Wednesday, December 3
“MISS K, WHAT’S THIS WORD here?” Wendy Keeling turned away from Gabriella and looked at the back of the room where the two boys in grade five sat. Randy had his head tilted and was watching her expectantly and impatiently.
“You must call me by my full name, Randy. Miss Keeling. And put up your hand if you have a question.”
“But you weren’t looking back here, and my arm would have fallen off waiting.” He looked around at the gratifying giggles of his classmates.
“Now then, what word? Did you know it, Samuel?”
The boy she addressed, who had been reading with Randy, shook his head. They were such a contrast, she thought. Randy, loud, confident, abrasive, but curious, and Samuel, painfully shy and almost unable to look anyone in the eye. She wondered about his family life. She was sure she’d seen a faint bruise on his cheek. But if there was a puzzling word, she’d expect Samuel to be the one to know it.
Randy pointed at the word.
“I bet I would know it!” One of the Bertolli boys called this out from where he sat, leaning on the back of his seat, watching the proceedings at the back of the room.
“Thank you, Rolfie. Turn around, if you please. I expect that sheet of arithmetic to be done when I am finished here.” She turned back to the word in question. “Do you think you could figure it out by what is written around it? Read me the whole sentence.”
By three thirty Wendy Keeling was making sure the children were bundled up and ready to leave. Mrs. Bertolli was standing at the driver’s-side door of her panelled station wagon with one foot inside the car, waiting for her boys. She waved cheerfully, and Miss Keeling waved back, almost relieved by the reduction in noise and motion of the three Bertolli boys all leaving at once. They were lively and energetic, but, she reflected, they enjoyed school and seemed almost excited about learning. Though she suspected their mother of being indulgent, she knew their father was a composer who taught music at the school in town. The whole family seemed kind, energetic, and creative. The old saying, which annoyed her in its simplicity, nevertheless held here: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She firmly did not think about what it meant about the fractured tree she’d fallen from.
The cars had gone, and the children who usually walked to their nearby homes down the hill near the lake had disappeared around the bend of the curved road. She turned back inside to begin planning for the next day. The wood in the stove was burnt down to glowing coals, so she might just get an hour’s work in before the stove went cold.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when, instead of a schoolroom blissfully free of children, she saw Samuel, still at his desk, apparently reading. “Goodness, Samuel, what are you still doing here? Don’t you usually walk home with Gabriella?” She realized that she’d seen Gabriella marching off down the hill on her own.
Samuel put his finger on the spot where he’d stopped reading. “My mom is away,” he said.
“Oh. But your dad is home, isn’t he?”
“He doesn’t come home till after it’s dark.”
Miss Keeling frowned. “Ah, you have to be home on your own, is that the trouble?”
Samuel shrugged and pretended to read again.
“Where has your mother gone?”
“I don’t know. She just left. It was after when my birthday was.”
After his birthday? If she remembered the student card, Samuel’s birthday was in late September. She tried to remember. Had Rose Scott told her about this? She would ask when she got home.
“I see.” Wendy Keeling swallowed and pushed away an uprush of memory, surprised by the strength of feeling it engendered. Her mother leaving was not necessarily the same thing as Samuel’s mother leaving, she reminded herself. She squatted down and looked at him.
“I have to do about an hour’s work, and then, if you like, I will take you home. I could talk to your father to see if we could arrange for you to go home with another student and stay there until he comes home every day.”
Samuel stood up and shook his head violently. “It’s okay, miss. My father wouldn’t like that. I’ll just go home now.” He closed the book and pushed it into his desk and strode to the kitchen area with the wooden coat pegs and took his coat. It was threadbare and too short for him.
Wendy Keeling stood and watched him. “I’m happy to take you there.” She looked back at the stove, the warmth of which she would be sorry to walk away from. “Come. I’ll drive you down.” She could just as well do her work at home. Miss Scott would understand. She must have faced situations like this more than once during her tenure.
Samuel stood at the door and looked back at her. “I can go by myself.” Then he was out the door, closing it loudly.
The teacher could hear him going down the steps. Something made him afraid. She walked to the window, watching him walking in his heavy, rough boots along the tracks left by the cars of the other parents. She wondered if she should insist, but she could hardly wrangle a reluctant boy into her car, and he’d made the trip countless times, no doubt many of them on his own. She realized that it was not his physical safety she was thinking of but his emotional state.
She went back to sit at the teacher desk at the front of the room and took up the reader to begin looking at what could be done for the next day’s lessons. She opened the book and her eyes filled with tears. She set the book on the desk and stared unseeing through blurry eyes at the title of the chapter.
How could she meet the sadness or loss of this child, or indeed any other she was to confront in her career? She was scarcely able to deal with her own sense of abandonment, and worse now, this sudden return of constant fear.
Vancouver, September 1932
WENDY IRVING, A grade-three student at Seymour Elementary School, climbed up the steps of her house, happy because the sun was shining still, and it was warm enough to take off her sweater. It was as she was undoing the buttons that she realized she had left her metal lunch box at school. She stopped in front of the door and looked back down the street toward the school, holding her green sweater so that most of it was on the ground. Should she go back? Her mother would be mad. She threw her sweater into the corner of the porch and was about to turn and run back when the front door opened and her father stood looking at her. She could smell the smoke of his cigarettes wafting out from inside the house.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She stopped and looked anxiously at her father, who seemed murky in the darkness of the house. “I forgot my lunch box. I was going—”
But her father pushed the screen open. “Get in here.”
Once she was inside, she tried to understand why her father was still in his pyjamas and bathrobe and why the house was dark when it was so nice outside. The cord of his robe had slipped most of the way through the loops and one side was dragging across the floor. Later she would remember that she felt a kind of silence in the house, as if some force she couldn’t define had left it.
She followed her father into the kitchen, thinking her mother would be there, as she always was. He stood by the sink and lit a cigarette, tossing the match into the sink, where it hissed briefly.
“Your mother’s gone.”
“Did she go to visit Grandpa?” Why was her father still in his pyjamas?
“Don’t ask stupid questions! She’s not coming back. She won’t be here to make your breakfast and lunch and whatever the hell else she did. You’re going to have to pull your own weight.”
Wendy watched her father fearfully. She tried to imagine what “pulling her own weight” meant. He was usually busy and was never home to put her to bed and didn’t like to read to her, but she had never seen him like this.
That night, Wendy held her worn teddy bear and prayed in the darkness. She whispered urgently to the bear that he should too, because he used to be her mother’s bear, and he might have prayers that would work better.
The first phone call came in mid-October. Her father wasn’t home. It was the school principal.
“Is this Wendy? Is your father there, please?”
“No. He . . . he’s not back yet.”
“Do you know what time he gets home? Is he at work?”
“I think so. He always comes home later.” There was a silence at the other end of the line. Wendy’s heart was pumping so that she could feel it in her chest.
“It’s six thirty now. Can I speak to—is there someone else I can talk to? Who is looking after you until he gets home?”
“Nobody has to look after me. I can do everything,” Wendy said with a touch of anxious defiance.
There was sigh. “You tell him, please, that he has to phone me at the school or, better yet, come in. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Wendy waited to hear if he’d say something else, but she heard only the click of the receiver being put down on the other end.
“THIS IS BULL. We’re going to go live with my brother. He’s got a wife and kids. She can at least look after you, since you can’t seem to manage yourself. You know why I got called? They said you were dirty and your clothes weren’t ironed.”
Wendy sat on the worn mauve couch in the living room and looked at the floor. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to iron.
“Can I take my bear?”
“You take whatever you can carry. I’m not carrying nothing of yours.”
The train journey took almost two days. Wendy slept under her coat on the seat beside her father, who slept sitting up, his head wedged by the window. They ate most of the food that he had brought in a cloth bag. A loaf of bread, some apples, and there was also a can of meat, but he didn’t open it. He talked very little, not even to say, “We’re here,” when they pulled into the station at Williams Lake. He simply got up and yanked her suitcase off the rack above their heads and dumped it on the seat beside her, then took his bag and pushed open the door of the compartment. When they stood on the road outside the station, he finally spoke. “He’s not here, just like I thought.”
Wendy stood next to him and tried to see where the town was, but she only saw a few houses. She could hear what she thought was water somewhere. It was already getting dark. She put her suitcase down, put the bear on top of it, and buttoned herself into her coat. Her socks had fallen down to her ankles and she could feel the cold air on her legs.
A black truck pulled up and a man wearing a thick green tartan jacket and a black hat with earflaps opened the window, waving. “You made it, then. We’d best get on. It’s an hour on the road and my headlamps don’t work.”
Wendy’s father slung both bags into the back of the truck resting against the cab and then lifted her up and put her on the bags. He got into the passenger side and closed the door. She heard her uncle say, “She’ll be cold back there.” She didn’t hear her father’s reply because the truck started and bumped along the road away from the station. They never went through any town that she could see. Just some houses and a store with a gas pump. There was a man on the porch smoking, watching them go by. He threw his cigarette butt onto the ground and shook his head and went into the store. She could see the light spilling out the door and then disappearing when he closed it.
She cowered back into the corner and pulled up her socks, and then pulled her yellow dress as far as it would go down over her legs. Her hair flew as if there were wind coming from all directions. She wanted to brush it away from her face where it was whipping into her eyes, but she didn’t want to take her hands out of her coat sleeves where she had shoved them to keep warm.
Every bump on the road seemed to elevate her off the suitcase she sat on. She began to imagine she was Ali Baba, flying on a magic carpet, in the dark, with the wind blowing her hair. He would be able to see the earth below him, so she closed her eyes and imagined they were flying over a big city.
When they stopped finally, after a climbing and winding drive, Wendy sat still and waited. Her father and uncle got out of the truck at the same time and her father came around to the back.
“Get up,” he said. He waited till she was on her feet and reached for their two bags and started for the house. Wendy, stiff from the cold, leaned down and picked up the bear where it had dropped. The screen door of the house opened and a woman came out.
“Is that the girl?” she said. “Poor mite. Looks like she’s frozen to death.”
“She’s fine,” her uncle said. “Tend to her.”
Wendy felt herself lifted out of the truck and put on the ground.
“You look like you could use a meal,” the woman said, leading her inside. The door opened directly into a kitchen. Wendy could immediately feel the heat of the stove. A black and tan dog struggled up from a tattered rug and looked at her, wagging his tail tentatively, and then sat on his haunches as if the effort had been too much.
“He’s old,” the woman said. She unbuttoned Wendy’s coat and pushed her into a chair on the end of the table nearest the stove. “The two little ones have already gone to bed,” she added, as if Wendy had asked after them. “You don’t talk much, do you?”
Wendy managed to mutter a thanks when a bowl of dark soup and a piece of bread were placed before her. Looking surreptitiously across the table to see if there was butter, and seeing none, Wendy picked up the bread and bit a piece off. It was soft and fresh, reminding her how hungry she was. She and her father had run out of the bread and fruit he’d brought that morning.
The woman left the room with a tray of the same meal and Wendy could hear the voices of her father and uncle talking in another room somewhere. She looked around the kitchen. It’s dark light, she thought. There was some sort of lamp hanging on the wall by the door and another sat on top of some shelves where dishes were piled. Everything in the kitchen lay in a kind of murky golden shadow. She tried the soup. It tasted strange, but she decided it was good, and began to lap it up quickly, slurping it off the big spoon she had been given.
She was about to say something to the dog when the door opened and the woman came back and looked at Wendy’s bowl. “You don’t turn your nose up at good food, anyhow. I made up a bed for you with the children. I’ll show you what to do tomorrow. Can you read any?”
Wendy stood up to follow the woman, taking the teddy bear under her arm. She loved reading. She always took lots of books out of the library at school. “I read lots of books. Are you my aunt?”
“So, you do talk! I thought you were some sort of mute. Aunt Hilda. And you won’t be having that thing with you. You’ll have the Lord with you.” To Wendy’s dismay, her aunt reached out and took her bear and tucked it under her own arm. In the dark, after the door to the bedroom had been shut, Wendy lay on the mattress on the floor, the blankets pulled tight against her with both her hands. She could hear one of the children snuffling in a crib nearby. What had Aunt Hilda meant by showing her what to do tomorrow?