Well, just when you think you know who they are, Kornelius said, wryly.
Sara watched as Katy pushed out her chest dramatically, lifted her chin and swaggered in an exaggerated long gait. I’m Peter Goosen, she shouted. Then she stretched her neck, put a hand to her forehead and swivelled her head this way and that, as though she were spying on someone. I’m Franz Pauls, she shouted to Sara in a self-important voice. She snapped imaginary suspenders and then caught herself.
I shouldn’t have done that. Her features grew strained, aging her instantly. He was so young to be a teacher. He was my first and my last teacher. But you wouldn’t remember him.
Of course I remember him. I remember that you didn’t like him, Sara retorted, still smarting from Katy’s laughter in the barn.
Yes, and I’m sorry for that, Katy said, her shoulders drooping.
The wedding guests streamed from the house now, led by Annie, carrying a camera. The sisters went to meet them.
Picture-taking, Kornelius said, with resignation. Man, oh man. They can’t get enough of it. Welcome to the family.
Oliver flinched as Kornelius clapped him on a shoulder. He wished the man had kept silent. If Sara had wanted him to know, she would have told him, he thought. Forgetting that when they were together they were usually horizontal and in a hurry. In the heat of the moment or rising from it. Until now, Sara had begun and ended there. Welcome to the family. He hadn’t the faintest notion of the extent and complications of such a family.
He followed Kornelius across the yard, dragging his feet. I’ve made a mistake—the realization was a stone dropping to the pit of his stomach, making him want to back away, even as he went forward to join the wedding party for the picture-taking. He took each step with the increasing and sickening certainty that he’d made a terrible mistake.
The wedding guests pressed in around him, some calling out comments in broken English and the others laughing, their odd sense of humour passing Oliver by. He was pulled and jostled to the middle of the group, Sara taking him by the arm. He was joined in marriage to a stranger, was the father of her child, and he’d never felt more alone.
The camera’s shutter opened and closed with a tinny decisive click, while Oliver thought, it’s too late. He was impatient when Annie held up a hand to keep the wedding party in place. He knew he had Annie to thank for the decorated parlour, for having rehearsed Katy’s children to sing a greeting before the minister took charge. But throughout the long winter afternoon he’d grown uncomfortable at how diligently Sara’s people worked to be accepting of him, as though he were a piece of real estate to be tilled and seeded and brought to harvest.
And now this. This, this. This information Kornelius had passed into his hands, which left him grappling for something in the depths of his experience that would clue him in on how to deal with it. Once again the camera’s shutter opened and closed, while Oliver thought, I’ve made a mistake.
Just one more, Annie called.
Lay off, Annie, Kornelius said. Enough already. He broke ranks, stepped out of line, and the others followed.
I only wanted a last picture, Annie said, tears welling and then spurting from her eyes like watermelon seeds. One more, that’s all, she cried, her voice rising towards hysteria. It’s Sara’s wedding and Mama and Papa should be here. They should all be here.
Katy hurried over to her, slipped an arm about her waist, while Sara escaped to the house, her pulse pounding in her ears as she heard Katy say, They’re here. They can see.
In the wedding group snapshot these ordinary-looking people stand in three rows in a snowy farmyard. Sara and Oliver are in the centre of the first row, both unsmiling. Alvina is taken by how Sara clutches Oliver’s arm in a fiercely proprietary manner. She tilts her head towards his shoulder as though to dispel any doubts about them being man and wife.
When was this taken? Alvina has asked Sara on more than one occasion. Soon after we were married. At a family gathering, Sara says, wiping flour from her hands before taking the snapshot and studying it carefully as though searching her mind. I thought I was so grown-up, she once said, as though laughing at herself. He looks like a gypsy. And Alvina thinks, it’s true, he does. Oliver gazes off to one side of the camera, his dark hair curling overtop his collar, high cheekbones reflecting light, trousers wide and bagging at the knee. While all around him the others stare directly at the camera. They’re fair-skinned, round-faced and solemn people, and pose as though they’re aware that at some point, in their lives or in the hereafter, they could be called upon to give an account of this day.
Within hours of the picture-taking Kornelius brought them home, the winter darkness having quickly descended. Here and there, lights twinkled in the windows of the houses in Union Plains, while in the Vandal house a lantern wavered in the draft of the open door as Oliver gathered up an armload of firewood. After the baby came along the house would need to be electrified, hooked up to a source of water and a septic field. Sara was right, he thought, the windows were crooked and drafty, and when the heat from the stove got up, the earth beneath the floor gave off the odour of mice, like the smell that hung about the corners and closets of the hotel, and in the vacant guest rooms.
There’s something wrong. What is it? What’s wrong? Sara had wanted to know as soon as they stepped inside the house, following him about the rooms. She came to the doorway now, watched him stack the wood against his body, a coat slung over her nightgown, bare feet, toes curling on the sill against the cold. She stepped inside as he came in and set the wood down beside the stove. We need a wood-box, she said, unhappy with the bits of bark and chips littering the floor.
I’ll build you one, Oliver said. I’ll build you a dandy woodbox. Then he turned away from her and said, Go to bed. I won’t be long. I’m going to see a man about a dog. To stretch my legs, is all.
To take the air, to feel the wind. To gather my thoughts. To keep from smashing his fist into a wall, as he would a hammer one day in the future, while hanging a shelf. Pound and pound through Sara’s shouting at him to stop, until he’d put the hammer clean through the shiplap.
He told her he was going to the hotel to relieve Cecil. The old gent’s gout had flared up, and it wasn’t kind to keep him on his feet. After he shut down the parlour, likely he would go for a walk to feel the air. Go to bed, he told her again.
You can’t leave me, she said. Her dismay at his departure was replaced by fear. She’d never once slept in a house alone, and wouldn’t be able to sleep, not until he returned. She had heard things going on in the house during the night, thumping, an animal’s breathing beneath the floor.
Listen here, woman, I can’t afford to take any more time off. You know very well what I do. I’m going to work, he told her. You danged well better get used to it.
Three raps at the door brought Alice. They sat in the dark and sipped tea, then a finger of whisky. Inhaled its amber fumes and talked about this and about that. Chewed the fat.
Oliver described to Alice the people he’d met that day, without once saying the word wedding. He told her about their strangeness and lack of lustre, not telling her that, before he and Kornelius had joined the others for picture-taking, Kornelius had opened his shirt and bared his back to display a map of scars, several of them pebbled and ridged with proud flesh. Sara’s got them too, only they don’t show, he’d said.
Those people will laugh over nothing, Oliver said. Alice laughed and said, Like that? They fell silent. The house creaked as the temperature outside fell. Oliver listened for the inevitable footsteps in the upstairs hall, which never came.
Alice’s hand rested on the table near his hand, its palm turned up, as though she expected something would drop into it. She flinched when he placed his hand round hers and gave it what was meant to be a reassuring squeeze, while hoping for the same. She drew away from him, got up and switched on a light, took down a deck of playing cards from a cupboard and returned to the table.
Your pleasure, mademoi
selle, Oliver said.
Hearts, she replied.
He waited as she shuffled the cards, her small cone-shaped breasts shifting beneath her sweater as she began dealing them out.
ELEVEN
Housekeeping
OR A TIME a piano man makes calls to the Vandal house to tune the Heintzman, until he pronounces the instrument no longer worth the effort. And so the piano is relegated to the back porch, where its joints loosen, the felts on the hammers harden, its veneer cracks. Most of its ivories are chipped or missing entirely, having been pried loose by restless fingers. Oliver cannot pass by the instrument without feeling wounded, without thinking, what a crying shame.
The letters of the piano keys are labelled in crayon, the work of Ruby, who thinks she doesn’t have the ear. Nevertheless, at five years old she’s determined to teach herself to play. Thanks to a Learn to Play Music book of simple tunes provided by Florence Dressler, who also obligingly wrote the letters beneath the notes of the songs, Ruby toils on. Her pointed tongue flicks across her lips as she searches for a corresponding letter on the keys to the letter beneath a note on the staff. Sometimes she plays the piece of music an octave higher or lower than she means to, until Alvina goes out into the porch and positions Ruby’s body on the middle of the bench and moves her hands to the appropriate octave. Oliver bought the piano reasoning that it would be years before his future children would need to reach beyond the midsection of its keyboard. He didn’t take into account music such as boogie-woogie and rock and roll; Emilie plays mostly at the top and bottom of the keyboard, and sometimes with her feet and elbows. The distorted pounding suits her musical taste. Ida prefers to play hymns, improvising as she goes along, embellishing the melody with clever trills up and down the keyboard, but when, invariably, the sounds of the high and low registers fall apart, she becomes cross and says, Shoot! Instead of Shit!, as she would like to but doesn’t, because she’s playing hymns. The piano keys are mushy beneath Oliver’s touch, the tone wavering and offensive to his ears, and he gives up trying to coax a tune out of the instrument. His sons remain indifferent to piano playing, preferring a trumpet or saxophone, if only they had one.
Oliver believed that by the time any of his future children was an accomplished pianist, he’d be flush and able to purchase an upright grand, whose sound was better suited for the classical style. Which, despite his objections to Alice going away to the academy to study, was what he imagined his children would play. He also concluded that classical music could only be truly appreciated, and played with the necessary ferocious power, by a man.
During the almost twenty years that follow their second wedding night, Sara and Oliver find themselves in one another’s company for only brief moments at a time. A moment when the bed springs dip beneath his weight and Sara’s inner chatter flattens to a straight line. He sheds his clothing in the dark, and sometimes sparks fly off his body with a snap, sheets of static electricity flash with the downward movement of his trousers, across his chest, illuminating him in a sharp blue moment of light. He slides in beside her with a learned stealth so as not to disturb the current baby asleep in its crib, and they have this moment when they lie side by side, not yet touching.
So how was work? Sara asks. By work she means how much money was in the till at the end of the night, an indication of the amount she can expect to be in his leather envelope the next time she goes shopping. She’s unaware that, as the years pass, more money comes through the hotel’s back door than from the ancient cash register, a marble and brass edifice as large as a pulpit. She’s never heard the term bootlegger.
It was a quiet night, he may say. A Saturday night hockey game in Alexander Morris, a talent contest in another town or a dance in Ste. Agathe means that the parlour is empty most of the evening, except for the old-timers nursing a tumbler of beer for hours, until he takes pity and draws a round on the house. Easy come, easy go, he tells them with an ever-increasing uneasiness.
It was a fair night, a good night, he may say. And come to believe his own optimism, entertain thoughts of dropping in at the car dealership in Alexander and arranging for a loan to purchase an old Chevrolet that has been sitting on the lot for half a year. He’ll leave Cecil in charge of the parlour more often, go places. Maybe drive to Emerson and check out the car bingo that is attracting players for miles around, including Indians from the Roseau River Reserve. The jackpots are sometimes near to three hundred smackers.
He’ll take the kids to play bingo. For sure. Why not? It would widen their horizon. Drive around the border town for a bit, maybe drop in on cousin Danny and his family. Danny surprised him by showing up at the hotel one night. The man’s a customs officer, he told Sara. He’s a high school graduate. The young cousin came through the dimness of the parlour towards him, a clean-looking and neatly dressed man whose soft smile reminded Oliver of his mother. He was surprised when Danny ignored his extended hand and hauled him into a bear hug. Come and see us, bring the family, don’t be a stranger, he said when he left. Maybe Oliver will do just that. If he won a bingo jackpot, they could go on a real trip.
Yes. Take Sara and the kids to see Ontario. The forests he saw from the train when he was returning from leave. He made that trip twice on mercy, when Sara gave birth. At the end of two years he returned home for good. An honourable discharge for the old fella, whose burgeoning family needed him more than the war effort did. The train wound through slabs of rock and black forests that gave way suddenly as it left shield country. The prairie lands seemed to descend from the sky, the land and water touched by light and releasing a tension in his body. It was as though he’d been holding his breath for the entire passage through the rock and woods. He’ll take his kids to see that black forest and make them appreciate what they have. You betcha.
I’d like to buy me a car, Oliver muses aloud, during one of his optimistic meanderings.
We could go to Edmonton, Sara says, her mind leaping with the possibility. She would like to visit the distant cousin on her mother’s side. During the ocean crossing the woman noticed Sara’s plight of the too-large stockings, and exchanged them for a pair that fit. A small gesture, but one that Sara has never forgotten. If they had a car, she and Oliver could go for a spin to neighbouring towns on Sunday afternoons. They’d be able to park in the driveway and have conversations without all the big ears listening in.
Niagara Falls, Oliver says, his imagination up and running. Just you and me. We’d stay in a motel, feed the radio quarters and not get out of bed all day.
In the silence that follows, the clock on the bureau seems to tick louder. A stack of freshly ironed laundry on the easy chair beside the window glows in the light of the moon. A child calls out abruptly in sleep. Sara holds her breath as she listens. Their children cry out to be rescued from ravenous wolves and raging fires. They dream of falling and of flying, of being able to breathe underwater. Who would look after them? she wonders. She can justify needing help to care for them when she’s ill, or lying in with a baby. But how could she for a vacation?
They have moments together when they seed the garden; in later years, without the presence of a blanket of children set down in a patch of shade. Alvina tends to the children and the house. They work well together when they plant, there’s no need to speak as Oliver hoes a shallow trough while Sara comes behind him, trailing seeds and covering them. Hours later they stop to drink water from a jar and gaze at the sky, Oliver reaching for Sara to massage a crimped neck muscle. She leans into his kneading, wondering at the strength of his fingers, grateful for their heat. When a woman passes by in the street, Oliver calls a greeting, while Sara returns to the task at hand.
It doesn’t hurt to be friendly, Oliver says. Smile, Sara, your face won’t crack.
I’ve tried that. They only want to make fun of me, Sara says. The English hid their unfriendliness behind crooked little fingers as they sipped weak tea and nibbled on stale biscuits she wouldn’t be caught feeding to a stray dog.
Throughout the nearly twenty years of their marriage, Sara attends weddings and funerals alone because Oliver cannot shut down the hotel, and church, as Sundays are his only day of rest. On parents’ day she visits her children’s classrooms with the smaller ones in tow, sits with the other parents on chairs placed across the back of the room while the teacher conducts a lesson. She’s taken by the busyness of the classroom, the colourful artwork, the earnest look of exercises pinned to the walls, the maps, the scribblers lying open on a display table, which she dutifully inspects along with the other parents. But unlike them, she doesn’t understand what she inspects. She doesn’t know long division or multiplication, fractions, the simple algebra and geometry exercises, the names for the parts of a flower or the body of a bee. Why must they learn health, she wonders, and about the ancient Greeks—of what use will that information be to them in the future? She bristles when a teacher puts her hands on Sonny Boy’s shoulders and steers him over to the blackboard to work on an equation.
She’s quietly amazed that her children can recite and point out all the states in the United States, the provinces in Canada and their capital cities, while she strains to find Russia on the map of the world, and fails. She’s nonplussed by their politeness and deference to the teacher, their confidence. She knows she should be proud that they’re among the achievers, and not envious.
You should be there, she tells Oliver. School visits make her feel inadequate, and she overdresses for them, she knows from the sideways glances of the other women, which makes her chin rise and her smile feel forced, while at the same time she fights against a shyness that wants to pull her chin down, turn her controlled smile into an obsequious one. If she spoke, she would flounder for words that, at home, come so fluently. Oliver only needs to enter a room, and everyone turns towards him as though expecting to be entertained or encouraged, expecting that he knows that someone in their family is ill or has passed away, or has a new baby. Expecting to feel better for having talked to him.
Children of the Day Page 21