A Good House (2 page)

After the thirties, with the hardware let go for a song, Bill's father had started to sell cars and trucks up at the Chev Olds and he'd loved it, the wheeling and dealing, the good cigars, the flask of celebratory rye in the top drawer of his otherwise empty desk. He was now, in late middle age, a minor partner, with no serious thought of retirement.

Sylvia's Ferguson grandparents had moved up from the Chatham area when they were just young to take over the grocery store, which her father had recently sold to the Clarkes, although he'd reluctantly agreed to continue on for a couple of years as their butcher.

Bill and Sylvia had married in 1936, the year King George died, because Sylvia was pregnant with Patrick, a situation which was not especially desired but certainly not unusual. Sylvia's father adjusted himself to the circumstances quickly, he didn't see any reason to go too deeply into these matters, but her mother thought Sylvia, because she was so very pretty, could have done better and like a fool she said so.

Sylvia had to pull her mother down on the front porch steps to try to convince her once and for all that Bill Chambers was a very decent man, a kind man, that while he was obviously neither traditionally handsome nor brilliant he was everything else a woman could want, and then some. Saying these last words she had smiled and raised her eyebrows in an impudent gesture which was both rare and immediately understood for what it was, and which settled the question for good.

Bill Chambers signed up to go overseas in 1942, very soon after they'd bought the house, just when Sylvia was starting to find ways to believe in the life they were making. He wasn't any kid, he was almost thirty. To explain himself, he told Sylvia he simply couldn't stand not going. He left by train, was sent first out to Halifax to be too hurriedly educated by his country, too quickly taught about ships and depth charges and German U-boats, and then he was shipped over with all the others like him to try to apply what he had too quickly learned.

When it was finished, finished for him, he came back to Sylvia and the kids left-handed. In the organized chaos of an attack from the air, in the bitterly cold, loud, black, bloody mess that was a battle in the North Atlantic, the caution Bill had taught himself, the deliberate, sober, rational maturity he'd thought he would need was wasted. He watched the three most useful fingers of his right hand leave his hand, watched two of them land on the deck at his feet, and just before the guy beside him kicked them overboard he had snapped a mental picture that would make itself available to him for the rest of his life: the bloody fingers rolling slightly with the heave of the ship, the pulpy, mangled flesh that was no longer his own split open like burst sausage, the nails, blue-white and still almost real, holding firm.

But none of this made Bill Chambers extraordinary. He had come home alive, to his family, to his job, to his comfortable house on Stonebrook Creek. And in 1949, with the war mercifully over and won, the only cost to Bill those three fingers and the time it took to train his left hand, with the country ready to enter an unprecedented boom and Sylvia confident that she could get her children safely through their childhood, comfortable was what the Chamberses were hoping against hope to be.

1952

THE NEW SIREN
was installed in Stonebrook's Town Hall tower on the first good Tuesday in April, after the rains had soaked and softened the fields and then abruptly ended, leaving the spring sun behind to warm the soil for planting.

The old cast-iron bell, the original, was not to be replaced but augmented by this new technology. The bell would continue to announce twelve noon but the siren would signal the fires and emergencies. The siren would call the volunteers from their work or their supper tables or their ball games or their beds.

The councillors agreed they could justify the expense, which was substantial, because a tornado had cut through the county the previous July and people complained for months afterward that they had not heard any warning at all from the Town Hall, not a blessed sound above that wind. The councillors and everyone else who had given it any thought believed that the wail of a siren would be more likely to carry, would probably ride the wind undiminished.

Because there were regulations to meet, because it had to be done right the first time, the installation contract had gone to a company from Sarnia, and when the men from Sarnia pulled up to the Town Hall curb at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning with the thing crated up in the back of a truck, there was a small semi-official party waiting on the Town Hall steps to meet them, to unlock the doors and turn on the lights and lead them up the three flights of stairs to the top of the bell tower. The mayor was there and the two councillors who had pushed hardest for the siren. Norma Fawcett, who had worked forever up at the town office taking receipt of the taxes and keeping the town books and scribbling the minutes at the council meetings, had been asked to come along in case they needed someone to fetch coffee and maybe something from the bakeshop. Charles Taylor, the town's quiet, well-mannered simpleton, had been dressed in his slacks and shirt and tie and sent up to watch the installation by his mother, who strongly believed that Charles had as much right as anyone to take part in things. And Archie Stutt made sure he was in attendance because as the town's de facto maintenance superintendent, you could bet he would be left in charge of the thing after the experts from Sarnia pulled out.

Bill Chambers joined the delegation on the steps just as the siren was being taken off the truck. He had made his own breakfast and left the house for the hardware store an hour early, walking a slightly different route uptown in order to arrive at about the right time. He was there with the other men not in any official capacity but because two years earlier he had climbed the two flights with Archie Stutt to measure and make an estimate on the lumber needed for a new tower staircase and that day he had seen the old bell up close for the first time and he had admired it.

It wasn't brass like a show bell but the more lowly cast iron. The dull pewter sheen had been fouled here and there with the crusty smear of bird droppings, but it was nevertheless a beautiful thing. Its weight was self-evident, it was three feet across at the base. The clapper was the size of a softball. Bill wasn't convinced anyone would want to harm the bell, the town council had vowed to keep it and they'd said the siren would not in any way interfere with its workings, but sometimes people got wacky, spur-of-the-moment ideas, sometimes people had to be tamed down a little. He thought he'd just stand around quietly for an hour or so and watch out for the bell.

Like the library and the churches, the Town Hall had been built to be taken seriously. The windows and doors and roof line were not elaborate but purposeful, symmetrical, calming. There was a substantial cornerstone and intricate although not ostentatious brickwork around the double front doors and at all the corners and up under the eaves. There were generous concrete steps with sturdy balustrades and, on each side of these, chained-off space and good, regularly renewed soil for tidy beds of geraniums and snaps and pansies.

Inside the Town Hall there was an office on the main floor where people paid their taxes and complained about storm sewers, and another office where the town constable kept a desk and a couple of overstuffed filing cabinets and where he might be reached by telephone if he wasn't in the barbershop or walking up and down Front Street, gossiping. There were four jails cells which were cleaned occasionally but rarely used. There was a two-stall washroom which for many years was made available to kids who'd got caught too far from home.

The auditorium up on the second floor held thirty rows of shiny, hard, dark brown chairs with squeaky flip-up seats. The rows of chairs were attached to runners and these runners were designed to be bolted to the floor, but they were not bolted because sometimes they had to be removed in an afternoon and stacked at the sides of the hall for a demonstration of some kind or a crowd too large to be seated or a big dance, although now the dances were usually held in the Memorial Arena, which had been built down near the fairgrounds. The new dance floor in the arena was top-of-the-line hardwood and it had been constructed right at ground level, which meant a lot less disconcerting spring when there was a big crowd. There was a raised platform for a five-piece band and on the platform an upright piano which had been purchased the year before with the proceeds from a raffle on a humble Christmas turkey.

The arena was the newest public structure in town. Since the war, all across the province dozens of memorial arenas had gone up because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger. Through the months of fund-raising and construction both of Stonebrook's newspapers gave a running account of activities, and when the doors were finally thrown open the editors proudly put the total value at fifty thousand dollars, careful to include in their valuation loads of gravel and electrical supplies delivered without an invoice, all the cash donations, large and small, some of these sent by expatriates from as far away as California or Calgary, and freely offered manual labour tagged at seventy-five cents an hour. Bill Chambers had taken Patrick and Paul over with him several times to mix cement or haul lumber, and Sylvia and Daphne had spent a few evenings pounding nails. Fifty thousand dollars was still substantial money in 1952. You could build a perfectly adequate house for under six thousand; you could get yourself a loaded Cadillac like Doc Cooper's for somewhere around four thousand.

*   *   *

THE INSTALLATION PEOPLE
from Sarnia had turned out to be pros. And not one of the men who assembled that morning had mentioned the old cast-iron bell one way or the other, the talk was all about the siren. But nevertheless Bill was glad he'd gone. It had been something to see.

In just under two hours, including a half-hour break for coffee and banter and bran muffins hot from the oven of the bakeshop across the street, the men had the siren securely mounted and wired in and set to go. Bill didn't stay around for coffee. He couldn't spend the entire morning guarding the tower bell. By the time the guy in charge was ready to give the siren its first test run, shortly before ten, Bill was at his job at the hardware store, patiently trying to get two confusing lumber invoices sorted out with the steadfast bookkeeper, Margaret Kemp.

Sylvia Chambers heard the siren's first wail, pausing with her hands on her hips over the long bed of tulips that lined the far side of the driveway, wondering about the possibility of peonies.

Patrick Chambers was at his desk at the back of the room over at the high school, sitting behind Murray McFarlane, conjugating aloud the Latin verb “to win” with the rest of the university-bound grade tens.

Daphne in grade seven and Paul in grade six were standing out in the dusty fenced playground with all the other kids from all the other grades, listening. After their principal had got the courtesy call from Norma Fawcett up at the town office he had walked from classroom to classroom to forewarn his teachers, and as they stood in the playground listening many of these teachers were preparing a brief, impromptu civics lesson: the purpose and function of a Town Hall, how people must work together in communities, for progress, for safety, for the good of the group as a whole. Most of the kids were quiet, their arms at their sides and their faces upturned as if such a sound was something that came from the sky.

Two hours later, when the tower bell chimed twelve just as it had the day before and every other previous day, Bill was already out on Front Street. If he could manage it, he usually left the hardware store a few minutes before noon because he liked to hear the sound of the bell clearly, in the outside air.

With a dinner of pork chops and last year's apple jelly and mashed potatoes and creamed corn set to go the minute they all came in the door, Sylvia stood on the back step taking the last of the clothes off the line, snapping and folding shirts and pants and aprons and pyjamas and nighties and underwear, dropping them into the wicker basket at her feet. She had guessed right, it had been a good breezy morning for wash. She could smell the morning in the clothes.

Patrick had split off from his friends to walk the last few blocks from the high school alone. As he walked, conscientiously planting exactly two steps in each new square of cement, he was trying once more to successfully tell himself a story in Latin. The story had to be about war because almost all the verbs and nouns he had learned that year from the dour Mr. Stewart lent themselves best to war.

Paul and Daphne, each of them having just received a quickly conceived civics lesson, were walking the few blocks side by side, not a word shared, their coming home together unusual because long-legged Paul walked so fast. He liked to be where he was going
now,
liked to eat dinner quickly so he could get himself back to the playground to join his rowdy friends. Daphne had to take two or three steps for each one of his but that was all right, she could do that.

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.