Chapter ­5

Jack put Buddy back in the carrier box, turned his bicycle around and headed home. He was pretty sure whose old dog he had just covered with branches. Cairn wasn’t that big a place, only about 250 people nestled together on six side streets and four avenues. It was far smaller in area than the flight school. Older too, built in the 1880s. The Waters family had been there since the turn of the ­century.

Cairn sat beside the main ­east-­west Canadian Pacific Railway line. Most of Cairn’s citizens were pretty decent folk, as far as Jack could tell. There were a few drunks, a few ornery folk, and a couple of people who didn’t have much common sense according to Jack’s dad. This pup had come from one of the problem families, Jack ­figured.

The Boyles had a pack of black ­lab-­terrier mix dogs and lived the other side of town on Pasqua Street, just down from the train station. Their neighbours, the Nelsons, favoured border collies that also ran loose, chasing cows, messing with gardens and scaring cats. Folks knew enough not to bother the Boyles or the Nelsons. The young guys in both families took offence easily, and liked fighting and drinking too ­much.

Their unpainted houses were a disgrace, Jack’s mother said, and their kids ran wild like their dogs. Instead of flowers and neat gardens, dismembered cars and trucks decorated their yards. Jack’s mother shook her head over them. Maybe cleanliness wasn’t next to godliness but in his mom’s mind it sure was ­close.

Being cantankerous seemed to hold the Nelson and Boyle families together. Jack had sure had enough ­run-­ins with Jimmy Boyle, the youngest of the boys, and his best friend Pete Nelson – or, as everyone called him, Repete, his father being the original ­Pete.

Jimmy Boyle was a bully. Repete imitated ­him.

Jack was strong and fast and Wes had been the tallest kid in class, so they hadn’t been bothered as often as some kids. Then Jimmy and Repete had quit school after grade ten and life had calmed down. Jack figured this pup was one of the ­Boyle-­Nelson ­breed.

He pedalled on. He had to talk his mother and father into letting him keep this pup. His grandpa Waters had been a dog person, but ever since he’d died of a heart attack in 1937 there hadn’t been a dog around the ­place.

Grandpa’s dog Spike had given up after his master had died of a massive heart attack. He’d stopped eating and Jack figured he’d died of a broken heart. He was buried in the yard under the caragana hedge. Jack had been ten at the time and had thought the dog should have been buried in the family plot in the Cairn cemetery. His dad laughed and made it one of his stories to pass out to customers like liquorice ­twists.

Now Jack was older and knew you couldn’t bury dogs in a people ­cemetery.

He steered with one hand and kept the pup calm by petting him and talking to him. “We’ll see if we can’t give you a home, Buddy. Dad won’t be a problem. It’s Mom we’ve got to win over.” He’d have to promise to walk the dog, probably build Buddy a doghouse, and train ­him.

Maybe a dog would help his family keep their minds off Sandy being missing. Help them keep up hope. Help keep up the picture of Sandy in France, being helped by the Resistance ­fighters.

“If I could, Buddy, I’d go find him myself.”

Jack knew the Royal Canadian Air Force would take ­seventeen-­year-­olds on as “boys.” He wished he could go right now. He wanted to help end the war so Flo and Sandy could come home. If he were old enough, he’d go. Mom would be furious. But all the recruitment posters pleaded for the young and able to join the armed forces. He was young and able. He was just a year too young. That’s what came of skipping Grade Four. Some of his classmates had already signed up and left. The more he thought about it, the faster he ­pedalled.

Jack couldn’t be a pilot because of bad eyes, but there were lots of things a skinny, compact guy with thick glasses could do. Even if he wasn’t the biggest guy in grade eleven, he was the smartest in Math and ­Science.

Jack kept his love of planes and flying to ­himself.

His mother hated flying and planes with a passion. After all, her first husband had been a flyer, and he had died. But not in a plane, Jack knew that much. His uncle Jack Waters, dad’s older brother, had died shortly after coming back from the First World War, leaving Ivy on her own. Ivy had Florence a few months later in 1919. Then Bill and Ivy had married in 1924 when Flo was five. That was all Jack ­knew.

Jack had watched his mother one morning as she hung out the sheets. They heard a plane engine, then silence, and then the sound of a crash invaded the peace of the early spring morning. Ivy had grabbed the laundry basket and hurried into the house without a backward ­glance.

Jack stopped in the lane behind his house. He shook his head. Maybe it was a good thing he was too young to go and fight. With Sandy and Flo gone, someone had to stay home and mind the chickens, as his dad ­said.

“Come on, Buddy, Mom will have had her second cup of tea. I hope the news on the radio is good. Dad says the tide has turned and we’re winning more often.” He wheeled the bike toward the ­house.

His mother appeared at the open back window. “Jack? Did something happen at the airfield? You’re not sick, are you?”

“I’m fine, Mom.”

Ivy Waters burst out of the house, the screen door banging behind her. Flies, fleas and all unsavoury or ­germ-­ridden creatures were banished from Ivy’s ­house.

“You didn’t lose your job, did you?” She watched as he propped his bike against the white clapboard ­house.

“I’m fine, Mom.” Jack rescued the wriggling pup from the carrier, clasped it in his two hands and turned to face his mom – small, worried, wearing her crisp, clean, flowered ­housedress.

She had a smudge of flour on her nose. “I was making cookies to send to Flo in my next parcel,” she ­said.

“Look what I found.”