to the side before turning back and saying, in a voice turned husky and flat and accusing, "How's the Pea-picker?" There was something sudden and spasmodic about these jibes, and something else as well, an imitative feel. They seemed a rehearsal or a preparation, for a role that was familiar to Searcy but not to me.

I did what I could to retaliate. Searcy's own father was tall, reserved, thin-headed like his son, and gratifyingly, promisingly bald. But calling him "Pinball" or "Shoeshine" didn't balance out "the Pea-picker," I found. My names were too reactive; I never used them except in self-defense. That was one problem. Another problem was that baldness itself, not being unique or strange, wasn't sufficiently disgraceful. "Pea-picker" on the other hand, though it lacked the bite of metaphor and wasn't literally true-that garden plot produced zucchini galore but no peas I can remember-managed to be deadly in its reticence. It hinted at my father's distinguishing strangeness, which was his mild, pastoral, flower-sniffing side. His eccentric gentleness. Searcy knew, we both knew, that he had the edge.

I saw how my father might need protecting, from the combative, fashion-abiding people who surrounded us.

***

The stroke a year ago left my father weakened on the right side of his body, confused about numbers and dates, and diminished in his powers of speech. There was a mental daze that lasted several weeks. The right-side weakness made it hard for him to shave and for a while he wore a disquieting white beard, the first beard I'd ever seen on him. It signaled new developments, changes we weren't ready for.

The first weeks of his recovery were mostly spent in bed, sleeping and eating. Like a newborn he would wake to eat, then sleep again. We came home often, Jack and I, and made sure he got a good quota of healthy, clot-curtailing foods. Salmon, oatmeal, yogurt with cracked flax.

We would visit him in his room upstairs. It was the same room Jack and I had shared as boys and our old beds, now used only for piling clothes and towels and diapers on, still ran foot to foot along one wall, across from the bed in which my father lay. Otherwise few reminders of that time. No icon-shrines above the pillow-spots, no residual nail-holes to be seen. Where had they gone? It took me a moment to locate them. On an open shelf above the childhood beds was a big collection of my father's holy stuff, icons and crosses and something else, maybe a relic, in an old jam jar. Our icons were up there, small brown upright rectangles.

The number confusion was the most pronounced if not the most obtrusive of his new handicaps. Questioned about the current year - my mother was always testing him on this, as if the right answer might prove him well again - he would think for a moment, frown, then exclaim in that assertive, rushing way of his, "Why it's, it's 4002!" Then he'd search our faces anxiously. "Isn't it?" The certainty, then the round-eyed vulnerability: something typical in that.

It was the language loss that pained my father most. Trouble with his words - that was what we called it. He'd been an enthusiastic talker all his life, a raconteur and holder-forth, and it frustrated him now, astonished him I think, to find the wanted words eluding him. Sometimes he couldn't recall a word. Worse was when the word was there waiting in his brain but he couldn't make his mouth pronounce it, and would fall into convulsive stammering. "Just leave it, dear!" my mother would say to him sometimes. He struggled mightily.

The stroke left him vulnerable in other ways. Though reading was difficult for him now he'd sometimes scan the newspaper, then cry over the miseries reported there. It didn't matter how remote they were. Chinese earthquakes, fresh African atrocities - it all upset him helplessly. The stroke had stripped him of some protective layer of selfishness, callousness - whatever it is that lets people, even the most humane, go whistling about the business of their lives while others suffer beyond their view. This new tenderness, together with physical weakness, kept him away from the TV three floors down.

As the weeks passed and his condition improved, we began to worry about his idleness. All his life he'd been an energetic man, reading and writing, gardening, churchgoing several times a week, organizing music for the choir. Now he lay in bed all day, blinking at the ceiling. Disconcerted by his word-trouble, he took no calls, saw no visitors but us. He read hardly at all, apart from those traumatic peeks at the Globe and Mail. One day Jack and I drove to the Sony store and bought a CD player for his room so he could listen in bed to his beloved Gaither gospellers. On the buttons we put small round stickers, red and green, to remind him how to stop and go. That was a success.

Another day I brought home March of the Penguins from Blockbuster. I had the idea that a nature film, by all reports a genial one, would suit him better than the bedlam of regular TV fare. Standing in his room with Jack that afternoon, I suggested watching it later on.

"Oh noooo," my father said, shaking his head. "I'm not ready for that one yet. Not at all. No, no thank you. You go ahead." He kept shaking his head.

His repugnance puzzled me. It wasn't Texas Chainsaw Massacre, after all. Had he understood? "It's about penguins, Dad. It's pretty low-key, I think."

He shook his head again. "Oh no," he said. "I'm not ready for anything like that. Nature. I won't be ready for that one for a loooong time."

Jack and I looked at each other.

Over the next few days we made a joke of it. Said we'd make him watch March of the Penguins if he didn't start getting some exercise.

Months passed, his strength returned. He began to come downstairs again. From the stairtop in the mornings he would throw his two canes down to the hall below, with an alarming clatter. He'd spend his days sitting in the living room, awake, flipping through the newspaper, which no longer made him cry. His speech improved. He still had trouble with his words when tired, or when he'd had more than one glass of the dinner-time wine he relished now for its little lift. But he learned to work around, to manage, his damaged verbal circuitry, and those anxious stammering moments ceased. When words failed him now he'd shake his head and smile and say, "I can't talk!"

We got used to the occasional quirks of speech. Some of them we enjoyed. Grilled shrimp once became frilled chimp, Jack's Blackberry a Mulberry. Trying to guess what word he was looking for could become like a game of family charades. When someone guessed right he would point and exclaim, "That's it!" We teased him as we always had. We graded his performance saying dinner-time grace, docking him if he slurred the words or said "all our murphies" instead of "all our mercies." It was like graduate school, though - we never gave him lower than a B.

We'd sit together in the living room and at some point he'd bring the talk round to religion. The spiritual note was unavoidable with him and was always discomfiting for Jack and me, lazily agnostic as we were. Martyrs and holy people and the workings of God in the sublunary world - these were the topics that engaged my father's mind. They didn't engage our minds. But we weren't inclined to tell him so. Our way of dealing with such talk was to offer a kind of shifty assent, which looked like "I agree" but meant something more like "I think I understand what you're saying." As in the long-ago days of churchgoing, we consented to keep him company, but his urgent concerns were alien to us.

I was unprepared when he said to me one day, from his corner chair in the living room, "It was hard, you know, after my stroke. Lying there in bed, and all I could think about were those things, those ... creatures." He screwed his face up in disgust like someone saying eeeuuyuw. "Those enormous, slithering creatures."

I nodded, frowned. "Which creatures?"

"Those slithering, enormous ... creatures." He raised his hands as if in imprecation and made slow, clutching motions at the air. "Here on earth for millions of years."

"Dinosaurs?"

"That's it!" he said, pointing at me. "Dinosaurs. Millions of years on earth. Millions of years before man."

My father had always disliked snakes but this wasn't his herpephobia, I guessed. "You mean," I said slowly, "you were thinking about the smallness of human history in relation to the history of the world?"

He nodded. I felt a strange distress.

"Well, that was the old Victorian anxiety, wasn't it," I said. "Darwinism, evolution, it all seemed like a threat to the Christian scheme. But that was . . . you're not worried about that now, are you?"

After a pause he shook his head. "No, no. I believe."

"Good," I said, to my own surprise. Then I changed the subject.

Maybe he'd wanted to say more. Maybe he heard impatience in my voice and thought his dinosaur worries seemed childish to me. They did not, of course. The childish one was myself. I couldn't afford to have him doubting now. I needed to keep him where he'd always been.

His big, strenuous presence, it was still our protection against the night.