A Good House (3 page)

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.”

*   *   *

NEITHER 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, close-set 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.

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.

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.

*   *   *

PATRICK 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.

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 midmorning. 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.

One of the oldest girls, the one most sure, who could suddenly and boldly talk the way Murray talked, folded her arms and suggested that if it was going to be for real, there should be a high-wire act, and immediately all the others jumped in, insisting on acrobatics and yes, Murray, yes, a trapeze.

Paul and his friends filled the space between the girls and the older, more worldly, mocking boys. They were quiet and patient, waiting as they always waited to see which way it would go.

Murray's plan was to set up the circus right there, on the hard-packed open space where the trucks backed out of the town's cement-block garages. His plan was to have auditions to see who was best at what.

He tried to be fair-minded. Everyone did what they believed they could do best and Murray watched patiently, judged what he saw, and made notes in a little black notepad. After a few days of consideration, he divided them according to their abilities.

They practised all through July, four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings, and Sunday afternoon. Murray was firm with schedules, merciless with absences. The mothers who were inclined to get involved got involved. Sylvia Chambers sewed, swapped material with other mothers, took her shears to dresses she was sick of, to ratty towels, and grey dress pants shiny at the knees and rear end. The McGregor kids unearthed a navy blue cape with bright-red satin lining that smelled of mothballs. Clown costumes were adapted from Christmas pyjamas that fathers would never wear anyway and bathing suits were tarted up with sequins and organza frills and bits of velvet ribbon tied in bows.

Jugglers trained hard in the privacy of their own backyards. There was a ventriloquist with a stuffed old-man dummy whose head he had severed from his sister's happily no-longer-favourite baby doll and an animal act, not just dogs leaping high through hoops but two miraculous cats, mother and daughter, who could walk around on their hind legs for a long time and another equally miraculous tabby who could almost talk, who could almost say
mine
and
never.

One of Paul's friends practised short riffs on a bugle which belonged to his older sister who marched in the high school bugle band and another boy learned to do a half-decent roll on an ancient snare drum loaned to him by his neighbour, an old, old man no one had ever imagined beating a drum.

Murray selected the acrobats, the girls who cartwheeled every spring day across front lawns on the way home from school. He deferred to their wishes when it came time to pick the handlers, the boys who would lift and throw them up to each other's shoulders and try to catch them, to protect them from injury when they fell.

Charles Taylor, Charles the First, they called him, came every night, dressed up in his shirt and tie and, hanging from his neck on a braided cord, his silver safety whistle, his signal. Everyone was familiar with the sound of the whistle because Charles blew it when he thought he was lost and when he didn't like the look of the dog that was following him and once, very loudly, when he tripped running across the train tracks and hurt his back. Charles stood off to the side and watched with devout attention as the girls practised their routines and the kids made him help sometimes, but not with saving the girls.

A trapeze was suspended from one of the girders under the water tower. Murray bought the rope and the pipe new at the hardware, to be safe, to be sure, and then he had to ask to borrow the town's extension ladder, and when he did Archie Stutt said he'd better climb up there himself. He refused to climb as high as some of the kids, the boys in particular, wanted, telling them as they steadied his ladder that they'd be smart to get themselves into the habit of thinking twice. The next day one of the boys discovered a length of braided steel for the high wire, in the back of one of the town trucks, and so Archie hauled his ladder out again and tied one end of the wire to another girder and the other end to a foothold on a telephone pole on the street. It was eight feet off the ground and it sloped, slightly, but Archie said that was all right, high wires could slope.