A Bird in the House

by Margaret Laurence

  I got my coat on and came along. The North End of Manawaka was full of shacks and shanties, unpainted boards, roofs with half the shingles missing, windows with limp hole-spattered lace curtains or else no curtains at all, chickens milling moronically in yards where the fences had never been lifted when they leaned and the weeds never hacked at or fought down. The cement sidewalks were broken, great chunks heaved up by frost and never repaired, for the Town Council did not pay much attention to this part of town. A few scraggy structures had once been stores but had been deserted when some of the town prospered and moved south away from the tracks. Now the old signs could still be seen, weathered to peeling pastels, grimy pink that had once shouted crimsonly “Barnes’ Grain and Feed,” and a mute rotting green that had once boldly been “Thurson’s General Store.” The windows of these ex-shops were boarded over now, and they were used only as warehouses or roofs over the heads of rodents and tramps.

  At the furthest point of the town the C.P.R. station stood, respectably painted in the gloomy maroon colour known as Railway Red, paradoxically neat in the midst of the decrepit buildings around it. Above and beyond the station rose the peaked roofs of the grain elevators, solid and ugly but the closest thing there was to towers here.

  I knew Harvey had been brought up by his aunt, his dead mother’s sister, but that was all I knew about him. My grandfather went directly to the place. It was a small square frame house with wooden lace along the front porch. At one time it must have been white, but it had not been painted for years. The rust-corroded gate stood open and askew, having apparently once been wrenched off its hinges. In the yard the goldenrod grew, and the tall uncut grass had formed seed-nodules like oats. My grandfather knocked at the door.

  “Yes?”

  The woman was big and haggard, and her face, wrinkled like elm bark, was spread thickly with a mauvish powder. Her grey hair was snipped short like a man’s. She wore a brown tweed skirt which looked as though it had never been cleaned throughout a long life, and a tight-fitting and filthy peach-coloured sweater that betrayed her gaunt and plank-flat body.

  “Well, if it ain’t Mr. Connor,” she said sarcastically.

  “Where’s your boy, Ada?” my grandfather demanded.

  “What’s he done?” she asked immediately.

  “Stole a telescope. I want it back.”

  The door opened wider.

  “Come in,” Harvey’s aunt said.

  The house was not divided into living room and kitchen. There was one large room on the ground floor and it was used for everything. At one end the black wood stove stood, surrounded by pots and pans hanging on nails from the wall. The table was covered with oilcloth, the worn-off pattern showing only feebly. The dishes from breakfast were still there, the grease stiffened on them, the puddles of egg yolk turned to yellow glue. On the cabinet stood a brown crockery basin with a wooden spoon and batter in it – the pancakes for tonight’s meal. The house had that acrid sour-milk and ammonia smell that comes from food left lying around and chamber pots full of urine unemptied until they are overflowing.

  In the front part of the room stood two armchairs with the plum velour ripped and stained, and a spineless sofa, sagging in the middle, once blue plush and now grimed to a grey calico. On the sofa sat Harvey. His long legs were thrust forward and his head lolled to one side. He looked as though he were pretending, without much acting ability, to be asleep.

  His aunt darted in like a giant darning needle.

  “All right, you. Where is it?”

  It seemed strange that she would ask him this question straightaway. She never asked him whether or not he had actually taken it.

  Harvey did not reply. He lay there on the sofa, his eyes flickering open, then half closing again. His aunt with an explosive quickness that made me jerk in every nerve, snatched the wooden spoon out of the bowl of batter and hit him across the face.

  Harvey’s eyes opened a little more, but only a little. The amber slits stared at her, but he did not move. He bore it, that she had hit him like that, and in front of other people. He was not a kid any longer. His shoulders and body looked immensely strong. He could have thrust her hand away, or held her wrists. He could have walked out. But he had not done so. Slowly, with a clown’s grin, he wiped the batter off his face.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll give you one chance more, and that’s all. After that, you know what.”

  I never discovered what final card she held. Would she have turned him over to the Mounties, or thrown him out of the house? It did not really matter. Maybe the threat was one left over from childhood, still believed in by both of them, out of habit. Or maybe there was no specific threat at all, only a matter of one will being able to inflict what it chose upon another.

  He lumbered to his feet, and in a few minutes he came back to the room. He threw the telescope on the floor, and he gave me a devastatingly scornful look. Then he sat down on the sofa once more.

  His aunt picked up the telescope and handed it to my grandfather. Her voice was a whine, but underneath it there was a desolate anger.

  “You’re not gonna go to the police, are you? Listen, you got no idea how it’s been. What was I supposed to do, left with a kid to look after? Who’d have married me? What man would’ve taken on that? He’s never been anything but trouble to me. Who do you think he takes after? Some shit nobody but her ever seen.”

  “I’m not going to the police,” my grandfather said aloofly. Then he went away.

  “Did you know her, before?” I asked him, when we were walking home.

  “No,” my grandfather replied without interest. “She was nobody a person would know, to speak of. She was rust always around town, that’s all.”

  Harvey’s pestering of Nanuk stopped, for soon afterwards he quit school, dropped the paper route, and got a job with Yang Min, the elderly Chinese who kept a small café at the North End, where the railway section hands went for coffee.

  For Nanuk, the respite came too late. He had become increasingly suspicious of everyone except the family, and anyone who approached the front gate when he was in the yard was met in the same way, with the low warning growl. If they attempted to open the gate, he would stand there, poised and bristling, waiting for their next move. Their next move became predictable. Whoever it happened to be would quietly close the gate and go away. They would then phone my mother. Sometimes Grandfather Connor would answer the phone. They would tell him about Nanuk, and he would rant at my mother for the rest of the day, saying that all Huskies were savage by nature.

  “Listen, Vanessa, I want to talk to you,” my mother said. “Grandfather knows someone on a farm out by Freehold who’s willing to take Nanuk. It would be a much better place for him. He could run around. And on a farm, he wouldn’t be so much of a danger.”

  I knew there was no point in arguing. It had become inevitable. Nanuk was taken away on a morning when I was at school. I did not say goodbye to him. I did not want to. I mourned for him secretly, but after a while I no longer thought about him so very much.

  About a year later, the Starlite Café at the North End was robbed. Yang Min, the old man who owned it, was found unconscious on the floor. He had been badly beaten up.

  They caught Harvey quite quickly. He had hopped a freight. The Mounties picked him up only two stops beyond Manawaka.

  “Apparently he didn’t even try to deny it,” my mother said. “Not that it would’ve done him much good. You’d have thought he would have hidden the money, though, wouldn’t you?”

  What I said then surprised me as much as it did my mother. I had not known I was going to ask this question. I had not known it was there to be asked.

  “Mother – what really happened to Nanuk?”

  My mother looked shocked and distressed.

  “What makes you think –?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just tell me.”

  Her voice was almost inaudible, and there was a resignation in it, as though she had given up
trying to make everything all right.

  “The vet took him,” she said, “and chloroformed him. Well, what else could I do, Vanessa? He wasn’t safe to go free.”

  Harvey Shinwell got six years. I never saw him again. I don’t know where he went when he got out. Back in, I suppose.

  I used to see his aunt occasionally on the street. She was considered safe to go free. Once she said hello to me. I did not reply, although I knew that this was probably not fair, either.

  JERICHO’S BRICK BATTLEMENTS

  Before we moved into it, the Brick House had always been a Sunday place to me. It was a fine place for visit ing. To live there, however, was unthinkable. This would probably never have been necessary, if my father had not died suddenly that winter. That spring, with the wind only beginning to thaw and the roads flowing muddily with melted snow, my mother had told me that she and my brother and myself would be going to the Brick House to live.

  “You’re twelve and a half, Vanessa,” she had pointed out, unnecessarily and almost defensively, as though she anticipated my protests. “That’s quite old enough to understand. We can’t afford to keep two houses going, and there are Grandfather and Aunt Edna rattling around down there all by themselves.”

  “I don’t want to go,” I said, knowing it was making her feel worse than she already did, but unable to stop myself. “I don’t want to live there. Not with him.”

  “He’s my father, Vanessa,” she said, dredging up the words as though they belonged to her duty self rather than her own self, “and he’s your grandfather, so you will please kindly not speak that way about him.”

  The day we moved, I watched the man carry in the crates and barrels which held the MacLeod silver and china, and the trunks and cardboard boxes which held our clothes and assorted possessions. Nearly all the furniture had been sold. I wanted the movers to walk slowly, dragging their feet, but they lugged the boxes briskly, joking as though nothing were the matter. I spotted among the other things the suitcase which contained my own treasured objects – a blue glass slipper like Cinderella’s, a shiny wooden darning egg, which had been brought from Scotland ages ago and which bore a picture of a town so miniature that you had to use a magnifying glass to see the streets and name – “Helensburgh, on the Clyde,” a dozen or so unmatched dangling bead earrings discarded by Aunt Edna, a white silk bookmark which said “Feed My Sheep,” in cross-stitch, and the leather-bound telescope which some distant naval MacLeod had once used to sight the enemy. There was a kind of finality about seeing this suitcase of mine going the way of all the other boxes, up the front steps, across the verandah, through the front door of the Brick House. There could be no reversal of decisions now. I felt as though nothing favourable would ever be likely to happen again.

  Grandfather Connor, dressed in his huge and rank-smelling bear coat despite the mild air, was directing traffic from the top step.

  “Mind how you take them barrels in,” he warned. “The plate glass in that door cost me something, I can tell you, and I’ll not have you crashing into it. Easy, man – can’t you see where you’re going? You’re not getting paid to walk around with your eyes shut. That’s it – straight through the front hall, now, and into the kitchen.”

  He caught sight of me, lurking beside the caragana hedge.

  “Come on, Vanessa,” he shouted. “A big girl like you – can’t you even give your mother a hand? I can’t abide people standing around doing nothing. If you’re this bone-idle now, the Lord only knows what you’ll grow up to be like. Come on, now!”

  In the kitchen, which was sweltering from the heat of the black woodstove big enough to cook for a threshing gang, my mother and aunt were unpacking while my brother, who was not quite three, was delightedly shuffling through the offcast bits of newspaper which lay like piles of autumn leaves on the floor. My grandfather had followed me in. He looked at the plates and cups and soup tureens which were emerging from one of the barrels as my mother pulled off the newspaper and set the china on the floor.

  “I don’t know why you’re unpacking all that stuff, Beth,” Grandfather Connor remarked. “It’ll just have to go back in again.”

  My mother looked up in surprise.

  “It’s the MacLeod china,” she said. “It’s Limoges. I thought we’d use it.”

  “We’ve got no room for it here,” my grandfather said decidedly. “It’ll have to go in the basement.”

  “But Father –”

  “No buts about it,” Grandfather Connor interrupted. “We don’t need no china of the MacLeods. We got plenty of our own. I’m not having it up here.”

  My mother looked at the plate she was holding. It was edged in gold and it had tiny moss roses on it. She shrugged and began wrapping it up in newspaper once more. When my grandfather had gone outside once more to supervise the movers, Aunt Edna turned to my mother.

  “For mercy’s sake, Beth, why didn’t you say we’d be keeping it out and he could just lump it?”

  “What’s the use?” my mother replied. “It’s like batting your head against a brick wall. He’d get his way in the end. He always does. How you can keep on arguing, Edna, after all this time, I just don’t know. It would play me out.”

  “Well, if you’re going to make a carpet of yourself,” my aunt said aggressively, “he’ll sure as death walk all over you. Look at the way he was with Mother.”

  “I don’t know,” my mother said. “She never met him head-on like you do, but I’ll bet she got on better that way. Look at this, Edna. It’s the barrel with the silver. Here we are with two entire silver tea services, Mother’s and the MacLeods’, and hardly a nickel to our names. I suppose it’s funny in a way.”

  “Funny peculiar,” my aunt commented. “Not funny ha ha.”

  “What on earth are we going to do with it all?” my mother enquired.

  “Sell it,” my aunt suggested tersely, “and buy a case of rye.”

  I went out into the back yard. The old stable at the end of the garden was locked, but I had long ago discovered a way in. A flimsy outside staircase led up to the loft, which was never locked, for it contained only empty boxes and sparrows’ nests and a few broken chairs. I went up, found the two loose boards, lifted them and lowered myself down to the stable rafters below. From there it was an easy jump to the roof of the MacLaughlin-Buick and down to the ground.

  Grandfather Connor’s car, the only one he ever owned, had not been driven for years now, but he refused to part with it. It had tall thin wheels and the body of it was high and square. The seats were beige and brown-striped plush, and they looked nearly as unworn now as they must have done when the car was new, long before I was born. He had never driven it very much and had always taken great care of it. Perhaps he had thought it was too expensive to be used except occasionally. Or perhaps he had never grown accustomed to the fact that it could not be controlled by shouting.

  I opened the door of the car and climbed inside. I did not think Grandfather Connor or anyone else ever came here any more. Now I was glad I had never told anyone about the loose boards in the loft. There were black oilcloth side-pockets inside the car doors. They would do nicely to keep scribblers and pencils in. I lay back on the striped plush and propped my feet devilishly against a window, not caring if I scraped the glass or scratched the paintwork. I began to size up the inner situation, which was a relief from the outer. I already had half a five-cent scribbler full of the story I was writing.

  The tale was set in Quebec in the early days of the fur trade. The heroine’s name was Marie. It had to be a tossup between Marie and Antoinette, owing to a somewhat limited choice on my part, and I had finally rejected Antoinette as being too fancy. Orphaned young, Marie was forced to work at the Inn of the Grey Cat. La Chat? Le Chat? And what was Grey? They didn’t teach French until high school in Manawaka, and I wasn’t there yet. But never mind. These were trivial details. The main thing was that Marie had overheard the stealthy conversation of two handsome although shabbily dressed voy
ageurs, who later would turn out to be the great coureurs-de-bois, Radisson and Groseilliers. The problem was now plain. How to get Marie out of her unpromising life at the inn and onto the ship which would carry her to France? And once in France, then what? Neither Radisson nor Groseilliers would marry her, I was pretty sure of that. They were both too busy with changing back and forth from the side of the French to the side of the English, and besides, they were too old for her.

  I lay on the seat of the MacLaughlin-Buick feeling disenchantment begin to set in. Marie would not get out of the grey stone inn. She would stay there all her life. The only thing that would ever happen to her was that she would get older. Probably the voyageurs weren’t Radisson and Groseilliers at all. Or if they were, they wouldn’t give her a second glance. I felt I could not bear it. I no longer wanted to finish the story. What was the use, if she couldn’t get out except by ruses which clearly wouldn’t happen in real life?

  I climbed over into the front seat of the car and sat for a moment with my hands on the stiff black steering wheel. There, in the middle, was the button which used to make the horn work. All at once I could hear that horn again, loudly, in my head, and I remembered something I didn’t know I knew. I remembered riding in the MacLaughlin-Buick with my grandfather. It was a memory with nothing around it, an unplaced memory without geography or time. I must have been exceedingly young, four at most. I was sitting small and low on the front seat, hardly high enough to see out through the windscreen. My grandfather was sitting straight and haughty behind the steering wheel. And the car was flying, flying, flying, through the widespread streets of that enormous town, and its horn was bannering our presence as we conquered. A-hoo-gah! A-hoo-gah! I was gazing with love and glory at my giant grandfather as he drove his valiant chariot through all the streets of this world.

  I closed the car door carefully. Then I climbed to the rafters and hauled myself back up into the loft. I looked around and discovered a packingcase that would do for a desk. A scribbler could be hidden in a dozen places. The loft was easier to get at. There was more space here, really. It would be a better place to be mine than the garage below.