Homesick Read online

  The party was set for eight o’clock Saturday night. As the hour drew near Vera hung a sign on the door of the cafe which announced “Closed for Private Function,” and stood guard, ready to turn back anyone who wasn’t Portuguese. Vera had never seen any of her guests in anything but work clothes and now they struck her as a tiny bit comical, solemnly and identically dressed in tieless white shirts buttoned to the throat and sombre black suits whose pockets bulged with bottles of home-made wine. She hadn’t counted on the wine and it made Vera nervous that some Nosy Parker would report her to the police for serving liquor in an unlicenced establishment. So the Portuguese were unceremoniously scooted through the door and, once the flock was all safely inside, she practically nailed the blinds to the window-ledge so no snoop could steal a peek in. The last thing she needed now that she was finally turning a buck was to get her business licence pulled.

  It was a memorable party. They ate, they drank, and after they had done enough of both they began to sing and even dance. Elaborately courteous, they offered Vera ecstatic compliments in barely comprehensible English which grew less comprehensible the drunker they got. Vera understood that their grandiose praises bore little relation to the quality of her Portuguese cooking which could be, at best, only passable. Rather, they were expressions of gratitude for her willingness to attempt to please them and make them feel at home.

  “Missus, is good dinner,” one after another of them reported gravely to her. Domingo, drunk by midnight and unhinged by the nostalgia evoked by the taste of boiled potatoes served with olive oil and wine vinegar instead of butter or gravy, sat by himself, surveying the scene. Suddenly he lifted a glass of wine high above his head and shouted, “You are Queen, Vera! Queen of the Portuguese!” The toast was taken up with a roar of drunken enthusiasm. “You are Queen of the Portuguese, Vera! Queen!”

  The proclamation was true. After that night Vera was Queen of the Portuguese, treated with the respect owed a queen and given unswerving loyalty. From the time of the party Portuguese Vera knew these customers were hers, no one was going to entice them away from her.

  Something else became plain after the party. Vera could see it was impossible for her to carry on in the fashion she had for the past few weeks. It was too much to ask Daniel to serve breakfast before school, rush back to The Bluebird during lunch hour to wait tables, and then return after school to work the supper shift. At first she had been leery of hiring staff because she could not believe that this unanticipated burst of busyness could continue, but now it seemed certain that it would, that The Bluebird really did have some sort of future. So Vera became an employer, engaging two high school dropouts as waitresses and a middle-aged woman with a history of alcohol problems as dishwasher. Daniel was relegated to lighter duties, manning the till at supper, clearing tables, mopping up the floor once the supper rush was over.

  Her new employees didn’t know what to make of Vera. She expected them to match her frantic pace and when they didn’t they caught hell. Mad, Vera could strip the paint off an outhouse wall with her tongue. Irene, one of the waitresses, burst into tears several times during her first week of work. On the other hand, Vera’s workers earned more money at The Bluebird than they could anywhere else in Connaught. They started at better than the minimum wage, Vera explaining that she didn’t expect minimum work out of them so they ought to get paid better than minimum pay. As boss, she stressed one thing to her waitresses. It was their job to get the Portuguese fed and out the door as quickly as it was humanly possible. The men had to be at work by seven in the morning and back on the shovel after lunch by one o’clock. She promised her waitresses that every day they got the crew clear of the restaurant by starting time, morning and noon, they would each get a three dollar bonus, paid straight out of the till at the end of the day.

  Stutz had warned her against paying higher than average wages, as if her decision was simply a bid for popularity. Yet despite paying higher salaries, despite performance bonuses for hustle, the sums of money she banked at the end of each week slowly and steadily mounted. Soon she was writing weekly cheques of fifty dollars against Stutz’s loan. Within the year she hoped her debt to him would be paid in full.

  On June 1, with great fanfare, the provincial government and an American mining company had announced that a potash mine would be developed six miles south of Connaught. The choice news was that the town council’s gamble had appeared to have paid off; Connaught was chosen as company headquarters. A surge of activity followed hard on the heels of this announcement. Overnight things began to change. Strangers appeared on the streets. The entire second floor of Alec Monkman’s hotel became temporary offices for geologists, engineers, planners, while the third floor became their living and sleeping quarters.

  A three-shift crew of shaft sinkers arrived. No one in Connaught had ever seen their like before. To the citizens of Connaught they were a different breed of man, grey-skinned from lack of sun, hard, wild, desperate in the pursuit of their pleasures. Drawn from all over North America, they spoke with every accent, lured by the big money which goes hand in hand with work that demands you risk your life hourly. Their hard-earned wages ran between their fingers like water and they wanted the best that life had to offer and money could buy. They ordered steak and eggs for breakfast, drank Crown Royal. Their cars were big, flashy, expensive, and neglected – Buicks and Chryslers and Oldsmobiles caked in mud or floured in dust. The dangers of the job had made them addicts to excitement so when their shifts were over they made trouble drinking and fighting. There seemed to be no let-up to the noise, the confusion, the disorderliness. Day and night, semis rolled through town bearing huge pieces of earth-moving equipment lashed to their trailers with chains, shaking people in their chairs and in their beds, making the dishes jingle in the cupboard and spoiling television reception. The town council hurriedly passed a by-law outlawing the big trucks from travel on the newly paved streets. Sometimes the drivers heeded the ordinance, sometimes they didn’t. When they did, the air was filled with rumble and clouds of yellow dust, and when they didn’t, the fresh pavement had to be patched and repaired by the crews of Portuguese.

  At the hotel the mining company had started to hire. Men the locals did not recognize caused resentment when they stood in a line that stretched the length of the corridor and slithered down the stairs, each man waiting his turn to step up to the desk and state his occupation – electrician, carpenter, welder, pipe-fitter, labourer. Miners would not be needed for a long time yet. On site a chain-link fence was being raised around the property, an army of men were throwing up temporary offices, warehouses, bunkhouses, cook shacks, tool sheds. To make themselves heard above the roar of graders, Euclids, and bulldozers which wheeled and plunged and bucked all over the grounds, everyone shouted.

  The people of Connaught stood by like witnesses to a catastrophic accident. In the blink of an eye, everything had changed and they weren’t sure how it had happened. On the east side of town a disorganized, ramshackle trailer court had sprung up, by day populated with frowsy women screeching at slummy kids, and by night the scene of all-night drinking parties from which husbands stumbled out in the morning, bound for work. There were rumours that there was another kind of woman out in the trailer court, the kind that lived by herself and entertained men at any hour.

  On the west side of town a different kind of development was taking place. It was marked by newly excavated basements surrounded by heaps of earth and the skeletal frames of the split levels the Americans were building to house their families. Rumours mushroomed like the houses themselves. The town was making a fortune selling lots to the Yankees at inflated prices, so much money there would be a moratorium on taxes next year. You wait and see, others said, the taxes we’ll all be paying when we start laying water and sewer lines for the Americans and building them their hardtop roads. This was the viewpoint which suited the old-timers – that the mine meant nothing but heartbreak and disappointment. Wasn’t the school board already worr
ying where they were going to put all those unplanned-for kids when classes started in the fall? Some said there was no avoiding it, a school would have to be built next year. Then taxes would go through the roof. And prices were going up in the grocery store, going up everywhere you looked. There was too much drinking and fighting and general carrying on, nobody could deny that either. These newcomers were a bad lot and their kids were worse, shifty-eyed little buggers you couldn’t trust as far as you could pitch one of them. Wait and see what Hallowe’en is like this year. Wait and see. Your eyes’ll pop.

  The feeling took root in the ordinary citizen that whatever benefits this hullabaloo brought weren’t worth it. Vera did not share this opinion. To her, life seemed to have made an unexpected detour through Connaught, stirring it up, waking it up. The sudden flush of raw, uncouth energy, the jump and bustle, the easy come and easy go of it, reminded Vera of what it had been like during the war.

  It didn’t hurt either that her business had taken another upswing, nearly doubling, with the start of mine operations. A sudden flood of men, many of them single, meant she could barely meet the demand for meals. There might be cook shacks out on the mine site but when the day shift ended the first thing on every man’s mind was to drive into town for a couple of cool ones. Usually they didn’t bother to return to camp for supper. “Let’s eat at Vera’s,” someone would suggest, and it was decided. Besides, if they remained in town for their meal they could get back to the beer parlour with scarcely an interruption.

  Circumstances had reversed themselves. Now it was her father’s restaurant which was the second choice and received the overflow, not The Bluebird. Men were willing to wait for a place at Vera’s. Vera had Mr. Stutz hammer together a long sturdy bench which she set outside, against the front wall of her cafe. There her customers could wait in comparative comfort when the weather was fine. Townspeople strolling by during the supper hour never counted fewer than ten men sitting there side by side, waiting their turn and considering what it would be tonight – a half-chicken crisp and golden and savoury, a T-bone smothered in buttered mushrooms, a thick slab of pink roast beef, or maybe Vera’s pork chops and sauerkraut. Then dessert. Deep-dish apple pie, hot, with two scoops of ice cream melting into the pastry. Or a maple walnut sundae. They would sit, dog-tired, smoking cigarettes and drinking the complimentary coffee which Daniel brought out to them, the evening sun spreading its still bronze light over them so that it would have been easy to mistake them for statues representing some quiet virtue such as patience or fortitude.

  Inside, however, it was bedlam itself. Vera had installed a juke box, and if the men weren’t feeding it quarters she’d toss in a few herself, just to keep the mood cheerful. She’d also taken on another cook so that no matter how busy it got she could always take a few minutes to have a word with her patrons. Floury-armed and red-faced, the Queen of the Portuguese went on her walkabouts, distributing the regal smile and nod, chaffing this one, dropping a joke here, exhibiting the common touch. The men loved it.

  “Hi, good-looking. What’s cooking?”

  “Not your supper, John. You talk to me that way yours goes on the back burner.”

  “Hey, Vera, Tony wants a date!”

  “So does his wife. They ought to get together.”

  Roars of laughter, forks ringing on water-glasses in applause, and Vera would glide through the swinging doors of the kitchen, buoyant on a wave of popularity.

  “That Vera, isn’t she something?” they’d declare, shaking their heads.

  For the first time in a good many years Vera was inclined to agree with them. Yes, she was something. Damn right she was. People were beginning to sit up and take notice. “That one is a goer,” Connaught’s old-timers would say. Even her father couldn’t overlook her now. She couldn’t suppress a small smile of triumph when Mr. Stutz reported that Alec had crossed out the prices of all the meals on the hotel menu and reduced them all by twenty-five cents. When she learned that, Vera also crossed out her prices, but instead of cutting them, she increased them all by a dime. It wasn’t greed which prompted this; she merely wanted to demonstrate that the success of The Bluebird had nothing to do with cheapness, nothing to do with money was at the heart of it.

  The daily take continued to grow. Working seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, there was little opportunity to spend her money. The best she could manage were daydreams while rolling piecrust or scraping carrots, daydreams of the things she could afford to buy herself now: tailored suits, a good cloth coat, smart wool skirts. Clothes that didn’t go in and out of fashion on a whim, clothes that bespoke quality. Katharine Hepburn clothes. It was good enough to know that she could have them if she wanted them; the money would stay in the bank, earning interest for the day Daniel would need it.

  Vera had made a strange discovery. Money was like a telescope, extending the range of vision. In the bad old days, when she had been a checkout girl in the supermarket, Vera had seldom allowed herself to look beyond payday, the end of the month, further than thirty-one days. There seemed no point to it. Now things were different. Letting her imagination run free she could see him through six or seven years of university, or however long was required to make him something really fine, a doctor or a lawyer perhaps. Contemplating that made clothes unnecessary. Anticipation was sweeter than any showy glad rags, so were feelings of sacrifice. She thought of how proud Stanley would be – of her, of their son.

  Each night, regular as clockwork, Mr. Stutz slipped into The Bluebird minutes before it closed. While Vera counted the day’s receipts and transferred them to a heavy canvas deposit bag, Stutz stood in the window, scanning the street. When the money was safely stowed in the bag, the two of them went out together. For weeks Mr. Stutz had insisted on walking Vera to the bank’s night deposit chute to protect her from attack and robbery. “Connaught’s changed,” he would say, “there’s bad characters around who wouldn’t give it a second thought.”

  Mr. Stutz was a sternly chivalrous man and he could not be persuaded that she was in no danger on her short walk to the bank. Only when the cash was safely deposited could he be made to say goodbye in his reluctant, formal manner. There had been arguments when he first began to escort her because he had wanted to see Vera all the way home, to her doorstep, but after strong protests he had relented. Mr. Stutz suspected what made her so uneasy. A single woman seen home each and every night of the week by a man might be running risks with her reputation. He could see her point, he supposed.

  Of course, it had never entered Vera’s head that her good name was in any sort of peril. She simply wanted to avoid stimulating his hopes, if he had any. She didn’t know whether to believe her father or not. Besides, the walk home was the only time she had to herself, completely alone. It was pleasant to feel the summer night like a shawl, warm and soft about her shoulders. The streets occupied by natives of Connaught, unlike those of recent immigrants, were silent and dark, except for the occasional glow of a porch light haloed in a swarm of moths. Vera liked to remove the shoes from her aching feet and pad along the sidewalks the Portuguese had laid, the coarse texture of the concrete prickling the soles of her naked feet.

  Going barefoot she remembered how it used to be, headed for home in the dark as a girl of ten, every nerve alive and quivering, a stealthy, wary animal. Vera, “the big show-off,” always made a point of walking home from the movies alone. It was a way of attracting attention; everybody else travelled in a giggling pack, or at least in pairs, because they were scared of the dark and their own shadows.

  “How can you!” Phyllis and Mabel used to exclaim, causing a half-smile to briefly flit across their friend’s lips. Phyllis and Mabel walked hand in hand, took turns delivering each other home first, the lucky one standing on her doorstep to watch her friend sprint the yawning black distance of two doors down, the yawning black distance which separated the Knouch and Tierney verandas, populated with God knew what – the Lindbergh baby kidnappers, mad dogs, crazy tramps.


  Vera refused to let her own fear master her. She made herself walk purposefully slow under the big white moon smoky behind a smear of cloud, her heart pattering fast as it tried to climb up her throat, her feet dragging as if they were in chains. She wasn’t going to permit herself to run no matter how strong the impulse grew to scamper for the lighted kitchen where her mother and father sat. “Sissy!” she hissed at herself under her breath. “Pissy-pants!”

  Between Vera and safety was the weird rustling of caragana and lilac hedges crowding the wooden walk, the slap of an unlatched gate in the wind, the shadows which shifted like premonitions across her path, the big boys who crouched in the limbs of the trees that grew by the funeral parlour, ready to spring howling and whooping down out of the trees which bore berries bright as blood, the ones every kid in Connaught called undertaker berries and believed were poison and red because the undertaker poured the buckets of blood he drained from corpses onto their roots at midnight. If you didn’t run screaming when the big boys dropped out of the trees screeching like baboons their dignity was offended. They crowded threateningly close and tried to make you cry with lurid suggestions as to what they might do with you. “Let’s tie her up and leave her for the night in the back of Michaelson’s hearse, right on the spot where the stiffs ride!”

  There was very little satisfaction to be got trying to terrify Vera. One night when they threatened to make her eat a poisonous undertaker berry she said, “I don’t believe they’re poisonous anyway. Anybody with a brain knows that.”

  “So eat one then,” a big boy dared her.

  She didn’t hesitate but stared him straight in the face, reached up with her eyes still on him, fumbled with the branch, plucked a single berry, popped it in her mouth, and swallowed it at once, like a pill, before she realized exactly what she was doing. A second later she had spun round and was running for all she was worth to her house because if she was going to die it had to be at home. She found her father alone in the kitchen, playing solitaire. Her mother had been tired and had gone to bed early. Vera dragged a chair up as close to him as she could get and sat down to wait for whatever was going to happen to her. Her knees were jammed so tightly together that her legs shook.