Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  He wanted to make her sweat and moan on his narrow bed in his hotel room under the stairs, stealth, the necessity for quiet, driving his blood hot, her teeth grazing and nipping at his palm. But the hotel was at the other end of town, and they were here, and he was ready.

  He caught Sara by the window, was driven by her protests to chase her across the room. Not here, not now. It’s too cold. Someone will come. The floor’s dirty, she said. She tried to twist out of his arms, reached to steady herself, and her hand came upon a leather thong looped onto a nail beside the window frame.

  Was ist das? she asked. For moments their hard breathing was the only sound as she held the pouch up between them, its leather stained and smelling of strong tea.

  You got me buffaloed, Oliver joked, knowing that the beaded orange-and-white pouch was a strike-a-light and held the means to spark a fire. Sara burst into laughter. You understood me, she said. You can understand German if you want to. Then she turned and threw the pouch out the broken window into the yard, where the bleached grasses of summer lay flattened under a hard covering of snow.

  Liebst du mich? Sara asked, and then once again, in English—Do you really love me? When he nodded she removed her hat and hooked it onto the nail beside the window frame. Her light brown hair was a cap of soft waves tucked and pinned under at the back of her head, revealing the shape of her small skull. Then she untied the belt of her wraparound coat and let it slide from her shoulders onto the floor.

  Oliver clasped Sara to his chest and thought, with a pang of worry, she wasn’t much taller than the day he’d first seen her on the ferry. Eight years later, that girl had become this woman he held in his arms, though she didn’t look grown enough to bear children. Beyond the window the strike-alight pouch lay on the snow, its babiche thongs crumpled beside it. He said, My own little pig, my dear, of course I love you. Sara, satisfied for the moment, stepped out of his embrace and began unfastening the buttons of her dress, lest he try to do it for her and half of them wind up scattered across the floor.

  A little while later Oliver Vandal, Sara Vogt’s gypsy-looking man, her thin-as-a-rail man with wild dark eyes, lay on the floor beside her, spent, drifting towards a gentle snore, dreaming of his house, its open doors and windows welcoming a bit of rain; the scuttle of autumn leaves, a fox crossing its doorsill. He dreamt that he would take Sara roaming in the country. Take her out amid the booming and echoing dance of the prairie hens, among the red dogwood. He’d show her its bark, pulverize it, put it in a pipe, and they would smoke what his grandmother had called kinnikinnick. He was about to become a chef de famille, and would see to it that the children they brought into this world, the baby already sparked to life inside her, grew up to be children of experience, and were not, by God, taken over by civilization.

  Whose house is this? Sara asked, her eyes growing heavy. Despite the chill of the room, she wanted to sleep.

  Her hairpins had worked loose and strands as fine as cobwebs tickled his neck as she breathed. Your guess is as good as mine, he said. What does it matter? It’s empty, it should be put to good use.

  Water under the bridge, Oliver thought, as Sonny Boy and George matched him step for step. The two youngest hung on to his thumbs and hippety-hopped, mullets tugging on the end of his line. When they’d left the yard, Ida had hurried on ahead, eager to join her friends gathering on the school steps, while Emilie headed off in the opposite direction. I’m going to see a man about a dog, Emilie said, when Ida inquired.

  He stopped for a moment and ruffled Simon’s hair and straightened his bow tie. The way the kid looked at him made Oliver want to turn away.

  For the most part, his children encountered in him what the patrons of the Union Plains Hotel encountered—a generous and amiable broad-faced man who, despite the stories he liked to tell of a wild and desperate childhood, seemed to be a cautious person. He dispensed warnings of rabies and distemper whenever a stray dog ventured into town. He warned swimmers to beware of the river’s unpredictable currents, hikers of inclement weather he didn’t need a barometer to predict.

  Although he didn’t own an automobile, for a time in his youth he’d driven taxi in Winnipeg, a city he swore he knew like the back of his hand. He did not have a bank account, but he did have a cash register at the hotel, with compartments that kept his money accounted for and secure. He didn’t join his children and Sara on Sundays, when her brother-in-law took them across the river and inland into Mennonite territory in order to attend church. He seemed more charitable and forgiving than the people his children encountered in church, and so they accepted him for who he was—different, diffident and sometimes gregarious. But most of all, in their experience, he was absent.

  See here, Oliver said, and cleared his throat before continuing. I knew what I was doing when I shot at the doorsill. I was testing the rifle. Turns out she’s shooting low, that’s how come I got the boat. A gun needs to be fired now and again. But it’s not something I want you boys fooling around with, you hear?

  We won’t, Simon said, speaking for Manny too, who was at the age of being interested in fire and quietly eager to start one. Manny had borrowed his father’s eyepiece, a loupe Manny now carried in his pocket. Oliver kept it in a buffet drawer and used it to better see the splinters he plucked from their skin and the specks of debris he dabbed from their eyes. Sonny Boy and George remained silent, anticipating the arrival of a black Chevrolet in front of the school, the Bogg brothers coming to pick them up and take them down the highway to attend the Alexander Morris Composite High.

  Along the way, children straggled from yards, their voices like the twittering of anxious sparrows as they headed towards the two-storey red-brick schoolhouse that in years past had been near to bursting with students. Half of its eight classrooms were empty, and the building was feared to be a hazard as it sagged at one side under its own considerable weight.

  Once I shot at a mouse in my mother’s pantry with a twenty-two, Oliver said now, hoping to capture his older son’s attention, I put a hole clear through a crock of corned beef. That was before mousetraps were invented. He was rewarded with a snort of what might have been withheld sarcasm from Sonny Boy, while George seemed lost in his thoughts, clutching his binder and books against his chest. Even to himself Oliver’s laughter sounded tight, a smoker’s wheeze, and he wondered if his sons detected the lack of mirth in it.

  Sonny Boy was wearing his knife, the belt of his blue jeans threaded through its leather sheath. He was good with that knife, he had a sharp eye and steady arm, but there was nothing around about that required sticking, Oliver thought. Sonny Boy wanted danger. He wanted to rescue people, to save himself, to test his courage. It went against some people’s natures to sit for hours in a classroom. Sonny needed to know the bellyache of hunger and to have no one but himself to rely on. He wasn’t learning any of that at the high school.

  The two younger boys entered the schoolyard without a backward glance, dashing off to join the games already in progress. Having the time of their lives, Oliver thought. Which amounted to such a short time.

  A horn tooted as the Bogg brothers’ car came to a stop in front of the school. Several small kids ran over to it, likely thinking to write wash this car in the dust on the door, and were scared off by the loud warning—Touch this car and we’ll break your arm—from the two burly sons of a local farmer.

  Don’t you forget, you boys come round to the hotel for chores after school, Oliver reminded Sonny Boy and George. They would sweep up, wash the tumblers and ashtrays, dust the mirror and the buffalo. Wipe tobacco smoke from the picture glass of a photograph hanging above the bar, a portrait of Fine Day, a Cree war chief. A picture that might one day soon wind up in a second-hand shop, or in a museum.

  I’m setting pins after school, Sonny Boy said, and Oliver remembered he was now employed part-time at the bowling alley in Alexander Morris. He would be late coming home and would hook a ride on the highway.

  Sonny sprinted off to climb int
o the car, as though he’d escaped a confinement. He and the Bogg boys called for George to get the lead out, but he seemed reluctant to leave his father.

  They aim for Sonny Boy, George said, in a monosyllabic mutter. Sonny’s bruises? he added, referring to the angry-looking yellowish-and-blue marks on Sonny’s arms and shins. When he sets pins, the Alexander kids try and get him with the ball, George explained, when Oliver appeared not to understand. They think we’re hicks. The French kids are frogs. Anyone with a Low German accent is a square-head. The Chartrand kids get called chiefs, he added, the Chartrand family being the only Metis family living in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon town.

  The school of hard knocks takes some getting used to, Oliver said carefully. It’ll put hair on your chest, he thought. He watched George shuffle off to the waiting car. He had yet to prove what he might be good at, except at being quiet, his cheeks burning brick-red at the threat of being noticed.

  You’re not a hick, Oliver thought to call after him. The Bogg brothers, they were hicks, farm boys who could be counted on to hit a home run nearly every time they came up to bat.

  Oliver waved as the car sped off, thinking he should have told his boys that he’d once shot at a privy knowing his mother was inside. Knowing she would come out fighting mad with her underclothes down around her ankles. Shooting at the privy had been the quickest way to get her attention before the truancy man hauled him and his brother, Romeo, away. He also hadn’t told his sons about once being at Romeo’s house in St. Boniface and taking a shot at a church steeple to see if he could make its bell ring. Like most children these days, he supposed, they were not interested in their parents’ stories, or his grandmother’s remembrances, either, which he sometimes took out and read, although he knew them by heart.

  As he walked towards the hotel, her warm voice ran through his head. Me and my man loaded two carts. The children rode in one, while we took what we could with us from Red River. We was leaving Red River and St. Jean where I was raised, for Batoche, as my man’s health was not good, and I had a sister there. Monsignor Tache and our Father of St. Norbert called a meeting of all Catholics. I remember that the Priest told us that our country was sold to the Orangemen. These Orangemen was going to harness the Black Dresses and Black Robes and make them plough the land. It was decided to send for Louis Riel. Those who wished to defend their country and religion went to Fort Garry to protect it from the Orangemen. Mr. MacDougal was coming. So my man went with fifteen or twenty others on horseback to meet him at La Salle. MacDougal was scared and went back to Pembina. There he told them that there was around a thousand men holding him up at St. Norbert and he couldn’t possibly get through. Of course, it was a miracle that he should turn when there were so few men to stop him, and so my man and others erected a cross at that point. After the trouble at Red River was all over, we loaded the two carts and my husband and myself and four children went to join my sister at Fish Creek, near to Batoche. By this time, my man’s chest was bad and he was pretty well useless.

  Sara and the children were indifferent to the history of Union Plains, and of the French towns dotting the plateau de coteau of the Red River, which had been predominantly Metis settlements, and among the first towns and villages of the North-West Territory. Aubigny, where Oliver had spent his youth, St. Adolphe, Ste. Agathe, St. Jean Baptiste—the birthplace of his grandmother, and where she had ended her days.

  The French towns across the river from Union Plains possessed similar churches to each other whose spires were visible from Stage Coach Road. The histories of these settlements harked back to the fur trade, to the Metis freighters who stopped to trade on their journeys to and from St. Paul, going east and west, their oxen-drawn Red River carts a shriek of sound announcing their arrival and departure.

  Their histories, and those of the Oblate fathers and Trappist monks, the Red River rebellion led by Riel, the histories of the Cree women peddling their hand-crafted wares in the towns along the river, most people, including his own family, didn’t care to know.

  History, for his children, was recalling the concession booth beside the highway where they’d been able to purchase ice cream, and which had been swept away by high spring water. The Second World War had ended. King George VI had died and they must now sing God Save the Queen. Long ago, a train had jumped the track at the train station and caused the death of two men. A man had become lost in a snowstorm while delivering a load of ice, and perished. More recently, a booth Florence Dressler operated during the summer months as a nip-and-chip takeout stand had been shut down by health regulators for its lack of running water. That was history to them.

  When Oliver entered the hotel, he was struck by the heaviness of the air, the odour of must retreating to the corners of the room as he drew the blinds on the poolroom windows. He heard footsteps in the hall above, and knew the old gentlemen were up and would soon want to wet their whistles. What would become of them, if the hotel shut down? They wouldn’t find accommodations for what he charged them. What would become of Union Plains? A ghost town, likely, the hotel a falling-down relic of the past, a shell people would poke about in while out on a Sunday drive into the country.

  He’d come home for supper last night thinking to tell Sara about the man and woman who’d stopped by the hotel to see him, the woman catching him by surprise in his broom-closet office under the stairs late in the day, when he’d already turned the lights off over the pool tables and in the parlour, as he usually did over the supper hour.

  The woman said she would appreciate it if Oliver would sell her a bottle, as her old codger got mean when he was dry. He was waiting for her in the car, she said, and nodded at the shelves in his closet, indicating the poolroom beyond that wall, its large windows and the street where, Oliver feared, the man waited in plain view.

  She’d come to purchase bootleg liquor on the say-so of a barber in Alexander Morris, she told Oliver. A town they’d stopped in as they returned from a trip south of the border. The barber, Delorme, had said just to mention his name. My hubby is one thirsty bugger, she said, as though this might help to sway Oliver, as though thirst was his next of kin.

  Usually these transactions went on after work and from the back door, but there was something doelike about her that tempted him to take a chance. She was good-looking, with soft dark eyes, dark hair, her stomach rounding out the front of a green tailored suit. A drinker’s belly. He noted that her handbag was large enough to hold a bottle, or two. The odours of fried bacon and tomato soup wafted down from the second floor as the old gents began preparing their evening meal; the lights had been turned off, anyone going by would think he’d left for supper. Oliver reasoned that it should be safe to sell her a bottle.

  He wanted to pull the light chain in his under-the-stairs office, lock its door, make the woman wait among the pool tables in the semidarkness while he went into the cellar. He didn’t want her in his room, whose shelves were stacked with the towels and sheets Sara laundered for the gentlemen boarders. His shaving basin rested on a middle shelf with its ring of soap, the mug and brush beside it. A buffalo robe hung from two hooks beside the door, a robe that had once covered a cot where he’d slept as a boy and then as a young man, in what had now become this broom-closet office under the stairs.

  You sell me a bottle, I’ll tell you your fortune. One good turn deserves another, the woman said.

  She took his hand, turned it over and cupped it, her fingers clammy against his hot skin. A sour odour wafted from her nostrils and pores, and he stepped back. Likely she needed a drink more than the man. She peered into his palm, her lashes thick with mascara, some of which had come off on the skin beneath her brows and looked like the tracks of insects. From the lobby came the sound of the door opening and closing.

  Oh gosh, I shouldn’t have started this, she said, and dropped Oliver’s hand.

  The footsteps faded. Whoever had come in had gone into the parlour. Connie, where in hell are you? a man called.

  Oliv
er followed the woman and the odour of cigar smoke through the lobby, and as they entered the parlour a shaky smile covered half the woman’s face, revealing lipstick-stained teeth. He could smell her fear.

  I was in China, where did you think I’d be? she said.

  The man standing in the centre of the room wore a fedora crooked to one side of his head and shadowing his face, but as he came over to the bar, the light through the curtains revealed his bulbous features. A bulldog. Once he clamped onto something, this man would shake the life out of it. Oliver noted the off-white suit, soiled at the cuffs and in need of pressing, a Masonic ring on one hand, two gold rings on the other. Likely he was a gambler. He recognized the type from his taxi-driving days.

  So, you’re Vandal, then? the man said, sizing Oliver up, and when Oliver nodded the man turned away as though to dismiss him. Where’s the bottle? What’s the holdup? he asked the woman, and Oliver thought for a moment that his deep voice sounded familiar.

  The air in the parlour was oppressive with the acrid odours of lives being sloughed off for near to a century. The velour curtains held the smell of weather, excitement and desolation. Oliver indicated where the couple should sit; he wanted them to stay put while he went into the cellar room behind the furnace.

  But the man strolled the length of the parlour and back again, jingling coins and keys in his trouser pockets, the hint of a smile playing on his blunt features as he surveyed the room, its arrangement of square oak tables and hoop-backed chairs, the gilt-framed mirrors, the shaggy buffalo head mounted on a wall. He tipped his fedora to the back of his head and whistled. My God, it’s just as Villebrun said. Nothing’s changed.

  The age lines in the man’s grey face softened and Oliver finally realized, with a start, that he had seen him before, years ago, when he was just a boy. There was always a single voice pushing through all the others, laughing more uproariously, while he tried to fall asleep in his room under the stairs. This man’s hoarse and gravelly voice.