A Boy of Good Breeding

A
lgren was Canada’s smallest town. It really was. Canada’s Smallest Town. It said so on a big old billboard right outside the town limits and Knute had checked with one of those government offices in the blue pages and they said fifteen hundred is what you need for a town. And that’s what Algren had. If it had one less it would be a village and if it had just one more it would be a bigger town. Like all the rest of the small towns. Being the smallest was its claim to fame.

Knute had come to Algren, from the city of Winnipeg, to look after her dad who’d had a heart attack. And to relieve her mom who said if she spent one more day in the house she’d go insane.

She was twenty-four years old. Her mother, Dory, had intended her name to be pronounced “Noot uh,” but nobody got it so it became just Knute, like “Noot.” Even her mom had given up on the “uh” part but did from time to time call her Knutie or sometimes, and she hated this, Knuter.

Knute had a daughter, Summer Feelin’, and Summer Feelin’ had a strange way of shaking when she was excited. She flapped her arms, and her fingers moved quickly as though she were typing to save her life, and sometimes her head went back and her mouth opened wide and sounds like
aaah
and
uh-uh-uh
came out of it.

When she first started doing it, Knute thought it was cute. Summer Feelin’ looked like she’d lift right off the ground. But then Knute started worrying about it and decided to take her to a specialist, a pediatric neurologist. He did a number of tests, including an encephalogram. Summer Feelin’ liked the wires and enjoyed the attention but told the doctor that flapping was just something she was born to do.

Eventually after all the results came in and the charts had been read and analyzed, he agreed with her. She was born to flap. There was no sign of strange electrical activity in her brain, no reason to do a CAT scan, and all accounts of her birth indicated no trauma had occurred, nothing untoward as she had made her way through Knute’s birth canal and into this world.

Every night Knute lay down with Summer Feelin’. That was the time S.F. told Knute stories and let her in on her big plans and Knute could feel her daughter’s body tremble with excitement. It quivered. It shook. It was out of her control. Knute would hold Summer Feelin’ until she stopped shaking, maybe a twitch or two or a shudder, and fell asleep. The specialist said S.F.’s condition, which wasn’t really a condition, was very rare but nothing to worry about. Then he’d added, in a thoughtful way, that the condition or lack of condition might be the precipitator to that rare phenomenon known as spontaneous combustion. So Knute worried, from time to time, about S.F. bursting into flames for no apparent reason. And that was the type of concern she couldn’t really explain to people, even close friends, without them asking her if she needed a nap or what she’d been reading lately or just plain laughing at her.

March was the month that Knute and Summer Feelin’ arrived in Algren. Tom had had a heart attack (or
his
heart attack, as Dory called it) in December. He’d been putting up the last
decorations on the tree and BAM, it happened. He fell over, and because he was sort of clutching at the tree it fell on top of him. Ten days later, in the sterile intensive care ward of the hospital, nurses were still finding tiny pine needles in his hair and in the many creases of his skin. He picked up a nasty infection called septicemia in the hospital and, as a result, his lungs malfunctioned and he was put on a respirator. Of course, he couldn’t talk, but in his more lucid, pain-free moments he could write. Sort of. All he ever wrote, in a barely legible scrawl either stretched out over the whole page or sometimes scrunched up in the bottom corner, was “How is the tree?” Or “Is the tree okay?” Or “Is the tree up?” Or “I’m sorry about the tree.”

One day in the hospital Dory told him, “Tom, it’s Christmas Day today. Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”

His eyes were closed but he squeezed her hand. She said, “Do you remember Christmas, darling?”

And he opened his eyes and looked up at her and shook his head. Yet the next day, again, he wrote about the tree. He couldn’t remember Christmas, but he knew a tree should, for some reason, be erected in his living room.

Gradually he could remember a bit more and he could spell “world” backwards and count by sevens and all those things they’d asked him to do in the hospital when he was off the respirator and out of intensive care, but still he had a strange scattered memory, like, for instance, he knew he must, absolutely
must
, shave every morning, but he was unsure why. He reminded Dory to check the battery in the smoke detector, but when she said, “Oh, Tom, what’s the worst that can happen if our battery is dead for a day or two?” he didn’t have an answer. So he was caught in a bind where he was committed to doing what he’d always done but he couldn’t remember why he was doing it. His life, some might have said, had no purpose.

Neither did Knute’s, really. Summer Feelin’ was in a day care that she hated and Knute was working full time as a hostess in a busy downtown restaurant where everybody was used to seating themselves. She wasn’t aggressive enough to say, “Hey, can’t you read the sign? It says ‘wait to be seated,’” and so, pretty much, she just stood there all day smiling and feeling stupid. From time to time she moved the sign right in front of the door, but people would walk into it and then move it back out of their way. Sometimes the waitresses got mad at her because she wasn’t seating anybody in their sections or because everybody was sitting in their section and they were run off their feet trying to keep up with the orders. Then, for a while, Knute would try to keep people from walking past her and she’d say things like, “Please follow me,” or “A table will be ready in a minute,” or “How many of you are there?” Usually there would be two and when she asked how many of them there were, they’d look at each other like she was nuts, then they’d hold up two fingers or point at each other and say, “one, two,” in a loud voice.

“Two!” Knute would say, “okay, two, hmmm … two, you say,” like she was trying to figure out how to seat twelve. Then she’d meander around and around the restaurant with them behind her, suggesting possible tables, and she’d say, “Oh no, I think, well, no, well, yes, okay, sure, right here is fine. Wherever you want, really, I guess.”

Her boss’s wife and all the waitresses and the dishwasher and the two cooks kept telling him to fire her, but her boss kept giving her more chances. He told Knute she’d get the hang of it in a while, just get in their faces and make them wait. “They’re like pigs at the trough,” he said. “You gotta keep ’em under control.”

On her first day Knute had actually managed to lead an old couple to a table. But somehow they got their wires crossed, and Knute pulled a chair away from the table just as the man was
going to sit on it. In slow motion he fell to the ground while Knute and his wife stared, horrified. As he fell, he knocked over the fake flower arrangement and the vase shattered.

Knute’s boss came running out and picked the old man up, cleaned up the glass and told them lunch was on the house. Then he took Knute into the kitchen, made her a salami sandwich on a bagel, sat her down on a lettuce crate and told her not to worry, not to worry, this was her first day, she’d work out the kinks. But she never did. Anyway, it was a lot better than pumping gas. The one time Knute tried that she accidentally filled up a motor home with gas—not the gas tank, but the interior of the motor home itself. She had stuck the nozzle into the water-spout hole instead of the gas tank hole. The woman driving the van hadn’t noticed until she lit up a cigarette and her motor home exploded, partially, and her leg ended up needing plastic surgery. Her husband sued the gas station and won a bunch of money, of course. Knute was let go and told, by her supervisor, that she should get tested for brain damage.

On her way home from the restaurant, Knute would pick up Summer Feelin’ and listen to her tell lies about the day care. How Esther, one of the workers, had punched her six times in the face, how Justin, one of the twins, had made her put her tongue on the cold swing set and it had stuck and they left her out there all alone all day, how a terrible man with purple skin and horse feet had come and killed seven of the kids.

“Summer Feelin’,” Knute would say, “I know how much you hate it, but for now you have to try to find something good about it. It can’t be that bad.”

Knute was tired from standing around stupidly all day. But she felt she had to make it up to Summer Feelin’, so for an hour or two before bedtime the two of them would play in the park or get an ice cream, maybe rent a movie or walk to the
library. And that wore Knute out even more. Her favourite days were when Summer Feelin’ would relax and they could just sit at their little table and talk. Summer Feelin’ would tell her funny stories and shake with excitement and then, in the evening, they’d curl up together with Summer Feelin’s soft head under Knute’s chin. Knute would try not to fall asleep because that would mean that was it, the day. If she didn’t fall asleep she’d get up very quietly and make herself a cup of coffee and phone Dory, collect, or her buddy Marilyn, who just lived a couple of blocks away but had a kid and so was housebound like her in the evenings. Sometimes Marilyn and Knute watched TV together over the phone.

When Dory called and suggested Knute and Summer Feelin’ come back to Algren and live with her and Tom for a while, Knute felt like someone had just injected her with a warm, fast-acting tranquilizer. It felt like she had just put her head on a soft feather pillow and been told to go to sleep, everything would be fine. Dory made it sound like she needed Knute desperately to help with Tom, to protect her sanity, and it’s true she did. But Dory also had a sense that Knute was tired, really tired. That all she was doing was spinning her wheels. It took Knute about fifteen minutes to quit her job, cancel Summer Feelin’s spot at the day care, tell her landlord she was moving, and pack their stuff. When she told Summer Feelin’ that she could kiss her awful day care good-bye, she flapped like crazy, and Knute had to put her in a nice, warm bath to calm her down. She told Marilyn she was going to her mom and dad’s for a while and Marilyn asked if she could go, too. The next day Summer Feelin’ and Knute were on the road.

Not for long, though, because Algren was only about forty miles away from Winnipeg. Knute and Summer Feelin’ peered out the car windows at the clumps of dirt and piles of melting snow and S.F. said it reminded her of the moon.

When they got to the outskirts of Algren, which was really the same thing as the town, they saw Hosea Funk, the mayor, standing in a ditch of water with hip waders, gazing soulfully at the billboard that said, Welcome to Algren, Canada’s Smallest Town. Of course there’s not a lot to be done when people die or when they’re born. They come and go. They move away. They disappear. They
reappear.
But more or less, give or take a person or two, Algren was the reigning champ of small towns. Well, there was another famous thing about Algren but it wasn’t as impressive (if you can call being a town whose population consistently hovers around fifteen hundred people
impressive):
Algren was also the original home of the Algren cockroach. The Algren cockroach was one of only three types of North American cockroaches. Apparently it was first brought to Algren on a plant or a sack of potatoes or something a hundred years ago from Europe and the rest was history. In the encyclopedia under “cockroach” it listed the Algren cockroach and mentioned Algren as a small town in southern Manitoba. No mention of its being
the
smallest town in Canada, much to Hosea Funk’s chagrin.

As they passed Hosea standing in the ditch, Knute honked the horn and waved. “Who’s that?” S.F. asked.

“The mayor,” said Knute. “He’s an old friend of Grandpa’s.”

The horn startled him out of his reverie and Hosea straightened his golf cap and started up the side of his ditch. He didn’t wave back. He tugged for a second at the front of his jacket and then nodded his head, once. That’s how the men in Algren greeted everyone, friend or foe.