The Better Mother (16 page)

“The blond one pushed my Jimmy into the duck pond and tried to hold his head down. Would have drowned him if Mr. Lumby hadn’t heard the ruckus.”

“Men who don’t help themselves only punish their families.”

Val knew that money was tight for everyone these days and that, years ago, when she was a baby or maybe even before she was born, times had been better. The stories her father told his friends were always the same: he was once the bravest logger in the whole province, and could climb the tallest spruce in his spiked shoes without even a shiver of dizziness or fear. Some men never got the hang of it and were relegated to sawing the logs into pieces after they came crashing down to the damp, mushroomy forest floor. But not her father. Sometimes he’d climb higher than he ever needed to, just so he could sway with the skinny branches and feel his whole body bobbing in the wind. The other men hollered up at him that he was as crazy as the crow they once saw eat her own chick, but he didn’t listen, only grinned wildly at the sunshine he never felt while on the ground.

They had been on relief for as long as Val’s memory stretched, but she knew that other children’s fathers had started to work again now that the sawmills were expanding and the trains were stopping to pick up wood and fish to ship east, and that the other girls in school were wearing new hair ribbons and sturdy boots. But Val didn’t care as much about those things as Joan, whose eyes flashed meanly when Beryl showed off her cashmere stockings at recess by dancing the Charleston in the schoolyard.

“My dad is the new foreman at the lumber mill,” she said as she smoothed down her sleek, dark hair. “He bought my mum a jar of special cold cream that cost a whole three dollars.”

That afternoon, Beryl went home crying, her legs bare and her arms tied behind her back with one ripped stocking. The other was tied around her head, with the foot stuffed unceremoniously into her mouth.

Once in a while, Val watched her father leave in the morning for a pickup shift at the rail yard, his lunch pail half full of bread and butter, an apple and beef jerky. He came back before bedtime, his face covered in a fine layer of dirt and his work pants covered in paint or smelling like whatever he had been loading and reloading into the cars. Other days, he would simply sit in the backyard or on the front stoop in an old kitchen chair, watching as people walked by, as the occasional car or truck rumbled down the road. Eventually, by dinnertime, two or three or four of his friends, those who had no children or wives and couldn’t get relief, would show up and Meg—her shoulders drooping with exhaustion, or perhaps disappointment—would have to search the house for more scraps of food to make a big enough meal for everyone. Val particularly hated the soup, which was dense with potatoes and not much else, and she felt sick every time she walked through the kitchen and saw it bubbling thickly on the stove, its smell seeping through the house like dirty clothes wet with rain. She swore she would never be like her mother. If she married, he would be rich. If she didn’t, she would take care of herself.

On nights like these, Val and Joan huddled together in their makeshift play tent made from fallen branches and an old tarp of their father’s, and pretended to cook a meal—Val doing the cooking while Joan organized their imaginary dishes.

“I’m going to make a lemon chiffon cake.”

“What’s a chiffon cake?”

“I think it’s a cake that has lots of bubbles in it; one that floats in your stomach when you eat it.”

“Oh. What else?”

“Bacon and toad-in-the-hole and roast chicken and jellied salad and champagne.”

“I think I would like some beef pie too, please.”

“All right, Joanie. Beef and mushroom pie it is.”

The other children at school were buzzing, their small heads bent together in class or at lunchtime. But this time, they weren’t whispering thoughts and observations (both true and untrue) about the Nealy girls. They were talking about war.

Words that Val and Joan had never even considered before became part of conversations they overheard wherever they went.
Germany. Enlist. Fighter plane. Commonwealth
. The older brothers of the other children at school were enlisting and, every morning, another girl or boy would brag about how Jimmy or Willy or Fred had made the decision to leave home and shoot Nazis. Once in a while it was even somebody’s father, usually a man who hadn’t been able to find work and whose children were as poor as Val and Joan. At home, however, the discussions were still the same, which meant that Warren still talked about the old days with his buddies, and Meg softly told the girls about her one visit to the city, a story they knew so well that they repeated it silently whenever they had a quiet moment.

But news has a way of infiltrating even the most isolated house, even the one drowning in bush and the scent of
decaying raccoons and squirrels, long dead and hidden in layers of salal and creeping Charlie.

One evening, their father sat down to dinner (trout from the river, small knobbly carrots from the garden and the last jar of applesauce from the autumn before) and smiled broadly at his family. His lips stretched far past his teeth and showed what Val thought was an unseemly expanse of gum. Banging his fork on the table, he announced, “I’ve found a job.”

Meg gasped and Joan gaped.

“You see, I told you it would happen,” he said, spearing a carrot. “There was never any need to worry.”

Val couldn’t remember if her mother had ever said she was worried. Then again, her mother didn’t say much.

“Where?” Meg asked, her hands resting on the tablecloth, her plate of food steaming in front of her. “How?”

“They’re reopening the fish cannery downriver. It’s going full steam, Meg, with shifts around the clock. The pay isn’t as good as I was hoping for, but I’m glad to be off relief. It hurts a man’s pride to take handouts like that.” Her father thumped on his chest with his fist.

Her mother said nothing, but Val sat up straight and looked around the table. “It’s because of the war,” she announced. “They need to feed the soldiers and they’re going to send them canned fish.”

Joan nodded and said, “That’s right. The war.”

Their father ignored them and nodded at Meg, who was lifting her first forkful of food to her mouth. “Bake us something sweet. The boys are coming by tonight to celebrate. It’ll be a party.”

Later, Val and Joan sat on the back porch, hidden by the holly bush that grew by the stairs. Warren and his friends smoked and drank, passed around bottles and stories, and threw rocks at the furry shapes that scurried around the perimeter of the yard. Crouched around a small fire, each man was indistinct and Val couldn’t tell whether the one closest to the outhouse was Johnny or Oliver or Buck. Their clothes were faded or stained the same shade of brown, and each of them had the same scratchy voice, a voice scarred by yelling, drunken singing and the sharp-edged whisky that clawed at their throats on the way down. The one she recognized was her father, with his narrow shoulders and scrawny neck, his outline sharp against the wavering firelight.

“What about the logging then, Warren? Canning fish sure isn’t the same thing now, is it?” Their laughter lifted the hairs on Val’s arm. So loud. Tinged with that meanness that swells in groups.

Val saw her father lean back and tip his face toward the night sky. She wondered what he was looking at because there were no stars tonight, no moon. Nothing but the dun undersides of clouds, one shade brighter than the sky itself.

“Meg won’t have it. She told me so this afternoon. Said she wasn’t going to stand for me disappearing into the bush for weeks at a time, no matter how good the money was. I tried to reason with her. The war will be eating up all sorts of things, not just canned fish, but lumber and steel too. I told her, these next few months could be the richest of our lives, if she’d let me go. But she doesn’t like the danger. And, of course, she doesn’t want to be alone. Once a lady has had a taste of this,” he said, gesturing toward his crotch, “there’s no turning back.”

The laughter rose up again and Val rubbed her ears to empty out the sound. When had she ever heard her mother say those things?

Joan leaned in toward her and whispered, “I don’t think Mum would notice if Daddy went away.”

One man, whose voice sounded smoother than the rest, as if he had been chewing on duck fat, boomed into the air. “Come on now, Warren. Maybe you’re getting old and scared of what those trees could do to you, hmm?”

Warren stood and threw his bottle at the man’s head. He missed, but his target rose as well and began pushing up the sleeves of his shirt.

“Lost your temper with your balls?” the man hissed.

Val craned her neck to see better, but the light from the fire skipped over the men’s faces and all she could see was their two standing bodies, dark and tense. She held her breath, waiting for another word, for the sound of fist hitting flesh, but everything was silent. No small animals rustling in the bush, not even the breaking of water on rocks. Joan put her thin hand on Val’s knee.

Their mother stepped out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, not noticing her two daughters crouched behind the railing. She held a plate with a flat, plain cake. Blinking against the darkness, she said softly, in a voice that wavered on the air, “Cake?”

The other man sat down with a thump. Warren strode over, pulled the plate out of Meg’s hands and dropped it on the tree stump in the middle of the yard. “Eat,” he said, before disappearing into a narrow gap in the bush and stomping toward the river.

—

By the time Val was fourteen, she and Joan had stopped going to school altogether. Their mother said nothing about it as she let down the hems of their dresses and sent them on errands to buy milk and flour. It didn’t even matter when the truant officers came to the house and knocked and knocked. Meg simply turned her head creakily at the sound while continuing to knead the bread or wash the windows. Eventually it became Val’s job to feed the chickens and make sure they had enough air and light. It was Joan’s job to weed the garden and harvest what could be eaten. But these things took little time, and by mid-morning the girls had nothing to do, so they started to dance.

In the attic, they found an old record,
Hinky Dinky Parlez Vous
. In their bedroom (where their father couldn’t see or hear them and complain about the noise), they set up the ancient phonograph and danced, each taking turns high-kicking, twirling, doing the splits. In the beginning, Meg told them about the show she saw in Vancouver, describing the routines at her daughters’ prodding. When Warren went to work, they pulled their mother into the bedroom and danced for her. She laughed until she cried, her hands clasped over her belly.

“You two will never be famous hoofers, but at least you try,” she said, wiping away the tears on her cheeks.

After two years of selling eggs for pennies and accompanying their mother on intermittent cleaning jobs, Val came up with a plan. One night, as she and Joan were lying in bed, awake because their father was outside drinking again with his friends, she whispered the details to her sister.

“We’ll run away, see? We’ll hitch a ride to Vancouver
and we’ll audition for the Orpheum. They’ll take us for sure. And then, maybe we can get all the way to New York! Mum said the vaudeville shows were full of dancing girls like us. Come on, Joanie. What do you think?”

Joan pulled the quilt up closer to her chin. “I don’t know, Val. We don’t really know anything about Vancouver, do we? Mum hasn’t been there in almost twenty years.”

Val grew angry. “What’s the matter with you? When did you become such a wet blanket?”

“I’m not! I want to leave this place as much as you do. I just don’t know that running away is the best thing to do.”

“Do you have any better ideas?” Val asked scornfully.

“No,” said Joan. She turned to face the wall. “But I’ll think of something.”

A few weeks later, Val woke up in the middle of the night, feeling strangely cold. She turned over. Joan had disappeared.

Val pulled on her housecoat and padded through the house in her bare feet, listening for her sister’s voice or the creak of a floorboard. She peered into her parents’ room, where her father lay on his stomach, his face squished into his pillow. Her mother was curled on her side, taking up less room than a small child. Outside, Val could see the deep blackness of the river.

She heard a murmur and a slight thump coming from above. In the hall, she saw that the ladder to the attic had not been pulled up. “What on earth is she doing up there?” Val whispered. She had thought that speaking would dissipate the heavy silence, but her words fell and disappeared, making no impact whatsoever on the quiet around her. As she climbed
the ladder, she heard the squeak of the unfinished wood floor.
Is she dancing?

Moonlight flooded in through the uncovered window. Against the walls, boxes of old clothes and toys and tools sat in uneven piles. In the corner, an armchair was covered with a white sheet. And there, right on the floor, on top of their dead grandmother’s quilt, was Joan, naked, her back arched, her white breasts pointed toward the ceiling. Underneath her was a man Val only knew as one of her father’s friends. His brown hands were travelling up and down her sister’s body as she rode him, moaning with her eyes closed. A pool of moonlight illuminated the curve of her hips, the paleness of her skin. The man was barely visible; he was, to Val, shades of brown and clumps of black, curly hair.

He lifted his head. Val stepped backward, looked behind her for the trap door. Before she could step down onto the top rung of the ladder, she heard his voice.

“You can be next, big sister, if you like.”

As Val climbed back down, Joan’s giggle floated after her.

In the early morning, Joan crawled back into bed beside Val, smelling of flesh rubbed together, like the odour of burning hair and sour milk. Val kept her eyes shut and pulled the blankets up to her nose until dawn, when she quietly left the bedroom and went outside to the henhouse. She checked their nests, her ears filled with the sound of clucking chickens.