Homesick Read online

  One thing, I never surrendered my dignity. I did my job but you never caught me kissing the boss’s ass, or pretending to his face that I was eternally grateful for the big favour of being allowed to work for him.

  Checkout girl was the worst. Six months after I’d gone to work at the supermarket I remember Pooch saying to me, “Well, Vera, now you’ve had a chance to size it up, tell me: What do you hate most about this christly job?” Pooch said it was how her ankles swelled. Said she’d had nice ankles before all the standing, punching the till.

  I said, “What I can’t stand is that if I were to stay here until I was sixty-five I’d still be a girl. Notice how you always stay a girl? I call the store manager Mr. Anderson and he calls me Vera. That’s what gripes me. I ran away from home so I could stop being somebody’s girl and I find nothing’s changed. I’m still somebody’s girl.”

  Pooch said, “They can call me what they like, so long’s they pay for the privilege.” That’s typical.

  Of course, when I broke the news to Pooch where I was moving to, I saw the glint in her eye. She was glad to see me taken down a peg after all of my brave talk. I knew what she was thinking, although for once she was gracious enough not to say it. I have to thank her for that.

  Maybe it’s hope I need more than pride just now. Because I’ve got to believe this is right for Daniel, if not for me. Because if I fail Daniel now, I fail his father too, and all that was fine and good and noble in Stanley. All of him that was aimed at higher things.

  So I’ve just got to see it as another sacrifice, taking him home and settling in under Father’s roof again. I’ve sacrificed plenty before, for Daniel. And I did it because I had faith in him, I knew he was every bit as brilliant as his father. I was right, too, knew it when they had me to the school to discuss skipping him. It was because I had given him advantages like the Book of Knowledge. There were compliments, too, on how I had raised such a fine, intelligent boy. “Alone as you are,” the principal had said, “it’s something to be proud of.”

  The look on their faces when I refused. They weren’t expecting that. But I knew it never does any good to have your head turned by praise. Keep your eyes on the prize. They tried to change my mind. That principal even started to talk more slowly, as if I were too dim-witted to follow what he was saying. “The thing is, Mrs. Miller,” I can still hear him say, “is that we find that boys and girls like Daniel – if they aren’t continually challenged, why, they lose interest in school, become bored. Their marks may even drop. Now Miss Robinson and I have discussed this matter very thoroughly and we’re agreed, as professionals, that it would be best for Daniel to move on to Grade Four at this time.”

  That kind always knows what’s best for you and yours. Even though they’ve never stood in your down-at-heel shoes to look at the problem. Because all those complicated tests they’d given Daniel had measured everything except what concerned me. His character. Maybe it’s unnatural for a mother even to admit thinking it, but that I had doubts about.

  It didn’t take Mr. Principal too long before he thought he knew why I was hesitating. “Mrs. Miller,” he said, “if it’s buying a new set of textbooks for Daniel in the middle of the year that’s troubling you… some arrangement can be worked out through the school. There’s no need for you to feel any financial embarrassment.” I suppose I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt and grant that he was trying to be nice. Still, it was sort of insulting. They think just because you’re poor all you ever think about is money.

  Well, I wasn’t about to give him my reasons. To suggest maybe Daniel was lazy and soft by nature. It seems to go hand in hand with cleverness. Maybe because everything comes too easy to the clever ones, they never learn any fight. Nine times out of ten it’s them who quit on you when the going gets tough. With Daniel I couldn’t tell whether he’d collapse on me or not. What if he found the work too hard after he was skipped? Would he give up and fizzle like a bad firecracker?

  There was nothing to gain risking it. Not after I’d got him that far, all the way to the top of his class. Because one thing was for sure. I knew a checkout girl’s wages weren’t going to take Daniel anywhere. That was as sure as Carter’s got liver pills. If he was going to go to university the way his father would’ve wanted, it was up to me to see he got a scholarship. I’m sure I did right to hold him back the way I did.

  Pooch said I was crazy to worry about an eight year old getting into university. She didn’t know the half of it. I started worrying when he was six. But then Pooch couldn’t harbour any hope of that Lyle of hers doing anything to write home about. Unless it was from jail. And as far as Pooch is concerned her responsibility is over once she’s cleaned and fed him.

  As far as Daniel goes, my job is never over. Come home dog-tired, make supper, do the dishes. Then get him to do the drills. The flash cards I made from old cigarette boxes with the arithmetic problems printed on them in black grease pencil. All done so that learning arithmetic would feel more like a game, more like fun. Shuffle those cards like a real deck of cards, snap one off at him. “16 × 16! Come on, Daniel! You know that! Think!” Start counting. He had five seconds to come up with the answer. Just like a game show on the television.

  He had more in his head than all the other six year olds put together. The two of us memorized the capitals of all the provinces and all the states. We did weights and measures. How many quarts to the peck, rods to the mile? We did every president of the United States and every prime minister of Canada. The kings of England. He could spell every word in his speller.

  Sure he complained. Whined. They didn’t have to learn any of this stupid stuff in school. All I used to say is, “Knowledge is something nobody can take away from you. They can repossess your car but they can’t repossess your knowledge.” But what used to really gall him was the way I made him learn those poems they gave him for memory work. Perfect to the punctuation. Two of us chanting together. “I sprang to the stirrup comma and Joris comma and he semi-colon new line I galloped comma Dirck galloped comma we galloped all three semi-colon.” Full effort for full marks was my attitude. Make the teacher sit up and take notice.

  I read him to sleep every night before he learned how to do it for himself. Those were the nice, quiet, peaceful times. I could smell him in his bed, fresh and clean from his bath. Children’s classics. That’s what the librarian called them. She helped me pick. I had read hardly one of them myself. All we had in Connaught when I was growing up was a few broken books thrown in a cupboard at the back of the schoolroom. I remembered reading Little Women as a girl so I took that out from the library first. And Black Beauty. The rest I let the librarian choose. Westward, Ho!, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, Little House on the Prairie. I even got to read Anne of Green Gables finally.

  The bus slowed jerkily, came to a halt at a railway crossing. The driver flung open the door and sat listening for the sounds of an approaching train. Everybody leaned forward in their seats and listened too. There was nothing to hear but the muffled throbbing of the bus engine. The coach stood crouched in the silence of empty distances, unhindered lines of vision. Everything disappeared into the blank horizon. The grid road upon which they sat dwindled away to nothing there. Below the nose of the bus rails burned, hot silver laid on a bed of slag and cinders.

  Suddenly out of the stillness, wind. A dust-devil whirled up dirt and grit from the road and scurried it through the open door and into the coach. The young man in the crisp white shirt and tie covered his nose and face with a large handkerchief. The driver slammed the door against the dust-devil and the bus abruptly snarled and thumped its way over the planks of the crossing.

  Medical student. That’s what he reminds me of with that hanky over his face like a mask. He looks exactly like one of those interns and residents from my days at the hospital, back when I was hustling bed pans and wiping old bums there as a practical. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts he’s a medical student. It would explain a dapper young man like him riding
a bus. They get paid nothing.

  I was sorry to leave the hospital. At least I felt I was doing something good, something worthwhile there. But how could I carry on after the old woman downstairs up and moved out on me to go live with her daughter? Had nobody that would babysit shifts. And you can’t leave a kid by himself for eight hours a stretch. Nine, counting trolley time there and back from the hospital. Chambermaiding at the hotel worked out better. I could be home at quarter after six so he was alone only a couple of hours after he finished school. Of course, it wasn’t much of a life for him, being made to go straight home and lock himself in the apartment. He hated me phoning on my coffee breaks every afternoon around four to check up on him. But he also knew that he’d better be there to answer when I called. Every time he let it ring more than twice I was in a sweat. Saw him dead under the wheels of a truck, or riding off in a sex fiend’s car.

  Maybe I was too hard on him, not allowing him to have other kids in for company. Could be I was wrong to be so strict on that count. But you never know what the little buggers’ll get into when somebody isn’t watching them. And two or more are always more naturally inclined to mischief than one. They encourage each other. Playing with matches, poking wire coat-hangers into electrical sockets. Imagine coming home to face the outcome of that.

  I did what I had to. No excuses. It wasn’t easy for him but easy is for those who have choices. I don’t see as I did. Latchkey kids is what they call them. All the women’s magazines deplore it.

  You never know what’s going on in a kid’s head. The whole winter of his first year in school he spent drawing maps when he was alone by himself after school. Back at six-fifteen every night and having to bang the bejesus out of the door to get him to come unfasten the chain and let me in. Every evening the same. Like he was in a trance.

  “Hi, Mom” was all I got. Needed to be reminded to give me my kiss. He was more interested in getting back to the kitchen table and his maps than saying hello to me. At first I thought it was homework. But it wasn’t. These weren’t maps of actual places like we did when I was in school. No tracing the U.K. from an atlas, marking places and products on it. Sheffield and steel, York and wool. No, these islands came directly out of his head. They were invented islands.

  I give him credit for a beautiful, artistic job. You’d half-wish they were real so you could pay them a visit. Always snaky rivers twisting down from mountains to the seas, maybe a volcano puffing smoke, golden beaches. A vacation paradise.

  Every bay, cove, river, stream, mountain, inlet, peninsula he gave a name to. Fish River, Parrot Point, Treasure Cove. The seas were always wild and stormy. He bore down so hard with that blue crayon of his he left ridges of wax on the paper, like real waves crashing towards the beaches.

  It’s time to eat and he hasn’t cleared away his junk, just sits hunched over his map, colouring. Hasn’t set the table like you’ve asked him to a dozen times. Flipping the light switch on and off to get his attention, even though pretty soon the light seems to be blinking in time with that little vein pulsing in your temple. “Mother attempting to make contact with space voyager. Mother to Master Daniel. Come in, Master Daniel.”

  Stares at me like I’m out of my mind. They have no sense of humour, kids. Not mine anyway.

  If you didn’t laugh, you’d weep. Thank God I’ve got a sense of humour. Of course, I was blessed with the kind that mostly gets you into trouble. Every so often getting dressed down by the store manager for giving lip to a customer. “Vera, if you don’t learn to curb your tongue I don’t care how fast you can punch those buttons, you’ll have to go,” is what he used to say.

  Pooch offering advice. “Do what I do, Vera, just think what you’d like to tell them. That’s what I do.” Which was okay for Pooch because she couldn’t work up a suitable smart reply in under an hour and by then they were home and had the groceries unpacked and in the cupboard. But, speaking for myself, remarks slipped out before I realized it. Part of my trouble all my life, a vinegar tongue.

  People misunderstand. Take the first time I saw Daniel. The nurse showing him to me and saying, “Oh, isn’t he the most darling, beautiful boy!”

  Hardly. They’re never beautiful right after they’re born. Ugly as sin. I mean, what if Royal Doulton was to make a china figurine of them, all red and gruesome like that? They couldn’t sell it. Not if it was true to nature. I never put it like that to the nurse though. What I said was the baby resembled Mr. Gandhi.

  She was shocked and offended, that young woman. Shocked and offended for all of motherhood, I believe. Probably thought I was unnatural, unloving. But, as I said, it’s either laugh or weep. At the moment the sight of that tiny struggling thing with its bruised-looking skull and smear of hair had turned loose a rush of love all hot and thick at the back of my throat, so hot and thick it was threatening to melt me into tears if I didn’t do something to stop it quick. Which is how I arrived at Mr. Gandhi.

  Nobody could accuse me of loving him too little, more likely the opposite. Had to be careful after Stanley died that I didn’t make too much of Daniel. How many nights spent hovering over his crib while he slept? Just standing there in the dark in my nightgown, feet two blocks of ice on the floor. A terrible ache in my shoulders from gripping the bars of his crib so tightly, gripping them because if I left my hands free I wouldn’t be able to trust them not to go fussing with him, picking him up, touching him.

  Past one o’clock, past two o’clock, past three o’clock. Waiting for him to cry. Or just whimper so I could snatch him up and hold him. All hunger for the smell of him, for the burrowing warmth of him, for the kick and jerk and jump of life in his limbs.

  Love. It’s not fair that Daniel has been cheated out of his father’s love. He never even knew him. I want him to love his father. But how could he love what isn’t even a memory? All he’s got is my stories to build love on.

  “Daniel, when you were very small and your Dad and I went out he was always worried you’d catch cold. So I’d have to bundle you in every blanket we owned just to keep him quiet. Blanket after blanket after blanket. When I was done, nobody could have guessed there was a baby at the centre. I asked him, ‘Satisfied?’ Up went his hand to stop me and he disappeared. In a minute he was back with an old overcoat of his. ‘There’s a nasty wind,’ he said. ‘Maybe if you put him in this?’ And you know what? You almost fit. Wrapped in all those blankets, at four months old you were almost a size forty. My size-forty baby, I called you.”

  I tell him in what respects he’s like his father. I encourage him to set his sights high. “Your father may have run a men’s wear store but he had read more books than most university professors. You’ve got his brains and his brains were not third-class brains, not even second-class brains. They were the top-drawer variety. So see what you can do with them.”

  Not much in the past ten months. His final report card had a D, 5 C’s, 2 B’s, an A. But that’s not the worst. Having him brought home in a patrol car took the cake. Suspected of smashing headlights on parked cars, although they couldn’t prove it. Finding the stuff hidden in our storage bin in the basement of the building, stuff he hadn’t the money to buy. Pocketbooks, a hunting knife, batteries, gloves, aftershave. I knew it was stolen. Why this crap? What use to him was it, aside from the pocketbooks and maybe the knife? Boys always want to own a knife. But batteries? Gloves? Aftershave?

  You can’t tolerate a thief, nor a liar. No, none of it was his. He was keeping it for a friend. He lied to my face, a barefaced lie.

  What friend? Who? Lyle Gardiner?

  No, not Lyle. Lost where he was going for a second. Tom. Tom Perkins.

  Liar. Sneaky little bastard. No such person.

  I acted mad, played mad, although I was really cold with fear. Once they start going to ruin on you, who’s to predict where it’ll come to an end? Police at twelve. What’s next? Especially in a city, with so many invitations and opportunities to do wrong. Get him away, was all I could think.

 
Connaught was what I thought, thought it because I had no other place to think. The old man assuring me he’ll find me a job, find us a place to live, everything will be set, no worries. And in a small town you can keep better track of a kid, watch him.

  There’s no denying this isn’t what we called damage control in the Army. Extinguish the fire. Man the pumps. Damage control stinks of defeat. I’m not a salvager by nature. Unless you’ve let things go wrong, there’s no need for salvage. And I’d no business letting things go wrong.

  There’s a world of difference between the going back home and the leaving. The leaving was a kid’s run headlong down a steep hill. Legs going faster and faster, flopping looser and crazier in your hips and you not heeding because it’s not your legs, or even your windmilling arms you trust for balance. It’s the freedom and wildness, the scream of delight, the risk of it, the I don’t give a shit for skinned knees of it, which keeps you from falling and harm.

  The going home is nothing but a long hard climb up a hill to no surprises, to I told you so, to him and his boring little town. But that I can take, and gladly, if it puts Daniel straight again.

  Vera consulted her watch. In an hour they would be arriving in Connaught. Now, so close to her birthplace, she searched the landscape for anything familiar, anything she recognized. Barbed wire fences strung on peeled poplar poles, summerfallow fields stained white with alkali where the sloughs had already dried despite it being only early July, all went by. The grain crops were stunted. On the rises where hot winds first draw the ground moisture, the wheat was faintly streaked with yellow and even shorter in the stalk than elsewhere. The heat pressing down out of the cloudless sky had ironed all movement from the fields, not a breath of wind wrinkled the crops. There was only an illusion of movement where, in the distance, the farmhouse, a granary, a shelter belt wobbled in the distortions wreaked by the burning air.