Homesick (17 page)

Then a light burst on behind the mannequins, a lock rattled, and the door to the shop was thrown open. Vera and Thomas froze. Thomas remained on his knees, neck craned around to the door, mouth hanging open stupidly and eyes squinting against the sudden brightness. A man in a vest undershirt, trousers, and stockinged feet stood in the open doorway, a look of gentle, bemused perplexity on his face. He was middle-aged, very tall, stoop-shouldered, and had faded, reddish hair. Something about his manner made Vera think of Jimmy Stewart, her favourite actor. He had the bewildered innocence of Mr. Smith. A slow smile of amusement spread over his face as he took in the scene, Thomas down on his knees before Vera.

“I hope I haven’t interrupted a proposal,” was all the man said.

With that, Thomas got to his feet and began to strike ruthlessly at the dust on the knees of his trousers.

“Not likely,” spat out Vera. She jabbed an accusing finger at Thomas. “He followed me. He chased me. I ran here because I saw a light was on.”

The red-haired man took a step nearer, peered from one to the other, settled on Thomas. “Is that right?” he asked. “Were you following the lady? Did you chase her?”

“I only wanted to talk to her,” said Thomas sullenly. “Anyway, what business is it of yours?”

The storekeeper turned to Vera. “Do you know this man?”

“Does she know me,” interjected Thomas. “I’ll say she does. She’s my girlfriend.”

The red-haired man nodded his head reflectively. “So it’s like that,” he said. “A lover’s spat. But please, not on my window.” He flattened his palm against it. “It’s only glass. A really good spat could break it.”

“I want you to know,” said Vera, “that this man is an out and out maniac. I never was a girlfriend of his. He imagined it all. Mister, this man is crazy and I’m afraid of what he might do to me. Please tell him to go away.”

“You know that isn’t true, Vera. You were my girlfriend.”

“And there’s no lovers’ spat either. He just ran up and grabbed me here on the street. What it is is a pervert attack or something.”

The red-haired man was speaking to Thomas. “Please, maybe it would be better if you left the lady alone for the time being. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow she’ll want to talk. But now she’s upset and it’s clear she doesn’t want to discuss matters.”

Thomas glowered at the advice. “Why don’t you keep that big fucking nose of yours out of our business? Who asked you?”

“Oh, I think this is my business,” the man answered calmly, “because, you see, this window the two of you were trying to crash through is my business. And if it’s true that you’re bothering this young woman like she says you are – well then, in all decency, that has to be my business, too.”

“You’d better believe he’s bothering me,” chimed in Vera.

Thomas raked her with a brooding glare. “You better shut up, Vera,” he warned.

Suddenly she remembered the hat-pin. She drew it out of her sleeve and held it glinting in the light. “How’d you like this rammed up your ass, buster?” she said.

“That’s enough,” the store owner said sharply, pushing her arm down. “Maybe everybody should calm down and stop talking such nonsense, threatening each other like children. Maybe you should go home now, son, and give her time to think about it.”

“Yeah, with any more time to think about it I ought to really make myself sick to my stomach,” said Vera.

The man ignored her. He continued speaking to Thomas in a soft, persuasive tone. “There’s really no point, is there?” he reasoned. “This has all got out of hand. Leave her be. Sleep on it. The morning always makes a difference. Don’t make yourself any more trouble.”

It was the mention of trouble that seemed to agitate and incense Thomas. “There’s no trouble in me standing where I choose!” he said, flying into a rage. “You can’t order me off the street! You and your tribe may have bought everything on it but you don’t own the road yet!” Suddenly seized by suspicion he broke off, threw Vera a cunning, measuring look. “So this is it, is it? Some dirty old Jew waiting for you in his underwear.”

Vera flung her arms into the air in exasperation. “Didn’t I say he was crazier than a shit-house rat?” she appealed to the storekeeper.

“Don’t think I don’t know who the Sunday man is now. Only light on in the street and she goes for it. Pussy bought by a kike!” he shouted. “Pussy bought by a kike!”

“Lower your voice,” said the red-haired man. “There are old people who live on this street who shouldn’t have their sleep disturbed by such foolish and disgusting talk. It frightens them, loud voices and such talk.”

“Make me lower it,” taunted Thomas, mouth twisted, bitter. “What’s the old saying? Takes nine tailors to make a man. How many Jew tailors to make one? Show me. Make me lower it! But your type can’t, can they?”

What astounded Vera was the composure of the red-haired man. She could detect no sign of anger in his face, only some variety of resigned melancholy. “No,” he said quietly, “I suppose my type can’t ever make your type do much.”

“You’re fucking right you can’t!” crowed Thomas. “I’ll make just as fucking much noise as I please. I’ll, I’ll …” and, lost without a threat, Thomas looked wildly about him, reared back, and drove his heel into what confronted him in the glass of the store window, his own desperate, unhappy reflection.

The pane exploded in fissures like the break-up of a frozen river and then the shards began to drop about them in an icy, silvery-sounding rain as the store expelled a long sigh of warm air into their astonished faces. Vera and the shop owner were still gaping when Thomas whirled about and began a panicked get-away, coat billowing out behind him as he clattered up the street. Vera, turning, wondered why the red-haired man didn’t give chase. He hadn’t yet lifted his eyes from the glittering wreckage strewn at his feet. So it fell to Vera to express the anger and contempt she believed Thomas had earned. “Run, you coward, you!” she shouted after him. “Run, you gutless wonder!”

The sound of her voice brought Thomas up short, looking like a man who has forgotten something. He stood facing her, indistinct, blurred by a hundred yards of night. “So, Vera,” he called plaintively, “what’ll it be? Whose side are you on anyway? Mine or his?” A pitiable question that only Thomas could have framed in such circumstances.

Vera squeezed her eyes tightly shut and obliterated Thomas. “His!” she shouted, shaking with fury. In the release of bottled-up tension a kind of exaltation took hold of her. “His! His! His!” she cried, eyes and fists clenched tight. A hand took her by the shoulder. “That’s enough,” said the man. “Quiet. He’s gone now.” Vera opened her eyes to lights springing on above the shops and silhouettes sliding over drawn blinds. Her gaze fell to the road. He was right. Thomas was gone. There was no trace of him. Except for the broken glass.

Vera felt a twinge of responsibility for having led misfortune to the door of a stranger. “Christ,” she said, shoving a piece of glass with the toe of her shoe, “look at the mess he’s made. Look at what that poor excuse for a man did to your window. If you call the police I can give them his address. I know where he lives. I’d be glad to be a witness for you.”

The man shrugged, turned down the corners of his mouth expressively. “I don’t think police are what that unfortunate young
man needs,” he said. He regarded the fragments of broken glass and the light which fell glittering upon them. “Kristallnacht,” he said to himself.

Vera had not understood the foreign-sounding word. “Pardon me?”

“Nothing. Don’t pay any attention to me. I was just reflecting upon the beauty of broken glass and electric light. Others have done it before me.”

“There’s nothing beautiful about broken glass. It only means work, sweeping it up, replacing it.”

“A practical woman,” he said.

“Well, maybe we should set about fixing it. If nothing else, we can tape some pieces of cardboard into the window. You must have boxes in the store.”

He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of the hand. “It’s much too big a hole for cardboard. Repairs can wait until morning.”

“I’m not saying it would keep anybody out but what if it snows? And a window without anything in it has got to be an invitation to help yourself.”

“If it snows it snows. There’s nothing really worth stealing except the cash register and I can carry that upstairs with me. Besides, if there are any prowlers I’ll hear them.”

“You sleep that light?”

“As a matter of fact, at night I don’t sleep at all.” He smiled wryly at her surprise. “I’m a man of peculiar habits. I go to bed for five or six hours right after I close the store. At midnight or so I get up to read. Perfect peace and quiet. No interruptions. Except for tonight,” he added. “A bachelor’s freedom to do as he pleases. This is the wild use I make of my freedom.”

“You read all night?”

“I also drink too much coffee. Sometimes with a little whisky in it. More bachelor wildness.” He hesitated. “After such a cold and trying adventure as you’ve had tonight, could I interest you in a cup of coffee?”

“I believe you could.”

He held out his hand. “I believe formal introductions are usually the preamble to whisky. Stanley Miller.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Miller,” said Vera, taking his hand. “I’m Vera Monkman.”

“Please, Miss Monkman,” he said, indicating she should enter, courteously stooping his stooped shoulders even more.

That was how it began. Her trailing him as he puffed up the steep stairs packing an antique nickel-plated cash register in his arms. Or perhaps it didn’t really begin until she stepped into his apartment and looked with amazement upon his living room, books stacked to the height of a man’s head along three walls and a phonograph player spitting static because she and Thomas had interrupted his pleasure. And then he reset the needle on the record spinning there on the turntable and the music began once more at the beginning and it was classical. Pure and refined and as different from what she listened to on her radio in her rented rooms as crystal is different from everyday glass. (Kristallnacht was the word he had said.)

And the conviction took hold of her that all these books and this music were where she was headed when she was sixteen years old, reading Shakespeare and learning French, and then it got stolen from her, this dream she never quite got straight in her head because she was too young, but was nevertheless surely bound for, a true tendency of the heart’s deepest ambition.

It made her feel unworthy, that room, and filled her with regret that she had never become so fine a person as to deserve sitting in such a room. And that, too, was the beginning of it.

9

O
nce Daniel and Alec were clear of Connaught and onto the country backroads the police seldom bothered to patrol, grandson and grandfather exchanged seats so that Daniel could drive the truck the rest of the way to the farm. Alec couldn’t see any harm in this. He had given the boy plenty of practice wheeling the water-truck over the rutted trails that criss-crossed his land and tied one field and one pasture to another. He was confident Daniel could handle it. Traffic on the grid roads was always light and it was likely they would travel miles and miles without encountering another vehicle. Besides, Monkman had to admit that the kid might be less of a menace behind the wheel than he was himself. On several recent occasions Alec had caught himself just in time, at the point his truck was on the verge of careening off the road and plunging down into a ditch. There had been barely time to jerk the wheel around and recover his line in a spray of gravel.

Monkman knew it was not his eyes that were to blame; it was his mind. When it wandered the vehicle wandered with it. The young weren’t prey to this particular misfortune. Look at Daniel. All attention, he was trying his damnedest to do it right, to please. Not once had his eyes left the road, his speed remained cautious
and steady, both hands were quick and diligent on the wheel. He glowed with importance. Well, it never hurt to give a boy a job that puffed his chest out a little. Everybody needed to matter. That was the reason he discussed his business with the boy, just as if Daniel had a clue as to what he was talking about or owned an opinion worth listening to. Respect was not ever wasted, not even on a twelve-year-old kid. If he had finally learned anything from living, it was that.

So he had explained to Daniel at great length what they were doing today and why they were doing it the way they were. He hoped it would be a lesson in how complicated life could be, a demonstration that nothing was ever as simple and straightforward as it might look. Not even catching a thief.

For five years running the old man had been after his tenant, Marker, to break a pasture on the farm and seed it to flax. Every year Marker promised he would, but never got around to it. When he neglected again that spring to turn sod, Monkman, disgusted that land should stand idle and unproductive, bought twenty head of cattle to graze it. Now one of them was missing. Marker claimed it had been killed by lightning.

On Tuesday, when Alec and Daniel had come to pump a tank of water for the garden from the creek, Marker had been too insistent on showing them where he had supposedly disposed of the animal’s carcass. He led them to the cellar hole of the original homesteader’s shack. It was filled with rocks carried from a stone pile at the edge of a nearby field. Marker had asserted that the missing steer lay buried under the boulders. Alec didn’t believe it for a second. First of all, there were no drag marks on the ground near the cellar hole and such marks would have been clearly visible if the steer had been pulled there with a tractor as his tenant claimed. Second, it was entirely out of character for Marker to go to all the trouble and effort of burying a dead animal, particularly one he didn’t own. Over the years, to his grief, Alec had learned that Marker was as lazy as a spotted dog. He would be much more
inclined to let a carcass rot and breed flies than haul boulders to cover it.