Homesick Read online

  Homesick

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “One has only to read the first page of Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Homesick to see why his books have garnered him international awards…” – Regina Leader-Post

  “If great art is that which holds a mirror up to nature, as was once said, then Homesick is great art.” – Daily News (Halifax)

  “[Vanderhaeghe’s characters] lift themselves by pride and love from the ordinariness of their world.” – Ottawa Citizen

  “Vanderhaeghe has an unerring eye for the prairie landscape and a shrewd ear for the ironies of small-town conversation… He balances his dramatization of the cycle of life with exuberant storytelling…” – London Free Press

  “His stories and novels are character studies par excellence…” – Andreas Schroeder

  “Guy Vanderhaeghe writes about what he knows best: people, their sense of mortality, their difficulty in being good during a difficult time… The dialogue and the characters are eclectic and real.” – Vancouver Sun

  “Beautifully written… Vanderhaeghe writes in a spare, poetic prose that is deceptively simple. He uses his medium very effectively to capture both the icy harshness and the warmth of family life… Homesick is an unexpectedly powerful work… His extraordinary talents deserve wide recognition.” – Whig-Standard (Kingston)

  It is the summer of 1959, and in a prairie town in Saskatchewan, Alec Monkman waits for his estranged daughter to come home, with the grandson he has never seen. But this is an uneasy reunion. Fiercely independent, Vera has been on her own since running away at nineteen – first to the army, and then to Toronto. Now, for the sake of her young son, she must swallow her pride and return home after seventeen years. As the story gradually unfolds, the past confronts the present in unexpected ways as the silence surrounding Vera's brother is finally shattered and the truth behind Vera's long absence revealed. With its tenderness, humour, and vivid evocation of character and place, Homesick confirms Guy Vanderhaeghe's reputation as one of Canada's most engaging and accomplished storytellers.

  Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Homesick

  Copyright © 1989 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  To Margaret, as always

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their generous financial assistance during the writing of Homesick.

  I would also like to express my thanks to my editor Ellen Seligman for her careful and thoughtful labours.

  Portions of this novel have previously appeared in the following: a slightly altered version of Chapter 1 was read on CBC Radio’s “Speaking Volumes” and “Aircraft”; Chapter 3 previously appeared in Books in Canada.

  1

  An old man lay asleep in his bed. This was his dream:

  He is young again, once more an ice-cutter laying up a store of ice for the summer. The Feinrich brothers and he drive their sledges out on to the wide white plain of the lake. The runners hiss on the dry snow, metal bits in the harness shift and clink, leather reins freeze so hard they lie stiff and straight as laths down the horses’ backs. Before them the sky lightens over purple-shadowed, hunch-shouldered hills.

  When the sun finally rises, so does the wind, bitter and cutting. On the lake there is no place to escape it, no trees, no sheds, no bluffs to hunker down and hide behind. On the lake there is only flatness, a rushing space that squeezes eyes into a squint.

  There it is now, the first long drawn-out sigh of breath tumbling over the hills, the faint breeze setting snow snakes writhing out over the ice and hard-packed drifts to meet them. By fits and starts this wind gathers force, the skirts of coats billow and snap, its fierce touch penetrates every layer of clothing, drives nails of cold through coveralls, trousers, woollen combinations. It raises gooseflesh and tears the manes of the horses into ragged, whipping flags. It pounds the drum-skins of tightly drawn parka hoods.

  They halt. The horses stamp on wind-polished ice. Down from the sledge, standing on bare, clean ice he can feel the cold rise through the soles of his boots, seep through stockings, sting toes. Walking over the ice he can sense the yaw and pitch, the tilt, the gentle undulations that cannot be seen but must be felt, things the eye skates over, fails to register. It makes him feel uneasy, unsteady. He thinks of the waves which ran one after another in slow succession to shore until winter laid its dead hand upon their backs, binding up the heaves and swells, arresting motion. He sees the long rivers of fracture, the widely flung tributary cracks.

  He chops a hole for the saw. The axe makes a terrible ringing on the ice, a clash like metal striking metal. With each blow, shards of ice leap like sparks in the air. He opens the lake for the ice-cutters, water spurts and gurgles in the wound. By the time he raises the axe above his head, the water splashed on the blade freezes in a glassy sheath.

  The saws squeak. The first block is lifted dripping and gleaming. A square of black water opens wide at his feet. His feet are numb with cold.

  So he dances. Dances to heat his feet. A polka right there on the huge ballroom floor of the lake, an imaginary partner cradled in the curve of his arm as he whirls round and round, boots clattering and heels flicking, the Feinrichs laughing and clapping time with their cow-hide mitts. Faster and faster he goes. The horses’ nostrils smoke surprise, their eyes roll, their heads jerk as he flashes by. Faster, faster. He throws back his head and sees the last faint stars, the pale silver moon spin with him. Dance with him.

  Then he falls. A sudden stunning breath-robbing descent through searing cold and blackness. It blots away moon and stars. A slow, buoyant, bubbling rise which ends with a bump under the ice.

  He stares up. Ice. He is under the ice, groping and scrabbling with his nails, searching for the cut-hole, a way out. He snuffles and gulps the thin scraps of air captured between ice and water, kicks his legs frantically. He butts his head madly, desperately against the ice. Water rolls and churns over his shoulders. Out, out, out.

  At last, exhausted, he can only hang in the water, suspended in silence and cold. His boots are buckets, pulling heavy on his ankles. His trouser legs balloon with cold and water. It is a silence like he has never heard, a cold like he has never felt. He grows colder by the second and guesses this means he is dying. This is a different kind of cold under the ice, you don’t go numb with it. The colder you get, the more it hurts. The more you die, the more you feel.

  Every inch of him aches with it. He is cold through to the sap and marrow of his bones. The quiet is no less terrible.

  Then he hears something. Above him, people walk. Crunch, creak go the footsteps.

  “I’m down here!” he shouts. “I’m down here!”

  They don’t heed his cry. They don’t stop. They pass over.

  “For the love of God!” he shouts. “I’m down here! Under the ice!”

  The crunch, creak fades away.

  His last struggle against the ice begins. It is all rage and foaming water.

  Alec Monkman woke in his bed, pillowcase bunched in an arthritic fist. Despite the violence of his grip, the ache and throb of skewed and swollen knuckles was lost beneath all the rest of it. Yet the pain was there, lurking deeper than bone, deep as the deepest waters of sleep from which he had fought upward in terror, cold and shivering, only to find more ice.

  Monkman kept his eyes fixed on the feeble, milky light across the bedroom; stars hedged round by a window-frame. Underneath the ice he had sought for some sign of light, a glimmer to guide him.

  Jesus Christ Almighty, maybe one of these nights he will drown and it will be left to Stutz to discover him in the morning, deader than Joe Cunt’s dog.

  He had never had any affection for water. Strange then that his first job should have been building bridges. Not that he had had
any choice; his Dad had got him the job. His father had work on a bridge construction crew and got him a place by lying about his age. He was fourteen. It was his father’s opinion that children ought not to get accustomed to living off their parents’ charity, and that fourteen was just about the proper weaning age. So Alec had been put to work driving a gravel wagon two months after the decisive birthday.

  Sitting on the seat of that wagon he had seen his first man killed. He had glanced up and seen the half-breed fall from a trestle, sixty feet down to the river. The breed had looked like a spider dropping on a spinner, arms and legs splayed out and working like crazy. The men said he knocked himself out because of the way he fell, face down and on his belly. It kicked the air out of his lungs and did him in, stole any chance of survival he had. Nobody could reach him out in the river, the race of water was too strong, sweeping him around the bend and out of sight before anyone could move.

  They had unhitched Alec’s team and he and three others had chased down the river after him on the horses, only catching up when the body hooked on a snag. They found him with the white water tumbling over his shoulders and his long black Indian hair fanned out from his skull, rippling and waving in the current.

  He had never forgotten how water swallowed you. Never completely trusted it, even when it was eighteen inches thick and solid. One winter was all he could bring himself to cut ice.

  Stutz knew about the dream. He had asked Stutz what he made of it. “It’s the arthritis,” said Stutz. “It makes you ache in your sleep and you dream the cold.”

  The dream, or a variation on it, visited Monkman every week or so. Sometimes when he floated upright in the icy water, the life trickling out of him, it wasn’t footsteps he heard above him but singing far off in the distance, the faded harmony of childish voices. Other times the ice was absolutely clear, a pane of glass, and he could stare up through it at the sky, the moon, the stars.

  No one dream was any easier to bear than another.

  He shifted his eyes from the window to the clock. A bit past one o’clock. Not so very late.

  Monkman climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of socks, padded downstairs in his underwear. He could not help himself. He needed the sound of another voice to break the loneliness of the ice. Before he had even prepared his excuse for calling, he had dialled Stutz’s number and the phone was ringing. It rang nine times and then Stutz answered.

  “Yes, Alec?” Stutz knew who would be the only person phoning at that hour.

  Monkman cast desperately around in his mind, scrambling for a plausible reason for disturbing him.

  “Yes, Alec?” repeated Stutz patiently.

  Monkman seized upon the first thing which offered itself. “You know Vera and her boy are coming tomorrow. Can you pick them up?”

  “Is that the bus?”

  “Yes, on the STC.”

  “Morning bus or afternoon bus?”

  “Just a minute, I’ll check.” The old man squinted at the calendar tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He read what he had scrawled over the date, July 2. “Afternoon bus. One o’clock.”

  “One o’clock it is then,” said Stutz.

  There was no exasperation or resentment in Stutz’s voice that Alec could detect, and for that he was grateful. He cleared his throat and, embarrassed, tried to explain. “I just wanted to clear that up. My memory isn’t what it used to be and I kept thinking I’d forget. I didn’t want them standing waiting with their luggage. So I just wanted to clear that up. Wouldn’t sleep otherwise. Seems I can’t sleep with things on my mind anymore. Must be a symptom of old age.” He laughed in such a way as to alert Stutz that his reference to old age was not to be taken seriously, was a joke.

  “What is it, Alec?” asked Stutz in his calm, deliberate voice. “Is your arthritis worse again? Is that what keeps you from sleeping?”

  Monkman glanced at his gnarled hand clutching the receiver. Looking at it made him aware of the pain. “I suppose,” he said. “Yes, that could be it.”

  That settled, Alec Monkman hung up the receiver and considered Vera’s return. Thought of how so long ago she walked out on him without so much as a by your leave. Walked out on him, a widower, and her younger brother Earl, leaving the boy without benefit of a woman in the house. All the letters she wrote during the war (all of them addressed to Earl) could not make up for that. And then from 1945 until late 1946 even they stopped coming, didn’t start again until she sent her wedding announcement, this time addressed to both of them, although now there was only one of them still at home to read how she had married her Jew down east. It was like Vera to make a big production mentioning that. As if he cared she married a Jew.

  So now the silence between them had been broken. Sort of. Twelve years of hit and miss Christmas cards, the occasional photograph of her and the kid. And always tagged on to the end of the scanty, bloodless news the same question, the reason she wrote at all: Do you have Earl’s address?

  And always he wrote back: No, I believe he’s moved again. Kind of a drifter, your brother.

  He thinks of her as she was when she left at nineteen. Passionate and headstrong. He can’t deny the beauty of these qualities. Her mother had them too.

  His Vera with a child of her own. He can scarcely credit it. How old is the boy now? Eleven? Twelve? Daniel is his name. Daniel Miller.

  It’s typical of Vera to claim that it’s only because of the boy she wants to come home. “It is because of Daniel that I ask you to help us. I am afraid the city means trouble for him,” she had written. The only letter – real letter – he can recall receiving from her in all those years. Signed Vera Miller, which struck him as pretty stiff stuff served up to you by your own daughter.

  He had not hesitated to say, Yes, come. After one of his dreams, company in the house would be welcome. He could not go on as he had been these past few months, telephoning to Stutz all hours of the night.

  Why now, at the age of seventy-three, should he take to drowning in his bed?

  2

  On the last part of Daniel’s and Vera’s journey, the leg which carried them from Regina to Connaught on a little-used local line, the bus was nearly deserted. There were only four other passengers: an old man with a barricade of soiled shopping bags behind which he lurked; two teenage girls, one fat, one thin, who took turns admiring their reflections in a compact mirror as they practised french-inhaling and blowing smoke rings; and a proper-looking young man in a white shirt and dark blue tie who sported a crew cut.

  Vacant seats provided Daniel with an opportunity to escape his mother for the first time in two days and the boy had crossed the aisle to stretch himself out on two of them and nap. Vera remained where he had abandoned her by the window, holding herself absolutely erect, an imperious upward tilt to her chin. In spite of how awful she had felt for the past two and a half days, Vera preserved her aloof posture because she had a theory that people who kept their spines straight didn’t get talked at and bothered on buses.

  Vera Miller was a tall woman who had never once despaired over her height. Even though she was five feet eleven inches she was not afraid to wear high heels. She took secret satisfaction that her hands were large and powerful-looking. She never wore jewellery and although she was thirty-six and her thick brown hair was showing grey she refused to consider dyeing it. She had good teeth and a bad nose, one with a conspicuous bump on the bridge because she had swung a door open on it when she was six and broken it. Her eyes were a biting, restless blue.

  My God, she thought, a fifty-six hour ride from Ontario to Saskatchewan on a Greyhound coach. No sooner the bus pulls out of the depot than my sick headache starts and carries on nonstop two and a half days. Of course, I can’t say whether it’s the bus keeps my head thumping or the sight of Daniel over there, what he’s managed to turn himself into the last ten months. If his father was alive what would he make of all that ridiculous hair? Knowing Stanley, probably just laugh. Duck’s ass – there’s truth in the name. At
least Daniel knows what I think. I didn’t spare him. “That’s no hair for a twelve year old,” I told him. “It makes you look like a pimp angling for a promotion.” You try, or say anything to keep them decent. I thought maybe threatening to make him wash the grease out of his hair every night before he went to bed, telling him I wouldn’t have my pillowslips ruined, might persuade him to give it up. But he’s his mother’s son. Stubborn. Chalk that one up to him.

  Daniel, Daniel, after all those years holding out, you make me beg for help. The pickle you got yourself into, behaving like that. I swore I’d never do it. I swore I’d never go back to Connaught. I swore I’d never ask the old man for a nickel or a blessing. There’s not many people keep a promise they made at nineteen as long as I did. And I’d still be keeping it if you hadn’t gone off the rails on me.

  I’m not like some people; I’m not good at swallowing my pride. It sticks in my throat. Funny how some people have no notion of pride. Pooch Gardiner, poor old silly bitch, certainly doesn’t. When I let it slip Dad had got himself comfortable in his later years she couldn’t feature how I hadn’t got my snout in the trough. “Fool’s pride,” Pooch called it. But then Pooch isn’t one to look too closely where a dollar comes from. “If your old man has a little money,” she said, “why shouldn’t he help? You’re a widow, aren’t you? And Daniel’s his grandson, isn’t he?”

  Which is to miss the point. Asking him for anything is to admit failure, to admit I couldn’t make it on my own. But I did make it on my own, for seventeen years. Nobody can take that away from Vera Miller. I buried a husband with a seven-month-old baby in my arms and I supported and raised that baby on my own. Until now.

  Vera Miller is pride. That’s what I am, pure and simple. Because without pride and hope, how did I ever make it this far? How else did I drudge at all those shitty jobs all those years – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl – without letting myself think I was nothing but those things – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl?