Homesick Read online

  Vera tried to convey, too, how she was now a traveller. She wanted to give Earl some idea of the sprawl and space and harsh grandeur of the country she was passing through. She wrote to him of what she had witnessed early one morning as her train rattled through Manitoba; wrote of a vast, distant field crawling with hundreds of minute figures. The scene would forever have remained a puzzle if the track had not curved just then, carrying her nearer and nearer. Vera had laughed aloud when the tiny figures grew larger and larger, resolving themselves into soldiers bending and straightening under the brilliant morning sun. They were stooking. On a whim an officer had turned a day of back-breaking labour for some farmer into a few minutes of diversion on a route march for a company of men. Now the troops were larking about, ramming the butts of sheaves into the soil and tossing the heavy heads together, battle-dress drab against the sun-drenched gold of stubble. As the train rumbled by, reducing speed on the bank of the curve, the men closest to the tracks waved to the passengers who were the first witnesses to their joke, looking not at all like soldiers but like boys on an outing, and one or two threw their caps exuberantly into the air, their mouths yawning in a soundless cheer.

  Vera tried very hard to get things right in her letters, to capture the strangeness of being far from home. The descriptions came so thick and fast her pen could scarcely record them. There were the prosperous farms of old rich Ontario with acres of tall corn and huge barns and sleek black and white cows with heavy udders, dreaming in the flickering shade of great trees she guessed were maples. And she described the enormous temple of Union Station in Toronto which by rights ought to have seemed empty and hollow because of its soaring roof, but which bustled and teemed with soldiers and airmen and sailors and women and children all rushing about every which way, hugging and kissing while the arrivals and departures rolled on like some awful announcement of the doom of journeys missed, chances never seized, life never lived. So hurry up! And when she came to the end of her trip, a young girl in a town in Ontario, she wanted, out of the fullness of her nineteen-year-old heart, to write a letter that said, “Tell everyone in Connaught that Vera Monkman is alive and kicking!” Both words underlined three times for emphasis. She didn’t write any such words, however. Instead, she signed it, “Your loving sister, Vera,” and enclosed a dollar of her pay for Earl, to show she was thinking of him and also to demonstrate to her father she was doing just fine, thank you very much, without him. Because, for as long as Vera corresponded with Earl, filing her reports on life in the Army, she never sat down to write without imagining two faces reading her letters, one Earl’s, and the other, hovering just over his shoulder, her father’s.

  Not that everything about the Army was wonderful. By the time she was transferred to Saint Anne de Bellevue Vera was having second thoughts about being a cook. In summer the kitchens were hotter than the hubs of hell and the noise, the incessant rattle of pans and clash of pot lids, the thin steamy stench of watery vegetable soup, the smell of raw chickens and burned food so jangled her nerves and upset her stomach that she found it next to impossible to eat. For days on end she could keep nothing down but weak tea, soda biscuits, and Jello. Yet never once did Vera present herself on sick parade. What if they found something really wrong and she was given a medical discharge? The last thing she wanted was to be forced to quit the Army just when she was proving herself so able. Because she was able. In six months Vera had been promoted to lance corporal in recognition of her general efficiency, precise and accurate record-keeping, and careful management of supplies. There were predictions she would make sergeant before long.

  It was difficult to bring her success to Earl’s and her father’s attention without seeming to brag, bragging being much disparaged among the Monkmans. The solution proved simple in the end. Vera had a studio portrait taken of herself in uniform, taken in three-quarter profile so that the stripes on her arm were clearly visible. She was certain they would be noticed. Of other matters, which reflected less directly on her, it was not necessary to be so modest. She had the excuse that her descriptions to her brother of extended leaves taken in the fabulous cities of the U.S.A. were justified because of their educational value. If they also happened to cast Vera in a sophisticated, worldly light, maybe that couldn’t be avoided.

  In particular, she dwelt at great length on her one visit to New York, where she and her companions had plucked up the courage to storm the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria looking for movie stars and from there, in a moment of insane bravado, pressed an assault on the restaurant, requesting a table for luncheon. They got one, it being an unfashionable, slack hour, and they servicewomen in the uniform of an ally. It was the uniform, Vera once again explained to her brother, which earned her the right to eat in a hotel that numbered among its guests millionaires, European nobility, and the stars of stage and screen.

  Later, they took in all the city’s tourist sights, saw Radio City Music Hall and the high-kicking Rockettes for whom they harboured a mild contempt as frivolous women who did not appreciate the seriousness of war and the sacrifices it demanded. They went to the top of the Empire State Building and then uptown to see Grant’s Tomb.

  These were the things she wrote to Earl, to mark the changes in her. There were other things of which Vera was scarcely aware and, if she had been, could not have written of to a brother.

  Old friends like Phyllis and Mabel might have thought that life in the Army had led to a deterioration in her manners and turned her just a tiny bit vulgar and unladylike. They would certainly be alarmed to see the way she drank beer, straight out of the bottle rather than a glass, and how, when she was tight, she would rise unsteadily to her feet and say loudly, in mixed company, “Make way, boys, this lady’s got to tinkle.”

  Somehow, too, the promises which Vera had made to herself to improve her mind had been neglected. She only glanced at the war news in the papers and had given up attempts to read books in the barracks during the evenings. The hubbub there was too distracting, her attention snagged on bits of camp gossip and talk of men. Most evenings she spent playing cribbage with a homesick recruit from Newfoundland who cried in the shower, believing tears couldn’t be detected in the midst of all that streaming water. But as the case of that girl proved, Vera was learning it was impossible to hide anything in the Army, or hide from anything. Like sex. She was getting sick and tired of being importuned and bothered by soldiers. The young ones were no better than beggars, all beseeching mouths and beseeching hands. They fumbled at you on the dance floor and in ill-lit doorways. What was worse, they struck sentimental poses and talked of dying because their bragging, lying friends told them that never failed to produce the desired result. To Vera it was exasperating and wearying, fending off this desperate stroking and fondling. They were nice enough boys but fools. Couldn’t they see that all this talk of death sounded ridiculous standing under a lamppost in Kitchener?

  If you steered clear of the young heroes, that left only the tough rinds and peels, the vets of the Great War who had reenlisted, been judged unfit for active service, and assigned duties as drill and gunnery instructors. Vera preferred them to the boys. They were more patient and charmingly persistent. A number of times when she had drunk too much Vera had permitted them liberties. For none of these old men did she feel an individual passion but at certain times she was aroused to an impersonal excitement when a hand crept to a stocking top, or closed on her breast, muffled in its khaki tunic. Eyes pressed tightly closed, she would ask herself, Why not? Why not find out? Why not get it over with? But she didn’t. Vera was put off by the element of struggle in it all, by their I win, you lose attitude, by the feeling they wanted to take her, to have her. That was the one satisfaction they would never get.

  Not surprisingly, none of this found its way into her letters to Earl. The picture she drew of herself was incomplete. In reality, the correspondence of Vera and her brother was the correspondence of shadows, a record of one memory speaking to another, of two people who grew di
mmer and dimmer as the months became years and the memories grew more unreliable. Their father was the wall upon which the shadows met. Because Vera knew he read her letters to Earl, she could never ask the questions that plagued her. How is he treating you, Earl? Are things better now that I’m out of his hair? Earl, are you happy? She had to rely on what she could divine from the notes written on lined pages torn from a school exercise-book, the words thick and clumsy-looking because of the heavy-handed way Earl drove his fountain-pen across the paper. The childish, immature way in which he expressed himself was never remarked by Vera. In her mind, he grew no older, was as she had left him.

  Got better marks from the new teacher. Mr. Mackenzie joined up on the school trustees so we have a lady teacher now. She is not so strict and owly as Mackenzie. I got specs now. Catch better with them than before, but still am no great shakes at ball. Isn’t in the cards I guess.

  No, Vera supposed it wasn’t. Earl had sent along a photograph of himself in his baseball uniform. She was shocked to see him suddenly shot up tall and thin as a reed, his Adam’s apple looking like an orange in a Christmas stocking, and his new glasses throwing sun back into the camera in a brilliant blur. It was typical of Earl to have a picture of himself taken in baseball uniform, not wearing his glove but absent-mindedly clutching it by the webbing so it hung, limp dead leather, like a trophy of the hunt, a strange beast pulled from the sea, or huge bat plucked from darkness. Oh dear, Earl, Vera thought, shaking her head.

  Reading between the lines, Vera could not always piece together the actual state of things in Connaught. Much of what Earl told her was communicated offhand, by the by. In January of 1944, in a letter written to thank Vera for the present she had sent for his fifteenth birthday, Earl passed on the momentous news that his father had taken over the town garage and hired himself help.

  Dad has taken on a man with a glass eye. Dad says men are hard to come by with the war but since this one has a glass eye he can’t fight. His name is Mr. Stutz and he comes from somewhere down the line, Kimberley I think.

  We got him because Dad says he is tired of doing bull-work his time of life. From now on Dad says Mr. Stutz can haul freight and he will sit on his behind doing the easy stuff like showing pictures and pumping gas for a living. Dad says Mr. Stutz is a good worker but has opinions. I seen him smoking so he isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness although he’s death on drinking. That’s how he lost his eye. Somebody drunk poked it with a pencil or something.

  Mr. Stutz is stronger even than Dad. Friday he carried an engine block across the shop on a dare. Was Dad ever mad when he heard. He said he could of hurt himself and been laid up and lost to him.

  Mr. Stutz figured prominently in Earl’s letters from that time on. He had clearly made an impression on her brother and perhaps beyond. In one of Earl’s letters she came across a cryptic line. Dad is better since Mr. Stutz came. How exactly was this to be taken? Did he mean her father was feeling physically better now that Mr. Stutz had relieved him of heavy work, or did he mean that Mr. Stutz was exerting some kind of steadying influence on her father, discouraging his wild, erratic behaviour? She wished she knew. Vera often worried about Earl, partly out of guilt, she supposed. Her brother had always needed someone to look out for him, to take his side. Maybe Mr. Stutz was doing that. Often during lulls in the clamour of the kitchens, she thought of the man she had cast in the role of her brother’s protector. However, try as hard as she might, she could only imagine him one way – as a man moving stiff-legged in a sailor’s rolling walk, arms pulled straight by something heavy – a keg of nails, an anvil, an icebox which buffeted his thighs with every lurching step he took. That was Mr. Stutz to Vera.

  But Vera had more to worry about than just Earl. By now she was a sergeant with a sergeant’s responsibilities – that is, she had to run things in a way that allowed the officers to believe they were actually in charge. She had to manage people with an easy or heavy hand, whatever the situation required. There were times when she was all at sea. What to do about the girl who was sending gifts of chocolate and perfume to another? How to uncover a barracks room thief? There were sleepless nights enough. And then there was the final worry. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer the war was drawing to a close. There were pictures in the newspapers of Russian and American troops shaking hands and posing as comrades beside the wide, slaty waters of the Elbe.

  Still, no one yet dared to think of it as finished, not with Japan holding out. On the radio sonorous voices reminded them all of the terrible price in blood which must still be paid. It was difficult to think of life outside the Army as anything but far distant. Then, very soon, Vera had to imagine it. Two bombs dropped, two unearthly flashes of light, two storms of heat and dust and it was over.

  This sudden peace took her unprepared. The Army began to melt away around her. It was like waking from a dream. A week never passed that Vera wasn’t down at the train station to see another of her discharged girls off home. She pressed cigarettes and bags of peppermints on them, brusquely shook their hands, and called them by their surnames before they climbed aboard. The shuddering, panting locomotives jerked forward, the carriage couplings rang, and Vera was left feeling like autumn, like those stark days when the leaves have fallen but the snow has not.

  Then in 1946 it was Vera’s turn. She was out on civvy street, her winter uniform carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied up in string, and laid in the bottom of a drawer in a rooming-house in Toronto. There was only one thing clear in her mind. She was not going home.

  Vera would have preferred to remain in the Army if that was a thing women did, but women didn’t.

  7

  Every night after supper Daniel walked and figured. It was his best chance to be absolutely alone because everybody else in Connaught was still indoors eating, he had the streets to himself. In Alec Monkman’s household supper was served earlier than in other households because he refused to eat at six o’clock when everyone else in Connaught did. In other houses it was the custom to seat yourself for the evening meal when the “supper siren” blew at the Town Hall. Three times a day a siren sounded from one end of Connaught to the other: at noon, at six, and at nine in the evening when it reminded children that there was a curfew for kids under sixteen years of age. Daniel had never heard of anything so weird, so backward. His grandfather had strong opinions about the siren, too. He said that eating at exactly the same time as eight hundred other people made him feel just like one more pig at the trough. All that snuffling and chewing, he could hear it. It put him off his own feed, he claimed. That was why at their house they ate at five.

  Daniel had a route he followed on his figuring walks. Down his grandfather’s street and past the RCMP detachment he went, the sun settling at his back, his shadow long and spidery-legged. In the evening calm the red ensign draped limply around the police flagpole. Mr. Stutz had been eager to tell him all about the police headquarters, had acted as if it had something directly to do with him. Daniel knew there were two cells in the basement, one of which had actually held a wife-murderer for several days before he was transferred to jail in Regina. He knew that every other month up on the second floor a judge tried minor offences, meted out fines and punishments. Whenever court was in session Mr. Stutz took a day off work and occupied a folding chair in the makeshift courtroom with its picture of the Queen on the wall and the simple desk which saw duty as a judge’s bench. Mr. Stutz had told Daniel that, if he cared to, he could accompany him to court next sitting.

  One of the things that Daniel tried to figure as he walked was what he and his mother were doing in Connaught. There had been no warning of a move. All of a sudden she announced they were going, the furniture was sold to a second-hand dealer, and they loaded themselves onto a bus. Why? Maybe the fight with Pooch over the toenail polish had something to do with it, although he couldn’t be sure. His mother had never provided a reason. Reasons were not things he expected from her. “Because I said so” was about the best
you got.

  He hadn’t wanted to go. His mother said, “You’ll make new friends. Better ones than you could here. Kids in small towns are so much friendlier.” Which wasn’t true. He knew he wasn’t the sort to make new friends. Maybe because she had never let him get any practice at it, learn the knack of it, keeping him locked up in a dumpy apartment waiting for her to come home from work. How was he supposed to get the trick of it? Deep down maybe he was a loner like James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

  Now he was passing the little shacky houses where the old foreign ladies lived, the ladies with the peach-pit faces and the kerchiefs (babushkas, Stutz called them) knotted under their chins on even the hottest days. According to Mr. Stutz, a lot of these old women could scarcely speak more than a few words of English. English had been for their husbands. But now the husbands were dead and they had no men to interpret for them, no men to trail along after in kerchiefs, brown stockings, black dresses printed all over with tiny, dusky-red flowers. They seemed to spend all their time in their gardens. Front yards were planted with sunflowers and poppies. Back yards were full of onions, beets, dill, cabbages, cucumbers, potatoes, and the rusty tin cans they screwed into the earth to protect bedding plants. Because of the cans the back yards seemed to Daniel to be a cross between a vegetable patch and a dump.

  During afternoons, if the old foreign ladies happened to be pecking in the dirt with their hoes and Daniel went by, they all straightened up and stared at him suspiciously and narrowly as if he were an alien from outer space. Which he may as well have been, his mother said sarcastically, Daniel not being native-born to Connaught.