That house in Manawaka is the one which, more than any other, I carry with me. Known to the rest of the town as “the old Connor place” and to the family as the Brick House, it was plain as the winter turnips in its root cellar, sparsely windowed as some crusader’s embattled fortress in a heathen wilderness, its rooms in a perpetual gloom except in the brief height of summer. Many other brick structures had existed in Manawaka for as much as half a century, but at the time when my grandfather built his house, part dwelling place and part massive-monument, it had been the first of its kind.
Set back at a decent distance from the street, it was screened by a line of spruce trees whose green-black branches swept down to the earth like the sternly protective wings of giant hawks. Spruce was not indigenous to that part of the prairies. Timothy Connor had brought the seedlings all the way from Galloping Mountain, a hundred miles north, not on whim, one may be sure, but feeling that they were the trees for him. By the mid-thirties, the spruces were taller than the house, and two generations of children had clutched at boughs which were as rough and hornily knuckled as the hands of old farmers, a bird in the house and had swung themselves up to secret sanctuaries. On the lawn a few wild blue violets dared to grow, despite frequent beheadings from the clanking guillotine lawn mower, and mauve-flowered Creeping Charley insinuated deceptively weak-looking tendrils up to the very edges of the flower beds where helmeted snapdragon stood in precision.
We always went for Sunday dinner to the Brick House, the home of my mother’s parents. This particular day my father had been called out to South Wachakwa, where someone had pneumonia, so only my mother and myself were flying down the sidewalk, hurrying to get there. My mother walked with short urgent steps, and I had to run to keep up, which I did not like having to do, for I was ten that spring and needed my dignity.
“Dad said you shouldn’t walk so fast because of the baby. I heard him.”
My father was a doctor, and like many doctors, his advice to his own family was of an exceedingly casual nature. My mother’s prenatal care, apart from “For Pete’s sake, honey, quit running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” consisted mainly of admonitions to breathe deeply and drink plenty of water.
“Mercy,” my mother replied, “I don’t have to slow up that much, I should hope. Get a move on, Vanessa. It’s nearly five, and we should’ve been there by now. I suppose Edna will have the dinner all ready, and there won’t be a thing for me to do. I wish to heaven she wouldn’t, but try to tell her. Anyway, you know how your grandfather hates people to be late.”
When we got to the Brick House, my mother stopped hurrying, knowing that Grandfather would be watching from the bay window. She tidied my hair, which was fine and straight and tended to get in my eyes, and she smoothed down the collar of the white middy which I hated and resented having to wear today with my navy pleated skirt as though it had still been winter.
“Your summer dresses are all up to your neck,” my mother had said, “and we just can’t manage a new one this year, but I’m certainly not going to have you going down there looking like a hooligan.”
Now that the pace of our walking had slowed, I began to hop along the sidewalk trying to touch the crooked lines where the cement had been frost-heaved, some winter or other, and never repaired. The ants made their homes there, and on each fissure a neat mound of earth appeared. I carefully tamped one down with my foot, until the ant castle was flattened to nothing. Then I hopped on, chanting.
“Step on a crack, break your grandfather’s back.”
“That’s not very nice, Vanessa,” my mother said. “Anyway, I always thought it was your mother’s back.”
“Well?” I said accusingly, hurt that she could imagine the substitution to have been accidental, for I had genuinely thought it would please her.
“Try not to tear up and down stairs like you did last week,” my mother said anxiously. “You’re too old for that kind of shenanigans.”
Grandfather was standing on the front porch to greet us. He was a tall husky man, drum-chested, and once he had possessed great muscular strength. That simple power was gone now, but age had not stooped him.
“Well, Beth, you’re here,” Grandfather said. “Past five, ain’t it?”
“It’s only ten to,” my mother said defensively. “I hoped Ewen might be back – that’s why I waited. He had to go to South Wachakwa on a call.”
“You’d think a man could stay home on a Sunday,” Grandfather said.
“Good grief, Father,” my mother said, “people get sick on Sundays the same as any other day.”
But she said it under her breath, so he did not hear her.
“Well, come in, come in,” he said. “No use standing around here all day. Go and say hello to your grandmother, Vanessa.”
Ample and waistless in her brown silk dress, Grand mother was sitting in the dining room watching the canary. The bird had no name. She did not believe in bestowing names upon non-humans, for a name to her meant a christening, possible only for Christians. She called the canary “Birdie,” and maintained that this was not like a real name. It was swaying lightly on the bird-swing in its cage, its attentive eyes fixed upon her. She often sat here, quietly and apparently at ease, not feeling it necessary to be talking or doing, beside the window sill with its row of African violets in old ginger jars that had been painted orange. She would try to coax the canary into its crystal trilling, but it was a surly creature and obliged only occasionally. She liked me to sit here with her, and sometimes I did, but I soon grew impatient and began squirming, until Grandmother would smile and say, “All right, pet, you run along, now,” and then I would be off like buckshot. When I asked my grandmother if the bird minded being there, she shook her head and said no, it had been there always and wouldn’t know what to do with itself outside, and I thought this must surely be so, for it was a family saying that she couldn’t tell a lie if her life depended on it.
“Hello, pet,” Grandmother said. “Did you go to Sunday school?”
“Yes.”
“What did you learn?” Grandmother asked, not prying or demanding, but confidently, serenely.
I was prepared, for the question was the same each week. I rarely listened in Sunday school, finding it more entertaining to compose in my head stories of spectacular heroism in which I figured as central character, so I never knew what the text had been. But I had read large portions of the Bible by myself, for I was constantly hard-up for reading material, so I had no trouble in providing myself with a verse each week before setting out for the Brick House. My lines were generally of a warlike nature, for I did not favour the meek stories and I had no use at all for the begats.
“How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle,” I replied instantly.
“Second Samuel,” Grandmother said, nodding her head. “That’s very nice, dear.”
I was not astonished that my grandmother thought the bloody death of Jonathan was very nice, for this was her unvarying response, whatever the verse. And in fact it was not strange, for to her everything in the Bible was as gentle as she herself. The swords were spiritual only, strokes of lightness and dark, and the wounds poured cochineal.
Grandfather tramped into the dining room. His hair was yellowish white, but once it had been as black as my own, and his brown beaked leathery face was still handsome.
“You’d best come into the living room, Agnes,” he said. “No use waiting here. Beth says Ewen’s gone away out to South Wachakwa. It’ll be a wonder if we get our dinner at all tonight.”
Grandmother rose. “Yes, I was just coming in.”
Grandfather walked over to the window and peered at the plants on the sill.
“Them jars could do with a coat of paint,” he said. “I’ve got some enamel left in the basement. It’s that bottle-green I used on the tool-shed.”
“Is there no orange left?” Grandmother enquired.
“No. It’s all used up. What’s the matter with bottle-green?”
“Oh, nothing’s the matter with it, I guess. I just wondered, that’s all.”
“I’ll do them first thing tomorrow, then,” Grandfather said decisively.
No tasks could be undertaken today, but there was no rule against making plans for Monday, so my grandfather invariably spent the Sabbath in this manner. Thwarted, but making the best of a bad lot, he lumbered around the house like some great wakeful bear waiting for the enforced hibernation of Sunday to be over. He stopped at the hall door now and rattled it, running hard expert fingers along the brass hinges.
“Hinge is loose,” he said. “The pin’s worn. I’ll have to go down to the store and see if they’ve got one. That Barnes probably won’t have the right size – he’s got no notion of stock. Maybe I’ve got an extra one in the basement. Yes, I have an idea there’s one there. I’ll just step down and have a look.”
I heard him clumping down the basement steps, and soon from the area of his work-bench there arose the soft metallic jangle of nails and bolts, collected oddments being sifted through. I glanced at my grandmother, but if she was relieved that he was rummaging down there, she gave no sign.
I did not know then the real torment that the day of rest was for him, so I had no patience with his impatience. What I did know, however, was that if he had been any other way he would not have passed muster in Manawaka. He was widely acknowledged as an upright man. It would have been a disgrace if he had been known by the opposite word, which was “downright.” A few of my friends had downright grandfathers. They were a deep mortification to their families, these untidy old men who sat on the Bank of Montreal steps in the summer-time and spat amber tobacco jets onto the dusty sidewalk. They were described as “downright worthless” or “downright lazy,” these two terms being synonymous. These shadows of wastrels, these flimsy remnants of past profligates, with their dry laughter like the cackle of crows or the crackling of fallen leaves underfoot, embarrassed me terribly, although I did not have any idea why. Walking down main street, I would avoid looking at them, feeling somehow that they should not be on view, that they should be hidden away in an attic along with the other relics too common to be called antiques and too broken to be of any further use. Yet I was inexplicably drawn to them, too.
With Grandfather safely occupied, one danger for me was temporarily over, for if he could think of nothing else to do, he would sit me down on a footstool beside his chair and make me listen, fidgeting with boredom, while he talked of the past. To me there was nothing at all remarkable in the fact that he had come out west by stern wheeler and had walked the hundred-odd miles from Winnipeg to Manawaka. Unfortunately, he had not met up with any slit-eyed and treacherous Indians or any mad trappers, but only with ordinary fanners who had given him work shoeing their horses, for he was a blacksmith. He had been the first blacksmith in Manawaka, and finally had saved enough money to set himself up in the hardware business. He frequently related the epic of that significant day.
“I mind well the day I sold out the smithy to Bill Saunders. He was my helper in them days. He died of a growth only last year, and no wonder. He was always a great man for eating fried stuff. I used to tell him it coats the inside of your stomach, but he never paid heed. Well, I’d rented the store space in the old Carmichael block, and I says to Billy, ‘I’m going into hardware and if you want the smithy, she’s yours for five hundred on the anvil!’ He laid down his money, just like that. I picked it up and walked out and I never shoed another horse from that day to this. It was hard going in them days, to make the store pay, but I used to load up the buck-board with kettles and axes and that, and take it all around the countryside, and I done a sight better than I would’ve if I’d sat at home like some fellows I could mention, just waiting for the business to come to me.”
I had been trained in both politeness and prudence, so I always said “Gee” in an impressed voice, but it did not seem very exciting to me. I could not imagine the store looking any other way than it did now, a drab place full of kitchen utensils and saw-blades and garden tools and kegs of nails. It was not even Connor’s Hardware any longer, for Grandfather had sold it a few months ago and had officially retired. He still felt as though he were in the business, however, and would often go down to the store and give good advice to Mr. Barnes, the present owner. Once he took me with him, and I pretended to be studying the paint charts while Grandfather held forth and Mr. Barnes kept saying, “Well, well, that’s a thought all right, yessiree, I’ll have to think about that, Mr. Connor.” Finally Grandfather went stomping home and said to Grandmother, “The man’s a downright fool, and lazy as a pet pig, I’ll tell you that much,” and my grandmother chirped softly to my aunt, “Edna, make your father a nice cup of tea, will you, pet?”
Aunt Edna and my mother were talking in the kitchen now, so I went out. My mother was the eldest in the family of five, and Aunt Edna was the youngest, and while both had the Connor black hair and blue eyes, they were not alike in appearance. My mother was slight and fine-boned, with long-fingered hands like those on my Chinese princess doll, and feet that Aunt Edna enviously called “aristocratic,” which meant narrow. “It’s a poor family can’t afford one lady,” my mother would reply ironically, for we all knew she worked as hard as anyone. Aunt Edna, on the other hand, was handsome and strong but did not like being so. She said she had feet like scows, and she was constantly asking if we thought she had put on weight. My mother, torn between honesty and affection, would reply, “Not so anyone would really notice.”
I climbed up on the high kitchen stool, as unobtrusively as possible. I was a professional listener. I had long ago discovered it was folly to try to conceal oneself. The best concealment was to sit quietly in plain view.
“He’s always been so active,” my mother was saying. “It’s understandable, Edna.”
“It’s all right for you,” my aunt said. “Ken Barnes doesn’t phone you to complain.”
“I know,” my mother said.
She leaned against the kitchen cabinet, and all at once I saw the intricate lines of tiredness in her face. Perhaps they had been there all along, but I had never before noticed them. The sight frightened me, for I still needed the conviction that no one except myself ever suffered anything. Aunt Edna, too, was scrutinizing her.
“You need a few more smocks, Beth, I thought I’d run up a couple for you on the machine. I’ve got that rose crepe – I never wear it here. The colour would suit you.”
“What? Do sewing, with this house to run? You haven’t the time, Edna. Don’t be silly.”
My mother disliked rose intensely, but Aunt Edna had forgotten. The dress had been my aunt’s best one, which she had bought when she went to Winnipeg a few years before, to take a commercial course.
“I’ve got nothing to do with my evenings,” Aunt Edna said. “I can’t just sit around and twiddle my thumbs, can I? It’s settled then. I’ll get at it next week.”
“Well, thanks,” my mother said. “It’s very good of you. What are we going to do about the other, Edna?”
“What can we do? I’m certainly not tackling him about it, are you?”
“Hardly. My, what a pity he ever sold the place. Maybe it was getting too much for him, but still –”
“I was against it, but you know what he’s like when his mind’s made up. He said a man of his age ought to be able to afford to retire. He thought he’d been in hardware long enough.” Then Aunt Edna laughed. “Hardware – that was certainly the right thing for him to go into, wasn’t it? Can you imagine him in software or – heaven forbid – perishables?”
“Is there such a thing as software?” my mother asked.
“Not in his language, kiddo,” Aunt Edna said.
Then they both giggled, and I, all at once wanting to be included, dropped my camouflage of silence.
“Why does Grandfather always say ‘I seen’ and ‘I done’? Doesn’t he know?”
Aunt Edna laughed again, but my mother did not. “Because he never had your advantages, young lady, that’s why,” she said crossly. “He had to leave school when he was just a child. Don’t you ever mention it to him, either, do you hear? At least he doesn’t say ‘guy,’ like some people I could name.”
“Haw haw,” I said sarcastically, but I said it very quietly so she did not hear.
“Nessa,” Aunt Edna said, “where’s that clothespeg doll you were making?”
I had forgotten it. I got it out now and decided I would be able to finish it today. Everyone else in Manawaka used the metal-spring type of clothespegs, but my grandmother still stuck to the all-wooden ones with a round knob on top and two straight legs. They were perfect for making dolls, and I used a pipe cleaner for the arms and bits of coloured crepe-paper for the clothes. This one was going to be an old-fashioned lady.
“You know, Beth,” Aunt Edna said, “that’s not right about advantages. He had plenty. Anyone could make a go of it in those days, if they were willing to work.”
“Oh, I suppose so,” my mother said. Her voice sounded peculiar, as though she were ashamed that she had brought the subject up. She turned away and bent her dark head over the big woodstove that said “McClary’s Range” in shining script across the warming oven at the top. She poked at the bubbling cauliflower with a fork.
“I’ll bet a nickel Ewen won’t be back in time for dinner. It’s Henry Pearl, and I guess he’s in a pretty bad way, poor old fellow. He wouldn’t come in to the hospital. He said he wants to die on his own place. Ewen won’t get a cent, of course, but let’s hope they pay in chickens this time, not that awful pork again, just loaded with fat.”
“Why don’t you ask me if I’d had any word?” Aunt Edna said coldly. “Since that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Well, have you?”
“No. The ad’s been in the Winnipeg papers for the full two weeks now. Tell Ewen thanks but I’m afraid the money was wasted.”
“If you think it would be any use, maybe we could –”
“No,” my aunt said. “I’m not borrowing any more from Ewen. The two of you have enough to worry about.”
“Well, maybe Winnipeg’s not the right place to try. Maybe you’d have a better chance right here in Manawaka.”
“Oh lord, Beth, don’t you think I’ve gone to every office in town? They’ve all got stenographers already, for pity’s sake, or else they can’t afford to hire one. Won’t this damn Depression ever be over? I can see myself staying on and on here in this house –”
I had put too much mucilage on the crepe-paper, and the pieces of the lady’s skirt were slithering and refused to stick properly, on the doll. Then half the skirt got stuck on my hand, and when I angrily yanked it away, the paper tore.
“Darn it! Darn this darned old thing!”
“What’s the matter?” my mother asked.
“It won’t stick, and now it’s ripped. See? Now I’ll have to cut out another skirt.”
I grabbed the scissors and began hacking at another piece of paper.
“Well, as your grandmother says, there’s no use getting in a fantod about it,” my mother said. “Why don’t you leave it now and go back to it when you’re not so worked up?”
“No. I want to finish it today, and I’m going to.”
It had become, somehow, overwhelmingly important for me to finish it. I did not even play with dolls very much, but this one was the beginning of a collection I had planned. I could visualise them, each dressed elaborately in the costume of some historical period or some distant country, ladies in hoop skirts, gents in black top hats, Highlanders in kilts, hula girls with necklaces of paper flowers. But this one did not look at all as I had imagined she would. Her wooden face, on which I had already pencilled eyes and mouth, grinned stupidly at me, and I leered viciously back. You’ll be beautiful whether you like it or not, I told her.
Aunt Edna hardly appeared to have noticed the interruption, but my mother had her eyes fixed dubiously on me, and I wished I had kept quiet.
“You know what he said yesterday?” Aunt Edna went on. “He told me I was almost as good as Jenny – she was their last hired girl, remember? Not as good, mark you. Almost.”
“You mustn’t be so touchy,” my mother said. “He meant it as a compliment.”
“I know,” Aunt Edna said in a strained voice. “That’s the hilarious part. Oh, Beth –”
“Nessa, honey,” my mother said hastily, “run in and see if Grandmother wants to wait dinner for Daddy or not, will you?”
Humiliated and furious, I climbed down from the stool. She reached out to ruffle my hair in an apologetic gesture, but I brushed away her hand and walked into the living room, wrapped in my cloak of sullen haughtiness.
Grandfather was walking up and down in front of the bay window, first looking out and then consulting his pocket watch. He stared at me, and I hesitated. His eyes were the same Irish blue we all had, but the song “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” had certainly not been referring to him.
“Where’s your father got to, Vanessa?” he said. “He better get a move on.”
Exhilarated with an accumulation of anger, I looked for something offensive to say.
“It’s not his fault,” I replied hotly. “It’s Mr. Pearl. He’s dying with pneumonia. I’ll bet you he’s spitting up blood this very second.”
Did people spit blood with pneumonia? All at once, I could not swallow, feeling as though that gushing crimson were constricting my own throat. Something like that would go well in the story I was currently making up. Sick to death in the freezing log cabin, with only the beautiful halfbreed lady (no, woman) to look after him, Old Jebb suddenly clutched his throat – and so on.
“You mind how you talk,” Grandfather was saying severely. “Do you want to upset your grandmother?”
This was a telling blow. I did not want to upset my grandmother. It was tacitly understood among all members of the family that Grandmother was not to be upset. Only Grandfather was allowed to upset her. The rest of us coddled her gladly, assuming that she needed protection. I looked guiltily at her now, but she appeared unaware that anything nasty had been spoken. If it had been a week-day, she would have been knitting an afghan; but as it was Sunday she was reading the Bible with the aid of a magnifying glass. She did not believe in eyeglasses, which were, she thought, unnatural. She did not believe in smoking or drinking or the playing of cards, either, but she never pushed her beliefs at other people nor made any claims for her own goodness. If a visitor lit up a cigarette, she did not say a word, not even after he had gone. This was not a question of piety to her, but of manners. She kept one ashtray in the house, for the use of smoking guests. It was a thick glass one, and it said in gilt letters “Queen Victoria Hotel, Manawaka.” Uncle Terence, the second oldest of her children, had swiped it once, out of the hotel beer parlour, but Grandmother never knew that, and she was always under the impression that the management had given it to him for some reason or other, possibly because he must have been such a polite and considerate dining room guest, which was the only part of the hotel she thought he had ever been into.
My grandmother was a Mitigated Baptist. I knew this because I had heard my father say, “At least she’s not an unmitigated Baptist,” and when I enquired, he told me that if you were Unmitigated you believed in Total Immersion, which meant that when you were baptised you had to be dunked in the Wachakwa River with all your clothes on. Unlike the United Church, where I went with my parents and where the baptisms were usually of newborn babies and the event happened only once for each person, in my grandmother’s church the ritual was often performed with adults and could occur seasonally, if the call came. Grandmother had never plunged into the muddy Wachakwa.
“With her tendency to pleurisy,” my father had said, “we can count it a singular blessing that your grandmother believes in font baptism.”
Grandfather had started out a Methodist, but when the Methodists joined with the Presbyterians to form the United Church, he had refused to go because he did not like all the Scots who were now in the congregation. He had therefore turned Baptist and now went to Grandmother’s church.
“It’s a wonder he didn’t join the Salvation Army,” I had once heard Aunt Edna remark, “rather than follow her lead.”
“Now, Edna,” my mother had said, glancing sideways at me. So I heard nothing more of any interest that day but I did not really care, for I was planning in my head a story in which an infant was baptised by Total Immersion and swept away by the river which happened to be flooding. (Why would it be flooding? Well, probably the spring ice was just melting. Would they do baptisms at that time of year? The water would be awfully cold. Obviously, some details needed to be worked out here.) The child was dressed in a christening robe of white lace, and the last the mother saw of her was a scrap of white being swirled away towards the Deep Hole near the Wachakwa bend, where there were bloodsuckers.
Grandfather did not believe, either, in smoking, drinking, card-playing, dancing, or tobacco-chewing. But unlike my grandmother, he did not permit any of these things in his presence. If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chanced to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.
Grandfather had stopped his pacing now, and stood squarely in front of Grandmother’s chair.
“Agnes, go and tell them girls to serve up the dinner now. We can’t wait around all night.”
“Will you go, pet?” Grandmother said to me. “Your feet are younger than mine.”
When I conveyed the message, Aunt Edna stood in the kitchen doorway and bellowed loud enough for a person to hear in South Wachakwa.
“Tell him the cauliflower isn’t done yet!”
“Edna!” my mother hissed. Then she began laughing, and put her handkerchief over her face. I was laughing, too, until I looked again and saw that my mother was now crying, in jerky uncertain breaths like a person takes when he first goes outside in forty-below weather.
“Beth –” Swiftly, Aunt Edna had closed the kitchen door.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “What an idiot. There – I’m fine now.”
“Come on – we’ll go up to my room and have a cigarette. Glory! What are we going to do when the Attar of Roses is all gone?”
The Attar of Roses was a decidedly strong-smelling perfume that had been given to Aunt Edna by one of her boyfriends in Winnipeg. It was in an atomiser, and she used to squirt it around her bedroom after she had finished a cigarette. On these occasions, my mother always said, “Do you think we are teaching the child deception?” And Aunt Edna always replied, “No, just self-preservation.”
I went up the back stairs with them. Aunt Edna’s room had a white vanity table with thin legs and a mirror that could be turned this way and that. Beside the mirror sat a dresser doll that had been given to Aunt Edna by another admirer. “An old boyfriend,” she had told me, and now that I was ten I understood that this did not refer to his age but to the fact that they were irrevocably parted, he being in the city and she in Manawaka. The doll had a china head and body, set on a wire hoop-skirt frame that was covered with fluted apricot crêpe de chine. Her high coiffure was fashioned of yellow curls, real hair cut from a real person’s head. “Probably somebody that died of typhoid,” Aunt Edna had said. “Well, toujours gai, kid, but I wish he had sent chocolates instead.” Aunt Edna’s room also had a blue silk eiderdown stuffed with duck feathers, a Japanese lacquer box with a picture of a chalk-faced oriental lady holding a fan, a camphor-ice in a tubular wooden case with a bulb head painted like a clown, a green leather jewellery case full of beads and earrings, and a floppy pyjama-bag doll embroidered with mysterious words such as “Immy-Jay” and “Oy-Ray” which I, like Grandmother, had believed were either meaningless or else Chinese, until I became acquainted with Pig Latin.
My mother sat down on the bed and Aunt Edna sat at the vanity table and began combing her hair. The smoke from their cigarettes made blue whorls in the air.
“Honey, what is it?” Aunt Edna asked in a worried voice.
“It’s nothing,” my mother said. “I’m not myself these days.”
“You look worn out,” Aunt Edna said. “Can’t you quit the office? You’ll have to, soon, anyway.”
“I want to keep on as long as I can. Ewen can’t afford to hire a nurse, Edna, you know that.”
“Well, at least you needn’t do your spring house-cleaning this year. Beating the carpet like you were doing last week – you’re out of your head, Beth.”
“The house is a disgrace,” my mother said in a small voice. “I just want to get the rugs and curtains done, and the cupboards, that’s all. I don’t intend to do another thing.”
“I’ll bet,” Aunt Edna said.
“Well, what about you?” my mother said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice you’d done the pantry cupboards this week. This house is far too much for you, Edna.”
“Mother ran it, all those years.”
“She had us to help, don’t forget. And she was hardly ever without a hired girl.”
“The least I can do is earn my room and board,” Aunt Edna said. “I’m not going to have him saying –”
She broke off. My mother got up and put an arm around Aunt Edna’s shoulder.
“There now, love. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
The phone rang, and I ran down to answer it, feeling some unaccustomed obligation. Their sadness was such a new thing, not to my actual sight but to my attention, that I felt it as bodily hurt, like skinning a knee, a sharp stinging pain. But I felt as well an obscure sense of loss. Some comfort had been taken from me, but I did not know what it was.
“Hello.” It was Central’s voice. She had a name, but no one in Manawaka ever called her anything except Central. “Is that you, Vanessa? Your dad’s calling from South Wachakwa.”
I heard a buzzing, and then my father’s voice. “Vanessa? Listen, sweetheart, tell your mother I won’t be home for a while yet. I’ll have dinner here. And tell her she’s to go home early and get to bed. How is she?”
“She’s okay.” But I was immediately alert. “Why? What was the matter with her?”
“Nothing. But you be sure to tell her, eh?”
I ran upstairs and repeated what he had said. Aunt Edna looked at my mother oddly.
“Beth?”
“It wasn’t anything,” my mother said quickly. “Only the merest speck. You know how Ewen fusses.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Aunt Edna said. “You tell me the truth this minute, Beth.”
My mother’s voice was slow and without expression.
“All right, then. It was a pretty near thing, I suppose. It happened on Tuesday, after I’d been doing the rugs. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. You don’t need to say it was my own fault. I know it. But I’d been feeling perfectly well, Edna. Really I had.”
She looked up at Aunt Edna, and there was something in her eyes I had not seen before, some mute appeal.
“If I’d lost it, I’d never have forgiven myself. I didn’t do it on purpose, Edna.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Aunt Edna cried. “Don’t you think I know?”
And then, strangely, while I sat on the cedar chest and watched, only partially knowing and yet bound somehow to them, they hugged each other tightly and I saw the tears on both their faces although they were not making a sound.
“Mercy,” my mother said at last, “my nose is shining like a beacon – where’s your powder?”
When my mother had gone down to start serving the dinner, Aunt Edna put away the ashtrays and began spraying Attar of Roses around the room.
“How’s the poetry?” she asked.
I was not shy about replying, for I loved to talk about myself. “I’m not doing any right now. I’m writing a story. I’ve filled two scribblers already.”
“Oh?” Aunt Edna sounded impressed. “What are you calling it?”
“The Pillars of the Nation,” I replied. “It’s about pioneers.”
“You mean – people like Grandfather?”
“My gosh,” I said, startled. “Was he a pioneer?”
Then I felt awkward and at a distance from her, for she began to laugh hoarsely.
“I’ll tell the cockeyed world,” she said. Seeing I was offended, she cut off her laughter. “When do you work at it, Nessa?”
“After school, mostly. But sometimes at night.”
“Does your mother let you keep your light on?”
I looked at her doubtfully, not sure how far she could be trusted. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell?”
“Cross my heart,” she said, “and hope to die.”
“I don’t keep my light on. I use my flashlight.”
“Mercy, what devotion. Do you write some every day?”
“Yes, every day,” I said proudly.
“Couldn’t you spin it out? Make it last longer?”
“I want to get it finished.”
“Why? What’s the rush?”
I was beginning to feel restless and suspicious.
“I don’t know. I just want to get it done. I like doing it.”
Aunt Edna put the perfume atomiser back on the vanity table.
“Sure, I know,” she said. “But what if you ever wanted to stop, for a change?”
As we were going down the back stairs, we heard the front door open, and Grandfather’s voice saying, “Well now, well now –” and then another voice. Aunt Edna gasped.
“Don’t tell me. Oh heavenly days, it is Uncle Dan. Now all I need is somebody from the government coming and telling me I owe income tax.”
“I thought you liked Uncle Dan,” I said curiously.
“I do,” Aunt Edna said, “but it’s not a question of whether you like a person or not.”
We emerged into the kitchen. My mother had stopped carving the pork and was standing with the silver knife in her hand, motionless.
“He’s certainly had a few, judging from his voice,” she said. “Why on earth does he do it? He knows perfectly well how much it upsets Mother.”
“One of these days Father is going to tell him to get out,” Aunt Edna said. “But I’d kind of hate to see that happen, wouldn’t you?”
“He’ll never do that. Blood is thicker than water, as you may have heard Father mention a million times.”
“That’s not why he lets him come around,” Aunt Edna said. “Seeing Uncle Dan reminds him how well he’s done himself, that’s all. Lord, I must stop this – I’m getting meaner every day.”
“Well, I suppose we’d better go and say hello to the old fraud,” my mother said. “He can have Ewen’s place at the table.”
Uncle Dan was Grandfather’s brother, but he was not upright. He had a farm in the South Wachakwa Valley, but he never planted any crops. He raised horses, and spent most of his time travelling around the country, selling them. At least, he was supposed to be selling them, but Aunt Edna said he had horse-trading in his blood and couldn’t resist swapping, so he usually came back to Manawaka with the same number of horses he had started out with, only they were different horses, and no money. He had never married. I liked him because he always carried brown hot-tasting humbugs in his pockets, usually covered with navy fluff from his coat, and he sang Irish songs. I liked him only when none of my friends were around to see, however. In the presence of the other kids, he embarrassed me. He was older than Grandfather, and he did not keep himself very clean. His serge trousers were polka-dotted with spilled food, and when his nose ran, he wiped it with a sweeping motion of his claw hand. He never cleaned his fingernails, although sometimes he brought out his jackknife and pared them, dropping the shavings on Grandmother’s polished hardwood floor and causing her to utter the only phrase of protest she knew – “Now Dan, now Dan –” Sometimes when I was downtown with him he walked and talked waveringly, and bought an Eskimo Pie for me and a packet of Sen-Sen for himself, and I was not meant to know why, but naturally I did, having among my friends several whose fathers or uncles were said to be downright no-good.
Uncle Dan was smaller than Grandfather, but his eyes were the same blue. They bore a vastly different expression, however. Uncle Dan’s eyes hardly ever stopped laughing.
“Well, Dan, you’re back,” Grandfather said.
“I’m bad, I’m back,” Uncle Dan carolled. “Just got the niftiest black two-year-old you ever seen. Got him from old Burnside, over at Freehold. Swapped him that grey gelding of mine.”
“No cash, I’ll wager,” Grandfather said.
“Well, now, Timothy, how’ve you been?” Uncle Dan cried, cannily changing the subject. “You’re looking dandy.”
“I’m well enough,” Grandfather said. “Minding my own business. I sold the store, Dan.”
“Yeh, you done that before I went away. Taking life easy, eh?”
Under her breath, Aunt Edna said, “Red rag to a bull –” and my mother said, “Shush.”
“I keep busy,” Grandfather said furiously. “Plenty to do around here, you know. Got two loads of poplar last week, and I’m splitting them for kindling. A man’s got to keep busy. I got no use for them fellows who just sit around.”
“Well, well, you’ll have the biggest woodpile in Manawaka, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second,” Uncle Dan said in gay malice. “By jiminy, here’s Vanessa. You’ve grown, macushla, and so you have, to be sure.”
“Oh Glory,” said Aunt Edna in a low voice. “Macushla, indeed.”
“And Beth and Edna –” Uncle Dan cried. “By the Lord Harry, girls, you’re getting more beautiful with each passing day!”
My mother, stifling a laugh, held out a hand. “Good to see you, Uncle Dan. We’re just going to have dinner. Do you want to go up and wash?”
Grandmother had not come out into the front hall. She still sat in the living room. The Book was on her knee, but she was not reading. Uncle Dan swept her an unsteady bow.
“Hello, Dan,” she said. Then, apparently without effort, as though she refused to set bounds to her courtesy, “It’s nice to have you with us.”
Uncle Dan’s eyes stopped smiling and grew moist with self-sorrow. “Ah, no, it’s you that’s the nice one, to be sure, opening your door to an old man.”
His voice quavered; he looked as though he might faint with sheer fragility.
“If he goes on like that,” Aunt Edna whispered angrily, but unable to suppress a small belch of acid mirth, “I’m walking out, so help me.”
“He’ll be all right once he’s had some food,” my mother said.
Dinner was very entertaining, with Uncle Dan tucking his serviette in at his chin, and spilling gravy on the clean damask cloth, and burping openly and then saying, “Par’n me, as the fella says.” He told jokes of the kind I was not supposed to understand and which in fact I did not understand but always pretended I had, by rude guffaws for which I was reproached. Grandfather kept saying, “Mind your language, Dan,” or “Mind your elbow – that water tumbler’s going over – there, what did I tell you?” My mother and Aunt Edna kept their heads down and ate hurriedly. After dinner, Grandfather and Uncle Dan settled down side by side on the chesterfield, while Grandmother sat in her golden-oak armchair. Uncle Dan drew out his pipe and the oilcloth roll of tobacco. Aunt Edna, gathering up the dishes, glanced into the living room and began muttering.
“That damn pipe of his. It reeks to high heaven.”
“Grandfather never lets anyone else smoke,” I said, “so why Uncle Dan?”
“Don’t ask me.” Aunt Edna shrugged. “It’s one of life’s mysteries. Maybe it’s his present to Uncle Dan – the booby prize.”
I went into the living room to wait until the dishes were stacked and ready to begin drying. Grandfather and Uncle Dan were chatting, after their fashion.
“We’re neither of us as young as we used to be, Dan,” said Grandfather, who specialized in clear but gloomy statements of this kind.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Uncle Dan replied, sucking at his pipe and sending up grey clouds like smoke signals. “I feel pretty near as good as ever.”
“You don’t look it,” Grandfather said.
“What’s that?”
“I said you don’t look it. You’re getting hard of hearing, Dan.”
Uncle Dan puffed silently for a moment. Then, with deliberation, he removed the pipe from between his yellowed teeth and held it in his hands, stroking the briar bowl.
“Well, sir, maybe you’re right, at that,” he said reflectively. “I used to be able to hear a fly when he walked up the wall, but now I can only hear him when he rustles his wings.”
I snickered, and Uncle Dan looked down at the footstool where I was perched.
“There’s my girl,” he said. “What about a song, to while the happy hours away?”
Not waiting for my agreement, he struck up at once, in a reedy old-man’s voice, sometimes going off key, but sprightly nonetheless, tapping out the rhythm with one foot.
With the tootle of the flute and twiddle of the fiddle,
A-twirlin’ in the middle like a herring on a griddle,
Up, down, hands around, crossing to the wall,
Oh, hadn’t we the gaiety at Phil the Fluter’s Ball!
I clapped, feeling traitorous, not daring to look at either of my grandparents. Uncle Dan, encouraged, sang “MacNamara’s Band,” in which he always put himself instead of MacNamara.
Oh, me name is Danny Connor, I’m the leader of the
band,
Although we’re few in number, we’re the finest in the
land –
He sang it very Irish, saying “foinest,” and when he got to the line “And when we play at funerals we play the best of all,” he winked at me and I winked back.
“Sing with me,” he said, before the next song, but I shook my head. I could never sing in front of anybody, for I always thought I might sound foolish; and I could not bear to be laughed at.
Uncle Dan kept right on, and now he was really enjoying himself. He sang “Nell Flaherty’s Drake” with great vigour, especially the part about the curse that’s laid on the person who stole and ate the bird.
May his pig never grunt,
May his cat never hunt,
May a ghost ever haunt him at dead of the night,
May his hens never lay,
May his horse never neigh,
May his goat fly away like an old paper kite –
All at once Grandfather slapped his hand down hard on the arm of the chesterfield, making it wheeze.
“That’s enough, now,” he said.
Uncle Dan continued his singing.
“Enough!” Grandfather shouted. “Are you stone deaf, man?”
Uncle Dan stopped, looking perplexed.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Sunday wouldn’t make no difference to you,” Grandfather said, “but you needn’t forget where you are.”
“Well, now, Timothy,” Uncle Dan said, “you needn’t be like that about it.”
“I’ll be any way I please, in my own house,” Grandfather said.
I judged this to be the right moment for me to go to the kitchen and help with the dishes. Now the two old men would sit and argue, and Grandmother would have to listen to the thing that distressed her more than anything in this world – a scene, a disagreement in the family. I knew quite well what would happen. Grandmother would remain as outwardly placid as ever, but later in the evening she would go out to the kitchen and call Aunt Edna and say, “I wonder if you would have an aspirin handy, pet? I’ve a little headache.” When she had gone back to the living room, Aunt Edna would say to no one in particular, “She’s been sitting there for hours with a splitting head, I don’t doubt.” And then, if I was in luck, my aunt would turn to me and say, “C’mon, kiddo, let’s drown our sorrows – what do you say to some fudge?”
The dishes had been started. Aunt Edna handed me a tea-towel.
“Let’s not break our necks over them, eh?” she said, and I knew she wanted to dawdle so she would not have to go back into the living room. But we did not dawdle, for my mother was a fast washer and we had to keep up with her.
“Was Uncle Dan born in Ireland?” I asked, conversationally.
My mother and Aunt Edna both laughed.
“Mercy, no,” Aunt Edna said. “The closest he ever got to Ireland was the vaudeville shows at the old Roxy – it burned down before you were born. He was born in Ontario, just like Grandfather. The way Uncle Dan talks isn’t Irish – it’s stage Irish. He’s got it all down pat. Macushla. Begorra. He even sings rebel songs, and he a Protestant. It makes no earthly difference to him. He’s phoney as a three-dollar bill. I really wonder why I like him so much.”
“You always told me I was half Irish,” I said reproachfully to my mother.
“Well, you are,” she replied. “You’re Scottish on your father’s side. You take after the MacLeods as much as the Connors. You’ve got your father’s reflectiveness. And in looks, you’ve got your Grandfather MacLeod’s hands and ears –”
She looked at me, as though to make certain that these borrowed appendages were still there. The idea of inherited characteristics had always seemed odd to me, and when I was younger, I had thought that my Grandfather MacLeod, who died a year after I was born, must have spent the last twelve months of his life deaf and handless.
“You’re Irish on my side,” my mother continued. “Your grandfather’s parents were born there. Do you remember Grandma Connor, Edna? She lived with us for the last few years before she died.”
“Only vaguely,” Aunt Edna said. “What was she like?”
“Oh, let’s see – she was a tiny little woman with a face like a falcon, as I recall, kind of fiercely handsome. Father looks quite a bit like her. She used to go out each year to the Orangemen’s parade, and stand there on Main, cheering and bawling her eyes out.”
“My Lord,” Aunt Edna said. “What did Father think of that?”
“He was mortified,” my mother said. “Wouldn’t you be? There was this small ferocious old lady, making a regular spectacle of herself. She always wore a tight lace cap on her head. She didn’t have any hair.”
“What?” Aunt Edna and I cried at the same time, delighted and horrified.
My mother nodded. “It’s quite true. She’d had some sickness and all her hair fell out. She was bald as a peeled onion.”
We were still laughing when we heard the shouting from the living room. I found it hard to switch mood suddenly, and could not take the raised voices seriously. Tittering, I nudged my mother, wanting the shared hilarity to continue. She did not respond, and when I looked up at her, I saw her face was rigid and apprehensive. The joke was over as though it had never been. My mother and my aunt went reluctantly into the living room, and I followed.
“What beats me,” Grandfather was saying, “is how you’d the nerve to ask. Easy come, easy go – that’s what you think. It never come easy to me, and it’s not going easy, neither!”
“Steady, Timothy,” Uncle Dan said, as though he were speaking to a horse that had turned mean. “Steady, boyo.”
“Steady, nothing. You think because I sold the store that I’ve got a fortune stowed away. Well, I’ve not. And what I’ve got, I’m hanging on to. The taxes on this house alone – it don’t bear thinking about. Who’s to look after things, if I don’t? Here’s Edna, keeps claiming she can’t get work. And Beth and Ewen, having another baby they’ve no business to be having if Ewen can’t even get people to pay their doctor bills. I’d make them pay up, I’ll tell the world, either that or I’d stay away from the woman entirely –”
“Oh God –” my mother said, her face white.
“Steady,” Aunt Edna said, grasping her by the arm. “And now you,” Grandfather went on. “All of you, picking away, picking away, wanting something for nothing. I never got it for nothing. None of you know that. Not one of you knows it.”
“Hold on a minute,” Uncle Dan protested. “I never said give, I said lend. You’d have the horses for security. You done it before, Tim.”
“The more fool I, then,” Grandfather retorted. “I hoped you’d make a go of things. But no. It all went up in smoke or down in booze.”
“That ain’t true!” Uncle Dan said.
But there was something feeble about his voice. And I realised that it was true, what Grandfather had said.
“No use in talking,” Grandfather said. “You can get out right now.”
In the long silence, I looked at my grandfather’s face. He looked surprised, as though he could hardly believe he had spoken the words. Then his expression altered, grew set and stubborn.
“I will,” Uncle Dan said slowly, “and I’ll not be coming back.”
“So much the better,” Grandfather said.
Uncle Dan rose, walked out to the hall alone, and began putting on his coat.
“We can’t let him go like that,” Aunt Edna whispered. “He’s got no one –”
“Who’s going to argue it?” my mother replied bitterly.
The front door closed behind Uncle Dan, and everyone in the house stood quite still. Then a very unexpected thing happened.
“Timothy,” Grandmother said, “you’d best go after him.”
Grandfather swung around and stared at her.
“You’re out of your mind,” he said.
“You’d best go now,” Grandmother said firmly, “before he gets too far.”
For a moment I thought Grandfather was going to rage again, but he did not. He looked taken aback, almost stunned.
“You never liked his ways, Agnes,” he said.
Grandmother did not reply. She made a slight gesture towards the door, and that was all. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle. The line slid stealthily into my mind, and I felt a surge of spiteful joy at it. Then I looked again at my grandfather’s face, and saw there such a bleak bewilderment that I could feel only shame and sadness. His eyes chanced upon me, and when he spoke it was to me, as though he could not speak directly to any of the adults in that room.
“When he gets too old to look after himself, it’ll be me that pays to have him kept in a home. It’s not fair, Vanessa. It’s not fair.”
He was right. It was not fair. Even I could see that. Yet I veered sharply away from his touch, and that was probably not fair, either. I wanted only to be by myself, with no one else around.
Grandfather turned and looked at Grandmother.
“I never thought to hear you take his part,” he said. Then he walked outside and we heard his flat unemphatic voice, speaking Uncle Dan’s name.
When Uncle Dan and Grandfather had come back to the living room, the three old people settled down once more and sat silently in the blue-grey light of the spring evening, the lamps not flicked on yet nor the shades drawn. I went upstairs with my mother and Aunt Edna. The air in the bedroom was still sweet and heavy with Attar of Roses.
“Mercy, do I ever need a cigarette,” Aunt Edna said.
“If I didn’t know Mother better, I’d say it was revenge,” my mother said.
“Know her? What makes you think you know her? Maybe it was just that.”
“Maybe,” my mother said, “but I’d hate to think so, wouldn’t you?”
“No,” my aunt said. “I’d cheer like sixty.”
“Anyway, there’s more to it than that,” my mother said. “We always just naturally assumed she loathed the sight of Uncle Dan, but she said to me once, ‘Whatever his faults, he’s a cheerful soul, Beth, always remember that.’ I’d forgotten until now.”
“Beth, do you think she ever considered marrying him?”
“What? Mother? Don’t be ridiculous. What makes you say that?”
“Remember how Uncle Dan used to take us out in that cutter of his in winter, when we were kids? Mother always worried in case we got dumped in a snowdrift or the horses ran away. Well, I went out once with him, and out of a clear sky he said ‘She picked the right man, Edna, your mother, no question of it.’ That was a funny thing for him to say, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t suppose it meant anything,” my mother said.
“I wonder, though,” Aunt Edna mused, “what all of us would have been like, if she’d –”
“A pretty ragged bunch,” my mother said. “There’s not much doubt about that. Oh Edna, think how he must feel – Father, I mean. We’ve never given him credit for what he’s done.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Aunt Edna said. “Imitation is the sincerest form of compliment, after all.”
My mother’s head came up and she looked around this way and that, as though she smelled smoke and thought the house might be on fire.
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know quite well what I mean,” Aunt Edna replied. “Not one of us could go any other way. And what’s more, for all you’re always saying Vanessa takes after Ewen, you know who she really takes after.”
“That’s not so!” my mother burst out.
“Isn’t it?” Aunt Edna cried. “Isn’t it?”
I was hardly aware of her meaning. I was going instead by the feel of the words, the same way the faithful must interpret the utterances of those who rise up and speak in tongues. Her voice was high and fearful, burdened with a terrible regret, as though she would have given anything not to have spoken.
We went downstairs then, and I helped to pass the coffee around, walking carefully because it was in the good Spode cups. Grandfather and Uncle Dan took theirs without a word. Grandmother said, “Thank you, pet.” Her face was calm, and no one could even have begun to guess, from looking at her, what she might have been thinking, if anything. When he had finished his coffee, Uncle Dan said he thought he would just stroll down to the Regal Café and get a few humbugs.
My mother, coming in with the coffee pot to see if anyone wanted a second cup, hesitated and looked from Uncle Dan to Grandfather, as though she didn’t know which of them to ask, and couldn’t ask both of them at once. Finally she sighed, a mere breath, and refilled Grandfather’s cup. Uncle Dan went out, humming softly to himself, and when he had reached the front sidewalk he began to sing. We heard the song growing fainter as he ambled away.
Glory-o, Glory-o,
To the bold Fenian men –
Aunt Edna smothered a laugh. “Fenian! Grandma Connor would have a fit!”
My mother suddenly put a hand out and touched me lightly on the shoulder.
“Go with him, Vanessa,” she said. “Keep him company.”
And I ran, ran towards the sound of the singing. But he seemed a long way off now, and I wondered if I would ever catch up to him.