THE NEW SIREN was installed in Stonebrook’s Town Hall tower on the first good Tuesday in April, after the rains had soaked and softened the fields and then abruptly ended, leaving the spring sun behind to warm the soil for planting.
The old cast-iron bell, the original, was not to be replaced but augmented by this new technology. The bell would continue to announce twelve noon but the siren would signal the fires and emergencies. The siren would call the volunteers from their work or their supper tables or their ball games or their beds.
The councillors agreed they could justify the expense, which was substantial, because a tornado had cut through the county the previous July and people complained for months afterward that they had not heard any warning at all from the Town Hall, not a blessed sound above that wind. The councillors and everyone else who had given it any thought believed that the wail of a siren would be more likely to carry, would probably ride the wind undiminished.
Because there were regulations to meet, because it had to be done right the first time, the installation contract had gone to a company from Sarnia, and when the men from Sarnia pulled up to the Town Hall curb at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning with the thing crated up in the back of a truck, there was a small semi-official party waiting on the Town Hall steps to meet them, to unlock the doors and turn on the lights and lead them up the three flights of stairs to the top of the bell tower. The mayor was there and the two councillors who had pushed hardest for the siren. Norma Fawcett, who had worked forever up at the town office taking receipt of the taxes and keeping the town books and scribbling the minutes at the council meetings, had been asked to come along in case they needed someone to fetch coffee and maybe something from the bakeshop. Charles Taylor, the town’s quiet, well-mannered simpleton, had been dressed in his slacks and shirt and tie and sent up to watch the installation by his mother, who strongly believed that Charles had as much right as anyone to take part in things. And Archie Stutt made sure he was in attendance because as the town’s de facto maintenance superintendent, you could bet he would be left in charge of the thing after the experts from Sarnia pulled out.
Bill Chambers joined the delegation on the steps just as the siren was being taken off the truck. He had made his own breakfast and left the house for the hardware store an hour early, walking a slightly different route uptown in order to arrive at about the right time. He was there with the other men not in any official capacity but because two years earlier he had climbed the two flights with Archie Stutt to measure and make an estimate on the lumber needed for a new tower staircase and that day he had seen the old bell up close for the first time and he had admired it.
It wasn’t brass like a show bell but the more lowly cast iron. The dull pewter sheen had been fouled here and there with the crusty smear of bird droppings, but it was nevertheless a beautiful thing. Its weight was self-evident, it was three feet across at the base. The clapper was the size of a softball. Bill wasn’t convinced anyone would want to harm the bell, the town council had vowed to keep it and they’d said the siren would not in any way interfere with its workings, but sometimes people got wacky, spur-of-the-moment ideas, sometimes people had to be tamed down a little. He thought he’d just stand around quietly for an hour or so and watch out for the bell.
Like the library and the churches, the Town Hall had been built to be taken seriously. The windows and doors and roof line were not elaborate but purposeful, symmetrical, calming. There was a substantial cornerstone and intricate although not ostentatious brickwork around the double front doors and at all the corners and up under the eaves. There were generous concrete steps with sturdy balustrades and, on each side of these, chained-off space and good, regularly renewed soil for tidy beds of geraniums and snaps and pansies.
Inside the Town Hall there was an office on the main floor where people paid their taxes and complained about storm sewers, and another office where the town constable kept a desk and a couple of overstuffed filing cabinets and where he might be reached by telephone if he wasn’t in the barbershop or walking up and down Front Street, gossiping. There were four jails cells which were cleaned occasionally but rarely used. There was a two-stall washroom which for many years was made available to kids who’d got caught too far from home.
The auditorium up on the second floor held thirty rows of shiny, hard, dark brown chairs with squeaky flip-up seats. The rows of chairs were attached to runners and these runners were designed to be bolted to the floor, but they were not bolted because sometimes they had to be removed in an afternoon and stacked at the sides of the hall for a demonstration of some kind or a crowd too large to be seated or a big dance, although now the dances were usually held in the Memorial Arena, which had been built down near the fairgrounds. The new dance floor in the arena was top-of-the-line hardwood and it had been constructed right at ground level, which meant a lot less disconcerting spring when there was a big crowd. There was a raised platform for a five-piece band and on the platform an upright piano which had been purchased the year before with the proceeds from a raffle on a humble Christmas turkey.
The arena was the newest public structure in town. Since the war, all across the province dozens of memorial arenas had gone up because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger. Through the months of fund-raising and construction both of Stonebrook’s newspapers gave a running account of activities, and when the doors were finally thrown open the editors proudly put the total value at fifty thousand dollars, careful to include in their valuation loads of gravel and electrical supplies delivered without an invoice, all the cash donations, large and small, some of these sent by expatriates from as far away as California or Calgary, and freely offered manual labour tagged at seventy-five cents an hour. Bill Chambers had taken Patrick and Paul over with him several times to mix cement or haul lumber, and Sylvia and Daphne had spent a few evenings pounding nails. Fifty thousand dollars was still substantial money in 1952. You could build a perfectly adequate house for under six thousand; you could get yourself a loaded Cadillac like Doc Cooper’s for somewhere around four thousand.
* * *
THE INSTALLATION PEOPLE from Sarnia had turned out to be pros. And not one of the men who assembled that morning had mentioned the old cast-iron bell one way or the other, the talk was all about the siren. But nevertheless Bill was glad he’d gone. It had been something to see.
In just under two hours, including a half-hour break for coffee and banter and bran muffins hot from the oven of the bakeshop across the street, the men had the siren securely mounted and wired in and set to go. Bill didn’t stay around for coffee. He couldn’t spend the entire morning guarding the tower bell. By the time the guy in charge was ready to give the siren its first test run, shortly before ten, Bill was at his job at the hardware store, patiently trying to get two confusing lumber invoices sorted out with the steadfast bookkeeper, Margaret Kemp.
Sylvia Chambers heard the siren’s first wail, pausing with her hands on her hips over the long bed of tulips that lined the far side of the driveway, wondering about the possibility of peonies.
Patrick Chambers was at his desk at the back of the room over at the high school, sitting behind Murray McFarlane, conjugating aloud the Latin verb “to win” with the rest of the university-bound grade tens.
Daphne in grade seven and Paul in grade six were standing out in the dusty fenced playground with all the other kids from all the other grades, listening. After their principal had got the courtesy call from Norma Fawcett up at the town office he had walked from classroom to classroom to forewarn his teachers, and as they stood in the playground listening many of these teachers were preparing a brief, impromptu civics lesson: the purpose and function of a Town Hall, how people must work together in communities, for progress, for safety, for the good of the group as a whole. Most of the kids were quiet, their arms at their sides and their faces upturned as if such a sound was something that came from the sky.
Two hours later, when the tower bell chimed twelve just as it had the day before and every other previous day, Bill was already out on Front Street. If he could manage it, he usually left the hardware store a few minutes before noon because he liked to hear the sound of the bell clearly, in the outside air.
With a dinner of pork chops and last year’s apple jelly and mashed potatoes and creamed corn set to go the minute they all came in the door, Sylvia stood on the back step taking the last of the clothes off the line, snapping and folding shirts and pants and aprons and pyjamas and nighties and underwear, dropping them into the wicker basket at her feet. She had guessed right, it had been a good breezy morning for wash. She could smell the morning in the clothes.
Patrick had split off from his friends to walk the last few blocks from the high school alone. As he walked, conscientiously planting exactly two steps in each new square of cement, he was trying once more to successfully tell himself a story in Latin. The story had to be about war because almost all the verbs and nouns he had learned that year from the dour Mr. Stewart lent themselves best to war.
Paul and Daphne, each of them having just received a quickly conceived civics lesson, were walking the few blocks side by side, not a word shared, their coming home together unusual because long-legged Paul walked so fast. He liked to be where he was going now, liked to eat dinner quickly so he could get himself back to the playground to join his rowdy friends. Daphne had to take two or three steps for each one of his but that was all right, she could do that.
Spotting the kids, Bill had stood on the sidewalk at the front of the house to wait as they approached from their different directions and when they all came around the corner of the house Sylvia stopped folding clothes to watch them. She liked to watch her kids come and go, she did it regularly. Occasionally, in the hope that this might allow her to see them differently, maybe as other people saw them, just as they were, she tried to pretend that they didn’t belong to her at all.
Paul came up the steps first, taking them double, six steps in three. On an April whim he stopped on the porch to open the door so his mother could go into the kitchen first and then Patrick slammed into him and he was stuck holding the door open for Daphne and Bill. As soon as his father was clear, Paul threw Patrick off to beat him into the kitchen. There was a time when he always lost to Patrick, to his confidence rather than his strength, but those days were over.
They all took their places at the table and waited until Sylvia left the stove and removed her apron to sit down with them. This waiting was a rule, one of very few. Bill lifted the bowl of potatoes toward Daphne to start things off and after all the food had been around the table he passed his plate down to Sylvia so she could cut up his chop and asked, of everyone, “And where were you when the siren went off?”
Each of them told their stories in turn and then Paul, reaching for the bottle to pour himself a most-days-discouraged third glass of milk but thinking about the playground, about who might be back there already, said, “What’s it matter?”
“It’s just a habit you could get into,” Bill said. “Remembering where you are.”
* * *
NEITHER THE CHAMBERS kids nor any of their friends gave much thought to remembering, or to the development of habits. They were content to keep pushing forward through undisciplined time, and anyway, habits were what you caught hell for, biting your nails to the quick, picking at scabs to keep the sore going, sneaking down to Stonebrook Creek in your pyjamas to watch the moonlight shiver on the dark water. The kids used their time to do the things they needed to do. They occupied the town on their own terms.
Most of the adults believed that as long as no one got any big ideas, and if everyone kept a general eye out, the worst that could happen would be a dog bite or a bee sting or a superficial slash from some broken glass left lying around in an alley somewhere. They did not want to load the kids up with the burden of possible but highly unlikely danger because most of them disapproved of exaggeration generally. Nothing good came from blowing things out of proportion. Right after the war a partially deaf drifter who had not been able to find steady work had hanged himself under the grandstand down at the racetrack, and no one had forgotten the day he was found and cut down, but most people had decided that, as bad as it was, his decision was pretty much the kind of thing that had nothing to do with anyone, least of all the kids.
As well as the Town Hall and the arena, the kids were familiar with miles and miles of train track and with the smoky, always burning fires over at the dump, with the canning factory and the Vinegar Works and the foundry, the stores on Front Street, the racetrack, the churches, the Rotary Park, the library. They chased after pea wagons on their way to the canning factory, pulled at the tangled vines to feed on pods of sweet new peas. Their pockets empty but their heads crammed with schemes, they drifted into stores, left if they were told to, returned the next week entirely uninsulted.
And they knew the intricacies of Bald Hill and Stonebrook Creek. In the winter, the hill was called Toboggan Hill because what could be more enticing than the threat of a good soaking at the end of a fast ride? The wide toboggan run, pristine under the bright haze of a winter sun, was flanked on either side by tall, descending, close-set spruce and fir and pine and the new snow fell from the hovering clouds to a smooth, blinding whiteness. The kids did not go to the hill so regularly in the spring after the snow disappeared, but when they did wander across it, taking a shortcut, if they saw that the evergreens that lined the sides of their toboggan run had tried to reproduce themselves, if seedlings had taken root, they just ripped them out.
They followed Stonebrook Creek through unfenced backyards and out into the countryside hunting for mysteries, for bloodsuckers or two-headed toads or unfamiliar skeletons or, please just once more, a boxed-up, thrown-out stash of dirty magazines.
It was Daphne who discovered the dirty magazines. Wandering alone one morning along Stonebrook Creek a mile out of town she had spotted something new, a box that hadn’t been there the last time, and she’d crawled down and stretched out over the bank to pull the box open. Patrick and his friends soon took the magazines away from her but this find did provide Daphne with a brief reputation, a bit of status. She’d got the boys something they wanted.
They had all run back to the creek together, Daphne in the lead, and when they shoved her aside and knelt down to grab at the soggy women in black panties, their frantic enthusiasm made her stomach quiver, although she knew better than to let on. She just left them to it, walked away whistling.
It was not unusual for the kids to learn something important from the carelessness of adults. Most of them eavesdropped with considerable skill, easily recognizing the cadence, the tone of voice that indicated a desire for privacy. Given the opportunity of a morning alone at home or a neighbour’s house left empty, many of them could snoop through a closet or a chest of drawers without a trace of remorse.
In spite of the efforts of their teachers, most of what they learned about the outside world they learned Friday or Saturday night at the movie theatre, a sloped, narrow space wedged between Taylor’s Fine China and the Legion, with tight rows of hard seats and dusty red velvet drapes framing the big screen. War movies were big in 1952, and jungle movies and Westerns. You could usually count on a tough but beautiful, big-breasted, dark-haired woman the hero couldn’t bring himself to love and, in the Westerns, close to the end, a gunfight or a fistfight on the top of a fast-moving train. Good guys didn’t like to talk much and bad guys died slowly, often in quicksand, their repentance loud but useless because they could never be saved. Even the bad guys themselves knew no one would save them.
The kids were haphazard in their play and quietly disorganized. Their eager enthusiasms died as quickly as they had been born. They got to know each other on their own.
There were tough kids and kids not nearly tough enough, but most of them were assumed to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. If there were quarrels or fights, and occasionally there were, these were not reported back to parents because parents never did anything anyway. Parents couldn’t save you. When kids came home muddy and soaking wet or bleeding from an unusual wound or cranky or worried or defeated, there was no great fuss. A dish of ice cream, a bowl of cereal, a joke, a bath, a bandage, a good night’s sleep, these were the solutions.
* * *
PATRICK AND DAPHNE and Paul Chambers came together in play just the one summer, the summer of the circus. Along with a couple of dozen other kids they had been seduced by Murray McFarlane, who had previously been more or less invisible to them, negligible. For no reason anyone could have named, Murray was the summer’s sudden leader.
After his grade-ten exams, as a reward, Murray’s parents had taken him to Detroit where they had shopped for clothes and eaten in restaurants and gone to see a Hollywood film called The Greatest Show on Earth. Home from Detroit with the dialogue almost entirely forgotten but the big-top scenes still throbbing in full Technicolor through his brain, Murray remembered and imagined and dreamed and then carefully described to the others, at first just a few of them sitting on the Town Hall steps, a circus, the possibility of a circus. In spite of the fact that he didn’t play hockey or ball, or perhaps because he didn’t, Murray was prepared to claim his time in the sun.
Patrick was soon to be fifteen, Daphne was twelve and Paul was eleven. Their separate clusters of friends, normally grouped according to small but significant age gaps and assumed to be distinct for good reason, were joined by Murray into one mass of kids, eager and serious, performers and workers alike cooperating for the larger cause.
Murray was quite a bit taller than the other kids, with a long torso and gangly arms and skinny, long-boned legs. And like his notorious Uncle Brady, who had come home from Italy with just one eye and then died at a railway crossing too drunk to get his car door open, he was very badly coordinated. He was Patrick’s age but not in Patrick’s cluster. He usually roamed Stonebrook alone, attaching himself to other kids only when he felt the urge and then abruptly leaving them, as if he’d thought of something more important to do. They would see him wandering down along the creek or sitting on the Town Hall steps or sometimes up in the balcony at the arena, watching the game or, more usually, watching the crowd watch the game. Occasionally on a summer night, just as the sky got as dark as it was going to get, just before everyone had to start home, he would sit with them on the swings at the Rotary Park for a while and listen to the taunting innuendo and the dirty jokes. He could laugh easily when he was supposed to, when it was time. But he was quiet. He contributed nothing worth repeating or remembering.
Murray’s comings and goings were of no concern to Mrs. McFarlane, who was much older than the other mothers and who suffered from debilitating migraine headaches. He was just out somewhere, that’s what he told her and what she believed.
After a few nights of talking on the Town Hall steps, certain now of his authority, Murray advised the other kids that if the circus was going to be any good, everyone would have to agree to do what they did best. He called the first meeting after supper one dreamy evening in late June under the water tower.
Patrick Chambers’ friends, five boys at the mercy of growth spurts who represented the widest possible range of height, weight, intelligence, and confidence, were held together mostly by their skill with mockery. But they had been mesmerized by Murray, by his surprising ability to talk, to tell everyone exactly what could happen, what they could make happen. They’d heard about the meeting at the water tower and they turned up, took their positions just outside the circle of kids gathered tight around Murray, and before any of their repertoire of snide remarks had a chance to kick in they all had circus jobs, responsibilities assigned by Murray with a seriousness which was new to them and compelling in its novelty. They were caught up in the crucial early stages of planning and thus lost their momentum. A few of them had once or twice played at maturity, usually in response to some contrived expectation from a parent or some other adult, but this was different. They knew it and were ready for it.
Daphne and her friends sat at Murray’s feet, their faces summertime brown, their sleeveless blouses lifted and tied up at their midriffs and their bright cotton shorts dusty, soiled since midmorning. Some of the younger girls, the ones who still wore braids or pigtails, were particularly untidy because girls this age were done up just once a day, by their mothers, right after breakfast. All of the girls huddled and squirmed on the packed dirt, begging for some important part to play. They understood that this could be their chance to shine, to wear flashy, glamorous outfits, to show people what they were really like, inside.
One of the oldest girls, the one most sure, who could suddenly and boldly talk the way Murray talked, folded her arms and suggested that if it was going to be for real, there should be a high-wire act, and immediately all the others jumped in, insisting on acrobatics and yes, Murray, yes, a trapeze.
Paul and his friends filled the space between the girls and the older, more worldly, mocking boys. They were quiet and patient, waiting as they always waited to see which way it would go.
Murray’s plan was to set up the circus right there, on the hard-packed open space where the trucks backed out of the town’s cement-block garages. His plan was to have auditions to see who was best at what.
He tried to be fair-minded. Everyone did what they believed they could do best and Murray watched patiently, judged what he saw, and made notes in a little black notepad. After a few days of consideration, he divided them according to their abilities.
They practised all through July, four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, and Sunday afternoon. Murray was firm with schedules, merciless with absences. The mothers who were inclined to get involved got involved. Sylvia Chambers sewed, swapped material with other mothers, took her shears to dresses she was sick of, to ratty towels, and grey dress pants shiny at the knees and rear end. The McGregor kids unearthed a navy blue cape with bright-red satin lining that smelled of mothballs. Clown costumes were adapted from Christmas pyjamas that fathers would never wear anyway and bathing suits were tarted up with sequins and organza frills and bits of velvet ribbon tied in bows.
Jugglers trained hard in the privacy of their own backyards. There was a ventriloquist with a stuffed old-man dummy whose head he had severed from his sister’s happily no-longer-favourite baby doll and an animal act, not just dogs leaping high through hoops but two miraculous cats, mother and daughter, who could walk around on their hind legs for a long time and another equally miraculous tabby who could almost talk, who could almost say mine and never.
One of Paul’s friends practised short riffs on a bugle which belonged to his older sister who marched in the high school bugle band and another boy learned to do a half-decent roll on an ancient snare drum loaned to him by his neighbour, an old, old man no one had ever imagined beating a drum.
Murray selected the acrobats, the girls who cartwheeled every spring day across front lawns on the way home from school. He deferred to their wishes when it came time to pick the handlers, the boys who would lift and throw them up to each other’s shoulders and try to catch them, to protect them from injury when they fell.
Charles Taylor, Charles the First, they called him, came every night, dressed up in his shirt and tie and, hanging from his neck on a braided cord, his silver safety whistle, his signal. Everyone was familiar with the sound of the whistle because Charles blew it when he thought he was lost and when he didn’t like the look of the dog that was following him and once, very loudly, when he tripped running across the train tracks and hurt his back. Charles stood off to the side and watched with devout attention as the girls practised their routines and the kids made him help sometimes, but not with saving the girls.
A trapeze was suspended from one of the girders under the water tower. Murray bought the rope and the pipe new at the hardware, to be safe, to be sure, and then he had to ask to borrow the town’s extension ladder, and when he did Archie Stutt said he’d better climb up there himself. He refused to climb as high as some of the kids, the boys in particular, wanted, telling them as they steadied his ladder that they’d be smart to get themselves into the habit of thinking twice. The next day one of the boys discovered a length of braided steel for the high wire, in the back of one of the town trucks, and so Archie hauled his ladder out again and tied one end of the wire to another girder and the other end to a foothold on a telephone pole on the street. It was eight feet off the ground and it sloped, slightly, but Archie said that was all right, high wires could slope.
Below these main aerial attractions Murray called for mattresses which were volunteered by their owners and pulled from beds and carried back and forth daily through the streets. Patrick had stepped forward to take charge of the mattresses and he made sure they were returned every night after practice to the right beds and then set them up again the next time, organizing his friends who were the oldest, sturdiest boys because it took at least two of them to keep each mattress from dragging itself to shreds on the sidewalks.
During practices, while the girls perfected their acts, each time pushing themselves and each other further, harder, Patrick and the other boys stood at a slight distance with their arms folded, trying to keep their eyes on the mattresses in case some moron shoved one of them out of position by mistake.
Daphne was the youngest of the girls chosen for the trapeze and the high-wire act. She was chosen because she was slight and fearless and because her natural expression was an open smile. Showmanship, Murray called it. He said it was more important than anything else and he told the older girls to watch Daphne smile, to do it that way. Daphne had known she would be picked even before Murray gave her the nod because at twelve she already knew quite a bit about showmanship and its rewards. Like many happy girls, she had long since learned that a laugh or a smile paid off.
Paul was a clown, he asked to be, and he volunteered to stand on the stump beside the telephone pole on the street to take the money when everyone lined up to get in to see the show.
One of the scout tents was hauled from the scoutmaster’s garage and set up as a change room and Archie gave them a long length of his own greasy rope which they strung to cordon off the performance area. Strings of Christmas lights, enough to cover a dozen trees, were draped from girder to girder to telephone pole to make a canopy.
The girls who couldn’t cartwheel created elaborate signs with circus scenes and information, the date, the time, and the price of admission, or they organized a stand for Freshie, the ice-cold coloured water that people would buy at five cents a glass, distribution of profit to be decided later. Murray’s father, who owned the feed mill, was a very busy man and only vaguely aware that the kids were up to something behind the Town Hall but at his wife’s insistence he threw in the money for hot dogs and buns and onions. The hot dogs were to be cooked on the Rotary grills by two other fathers and sold at a substantial mark-up to pay for the things Murray had needed to buy with his own money: a roll of yellow admittance tickets, a box of bandages, extension cords for the Christmas lights, some twine, a few cans of cheap tuna for the cats, and soup bones for the dogs.
* * *
THEY BEGAN THEIR performance at seven-thirty sharp the Thursday night before the weekend of the Town Frolic, which was always held down at the fairgrounds. Everyone but the performers and the babies and the two fathers who were cooking onions and hot dogs was supposed to pay Paul twenty-five cents to walk past the telephone pole. The bread man, whose daughter was one of the sign painters, had loaned him a money belt with chrome cylinders, which he’d loaded up with the quarters and dimes and nickels Murray had solemnly counted out to start him off, a float, Murray called it. Just before people began to arrive, after he was into his clown suit with his face painted on, Paul took a few minutes behind the tent to practise sliding the coins into the cylinders and pushing the thumb-sized levers to release them down into his palm. Murray had admonished him that it had to be right, it had to balance. He said they should know how many people attended, to plan for next year.
Nearly everyone showed up: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, bachelors and old maids, babies in buggies, teachers, the ministers, the priest, the old priest. A few summer cadets from the army camp out at the lake came, which sent the older girls into spasms of dreamy hope, for a walk home in the dark after the circus was over, for an arm over a shoulder, or the very serious promise of letters after the boy had left the army camp to go back to his real life in Peterborough or Toronto or Galt.
Several kids from the reservation had got themselves into town and they stood around quietly, mixed in with the crowd separately or in pairs. People slipped them quarters to get in or to treat themselves to Freshie and hot dogs.
Standing on the stump waiting for Murray’s signal, Paul took the expected abuse from the people waiting in the line-up. Several of the women said loudly how much they liked his clown suit and when Margaret Kemp, who had worked at the hardware store with Bill Chambers for years, said, “That’s Sylvia,” another woman said, not exactly kindly, “Yes, isn’t it just.” The bank manager, who knew full well who Paul was, asked him, “How do we know you’re not some stranger? How do we know you won’t pocket our money and vamoose?” Charles Taylor stood close beside Paul on the stump like a guard.
When he got the signal from Murray, Paul didn’t hesitate to make everyone wait so he could add and subtract properly. One guy, some rich farmer he didn’t even know, gave him a five-dollar bill, told him to keep the change.
They had what was called a full house. Murray wore the satin-lined wool cape and an old black homburg which had belonged to his grandfather, a man he had never met. He draped his father’s white, monogrammed, silk scarf around his neck and to finish it off, to bring attention to his hands, he wore a pair of his mother’s white cotton wrist gloves, which he had found beside the Bible in the drawer in the front-hall table and tried on without her permission, a trick that was both out of character and effective because once he’d tried them on the gloves were forever useless to Mrs. McFarlane.
He welcomed the crowd using elaborate circus language. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Feast your eyes.…” he said. “Ask yourselves if you have ever seen.…” He praised each act as he introduced it, indicated with a broad sweep of the cape where the crowd’s attention should direct itself. He gestured dramatically with the baton that had been loaned to him by a retired drum majorette who was new in town and who worked in the Bank of Commerce. She had pushed it through her teller’s window after she’d changed his bills to coins, asking him only to promise her he would be careful with it.
They were good. Nearly all of them were very good. People applauded generously, laughed in appreciation for the obvious effort behind the performances. Archie’s ropes and cables held fast and the girls’ tarted-up costumes looked almost professional under the Christmas lights. The dogs and the cats seemed oblivious to the crowd, did what they knew they had to do to earn their treats out behind the tent. The smell of onions frying in butter prompted people who were not even slightly hungry to fork out an exorbitant fifty cents for a hot dog and someone put a baby in Paul’s arms for a picture. The baby stared up into his white clown face and oversized red lips calmly, as if these were just one more thing to learn.
When Daphne fell near the end of her thoroughly practised trapeze routine, the mattresses, although laid down just as Patrick had ordered them laid down, were not enough. People who’d had experience in such things immediately agreed that the loud cracking break in Daphne’s right forearm would mend, kids broke their arms regularly, but the break in her jaw looked like it might turn out to be a dog’s breakfast.
Sylvia Chambers had just finished telling Margaret Kemp about her new sewing machine. Watching her daughter drop and then seeing her hand go to her face soon after she’d landed, she said aloud, “Oh, Daphne. Oh, honey.” And looking quickly up at the trapeze, which was still swinging in the twisted air, still moving with the last of Daphne’s tricks, she thought, Why does it have to be us?
Bill Chambers was standing over near the Rotary grills, talking to some of the other men. He had watched the first part of Daphne’s performance but then someone said his name and he’d looked away. He didn’t see her fall. After the guy beside him pulled roughly on his arm to turn him around again he thought only to move forward, to push his way forward, and kneel to hold his daughter gently under the shoulders. Holding her he told her to go ahead and yell if she had to. “Let it out,” he whispered. “There’s no need to be brave.” The skin at her wrist had been pierced by a small nub of bloody bone and he recognized the break for what it was, knew that it could be set and that it would in time heal. But her mouth and inside her mouth. The skin covering her jaw was firm, unbroken, but the bones under it had been knocked out of alignment. The bones were completely askew. He had to steel himself, counsel himself not to look away.
He was leaning over, watching her face, waiting, as if the next move was up to her, and Daphne did make a sound but when it came into the air it was not the sound she had sent from her throat. She could see as soon as she heard it that she had terrified her father. He hadn’t been ready at all.
Sylvia was on her now too, cradling her bare legs which were shaking and blanched white, as if the fall through the air had bleached the deep summer tan. Sylvia told her, “Hold on, sweetheart, that’s a girl.” She told her that Doctor Cooper had left for his office already, that they were going to carry her right on the mattress and take her over to Cooper’s in the back of somebody’s truck, which was parked just in front of the Town Hall and coming around for her now.
Daphne looked away from her parents to the other worried faces hanging over her and then she looked up past the faces at the Christmas stars. She swallowed a mouthful of blood, and recognizing the warm, sour taste and knowing that you weren’t supposed to swallow your own blood she pushed herself up with her good arm and tried to spit, leaning over as far as she could to keep the mattress clean. Then the silence she hadn’t heard was broken by loud crying, girls crying, her friends, and turning again to spit, she said, “I’ve hurt myself.”
Patrick pushed his parents aside and took one corner of the mattress firmly in both hands, watching the men on the other corners, lifting when he was told to lift. He told Daphne it was all right, meaning we’re all here. When she looked up directly at him, he said the worst of all the words he knew to comfort her. “Bugger it,” he said, just loud enough for her to understand before she blacked out.
He was glad she’d blacked out. He knew it was better from playing hockey. What he didn’t know was why he’d ever let himself believe that one layer of mattresses would do any good. He was supposed to be learning stuff, he was supposed to be understanding things like the cross section of the earth in his geography textbook that showed miles and miles of strata down there, most of it rock. He tried to remember if Murray had told him one layer of mattresses or if he had decided one layer himself.
Paul, whose feelings were usually written on his face in plain English for anyone to read, stood in his clown costume at terrified attention directly under the water tower. He was on his own and in a state but because Sylvia had meticulously reshaped his tight little mouth into a fat red smile his crying made no difference, no one came to him. He had been close enough to hear the bones break when his sister landed and he had seen her body go limp in their father’s arms, but he didn’t know how bad it was, what it meant, and no one thought to walk over to reassure him, to tell him that his sister had blacked out because of the pain, that it was a natural reaction and likely a blessing. He gulped at the air with his smile, working hard to get the extra air he needed.
After the mattress was lifted, people stepped back so Bill and Sylvia could see Daphne safely out to the truck. Bill pulled Sylvia tight to his side, which made their progress more awkward than it would have been normally, if they’d walked separately. “She’ll be all right,” he told her. “There isn’t much that can’t be fixed now.” He tried to kiss the top of her head. “We’ll get this dealt with.”
The men lifted Daphne up into the truck bed, and when the last of them jumped down to close and bolt the tailgate, Sylvia pulled her skirt up to her hips and crawled in after her. “She’s not going alone,” she said, turning to offer Bill a hand. She knelt and Bill crouched and finally the truck began to move. Daphne was still unconscious. “Did you hear what she said?” Sylvia asked. “She said, ‘I’ve hurt myself.’” Now that they were moving she was allowing herself the release of tears. “Something this bad happens and it’s still, I’ve hurt myself, it’s still, This must be my fault.”
“It’s just an expression,” Bill said, although he knew it was more than an expression. Even in the midst of a loud, bloody battle, when they should have screamed, Jesus, some bastard tore my leg off, some bastard has just blinded me, some grey-haired captain of industry sent me all this way only to bleed to death, he had heard grown, dying men say only, I’m hurt, I am hurt here.
“She was doing really well,” Sylvia said. “She worked so hard.”
“We’ll get her through this,” Bill said.
Murray had followed the mattress out to the truck too, running along beside the carriers. A few people in the crowd, the old priest foremost among them, were taking the opportunity to mutter quietly that such a thing was bound to happen. As if they’d known there would be an accident, as if they’d been waiting for it. But most people took a different tack. Murray was told repeatedly by men and by some of the women too, “It wasn’t your fault, Murray. Accidents will happen.” And, “Don’t berate yourself, son.”
He didn’t hear any of it. He was talking faster than he’d ever talked, eager to articulate and receive all of the blame, ready for someone to yank him around by the shoulders and yell, It’s your fault, Murray, you and your big-time ideas. Sometimes ideas are better left alone. You are old enough, you should know that.
All he wanted from this night and from this whole summer was blame and another chance, to choose an older, stronger girl or to lower the trapeze down closer to the ground or to stand directly under Daphne with his arms braced as she slid and turned and dropped and caught herself and then didn’t.
* * *
DAPHNE WENT BACK to school that September almost immediately after she came home from the hospital in London. Sylvia had decided that even with the pain, which was sometimes severe, sometimes just plain pain, even though the doctors seemed to like the word discomfort, Daphne would be much better off involved again in some kind of normal life with her friends. In Sylvia’s experience, distraction was more often than not a good thing.
Daphne’s friends called for her in the morning, sometimes lifting her books off the table to carry them in their own arms, and one of them usually came home with her after school to hang around the house until supper. Sylvia wondered occasionally if all this solicitude could be real. Once or twice she caught herself thinking that these girls were just playing, just impersonating grown-ups, with one of them, Daphne, the pretend-hurt girl, and all of the others the pretend-loving friends. Bill was more than a little unnerved by the unrelenting high-pitched babble that filled his house now, the wild giggling, the running up and down the stairs for no good reason. But he didn’t let anyone hear him complain. He told Sylvia he only hoped it wouldn’t just suddenly evaporate one day, like some fad.
Sylvia made hearty soups to get the necessary nourishment past the wiring in Daphne’s jaw and she helped her with her teeth, most of which had been left, miraculously, intact. She held Daphne’s pretty lips open to get the toothbrush inside her mouth and after her teeth were clean they moved from the bathroom to Sylvia’s bedroom vanity. She sat Daphne on the upholstered vanity stool and played with her hair, twisted it up in a high bun and then pulled it back into a French roll, which she said was much too old for her now but might be something to think about later on. They experimented and laughed into the three-way mirror as the blood-red bruising down Daphne’s throat turned to brown and mauve and then to a sickly yellow and then was finally gone.
As bad as Daphne’s jaw looked, and was obviously going to look, both Patrick and Paul were secretly relieved that it wasn’t worse, glad it wasn’t her spine that had been shattered. Although, of course, they didn’t say that out loud.
* * *
THE FIRST TIME Murray McFarlane came over it was an October Sunday afternoon and they were all outside raking the leaves back to the creek to burn them. Bill found Murray an old, semi-retired rake up in the rafters of the garage, and while everyone else gathered the leaves into bigger and bigger mounds, Sylvia used a shovel to contain the fire, to over and over again scoop the red-hot ash back toward the centre of the fire. The still-burning leaves that drifted slowly in the updraught like charred butterflies or papery crows sometimes floated up out of sight and sometimes they dropped back down, either into the fire or into the creek, sizzling when they hit the water. Paul threw chestnuts into the burning piles, pitched them as hard as he could to sink them deep, and each time a hot chestnut exploded, Daphne jumped and someone else laughed, making light of her fear, which was new to her, and to them all.
Hearing Patrick complain about a wasted Sunday, Sylvia had to stop herself from taking a strip off him. She thought it had been a good day. “Your reward is that smell in the air,” she said, nodding her head to the rusty, bittersweet smell of the fire.
When it was almost done Bill and Sylvia left the kids to finish and went inside for one of their quick Sunday naps. Pulling the bedroom curtains shut, Sylvia thought about the coming winter, the snow that would drift across the backyard, the dirty ice that would crust the creek, and she began to describe for Bill the work they had ahead of them that year.
“First we have to get her properly healed,” she said, closing the door. “Everyone’s spoiling her now but that’s all right. We’ll spoil her for a time and then we can toughen her up again.” She curled into him, her smoky clothes already discarded over the side of the bed. “And there will be some guilt to get rid of. It’s guilt I’m seeing in the boys.” She played with the drawstring of his boxer shorts, pulling it again and again but never quite hard enough to release the small looped bow. “What matters most is that we get her back to herself somehow,” she said. “I don’t want her changed by this. I want her to be exactly what she would have been without the fall.”
“Sign me up,” Bill said, pulling the drawstring open himself.
“It’s her nerve,” Sylvia said. “We’ll have to help her get her nerve back.”
A little later when Sylvia came downstairs to start the meal Murray was still there, sitting with Patrick on the back steps, so she invited him to stay and eat with them. He phoned home immediately to let his mother know, and after this day of raking and burning and a supper of pancakes and the premium bacon Sylvia always got from her butcher father, Murray started to turn up regularly to sit around the kitchen and talk to whoever wanted to take the time to listen to him.