A Boy of Good Breeding

by Miriam Toews

  “Is he coming back just to see me?” S.F. asked. She shook. Knute knew who S.F. meant. She’d been wondering the same thing. No, she thought to herself, he’s run out of money and probably has some type of venereal disease that requires antibiotics and that’s why he’s coming back.

  “Yes, my darling,” she said and wrapped her arms around S.F. “You’re the main reason he’s coming back.”

  “I knew it,” said S.F. Knute fell over like a tree and her head hit Summer Feelin’s pillow. She couldn’t stop it from happening any longer. She closed her eyes and remembered Max. His hair, his smile, the way he talked, the way he smoked, the way he became maudlin when he drank too much wine, how he hardly ever took anything seriously, the passionate promises he made, how he took care of Combine Jo, how he hardly ever lost his temper, his hands, his stupid jokes, his laugh, his voice, his letters that stopped coming.

  “Mom, Mom, don’t sleep.”

  “I’m not sleeping, S.F.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m resting.”

  “Don’t rest.”

  “Summer Feelin’,” Knute said. “Do you think it’s kind of selfish of Max just to come and go whenever he pleases? Do you wonder why he hasn’t come to see you at all and you’re already four years old?”

  “I dunno,” S.F. said. She shrugged.

  Knute sat up and S.F. pulled her off the bed. It was time to make another heart-smart low-fat, low-sodium, low-cholesterol, low-excitement meal, probably of chicken breasts and rice.

  “Oh, Knutie?” Dory called from some cubbyhole she was painting in another room.

  Oh no, thought Knute. Another morbid anecdote. “Yeah?”

  “Did you hear that old Mr. Leander Hamm died?”

  “The guy with the hat?” Knute called out.

  “The guy with the hat. Yes. But he was very old. It’s a blessing, really.”

  “Well then!” Knute yelled. “Bless us each and every one and pass the whiskey.”

  “I just thought you might be interested!” said Dory. “For Pete’s sake!”

  “Hey, Mom!” Knute yelled. “Why don’t you crawl out of that hole and come and hang out in the kitchen with us while I make supper.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Dory yelled back. “Put the coffee on!”

  “Will do,” said Knute, chasing S.F. into the kitchen with wild eyes and singing into the back of her neck, quietly, “He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s given up his bed, he’s said all that he’s said, away his life has sped, his body’s left his head, give us his daily bread,” and Summer Feelin’ had to laugh in spite of herself. Thank God, thought Knute.

  Lorna was on her way home. Everything had gone quite well, thought Hosea, very well really, except for the end when she had said, “Oh, Hosea, you know I think about living with you, having a nice easy life together, you know, just … being together.”

  Nice? Easy? Could life be that way, Hosea thought, nice and easy?

  Could it? And the two of them together? Obviously she meant in Algren. How could the mayor of the smallest town up and move to the big city? Well, he couldn’t, thought Hosea. And after she’d said what she’d said, Hosea had pawed his chest a few times, and said, “Oh you.” “Oh you?” Lorna had said. “Oh you? That’s all you can say, Hosea? Oh you?” But he hadn’t meant it that way. He hadn’t meant it to sound like Oh you, you’re such a silly kid. But oh you, oh you, oh YOU, my Lorna, my love. Hosea understood how Lorna might have misunderstood. He’d mumbled it into his tugging hand and looked down when he’d said it and had wanted to carry her back to his car, to his house, their house, to their bed, to bring the exercise bike out into the open and have Lorna’s sexy, lively colourful stuff all over the place, instead of sad things like Euphemia’s tablecloths and ancient jars of Dippity-Do, and forget about his stupid plan and live in honesty, the two of them, day to day, with July first coming and going like just another hot summer memory and not a looming deadline.

  God knows how long it would be before Lorna came for another visit, or called to invite him over there, which was always exciting to think about but when he actually got there, to the city, to her apartment, to the cafés and bars and theatres and universities and health food stores and bookstores, he always felt like an idiot, like a big goofy farmboy on a school field trip, riding a big orange bus that said Algren Municipality Elementary School, and Lorna saying “Hi, hi there, how are you” to people he had never met, and introducing him and should he stick out his hand, and is this rough-looking guy hugging Lorna because he’s what they call New Age, or … Or the time he had driven to the city for that Emmylou Harris concert and his car had started on fire at a red light. He remembered running into a little grocery store and asking to use the telephone and the guy said, “No, no, sorry no.” Then, when he got back to his burning car, some kids in the neighbourhood had pelted him with hard, wet snowballs, laughing and yelling at him, “Let it burn! Let it burn!” No, he much preferred to have Lorna in his little house in Algren, baking cinnamon buns, just the two of them. And then, oh stupid me, he thought, that’s just what Lorna had said she wanted, too, and he’d said, “Oh you,” which she decided he meant as Oh you, that’s a crazy romantic notion that really has no place in our lives, when he’d meant the opposite, and wanted the very same thing, but how could he tell her Algren didn’t have room for her? She would have to be counted and he didn’t have enough dying people to level it off. How could someone tell somebody else something like that? Could Lorna wait until after July first? Hosea shook his head slowly. She would have to, oh please.

  Hosea had tried to get her attention but the bus just drove away under a sky the colour of glue and Lorna stared straight ahead. Hosea picked up a piece of hard snow and chucked it at her window and smiled and waved, but she had looked at him with one of those withering looks, a look that said, Chucking hard pieces of snow against my section of bus window will not thaw my frozen heart.

  Hosea walked over to the chunk of snow, the one he had chucked at Lorna’s window, and looked at it. The snow around it was dusty from the exhaust fumes of the bus. Hosea gently kicked the chunk of snow towards the sidewalk. He walked up to it and kicked it again, a little harder, to get over the ridge of snow that lined the sidewalk. Up and over, there it went. Hosea continued kicking the chunk of snow towards home. It was getting smaller and smaller. He hoped he could get it home before it disappeared. Gentle kicks, but long distances. Scoop it from underneath with the top of your foot. That was the trick. He shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. What if somebody saw him, the mayor of Algren, kicking a piece of snow down the sidewalk? Well, it wasn’t far to his house, and besides he’d done it as a boy, with Tom. They’d pick their chunks, inspecting them closely to make sure they were pretty much exactly the same size and weight, and then home they’d go. When they got home, if their chunks of snow hadn’t disappeared or been kicked so far they got lost, they’d play hockey with one of them until it did disappear and then, for a big laugh, they’d continue to play with it. It wasn’t there but they’d play with it anyway, taking slapshots, scoring goals, having it dropped by imaginary referees at centre ice, skating like crazy down the ice to catch the rebound off their sticks. Often, they would argue about goals, the puck being offside, illegal penalty shots, all that stuff, and they’d have huge hockey fights, throwing their woollen mittens down on the ground and trying to pull each other’s jackets off over their heads.

  One day Euphemia came out of the house with an empty whipping cream carton. “Here, you boys,” she’d said. “Why don’t you use this?” And she had put it down in the snow and stomped on it once for all she was worth and then picked the flattish thing up and tossed it over to them. They’d used it for a while, and Euphemia stood washing dishes looking out at them in the back lane and smiling, and then they’d gone to the front of the house, to the street, where Euphemia wasn’t as sure to watch them, and went back to their imaginary puck.

  It was Sunday. Algren wa
s dead. Hosea slowly made his way home. As he walked past the back of the Wagon Wheel Café, Mrs. Cherniski, the owner of the café, poked her head out of the kitchen and said, “Hey, Hosea!” Hosea’s head snapped up like a fish on a line, but not before he made a mental note of where his chunk of ice had stopped.

  “Hello, Mrs. Cherniski, how goes the battle?” said Hosea.

  “So that is you, I was wondering,” said Mrs. Cherniski, “with that hat and everything. Looks like old Leander gave you his hat before he passed on. Nice of him. But I’d have it cleaned, if I was you.”

  “Yes, I should, I suppose,” said Hosea, thinking that all its filth and wear was what he loved about it.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Cherniski, “I’ll tell you something. If you don’t get rid of that damn black dog out there, the one hanging around the front of my shop, I’ll shoot the damn thing myself, not a word of a lie.”

  “Oh no,” said Hosea, “don’t do that. I’ll find out who owns that dog and make sure they keep him on a line from now on.”

  “Well good, you better,” said Mrs. Cherniski. “Last night I had thirty people in my store, you know the Whryahha clan up for the son’s wedding, a private booking. I was serving roast beef and lobster bisque and damned if that dog isn’t sitting outside right there on the sidewalk, his rear end twitching in the wind. Then, dammit, he’s hunkering down in front of all the Whryahha’s in their Sunday best, and I see he’s having a shit right there on the path.”

  Hosea adjusted his hat and glanced at his chunk of ice. He shook his head in mock alarm for Mrs. Cherniski’s sake and said, “Hmmmph, that’s not very good.”

  “No it isn’t,” said Mrs. Cherniski. “A tableful of those Whryahhas just up and left, they couldn’t finish their meals and they weren’t about to pay for them, having to eat while a mangy mutt craps away right there in front of them. I damn well lost close to two hundred dollars last night, not to mention my reputation. Thank God I’m the only café in town, but Jesus, Hosea, you have to do something about that dog.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Cherniski. I’ll see to it pronto. In the meantime, you might want to try shooing it away, maybe a little kick.”

  “A little kick, my ass,” muttered Mrs. Cherniski. “I’ll plug the goddamn thing right between the—” but she was back inside. Slam went the back door of her café in Hosea’s face.

  Adjusting his hat, he went over to his ice chunk and gave it another kick towards home. He looked up at the water tower and wondered what colour to paint it when and if he ever found the money for paint. Bright red would be nice, maybe with a huge decal of a white horse that would wind itself around the tower’s entire circular top. He looked at the boarded-up feed mill and thought of turning it into a type of make-work project for the youth of Algren during the summer months. Perhaps they could turn it into a junior summer stock theatre for tourists passing through, on their way west to Vancouver, or east to Toronto. A quaint prairie play, maybe Lawrence Hamm could donate an old thresher that they could paint and put in the front of the theatre as a symbolic monument to a bucolic past. Now Hosea’s mind began to spin.

  He passed a couple of kids walking down the street. Their jackets were open and they were wearing rubber boots. “Hello there,” he said, “beautiful spring day, isn’t it?” The kids smiled and said, “Hi.” They knew who he was but they didn’t respond to his comment about the beautiful day. As a rule, thought Hosea, and he must remember this in the future, kids do not respond to comments about the weather. He stole a glance over his shoulder, making sure the kids weren’t looking back at him, and then quickly retrieved his chunk of ice from the gutter of the road. He had overkicked. Suddenly Hosea wondered to himself what Euphemia had done all day when he was away in school.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” she’d say to him when he came home from school, and he’d smile and make something up and she’d give him a nickel or a dime but he never asked her what she was thinking about.

  One day Hosea came home early because he had an earache, and he found Euphemia doing a handstand on a kitchen chair, gripping the nubby edge of it with her fingers and bicycling her legs around and around up in the air above her head. When she noticed him staring at her, she slowly brought her legs down to the floor and put the chair back beside the table. Then she’d laughed. “You know how it is, Hosea,” she’d said. No, he didn’t. He had not been amused. He was uncomfortable and alarmed. Why was his mother doing handstands on the kitchen chair? Had she lost her mind? Was she planning to run away and join the circus? Was she a freak? A Buddhist?

  He had not been too impressed with that display of athleticism, yet later that evening he tried to do the same thing and could not. Therefore, he surmised at the time, it wasn’t something someone could just do on command, and so she must spend her days practising this sort of thing. This is what she must do while I’m in school, he’d concluded. His question answered. But why?

  You know how it is, Hosea, she’d said. Now, as Hosea walked along kicking his piece of snow, he understood. Handstands on kitchen chairs, chunks of ice we can’t let disappear until we’re home. That’s how it is at a certain age. We’re forced to create a challenge for ourselves and meet it. It doesn’t matter what it is.

  Actually, Euphemia didn’t have as hard a time living in Algren as might have been expected. Nobody in the Funk family had told anyone about Euphemia being Hosea’s real mother, not even Minty with her big, flapping, eleven-year-old mouth. Even if one of her little brothers had paid attention to the whole brouhaha the night the truth was revealed and then, innocently, mentioned to one of their friends’ mothers, “You know what, my sister Phemie is Hosie’s real mom,” the friend’s mother would have said sweetly, “that’s right, dear, she is, of course she is, now run along and play.”

  Euphemia’s father had made arrangements for Euphemia to live in the house on First Street rent free. The owner of the house, in exchange, was given a few acres of land by Euphemia’s father. Euphemia’s father farmed the land but anything reaped from those acres was sold and the money given to the owner of the house.

  Just about everybody in Algren, except Leander Hamm—but he didn’t really give it much thought—was under the impression that Euphemia had taken it upon herself to raise this child, Hosea. She was an unmarried so-called mother of a mystery boy. She had committed no sin, of course, because the boy wasn’t hers biologically, they thought. The people of Algren were moved by her generosity and her devotion to the boy. It was a simple story with a familiar heroine, one of their own. A mysterious man on a horse gives Euphemia Funk a newborn baby when she’s outside using the biffy, and Euphemia, a trooper from the start, accepts her lot, smiles at her fate, and raises the boy. Not only does she raise the boy, she raises him to be the mayor of Algren and the man responsible for its claim to fame, a fame that overshadows that unfortunate cockroach story laid out in the encyclopedia, a fame that makes the Prime Minister and the entire nation take note, a fame that comes with being the smallest town in the country.

  But at the beginning, when Hosea was a little boy, the townspeople had no idea he would become their mayor. All they knew was that Euphemia Funk, a girl with so much going for her, had sacrificed it all to raise a child alone. And, furthermore, she didn’t seem to mind.

  The local churches brought her meals two or three times a week, the wealthier folks in town brought her their ironing and had her do their Christmas baking and sew their curtains and babysit their kids when they went to the city for a night out. Euphemia was almost always paid extravagantly for these jobs and was always promised more work in the future. Euphemia’s neighbours would shovel her walk and trim her hedges and clean her eavestrough and mow her lawn in the summertime. Tom’s mom gave Hosea all of Tom’s old clothes and some new ones, and baked Hosea’s favourite meal, Pork Diablo, whenever he stayed for supper.

  At first, when Euphemia’s parents and brothers and sisters would come to visit, her father would stay outside in his truck
, picking his teeth, taking apart some tool or another, or having a nap. He would set Euphemia and Hosea up with a house to live in and drive by at night from time to time just to see what he could see, but he would not go inside and pretend nothing had happened. He missed Hosea more than he thought he would, and a very small and non-verbal part of him admired Euphemia for her spunk and her amazing lie that wasn’t really a lie. But he would not set foot in that house. After all, he could make a statement, too. Let Euphemia’s mother and Minty and the boys traipse in like they were going to a Sunday school picnic and not the quarters of an unmarried mother and her bastard son, arms full of cookies and sweetmeat pies and strong coffee, table games and crokinole, good cheer and hugs and kisses. He would sit in his truck. Until one day Tom’s mother who lived right across the street came by and poked her head into Mr. Funk’s cab.

  “Have you got an aversion to family gatherings, Mr. Funk? Or are you afraid someone will steal your truck if you leave it alone for a minute? You know, I could have my boy Thomas watch it for you, ha ha ha. Like New York City. You know, where you pay a little boy from the ghetto a nickel to make sure nobody nicks your automobile, or strips the hubcaps—”

  “I was just going in,” Mr. Funk growled. “Thank-you for your consideration.”

  From that day forward, Mr. Funk dutifully entered Euphemia’s house along with his wife and the kids and set himself up in the dining room as the king of crokinole. He taught the kids, including Hosea and Tom, the combination shot, the straight-to-the-gonads shot, the right-between-the-eyes shot, and the triple lutz. It was the perfect appointment for him. He could avoid conversation and, at the same time, could release his frustration and self-righteous indignation each and every time he curled his middle finger to his thumb and let fire another crokinole rock.

  Euphemia and Minty and Mrs. Funk drank coffee in the kitchen and talked and laughed and the words “oh well,” “one more cup,” “what’s the rush” were always punctuated with the vicious crack of a crokinole piece from the next room.