Homesick (30 page)

Vera swore to herself she wouldn’t get rattled. Concentrating, she gingerly swabbed down a patch of skin, then pinched up a roll of flesh and skin. It felt queer and rubbery to the touch and left her with a distasteful sensation.

“My,” said Huff, “aren’t your fingers cool? But you know what they say. Cool hands, warm heart. That’s what they say. Is that true, Vera?”

“Shut up and hold still,” ordered Vera, taking aim with the syringe. It wasn’t easy because Driesen seemed to be fumbling and fidgeting with something in front, shirt buttons perhaps.

“You know,” he said, his voice suddenly grown harsh, “it’s what you want at a time like this – a woman’s gentle touch. I could get used to this. How about it? Would Vera like to be Huff’s private nurse?”

Vera’s answer was to stick him. The sight of the needle buried in the old man’s tensed buttock came as such a shock to her that she lost all recollection of what the next step was. Several seconds ticked by before she recovered, eased down the plunger with shaking fingers, and snatched out the syringe. There, it was done.

Huff turned and faced her. He smiled as he lifted up his shirt. “Look what Vera done. Pretty good for an old fellow, eh?” He smirked proudly, displaying a mangy nest of pubic hair from which a limply swollen member dangled, making fitful attempts to lift a head drooling a drop of liquid the colour and consistency of egg white.

“Oh yes,” he said, looking down at himself approvingly as he began to roughly pull and stretch his penis, “just give the old fellows half a chance and they’re sure to satisfy.”

It was with the broom near to hand in the corner that Vera knocked him down. The jars of face cream and hand lotion which he dragged down from the dresser as he fell were still rattling like hail on the floor when she burst out of the bedroom, across the living room, and blew wild-eyed and raving into the kitchen.

“Out!”

Driesen’s cronies had time only to pop open their mouths before the broom slashed the tabletop and sent cards and money flying, glasses skittering, and beer spraying into the air.

“Out!”

Chairs were overturned in the scramble to escape her, cries of consternation and alarm arose as Vera’s broom descended on heads and upraised hands, left, right, and centre. A panicked Huff, hands clutching his waistband, bolted past her and flung himself out the door. They all followed, one of them trailing the tablecloth knotted in his fist. Vera landed her final blow cleanly between a pair of shoulder blades and heard the handle snap with a pistol-shot crack. It made her feel wonderful.

“And don’t come back!” she shouted, pitching coats and overshoes into the snow after them, disregarding her father’s beseeching cries of “Vera! Vera!” from the open door behind her.

The last of their belongings were finally loaded and they were ready to leave. Daniel clutched the tow rope of a sleigh piled high with suitcases and cardboard boxes and, like a dog straining on a leash, leaned abruptly into the thickening darkness of five o’clock on a winter’s afternoon. One sharp tug, two sharp tugs. The sleigh jerked stickily under its load, then relaxed into a smooth, flowing glide, its runners squeaking over the dry snow gone pewter in the
failing light. Vera hoisted the handles of the wheelbarrow and rattled her cargo of dishes into the icy, rutted road.

Her father called out to her one last time from the doorway where he stood coatless in the cold. “If you have to go – all right. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Let me put your things in the truck and take you there. Please, Vera, listen to me. Will you listen to me? Vera!”

Vera pushed on, shoulders bouncing as the wheel of the barrow jumped in the ruts and tire tracks. She knew this was how she must go – with a sleigh and wheelbarrow borrowed from a neighbour, striking out across town for a three-room shack on the other side of Connaught, the only house to be rented on such short notice just before Christmas. The owner, who had inherited the house from his mother when she had died six months before, had been delighted to get a tenant. Nobody was willing to rent such places any more. It was too small, the thin, uninsulated walls made it impossible to heat, and it lacked running water. Mindful of its disadvantages, he had struck a deal with Vera, selling her whatever of his mother’s furniture remained in the house for next to nothing. For fifty bucks she got a woodstove in good condition, two cots, a table and four chairs, and a woodpile of seasoned poplar out back to boot.

Her father had made the last two days hell, pestering her with questions. What was wrong? Why was she leaving?

“What exactly did Huff do?” The big question.

“I told you I don’t want to talk about it. It doesn’t matter now what he did. What’s done is done. Let’s just say I don’t want any more of this atmosphere for Daniel and leave it at that.”

“I’ll be sorry ten times over as soon as you tell me what I’m supposed to be sorry for. But how do you expect me to apologize until then? And, Vera, forget all this foolishness about moving out. It’s crazy. What did I do that you’ve got to move out?”

“Isn’t this typical? Isn’t this typical you’d have to ask?”

What had worried Vera most was that Daniel might mutiny. So far he had only sulked and applied the cold shoulder. At present he was stepping out so briskly that she couldn’t keep pace pushing the wheelbarrow. A show of anger, she supposed. Yesterday they had fought.

He’d been upset about the move. “
Why
do we have to go? We just moved this summer. Why again so soon?”

“It’s not a big move, Daniel. It’s just across town, and it’s not as if you have to change schools or anything like that. That’s why I ruled out leaving Connaught right now, so you can finish the year in the same school. When school’s over then we’ll see what we’ll do.”

“I hate that new house. It’s a shit hole.”

“It’s no palace, I grant you. But it’ll do until we can find better.”

“Three crappy little rooms. An outdoor toilet. It doesn’t even have a
TV
.”

“Woe is Daniel, no
TV
. Tragedy of tragedies. Aren’t you hard done by? Maybe a weekend in India would teach you what hardship is. It’s not missing
TV
.”

“You better be prepared to miss me, then,” Daniel announced. “Because I’m going to be over here with him – watching
TV
.”

“If I were you I’d be careful of declarations about what ‘I am and I am not going to do,’ including where you’re going to watch television. All your decisions aren’t yours to make until you’re twenty-one and that’s some time off yet, sunshine. For your information what you don’t do is watch
TV
over here with him. I don’t want to catch you hanging around here –
ever.”
Her rage was the weak, jealous, tainted rage of a child and it often drove her into thoughtless, shameful declarations. She consoled herself that Daniel knew better than to take seriously, literally, what was said in the heat of the moment. Nobody ever meant
exactly
what they said, did they?

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I?” Vera could see he was fighting back tears. She could only guess at their meaning. Anger?

“Don’t trot that tone of voice out with me, young man. Understand?” Mother and son stared challengingly into one another’s eyes. Daniel was the first to look away. His yielding allowed her to speak more softly to him. “I think it’s time we both had a break from your grandfather, and the company he keeps. He and his cronies are having a bad effect on you – I see it more and more every day. Those old men aren’t company for a boy your age. It’s unhealthy, you ask me.”

“If that’s what it is – he already said you don’t want them coming around he’ll keep them away. He already promised you that –I heard him!”

“When you get to be as old as I am, maybe then you’ll have learned what your grandfather’s promises are worth.”

“Well, so what? Those guys won’t be coming around again anyway. Not after what you did. So who’s going to corrupt me?”

“You’re wasting your breath,” she said grimly. “It’s decided.”

Yet saying it was decided didn’t make it so. That was the sudden lurch of hot anger speaking, not really her. Vera knew better than to bank on anything ever being decided.

Snow had begun to fall. Vera felt flakes tickling and melting on her hot face. Pushing a wheelbarrow was hard, awkward work. She halted, set down the wheelbarrow, and took a breather, lifting her eyes to the blue corona of the streetlight. It resembled a fish-bowl, the flying snow tiny darting creatures which flashed briefly and brightly before settling, extinguished, dead-white and numb on roofs and roads, empty yards, and stripped gardens. It settled on Vera, too, on her coat, her scarf, the moon of her uplifted face. She was looking back in the midst of flight, back to that night so many years ago, the night of the snow, the night of the recital, the night of their unspoken understanding.

She started, wiped the moisture from her face, coming back to Daniel. There he was, far ahead of her, at the very end of the street. The snow was falling thicker and faster with every passing minute,
but still not so thick as to rub out the distinctive stoop to his shoulders and the peculiar toed-out walk he had been bequeathed by his father. At this distance, and in the midst of a blizzard, one could easily have been mistaken for the other.

15

T
he day after Christmas, temperatures plummeted to −40°F, and every chimney in Connaught ran a plumb-line of smoke against the windless, blue sky. These columns of white smoke shone in the intense sunshine, temporary pillars of marble erected by stoves and furnaces all over the town. Around two o’clock when Vera discovered the woodbox was getting dangerously low she sent Daniel out to split some wood. The clumsy thunking of his axe outside kept her company as she sat at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking coffee, and pondering her future. When a knock came at the door she supposed it was Daniel, kicking at it with his arms filled with wood, summoning her to open it and let him in. Instead, she found Mr. Stutz, red-faced, nostrils steaming in the bitter cold, and his broad chest stacked with parcels done up in Christmas paper.

“Come in, come in,” Vera urged, and Stutz did, ricocheting through the door-frame, stamping his feet noisily to shed the snow from his heavy, felt-lined boots. Once across the threshold he stalled, searching for a mat on which to remove his overshoes. There was none. As he looked around him, the bareness of the place impressed itself upon him. There were no curtains on the windows
of the cramped kitchen, and Mr. Stutz could gaze out onto the outskirts of Connaught, a glacial sweep of frozen prairie broken only by a line of telephone poles rambling west. The austerity, the vacancy of the house, was extreme. However, compared to what he could see of the rest of the rooms, the kitchen verged on clutter. It held a table and two chairs, and the cast-iron range filled one wall with its squat solidity and stove-pipe angles. Stutz wondered when the pipes had last been cleaned. There were brown scorch marks on the beaverboard indicating they were given to overheating. To his left he could look through a narrow door that gave onto an equally narrow living room, empty except for one of the cots that made up the dead lady’s estate and a forlorn display of Christmas presents set out in the middle of the scuffed linoleum floor – a bottle of perfume, a boy’s sweater, a box of Black Magic chocolates, a number of books. Gifts that Vera and Daniel had exchanged. Beyond this, another door stood open on Vera’s bedroom and Stutz could make out a cardboard box filled with clothes and the corner of another cot, twin to the first. There was nothing more to be seen.

“Just kick them off where you stand,” said Vera, noting Mr. Stutz’s indecision as to what to do with his boots, “and come and take a seat by the stove.”

Mr. Stutz carefully placed the presents on the table. “We’re late with these,” he apologized, “but the old gentleman thought that yesterday being Christmas you might have dropped by with the boy. When you didn’t, he asked me to deliver them.”

Vera was clearly annoyed at the presumption. “He had no reason to expect any visits from us. You can tell him I said as much. And you can take these back where they came from,” she said, indicating the parcels.