Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  by the same author

  THE RUSSLÄNDER

  NIGHT TRAVELLERS

  LADIES OF THE HOUSE

  THE MISSING CHILD

  THE CHROME SUITE

  THE TWO-HEADED CALF

  (for children)

  THE TOWN THAT FLOATED AWAY

  This book is dedicated to my brothers and sisters,

  Marie, Robert, Norman, Lenore, Joan,

  John, Peter and Betty

  And to the memory of my sisters, Annette and Judy

  Time used to live here.

  It likes to find places like this

  and then leave so quietly

  that nothing wakes up.

  WILLIAM STAFFORD, “From the Wild People”

  ONE

  The Vandals

  N THE MORNING, sunlight stretched like cellophane across the doorway of Sara and Oliver Vandal’s bedroom. The ticking of a clock beneath a heap of clothes on the bureau became louder as Oliver gathered them up and quickly dressed, his back turned to Sara in the bed. Throughout the night the clock’s muffled click, click had underscored the fist of worry in his ribs, and he had told himself, don’t jump to conclusions. But his worry hadn’t diminished or vanished, as it sometimes did when he awakened to the sight of the turquoise walls awash with daylight, the sound of his children’s voices in the kitchen below telling him that they were up and breakfast was on the go.

  Sara moaned and turned her face to the wall, the memory of their quarrel a sickness pressing against one side of her ribs. The baby sleeping in the crib stirred, then poked her almost bald head up from a blanket to regard her mother hunkered in bed, her father across the room, his dark head crooked as though he was listening to himself slide the knot of his tie up under his shirt collar. She flopped back down, sensing that it was futile to try to gain their attention. The baby was Patsy Anne Vandal, the day June 14, 1953, in Union Plains, Manitoba.

  Halfway across the room, Oliver was stopped by the sight of the shopping bag lying on the floor, shoes spilling from it, maroon calf-leather flats, navy slingback pumps, a pearlized bone-white sandal holding the imprint of a woman’s toes. The shoes conjured the image of Alice emerging through the darkness of her yard last night, bringing him the shopping bag, and Oliver relived the surprise of her breasts, as small and unyielding against his chest as they had been when they were kids. Her kiss, however, with its urgent appeal, was unlike any of her kisses that he’d chosen to remember.

  In comparison to the tiny shoes, his feet were ungainly and used up. He regarded them. Spidery threads mottled the skin around his ankles, the pads of several corns were swollen and sore—they were the feet of a man much older than his forty-five years. It occurred to him that his father had been his age when the lung disease had overcome him.

  Men and women can’t be just friends, Sara said, her tongue thick and coated and tasting like a peach seed. She took up where she had left off during the night, when Oliver had begun to snore, stranding her with her mind boiling for hours.

  You don’t say. Well, in my opinion they can be. Oliver stepped round the shoes. He knew that eventually the footwear would wind up at the bottom of the closet, along with all the other shoes Alice had sent home with him over the years, shoes she dropped off at the hotel—a friendly call at his place of business, he’d told Sara, a white lie, knowing that she was apt to turn molehills into mountains.

  Why shouldn’t I pay a friend a visit? he’d said last night, when there was no way around it other than to admit that he hadn’t stayed for the entire public meeting at the school, but had fled. Couldn’t sit there listening to all the down-in-the-mouth talk; and the next moment he found himself on the ferry and crossing the river. He hadn’t planned on going to see Alice, that was just the way it had turned out.

  Dragging the girls along, Sara muttered into the wall.

  I didn’t drag anyone. Oliver sighed heavily. I had me a walk, and they tagged along.

  A walk to see that woman.

  I don’t have time for talking in circles, Oliver replied, and stepped towards the door.

  You can make your own breakfast, Sara said, her voice sounding as though it came from the bottom of a barrel.

  Will do.

  Sara’s presence in the kitchen wasn’t as crucial as she seemed to think it was, given her usual early-morning hustle to get downstairs first thing, hair rolled up in the style of Wallis Simpson, a freshly ironed housedress cinched at her still-narrow waist. She was charged and determined to conduct the business of her household, emanating a purposeful energy. An energy that sometimes had the effect of throwing a monkey wrench into a smooth and well-running machine. Her arrival in the kitchen had the power to induce quarrelling and tears.

  This morning, however, she was worn out by her nightlong fuming.

  Some of us have to get to work, Oliver said, reminding her, as he often did, that his time was not his own. He couldn’t dally in the morning over a second cup of coffee, or the list she’d made of what needed fixing, or the remnants of a quarrel. This morning the word work was a raft being swept away on a fast current. His occupation; vocation, several long-time customers said, given that Oliver was a natural, the kind of man at ease with princes and paupers alike and therefore well suited to the hotel business.

  Suddenly Sara was up, swinging her legs over the side of the bed, her eyes burning with rage. All these years, she said. Going to see that woman while I waited half the night. Going to see a woman who thinks she’s better than I am. Showing her off to the girls. She hissed the words, her fists raised and shaking. Then she gasped and clutched her ribs.

  She’d been watching for him at the kitchen window last night when he returned home with the girls, staring into the darkness of the yard, her lit face betraying a raw fear. But once he entered the house, quick as a snake she lashed out, one hand on her hip, the other stirring the air to send the girls on upstairs to bed so she could have her say.

  You went to see that woman.

  Yes, I did.

  The startling admission had left them both speechless for moments.

  Sara broke the silence to accuse him once again. You went to see that woman, and took Ida and Emilie with you.

  I already said so, he snapped. And I didn’t take the girls, they tagged along. But why not, eh? Why shouldn’t they meet my old school friend? Heat rose in his neck as he remembered Alice’s kiss, the searching flick of her tongue. The girls had stayed out on the veranda the whole time, he was certain they hadn’t seen.

  Sara balled her nightgown in a fist beneath her ribs, her slate-grey eyes growing wide and watery, like blobs of melting glass. The sight made Oliver turn away. There’s no need to cry, he muttered, although in the almost twenty years he’d known Sara, he’d never seen her cry.

  I’m sick, she said, piqued, gone huffy that he would think she was about to bring on the tears. She hadn’t cried during the births of their ten children, each baby weighing over nine pounds, their oldest son, Sonny Boy, coming out into Oliver’s hands at eleven and two ounces. She hadn’t wept when Oliver hoisted a duffel bag onto his shoulder and boarded a train for Halifax, where he was stationed to barber in the army during the Second World War, leaving her to cope with four small children.

  Throughout Sara’s young childhood in a country that had become Soviet Russia, she hadn’t cried once during what had proved to be an entire season of weeping. She hadn’t cried when she’d boarded the train along with seven hundred other Mennonites who, like her, were fleeing their homeland. They’d cried for wanting to leave the country and then cried when they left it. They wept when their ship entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

  In Sara’s opinion, crying was a waste of tears, and she wasn’t about to start w
asting them now. Over Alice Bouchard? That whore? Huh! I guess not. A pain shot round from the back of one side of her ribs to the front, and she gasped.

  The colour drained from her face and her skin took on a pasty sheen. Beads of perspiration began popping out across her forehead. Holy Mother of Christ, the morning sickness, Oliver thought, and looked about the room. He saw the metal wastebasket on the treadle of the sewing machine, took it up quickly and put it on the floor between the crib and the bed, and got out of there.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Alvina, the oldest of the Vandal children, was at the Rangette, stirring the oatmeal to prevent it from sticking, her auburn hair still wound up in large rollers. Ida and Ruby, two equally capable girls, scraped soot from bread slices they’d left too long under the broiler. Four big-eyed Vandal boys, Simon, Manny and their older brothers, Sonny Boy and The Other One, were energetically engaged in the task of waiting for their breakfast to appear.

  Because the Vandal boys were boys, they’d been the first to use the wash basin and fresh towels. Consequently, as they sat at the table their faces radiated cleanliness, good health and what they were too young to recognize as contentment. Their scrubbed necks sprang up from their starched shirt collars as though to give them a loftier view of the world than their sisters could lay claim to.

  Simon had clipped a bow tie onto his collar in anticipation of receiving a perfect mark on a test, this one being in arithmetic. His milk-chocolate hair was arranged low across his forehead in the same way Sonny Boy combed his. Everything the two younger brothers had learned in their short lives, they had gained from watching Sonny Boy and The Other One, who were in their early and mid-teens. And so, although their mother was nowhere in sight, because they were boys they had good reason to be confident that food comes to those who sit and wait.

  Their duty of waiting for breakfast this morning included the extra chore of directing Emilie, their anemic-looking sister, through the precariousness of cooking basted eggs. Sonny Boy preferred the yolks to be slightly congealed at the edges, while Simon and Manny wanted to be able to bounce them on the floor. The Other One was easily satisfied, and would eat eggs prepared any which way, providing they were not raw. His real name was George, as in King George, and he was a silent, ruddy-complexioned boy possessing a strong and square jaw.

  Add more water, Simon advised Emilie, mimicking Sonny Boy, who’d earlier made the same suggestion. The suggestion had been ignored then, as it was now, Emilie’s attention absorbed by the voice droning from the radio. Although nearly two weeks had passed since the coronation, the news broadcasts still replayed portions of the service in Westminster Abbey. Bless we beseech thee this crown and so sanctify thy servant Elizabeth. Moments later the ensuing cries of God Save the Queen! buzzed in the radio speaker, and then came the booming sound of guns that Emilie felt in her spine.

  The thundering cannons and a choir’s carolling hymn faded, and the announcer’s voice cut in with the news of the day, releasing Emilie’s attention. Her pale eyes searched beyond the kitchen window for sight of Charlie, her new friend, the Arizona boy who had come to Union Plains to visit his grandmother. She anticipated being given a ride to school on his bicycle, clasping her hands over his midriff and speaking into the cusp of his ear. She would show him the coronation coin whose presence in the pocket of her pedal-pushers had warmed a spot against her thigh. Where he came from, they didn’t have a queen.

  Move, dipstick, you’re blocking the light, Sonny Boy called out to Emilie. On sunny mornings—and the sun was strong that day—light came blasting through the window and turned the Arborite counter and tabletop, along with Sonny Boy’s eyes, the colour of abalone. Emilie moved away from the window, and her brother’s eyes lit and his hair shone yellow, like corn syrup.

  Open the steam vent, Simon directed Emilie, adding, dipstick. Which brought the anticipated snickers from the two oldest brothers.

  Yeah, and close your mouth or you’ll lose all your air. Manny laughed at his own joke, the sound like a stick playing against a chain-link fence. Fifteen months separated the younger brothers, and while Simon was usually earnest and enterprising, this one, seven-year-old Manny, had an out-of-the-ordinary sense of humour. His private and sardonic fits of chuckling were somewhat beyond his years, and unsettling to those who thought they might be the cause of it.

  Nine of the ten Vandal children were in the kitchen that morning, the baby, Patsy Anne, being upstairs in the crib. A toddler named Sharon sat at a play table beside the mammoth Servelle refrigerator that Oliver had ordered from a company in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The appliance had proved to be a brand not serviced in Canada, and ever since its door handle broke off, the handle had been a pair of vise grips.

  The Vandal children breathed one another’s air, shared the same parents and a kitchen whose lime-green floor tiles shone like a freshly flooded skating rink. The wallpaper was dotted with cherries, and busy with the plaques Alvina had guided her sisters through making—plaster pears, peaches, clusters of grapes and strawberries, green apples, tomatoes—and hung diagonally across the wall. The radio on the counter was not yet a year old, but its maroon plastic case was cracked and its knobs were missing and replaced by clumps of adhesive tape. The newscast ended. The radio vibrated with a song about Dutch Cleanser. Wash those germs right down the drain, Dutch Cleanser, Dutch Cleanssserr, the choristers sang with an unnatural cheerfulness, their voices trailing off in a hollow echo.

  Turn that off, Alvina called to Emilie. It makes me want to scream.

  So scream and get it over with, Sonny Boy said, his sneer being appropriate for his age of sixteen.

  Emilie silenced the radio. Two or three eggs for Dad? she asked. Oliver’s preference was dipping eggs, yolks the consistency of clear honey that he mopped from his plate with toast. Alvina spooned steaming porridge into bowls that were arranged on a metal space-saver beside the Rangette, and was too preoccupied to answer.

  The ceiling shuddered now as feet pounded across the floor in their parents’ bedroom, but Alvina seemed to be the only one to notice her mother’s flat-footed and resentful gait. A little gut began chasing a big gut in her abdomen as she anticipated Sara’s arrival, the push of questions and directions. Did you—? Yes, I did. Don’t forget to—I won’t forget. Make sure you—I will.

  There was a moment of quiet above, then the bedsprings reacted suddenly and violently as Sara threw herself onto the mattress. What sounded like crying beat through the ceiling, but it couldn’t be crying, oh no, because Sara did not cry. There hadn’t been anything worth shedding tears over in the early years of her life, she said, and later she didn’t bother, because when had bawling ever changed a thing? Go ahead, cry. See where it gets you.

  The sound coming from the upstairs bedroom was harsh, a bark followed by a cough. Moments later it gave way to what, unmistakably, was throw-up.

  Turn the radio back on, Alvina called to Emilie. Turn it up loud. There was no sense in spoiling everyone’s appetite, she reasoned silently, as the retching rose in volume and ended in a crack of air exploding in the back of Sara’s throat. Clear and sunny for the remainder of the day, the radio announcer predicted.

  A growing wariness tightened Alvina’s scalp, and her metal hair rollers became a transmitter of anxiety. Throwing up in the morning meant, in her experience, one inevitable and irreversible fact. It meant another diaper pail of rank water, bleach stinging her nostrils and burning her fingers raw. It meant more presents for her to unwrap, the flannel bundles rolled in newspapers, and layers and clumps of baby mustard, a brown stew of undigested peas and carrots for her to scrape free with a putty knife.

  Holy Toledo, Alvina muttered, as she muttered during the warm months of the year when she brought the diaper pail up from the cellar and took it outside to the cistern. At such times, she hoped for a breeze to chase away the odour as she sat on an overturned log and scraped and kept an eye out for any objects the current baby might have ingested, a penny, a length of narrow
bonnet ribbon, a button. Once upon a time, she’d found three cat’s-eye marbles pressed into the muck, and not encased, and so she deduced that thebaby hadn’t swallowed them, but rather hidden the agates in its diaper nest. Holy shitty Toledo. Shitty being a word Alvina, understandably, had acquired at an early age. This shitty job, my shitty life, she thought. Hallelujah, Mother’s woofing up her insides again.

  She ran water into the porridge pot to soak it and, remembering that the water man was due to come and fill the cistern, took the key for the cistern padlock down from a top cupboard shelf and sent Ida to hook it on its nail beside the back porch door. Then she began yanking the rollers from her hair, poking them into a cloth bag whose ties she’d strung through the belt of her skirt. She toted her personals around in the drawstring bag to prevent the children and her mother from snooping; she shared a room with four sisters, and for the sake of privacy dressed and undressed in a closet.

  Sonny Boy swore in disgust, as Emilie dished eggs from the fry pan onto her brothers’ plates. Rubbery-looking eggs, curled and crispy brown around the edges, obviously not what he had ordered. Manny echoed his older brother’s disgust, although the eggs on his plate were exactly as he liked them.

  Their attention was drawn then to the sound of Oliver’s heavy tread on the stairs, and for a brief moment they were still, Alvina staring at the wall as though she was counting the number of steps, her brothers’ and sisters’ bodies rigid with awareness. Oliver’s arrival in the kitchen this morning was unlike any other morning. Simon muttered, Dad ruined my boat. Nine pairs of eyes swerved towards the kitchen door and its smashed sill, a long and deep gash that looked like an open wound. Simon’s wooden tugboat lay to one side of the door, shattered and unrecognizable.

  That’ll teach you to leave it lying around, Sonny Boy said.

  Don’t say anything, Alvina cautioned them. She raked her fingers through long heavy ringlets that she hoped she’d have time to coax into an Ava Gardner style. Oliver’s footsteps grew louder, and then stopped. Alvina turned to the counter, busy wiping smears of butter and toast scrapings from the breadboard.