Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  The river gave off a slippery odour of the bullheads he had once caught just to feel their slimy tough skin before throwing them back. Then a faint whiff of effluence reached him, and grew stronger with each step. He could see a patch of colour moving in the Bouchard yard, and as he went up the incline through the bushes, he realized that Alice was on her knees in the garden. He was surprised by that, as he’d never thought she was one to put her hand to growing things.

  He hesitated before opening the gate. He’d come without a piece of news to entertain her. He wasn’t about to tell her about the hotel closing, either. He always imagined that she was hungry for news, that since her aging parents had stopped travelling to escape the winters, she’d become the Rapunzel of a child’s fairy tale.

  He might tell her, A man took his own life. He went into the barn after supper one night and hanged himself. What was strange about it was that his wife didn’t notice him gone until morning. Oliver didn’t know if he envied or pitied a man whose wife didn’t miss him for an entire night. One Saturday evening, a car had gone off the end of the ferry into ten feet of water. Luckily none of the passengers, all of them kids, had suffered anything more than a scare. But the accident had fired up talks about there being a need for a bridge, and of shutting down the ferry.

  He might say to Alice, there was this kid whose father died, and his mother soon after. A skinny and scared orphan kid. He woke up and found himself on a couch in Madame Villebrun’s parlour, and in the woman’s drunken embrace. His head rocked and his mouth was thick near to choking with the sweetish taste of sherry. He found himself pinned by her arm slung over his waist, his nose buried into her bosoms, which was why he’d come to. His brain was starved for air.

  What Madame Villebrun thought would make him chirpy was to sip at a finger of sherry. She knew from rumours that the mothers of his kind calmed a baby’s colic with a twist of cloth filled with sugar and dipped in brandy. They filled their babies’ milk bottles with beer so they would sleep more soundly in the barn, bundled into a bed of straw, or in a sling cradle hung from the rafters, while their parents wore their shoes out dancing.

  On Sundays after his mother died, Oliver had been invited to share the Villebrun’s’ meal of a boiled chicken, an anemic-looking bird splayed across a platter, arranged with potatoes or turnips, or carrots Oliver pulled from the hotel garden. A garden he’d set to growing behind the livery; he’d learned from Johnny, a young Hutterite, to store the root vegetables in bins of sand in the cellar. Weekly, Johnny delivered a live hen in a gunny sack, which Oliver butchered, drew and plucked. When he’d finished scrubbing a week’s filth from the parlour floor, he bathed in the kitchen sink, washed the bird in the same sink and cooked Sunday dinner. He took it upstairs to the Villebrun’s, to be consumed with a bottle of sweet vermouth.

  Every Sunday he’d cooked and dined on boiled chicken, and afterwards, while Villebrun slept off the meal and the vermouth in the bedroom, Madame Villebrun had tried to seduce him. The patting, the light touches that were meant to seem motherly, fed her own need for affection. A need that brought her to his room to sit beside him and stroke his forehead, his shoulders, his stomach.

  Until he’d got wise and thought to empty his glass into hers, and put a hook on the door of his room. That stopped her flat. But he’d never been freed of thinking about those encounters.

  To this day Oliver can’t stomach the smell of boiled chicken, a pot rimmed and swimming with grease. It speaks to him of dirt left in corners, mildewed closets, a woman whose body is in need of a good wash, covering her scent with too much cologne.

  It took all of his weight to push open the gate, whose hinges were rusty. At the squeal of metal, Alice exclaimed and got to her feet. She was wearing the burnt-orange dress she had worn last night, the front of it and her hands streaked with soil. For some reason, Oliver found this appealing. She hurried to meet him, glancing back at the house several times, and at him, her eyes holding a familiar pleading.

  A plea that he stitch together the mangled bodies of her rabbits when a dog had got into the hutch, that he somehow breathe life back into them. That he rescue a kite caught in the high branches of a tree; that he remain loyal and at the same time stay on the periphery of her life, sustained by a treacle of words—My dear Oliver—and a girlish, tentative kiss on the day of his mother’s funeral, which she’d renewed from time to time with occasional pecks at his mouth and cheeks. Her kiss last night, however, had been hard and urgent, a woman’s kiss.

  He had come unprepared, without news to ease them into one another’s presence while he watched for signs that would tell him she had changed, had taken a beau, perhaps. Her travels had put more than miles between them. Recently he had found that the everyday wear of the years was polishing her heart to a hard smoothness. And so he was taken by this old softness in her, this pleading in her eyes, a shakiness of uncertainty over someone having vandalized her car.

  Why my car? Alice asked him, and Oliver thought, as usual, we can read each other’s minds.

  There were other cars parked where I was parked. And they weren’t touched. Why mine? she asked, and gave him her hand.

  FIFTEEN

  Fending for themselves

  ARA HAD HEARD OLIVER and the children leave the house when they went off to school, and she’d wanted to leap up and rap hard on the window, but it was as though a hand pushed her backwards onto the bed. Yes, go ahead, she said, make a show of being a father. She sliced the air, imagining that she was splitting herself and Oliver apart as though this were possible. As though during their first night of lovemaking they hadn’t left something of themselves behind in a newly formed creature, Sara and Oliver. It had come into being during the mingling of their breaths, heartbeats and thoughts, and in their absence it cried out to them like an abandoned child needing its parents in order to be complete.

  Her stomach had lurched when she’d said the word father. Papa, father. She was near to being forty years old and her throat clogged with a longing to be taken onto her father’s knee. She’d heard the radio in the kitchen going silent, Patsy Anne banging for attention, the arrival and departure of Stevenson, the water man. For near to an hour now the house had been quiet, and the clock’s ticking on the bureau seemed louder as its hands moved closer to noon.

  The sun rose up the sharp slope of the roof and turned the whites hanging from Florence Dressler’s clothesline even whiter. Florence squinted against the brightness as once again she came from the house and walked the length of the line of laundry, touching the clothes although she knew they had dried. She used the laundry as an excuse to peer through the spaces between the cranberry hedge and into the Vandals’ yard.

  She gnawed her lip at the sight of the baby still asleep in the playpen, and the sun growing hotter. Stevenson had alerted her to the situation before he’d left, and she had taken the liberty of covering the playpen with a sheet from the line to provide shade, all the while watching the kitchen window for signs of Sara, apprehensive that she might take the gesture as a slur. Sunburn is sunburn, Florence reasoned, and for the sake of Patsy Anne she was willing to take the risk.

  She was puzzled that Sara’s clotheslines weren’t hung with the wash, that she didn’t hear the slosh and chug of the machine in the back porch. Even more puzzling had been Sharon, the three-year-old, digging in the garden wearing nothing more than a pair of underpants, her pink dress in a heap in the sandbox, where she’d taken it off. Sharon, having learned how buttons and fasteners worked, was of the age to disrobe for the pleasure of having the option. For the pleasure of causing the kids to go screaming into the house to tell Sara that she had done so, and of having Sara come running out in a fluster of embarrassment. The swat on Sharon’s backside being worth the effort of undressing because of the excitement she had sparked.

  But Sharon was no longer in the garden, Florence noted, and the pink dress no longer in the sandbox. She reasoned that Ruby must have taken her into the house.

 
; Sara lay on the bed thinking that the quiet in the house meant Alvina had hauled the stroller out of the backyard shed and gone walking with the girls. The quiet seemed to be a person, a stranger moving through the downstairs rooms and into the front hall, ascending the stairs. A sudden quiet often preceded a crack of thunder, the screams of one of the kids being injured. Silence usually meant that Manny was up to something and the rest of the kids were in collusion, or Alvina was at the mirror in the girls’ room, dabbing lipstick on her mouth, shoving out her chest, practising looking like a hussy.

  Silence meant that The Other One was at the table in the dining room, perspiring and chewing his fingernails ragged as he studied for a test. Sonny Boy was about to take a chance for the sake of it, as he had done ever since being able to walk. Climbing onto the roof, riding his bicycle with his hands in his trouser pockets, stealing vegetables from the widow Anderson’s garden.

  Last Halloween Sonny and the Bogg brothers had attracted the attention of Constable Krooke when they hoisted a teacher’s car onto the roof of the creamery. Sonny Boy liked showing off to girls, Alvina had reported. She’d heard that he and the Bogg brothers were picking French girls up in Aubigny and the boys of that town had challenged them to a game of chicken on Stage Coach Road. The details of the car-racing game had passed Sara by, as she’d become rooted on the word girls. Sonny Boy and girls. At sixteen? She began noticing his irritation when she came near him, that he shrugged her hand from his shoulder.

  Sara could not have imagined that at this very moment Sonny Boy was teetering along the hand railing of the Morris Alexander bridge, a two-storey-high structure spanning the Red River near the town. The current was swift and the channel still swollen from spring high-water, and sometimes animals venturing into the shallows to drink were swept away and drowned. The Bogg brothers were among several other high school boys who paused to watch as one of those hapless creatures, a cow, came floating towards them, rolling onto its bloated side as it emerged from under the bridge and cast them a look with its opaque and sightless eye, giving them the shudders.

  Their mouths hung open when Sonny Boy reached a crossbeam and hiked up onto it, his hands gripping its sides as he half walked and half crawled up its slope to a girder. Then he stepped onto the girder and inched across it to another crossbeam, and pulled himself up to the second of several level girders, where most of the boys who were watching had already, at one time or another, etched their initials in its silver paint. B.B. T.B., Sonny read the Bogg brothers’ initials aloud. K.M. sucks cocks, he read, which brought a round of laughter.

  They expected he would take his knife from its sheath and scratch his initials into the paint, and were as surprised as Sonny was when he grabbed hold of a cable and swung himself up onto another crossbeam. He straddled it and humped up its cold length, noticing that the higher he went, the narrower the river seemed to be, a yellow sluggish snake of water. The cow’s carcass looked like a rusted barrel as it rounded a curve and floated out of sight.

  The top beam of the bridge vibrated with the river’s flow, and Sonny Boy felt it behind his knees as he sat, his legs dangling, not daring to look down at the treetops or the sprawling town beyond, or at the composite high school downstream and near the river, a new two-storey stucco building on a rise of land. The wind had grown stronger the higher he climbed, and he could hear the girders and cables humming. Nausea clutched at his stomach, and his hands were cold and clammy as he fumbled for his belt and the knife, at the same time fearing that the pressure needed to scar the paint would put him off balance.

  Sara’s fussing at Sonny Boy when she straightened his collar, her anxious eyes watching as he consumed the food she’d prepared, her eyes following him throughout the house had sent him racing across the fields towards the horizon, sent him shimmying up the bridge to the top span, where no one else had gone. His knuckles whitened and his hand shook as he scratched the letters N.V.; then he raised his arm in triumph. The boys cheered, stuck their fingers between their teeth and whistled, the shrill sound resounding in the steel around Sonny, echoing from the school grounds of Alexander Morris Composite and a moment later being answered by the harsh buzzer signalling students that it was time to change classrooms, time to return.

  The boys watched Sonny’s slow descent; Sonny watched himself descend, the careful and exact placement of his hands and feet belying the nature that had been attached to him—devil-may-care, dauntless. If anyone tried to get Sonny with a bowling ball, he, Norbert Vandal, and not the Bogg brothers, would see to it that they paid. Norbert, not Sonny Boy. The nickname was becoming a relic, like the buffalo on the wall in the beer parlour, which had been patted and fondled and admired near to wearing out.

  Sara did not for a moment think that the silence creeping through the rooms of the house was Ruby, going about on tiptoe lest she awaken Sara. She’d crept up the stairs and down the hall, and peered into the room and saw her mother, the bedsheet tucked around her body, eyes closed and hands folded on her bosom.

  Mom.

  Mom.

  The ladybugs had come back, they were coming through the wooden splinters of what had been the kitchen doorsill, under the doormat and across the floor, and disappearing under the refrigerator.

  Mom.

  When last Ruby had looked at the clock, it had said the time was 11:20, which she knew was near to twelve. Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock, the clock struck one. I’m leaving, the water man had called into the back porch. Anybody home? he had asked, startling Ruby into realizing that she was sitting at the play table on the chair she had intended to carry outside and set beside the playpen, turning the pages of the storybook she’d planned on looking at while watching Patsy Anne.

  The water man’s truck rumbled away down the road, and the kitchen grew silent except for the steady plop, plop sound of the perpetual drinking bird dipping its long beak into the glass of water. Ruby noticed the ladybugs, like spatters of paint moving against the white splintered wood and across the lime-green floor.

  Mom, she whispered, and when Sara moaned she tiptoed back down the hall.

  Good morning to you, we’re all in our places with bright smiling faces, Ruby thought, as she wrenched the vise grips on the refrigerator door and felt the clasp give way. Oh, this is the way to start a new day. As she would sing when she started school. Sit up straight, make a church steeple of your hands and put them on the desk in front of you. Good morning, boys and girls. Good morning, teacher. She’ll be riding six white horses, when she comes, woah, back! No, no, Ruby. That’s a grade three song. You’ll sing that in grade three.

  If Ruby needed to go pee she would raise her hand. If she needed a drink of water, she’d do the same. The water cooler was in the cloakroom, a big upside-down bottle with cone-shaped paper containers. You pull one of those paper cups out of the holder, you turn the little tap on the water cooler and you’ll get water. If you spill some, you’re in trouble.

  The heavy refrigerator door swung open on its hinges and crashed into the wall. She took out a plate stacked with leftover flapjacks and set them on the table, then a half-filled bottle of milk. Going between the refrigerator and table carrying a jar of pickles, rhubarb jam, struggling with a two-quart jar of butter soup that Sara had intended for their supper meal, the leftover bowls of porridge that Alvina, in her rush to be away, hadn’t put into a container. Ruby took out the blue bottle of milk of magnesium, which Oliver sometimes gulped down without bothering with a spoon; a piece of stinky feet cheese wrapped in wax paper, which no one but he would eat.

  She pulled a chair over to the cupboard and climbed up onto it, opening the cupboard doors and taking down the melamine plates, mustard-colour for the boys, maroon for the girls, her eyes travelling up to the second shelf and the third, where, she knew, was the statue Aunt Annie had given to her mother following a trip to New York.

  The Umpire Skate Building, Ruby thought as she took it down, not anticipating its heaviness, and it slipped from
her hands and tumbled to the floor.

  Oh, no, oh no, oh no. Sharon played with it, Ruby thought, as she bustled down from the countertop, onto the chair and then to the floor, thinking, I didn’t do it, Sharon played with it, and then she thought, Sharon?

  The porch door swung shut behind Ruby as she stepped outside and saw that someone had made a tent out of the playpen, and the stillness inside it told her that Patsy Anne was asleep. The tires of the water truck had flattened the quack grass and weeds from the front of the house to the back and the water cistern. Whose lid was pushed aside, the chain curled beside it and the key still in its padlock. You kids stay away, that’s not something you want to fool with. There’s five feet of water in there, which was higher than Ruby or Sharon, or Manny or Simon. It was up to Emilie’s eyes, they had calculated, and if ever Emilie fell into the cistern, she would need to bob up and down on her toes in order to breathe, until someone rescued her.

  Ruby knelt on the cement and stretched out on her stomach, the cement cool now that the cistern was full. She pulled herself along on her elbows, inching near to the blackness of the water, the light shining on its surface making it look even blacker. She saw her head, she saw what looked like a cloud of pink hollyhocks floating just beneath the surface of the water, which she knew was Sharon’s dress. And then suddenly Ruby was yanked upright by the arm, and looking into Alvina’s terrified face.

  Go and get Dad, Alvina shouted to Emilie, who took off running. Then Alvina crouched over the cistern hole and yelled, Sharon! As though she expected the three-year-old would swim to the surface and hold up a hand. And not come stumbling out of the backyard shed, as Sharon did now—half-naked, her cheeks spots of colour as she rubbed sleep from her eyes.

  SIXTEEN

  Unfinished business