“Can I help, dear?” Mrs. Duff smiled down at her. You could see where the red dye in her hair was growing out, and the pale hair, mostly grey, ran like a swath of cotton along her centre part. Mrs. Duff was the only woman Irene knew who dyed her hair. Her mother said it was evidence that Mrs. Duff was cheap.
“I’m okay, I can do it.” Mrs. Duff sometimes made mistakes, and Irene couldn’t afford any more material if something went wrong.
“Well, I’ll just help you cut it out, dear. It’ll go faster with both of us working on it.” She pulled out her own pair of scissors. She kept smiling at Irene with her mouth full of small teeth. Irene knew she was trying to make her feel better because none of the other girls were working with her.
“Really, Mrs. Duff. I’d like to do it myself. It’s okay.” Irene fought the urge to pull the pattern away, to hug it to her chest.
“Nonsense, Irene. Many hands make light work.” She began to cut into the fabric. Irene began on her side, trying not to pull the fabric askew. It seemed such a silly thing to try to do, both working on one small piece of cloth. The transparency of the effort humiliated Irene and made her angry. She snipped away, the scissors clicking.
“Mrs. Duff, I can’t catch the thread in this smocking,” Violet called out.
“Just a minute, dear. I’m just finishing up here.”
“You can go ahead, Mrs. Duff. I can do this.”
“Almost done,” she said cheerily. “Almost done.” Irene and her teacher seemed in a race now, first one to the inseam. “Got it!” Mrs. Duff cried. “All done! There, now, didn’t we do that in record time! You get it pinned up and I’ll see a machine frees up for you, dear.”
Irene held up the pyjamas. Did the legs look uneven? Did one look too narrow at the bottom? Was it the one she’d cut or the one Mrs. Duff had? Was it ruined? No, please God, it couldn’t be ruined.
A few minutes of pinning and measuring did nothing to allay her fears. One leg was definitely narrower than the other. But maybe it wasn’t too bad. Maybe it wouldn’t show when it was done. When her turn came at the machine she hurried through the job, hoping that speed would help her meet success at the finish line before failure caught up with her.
She held up the nearly finished pyjamas. She had only to hem the bottoms and put the elastic in the waistband now. It didn’t look too bad. A little crooked, maybe, but not too bad.
Janet MacKenzie pointed and laughed. “Gee, Irene, you making those for somebody with a peg-leg?”
Irene’s face flamed and she snapped the material back down on the table before anyone else noticed. What was she thinking? Tears sprang to her eyes as she looked down at the ruined pants. One of the legs tapered so much toward the ankle that only someone footless could ever get their leg into it.
Violet Clark arched her eyebrow. “Can’t anyone in your family cut a straight line, or should I say walk a straight line?” Janet laughed, and so did Sue-Anne.
“That’s enough, Miss Clark!” said Mrs. Duff, who rushed over to see how bad the damage was. “Oh dear,” she said, holding them up again, which Irene wished she would not do. “Oh dear.”
Everyone in the room stared at her and the ruined pyjamas. Irene thought how everyone was probably thinking how useless she was and how maybe they were right not to trust her with scissors and she was probably just as crazy as the rest of her family. But she wasn’t. And she didn’t do this, anyway, she didn’t make this mess, and she was tired of having to cover up for everybody else. She glared at Mrs. Duff, who was trying to stretch the material and wouldn’t look back at her.
Irene looked around at the girls, some sniggering behind their hands, some openly laughing at her, and some, like Ebbie over there in the corner, looking sorry for her, and she was suddenly tired of that too. And all the things that she couldn’t say and wasn’t allowed to say. Who were these girls, some of whom were on relief, for crying out loud, and depended on vouchers for food and hand-me-down dresses and came to school with nothing but bread and ketchup for lunch? Some of these girls had fathers who didn’t work, fathers who’d run off and left them destitute, mothers who had “friends” that paid the rent. Who were they to make fun of her?
“Perhaps we could make shorty pyjamas,” said Mrs. Duff, once again ready to help by cutting Irene’s material.
Violet Clark laughed again, and without knowing really why, except that it was the only thing to do if she wasn’t going to start crying right then and there, Irene laughed along.
“You know what?” she found herself saying. “By the time he opens his presents, Dad’ll have so much whisky in him that they’ll probably look even. He’ll be, as they say, legless.” And then, since her family was not the only one with problems, she said, “Hey, Sue-Anne, maybe you want me to make a pair for your brother Bill?” For who here did not know that Bill Richmond could be found most every Friday and Saturday night weaving out of Rupert’s Tavern with a red-mouthed woman on his arm and all his pockets empty?
There was nothing but silence. Then there was a loud snort, and all eyes turned to Ebbie.
“Good one, ‘Reen. Good one,” she said as her eyes met Irene’s.
“Irene, I’m surprised at you,” said Mrs. Duff, although the slight upturn at the corner of her mouth told Irene it was not an entirely unpleasant surprise.
“I’ll take that, thanks, Mrs. Duff,” Irene said, and with one decisive snip she turned the pyjamas into knee-length shorts.
On Christmas morning her father said the pyjamas were quite splendid and her mother agreed and wore her apron all that day and the next before wrapping it in tissue paper and putting it away in a drawer. At dinner Margaret brought out the turkey, glazed to lacquered perfection, and they applauded and it made Irene want to cry, her mother looked so proud and happy. On New Year’s Eve her father went out and didn’t come back, her mother locked herself back in her room with a chair under the doorknob, and Irene made a resolution that this year, this very year, she would begin to say what was on her mind, now and again, and perhaps once in a while she would go out if her mother was sleeping, sit in the Allen Gardens with a book, even if her mother didn’t want her to. This year she would try, and things would be better.
1934
The two of them sit on stumps outside the mess hall, away from the stink of the open trench toilets. David whittles aimlessly at a small branch while the union man talks. The government provides nothing in the way of entertainment, no radios, no cards, no baseball, no books, so the talk is welcome, more so because the man speaking is passionate and intelligent. He is a labour organizer, so most of the men haven’t paid him much attention. Who cares about saving the world? they say. We ain’t got no world left to save. But now, after being in the relief camp for a couple of months, David is starting to think this guy has something. The union man calls himself Bob. Organizers are blacklisted and use an alias when they move from one camp to another. The man has smuggled in a copy of the union paper, “Relief Camp Worker.” David has taken a look at it. It makes some sense. Organize, it says. Don’t let them treat you like dogs.
“I only came up here ‘cause I was tired of getting kicked around in Vancouver,” David says. “They said we’d get fed and all.”
The union man pushes his hair back from a high widow’s peak and smiles. “So, you’d rather get kicked around up here, working for twenty cents a day laying rail? Why, do you know that men are hired from outside the camps and they’re making twenty-five cents an hour for the same work?”
“Guess the government figures these fine accommodations are worth something.”
“This place is worse than jail. Christ, we’re even dressed like convicts. Tarpaper shacks. Two men to a bunk. Mud floors in the wash shed. Food you wouldn’t feed a dog, and fourteen-hour days clearing land, breaking rocks and laying rail. It ain’t so much of a deal.”
“I’ve maybe had about enough of that guy McIntock,” David says. McIntock has an unpopular way of calling the men to work: “Okay, slave
s, off your asses. We’re cutting trail today.”
“Most men here don’t have too much spirit left in ‘em, but I’m thinking you do.” Bob looks at him closely. “Maybe we should both get out of here. You might be interested in doing a little organizing with me.”
“We’re a long way from nowhere to be talking about leaving.”
Like all the relief camps, this one is set back about twenty miles from the nearest railway line and a hundred miles from the nearest town.
“We could maybe hitch a lift to the rail yard with one of the supply trucks. Or walk. Either way, best to go before the weather turns.”
The next day they appear before the sergeant-major in charge, a fat man with a mole the size of a nickel on his cheek.
“Time for us to be leaving,” says Bob.
The sergeant-major doesn’t look up from his desk. “Nowhere for you to go, pal.”
“We’ll take our chances.”
“Bad idea. Go report for work before I lose my good mood.”
Bob says, “Just here to pick up our pay for the week. Five days. One dollar apiece. I’ll take mine in dimes if it’s all the same to you.”
David can’t help but smile.
“What’re you grinning at, asshole?” says the sergeant-major.
“So, I think I’ll take mine in quarters,” he says, because he feels brave. There is something about the union guy that makes him want to be better than he is. Proud again. A man.
“Ya think so, do you?”
“If it’s no trouble.” He can say this smiling, and not smugly, either, but just smiling because it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other what this man thinks of him, and this is a good feeling. It doesn’t matter, even, if he agrees to pay him what he is owed or not. Suddenly it is easy to stand tall, and he realizes only then how low his head had been hanging.
“Have to deduct your room and board, and those clothes you’re wearing. Seems to me we break even.”
“Seems to me I can break your neck,” says Bob, leaning over the desk.
“Riley, get your ass in here!” the sergeant-major calls.
The door opens and Big Riley comes in, slapping a nightstick against his leg.
“Trouble?”
“Naw. Get these two assholes fifty cents apiece. And the papers. They’re leaving.”
“You owe us a dollar each, Mac,” says Bob as Big Riley leaves.
“I owe you lazy Communist bastards nothing.” The sergeant-major stands up and goes nose to nose with Bob. “If I wanted to I could have Riley here throw you in lockup until you rot.”
“You’re not in the fucking army now, pal,” says Bob. “This isn’t a fascist state yet.”
Riley comes back and tosses four quarters on the table. Then he puts a sheet of paper in front of them each to sign.
“This here says that by leaving, you agree you’ll never apply for residence in a camp again, or for any kind of public assistance. Stay or starve. You got that?”
“Oh, yeah. Been getting it all along,” says Bob, snatching up the money.
“It’s your funeral, friend.”
“Surprised you don’t make us sign a request for voluntary deportation like you do the immigrant guys.”
“Get the fuck out of my camp.”
The supply trucks refuse to pick them up. They walk the twenty miles and then wait eighteen hours for a train going slow enough to come by.
“I sure am hungry,” David says when they’ve climbed onto the roof of a south-bound freight.
“Yeah,” says the man who calls himself Bob, handing him a slice of stale bread and a couple of slices of bologna. “Well, we’ll be a lot hungrier unless somebody gets on this car with some food and a sharing mind.”
No one does. It takes them two days to get to Vancouver. All along the ride, the man who calls himself Bob tells him about the labour struggle and the new world they’re trying to build, where a guy can get a fair deal. By they time they reach the city outskirts, he knows the man’s real name and considers him a friend. The first friend he’s had in a long, long time.
Part III
14
April 1936
It was Saturday, April 18. Douglas stood behind the soda counter, absently polishing the chrome seltzer dispenser and listening to the radio accounts of the attempted rescue of D. E. Robertson, Herman Magill and Alfred Scadding from a collapsed gold mine in Moose River, Nova Scotia. Robertson was the chief surgeon at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. The men had been inspecting the abandoned mine to determine whether it could be reopened when they were trapped at the 141-foot level by a catastrophic rock slide. They had been down there, in the rising water and the pitch black, for a week. Draegermen, the local miners specially trained for hazardous rescues, worked around the clock to free the men, and all Toronto stayed glued to their radio sets, listening to the CBC’S J. Frank Willis’s frequent bulletins.
“Faint voices can now be heard coming from the drill hole these courageous draegermen have managed to sink into the mine shaft. We do not know how many of the three men trapped below are alive, but for the moment at least, hope shines brightly here. Cocoa and brandy have just been lowered into the shaft, providing the men with their first nourishment in seven days.”
Douglas shuddered. To be trapped below the earth in the dark, entombed. It was horrifying, yet neither he nor the rest of Toronto could tear themselves away from their radios.
The bell over the door rang and startled Douglas. The woman’s hair, a most improbable shade of blond, was a dull, teased-out nest. Her cabbage-coloured dress was so snug across her bony hips that a seam had given way and revealed a tongue of greyish slip beneath.
“Do you sell medicine?” She looked around the shop dubiously. He thought she might be twenty-two or thirty-two. Her skin was pallid and her eyes were bright from either fever or drugs.
“The sign says Druggist, doesn’t it?”
“I wasn’t sure …”
“Do you need something?” He snapped off the radio and popped a mint in his mouth.
“The doctor gave me a prescription.”
“Yes, yes. Let me see it.” Douglas crossed the room to the druggist’s desk. He filled so few prescriptions these days, he wondered if he would have what she needed in stock. He fancied she might be seeking mercury treatment. He suspected a venereal disease, perhaps a hazard of her profession. He held his hand out while she rummaged in her purse.
“I have it here,” she said and then began to cough. The sound was deep and rasping in her thin chest, a bark, a honk more than a cough. Instinctively he covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief, fearing tuberculosis. She had one hand, with pipe-cleaner-thin fingers, over her mouth, holding a soiled scrap of rag, the other flat against her chest as though pressing back the pain. Was that blood on the cloth?
“Do you want a glass of water?”
She nodded.
At the sink behind the soda counter he poured her water and then poured himself a shot of whisky from the can marked Beckman’s Strawberry Syrup. He quickly downed the whisky and brought her the glass of water. Her fit had subsided somewhat and she leaned against the desk, her face covered in a sheen of perspiration.
“Here.” He held out the glass and noticed that the edge was chipped. He thought of taking it back and getting her another one, but then berated himself. For someone like her? What difference would it make?
“Thank you.” She sipped daintily.
“Are you all right now?” He wasn’t sure if he should offer her a seat.
“Yes, much better. It comes on so quickly. But it passes.” She smiled, and he was surprised by how good her teeth were, strong and white. He had expected decay and stains.
“Do you have the prescription?” he asked.
She put the glass down and reached into her bag again. “I know it’s here …” She pulled up a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to him. Cough syrup. A strong one, with laudanum in it. Menthol vapours. Sulfapyridine
. So, a bacterial infection of the lungs. He suspected more. The date on the scrip was nearly three weeks old.
“You should have filled this before now. You’ve probably become worse since it was written. I’ll fill it, but you should go back to your doctor. You may have pneumonia.”
She did not reply, and he went to prepare the medication. At the same time, he helped himself to a sip or two of his own remedy, for the woman rattled him. When he returned she was sitting at one of the small tables and he could not help but notice that her skirt was hiked up above her knee. It was a very fetching calf, if a bit thin. Her left hand rested on her thigh. Her eyes met his directly, and the look in them, together with the parted lips, was a flame going through him.
“All done,” he said.
Again she did not reply, but looked at him and breathed through her open mouth, her frail chest rising and falling beneath the thin cloth.
“Will there be anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. She stood, wobbled a little on her heels, and came toward him. He found himself wanting to take a step back, which was ridiculous, because at the same time he wanted also to go toward her. He turned to the cash register and rang up the sale.
“That will be, let’s see, five fifty-seven.” He looked up from the register tape to find her standing closer to him than he had expected. “Five fifty-seven,” he repeated.
“I only have two dollars,” she said. “That’s all what I have in the world.”
He had known that, of course. A woman like this, in this condition, would not have been able to make any money for some time. He understood then how she had dragged herself from her bed in some cheap room nearby, dressed as well as she was able, hoping to make the right impression, and he understood what an effort like that must have cost her, the putting on of stockings and garters and a slip and such, all the soft and complicated things women wore under their clothes.
The Stubborn Season Page 13