I head for home, the spring breeze tousling my hair. Tousling? Ravaging would be the word. I must look like I’ve been electrocuted. My mind is still on Hazel and her strange family. The mother is obviously a madwoman they keep locked in the attic. She must have managed to get out somehow and found her way downstairs. But, what about the breaking glass? A vase. She threw it at Hazel in an attempt to kill her. Maybe I should be writing my play about that, about having a murderous lunatic for a mother. No wonder Hazel thinks stories shouldn’t have bad things happen.
My mind strays back to my play, The Wounded Lover. Why kill off the soldier at all? To kill or not to kill, that is the question. Shakespeare had no qualms about killing off heroes. Look at Romeo and Juliet. Look at Hamlet—a complete bloodbath at the end.
I walk along with my head down, thinking hard about the best way to end my play, until at last I see that the only answer is to abandon it and write one instead about a madwoman who tries to murder her family. I’m so deep in thought, I don’t notice that I’ve missed my corner and am now about to pass Woolworths. Good. A little bag of candies will get my brain working again.
Inside, I stand at the candy counter at the front of the store, pouring over the selection. Mary Foley’s counter, where she sells cosmetics—including lipstick with enticing names—is near the back. I should go say hi to her, but I don’t. I can see she’s busy chatting with some of her girlfriends.
“May I help you?” the salesgirl at the candy counter asks.
Chewing my lower lip, I mull over the selection. I need to make the absolute best choice—peanut brittle or Liquorice Allsorts. “Liquorice,” I say, and just as the girl is about to scoop some into a paper bag, I say, “Wait. I can’t make up my mind.”
She puts down her scoop. “Take your own sweet time, hon, I got nothin’ better to do.”
I stare hard at the peanut brittle, willing it to offer itself to be my choice, savoring in my mind the sweet-salty blend.
As I ponder the difficult decision, the girls who were talking with Mary come up to the candy counter. I don’t actually know them personally, but I’ve seen them around. They’re obviously continuing a conversation started a few minutes before. They don’t recognize me. They don’t even notice me.
One of them says, “He’s so standoffish and above it all. I don’t know why she doesn’t drop him.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be very patriotic, would it?”
“No, but you know what I mean; he’s let the war go to his head.”
“Oh, for sure! And he wasn’t even an officer or anything.”
“You know Mary. Too nice for her own good.”
I can guess who they’re talking about. Standoffish! My brother is the farthest thing from it. At least he wasn’t like that before he went away, I’m sure of that. Now that he’s back, he’s a tiny bit different, a little quieter. But, so what?
The girls buy a bag of chocolate kisses, each of them dipping into it, and leave without even glancing at me.
“Peanut brittle,” I say confidently. The minute I pay, and the girl hands over the small bag, I wish I’d chosen a square of chocolate fudge.
CHAPTER
8
“They should give us a week off school every month,” I say as I sprinkle more brown sugar on my cornflakes. It’s the last week of April, and school’s closed for the Easter break. “I love sleeping in.”
“Eight-thirty isn’t much of a sleep-in,” Jamie says.
“It is if you normally have to roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of seven and force your eyelids to stay open for another scintillating day at school.”
We’re in the kitchen having breakfast. Mother has brought the ironing board down from the sewing room and propped it over the backs of two kitchen chairs. She flattens tea towels and handkerchiefs while she keeps up with the conversation. Through the window, we can see Mrs. Hall, next door, hanging out her laundry. Mother waves.
“I need to go away somewhere,” Jamie growls into the newspaper he’s browsing through.
“But you just got home,” Mother says. “We’ve hardly had a chance to talk.”
“Talk! About what?”
“About you, of course, about your war experiences.”
“I didn’t have experiences. The war was about fighting. I wasn’t on a sightseeing tour. We were bombed. We were shot at. And we did the same back. Men died. And that was the war.” He glares at the classified section.
Letters not sent.
It’s quiet tonight. It won’t last, not after yesterday’s grim exercise. There were ten of us. We had to move quietly, in twos, crouching close to tumbled walls of bombed buildings, slipping into empty doorways. I was with Defazio, who grew up in downtown Toronto. He whispered something like, “This would be fun if I wasn’t so scared I’m gonna crap my pants.” I tightened up, too, because the same thought crossed my mind. Even so, it was a bit like the cops and robbers me and Coop used to play. Coop was always a robber.
We were in what was left of a small French village, where our job was to flush out a nest of enemy soldiers supposedly guarding a small munitions dump. It was one of those nights when the moon looked like a big silver dinner plate, just hanging up there. I was shaking like mad and couldn’t stop. That’s when I accidentally nudged an empty tin can, and it rolled down a grade and bumped against a stone wall.
Immediately, gunfire rattled and whizzed over our heads. It was coming from a bombed-out schoolhouse. I’d given away our position. My first thought was that I’d be court-martialed and imprisoned as a liability. My second thought was that prison would be a whole lot safer than this place. We kept low, slithering along, our faces nearly in the dirt. But at least we knew exactly where the enemy lurked.
We crept forward when we saw clouds tarnish the moon. We were half protected by an overturned vehicle and some household goods left behind by refugees making their escape. Just then, a dog jumped out of an abandoned car and barked at us. Our sergeant was lying low behind the tank, but he lured the dog to him, silently. I guessed he wanted to quiet him with a tidbit of something he pulled from his pocket, a moment of kindness in the face of battle. A second later, he grabbed the dog and slit its throat. Such is war.
Enemy fire rattled at and above our cover, but we moved stealthily forward. Everyone looked away from the bloody dog. Defazio silently threw up. The clouds drifted and we were close enough to see the Germans’ faces.
“Jeez, they’re just kids, some of them,” the sergeant whispered. He passed me his binoculars.
Some of them looked younger than me. Could have been me and Coop and Tom Klosky back in about grade eleven. “They don’t look dangerous enough to be Nazis,” I whispered.
Somebody muttered, “Worst kind. Hitler Youth. Learn to kill in kindergarten.”
On the order, we threw our grenades. I have to confess, I took the precaution of half-closing my eyes to avoid seeing the inevitable. We fell back to take cover behind a pile of rubble before whatever stores the Germans had were blown sky-high.
Can’t finish this. We’re on the move again. More later.
Mother rests the iron on its end and sighs. “Son, why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?” He sounds like a sulky kid.
“You’re being sarcastic and sullen. You’ve changed. I want my old Jamie back.”
He put the paper down. “What do you mean, I’ve changed?”
“You used to be a polite, loving son.”
He snorts. “That’s what war does to you, I guess. You’re ordered to throw grenades into the midst of a bunch of schoolboys and blow them sky-high, and the next thing you know, you’re being rude to your mother.”
“Jamie, stop being so difficult!” I say.
He scowls into the newspaper. I scowl at my cornflakes. Mother, tight-lipped, is busy filling her clothes-sprinkling bottle at the sink. I feel like throwing my cereal bowl through the window to relieve the tension. If Jamie doesn’t say something, I’m going to whack
him on the head with my spoon.
“I miss my war buddies, I guess,” he says. “I miss the camaraderie, even the taunting and teasing.” The atmosphere improves. He nibbles on a piece of toast.
“You still have friends here,” Mother says.
“It’s not the same. I miss the sweaty smell of fear we all had, and the way we felt lucky and reckless at the same time when we came away from a battle, more or less whole. Once we found a small goat ambling along a road, and we slaughtered it on the spot. We put it on a makeshift spit and cooked it over a fire.”
My mouth drops.
“How barbaric!” Mother says. She folds her tea towels, hem to hem, with mathematical precision, trying not to look at him as he talks.
“And then we devoured it, just pulled off gobs of meat with our filthy grease-soaked hands.”
I’m making gagging sounds.
Mother says, “Obviously, there was nothing wrong with your appetite back then. You probably got food poisoning. That’s what the problem is.”
Jamie brushes toast crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand and sips at his now-cold coffee. “My only problem is, I need a job. Also, I need to go away for a bit. There are a few people I should visit. My buddy Leeson’s widow, for one. She lives in Toronto. And I’d like to go back to the Coopers’, except that I don’t have anything to talk about besides the war. That’s the problem—I have only one thing on my mind. I need a job more than anything, that’s what I need.”
I take the paper from him and study the want ads. “ ‘Farm laborer wanted,’ it says here. Maybe you could work for Granny.”
“Now, there’s an idea!” He takes the paper back.
“I don’t think you have any idea how hard farmwork is,” Mother says. “Ask your father. Ask Granny. She worked that farm right along with your grandfather. She used to say she helped the Allies win the Great War by keeping them fed. ‘Napoleon was right,’ I’ve heard her say, ‘an army marches on its stomach.’ ”
“So what if it’s hard work? I’m just growing soft, hanging around here. I need to get back in shape.”
Mother nods sadly.
“Sorry for being so difficult,” he says.
She pulls the plug on the iron and leaves it on its end to cool. Coming over to stand near him, she pushes hair back from his forehead. I watch him clench his jaw as if it’s all he can do to keep from jerking away.
“I guess it must be pretty hard to adjust to civilian life again,” she says.
“I’m working on it.”
Jamie doesn’t object to me going along for the ride in Dad’s car out to Granny’s farm. He’s going to see if she’ll hire him for the spring and summer. We roll down our windows to feel the breeze on our faces. At full volume, we sing, “ ‘How’ ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’ ” We have to hum the rest because we don’t know all the words. But who cares?
“I’ll have to get a car of my own, if my plans work out.”
“Can you afford one?”
“Sure, a little secondhand coupe, if I can find one. I have my army pay. I wasn’t a big spender overseas.”
“Granny will pay you,” I say.
“I don’t want her to pay me. I’ll work for room and board.”
“You mean, you would actually move out there?”
“Of course.”
“No! You’re not allowed. We need you at home.”
He laughs. “Not half as much as I need to get away.”
That takes a little of the joy out of my day, and I sulk as we drive up the lane, rutted from a spring rain, and park beside Granny’s truck. Bounder, the old farm dog, lies in the sun, soaking up the warmth. He barely raises his head but wags his tail enthusiastically when I give him a good tummy rub. Jamie bends over to pat him and staggers a little when he stands up, as if the effort makes him dizzy.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Why does everybody keep assuming there’s something wrong with me?”
He knocks on the kitchen door and opens it. “Hi, Granny,” he shouts. A muffled shout answers from below the floor. He opens the cellar door to see Granny on her way up the ladder-like steps, with a bowl of last fall’s apples.
“Well, this is a nice surprise,” she says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’m looking for work.”
Granny raises her eyebrows at me. “Have those parents of yours put you out to work, too?”
“Why would they do that when they can use me for slave labor at home?”
“True enough,” Granny says. “And what about you, young buster, what kind of work do you have in mind? Not farmwork, surely.”
“Why not?”
She eyes him with her shrewd seeing-through-disguises look. “I’d have pegged you as more of a city boy.”
“A man can change.” He stresses man.
She purses her lips “Touché. However,” she adds, “I’ve already hired a man to help me this spring. He’s just back from overseas, too. By midsummer, though, I’ll need more help, if you can afford to wait a few months.” Jamie’s shoulders slump. “But since you’re here, and since I’ve had a great hankering for pickerel lately, and since I hear they’re running, how about taking a couple of Grandpa’s rods and trying your luck?”
Jamie shrugs, I grin, and soon we’re trudging through the pasture, with rods and tackle box, to where the river separates the farm from the forest.
“I’m feeling lucky,” I say.
“Bully for you.” He shifts the tackle box to his other hand.
“This is just what you need, a good day’s fishing. Back to nature and all that.”
“No, what I need is a job.”
We squelch through the ruts in the pasture. Not far away, cattle bend their necks over the new hay. Some raise their heads to scowl at us.
“To think I used to be afraid of those stinkers when I was a kid,” Jamie says.
“I wasn’t. Only thing I was afraid of was stepping in a fresh cow pie. Yikes! I just did.” I scrape my heel through the grass trying to get rid of the mess. “What a staunch!”
“I gather you mean stench.”
“Remember coming down here when the whole herd would come right for us?” I say.
“Not really.”
“You used to stop dead. You couldn’t move.”
“I don’t remember.”
Looking up now, the cattle take it into their heads to investigate at closer range and plod toward us. Jamie sticks out his chest, waves his fishing rod, and says, “Out of my way, cows, I’m coming through!” They back right up, and he grins.
“They’re steers,” I say.
Our favorite place on the riverbank is an outcropping of rock, a shelf of limestone slabs overlooking the widest part of the river. From the hunk of unsliced bacon Granny gave us for bait, Jamie cuts us each a couple of pieces with the fish-skinning knife. We bait our hooks and cast our lines.
“Give your wrist more of a flick when you cast,” he says, showing me how.
Reeling in, I think I feel a nibble, but I’m mistaken. It’s a perfect morning—sun for warmth, clouds for shade, swallows flitting and diving. A breeze blows off the river, keeping the blackflies at bay.
“This is like old times,” I say.
“This is like heaven,” Jamie says. “Maybe I could get a job selling fresh fish to people in town.”
“First, you have to catch some.”
I sit on the rock, dangling my feet above the water, reeling in slowly, thinking about the way the river has about six shades of color in it.
Jamie’s the first to get a bite. He pulls in a small fellow, not quite big enough to keep. Then I do the same. Probably the same fish. About fifteen minutes later, Jamie’s line bends almost double.
“Maybe you’re caught on a log,” I say.
“No, there’s something there, all right. It feels like a whale.”
Once it surfaces, we see that he has a good-sized pickerel o
n his line—a keeper for sure—and it’s putting up a pretty good fight. I get ready to scoop it up in the net as soon as Jamie reels it in close enough. In it comes, tail flipping, body writhing in a last battle against the inevitable.
“Granny’s going to love this,” Jamie says. He gets the hook out, bonks the fish on the head with the small club Grandpa used to use, and cuts off its head and tail.
“Maybe she’ll invite us to stay.”
Jamie’s busy gutting the fish and doesn’t answer, but then he yelps. He’s cut himself on the fish knife and is bleeding more than the fish. I whip a handkerchief from my pocket and offer to bandage the gash.
He pulls away as blood runs up his wrist and arm. “Is it clean?”
“Of course it’s clean.” Quickly, I wrap up his hand as best I can. Once the makeshift bandage is in place, I add, “At least it was clean last week. It may have been used once or twice since.”
Granny just shakes her head when she catches sight of Jamie dripping blood through the handkerchief onto her freshly scrubbed kitchen floor. “Well, I never in all my born days,” she says.
“At least we caught a fish,” I say, plunking the scaly thing down on the table.
With enough pressure, she gets the bleeding to stop, cleans the cut, and bandages it properly.
“It’s not that deep a slice,” she says. “I wouldn’t think it was worth that amount of blood. How do you feel?”
“Fine.” Jamie doesn’t look fine.
“Well, your face is as white as that fish’s belly. Maybe you should lie down.”
Surprisingly, he does what he’s told and goes into the parlor to lie on the settee.
Granny puts the fish on a cutting board and wipes blood off the table.
“What do you think is wrong with him?” I whisper. “Do you think he got blood poisoning from my hankie?”
Granny shakes her head, her lips tight with concern.
Eventually Jamie gets up and dutifully drinks some sweet hot tea at the kitchen table. Bounder is inside now, in his usual spot under the table, hoping for crumbs to fall. Jamie looks a little better. He nibbles on a bite of the fish that Granny has just cooked and served, along with homemade bread slathered in butter.
Little Red Lies Page 6