Homesick (2 page)

“Yes, on the
STC
.”

“Morning bus or afternoon bus?”

“Just a minute, I’ll check.” The old man squinted at the calendar tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He read what he had scrawled over the date, July 2. “Afternoon bus. One o’clock.”

“One o’clock it is then,” said Stutz.

There was no exasperation or resentment in Stutz’s voice that Alec could detect, and for that he was grateful. He cleared his throat and, embarrassed, tried to explain. “I just wanted to clear that up. My memory isn’t what it used to be and I kept thinking I’d forget. I didn’t want them standing waiting with their luggage. So I just wanted to clear that up. Wouldn’t sleep otherwise. Seems I can’t sleep with things on my mind anymore. Must be a symptom of old age.” He laughed in such a way as to alert Stutz that his reference to old age was not to be taken seriously, was a joke.

“What is it, Alec?” asked Stutz in his calm, deliberate voice. “Is your arthritis worse again? Is that what keeps you from sleeping?”

Monkman glanced at his gnarled hand clutching the receiver. Looking at it made him aware of the pain. “I suppose,” he said. “Yes, that could be it.”

That settled, Alec Monkman hung up the receiver and considered Vera’s return. Thought of how so long ago she walked out on him without so much as a by your leave. Walked out on him, a widower, and her younger brother Earl, leaving the boy without benefit of a woman in the house. All the letters she wrote during the war (all of them addressed to Earl) could not make up for that. And then from 1945 until late 1946 even they stopped coming, didn’t start again until she sent her wedding announcement, this time addressed to both of them, although now there was only one of them still at home to read how she had married her Jew down east. It was like Vera to make a big production mentioning that. As if he cared she married a Jew.

So now the silence between them had been broken. Sort of. Twelve years of hit and miss Christmas cards, the occasional photograph of her and the kid. And always tagged on to the end of the scanty, bloodless news the same question, the reason she wrote at all: Do you have Earl’s address?

And always he wrote back: No, I believe he’s moved again. Kind of a drifter, your brother.

He thinks of her as she was when she left at nineteen. Passionate and headstrong. He can’t deny the beauty of these qualities. Her mother had them too.

His Vera with a child of her own. He can scarcely credit it. How old is the boy now? Eleven? Twelve? Daniel is his name. Daniel Miller.

It’s typical of Vera to claim that it’s only because of the boy she wants to come home. “It is because of Daniel that I ask you to help us. I am afraid the city means trouble for him,” she had written. The only letter –
real letter
– he can recall receiving from her in all
those years. Signed Vera Miller, which struck him as pretty stiff stuff served up to you by your own daughter.

He had not hesitated to say, Yes, come. After one of his dreams, company in the house would be welcome. He could not go on as he had been these past few months, telephoning to Stutz all hours of the night.

Why now, at the age of seventy-three, should he take to drowning in his bed?

2

O
n the last part of Daniel’s and Vera’s journey, the leg which carried them from Regina to Connaught on a little-used local line, the bus was nearly deserted. There were only four other passengers: an old man with a barricade of soiled shopping bags behind which he lurked; two teenage girls, one fat, one thin, who took turns admiring their reflections in a compact mirror as they practised french-inhaling and blowing smoke rings; and a proper-looking young man in a white shirt and dark blue tie who sported a crew cut.

Vacant seats provided Daniel with an opportunity to escape his mother for the first time in two days and the boy had crossed the aisle to stretch himself out on two of them and nap. Vera remained where he had abandoned her by the window, holding herself absolutely erect, an imperious upward tilt to her chin. In spite of how awful she had felt for the past two and a half days, Vera preserved her aloof posture because she had a theory that people who kept their spines straight didn’t get talked at and bothered on buses.

Vera Miller was a tall woman who had never once despaired over her height. Even though she was five feet eleven inches she was
not afraid to wear high heels. She took secret satisfaction that her hands were large and powerful-looking. She never wore jewellery and although she was thirty-six and her thick brown hair was showing grey she refused to consider dyeing it. She had good teeth and a bad nose, one with a conspicuous bump on the bridge because she had swung a door open on it when she was six and broken it. Her eyes were a biting, restless blue.

My God, she thought, a fifty-six hour ride from Ontario to Saskatchewan on a Greyhound coach. No sooner the bus pulls out of the depot than my sick headache starts and carries on nonstop two and a half days. Of course, I can’t say whether it’s the bus keeps my head thumping or the sight of Daniel over there, what he’s managed to turn himself into the last ten months. If his father was alive what would he make of all that ridiculous hair? Knowing Stanley, probably just laugh. Duck’s ass – there’s truth in the name. At least Daniel knows what I think. I didn’t spare him. “That’s no hair for a twelve year old,” I told him. “It makes you look like a pimp angling for a promotion.” You try, or say anything to keep them decent. I thought maybe threatening to make him wash the grease out of his hair every night before he went to bed, telling him I wouldn’t have my pillowslips ruined, might persuade him to give it up. But he’s his mother’s son. Stubborn. Chalk that one up to him.

Daniel, Daniel, after all those years holding out, you make me beg for help. The pickle you got yourself into, behaving like that. I swore I’d never do it. I swore I’d never go back to Connaught. I swore I’d never ask the old man for a nickel or a blessing. There’s not many people keep a promise they made at nineteen as long as I did. And I’d still be keeping it if you hadn’t gone off the rails on me.

I’m not like some people; I’m not good at swallowing my pride. It sticks in my throat. Funny how some people have no notion of pride. Pooch Gardiner, poor old silly bitch, certainly doesn’t. When I let it slip Dad had got himself comfortable in his later years
she couldn’t feature how I hadn’t got my snout in the trough. “Fool’s pride,” Pooch called it. But then Pooch isn’t one to look too closely where a dollar comes from. “If your old man has a little money,” she said, “why shouldn’t he help? You’re a widow, aren’t you? And Daniel’s his grandson, isn’t he?”

Which is to miss the point. Asking him for anything is to admit failure, to admit I couldn’t make it on my own. But I did make it on my own, for seventeen years. Nobody can take that away from Vera Miller. I buried a husband with a seven-month-old baby in my arms and I supported and raised that baby on my own. Until now.

Vera Miller is pride. That’s what I am, pure and simple. Because without pride and hope, how did I ever make it this far? How else did I drudge at all those shitty jobs all those years – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl – without letting myself think I was nothing but those things – chambermaid, practical nurse, checkout girl?

One thing, I never surrendered my dignity. I did my job but you never caught me kissing the boss’s ass, or pretending to his face that I was eternally grateful for the big favour of being allowed to work for him.

Checkout girl was the worst. Six months after I’d gone to work at the supermarket I remember Pooch saying to me, “Well, Vera, now you’ve had a chance to size it up, tell me: What do you hate most about this christly job?” Pooch said it was how her ankles swelled. Said she’d had nice ankles before all the standing, punching the till.

I said, “What I can’t stand is that if I were to stay here until I was sixty-five I’d still be a girl. Notice how you always stay a girl? I call the store manager Mr. Anderson and he calls me Vera. That’s what gripes me. I ran away from home so I could stop being somebody’s girl and I find nothing’s changed. I’m still somebody’s girl.”

Pooch said, “They can call me what they like, so long’s they pay for the privilege.” That’s typical.

Of course, when I broke the news to Pooch where I was moving
to, I saw the glint in her eye. She was glad to see me taken down a peg after all of my brave talk. I knew what she was thinking, although for once she was gracious enough not to say it. I have to thank her for that.

Maybe it’s hope I need more than pride just now. Because I’ve got to believe this is right for Daniel, if not for me. Because if I fail Daniel now, I fail his father too, and all that was fine and good and noble in Stanley. All of him that was aimed at higher things.

So I’ve just got to see it as another sacrifice, taking him home and settling in under Father’s roof again. I’ve sacrificed plenty before, for Daniel. And I did it because I had faith in him, I knew he was every bit as brilliant as his father. I was right, too, knew it when they had me to the school to discuss skipping him. It was because I had given him advantages like the Book of Knowledge. There were compliments, too, on how I had raised such a fine, intelligent boy. “Alone as you are,” the principal had said, “it’s something to be proud of.”

The look on their faces when I refused. They weren’t expecting that. But I knew it never does any good to have your head turned by praise. Keep your eyes on the prize. They tried to change my mind. That principal even started to talk more slowly, as if I were too dim-witted to follow what he was saying. “The thing is, Mrs. Miller,” I can still hear him say, “is that we find that boys and girls like Daniel – if they aren’t continually challenged, why, they lose interest in school, become bored. Their marks may even drop. Now Miss Robinson and I have discussed this matter very thoroughly and we’re agreed, as professionals, that it would be best for Daniel to move on to Grade Four at this time.”

That kind always knows what’s best for you and yours. Even though they’ve never stood in your down-at-heel shoes to look at the problem. Because all those complicated tests they’d given Daniel had measured everything except what concerned me. His character. Maybe it’s unnatural for a mother even to admit thinking it, but that I had doubts about.

It didn’t take Mr. Principal too long before he thought he knew why I was hesitating. “Mrs. Miller,” he said, “if it’s buying a new set of textbooks for Daniel in the middle of the year that’s troubling you … some arrangement can be worked out through the school. There’s no need for you to feel any financial embarrassment.” I suppose I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt and grant that he was trying to be nice. Still, it was sort of insulting. They think just because you’re poor all you ever think about is money.

Well, I wasn’t about to give him my reasons. To suggest maybe Daniel was lazy and soft by nature. It seems to go hand in hand with cleverness. Maybe because everything comes too easy to the clever ones, they never learn any fight. Nine times out of ten it’s them who quit on you when the going gets tough. With Daniel I couldn’t tell whether he’d collapse on me or not. What if he found the work too hard after he was skipped? Would he give up and fizzle like a bad firecracker?

There was nothing to gain risking it. Not after I’d got him that far, all the way to the top of his class. Because one thing was for sure. I knew a checkout girl’s wages weren’t going to take Daniel anywhere. That was as sure as Carter’s got liver pills. If he was going to go to university the way his father would’ve wanted, it was up to me to see he got a scholarship. I’m sure I did right to hold him back the way I did.

Pooch said I was crazy to worry about an eight year old getting into university. She didn’t know the half of it. I started worrying when he was six. But then Pooch couldn’t harbour any hope of that Lyle of hers doing anything to write home about. Unless it was from jail. And as far as Pooch is concerned her responsibility is over once she’s cleaned and fed him.

As far as Daniel goes, my job is never over. Come home dog-tired, make supper, do the dishes. Then get him to do the drills. The flash cards I made from old cigarette boxes with the arithmetic problems printed on them in black grease pencil. All done so that
learning arithmetic would feel more like a game, more like fun. Shuffle those cards like a real deck of cards, snap one off at him. “16 × 16! Come on, Daniel! You know that! Think!” Start counting. He had five seconds to come up with the answer. Just like a game show on the television.

He had more in his head than all the other six year olds put together. The two of us memorized the capitals of all the provinces and all the states. We did weights and measures. How many quarts to the peck, rods to the mile? We did every president of the United States and every prime minister of Canada. The kings of England. He could spell every word in his speller.

Sure he complained. Whined. They didn’t have to learn any of this stupid stuff in school. All I used to say is, “Knowledge is something nobody can take away from you. They can repossess your car but they can’t repossess your knowledge.” But what used to really gall him was the way I made him learn those poems they gave him for memory work. Perfect to the punctuation. Two of us chanting together. “I sprang to the stirrup comma and Joris comma and he semi-colon new line I galloped comma Dirck galloped comma we galloped all three semi-colon.” Full effort for full marks was my attitude. Make the teacher sit up and take notice.