Homesick (9 page)

He made himself stop the truck. When he turned off the engine and killed the lights land and sky knit solid black against him. His mind ran back over all those places on the road where a mistake might have killed them. Nothing in the world could bring him to turn his truck around and go back over those places while it was still night. In the dark, he was sure he would make that mistake.

When the truck halted, Earl knew it meant the fire. His father didn’t have to say a word. Whatever they foraged out of the ditches was piled on the hard-packed surface of the road, rotten fence posts, dried Russian thistle, beer boxes. “Bigger, bigger,” his father urged, as they stumbled through the dark in a frenzy, filling their arms with water-killed willow, a smashed turkey crate, a weathered fir plank fallen off a load of lumber. Some nights the flames roared and blustered ten feet high, submerging the stars in a fizz of sparks. His father stood as close to the bonfire as he could bear, so close that Earl wondered his shirt didn’t begin to curl and smoke.

“There’s nothing like fire,” his father said, “to take the cold and darkness away. Is there, Earl?”

The sun rose on charred sticks, ashes, and Earl asleep in the truck. Only with daybreak did Monkman trust himself to start the engine and return to Connaught. In first light and the cold of dawn he wrapped his arms around himself and scattered the remains of the fire up and down the road with his boots. Then he crept home, driving painfully slow and careful so as not to disturb the sleep of his son, who, nevertheless, from time to time, spoke out in his dreams.

Monkman knew what awaited him. Vera. Vera in her mother’s housecoat, looking sallow and hollow-eyed. It bothered him to see her so, in her mother’s housecoat. Many a time he had almost brought himself to speak to her about her wearing of it. It wasn’t respectful or right the way she had gone into her mother’s closet and helped herself. To see her sashaying and promenading around in it, trailing ash and cigarette smoke like the Queen of Sheba, particularly galled him. Smoking was not a habit Martha had indulged in, or approved of.

Of course, he understood the business with the cigarettes was pure and simple defiance. Her way of saying if she must be mistress of the house she
would
be mistress of the house and do exactly as she pleased. He never said a word. The day she helped herself to his papers and tin of Black Cat tobacco and rolled a cigarette before his very eyes, he never said a word. Only watched as the cigarette came unglued and crumbled between her fingers as she puffed away.

Monkman hadn’t said no to her for months. Demanding grocery money, she demanded too much – three dollars a week more than her mother had ever asked for. Vera said it was because of the war and inflation. He didn’t buy that but he gave her the money anyway. He had made himself a situation and he had better learn to live with the consequences. He knew well enough where the extra money went. Into the Chinaman’s pocket when she treated her former schoolmates, Mabel Tierney and Phyllis Knouch, to Cokes. They were the girls he heard so much about, the girls who were going to be secretaries in the city. Often when he drove by the Chinaman’s cafe with goods from the three-twenty train, he saw the top of Vera’s head bobbing above the back of one of the wooden booths. There was no mistaking her. There wasn’t another head of hair like Vera’s in town. She had dyed it red because of Greer Garson. He figured maybe that was the result of working in The Palladium and seeing so many picture shows. You got ideas about being different and special and decided it would be fun to be
the only redhead in town. In his books she looked common, looked a tramp. Vera was taking the bit in her teeth, running away on him. There was an air of trouble about her, but what could he do? It had never been like this before; they used to be on good terms. How could she be made to listen?

The red hair was the final trial of his patience. He had deliberated taking his belt to her when he saw that. His father had always said there was two ways of raising a child: by example or by hand. Take your pick. But he had no pick. At present he was no example of much and knew it. As to doing the job by hand, it was a little late in the day for that. If you started whaling on a girl Vera’s age you had no chance of mending her, only of bending her even more. He knew Vera wouldn’t tolerate a whipping. She had heard her mother say often enough that any man who would strike a woman was no man at all. So naturally she had a prejudice against it.

Alec could suffer her disparaging looks and her tart tongue because what she had to say to him was mostly just and mostly the truth. What he couldn’t abide was his daughter smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, dyeing her hair red, and drinking Coke in the Chinaman’s on Monday, which was wash day, always had been. There was the question the old boy had never answered. If you can’t appeal to example, nor raise them by hand, what in Christ do you do? He sure as hell didn’t know.

Vera hated her father. She told Phyllis and Mabel that. She was careful not to mention the smashed fence pickets, the devastated corn patch, the shattered cupboards, the night driving. Anything really peculiar in your family was better kept close to the chest because in a small town people were apt to search for the same thing in you and make sure they found what they were looking for. Besides, there were rumours. No, instead of that, Vera talked about selling tickets at the theatre with cramps from your monthlies so bad you could weep and having to stick it out because if you told
him why you wanted to go home, he’d die of embarrassment. She described how he drenched his bread in gravy, ate it with a fork, and swore it was tastier than any dessert, which meant her dessert, the Nanaimo bars she had been taught to make in 4-H. And the radio. Played so loud you believed you’d lose your mind, making it impossible to escape Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and the audience laughing, so you couldn’t read a book like
Gone With the Wind
, a book you really had to concentrate on.

Her friends nodded sympathetically and said, “Oh, yes,” in voices flavoured slightly by alarm at the injustice of it all. Vera knew they really didn’t see it. Because whenever Mabel and Phyllis got the chance they steered the conversation around to plans for the upcoming graduation and what everyone intended to do when they had finished high school. All the boys in the class, all six of them, had made a pact to enlist. Phyllis and Mabel were going to secretarial school in Regina. They mentioned that every second breath they drew.

Couldn’t they see how it upset her to hear them talk of graduation glories? The only way she had to shut them up was to offer them a cigarette. That took the wind out of their sails. Neither of them dared to smoke in public yet for fear their fathers would hear of it, but they assured Vera that when they had their freedom in Regina they wouldn’t think twice about it. It was one leg up on them Vera had, being able to smoke cigarettes in the Chinaman’s. She might have had another advantage over Phyllis and Mabel if all the fellows already out of school weren’t away in the Armed Forces. Unlike her friends, whose fathers would have forbade it, Vera could have dated an older man, perhaps even one who owned a car. Her father wouldn’t have dared to try stop her. The problem was there were no older men to be had. Just shy farm boys who weren’t very clean and whose mothers cut their hair.

For Vera nothing was the same anymore, it all felt wrong. She was neither fish nor fowl; neither entirely free of the old life nor begun a new one. Her dignity demanded she dismiss Phyllis’s and
Mabel’s concerns, concerns she desperately yearned to share. When they frightened themselves with the horror of final exams set by the Department of Education in Regina, Vera smiled as if to suggest they did not know what care and worry were until they had responsibility for a house and young boy. When they debated the respective merits and demerits of Cullen’s and Creighton’s, the two city secretarial schools, Vera went pale and cold with fury. “Both’ll teach you to type, I’m sure,” she said.

No one seemed to notice.

“They say lawyers ask for a Cullen’s girl because Cullen’s girls get an especially good grounding in shorthand,” Mabel would say with a pensive air, bobbing her straw up and down the neck of a Coke bottle. “Shorthand is probably important taking down evidence.”

“Imagine what you could hear!” Phyllis would squeal, imagining herself taking down evidence.

“On the other hand, Creighton’s are supposed to be strong on bookkeeping and Dad says bookkeeping is the backbone of any business. If a girl is strong on the books he says she can rise to manage an office.”

“I could never give orders!” Phyllis would sprightly confess. “Imagine me giving orders!”

Vera certainly couldn’t imagine it.

Phyllis and Mabel spent all their time scheming about graduation, seeking to get their way as they always had done for as long as Vera had known them. As winter yielded to spring Vera watched them go back and forth to school in the snow and mud, their heads tilted together in excited discussion. Plotting, intriguing, endeavouring to pull wires. Vera knew one of their goals. They wanted to ensure that Bryce McConacher was made class valedictorian. “Sure,” Mabel had said to Vera, “the teachers have always made the best student valedictorian. But Bryce could give an inspiring and
humorous
speech. Not some dry as dust and mopey old talk which you can bet on getting from poor old Donald Freeman. It’s time for a change. We live in a democracy, don’t we?”

Lying on her bed with her arms folded crushingly across her breasts, Vera had to support the knowledge that loathsome Bryce McConacher was going to usurp a place that would have been hers if her father had let her continue in school. From the day she had gripped a pencil in Grade One, Vera had waged a see-saw battle with Donald Freeman for the place of honour at the head of the class, one year Donald savouring victory by the margin of a few decimal points in the calculation of their averages, the next year Vera.

However, Vera had to agree with Mabel when she claimed that Donald was no great shakes as a public speaker. Vera had always been the speechmaker. There were four oratory medals nestled in her mother’s jewellery box to prove it, emblems of consecutive victories in Grades Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Vera had triumphed with the aid of her mother’s coaching. “If you have stage fright don’t look at the audience. Look over the tops of their heads at the back wall. Don’t rush your speech, it’s not a foot race with the prize going to the fastest. And remember,
gesture
!” Her mother, who was a postmaster’s daughter, and who had had the advantage of music lessons, even beat time with a wooden spoon as her daughter orated in the kitchen.

Stretched out on her bed, Vera found she could still mumble to herself vast tracts of those speeches she had delivered in the Community Hall to a smiling, docile audience of parents, teachers, fellow students, and various other well-wishers. Oratory Night was an event, and its prizes hotly contested. All participants understood that what was required to win was to exploit the theme of greatness, make plain the ways of success. For several months before the big night the lives of the famous were pored over in the pages of the school’s
Encyclopedia Britannica
.

Vera’s first medal came when she was thirteen. Standing before a large crowd, the eyes of which she was self-consciously convinced were rivetted on her developing breasts, she was momentarily bereft of words. Then she turned her eyes to where her mother sat and
caught an index finger discreetly marking tempo against a purse. That launched her. In a confident, ringing voice Vera cried: “Who was Julius Caesar? A man who always followed his star. When great Caesar crossed the Rubicon boldly in front of the legions of Gaul, he was staking everything on Rome and himself.”

Vera tasted glory then, but what a pale, poor, cheating glory it was compared to the glory of graduation night, the anticipation of which could light your days for months. It was a night which had the power to transform, to raise Cinderellas out of ash pits. Vera had kept her eyes open, she had seen it happen in the past. All her old friends would be changed, none of them would be quite the same afterward. The boys would wear suits, some bought especially for the occasion, others borrowed from uncles, or brothers, or friends of the family. But all would look older, more serious.

The girls would be as no one had ever seen them before. It was rumoured that even Mary Epp would defy her parents, wear lipstick for the first time in her life and dance, if anyone asked her. Phyllis reported that Mary had already bought a tube of Heart’s Scarlet and hidden it in the toe of those sensible grey stockings she wore.

Mabel and Phyllis had purchased new gowns in the city and Mabel had been promised she could wear a family heirloom graduation night, her grandmother’s moonstone ring. How different they would all be! Vera knew how they would behave. After obtaining their diplomas Mabel and Phyllis would cry and hug and kiss one another and then graciously extend these favours to girls like Mary Epp (whom they had always despised), hoping to eradicate any unfavourable or harsh impressions that had rooted in such a person’s mind. And perhaps they would succeed and years later Mary would remember them beautiful and generous in their dresses, think warmly of them and wonder what had ever become of her old classmates.