by Dennis Bock
Now we looked to the horizon and not down at our feet as we ranged between the harbour to the west and the seawall to the east, a good mile or so, which felt ten times that due to the rocks and boulders we scaled. We often went down there at night, too, in pitch-dark but for the stars and the red glow from the Stelco plant that brushed the western sky. It didn’t matter how well you knew the terrain at night, it was treacherous and irregular—a miracle one of us or both didn’t break a leg or at least turn an ankle. But down we went during the day and at night, more and more as the weather warmed and finally school let out for the summer. My punishments had continued till the last day. By now, more than ever, it was clear to me that this plan we’d devised needed to work. It was the only way I’d survive the coming school year.
Our request to sleep on the back deck was refused that evening. We waited, conspiring, and once our parents were settled in bed, we snuck out through the upstairs bathroom window and retrieved our bicycles from the garage and coasted to the bottom of Sanctuary Road, where we stashed our bikes and assumed our lookout on the old limestone pier built by American militiamen captured by the British during the War of 1812—the first time in our history when the Royal Navy ruled the Great Lakes—and waited and watched and dreamed. The lake at this late hour was usually as still as glass, and the moon when it showed itself traced a beam as white as snow over the water. Always there was the glow of the steel plant in the west.
On those evenings we were allowed to sleep on the back deck we listened to our neighbours’ television sets and the barking dogs that sometimes chased us down our street. We took long sips of water that later obliged us to sneak out to the edge of the garden to relieve ourselves. Sometimes we talked about what our lives might be like if our mother wasn’t German. It was a pleasant thought to imagine her as an Australian or Norwegian or South African. There would be no number painted on our door and no bonfires in the front yard. Our father’s half-German parentage would mean little, and Thomas and I would be known as the Norwegian brothers, or whatever other harmless bloodline, and we would be free and clean and unremarkable. But she was German, and no amount of fantasizing could change that fact. I felt disloyal for wishing that she was someone else, and I wondered too if I would treat people like us the way we ourselves were treated if our father had married a woman who did not bear a shameful heritage. But this would not matter much longer, for we were upon that summer of our changing luck—our time had come—and I’d walk out over the lawn in my bare feet to the edge of the garden where I’d pee in the grass while Thomas, who never tired of pestering me, taunted my privacy with his flashlight beam.
One evening in early July we prepared for a late-night visit to the lake, as we usually did, by telling our mother once again of our intention to sleep out back. She helped me with our sleeping bags and pillows while Thomas fetched his flashlight. We waited until our parents’ room fell dark—we could see the window from where we lay on the deck—and gave ourselves another twenty minutes for them to fall asleep, then crept off to see if we’d find any newly arrived refugees camped out on the lakeshore.
The neighbourhood was quiet, as it usually was at this hour, close to midnight—the houses up and down Douglas Avenue dark and lonely-looking. The problem dogs were chained and silent now, and not a soul stirred but us. In the weeks since we’d taken up our vigil we’d seen no pedestrians or traffic pass on Main Street, which lay between our house and the lake, and no sign of the Citizen Patrol we knew to look out for. This fact had always given me the feeling that our mission had been blessed in some vague and unconfirmable way.
As we prepared to cross that night we saw headlights coming towards us from the east. We got behind a hedge next to a street lamp and waited for the vehicles to pass. There were three in all, the same sort of transports the scientists used on inspection day. I saw the labourers crammed in the back as the first one drove past. These were the men who paved roads and dug ditches and picked our fruit. Now they were on their way home to one of the internment camps an hour northwest, in Grand Valley near Orangeville, or farther still, near Kitchener. Or maybe even just up the road to Little Berlin. The second and third trucks passed in quick succession. The back flap of each was open and snapping in the wind. As the last truck passed us one of the men inside turned his head in our direction and seemed to hold on us, as if studying our faces.
We stayed at the lake longer than usual that night, talking about how close we ourselves had come to the life most Germans in Canada were living in those days. It was close to one o’clock when we got home. The house was dark. We snuck up the driveway and came through the garage into the backyard and slipped into our sleeping bags. They were damp and cold. We watched the stars while we waited to warm up, and we finally went upstairs to our room and got into our beds.
WE ACCOMPANIED OUR FATHER to the shipyard the next morning. He knew nothing about our nightly excursions, it seemed, and until that day I’d felt no qualms or guilt in keeping this secret from him. We were always afraid of being caught by our parents, or worse, by the neighbourhood patrol. But stronger than this was the hope that we’d be able to offer this gift to our mother and father, and to ourselves. It would be a marvellous surprise when we notified them of the rescue we’d effect and the subsequent praise that would free us from our troubles. But now, after being spotted by one of the men in the convoy, we feared that our secret would be discovered, and that someone would come to our house to question us. We’d always been careful to keep to the shadows, but we could never be sure that this project of ours was known only to us.
My father noticed the dark circles under my eyes. He asked if sleeping out there on the back deck was such a good idea and was something wrong? He didn’t recognize the lie when I shook my head. He placed a hand on my shoulder and kept it there as we walked. He was responding to me on a simpler level than I needed then, as a father does with a son who’s lost some small struggle that he will naturally rise up from again, like heartache or a betrayal of friendship, but the truth of the matter was more complicated than anything I understood.
On our way back from the shipyard, Thomas and I crossed the bridge via the catwalk. It was a sort of steel-mesh walkway on the underside of the bridge that seemed to disappear underfoot, the grating so coarse and open that you could see the river far below. Parallel to the catwalk was the heavy under-structure of deck-plates and crossbeams that were now home to a large colony of pigeons breeding and nesting with their young. We’d heard about them on the news. It was a breed of pigeon, called rock doves, that you couldn’t find in all of England, hunted as they’d been by an occupied population that had turned to eating its horses, dogs, and cats already years before. Here there were hundreds of these birds nesting in the trestlework, a selfish abundance, it seemed to me. They watched us, exercising their beautiful blue-and-grey wings in sudden bursts.
Reported with righteous indignation, the food crisis in England was in the news often. Every fall and spring, students from our school fanned out through town to canvass for money, clothing, and tinned goods, the latter two of which we piled high on the gymnasium floor over a period of weeks, then crated and sent it over. The whole country participated in those clothing and food drives back then. We were never sure that the things we sent over didn’t end up in Germany. We knew of the import taxes imposed on these charitable contributions, which was the nomenclature the German bureaucrats chose to apply to their theft. As we stood there on the catwalk watching the horizon I wondered if we shouldn’t capture the pigeons that surrounded us and send them over to England.
“It tastes like chicken, anyway,” Thomas said, removing the blue plastic straw he’d been carrying behind his ear that day.
Our mother knew what it was like to feel real hunger. She’d told us more than once that it didn’t matter what something tasted like, food was food. She’d learned this well enough in the camp in the Azores. I didn’t like the idea of eating pigeon meat. It seemed cruel to me. I didn’t thi
nk I could harm a single one of those birds, not even if I was starving, after watching the way they ran their beaks through their feathers and puffed and preened themselves.
Thomas loaded an unlit match into one end of his straw and leaned forward over the railing with his peashooter held to his pursed lips. He concentrated his aim and blew as hard as he could. The match head ignited when it struck the iron beam a few inches above one of the pigeons. It dropped harmlessly into the nest. He had a full box of matches to shoot. He tried again, aiming each time as if that match were his last.
Every so often he flicked out the saliva that accumulated in the straw, and then he redoubled his efforts. Some of the match heads failed to ignite when they struck the ironwork, but most of them flared and dropped their bright flame into the nests below, only to gutter out and disappear. I didn’t like what he was doing. I told him to stop. He kept on shooting those matches, most of them flaring and dropping uselessly into or near a nest, until there were no more matches left, and we continued on over to the far side of the bridge, climbed up onto the road using the utility ladder we’d discovered there, and made for home.
IN PREVIOUS SUMMERS WE’D often visited the abandoned fallout shelters around our neighbourhood. We enjoyed exploring their damp, cool spaces. We thought of them as forts, places we deemed our own. We weren’t able to gain entry into the shelters that the town still maintained for their original purpose—those were locked and serviced by the air-raid wardens you still saw occasionally climbing on one of the sirens, his loose tool belt slapping against his thigh. The shelters we called in on had been taken over by raccoons and the vagrants who haunted our town.
They were easy enough to break into. As I say, we’d not visited any so far that year, and on the Saturday in early June when we pushed through the warped plywood barring the entrance of the shelter on Randall Street we were met by a wall of stale air, the light as thin and tired as we’d always known it. The walls of the shelter were flaking and crumbled to the touch now, almost sixteen years after their construction. Our father had told us that the engineers who’d managed the building of these shelters had been forced to use a grade of cement inferior to the type used in the construction of the Miracle Canal due to shortages and priority rationing, and so it was natural for them to fall apart as quickly as they did.
No one ever really thought the duck-and-cover drills we were made to practise once a month at school would do much good in the event of a full-on nuclear exchange, especially after seeing the film reels that showed the horror of London. A shelter like this might save your life, though. The intermittent blaring of an air-raid siren was a regular feature of life in those days, and we knew what to do if that short staccato blast rolled into the long, constant droning that was not a test.
The shelter we chose that afternoon was set back in an empty lot just off the street. A plywood sheet made an improvised door that you could see from the sidewalk, and the shelter itself travelled fifty or so feet under the low hill that rose to the adjacent street the next block over.
We cut across the field and wrenched open the loose plywood and descended the concrete steps. Thomas struck one of the matches he had with him that day—he always carried matches, in case we found a package that still had one or two unsmoked cigarettes in it, and to bombard the helpless pigeons nested under the bridge with—and turned in a slow circle and whistled. I told him there’d be no echo here, it was too small, and he said he was whistling for hobos, not echoes—he just wanted to let them know we were here. You wouldn’t want to surprise a hobo out of his sleep, would you? he said. You had to be careful with their lot, what with the knives and diseases they carried.
The space was as long and wide as a school bus. There were benches along the lengths of the walls and a small cabinet, empty now, that might have contained medical supplies and provisions. The ceiling was low and there were smaller, locked doors that led off to who-knew-where.
“Everyone in here would burn like a marshmallow if there was ever a war,” Thomas said. “They put these here just to make you feel safe—just like those fake reports after the inspectors leave.”
“Even this deep?” I said. We might have been fifteen feet underground. I’d believed what we’d always been told about the effectiveness of these shelters.
“From the detonation, maybe, if it’s far enough away,” he said. “Like Toronto or Hamilton. But the radiation creeps into your bones and melts you from inside. Just like those people down at Blind Man’s Alley.” He swore and dropped the match when the flame touched his fingers. “And the bombs are stronger than they were. These shelters were built for 1944 bombs. They were nothing compared to now.”
MY FATHER HAD A worried expression on his face when he got home from work that afternoon. He didn’t ask us about our day or tousle my hair the way he often did. He sat at the kitchen table holding a full glass of water and watched our mother working at the kitchen sink. There was something going on between them. I took an apple from the fruit bowl beside the fridge and sat down and ate it. After a time he got up and crossed the kitchen and turned down the stove and said he needed to see her upstairs. They did this when there was something important to talk about. On one occasion they’d shut themselves in their bedroom to discuss an issue, and when my mother came back downstairs her eyes were red and puffy, and my father walked nervously about the house for the rest of the evening. I had no doubt that they’d convened to speak about us slipping out of the house in the middle of the night. One or both of them had heard us, I thought, and they’d let us know that our lies would not go unpunished.
After a short time in their bedroom my mother, dry-eyed as if nothing had happened, came back downstairs, and my father shut himself in the bathroom to scrub away the day’s work the way he usually did. When he was finished he sat on the front steps and watched Thomas and me kick the soccer ball around in the field across the street. I’d cleared out of the house to tell my brother that something was going on between our mom and dad. I said I thought they knew what we’d been up to. They didn’t know a thing about it, he said. I tried to act as if I wasn’t worried. From across the way I couldn’t see the expression on my father’s face as he sat on the steps, but more and more it was clear that something was wrong. He went back inside twice, returning again to sit and shake his head, as if to say that nothing of this made any sense to him.
He was wearing a fresh white T-shirt and grey slacks that afternoon. I smelled only the grass beneath our feet and the early summer and the vague tang of the lake three blocks south, but I knew he’d be wearing the light cologne he liked to put on after his bath and shaving. There was a time, not so long before then, when I would often soap and scrub his back as he sat in the tub, and afterwards watch him shave his face with the heavy flair-tip razor that opened like a claw. As he carved the white lather from his chin and sideburns and upper lip he liked to tell me about the crane he operated at the shipyard, or the flame-cutter that parted two-inch steel like butter, or how sometimes he climbed Tarzan-like on the ten-storey maze of scaffolding that encased a ship as it grew in its various stages of construction. These were wonderful things to hear. The names of the machines and tools he talked about thrilled me, though half the time I didn’t know what these things were supposed to do. It was a mark of his confidence in me that he spoke of come-alongs, shackles, and hydraulic cylinders as easily as he did, and I was content to accept the secret function of these devices as a mystery better left unsolved.
Now, he sat on the front porch steps shaking his head in what appeared to be disbelief or disgust. I had no idea what was coming. I wondered if I’d be able to tell the lie my brother wanted me to tell—that we’d not left the house last night or seen the convoy of interned labourers. We passed the ball back and forth between us, doing our best to pretend all was well, and finally our father got up and crossed the street and intercepted the ball we’d been kicking. He’d just turned forty that spring, still healthy, with the thick head of dark ha
ir that fell over his eyes when he leaned forward. He was a fit and handsome man and better with a soccer ball than either me or my brother. He flicked it up and held it under his arm and stared at us, waiting. I caught a whiff of his cologne. It was sweet and foreign-smelling, the one my mother said she liked best. I wondered if he’d put it on for her that afternoon.
His eyes were sharp and focused with worry. He was the sort of man who was willing to defend his home and family with a baseball bat, but could also appear to be as unsure and halting as he now seemed to me.
“Have you spoken to your mother yet?” he said.
The dread that had taken me subsided a little then. He was usually the one who dealt with the necessities of discipline in our family. If our mother needed to speak to us, perhaps the chosen course of action would be less than the strapping I felt coming. There might only be a lecture on the way, and some sort of grounding. She was softer on us when it came to this sort of thing, and I was pleased to think that it was her call.
“About what?” Thomas said.
“Your mother has some news for you both.”
His mood, sad until now, seemed to shift to a state of agitation. His jaw tensed and he motioned in the direction of the house with a tough jerk of his head. We followed him, soccer ball in hand, which we left on the porch, and found her setting the table in the falling light of our kitchen.
Her eyes were not red, which would have meant she’d been crying, but she looked different to me, ready for something, purposely composed. She straightened her apron and smiled when we came in. I couldn’t think of anything he’d be so disturbed or saddened by if it hadn’t bothered her in the same way it had him. My thoughts went to the death of a relative. We’d not seen our father’s parents in over a year—the three-hour drive to their town was difficult, the rationed gasoline hard to come by and too expensive on the black market—but certainly such a task would fall to him, not her. I supposed her brother back in Germany might be the issue. But she didn’t look upset. And no mail had come from Germany in months. There was no phone service between here and Europe, not for the likes of us. A telegram might have come, but, as I say, she didn’t look upset or emotional in a way that would lead you to think she’d heard any bad news.