KCP Fiction is an imprint of Kids Can Press.
ISBN 978-1-77138-098-0 (eBook)
Text © 2008 John Ibbitson
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of Kids Can Press Ltd. or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
This is a work of fiction and any resemblance of characters to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Kids Can Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative; the Ontario Arts Council; the Canada Council for the Arts; and the Government of Canada, through the CBF, for our publishing activity.
Published in Canada by
Kids Can Press Ltd.
25 Dockside Drive
Toronto, ON M5A 0B5
Published in the U.S. by
Kids Can Press Ltd.
2250 Military Road
Tonawanda, NY 14150
www.kidscanpress.com
Edited by Sheila Barry
Designed by Marie Bartholomew
Main cover image © 2008 Jupiterimages Corporation
Spot image of violin © 2008 Shutterstock Images
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Ibbitson, John
The Landing / John Ibbitson.
ISBN 978-1-55453-234-6 (bound). ISBN 978-1-55453-238-4 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8567.B34W38 2008 jC813’.54 C2007-906083-8
The Landing
A Novel by John Ibbitson
KCP Fiction
An Imprint of Kids Can Press
For Nola, who stayed
Contents
Prelude
The Haircut
Ruth Chapman
Sibelius
A Party
Limits
Fall
The Waome
Chaconne
Historical Note
A Note from the Author
Prelude
She had given him a bath, even though it wasn’t Saturday, and dressed him in his best clothes and pressed down his hair as best she could. His father had grumbled into his Sunday suit, and she was in the white dress with the pink and yellow flowers, so this was something special.
“I don’t need to go,” his father muttered again, half-grinning.
“Yes, you do,” she repeated, half-grinning back.
“Well, let’s go then.”
His father was wonderfully tall and terribly strong and wise in all things, and he took the boy’s hand while his mother opened the back door, which was the only one they really used, and they stepped into the cool spring evening.
The sun had set, but only just, with the sky still light and kids still chasing each other from yard to yard, as they walked past mostly white-painted wood-frame houses — though the Timson place was brick, “ ’cause they’ve made money,” as his father had once explained — and his mother took his other hand as an old jalopy wheezed past. The boy wanted to take a ride in a car so bad. “Some day,” his father had promised, but not yet.
They turned onto the main street, the stores locked and dark, the awnings rolled up, the sidewalks night-empty, until they got to the south end, where they met other people heading toward the Opera House.
The boy didn’t know that it was too grand a name for a hall so small, in a town so small, where not a living soul had ever seen an opera, or wanted to. He knew his grandfather had helped build it. “They built it after the town burned,” his father had told him the first time he’d been there, “to show we weren’t licked.” The boy wished his grandfather was alive. He had never known him. He must have been very strong.
“Is it Santa Claus?” the boy asked, suddenly excited, for he had been here once with other children and their parents, and Santa Claus had given him a little toy truck that he still played with.
“No, silly,” his mother laughed. “Christmas isn’t for a long time.”
And he noticed that there weren’t many other children as they climbed the creaking stairs.
The hall was bigger even than their church, and the ceiling even higher and the wooden seats even more uncomfortable than church pews. There were two big brass lights — chandeliers, his father had told him on Santa Claus day — to warm the wooden walls, and a stage brightly lit at the far end, set up high so that everybody could see. The hall was already mostly filled, especially at the back — like church, again — so they made their way to the front and edged past the knees till they found three seats in the middle.
“Now you have to be still and not make any noise,” his mother told him, just like she told him in church, where she’d press down on his leg if he squirmed too much — her warning that there would be no dessert later if he didn’t behave, though there always was.
So maybe it was church in the middle of the week, which he didn’t like the thought of, because he was getting more church than he needed already, and he began to feel cross.
But then men started to walk onto the stage, and they were dressed like nothing he had ever seen before, in black jackets that were cut off at the front at their waist but hung down at the back to their knees, and they had on white bow ties, of all things, and they carried things with them, and when they sat down, they began to blow into them and saw on them and hit them with sticks, making the most God-wonderful noise, and he grinned and clapped his hands.
“They’re just warming up,” his father explained, which made no sense at all because it was already quite warm, in fact he wanted to take his jacket off, and guessed his father did, too.
Then they stopped, and everyone fell silent, and the brass chandeliers went dark, and a fat little man walked onto the stage holding a thin little stick, and everybody started clapping, as though he’d done something.
He bowed to the audience, showing the bald spot in the middle of his black curls, and turned his back on everyone and raised the stick and —
Golly!
He had heard music before, of course. Hymns in church, and tunes his father whistled and his mother hummed. But this music washed over and around him, surrounded him, swirled past him, his pulse racing to catch up. All these men, making all this noise, all together, all at once, with this fat little man waving his stick, leading them on. The sound poured into his chest and up and down his spine, dark as chocolate and fast as horses and glorious, glorious. He had no idea what the music was called and neither did his parents and neither did just about anyone else in the crowd. But while the rest of them cocked their heads and listened, smiles of interest and enjoyment fixed or slipping, this boy was drowning, gasping, coming up for air, diving back in, wanting to drown.
His father looked down at him and nodded to his mother, who looked down as well. He was leaning forward, breath frozen, his eyes unblinking, his hands clenching his knee.
“Like it?” his father asked, but the boy didn’t hear, heard only the music accelerating, growing louder still, unbearable, making him want to yell back at it, until it smashed to a stop, leaving only an echo in the sudden silence.
People applauded, but the boy didn’t applaud. He clambered onto his seat, his eyes locked on the stage, trying to see, but he couldn’t see because the people in front had stood up, still clapping, and he looked at his fat
her in desperation, and his father laughed and grabbed him around the waist and hoisted him into the air until he was taller than anyone in the crowd.
The fat little man was bowing again, and all the other men were standing, holding their instruments, smiling and nodding. The boy wanted to touch them, wanted to be with them, wanted to know their magic more than he had ever wanted anything.
The conductor noticed him, this boy in the fourth row being held in the air by his father. Their eyes met. The boy stopped breathing, forgot even his father, held out his arms, beseeching.
The conductor smiled, and bowed to him. A private bow, a private smile. A salute. Welcome.
And then he straightened quickly, nodded to his players and left the stage, and left the boy amazed.
The Haircut
D, E, F-sharp, G, A —
“Damn.”
The A sounded sick. More like A-flat, or A- squished. It was the tuning peg. It just wouldn’t hold the tension in the A string anymore. Ben gave it a quick half-turn and tried again. Becky cackled her complaint.
Ben didn’t enjoy practicing in the toolshed any more than Becky enjoyed sitting through endless scales on a beat-up violin that wouldn’t stay in tune. But Becky didn’t have a choice, and neither did Ben. The other hens had taken a dislike to Becky, and so she had been moved to the toolshed to keep peace. Henry hated the sound of the violin, wouldn’t have it in the house. The toolshed was twenty yards from the house, though, and Henry’s bedroom was on the other side, facing the lake, so if Ben got up early enough, he could squeeze in among the rakes and shovels and hoes and baskets and milk canisters — and Becky — and practice for an hour in the stuffy, heating air until Henry was ready for breakfast, when he would yell,
“Enough!”
Ben slipped the fiddle into a battered and cracked wooden case, grabbed a basket and collected Becky’s egg, which had arrived with the squished A. Then he ducked into the henhouse, where other hens chirped and squawked as he took their eggs from them.
“Morning, Olivia. Morning, Sally. Morning, Elizabeth …” The fact that Ben’s mother gave the hens names drove Henry to swearing. But she was fond of the hens and named them, and that’s all there was to it.
Six this morning, not bad. There’d be a few more before noon. Some lucky cottager would buy the surplus. The cottagers were always asking if there were fresh eggs for sale.
But Celia wasn’t laying anymore; she’d be stew soon. Ben didn’t like it when a hen became stew, though he liked the stew well enough.
“Ben, where are the eggs?”
“Coming.”
She was in the summer kitchen, which was really just an extra stove out on the screened porch where breezes swept away the heat. On a hot day like this, the stove in the kitchen could turn the house into a sweatbox.
“Thanks, son.” She smiled at him. There had been a time when that smile was the most important thing in his life, his only anchor, but he was fifteen now, and he had other things on his mind. She smiled at him anyway, whenever she saw him, even though he never smiled back anymore.
Ben’s mom began cracking eggs sharply into a cast-iron pan where the bacon was already spitting, while Ben ran upstairs to his bedroom, shoved the violin under the bed and tucked in the sheets. He hadn’t slept well — it was only late June, but a July heat hung over everything, and he had struggled through the humid night thinking about the violin, about whether he was getting anywhere with it, about how to find enough money for a better one. He knew there wasn’t enough money; there never would be, though that didn’t help him get to sleep.
The smell of the bacon got him back downstairs and into the kitchen, where Henry was already bent over the table, staring at his coffee. Ben poured himself a cup, adding a bit of milk from the icebox, even though Henry thought everyone should drink their coffee black, because he did. Ben didn’t know if he put milk in his coffee because he liked it or because Henry didn’t.
“You didn’t set the table.”
“I know.” Ben gulped a mouthful of coffee and then grabbed the knives and forks. Though you’d think Henry could do it himself, just once.
Most people called Henry Hank, but Ben’s mother didn’t, and Ben didn’t. The day they moved in, Ben had called him Uncle Henry, but he just scowled. “Henry’s good enough for me.”
That was six years ago, after his father died, after Mom moved back to her old home, where her brother Henry was the only one left because the others had all gone to their reward or Saskatchewan. Henry never smiled, never had a good word. He seemed to resent everything in his life — the half a farm they farmed, the half a life they lived, Ben’s violin, Ben. Henry and Ben were pretty much at war now, the two of them, though they rarely spoke and never raised their voices. The war was fought in the silences.
“Ben,” his mother called.
He walked quickly out to the summer kitchen, where three plates were heaped with eggs and bacon and toast. It was the same every morning, except when there was no bacon — it cost money to fatten up a pig — but the eggs had just been laid, and Henry had butchered and cured the pig himself, and his mom had made the bread. It was fine.
Balancing the three plates, Ben walked carefully back to the kitchen while his mom poured hot water into the pan to let it soak. She joined them at the table, and they ate silently, as always. Then they waited, as always, until Henry was ready to declare Ben’s agenda: “Need you to weed the patch this morning.” “Need you to clean out the barn.” “Want you to take some supplies over to the Weismillers.”
They had twenty acres of hay and oats and turnips, all for the six cows, which gave milk that his mother churned into butter. There were a dozen hens, and a pig sometimes, and on the one patch of decent earth they grew vegetables for themselves and sold whatever they could spare.
But mostly they had a dock, which is why their place was known as Cook’s Landing, and why cottagers would roar up in their boats for gas and whatever milk or eggs or butter there was for sale. Henry bought the gas from the company in town, sold it to the cottagers and tried to make a living off the markup.
It had never been much. But since the Depression hit, it was even less. A lot of the cottages had closed up, people didn’t use their boats as much, and credit was hard to get in town. They kept themselves fed and paid their taxes, at least the ones they had to.
For once it was his mom, not Henry, who broke the morning’s silence.
“Jed’s sobered up. I want Ben to get a haircut.”
In town, which was forty minutes away by boat — at least their boat — everyone seemed to take either to religion or drink. That’s all that was left after the pioneers discovered their farms were good for nothing but pine trees and rocks. So there was the doctor who was always on the bottle and the doctor who was always quoting the Bible at you. There was the drunk dentist and the Baptist dentist. There was Claude, and there was Jed.
They owned a barbershop, where most of the time it was just Claude, a thin, pinched, sour little man who shaved every man’s head to within an inch of its life, leaving women to wince and vow they’d do it themselves next time. Jed, however, was a sculptor, who could subdue the unruliest mop and make a farmer look like a matinee idol, at least for a day, and whose sad gentleness made him scorned by some and pitied by others, because most of the time he was soused.
Jed never tried to cut hair when he was on a bender. He just took to his little, white-painted house out on the Jones Road and pulled the curtains and stayed in there for as many days or weeks as it took for him to work through whatever it was he worked through.
And then one day he’d reappear at his chair, beside the glowering Claude, and women would hurry their men to him, while there was still time.
“He doesn’t need a haircut, Mary,” Henry scowled, as he concentrated on sopping up the egg yolk with his toast.
“Yes, he does,
” his mother replied firmly. Ben knew she would win. On almost everything, Mary deferred to Henry, because this was his farm, and he had let her come back, and it wasn’t worth it to fight constantly with such a man. She only stood her ground on things that mattered — like letting Ben practice his violin, or making them all go to church on Sunday, except in the summer, and, today, having Jed cut her son’s hair.
“He can take the launch and pick up a bag of flour and some tea and — well, I’ve made a list.”
“I can see Ambrose.” Ben was sitting straight, watching the two of them attentively. Ambrose Heidman had taught Ben everything Ben hadn’t taught himself about the violin, and a chance to stop by and practice with him for an hour was gold.
“No, you can’t,” Henry snapped. “There’s too much to do on the island.”
Ben glowered and slumped. A trip into town, and no lesson. It wasn’t fair. Though Ben was painfully aware of how much there was to do on the island.
The message had come just two weeks ago. Someone had bought Pine Island. It was only a five-minute row from the Landing, an oblong strip of granite about a quarter mile from end to end, covered in white pine, mostly, though there was birch and maple, too, with a fine old cottage smack in the middle, mostly hidden by the trees. At least it had been fine when the Carlsons owned it, before the Crash, when they’d stopped coming and everyone knew the place was for sale, though no one wanted to buy.
But someone finally had — Americans, apparently, from New York — and they were arriving sometime around Dominion Day. They wanted the place fixed up and had wired up cash in advance. But there was a lot to fix, and most days Henry was too busy pumping gas or working on engines or caulking other people’s leaky boats to go over. So he’d left Ben to do it himself, and though Ben was strong for fifteen — wiry, his mother said, though Henry just called it skinny — the work left him drained at the end of the day. Henry had helped him patch the roof where it was leaking and replace the cracked panes of glass, but everything inside he’d done himself, cleaning out the mouse dirt, scrubbing the floors, washing the walls, which were lined in cedar, washing the windows with water and vinegar, scouring the stove, laying in wood for the stove and the fireplace — worst of all, getting the bird’s nest out of the chimney and scraping off the soot, which left him so filthy it took three swims and lye soap to get him clean.
The Landing Page 1