Home Truths

by Mavis Gallant

  After McLaughlin had dressed and had swallowed a drink in the washroom – for he was sick and trembling after his holiday – he came and sat down opposite the blond girl. He did not bother to explain that he had to sit somewhere while his berth was being dismantled. His arms were covered with coarse red hair; he had rolled up the sleeves of his khaki shirt. He spread his pale, heavy hands on his knees. The child stood between them, fingertips on the sooty window sill, looking out at the breaking day. Once, the train stopped for a long time; the engine was being changed, McLaughlin said. They had been rolling north but were now turning west. At six o’clock, in about an hour, Dennis and his mother would have to get down, and onto another train, and go north once more. Dennis could not see any station where they were now. There was a swamp with bristling black rushes, red as ink. It was the autumn sunrise; cold, red. It was so strange to him, so singular, that he could not have said an hour later which feature of the scene was in the foreground or to the left or right. Two women wearing army battle jackets over their dresses, with their hair piled up in front, like his mother’s, called and giggled to someone they had put on the train. They were fat and dark – grinny. His mother looked at them with detestation, recognizing what they were; for she hated whores. She had always acted on the desire of the moment, without thought of gain, and she had taken the consequences (Dennis) without complaint. Dennis saw that she was hating the women, and so he looked elsewhere. On a wooden fence sat four or five men in open shirts and patched trousers. They had dull, dark hair, and let their mouths sag as though they were too tired or too sleepy to keep them closed. Something about them was displeasing to the child, and he thought that this was an ugly place with ugly people. It was also a dirty place; every time Dennis put his hands on the window sill they came off black.

  “Come down any time to see a train go by,” said McLaughlin, meaning those men. “Get up in the night to see a train.”

  The train moved. It was still dark enough outside for Dennis to see his face in the window and for the light from the windows to fall in pale squares on the upturned vanishing faces and on the little trees. Dennis heard his mother’s new friend say, “Well, there’s different possibilities.” They passed into an unchanging landscape of swamp and bracken and stunted trees. Then the lights inside the train were put out and he saw that the sky was blue and bright. His mother and McLaughlin, seen in the window, had been remote and bodiless; through their transparent profiles he had seen the yellowed trees going by. Now he could not see their faces at all.

  “He’s been back in Canada since the end of the war. He was wounded. Den hardly knows him,” he heard his mother say. “I couldn’t come. I had to wait my turn. We were over a thousand war brides on that ship. He was with Aluminium when he first came back.” She pronounced the five vowels in the word.

  “You’ll be all right there,” said McLaughlin. “It’s a big place. Schools. All company.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I mean it all belongs to Aluminum. Only if that’s where you’re going you happen to be on the wrong train.”

  “He isn’t there now. He hates towns. He seems to move about a great deal. He drives a bulldozer, you see.”

  “Owns it?” said McLaughlin.

  “Why, I shouldn’t think so. Drives for another man, I think he said.”

  The boy’s father fell into the vast pool of casual labor, drifters; there was a social hierarchy in the north, just as in Heaven. McLaughlin was an engineer. He took another look at the boy: black hair, blue eyes. The hair was coarse, straight, rather dull; Indian hair. The mother was a blonde; touched up a bit, but still blond.

  “What name?” said McLaughlin on the upward note of someone who has asked the same question twice.

  “Cameron. Donald Cameron.”

  That meant nothing, still; McLaughlin had worked in a place on James Bay where the Indians were named MacDonald and Ogilvie and had an unconquered genetic strain of blue eyes.

  “D’you know about any ghosts?” said the boy, turning to McLaughlin. McLaughlin’s eyes were paler than his own, which were a deep slate blue, like the eyes of a newly born child. McLaughlin saw the way he held his footing on the rocking train, putting out a few fingers to the window sill only for the form of the thing. He looked all at once ridiculous and dishonored in his cheap English clothes – the little jacket, the Tweedledum cap on his head. He outdistanced his clothes; he was better than they were. But he was rushing on this train into an existence where his clothes would be too good for him.

  “D’you know about any ghosts?” said the boy again.

  “Oh, sure,” said McLaughlin, and shivered, for he still felt sick, even though he was sharing a bottle with the Limey bride. He said, “Indians see them,” which was as close as he could come to being crafty. But there was no reaction out of the mother; she was not English for nothing.

  “You seen any?”

  “I’m not an Indian,” McLaughlin started to say; instead he said, “Well, yes. I saw the ghost, or something like the ghost, of a dog I had.”

  They looked at each other, and the boy’s mother said, “Stop that, you two. Stop that this minute.”

  “I’ll tell you a strange thing about Dennis,” said his mother. “It’s this. There’s times he gives me the creeps.”

  Dennis was lying on the seat beside her with his head on her lap.

  She said, “If I don’t like it I can clear out. I was a waitress. There’s always work.”

  “Or find another man,” McLaughlin said. “Only it won’t be me, girlie. I’ll be far away.”

  “Den says that when the train stopped he saw a lot of elves,” she said, complaining.

  “Not elves – men,” said Dennis. “Some of them had mattresses rolled up on their backs. They were little and bent over. They were talking French. They were going up north.”

  McLaughlin coughed and said, “He means settlers. They were sent up on this same train during the depression. But that’s nine, ten years ago. It was supposed to clear the unemployed out of the towns, get them off relief. But there wasn’t anything up here then. The winters were terrible. A lot of them died.”

  “He couldn’t know that,” said Mum edgily. “For that matter, how can he tell what is French? He’s never heard any.”

  “No, he couldn’t know. It was around ten years ago, when times were bad.”

  “Are they good now?”

  “Jeez, after a war?” He shoved his hand in the pocket of his shirt, where he kept a roll, and he let her see the edge of it.

  She made no comment, but put her hand on Den’s head and said to him, “You didn’t see anyone. Now shut up.”

  “Sor ’em,” the boy said in a voice as low as he could descend without falling into a whisper.

  “You’ll see what your Dad’ll give you when you tell lies.” But she was halfhearted about the threat and did not quite believe in it. She had been attracted to the scenery, whose persistent sameness she could no longer ignore. “It’s not proper country,” she said. “It’s bare.”

  “Not enough for me,” said McLaughlin. “Too many people. I keep on moving north.”

  “I want to see some Indians,” said Dennis, sitting up.

  “There aren’t any,” his mother said. “Only in films.”

  “I don’t like Canada.” He held her arm. “Let’s go home now.”

  “It’s the train whistle. It’s so sad. It gets him down.”

  The train slowed, jerked, flung them against each other, and came to a stop. It was quite day now; their faces were plain and clear, as if drawn without shading on white paper. McLaughlin felt responsible for them, even compassionate; the change in him made the boy afraid.

  “We’re getting down, Den,” said his Mum, with great, wide eyes. “We take another train. See? It’ll be grand. Do you hear what Mum’s telling you?”

  He was determined not to leave the train, and clung to the window sill, which was too smooth and narrow to provide a grip; McLaughlin h
ad no difficulty getting him away. “I’ll give you a present,” he said hurriedly. But he slapped all his pockets and found nothing to give. He did not think of the money, and his watch had been stolen in Montreal. The woman and the boy struggled out with their baggage, and McLaughlin, who had descended first so as to help them down, reached up and swung the boy in his arms.

  “The Indians!” the boy cried, clinging to the train, to air; to anything. His face was momentarily muffled by McLaughlin’s shirt. His cap fell to the ground. He screamed, “Where’s Mum? I never saw anything!”

  “You saw Indians,” said McLaughlin. “On the rail fence, at that long stop. Look, don’t worry your mother. Don’t keep telling her what you haven’t seen. You’ll be seeing plenty of everything now.”

  Orphans’ Progress

  When the Collier girls were six and ten they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father’s mother. Their grandmother was scrupulous about food, particularly for these underfed children, and made them drink goat’s milk. Two goats bought specially to supply the orphans were taken by station wagon to a buck fifty miles away, the girls accompanying them for reasons of enlightenment. A man in a filling station was frightened by the goats, because of their oblong eyes. The girls were not reflected in the goats’ eyes, as they were in each other’s. What they remembered afterwards of their grandmother was goat’s milk, goat eyes, and the frightened man.

  They went to school in Ontario now, with children who did not have the same accent as children in Montreal. When their new friends liked something they said it was smart. A basketball game was smart, so was a movie: it did not mean elegant, it just meant all right. Ice cream made out of goat’s milk was not smart: it tasted of hair.

  Their grandmother died when the girls were seven and eleven and beginning to speak in the Ontario way. Their mother had been French-Canadian – they were now told – but had spoken French and English to them. They had called her Mummy, a habit started when their father was still alive, for he had not learned French. They understood, from their grandmother, and their grandmother’s maid, and the social worker who came to see their grandmother but had little to say to them, that French was an inferior kind of speech. At first, when they were taken away from their mother, Cathie, the elder girl, would wake up at night holding her head, her elbows on her knees, saying in French, “My head hurts,” but a few minutes later, the grandmother having applied cold wrung-out towels, she would say in English, “It’s better.”

  Mildred had pushed out two front teeth by sucking her thumb. She had been doing that forever, even before they were taken away from their mother. Ontario could not be blamed. Nevertheless, their grandmother told the social worker about it, who wrote it down.

  They did not know, and never once asked, why they had been taken away. When the new social worker said to Cathie, “Were you disturbed because your mother was unhappy?” Cathie said, “She wasn’t.” When the girls were living with their mother, they knew that sometimes she listened and sometimes could not hear; nevertheless, she was there. They slept in the same bed, all three. Even when she sat on the side of the bed with her head hanging and her undone jagged-cut hair hiding her eyes, mumbling complaints that were not their concern, the children were close to her and did not know they were living under what would be called later “unsheltered conditions.” They never knew, until told, that they were uneducated and dirty and in danger. Now they learned that their mother never washed her own neck and that she dressed in layers of woollen stuff, covered with grease, and wore men’s shoes because some man had left them behind and she liked the shape or the comfort of them. They did not know, until they were told, that they had never been properly fed.

  “We ate chicken,” said Cathie Collier, the elder girl.

  “They say she served it up half raw,” said their grandmother’s maid. “Survet” said the maid for “served,” and that was not the way their mother had spoken. “The sheets was so dirty, the dirt was like clay. All of yez slept in the one bed,” said the maid.

  “Yes, we slept together.” The apartment – a loft, they were told, over a garage; not an apartment at all – must still exist, it must be somewhere, with the piano that Mildred, the little one, had banged on with her palms flat. What about the two cats who were always fighting or playing, depending on their disposition? There were pictures on the wall, their mother’s, and the children’s own drawings.

  “When one of the pictures was moved there was a square mass of bugs,” said the grandmother’s maid. “The same shape as the pitcher.”

  “To the day I die,” said the social worker from Montreal to her colleague in Ontario, “I won’t forget the screams of Mildred when she was dragged out of that pigsty.” This was said in the grandmother’s parlor, where the three women – the two social workers, and the grandmother – sat with their feet freezing on the linoleum floor. The maid heard, and told. She had been in and out, serving coffee, coconut biscuits, and damson preserves in custard made of goat’s milk. The room was heated once or twice a year: even the maid said her feet were cold. But “To the day I die” was a phrase worth hearing. She liked the sound of that, and said it to the children. The maid was from a place called Waterloo, where, to hear her tell it, no one behaved strangely and all the rooms were warm.

  Thumb-sucker Mildred did not remember having screamed, or anything at all except the trip from Montreal by train. “Boy, is your grandmother ever a rich old lady!” said the maid from Waterloo. “If she wasn’t, where’d you be? In an orphung asylum. She’s a Christian, I can tell you.” But another day, when she was angry with the grandmother over something, she said, “She’s a damned old sow. It’s in the mattress and she’s lying on it. You can hear the bills crackle when you turn the mattress Saturdays. I hope they find it when she dies, is all I can say.”

  The girls saw their grandmother dead, in the bed, on that mattress. The person crying hardest in the room was the maid. She had suddenly dyed her hair dark red, and the girls did not know her, because of her tears, and her new clothes, and because of the way she fondled and kissed them. “We’ll never see each other again,” said the maid.

  Now that their grandmother had died, the girls went to live with their mother’s brother and his wife and their many children. It was a suburb of Montreal called Ahuntsic. They did not see anything that reminded them of Montreal, and did not recall their mother. There was a parlor here full of cut glass, which was daily rubbed and polished, and two television sets, one for the use of the children. The girls slept on a pull-out divan and wrangled about bedclothes. Cathie wanted them pushed down between them in a sort of trough, because she felt a draft, but Mildred complained that the blankets thus arranged were tugged away from her side. She was not properly covered and afraid of falling on the floor. One of their relations (they had any number here on their mother’s side) made them a present of a box of chocolate almonds, but the cousins they lived with bought exactly the same box, so as to tease them. When Cathie and Mildred rushed to see if their own box was still where they had hidden it, they were bitterly mocked. Their Ontario grandmother’s will was not probated and every scrap of food they put in their mouths was taken from the mouths of cousins: so they were told. Their cousins made them afraid of ghosts. They put out the lights and said, “Look out, she is coming to get you, all in black,” and when Mildred began to whimper, Cathie said, “Our mother wouldn’t try to frighten us.” She had not spoken of her until now. One of the cousins said, “I’m talking about your old grandmother. Your mother isn’t dead.” They were shown their father’s grave, and made to kneel and pray. Their lives were in the dark now, in the dark of ghosts, whose transparent shadows stood round their bed; soon they lived in the black of nuns. Language was black, until they forgot their English. Until they spoke French, nothing but French, the family pretended not to understand them, and stared as if they were peering in the dark. They very soon f
orgot their English.

  They could not stay here with these cousins forever, for the flat was too small. When they were eight and twelve, their grandmother’s will was probated and they were sent to school. For the first time in their lives, now, the girls did not sleep in the same bed. Mildred slept in a dormitory with the little girls, where a green light burned overhead, and a nun rustled and prayed or read beside a green lamp all night long. Mildred was bathed once every fortnight, wearing a rubber apron so that she would not see her own body. Like the other little girls, she dressed, in the morning, sitting on the floor, so that they would not see one another. Her thumb, sucked white, was taped to the palm of her hand. She caught glimpses of Cathie sometimes during recreation periods, but Cathie was one of the big girls, and important. She did not play, as the little ones still did, but walked up and down with the supervisor, walking backwards as the nun walked forward.

  One day, looking out of a dormitory window, Mildred saw a rooftop and an open skylight. She said to a girl standing nearby, “That’s our house.” “What house?” “Where Mummy lives.” She said that sentence, three words, in English. She had not thought or spoken “Mummy” since she was six and a half. It turned out that she was lying about the house. Lying was serious; she was made to promenade through the classrooms carrying a large pair of shears and the sign “I am a liar.” She did not know the significance of the shears, nor, it seemed, did the nun who organized the punishment. It had always been associated with lying, and (the nun suddenly remembered) had to do with cutting out the liar’s tongue. The tattling girl, who had told about “Where Mummy lives,” was punished too, and made to carry a wastebasket from room to room with “I am a basket-carrier” hung round her neck. This meant a tale-bearer. Everyone was in the wrong.