A Good House (2 page)

But none of this made Bill Chambers extraordinary. He had come home alive, to his family, to his job, to his comfortable house on
Stonebrook Creek. And in 1949, with the war mercifully over and won, the only cost to Bill those three fingers and the time it took to train his left hand, with the country ready to enter an unprecedented boom and Sylvia confident that she could get her children safely through their childhood, comfortable was what the Chambers were hoping against hope to be.

T
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new siren was installed in Stonebrook’s Town Hall tower on the first good Tuesday in April, after the rains had soaked and softened the fields and then abruptly ended, leaving the spring sun behind to warm the soil for planting.

The old cast-iron bell, the original, was not to be replaced but augmented by this new technology. The bell would continue to announce twelve noon but the siren would signal the fires and emergencies. The siren would call the volunteers from their work or their supper tables or their ball games or their beds.

The councillors agreed they could justify the expense, which was substantial, because a tornado had cut through the county the previous July and people complained for months afterward that they had not heard any warning at all from the Town Hall, not a blessed sound above that wind. The councillors and everyone else who had given it any thought believed that the wail of a siren would be more likely to carry, would probably ride the wind undiminished.

Because there were regulations to meet, because it had to be done right the first time, the installation contract had gone to a company from Sarnia, and when the men from Sarnia pulled up to the Town Hall curb at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning with the thing crated up in the back of a truck, there was a small semi-official party waiting on the Town Hall steps to meet them, to unlock the doors and turn on the lights and lead them up the three flights of stairs to the top of the bell tower. The mayor was there and the two councillors who had pushed hardest for the siren. Norma Fawcett, who had worked forever up at the town office taking receipt of the taxes and keeping the town books and scribbling the minutes at the council meetings, had been asked to come along in case they needed someone to fetch coffee and maybe something from the bakeshop.
Charles Taylor, the town’s quiet, well-mannered simpleton, had been dressed in his slacks and shirt and tie and sent up to watch the installation by his mother, who strongly believed that Charles had as much right as anyone to take part in things. And Archie Stutt made sure he was in attendance because as the town’s de facto maintenance superintendent, you could bet he would be left in charge of the thing after the experts from Sarnia pulled out.

Bill Chambers joined the delegation on the steps just as the siren was being taken off the truck. He had made his own breakfast and left the house for the hardware store an hour early, walking a slightly different route uptown in order to arrive at about the right time. He was there with the other men not in any official capacity but because two years earlier he had climbed the two flights with Archie Stutt to measure and make an estimate on the lumber needed for a new tower staircase and that day he had seen the old bell up close for the first time and he had admired it.

It wasn’t brass like a show bell but the more lowly cast iron. The dull pewter sheen had been fouled here and there with the crusty smear of bird droppings, but it was nevertheless a beautiful thing. Its weight was self-evident, it was three feet across at the base. The clapper was the size of a softball. Bill wasn’t convinced anyone would want to harm the bell, the town council had vowed to keep it and they’d said the siren would not in any way interfere with its workings, but sometimes people got wacky, spur-of-the-moment ideas, sometimes people had to be tamed down a little. He thought he’d just stand around quietly for an hour or so and watch out for the bell.

Stonebrook had been built on the rail line, at the meeting of three townships. As was the case with many of its sister towns, its earliest energy came from the tracks. The railway engineers might have imagined a path closer to the shoreline of Lake Huron all the way north to Goderich but the twisting, shallow valley cut by Stonebrook Creek had presented a costly deterrent.

The firmly squared grid laid down by the town fathers had taken its directions from the two main intersecting streets, the original streets, with the only exception to this grid a necessary accommodation for Bald Hill and for the creek. Front Street, which was
supposed to be called King, had been cleared of trees a hundred years earlier when the first stores were built but the narrower Town Hall street was still lined with healthy old maples whose massive branches had long before intermingled overhead to form a nearly perfect summer arch of leaves. The high summer heat got through the leaves easily enough but the bright sunlight was filtered and refined by the arch, falling dappled to the hot pavement and the well-kept grass and the slightly heaving sidewalks below.

Although the Town Hall had been given pride of place, its bell tower was not the tallest structure in town. With the exception of the Gospel Hall, all of the church spires surpassed it, and the water tower, which sat behind the Town Hall on thick steel legs which were splayed for strength, sunk deep into the earth and surrounded by concrete feet to hold them steady in a big wind, surpassed everything. The water tower was painted dark green and often, at least once every two or three years, because it stood as the first and most obvious reflection of the town’s fortunes, its self-regard. If you were driving into town from the north you could see the word STONE clearly spelled out in large white letters against the green of the tower, but if you were coming from the south, if you were following the short easy curve past the golf course down to the creek and over the handsome old bridge and then climbing the last long hill into town, the word BROOK appeared only as parts of itself, the letters disconnected by the floating reaches of the United and the Roman Catholic churches.

Like the library and the churches, the Town Hall had been built to be taken seriously. The windows and doors and roof line were not elaborate but purposeful, symmetrical, calming. There was a substantial cornerstone and intricate although not ostentatious brickwork around the double front doors and at all the corners and up under the eaves. There were generous concrete steps with sturdy balustrades and, on each side of these, chained-off space and good, regularly renewed soil for tidy beds of geraniums and snaps and pansies.

These broad Town Hall steps were often used for formal photographs, pictures of Girl Guides and women’s auxiliaries, of councillors before one of their weekly meetings, of some important
or famous visitor placed proudly front and centre in a group of interested townspeople. There was quite a bit of repetition in these pictures, faces recognizable from one grouping to the next, one year to the next. In the summer heat men posed in dress pants and white shirts with broad ties, sometimes in lightweight suits, and the women among them wore conservative print dresses, sometimes perky hats with a bit of light veil. In winter pictures the men sported felt homburgs with small teal feathers tucked into the silk bands, and heavy-looking wool overcoats, and some of the women wore fur, a floppy-pawed fox draped formally around the shoulders or a Persian lamb jacket with a smart little pillbox hat to match.

Inside the Town Hall there was an office on the main floor where people paid their taxes and complained about storm sewers, and another office where the town constable kept a desk and a couple of overstuffed filing cabinets and where he might be reached by telephone if he wasn’t in the barbershop or walking up and down Front Street, gossiping. There were four jails cells which were cleaned occasionally but rarely used. There was a two-stall washroom which for many years was made available to kids who’d got caught too far from home.

The auditorium up on the second floor held thirty rows of shiny, hard, dark brown chairs with squeaky flip-up seats. The rows of chairs were attached to runners and these runners were designed to be bolted to the floor, but they were not bolted because sometimes they had to be removed in an afternoon and stacked at the sides of the hall for a demonstration of some kind or a crowd too large to be seated or a big dance, although now the dances were usually held in the Memorial Arena, which had been built down near the fairgrounds. The new dance floor in the arena was top-of-the-line hardwood and it had been constructed right at ground level, which meant a lot less disconcerting spring when there was a big crowd. There was a raised platform for a five-piece band and on the platform an upright piano which had been purchased the year before with the proceeds from a raffle on a humble Christmas turkey.

The arena was the newest public structure in town. Since the war, all across the province dozens of memorial arenas had gone up
because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger. Through the months of fund-raising and construction both of Stonebrook’s newspapers gave a running account of activities, and when the doors were finally thrown open the editors proudly put the total value at fifty thousand dollars, careful to include in their valuation loads of gravel and electrical supplies delivered without an invoice, all the cash donations, large and small, some of these sent by expatriates from as far away as California or Calgary, and freely offered manual labour tagged at seventy-five cents an hour. Bill Chambers had taken Patrick and Paul over with him several times to mix cement or haul lumber, and Sylvia and Daphne had spent a few evenings pounding nails. Fifty thousand dollars was still substantial money in 1952. You could build a perfectly adequate house for under six thousand; you could get yourself a loaded Cadillac like Doc Cooper’s for somewhere around four thousand.

With the arena up and operating, Patrick Chambers soon began to play clean but earnest and reliable defence for the Stonebrook Bantams and he already had one short ridge of thick, healed stitches just above his right eyebrow. Eleven-year-old Paul, who played offence for the Pee Wees, a little ahead of his time and usually at centre, had such long legs, such an amazing stride, that he had so far escaped any serious bloodletting. Although they were often after him because he often had the puck.

In the arena proper, an oval bank of painted plank seats surrounded the ice surface like a Roman forum. Between periods, enemy teams gathered in enemy dressing rooms to be praised and harangued by their coaches, the dressing rooms firmly separated by a food booth where you could buy pop from a cooler filled with ice water or hot chocolate and french fries and very good hot dogs piled with generous mounds of pungent onions fried in butter.

Above the dressing rooms and the food booth there was a balcony where tiers of plank seats climbed to meet the bulky rafters, which stretched high out over the ice surface, high and massive, as in a barn or a church. Older people or people who didn’t particularly want kids crawling all over them could sit up in the balcony to watch the hockey games in peace.

T
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installation people from Sarnia had turned out to be pros. And not one of the men who assembled that morning had mentioned the old cast-iron bell one way or the other, the talk was all about the siren. But nevertheless Bill was glad he’d gone. It had been something to see.

In just under two hours, including a half-hour break for coffee and banter and bran muffins hot from the oven of the bakeshop across the street, the men had the siren securely mounted and wired in and set to go. Bill didn’t stay around for coffee. He couldn’t spend the entire morning guarding the tower bell. By the time the guy in charge was ready to give the siren its first test run, shortly before ten, Bill was at his job at the hardware store, patiently trying to get two confusing lumber invoices sorted out with the steadfast bookkeeper, Margaret Kemp.

Sylvia Chambers heard the siren’s first wail, pausing with her hands on her hips over the long bed of tulips that lined the far side of the driveway, wondering about the possibility of peonies.

Patrick Chambers was at his desk at the back of the room over at the high school, sitting behind Murray McFarlane, conjugating aloud the Latin verb “to win” with the rest of the university-bound grade tens.

Daphne in grade seven and Paul in grade six were standing out in the dusty fenced playground with all the other kids from all the other grades, listening. After their principal had got the courtesy call from Norma Fawcett up at the town office he had walked from classroom to classroom to forewarn his teachers, and as they stood in the playground listening many of these teachers were preparing a brief, impromptu civics lesson: the purpose and function of a Town Hall, how people must work together in communities, for progress, for safety, for the good of the group as a whole. Most of the kids were quiet, their arms at their sides and their faces upturned as if such a sound was something that came from the sky.

Two hours later, when the tower bell chimed twelve just as it had the day before and every other previous day, Bill was already out on Front Street. If he could manage it, he usually left the hardware
store a few minutes before noon because he liked to hear the sound of the bell clearly, in the outside air.

With a dinner of pork chops and last year’s apple jelly and mashed potatoes and creamed corn set to go the minute they all came in the door, Sylvia stood on the back step taking the last of the clothes off the line, snapping and folding shirts and pants and aprons and pyjamas and nighties and underwear, dropping them into the wicker basket at her feet. She had guessed right, it had been a good breezy morning for wash. She could smell the morning in the clothes.

Patrick had split off from his friends to walk the last few blocks from the high school alone. As he walked, conscientiously planting exactly two steps in each new square of cement, he was trying once more to successfully tell himself a story in Latin. The story had to be about war because almost all the verbs and nouns he had learned that year from the dour Mr. Stewart lent themselves best to war.

Paul and Daphne, each of them having just received a quickly conceived civics lesson, were walking the few blocks side by side, not a word shared, their coming home together unusual because long-legged Paul walked so fast. He liked to be where he was going
now,
liked to eat dinner quickly so he could get himself back to the playground to join his rowdy friends. Daphne had to take two or three steps for each one of his but that was all right, she could do that.