Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  “Go ahead, Benoit.” Helen removed her cold hand from mine.

  “Jackson was the only child. His parents tried for another, a brother for Jackson — his maman desired another boy — but she had mis…”

  “Miscarriage,” said Helen.

  “Yes, miscarriage. She had many of those and her doctor said to her, no more. So they decided to adopt. Girl babies were easy to get, but Jackson’s mother would not have a girl.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Helen put her cold hand on my arm and I bit my tongue.

  “I do not know, Violet,” said Benoit. “Mrs. Shirt is not a normal person. Many years ago I am sure she is beautiful and kind the way Jackson describes, but crazy does not come in one day. Who knows why she wants another boy baby? Not me.”

  “Okay, sorry, Benoit, go ahead.”

  “I should tell the whole story as I know it and then you ask your questions,” Benoit said. “It will save a lot of words.”

  “Okay.”

  “I tell you, there is much I do not know.”

  “Just go on,” said Helen.

  “Okay. So the wait for a boy was long, too long for Madame Shirt, so she went to the underground and found someone who would get her a boy, however grand the cost.”

  “Oh, dear God,” said Helen and picked up the picture of Bertram Shirt.

  “This was, uh, eleven years ago,” said Benoit.

  Helen looked at me. I still didn’t get it.

  “So these underground men were worse than even Evelyn Shirt understood. She thought she was paying very much money for a baby from a house for not married mothers — not in the law, but with the blessing of the baby’s maman. But the man she hired put the money in his pocket and stole babies right out from under the noses of parents or sisters or nannies or who. He even took them from hospital wards. Madame Shirt did not know this. She paid enough to not know.”

  A trickle of cold sweat ran down my sides and gathered at the waistband of my slacks.

  Helen passed me the photograph.

  “Bertram isn’t a girl,” I said. I kept up my struggle against the truth, against the strange recognition that I had sensed the first time I saw the picture. It wasn’t Jackson that Bertram resembled, it was my dad, in the pictures I’d seen of him as a boy.

  “Bertram is a girl and her name is not Bertram. It is Beatrice,” said Benoit. “This is not a good part of the story. The baby-taker grabbed what he thought was a boy and by the time he knew different it was too late. He had a woman with him who cared for the baby on the return to Montreal. She did not know the importance of the sex to the future maman. She cooed its name, “Sunny,” which was what the thief heard the baby called by its maman and older sister. I guess by you, Violet. He heard it as “Sonny,” and thinks the baby is a boy.”

  “Wait,” I said. I got up and lurched toward some wild yarrow growing in a corner of the yard. I threw up my supper and what felt like part of my innards.

  Helen and Benoit sat quietly till I returned to the small circle we made around the photograph.

  “Okay”, Benoit said, “remember now, that all information I have is third-hand from Jackson, so some could be wrong or not quite right.”

  “Go on,” Helen said.

  “Is she still alive?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Benoit.

  Helen and I looked at each other.

  “Benoit, you’ve got to come back to the house with us and tell it all to Will, before you go any further,” said Helen.

  “I know I do,” he said.

  “Why is she all got up like a boy in the picture?” I asked. “Why is Bertram written on the picture? Jackson didn’t say anything. We talked about Bertram.”

  “You surprised him, Violet. He was not ready yet to explain, so he agreed with Beatrice being Bertram.”

  “Why was she dressed as a boy?” I asked again.

  “It was, what you call, a masquerade party. Beatrice dressed as a boy and someone took a picture.”

  “And labelled it Bertram,” I said, “and put the name in quotation marks.”

  “It was the only picture Jackson could find of his sister to bring with him. She was not in many photographs.”

  “His sister.”

  “Yes. His sister.”

  “How did they get away?” I asked. “The people who stole her.” I remembered so vividly the search, the lengths that people went to, Ennis Foote’s promise to my dad.

  “This, I do not know,” said Benoit.

  “Okay. So Mrs. Shirt didn’t want the baby when she saw it was a girl,” he went on. “But she was stuck with it.”

  Helen groaned.

  “Her,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Stuck with her. Sunny is a her.”

  “Yes, pardon me, Violet. So the way Jackson says it, Madame Shirt has not been a good mother to Sunny. That is the worst part of the story.”

  “Dear God,” said Helen.

  “Jackson was only six when Beatrice arrived,” Benny went on, “too young to question what his mother was or was not doing. But as years passed he did question and object, when he watched her ignore his sister and when he heard Beatrice cry in the night.”

  “What about the dad?” I asked. “Did he ignore her too?”

  “No,” Benoit said. “He was a good papa, so Jackson says, tried his best. But he was a busy man with the railroad. And now, of course, he is dead. It is my belief that Papa Shirt’s death caused within Jackson the thoughts of finding Beatrice’s family. Her true family. His worries about her grew after his papa died.

  “Oh, my dear Lord,” said Helen. “We’ve got to go back to the house before you go any further.”

  The three of us stood up and brushed the dirt from our clothes.

  “It is important you know that Jackson came here to try to put this right,” said Benny. “He just was not sure how.”

  “He was certainly taking his time,” said Helen.

  “Did you know him in Montreal?” I asked.

  “No,” said Benny. “It is what we said. We met on the road, near Sudbury. There was a camp there, where we both spent a few nights. That is where we heard about the sugar beets.”

  “So him going out to hoe sugar beets…”

  “That was all true,” Benny said. “He was going west. And he would stop and see you on the way — make it clean with you folks and leave it to you what you wanted to do.”

  “Who looked after her,” I asked, “if Mrs. Shirt ignored her?”

  “Jackson,” said Benoit. “Mr. Shirt, as I said, nannies, Mrs. Dunning. Thank God they were rich.”

  “If they hadn’t been rich they wouldn’t have had the money to buy her.” Helen spat it out.

  We trudged down Highfield Street towards home.

  “How did Jackson find out who and where we were?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” said Benoit. “You must save most of your questions for him.”

  “If he ever turns up,” I said. “What if he doesn’t turn up?’

  “He will.”

  We turned the corner onto Ferndale and Benny slowed down.

  “Jackson was scared,” he said.

  “He sure didn’t seem scared of anything,” I said.

  “No,” said Helen. “He has a very unscared way about him.”

  “Especially when he found out that Mrs. Palmer had taken her own life,” said Benoit. “He got much more afraid then.”

  I remembered how pale and wobbly he’d gotten when I told him about my mum.

  “It has been so much in my head that I can barely believe that not one of you suspected us of anything,” said Benoit and stopped walking.

  “No,” said Helen. “We none of us suspected. Now, Benoit, don’t go mentioning worst parts to Will — what you consider to be the worst parts, that type of thing. He is bound to have a differing opinion on that. Come along, now.”

  And we walked past the last couple of houses to our quiet home and the unsuspecting
man inside it.

  We found my dad on the verandah.

  “Hello,” he said. “Benoit, I hear the work is going well on Crawford. Violet, your young friend Isabelle dropped by. She seems anxious to talk to you; she thinks she may have seen Tippy.”

  Helen herded him into the living room where we all sat down.

  “What is it?” he asked. “What’s going on? Violet? Are you all right?”

  Helen went to make coffee.

  Benoit told the story again up to where he had left off with Helen and me, the part where Jackson began to object to the way Beatrice/Sunny was being treated and to worry about her sadness, the part where his dad died.

  My dad was shaking. He asked Helen to pour some whiskey into his coffee. She gave us all a little, me less than everybody else.

  “You need some food in your stomach,” she said to me.

  My dad looked grey.

  “What was Jackson planning on doing?” he asked. “Where is he?” He stood up.

  “I am not certain,” said Benoit. “I know he wanted to find you and tell you. He is very worried about Beatrice, uh, Sunny. I do not think he had figured it further because then you folks would be the bosses and it would no longer be up to him alone.

  “And, sir, we do not know where he is. He is gone. Disappeared. Without his things.”

  My dad slammed his glass on the table. “Why, in God’s name, had he not said anything to us by now? Why didn’t you make him, Benoit?”

  “This isn’t Benny’s fault,” I said.

  “Of course not. Sorry, Benoit. Who else knows about this? Who all knows?”

  “Jackson, me, Tag, you folks. That is all as far as I know,” said Benoit. “But I only speak for myself.”

  And Isabelle in a way and probably the Willis twins and Dirk Botham and maybe Gert Walker, I thought, but kept that information to myself.

  “Tag. Why does Tag know?” my dad asked.

  “I am sorry, sir. Because I told him. We spent much time together on the road and on the trains. We talked about many things. There were not many topics did not arise.”

  My dad stood up abruptly. I’ve got to go to Montreal,” he said. “I’ve got to go now. I’m going down to the train station to get a ticket.”

  No one slept much. When Helen nagged at Dad to go to bed he said he’d sleep on the train. He drank more whiskey. That scared me a little; it was unlike him and I didn’t want him changed in any way.

  I dreamed of a man in a tan suit. When I awoke and went back to sleep the man in my dream multiplied and fell apart and turned into a pile of tattered clothes, sticky with blood. Tippy’s sweet dead snout poked out from beneath them.

  My dad was on a train to Montreal the next day. I swear if there hadn’t been a passenger train going he would have hopped a freight along with the hoboes. He had decided to do it on his own, without any help from the police, in the hope that he could. If he couldn’t, well, he would cross that bridge when he got to it, he said.

  Helen and I wanted him to take Mr. Foote with him, but he balked at the suggestion. I think he was afraid of the hoopla that might occur if word got out, harkening back to that terrible summer of 1925.

  “You two keep this under your hats, now,” he said when we kissed him goodbye at the station.

  As soon as we got home I went over to see Fraser and put him in the picture. He talked me into telling his dad. They promised it would go no further. Mr. Foote wanted to follow my dad to Montreal but he finally agreed to take a wait-and-see approach.

  Meanwhile, there was no sign of Jackson.

  There was no reason why his vanishing should be associated with the disappearance of our Sunny eleven years ago, and our discovery of his ties to her, but it was connected in all our brains and in my head at least, it stirred up an unholy turmoil.

  Chapter 27

  It was two days later that we read the first report in the paper about the man who had been killed by the railroad tracks. “Vagrant Found Murdered” was the small headline.

  Jackson still hadn’t turned up. None of us spoke his name but I was certain it was him. So was Helen. Benoit wouldn’t believe it.

  Any talk about the killing hinted at the involvement of the railroad bulls. From all across the country stories rode in on the rails along with the men about the savage violence of some of those police. They were said to think nothing of bludgeoning vagrants to within inches of their lives. And sometimes the line was crossed. I’d heard it from Isabelle and I’d heard it from Hedley Larkin, both good sources.

  The man’s name was not released at first because his next of kin had to be notified. A couple of days later he was identified as Jackson Shirde, seventeen, from Montreal. Shirde?

  At first all that went on in my brain was no. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t have happened without my seeing him again. I had to go back in time to before he died so I could at least say goodbye. I put on my sneakers and ran, only as far as the river.

  Then I couldn’t think at all. It was just pictures: Sunny’s carriage, a tall man in a tan suit whom I’d never seen before, Margie Willis’s grandfather’s dirty toes, the boxcar the community club had hauled over to our skating rink last winter as a shelter from the cold (l liked that one), Warren’s glowing little face (I liked that one too, but nothing stayed long enough for me to hold onto it). I shivered like my dad did when he found out about Beatrice/Sunny. I noticed that, as if I were observing my own reactions for scientific reasons. It wasn’t totally unpleasant.

  Jackson had been dead for at least three days. I had laughed on some of those days. Not a lot, though. There hadn’t been much to laugh about lately. There had been brief moments of nervous excitement over the idea of Sunny coming home but mostly it was a peaky sort of anticipation. I couldn’t picture it at all. I had stolen the photograph of “Bertram” from Jackson’s knapsack but couldn’t bring myself to look at it again. It rested at the bottom of my underwear drawer, waiting, like I was, for her to come home.

  Shirde was Jackson’s real last name. Or maybe it wasn’t him that the paper had identified; I thought that again and again. But I knew it was. I thought about my dad in Montreal. He was looking for a family of Shirts. I remembered him on the phone with Mrs. Dunning, saying, “Mrs. Shirt.” She would have been saying, “Mrs. Shirde.” But over the phone lines I supposed they sounded very much alike.

  When I went back to the house Helen was on the phone to my dad at his hotel in Montreal saying, “Shirde,” spelling it out for him: “s h i r d e.” She didn’t tell him how she knew; she didn’t mention Jackson’s death. I suppose she didn’t want him to feel worse about taking Mrs. Shirde’s remaining child. Helen’s face was a crumpled mess. She pulled herself together for the duration of the telephone conversation.

  I walked over to see Benny. He was sitting alone in a corner of the yard. It was obvious to me that he had heard. When I came near him his eyes were flat at first but he seemed to quickly click into my presence from wherever he had been.

  “How does that help?” I asked.

  “What?” Benny said.

  “Your stupid trances. How do they help?”

  “Help what?” Benny asked.

  “Anything,” I said. “What’s the point?” Then I burst into tears and Benny leapt up and wound his skinny arms around me. I sobbed noisily into his sleeve while several builders looked on.

  “Did you know his name wasn’t even Shirt?” I asked.

  “No,” said Benny and smoothed the hair away from my face. “No, I did not know that. Perhaps he changed his name for the trip west.”

  Benny needed to get back to work, so I left him and roamed the streets. I tried to convince myself that there were two rambling seventeen-year-old Jacksons from Montreal with similar last names, neither of which I’d heard before. And my Jackson was still alive.

  I went home to Helen. She didn’t talk to me much in those first days after Jackson’s death. She didn’t talk a whole lot to anyone. Mrs. Foote came over, but she w
anted to pray with us and neither Helen nor I would have it.

  Helen’s only words could have been spoken by anyone: “supper’s ready,” “don’t forget your satchel,” “how were classes today?” She wasn’t unpleasant, but I knew she didn’t care about answers. I grew uncomfortable around her, more so than when Jackson was a living being between us. Her sorrow, her mourning, seemed to take on a certain aggression — like a renunciation of sorts — of hope? of visions of rapture? — I couldn’t know. Whatever it was, it shut me out. I wanted what now seemed impossible — to rest my head against her shoulder with both her arms around me for a long, long time. I felt like I needed more comfort than I was getting and that caused me to want to bonk her on the head with the cast-iron frying pan.

  Dusty gauze cloaked the first couple of days and whetted blades lurked beneath it, never buried deep enough for safety or comfort. I couldn’t wash myself and I had trouble swallowing anything, even my own spit. It seemed like the last time I was able to take a deep breath was the night I got drunk. My whole body ached from trying. Also, I had to get away from Helen, but I didn’t want to be alone.

  I went with Gwen to visit Warren.

  “Tag’s dead, isn’t he?” Warren said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Tag’s dead.”

  “Well, no, not that we know of,” I said. “Why do you say that?”

  “We heard Nurse Parnell talking to Nurse Miles about a dead Negro, killed by the railroad tracks. Tag’s the only Negro around. I don’t like Nurse Parnell. She’s the only one here that isn’t nice. She said ‘nigger’ like mum does.”

  “This is news to us, Warren, but we’ll find out,” Gwen said and she marched out of the ward to the nurse’s station.

  “The way we heard it was that Jackson died,” I said to Warren.

  I knew it didn’t work to keep secrets that big. He would find out in the wind or from Nurse Parnell and then he would blame us for not coming clean.

  “Jackson?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Is this to do with your sister, Violet?” Warren asked.

  My temples squeezed inwards till I had to close my eyes and hold my head.