A Good House (3 page)

Spotting the kids, Bill had stood on the sidewalk at the front of the house to wait as they approached from their different directions and when they all came around the corner of the house Sylvia stopped folding clothes to watch them. She liked to watch her kids come and go, she did it regularly. Occasionally, in the hope that this might allow her to see them differently, maybe as other people saw them, just as they were, she tried to pretend that they didn’t belong to her at all.

Paul came up the steps first, taking them double, six steps in three. On an April whim he stopped on the porch to open the door so his mother could go into the kitchen first and then Patrick slammed into him and he was stuck holding the door open for Daphne and Bill. As soon as his father was clear, Paul threw Patrick off to beat him into the kitchen. There was a time when he always lost to Patrick, to his confidence rather than his strength, but those days were over.

They all took their places at the table and waited until Sylvia left the stove and removed her apron to sit down with them. This waiting was a rule, one of very few. Bill lifted the bowl of potatoes toward Daphne to start things off and after all the food had been around the table he passed his plate down to Sylvia so she could cut up his chop and asked, of everyone, “And where were you when the siren went off?”

Each of them told their stories in turn and then Paul, reaching for the bottle to pour himself a most-days-discouraged third glass of milk but thinking about the playground, about who might be back there already, said, “What’s it matter?”

“It’s just a habit you could get into,” Bill said. “Remembering where you are.”

N
EITHER
the Chambers kids nor any of their friends gave much thought to remembering, or to the development of habits. They were content to keep pushing forward through undisciplined time, and anyway, habits were what you caught hell for, biting your nails to the quick, picking at scabs to keep the sore going, sneaking down to Stonebrook Creek in your pyjamas to watch the moonlight shiver on the dark water. The kids used their time to do the things they needed to do. They occupied the town on their own terms.

Most of the adults believed that as long as no one got any big ideas, and if everyone kept a general eye out, the worst that could happen would be a dog bite or a bee sting or a superficial slash from some broken glass left lying around in an alley somewhere. They did not want to load the kids up with the burden of possible but highly unlikely danger because most of them disapproved of exaggeration generally. Nothing good came from blowing things out of proportion. Right after the war a partially deaf drifter who had not been able to find steady work had hanged himself under the grandstand down at the racetrack, and no one had forgotten the day he was found and cut down, but most people had decided that, as bad as it was, his decision was pretty much the kind of thing that had nothing to do with anyone, least of all the kids.

As well as the Town Hall and the arena, the kids were familiar
with miles and miles of train track and with the smoky, always burning fires over at the dump, with the canning factory and the Vinegar Works and the foundry, the stores on Front Street, the racetrack, the churches, the Rotary Park, the library. They chased after pea wagons on their way to the canning factory, pulled at the tangled vines to feed on pods of sweet new peas. Their pockets empty but their heads crammed with schemes, they drifted into stores, left if they were told to, returned the next week entirely uninsulted.

And they knew the intricacies of Bald Hill and Stonebrook Creek. In the winter, the hill was called Toboggan Hill because what could be more enticing than the threat of a good soaking at the end of a fast ride? The wide toboggan run, pristine under the bright haze of a winter sun, was flanked on either side by tall, descending, closes-et spruce and fir and pine and the new snow fell from the hovering clouds to a smooth, blinding whiteness. The kids did not go to the hill so regularly in the spring after the snow disappeared, but when they did wander across it, taking a shortcut, if they saw that the evergreens that lined the sides of their toboggan run had tried to reproduce themselves, if seedlings had taken root, they just ripped them out. Wandering their territory, they believed as children do that both the hill and the creek were quite large. But they were wrong. They could pull their sleighs and toboggans back up to the top of Bald Hill in just a few laughing, shouting minutes and they could easily jump the creek where it narrowed, where the flow of the water was partially blocked, slowed by good-sized rocks and by smaller rocks worn stone-smooth over time by the current. They could get across the creek almost anywhere if they got their hands on two or three old planks.

They followed Stonebrook Creek through unfenced backyards and out into the countryside hunting for mysteries, for bloodsuckers or two-headed toads or unfamiliar skeletons or, please just once more, a boxed-up, thrown-out stash of dirty magazines.

It was Daphne who discovered the dirty magazines. Wandering alone one morning along Stonebrook Creek a mile out of town she had spotted something new, a box that hadn’t been there the last time, and she’d crawled down and stretched out over the bank to
pull the box open. Patrick and his friends soon took the magazines away from her but this find did provide Daphne with a brief reputation, a bit of status. She’d got the boys something they wanted.

They had all run back to the creek together, Daphne in the lead, and when they shoved her aside and knelt down to grab at the soggy women in black panties, their frantic enthusiasm made her stomach quiver, although she knew better than to let on. She just left them to it, walked away whistling.

It was not unusual for the kids to learn something important from the carelessness of adults. Most of them eavesdropped with considerable skill, easily recognizing the cadence, the tone of voice that indicated a desire for privacy. Given the opportunity of a morning alone at home or a neighbour’s house left empty, many of them could snoop through a closet or a chest of drawers without a trace of remorse. Sometimes they took things, just some small thing needed as hard evidence of something they now believed to be true, although they almost always meant the theft to be temporary.

In spite of the efforts of their teachers, most of what they learned about the outside world they learned Friday or Saturday night at the movie theatre, a sloped, narrow space wedged between Taylor’s Fine China and the Legion, with tight rows of hard seats and dusty red velvet drapes framing the big screen. War movies were big in 1952, and jungle movies and Westerns. You could usually count on a tough but beautiful, big-breasted, dark-haired woman the hero couldn’t bring himself to love and, in the Westerns, close to the end, a gunfight or a fistfight on the top of a fast-moving train. Good guys didn’t like to talk much and bad guys died slowly, often in quicksand, their repentance loud but useless because they could never be saved. Even the bad guys themselves knew no one would save them.

The kids were haphazard in their play and quietly disorganized. Their eager enthusiasms died as quickly as they had been born. They got to know each other on their own.

There were tough kids and kids not nearly tough enough, but most of them were assumed to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. If there were quarrels or fights, and occasionally there were, these were not reported back to parents because parents
never did anything anyway. Parents couldn’t save you. When kids came home muddy and soaking wet or bleeding from an unusual wound or cranky or worried or defeated, there was no great fuss. A dish of ice cream, a bowl of cereal, a joke, a bath, a bandage, a good night’s sleep, these were the solutions.

P
ATRICK
and Daphne and Paul Chambers came together in play just the one summer, the summer of the circus. Along with a couple of dozen other kids they had been seduced by Murray McFarlane, who had previously been more or less invisible to them, negligible. For no reason anyone could have named, Murray was the summer’s sudden leader.

After his grade-ten exams, as a reward, Murray’s parents had taken him to Detroit where they had shopped for clothes and eaten in restaurants and gone to see a Hollywood film called
The Greatest Show on Earth.
Home from Detroit with the dialogue almost entirely forgotten but the big-top scenes still throbbing in full Technicolor through his brain, Murray remembered and imagined and dreamed and then carefully described to the others, at first just a few of them sitting on the Town Hall steps, a circus, the possibility of a circus. In spite of the fact that he didn’t play hockey or ball, or perhaps because he didn’t, Murray was prepared to claim his time in the sun.

Patrick was soon to be fifteen, Daphne was twelve and Paul was eleven. Their separate clusters of friends, normally grouped according to small but significant age gaps and assumed to be distinct for good reason, were joined by Murray into one mass of kids, eager and serious, performers and workers alike cooperating for the larger cause.

Murray was quite a bit taller than the other kids, with a long torso and gangly arms and skinny, long-boned legs. And like his notorious Uncle Brady, who had come home from Italy with just one eye and then died at a railway crossing too drunk to get his car door open, he was very badly coordinated. He was Patrick’s age but not in Patrick’s cluster. He usually roamed Stonebrook alone, attaching himself to other kids only when he felt the urge and then abruptly leaving them, as if he’d thought of something more important to do.
They would see him wandering down along the creek or sitting on the Town Hall steps or sometimes up in the balcony at the arena, watching the game or, more usually, watching the crowd watch the game. Occasionally on a summer night, just as the sky got as dark as it was going to get, just before everyone had to start home, he would sit with them on the swings at the Rotary Park for a while and listen to the taunting innuendo and the dirty jokes. He could laugh easily when he was supposed to, when it was time. But he was quiet. He contributed nothing worth repeating or remembering.

Murray’s comings and goings were of no concern to Mrs. McFarlane, who was much older than the other mothers and who suffered from debilitating migraine headaches. He was just out somewhere, that’s what he told her and what she believed.

After a few nights of talking on the Town Hall steps, certain now of his authority, Murray advised the other kids that if the circus was going to be any good, everyone would have to agree to do what they did best. He called the first meeting after supper one dreamy evening in late June under the water tower.

The town’s work yard, an open expanse of hard-packed dirt maybe twenty yards square, was more or less hidden from view behind the Town Hall, accessible only by a short side street, an alley really, lined with broad, smooth maple stumps. You had to know where it was to get there. The water tower stood in the middle of the work yard and on the north side there was a large cement-block garage with oversized doors for the fire truck. No one but the firemen and a few necessary officials were supposed to set foot in this garage and the boys who propped the Town Hall washroom window open to share a stolen pack of du Maurier cigarettes or climbed the bell tower with burlap sacks, for pigeons, accepted this as a fair-enough rule, disciplined themselves to accept it because they knew without having it explained for them that fire could be a very big deal, that fire could take anything it wanted, any time.

A larger garage on the other side of the yard housed the garbage truck and the town’s two smaller workaday trucks, which were used for ongoing street repair and the scooping up of dead squirrels or groundhogs, for small emergencies like attendance at a drain after a
big storm or the occasional capture of a mangy, shifty-looking dog no one knew from Adam. In the deepest recess of this larger garage there was a long workbench and an assortment of very serious tools which were kept clean and sharp by Archie Stutt, who had been the town’s man for years, both before the war and after, his temporary absence overseas covered by a drifter who had since drifted on. There were coiled heaps of greasy rope on the floor and five wheelbarrows hung high up on the wall, out of his way. Archie wore overalls and a heavy, beat-up jacket all winter because the garage was cold but it was cool in the summer and it suited him fine then.

As in the Town Hall itself, the lights in the garage, eight of them, were dropped from the ceiling on thick cables, and sometimes, if the double doors had to be thrown open in a storm, the lights would swing and squeal and hum in the wind and Archie, looking up, would shout to the kids huddled around him, “By Jesus, one of these times…” Archie was famous for anticipating the worst.

Patrick Chambers’ friends, five boys at the mercy of growth spurts who represented the widest possible range of height, weight, intelligence, and confidence, were held together mostly by their skill with mockery. But they had been mesmerized by Murray, by his surprising ability to talk, to tell everyone exactly what could happen, what they could make happen. They’d heard about the meeting at the water tower and they turned up, took their positions just outside the circle of kids gathered tight around Murray, and before any of their repertoire of snide remarks had a chance to kick in they all had circus jobs, responsibilities assigned by Murray with a seriousness which was new to them and compelling in its novelty. They were caught up in the crucial early stages of planning and thus lost their momentum. A few of them had once or twice played at maturity, usually in response to some contrived expectation from a parent or some other adult, but this was different. They knew it and were ready for it.

Daphne and her friends sat at Murray’s feet, their faces summertime brown, their sleeveless blouses lifted and tied up at their midriffs and their bright cotton shorts dusty, soiled since mid-morning. Some of the younger girls, the ones who still wore braids
or pigtails, were particularly untidy because girls this age were done up just once a day, by their mothers, right after breakfast. All of the girls huddled and squirmed on the packed dirt, begging for some important part to play. They understood that this could be their chance to shine, to wear flashy, glamorous outfits, to show people what they were really like, inside.