Homesick (34 page)

With so few demands on her time Vera could often be seen standing in the large front window of The Bluebird, arms folded over her breasts as she meditated on the snow blowing and shuddering
like smoke on the roofs across the way. There were afternoons she didn’t speak to a soul until Mr. Stutz dropped in to have his supper after work. Regardless of her objections, Mr. Stutz always insisted on paying for his evening meal, which only made Vera feel even more of a charity case. Many nights he sat at the back table as late as eight o’clock, toying with his coffee cup and being sickeningly cheerful, advising her not to worry, she’d soon turn the corner. By mid-February, Vera was convinced there wasn’t any corner to turn, no corner existed. Her sole concern was now endeavouring to desperately pry a nickel loose here and there. That was what it had come to, a scramble for nickels. She hoped that by staying open two hours later than her father’s restaurant she might capture a few dregs of business, but what she got was scarcely enough to pay for the extra electric light she burned. The Bluebird had rapidly become a losing proposition. Night after night while Daniel worked on his homework in one of the booths, Vera perched on a stool at the deserted counter, crossed her right leg over her left and flicked her foot up and down like a cat does its tail as it watches the mouse’s hole. Her anxious eyes seldom left the door of The Bluebird as she waited in a misery of anticipation, an ashtray overflowing at her elbow. If the door did swing open it was sure to be a teenager wanting a package of Old Dutch potato chips, or a Coke, or a young father asking if he could buy a bottle of milk from her because his wife had forgotten to go to the store that day and now they were out and the baby was crying for a bottle. Slim profits in a bag of chips or a quart of milk.

It was a relief, when midnight finally crawled round, to check the grill, draw the blinds, and lock the door. In seven short hours Vera would be obliged to start the slow water-torture all over again. Until then there was sleep, an exhausted reprieve from worrying how to meet the rent in March or thoughts of the $3100 she now owed Mr. Stutz. That was how winter stumbled on. Vera barely noticed the sun gaining strength, the icicles hanging from the eaves suddenly one day releasing a rain of pattering drops on
the sidewalk outside The Bluebird’s window, the children running home from school with their coats unbuttoned, their toques clutched in their hands, the puddles in the shining gravel of Main Street reflecting blue sky.

The change of seasons also seemed to bring a change of luck. Vera had the Portuguese to thank for that. The motives behind the arrival of the Portuguese in Connaught were by no means straightforward or simple. For more than a year there had been vague but persistent rumours circulating that an American mining company was considering establishing a potash mine somewhere in the vicinity of Connaught. The rumours could not be dismissed as farfetched since a mine had opened in the province only five or six years before. Nevertheless, for months no one could really believe such a stroke of good fortune could smite their particular sleepy backwater. Yet, if it did, the stakes would be enormous. If the mine did go ahead, the American company would need to choose a town for their headquarters, a town in which to settle office staff and miners. That would mean prosperity and unprecedented growth, a spectacular, heady boom in business. Anyone with a head on his shoulders could see that if a mine were to be established in the district there were only three possible choices for a headquarters, the three towns which stood within twenty miles of one another – Hildebrook, Czar, and Connaught. Of course, it was all a gamble, a gamble that the mine would go ahead at all, a gamble as to which town would claim the glittering prize if it did. But it was Connaught’s town council which acted first, having weighed the odds, then hesitated and see-sawed for months before taking a deep breath and casting the dice. The stakes were too high, too tempting to stand aside. Besides, all of the councillors were also businessmen and stood the most to gain from risking the taxpayers’ money. They reasoned that if the mine was to proceed, the Americans would select the most progressive, the most go-ahead
town as centre of their operations. As Councillor Stevenson, who owned a plumbing business, put it, “No American is going to pick some backward shit hole to live.” This was the argument that clinched the decision to pave Connaught’s dirt roads and lay new cement sidewalks as an enticement to the Americans and a way of gaining a march on Connaught’s unpaved rivals. A contract was hurriedly signed with an Edmonton company and, on May 1, the Portuguese arrived to lay asphalt and pour cement.

Vera could almost have believed that the angels sent them. New to town, strangers, they took their meals where they were made to feel most welcome, at Vera’s. In a single stroke her fortunes were reversed. Suddenly she found herself serving breakfast, lunch, and supper to thirty men, seven days a week. It didn’t matter that Daniel was run off his feet serving tables and herself cooking in the kitchen. What counted was the money she found in the cash register at the end of the first day of the Portuguese invasion. The total astounded her. Vera made up her mind that no one, but no one, was going to take her Portuguese away from her. In a matter of days she was on the friendliest of terms with the short, dark men who smiled so brilliantly and laughed so easily. Soon they were teasing her in fractured English, proudly displaying to her snapshots of wives and children, and teaching her to twist her tongue around their names. Soon they were at ease enough with Vera for their foreman Domingo to approach her with a request. “Please, can you make a party Portuguese for them? To help the homesick?” Diffidently he held out to her several sheets of wrinkled paper covered with awkward, misspelled translations of recipes. “Please, these foods?”

Vera agreed to help if Domingo would assist and guide her. Lacking certain ingredients it was necessary for her to improvise, Domingo at her side, sampling and judging. “Like this, Domingo? More or less?” And he nodded or shook his head, smacked his lips in theatrical appreciation or curled them in distaste.

The party was set for eight o’clock Saturday night. As the hour drew near Vera hung a sign on the door of the cafe which announced “Closed for Private Function,” and stood guard, ready to turn back anyone who wasn’t Portuguese. Vera had never seen any of her guests in anything but work clothes and now they struck her as a tiny bit comical, solemnly and identically dressed in tieless white shirts buttoned to the throat and sombre black suits whose pockets bulged with bottles of home-made wine. She hadn’t counted on the wine and it made Vera nervous that some Nosy Parker would report her to the police for serving liquor in an unlicenced establishment. So the Portuguese were unceremoniously scooted through the door and, once the flock was all safely inside, she practically nailed the blinds to the window-ledge so no snoop could steal a peek in. The last thing she needed now that she was finally turning a buck was to get her business licence pulled.

It was a memorable party. They ate, they drank, and after they had done enough of both they began to sing and even dance. Elaborately courteous, they offered Vera ecstatic compliments in barely comprehensible English which grew less comprehensible the drunker they got. Vera understood that their grandiose praises bore little relation to the quality of her Portuguese cooking which could be, at best, only passable. Rather, they were expressions of gratitude for her willingness to attempt to please them and make them feel at home.

“Missus, is good dinner,” one after another of them reported gravely to her. Domingo, drunk by midnight and unhinged by the nostalgia evoked by the taste of boiled potatoes served with olive oil and wine vinegar instead of butter or gravy, sat by himself, surveying the scene. Suddenly he lifted a glass of wine high above his head and shouted, “You are Queen, Vera! Queen of the Portuguese!” The toast was taken up with a roar of drunken enthusiasm. “You are Queen of the Portuguese, Vera! Queen!”

The proclamation was true. After that night Vera was Queen of the Portuguese, treated with the respect owed a queen and given
unswerving loyalty. From the time of the party Portuguese Vera knew these customers were hers, no one was going to entice them away from her.

Something else became plain after the party. Vera could see it was impossible for her to carry on in the fashion she had for the past few weeks. It was too much to ask Daniel to serve breakfast before school, rush back to The Bluebird during lunch hour to wait tables, and then return after school to work the supper shift. At first she had been leery of hiring staff because she could not believe that this unanticipated burst of busyness could continue, but now it seemed certain that it would, that The Bluebird really did have some sort of future. So Vera became an employer, engaging two high school dropouts as waitresses and a middle-aged woman with a history of alcohol problems as dishwasher. Daniel was relegated to lighter duties, manning the till at supper, clearing tables, mopping up the floor once the supper rush was over.

Her new employees didn’t know what to make of Vera. She expected them to match her frantic pace and when they didn’t they caught hell. Mad, Vera could strip the paint off an outhouse wall with her tongue. Irene, one of the waitresses, burst into tears several times during her first week of work. On the other hand, Vera’s workers earned more money at The Bluebird than they could anywhere else in Connaught. They started at better than the minimum wage, Vera explaining that she didn’t expect minimum work out of them so they ought to get paid better than minimum pay. As boss, she stressed one thing to her waitresses. It was their job to get the Portuguese fed and out the door as quickly as it was humanly possible. The men had to be at work by seven in the morning and back on the shovel after lunch by one o’clock. She promised her waitresses that every day they got the crew clear of the restaurant by starting time, morning and noon, they would each get a three dollar bonus, paid straight out of the till at the end of the day.

Stutz had warned her against paying higher than average wages, as if her decision was simply a bid for popularity. Yet despite
paying higher salaries, despite performance bonuses for hustle, the sums of money she banked at the end of each week slowly and steadily mounted. Soon she was writing weekly cheques of fifty dollars against Stutz’s loan. Within the year she hoped her debt to him would be paid in full.

On June 1, with great fanfare, the provincial government and an American mining company had announced that a potash mine would be developed six miles south of Connaught. The choice news was that the town council’s gamble had appeared to have paid off; Connaught was chosen as company headquarters. A surge of activity followed hard on the heels of this announcement. Overnight things began to change. Strangers appeared on the streets. The entire second floor of Alec Monkman’s hotel became temporary offices for geologists, engineers, planners, while the third floor became their living and sleeping quarters.

A three-shift crew of shaft sinkers arrived. No one in Connaught had ever seen their like before. To the citizens of Connaught they were a different breed of man, grey-skinned from lack of sun, hard, wild, desperate in the pursuit of their pleasures. Drawn from all over North America, they spoke with every accent, lured by the big money which goes hand in hand with work that demands you risk your life hourly. Their hard-earned wages ran between their fingers like water and they wanted the best that life had to offer and money could buy. They ordered steak and eggs for breakfast, drank Crown Royal. Their cars were big, flashy, expensive, and neglected – Buicks and Chryslers and Oldsmobiles caked in mud or floured in dust. The dangers of the job had made them addicts to excitement so when their shifts were over they made trouble drinking and fighting. There seemed to be no let-up to the noise, the confusion, the disorderliness. Day and night, semis rolled through town bearing huge pieces of earth-moving equipment lashed to their trailers with chains, shaking people in their chairs and in
their beds, making the dishes jingle in the cupboard and spoiling television reception. The town council hurriedly passed a by-law outlawing the big trucks from travel on the newly paved streets. Sometimes the drivers heeded the ordinance, sometimes they didn’t. When they did, the air was filled with rumble and clouds of yellow dust, and when they didn’t, the fresh pavement had to be patched and repaired by the crews of Portuguese.