Homesick Read online

  “When I was a girl I had red hair. That might have had something to do with it.”

  Monkman laughed. “It’s been a long time. I’d almost forgotten. Red hair that came out of a bottle.”

  “Yes. Out of a bottle. You hated it.”

  Her father gave her a measuring look. “I might have. My memory’s not what it once was.”

  “Mine is. You did,” said Vera.

  The old man shifted ground. “Is this the boy then?” he asked in a hearty voice, turning to Daniel.

  “Yes.” Vera nudged Daniel forward. “Daniel, say hello to your Grandfather Monkman.”

  “Hello.”

  “Now how do we go about this?” said Monkman. “I don’t know how I introduce myself to a grandson I meet for the first time when he’s practically grown. Do I shake hands, or what?” He threw his daughter a sly glance. “I think maybe that would be best, don’t you, son?” he suggested, extending swollen fingers. The boy gingerly grasped them and Monkman pumped his arm once, twice. “So what do you go by?” he asked. “Daniel, Danny, or Dan?”

  “It’s Daniel,” intervened Vera.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said the boy.

  “Who does he look like?” Monkman said aloud, apparently to himself. “I’m looking at him and thinking someone but I can’t put a name to him.”

  “Daniel looks like his father,” said Vera firmly.

  “Can’t be him I’m thinking of. I never met his father.” Monkman smiled at the boy. “I wasn’t invited to the wedding,” he explained. His next question was directed to Vera. “Would I have liked his father?”

  “It’s hard to say. But I don’t think he was your type.”

  “And what’s my type, daughter?”

  “You’re your type.”

  The old man adopted a confidential tone, drew closer to his grandson. “Your mother likes to let on I’m hard to get along with. But nothing’s further from the truth. Stutz here has been working for me for fifteen years and he’s never heard a harsh word from me. Have you, Stutz?”

  “No, never just one,” returned Stutz on cue.

  The two men laughed at an old joke, well-rehearsed.

  Pleased with himself, Monkman fussed with his hands, scratching the back of one, then the other. “What do you say we have a drink to celebrate your homecoming, Vera? There’s a bottle of Crown Royal under the sink, seal’s never been broke. I’ve been saving it for an occasion and I guess this is one. Stutz won’t join us – religious principles – but it wouldn’t hurt you, Vera, to have one. It’d help you relax after your long trip. And the boy could join us. Very weak, mind you, plenty of water in his, just a drop of whisky. All for the sake of the ceremony. It couldn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t let us stop you,” said Vera. “But Daniel and I won’t be having a drink.”

  “Oh, Jesus, no, I suppose not,” said Monkman, winking conspiratorially at Daniel. “To hell with that then. But later can I feed the boy? I thought the four of us could take supper in the hotel. I told Rita to put roast pork and apple sauce on the special tonight. That’s Rita Benger, the cook. You’d remember her. She’s Charlie Benger’s sister that went to school with you. Charlie Benger with the limp?”

  “Can we discuss supper in a bit?” said Vera. “I’d like to know what arrangements have been made for Daniel and me tonight.”

  “Arrangements?”

  “Yes, arrangements. Like where we’re to stay. Also, I’d like to know where and when I start work.”

  “Why, you’ll stay here,” responded Monkman with determination.

  “Until we find a place to rent.”

  “This is Connaught, daughter. There are no places to rent. I’ve got the two bedrooms upstairs that I thought the boy and I could have. That’d leave you the one down here. More privacy for you that way.”

  “I didn’t count on this,” said Vera, drawing together her lips. “I’ll see for myself if there aren’t places to rent.”

  “Suit yourself. But looking won’t change anything. There are no places for rent. Unless you’re interested in a fire-trap suite over the poolroom.”

  “All right then,” she said grimly, “there are no places to rent. What about work?”

  “We’ll settle that in due course. Catch your breath.”

  “What the hell do I live on while I’m catching it?” demanded Vera, suddenly exasperated. “All the money I have in the world is two hundred dollars in Canada Savings Bonds in that box,” she said, pointing. “I can’t afford to be a lady of leisure.”

  “Christ, Vera, relax. The trouble with you is everything gets blown way out of proportion. Always did. You and the boy are home now. You’re taken care of. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “I didn’t come home to be taken care of. I’m not a child. I came to work. You promised me a job.”

  “If I promised you a job, you’ve got a job. I’m your father. What do you expect me to do? Cheat you? Put your mind at rest. You’ve got a job for chrissakes.”

  “What kind of job?” Her voice was flat, controlled.

  “An easy job. You said you wanted to be able to spend more time with the boy so I got you one. We’ll talk about it tomorrow when you’re not so tired and irritable from your trip.”

  “I want to talk about it now. What kind of job?”

  Monkman hesitated. “Housekeeper,” he finally admitted, reluctantly.

  Vera’s face flushed. “Housekeeper to who?”

  Monkman appealed to Mr. Stutz. “Is she serious? ‘Housekeeper to who?’ she says.” He swung back on Vera. “Christ, for who do you think? For me. And for him,” he added, nodding to Daniel. “For once you can be a full-time mother. You can look after your boy.”

  “And you.”

  “That’s such a hardship? You wash his shirt, throw mine in the machine, too. You boil him a potato, boil me one, too. Where’s the strain in that?”

  “That’s not where I expect the strain to come in.”

  “So where does the strain come in?”

  “I’m a grown woman. I’m thirty-six years old and I want to have my own money. I mean to have a salary, not a housekeeping allowance. I don’t intend to snitch nickels and dimes from household expenses so I can buy myself a new bra when I need one. I want a wage. I’m not sixteen years old like before.”

  The word bra caused Mr. Stutz to cast his eyes down to the toes of his boots.

  “I was a poor man in those days,” her father announced.

  “I get a wage or I’m dust. I’ll cash one of my bonds and climb back on that bus tomorrow and head right back where I came from.”

  “Look at her, Stutz!” cried Monkman. “Look at her! There’s fire for you! Exactly like she was when she was seven, skipping rope with the other little girls. Going over that rope with her jaw set solid as iron and her pigtails cracking up and down like buggy whips. Little Miss Determination. When I saw that, I said to myself, Lord help and protect the man who gets her.”

  “Let the Lord look after whoever He has to. I’ll look after myself. Do I get a wage or not?”

  “What was it your mother did down east?” Monkman inquired of Daniel. “Trade horses? I got a feeling I’m about to be skinned. I best remember you don’t sup with the Devil unless you own a long spoon.”

  “I’m not joking,” said Vera. “I’m deadly serious.”

  “Well then, how much?”

  “Room and board for Daniel and me and a hundred a month. When I find a place and move out – two hundred a month.”

  Monkman shot Stutz an ironic smile. “Sound fair to you, Stutz?”

  “This is family,” he said. “I don’t put my nose into family business.”

  “You got any idea what minimum wage is in this part of the world, girl?” demanded her father. “Any idea at all?”

  “I don’t work for minimum wage. I’m not a minimum wage person.”

  Monkman pushed back his fedora with the tip of his forefinger. “Stutz,” he said, “why don’t
you take the boy and his luggage upstairs to his bedroom. We’re going to have a money discussion here and I don’t want you getting any exaggerated notions of your worth from my daughter here.”

  Daniel looked questioningly at his mother. “Go along,” she said, motioning to the stairs with her head. Stutz and he disappeared up the stairs, toting a duffel bag and suitcases.

  “Daughter,” said Monkman, “you can have your money. But let’s not get into the habit of public wrangles. I don’t like them. I prefer a soft voice in private. Besides, this isn’t just about money, is it? What else is eating you?”

  “I want one thing clear,” said Vera. “Daniel is my son. I’ll have no interference from you. I saw what you’re up to.”

  “What the hell kind of nonsense are you talking now, Vera?”

  “Trying to get on the good side of him and put me on the bad. Offering him a drink. Winking at him or pulling a face whenever you made a reference to me. I won’t be turned into a witch or a fool, or talked around as if I wasn’t in the room.”

  “Jesus, didn’t somebody come prepared to stomp snakes? I meant nothing by it.”

  “I won’t allow you to put yourself between me and Daniel the way you did between me and my brother.”

  “You’re dreaming, daughter. I never came between you and your brother.”

  “Not much. Then why didn’t he write when I sent my wedding announcement? Because you wouldn’t let him. He was always under your thumb.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I did no such thing.”

  “Then why didn’t he write? He wrote once a week during the war.”

  Monkman stirred from one foot to the other. “Maybe you should remember who stopped writing first. He went down to the mail box once a day for almost a year after the war, looking for a letter from you. There weren’t any.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Maybe somebody else is entitled to reasons, too.”

  “I got my suspicions why he didn’t write.”

  “She has her suspicions,” Monkman told the ceiling.

  “You say you never stood between us,” declared Vera furiously. “Then how come every time I asked you for his address I never got it?”

  “You never got it because I didn’t have no address to give. He’s always on the move. I never know where he is, Alberta, the States. Those drilling rigs never stay put. He doesn’t have an address.”

  “A man without an address,” said Vera sarcastically.

  “That’s about it.”

  “And he never visits?”

  “No more than you ever did.”

  “That’s not like Earl. What happened? Did you two have a falling out? Is that it?”

  Monkman avoided meeting her eyes. “No,” he said.

  “If you didn’t, it’s a miracle. The way you treated him.”

  “I was drinking then,” said her father. “But I never run out on him. Just remember who was the one done that.”

  5

  “If there’s a grass whip in there, pass that out, too,” Vera ordered, leaning into the doorway of the tool shed, a hoe in her hands.

  “A what?” said Daniel.

  “City boys. Is there a scythe then? You know what a scythe looks like, don’t you? You’ve seen pictures.”

  It was her first Sunday in Connaught and Vera had decided to pay a visit to her mother’s grave. The decision had been made on the spur of the moment when her father announced after breakfast that he would be gone most of the morning, checking crops on the farm he had rented to an unreliable tenant. If Daniel and she hurried, they could be back home before he returned from his tour of inspection.

  The long, awkward, rusty blade of the scythe poked, felt, sniffed its way out of the door of the shed. Behind it Daniel appeared, blinking his eyes and trying to wipe the ghostly, clinging sensation of cobwebs from his face.

  Vera hefted the hoe. “All right,” she said, “these ought to do the trick knocking down weeds. Because if I know your grandfather half as well as I think I do, he’ll have neglected to see to her grave. It’s likely ass-deep in nettles. A disgrace, which we will remedy.”

  Daniel, who was not particularly eager to spend a Sunday morning grubbing weeds in a cemetery, especially after learning it was situated a considerable walk outside the town, said, “If you want to do this, why not wait until he gets back? He’d drive us out there.”

  “Because I don’t want him involved.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s my mother,” Vera stated with dreadful finality, “and I don’t want him involved. Get me?”

  He got her.

  Shortly before ten o’clock they started for the graveyard. Vera led them off with an air of purpose, slapping a pair of work gloves against her upper thigh in time with every stride she took, her hoe shouldered like a rifle. Daniel lagged a step or two behind, the scythe cradled clumsily in his arms. The streets were deserted, sunny and silent, pervaded with the sweet, aching stillness of Sunday morning in a small town. Some still slept in their beds. In churchgoing houses, boys were spreading newspapers on the floors in preparation for polishing shoes to be worn to Sunday School. Other children were having their hair washed, their mothers dippering soft water from the reservoir in the wood stove in warm, soothing floods over bowed heads and hair stiffened and peaked with lather. Working men drank a second cup of coffee in their undershirts without hurry, drew meditatively on cigarettes while they listened to Uncle Porky Charbonneau on the radio read them the Saturday funny papers. Only occasionally was the deep, slow, steady quiet broken by the excited barking of a dog, or an automobile with a hole in its muffler.

  Past the peaceful houses Vera and Daniel marched, past the yards hedged with lilacs and caraganas and smelling of grass and shade. They turned into Main Street and there the sun lay harsh and glaring on the cement sidewalks, the stucco storefronts, the plate-glass windows. The druggist had forgotten to roll up his torn awning and it was lazily puffing and popping in a breath of breeze. There was evidence the farmers had been to town the night before for Saturday night shopping. Plenty of cigarette stubs, Copenhagen snuff cans and Lucky Elephant Popcorn boxes lay in the gutters opposite wherever an auction poster had been tacked to a streetlight pole. Only a single car was parked on the street. It stood where it had all night, outside the hotel, directly in front of the beer parlour entrance. Huff Driesen had been too drunk to drive home to his daughter’s and was sleeping on the sofa in the hotel lobby.

  “I wish I had a can of white paint and a brush,” said Vera. “All she’s got for a marker is one of those iron crosses and by now it won’t have a fleck of paint on it. It’ll be nothing but rust. You have to whitewash those things regular – once a year, or they go to pot.”

  Daniel did not respond. It was a way of expressing his reluctance to join wholeheartedly in her expedition. All the same, he had to be careful not to provoke one of his mother’s famous explosions of temper by an outright exhibition of defiance. He was treading a dangerously fine line, but he’d had some practice at it.

  Once they had crossed the railroad tracks, only a few derelict shacks straggled on either side of the road. Here, outside town limits, by-laws did not apply and the yards held chicken runs and chicken coops, or lean-tos sheltering a cow. In front of the last house a gaunt red horse tethered to a discarded tractor tire lashed its tail to discourage flies and despairingly nuzzled ground that had been cropped black and bare of grass. A flock of small children hunkered in a patch of dirt before their door and stared as Vera and Daniel went by. The youngest, a boy of about three, suddenly yelled, “Pigshit!” in a challenging manner.

  “Ignore him,” said Vera.

  Then they were in open countryside, pasture and poplar bluffs. Vera pointed to a prominent rise about a mile distant. “That’s it. That’s the Protestant Cemetery.”

  Despite the earliness of the hour, Daniel could sense the heat building insistently. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. He was thirsty. He squinted a
t the rise. It seemed an awfully long hot walk there and back. Nor was it any piece of cake hauling the scythe. It was nearly as tall as he was.

  “Your grandmother would have expected her grave to be kept clean and neat. She was a lady that demanded respect, and in my books the dead are owed every bit as much respect as the living. It’s not too big of a sacrifice to spend a little time tidying on a Sunday morning, is it? And God knows the last time that happened.”

  Daniel fell farther behind his mother and the sound of her voice. He was dawdling, swatting the heads off Canada thistle with the scythe. The keen blade went through weeds and the tough prairie grass like a hot knife through butter. Roadside and ditches were spotted with colour. Purple clover, wild blue flax, yellow goat’s beard, white yarrow, and cow parsnip were sprinkled everywhere. Over the bright flowers bees hovered and droned and brighter butterflies flitted. The air was electric with a crackling and buzzing and thrumming of insects hidden in the undergrowth. Daniel felt as if he were moving in an atmosphere charged with static, walking on legs that the heat was draining of energy, turning water-muscled, draggy, listless.

  His mother, on the other hand, seemed to be stepping out more and more briskly; the head of her hoe was bobbing and jerking smartly up and down over her shoulder. She kept up a running commentary on his snail’s pace, tossing out remarks. “It’s surprising how soft city boys get and afraid of work. Take my advice, Daniel, and leave off whacking the weeds in the ditches and save your strength for the ones up top. Anyways, weeds on the road allowances are a municipal responsibility. They’re no concern of yours.”

  He adopted the wisest course, gave it up, slitted his eyes, propped the scythe on his shoulder, and shambled along in the dust a little more quickly.

  They began to encounter traffic; farmers from south of town headed for church. First came Catholics bound for ten-thirty Mass; a little later, worshippers at the United Church. Both denominations were equally and impartially cursed by Vera, even though they reduced speed to avoid spraying Daniel and her with gravel and to gain themselves a look. Vera described it as “a slow-motion gawk.” Car after car and truck after truck went by at a crawl, passengers unabashedly crowding forward behind the glare on the windshield to gaze curiously at the curious pair. Even though they were never recognized and identified, this did not prevent the man behind the wheel in his Sunday best from waving. Country manners demanded a salute even to strangers, although apparently women and children were under no obligation to offer this courtesy, only the driver. As the automobiles slid by, churning up clouds of fine, shifting yellow dust, the man of the house raised a hand in greeting as the others gaped and craned their necks. Vera nodded curtly back while she muttered ill-naturedly under her breath, “Fill your eyes. Two clowns minus the circus, but it’s free – which is the price a farmer likes.”