Emancipation Day (8 page)

“That’s enough, girls,” Freddie said.

“I sleep with thirty-five men in a barracks,” said Jack.

The twins howled. “What’s a
barracks
?” Beverley asked.

“A big building with lots of beds in it.” Two long rows of cots, eighteen to a side, each with its drumhead of white woollen blanket with a single black stripe, and a metal locker, regimental numbers stencilled on the door. The blanket itched. He’d got used to the snoring and farting and drunken roughhousing. In fact, he liked it. It was what men did. The incessantly polished,
unforgiving linoleum floor reflected the square of light coming through the window in the bathroom door, and he liked that, too.

“That’s a
hospital
!” said Sadie knowingly.

“Mommy and Auntie Viv seem to be taking a long time with the rum,” said Freddie. “Why don’t you two go and see if they’re leaving any for us.”

The twins scampered off and Freddie turned to Jack. “Vivian tells us you’re from Ontario somewhere. Windsor, is it?”

Jack noticed the way they called her Viv amongst themselves, but Vivian when addressing him, as though her name was their private possession, not to be used by strangers. “Windsor, yes,” he said. “Across from Detroit.”

“Never been there, I’m afraid. Been to Toronto a few times.”

“What line of work are you in?” Jack asked, man to man.

“Oh, import and export. Feeding the troops and all that.”

“Import and export?”

“Our people bring in fish, and we pack it up and ship it off to Merrie Olde on the Derry Run. We also bring sugar and rum up from the Islands, bit of coffee and cocoa. Surprised the Germans haven’t got
us
blocked off. Torpedo the odd fishing boat and the whole fleet would stay in harbour. That’d starve the Brits out. Your lot’s doing a fine job of keeping the U-boats out of Cabot Strait.”

His lot? “Not me,” Jack said. “I’m just a bandsman.”

“Not a bit of it,” Freddie protested. “Morale is everything. You must know that.”

“I guess so.”

“You’ve done wonders for Vivian’s morale, I can tell you. Regular droop before you came along.” Freddie went back to poking at the fire. “What do your people do in Windsor, if you don’t mind my asking?”

His people? He bloody well did mind. “They build houses.”

Freddie started to say something, but then Iris and Vivian came in carrying trays and trailing the twins.

“Wait, girls, just wait, for heaven’s sake,” Iris said, setting her tray precariously on top of the books and magazines on the low coffee table in front of the chesterfield. On the tray were a teapot, four cups, a stack of saucers and a plate of cookies. Vivian placed her tray on a side table. It held an ice bucket, two tumblers and a bottle of rum—not the one he’d brought.

“Cookies!” said the twins in unison.

“Make them yourself, Auntie Viv?” Jack asked Vivian.

“Vivian can’t boil water—can you, love?” Iris said.

“I can make toast.”

“Yes, but you have to pull the blackout curtains first in case the wardens think you’re signalling the Germans with the flames.”

“Iris, that happened once.”

“Will you have some tea, Jack?” Iris asked. “Or do you prefer rum?” Everything she said had an edge to it, a secret meaning she would hint at but was not willing to share outright.

“I’ll have a bit of the serum, if you don’t mind,” he said. Was that polite enough for her?

Iris laughed, not entirely pleasantly, and got up to pour the
tea. Jack wondered what it was she was so disappointed in. She didn’t know anything about him.

“You don’t like going to sea, I hear.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” he said. “I get seasick. The doc thought I was going to die out there. I spent most of the run hanging over the side with the dry heaves.”

“We have men working for us who are just the same,” said Iris. “Still, they go out every day to fish.”

“Mommy, what’s the dry heaves?” asked one of the twins.

“I’ve read somewhere,” said Freddie, “that Polynesians actually boast about getting seasick. And they’re the best sailors in the world.”

“Mommy, what’s the dry heaves?”

“Not now, girls.”

Jack gave Vivian his best Frank Sinatra smile. She looked lovely, sitting on the chesterfield beside the twins, hands folded in her lap, knees slanted demurely a few degrees away from him. Pretty as a pin-up. Now Iris, on the other hand, she still hadn’t brought him his drink.

“On second thought, Iris,” Jack said, “maybe I’ll have a cup of tea.”

Iris asked Sadie to pass her a cup from the tray, and Freddie asked Jack if he intended to go back to Windsor when the war was over.

“Only if we win it.”

“Really?” Iris said, handing Jack his tea. “All the way back there?”

“Oh, well, you know,” Jack said. “I haven’t decided yet.” He looked at Vivian. Something had startled her. “Who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll stay here.”

Iris looked at Vivian. Jack smiled at the twins. No one said a word.

WILLIAM HENRY

T
he house William Henry and Benny were working on was in Walkerville, owned by a man who worked at Hiram Walker’s, an accountant or something, something to do with money, anyway. It was a big yellow-brick house with ivy growing over it, looked like a jungle there on Willistead Crescent, attached garage, private backyard, must have cost a fortune to build, and Hiram Walker probably gave it to him. William Henry regarded working in the man’s house not so much as an obligation as a kind of promise he was fulfilling that he wished he hadn’t made. It was a small job, anyway: take out a stud wall between two rooms on the ground floor to make a larger room. William Henry had told Jackson to quote high so
they wouldn’t get it, a hundred dollars, but the owner went for it anyway. Money meant nothing to some people. It was their second morning at it. William Henry and Benny did the grunt work in the mornings while Jackson got his beauty rest, and then Jackson did the easy work after lunch.

Benny had already taken a crowbar to the wall and had most of the plaster on the floor, and William Henry was pulling the exposed laths off carefully because they were hand-split cedar, not machine-made, and he would reuse them somewhere else, maybe in the dream home they kept talking about building for themselves. Maybe out River Canard way. Two dream homes, one for him and Josie and one for Benny and whoever he settled down with. Alvina could have their current house in town. Jackson wouldn’t be wanting a home in River Canard. That wasn’t his dream.

Which was too bad, thought William Henry, as he worked the lath nails loose. Jackson always seen himself as destined for better things. Well, who didn’t? Didn’t Benny want better? Didn’t William Henry want better for both his sons? Just that for Jackson, better meant whiter.

“When I get my own place,” Benny said, “I’m going to have faucets like the ones they have in their bathroom upstairs. You seen ’em? Some kind of polished copper or maybe brass, looks like gold, anyway. And a stand-up shower. And they got closets in each room big enough you could turn one of them into a bedroom. These people were not brought low by the Depression, like we was.”

“Some people do well in hard times,” William Henry said.

William Henry and Benny agreed on most things. These days, anyway. Wasn’t always the case. Benny had been wild in his youth. Drinking and fighting, shoplifting, minor offences but they added up. William Henry had been down to the police station more than once to bring him home. For a while there he thought he was going to lose both his sons.

“Why he ain’t in the Army?” the cop asked the last time. “The Army’d straighten him out soon enough.”

But it wasn’t Benny who needed straightening out, it was Jackson. The damn fool couldn’t even wait until he turned eighteen, tried to join when he was sixteen, lied about his age. His mama had to go down to the recruiting office herself to show them his birth certificate and get him out of it. What he want to go and do a thing like that for, give his mama a heart attack? What did that war have to do with him anyway?

William Henry had known there was a chip on that boy’s shoulder since the day he was born, as soon as the women wouldn’t let him into the bedroom to see his newborn son. They were living on Tuscarora then, in that small house with no basement and water heating on the oil stove, and the walls so thin he could hear everything going on in the next room, Josie forgetting she’d turned Baptist and calling on her Catholic saints to help her, the women wringing out towels in the basin and telling her to push, that’s right, darlin’, push a little more, that’s it, while he sat in the front room with Alvina and little Benny wondering what in God’s name he was going to do to pay the bills.
The Chrysler plant had just opened at the top of McDougall so it must have been 1925. He might be able to get a job there. They didn’t hire coloureds for the assembly line, but they did for the foundry, which was dirtier work. He’d been plastering and doing odd jobs around the Settlement, hauling ashes, cleaning garages, anything he could do with a truck. They’d been getting by, it wasn’t the Depression yet, but they didn’t need another mouth, that was for sure. A big one, too, by the sound of it. And then everything went quiet in there, all at once, like an angel flew over, and he knew something gone wrong.

He couldn’t hear Josie anymore. He remembered looking at Alvina and her looking at him. She was twelve, old enough to know what was going on, but Benny was only four, he was playing with some pieces of wood on the floor. They stopped moving, poised to listen, like they were in a forest, like they knew their future was about to become even harder than they thought it was going to be. He turned to look at the wall and saw the photograph of Josie’s sister, Hazel, and thought someone would have to tell her, if they could find her, because she’d gone off to Chicago. And then he thought of Josie’s father, the Reverend John S. Rickman, the AME pastor, who was somewhere in Indiana now, he’d have to be notified even though he was the one who gave Josie up for adoption. And then the baby started crying, maybe it had been sucking all that time, and he heard Josie’s voice pleading, don’t let him in, don’t let him in. But he was so happy to hear her voice he got up and went in anyway.

William Henry stared down at the lath in his hands and realized he had drifted off. That was happening a lot lately.

“We need to cut that wire and re-run it through the ceiling,” Benny said, lighting a cigarette and looking at him oddly.

William Henry nodded. “We’re going to lose money on this job,” he said. “Jackson should’ve known that wire was in there.”

Benny shrugged. “Not even Jackson can see through walls,” he said, and they both laughed.

In the truck, heading into the city for lunch at the British-American Hotel, William Henry’s mood lifted. It was as though they were setting off on a vacation together, father and son, a limitless stretch of freedom, understanding each other perfectly, united in the work that lay behind them and the hours that stretched ahead. He never had that feeling with Jackson. But William Henry
had
got up from his chair in the front room the day Jackson was born, and he
had
gone into the bedroom to see his child, as what man wouldn’t? “You kids stay here,” he’d said to Alvina and Benny, who anyway made no move to join him. The women had changed the sheets on the bed and Josie was sitting propped up against the wall, holding the little bundle to her and looking at William Henry as though he was the Devil himself come to take the baby from her. Boy or girl? he asked. They already had one of each so it didn’t matter to him. It was one of the women who said, “Boy.” Josie didn’t say anything, nor even lift the corner of the blanket to show him.

“Alive?” William Henry asked. Why else would they be acting so strange?

“Of course he alive,” the other woman said. “Didn’t you hear him hollerin’ just now?”

William Henry leaned over his wife. “Josie?” he said. She was getting ready to cry, her chin wrinkled up and trembling.

“Oh, Willie,” she said. “I never thought. All the time I was carryin’ him I never thought …”

“Thought what? What you sayin’, girl?”

She looked away from him, turning her head so far from him that the cords on the side of her neck stood out like tree roots. Then just as quickly she looked back to him. But this time she was defiant. With one hand she carefully unwrapped the bundle she’d been holding against her, exposing the child to him. By now he knew the baby had to be deformed in some way. He’d heard of babies born with extra toes, or tails, or with paddles for arms, or enormous heads with bulging eyes, every sort of affliction on this earth. He prepared himself for a shock. The light in the room was not good, but this baby looked all right to him. He could see two arms and legs, a little body curled up like a crawdad in the crook of Josie’s arm.

Relief washed over him. “I don’t see nothin’ wrong with him.”

Josie looked down at the baby. “Open the curtain, will you, Ephie, dear.”

Light streamed in. William Henry saw immediately what was wrong. He saw the baby’s pink cheek working to release the milk from Josie’s dark breast. The baby’s pink fingers, tightly closed with the effort of kneading Josie’s stomach. Its little pink legs gently kicking.

“This here’s a white baby,” he said, horror-struck. Deformed after all.

“No, it’s not,” Josie said, pleading. “It can’t be, Willie. It’s just real light, is all.”

“It’s not. It’s a white baby.”

“I want you to love this baby, Willie.”

“I can’t, Josie. It ain’t mine.”

“Willie, it is. It surely is.”

“How can that be so?” he said, louder than he intended.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I swear it is.”

He could see her wretchedness and it pained him, but his eyes kept going back to the child, a pale blemish against her beautiful skin.

“This,” William Henry thundered, “is a white man’s baby!”

“No!” Josie shrieked. “No, Willie, it’s yours.”

But William Henry was beyond listening. He felt his chest tighten as he realized what must have happened. He stood in his fury, his mind racing with the face of every white man he had ever known who she could have done this with. There were white men in the Settlement, plenty of them, workers who come up for the war jobs and the high wages but found them all taken, salesmen down on their luck, factory men between factories, he saw them every day when he went out for his shave. Did one come in here and make this baby when …? Oh God, he’d made it so easy for them! He looked down at her now, her face streaked with misery, clutching the child to her breast. How could she have done this? And how could he stay here,
how could he ever be seen with them? Might as well hang a sign around his neck!