The Old World and Other Stories

by Cary Fagan

  And then there was the younger sister. People paid lip service, they took her hand and asked how she was holding up but took no real notice of her. At least that’s what I thought. I’d had time to think about my earlier feelings for the older one and now saw them as a sort of narcissistic fantasy. I vowed not to be so naive about myself again.

  HER: I didn’t talk about my sister to anyone, except the school counsellor because I had to. I told her what she wanted to hear, but was any of it true? Not in the way I said, because it was far worse. At first I thought there was a big hole in me, an emptiness that could never be filled. But slowly I realized it wasn’t empty because the whole universe was pouring into me.

  Visitors came. They brought casseroles, salads. I sat in a chair and smiled and didn’t hear my own voice. He came with his father. I didn’t know him well, although I’d seen him now and again for years, ever since we were both young. He was two years older than me. Of course I knew that he had been infatuated with my sister. In all those years I don’t think he ever talked to me other than to say hello just to be polite.

  And then one afternoon, when the house was quiet, he said, “Shall we play something?” We had a pile of all the usual board games. They’d sat on a shelf beneath the end table for years, unused.

  HIM: I could only imagine how painful and yet deadly boring these visits were for her. It wasn’t that I liked games; in fact I’d always been bad at them, which was strange considering my math skills. She looked at me and said, “Why not?” and we just grabbed the first box and began to set up the board. I watched her play, watched her eyes and the slight movement of her mouth. She was quick-witted and also wanted to win. I decided not to let her, but I lost anyway.

  HER: Even after the mourning period was over, he would come with his father. And we would pick a game at random and play and talk in low voices. He really wasn’t very good at any game. He spoke slowly, thoughtfully, and if he made a joke it was so understated that I didn’t get it for a moment. But when I did, I laughed. One day I asked myself whether he was handsome. I couldn’t make up my mind so I decided that he was.

  HIM: I began to say to my father, “Do you think we should pay a visit?” And when he decided that it was time to stop, that the family needed to be left alone, I began to go by myself.

  HER: When spring came he asked if I wanted to take a walk. And the next week he asked if I wanted to go out with him and some of his friends from university. I wasn’t interested in the boys in my grade so I said sure. We went to a café where we drank strong coffee and talked about what they were studying. There were heated arguments about politics and music and novels. I began to read the books they talked about so that I could join in. They treated me like an adult. They agreed with me or told me I was absolutely wrong or called me an idealist.

  He always listened to me and thought before replying. I could see that he wasn’t afraid to be swayed by my point of view. One day a friend asked him about his studies. He was going to have to focus exclusively on the sciences next year if he wanted to go into research. He would even have to dissect a cadaver.

  “You’ll be able to see into the human heart,” someone joked.

  “The heart is just a muscle,” I said.

  HIM: “The heart is just a muscle,” she said.

  “Yes,” I responded, “but an important one.”

  HER: He formally asked me out. Over time we became a couple, but we still went out with his friends. I began university and became preoccupied with my own studies. But we always had time for each other. We talked about my parents, and his father. We knew that we would have to find our own way.

  A year went by, another started. And then I waited for him to ask me, worrying about his tendency to be passive, to hope rather than do. But if he couldn’t find the courage, I thought, then to hell with him!

  HIM: I went to her door. I’d never been so nervous in my life. Despite knowing her so well, I couldn’t be sure of her answer. And then she opened the door and I looked into her eyes and couldn’t speak. A plane appeared overhead, on its way to the airport. I waited for it to pass, and then still I couldn’t get a word out.

  HER: I said, “I already know the question, but you still have to ask.”

  HIM: I laughed. And I asked her. And when she answered I told myself not ever to forget what I felt at that moment.

  HER: I said, “I want a simple wedding. And a nice picture.”

  WHERE WE ARE NOW

  It has not been easy to track down my former classmates, all these years later. Some, of course, I have continued to be acquainted with into adulthood. Others I have heard about through relatives. Some have made return visits (occasionally in a casket). I have come across articles in newspapers. Here, then, is a record of what has happened to us.

  Elizabeth Ghero. Married the third son of the farm family next to her own. Bore seven children, raised prize chickens, put her sister into the county mental institution, buried her husband and remains still in the house, although the fields around her have gone to grass.

  Alice Bailey. A class favourite, she was known for her fine sewing and became a seamstress with a fitting room above the lawyer’s office. Married classmate Lymon Young who became a drinker, unable to hold down a job, and who emptied their cigar box of savings before getting on an eastbound train never to return. Seven years later Alice was able to have him declared legally dead, and she married another classmate, Lloyd Carley, even though he’d had polio and walks with crutches. Alice remains the best seamstress for eighty miles.

  Henry Read. Struck by lightning at age seventeen while walking home from a rained-out baseball game. None the worse except for a white streak in his hair, he later became the well-known senator Henry “Lightning” Read, only to have his reputation tarnished by the Gorham Bridge scandal, about which he maintains his innocence.

  Daniel Zorn. Died of the influenza.

  Hilary Wright. Died of the influenza.

  Donald Martin. Died of the influenza.

  Celery Tompkins. Another farmer’s wife, with twelve children (all surviving), grown senile now and living with the family of the second oldest, where she sits in a rocker on the porch and every so often says, “Never had a minute to myself, never had a minute.”

  Paul Buchanon. A wild boy who preferred hunting and fishing and trapping to book learning, he left school early and lived in a shack in the woods. One winter got his own foot caught in an iron trap he was setting and had to saw it off, afterwards packing the bloody stump with snow so he could drag himself the seven miles to town. Didn’t change his life much.

  Chancey Darling. Agricultural college, then an insurance job in which he spent his time trying to deny the compensation claims of farmers. He was the first person to drive an automobile along the town’s main street. He parked the car in front of Matilda’s Home Cooking for a piece of lemon meringue pie and when he came out again discovered that someone had shat on the driver’s seat.

  Matilda Oswin. Opened her own restaurant (see above) and then partnered with a businessman from the east to sell jars of jellied pig’s feet using her recipe. Everyone said he would swindle her out of every last penny, but she is now the richest person in town and living in a mansion up on Norgate Hill. As a “companion” she took in another classmate, Dorothy Hall, known for her extreme shyness, and what the two of them get up to is nobody’s business.

  Milton Phar. Joined the army, killed at Verdun.

  Walter Lowry. Joined the army, killed at the Somme.

  Derek Enderby. Joined the army, survived, opened a tavern called Three Friends where he still tends bar.

  Margo Nott. The oldest girl in the school, and known for being deeply religious. Surprised everyone by running off with the photographer who took the class picture. Her mama cried for a week while her father went looking for her. But when he found them (asleep in a hotel room), the “deed” was done. She
and the photographer opened a studio in Chicago and, due to the World Exhibition, were very successful for several years until the Depression ruined the business.

  William Lintz. Killed by a horse at age thirty-two.

  Augustus Norham. Became the town’s telegraph operator. One morning an overheard piece of gossip alerted him to the illicit relationship between his wife and a former classmate, Luke Tasnig. Left his post, found Luke having a piece of lemon meringue pie at Matilda’s Home Cooking, and shot him in the head. Miraculously Luke survived. Augustus was convicted of attempted murder and served three years in the penitentiary. During that time he began to write Western novels, one of which was turned into a moving picture starring Ward Bond.

  Luke Tasnig. After surviving a pistol wound to the head (see above), he became a Methodist preacher. Continues to preach at tent revivals.

  Georgina Osborne. Moved, if rumours are to be believed, to Peru.

  Robert Horne. Became a lawyer, then a judge. Gave Augustus Norham his lenient sentence, some say because Justice Horne had been picked on after school by Luke Tasnig.

  Theodore Smith. Remembered in school for screeching on a fiddle whenever he got a chance, he became an energetic musician, often playing for dances. As a member of Smith’s Sodbusters he found fame as a radio performer, also recording a number of 78 records. He eventually returned to farming but will still pick up his fiddle if anyone asks.

  Blanche Higart. Married classmate Lawrence Baldwin who went to work at the distillery. Blanche had three boys, all of whom enlisted in the second great war. The eldest was lost to a U-boat while crossing the English Channel. The middle one died in the Battle of the Java Sea, and the third on the beach at Normandy. Blanche and Lawrence considered their life over, but then Blanche — her hair by then completely grey — became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter.

  The histories of the rest are still unknown, classmates spread far and wide in this great world of ours. I hope to publish further updates in the future, at least until I myself am no longer capable of holding a pen or writing a coherent sentence, or when my own candle has burned to the end. And yet when we are gone, our children and their children will go on. All we can do is hope that the memory of our own time here on earth will be kept alight for a little while.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My great thanks to Sarah MacLachlan for her continuing support. To Janice Zawerbny for saying yes. To Melanie Little, for being a writer’s dream of an editor. And to absolutely everyone at Anansi.

  Thanks also to Rebecca Comay for being the first, best reader, and to Sophie Fagan and Yoyo Comay-Newman for sampling and giving their thumbs up.

  Last, I humbly acknowledge and thank the unknown photographers and their subjects.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Author photo: © Mark Raynes Roberts

  CARY FAGAN has written several critically acclaimed books, including A Bird’s Eye, finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; My Life Among the Apes, long­listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Valentine’s Fall, finalist for the Toronto Book Award. He has also written many popular books for children, for which he has won the Vicki Metcalf Award for Children’s Literature and the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award. He lives in Toronto.

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”