The Progress of Love (21 page)

That is not a suitable word for it. Callie cross and impatient at first, keeping at her work, then sullen, then oddly tractable. Taunting her with being scared was surely the effective tactic. They must have known, by then, her real age, but they still treated her as if she were an imp to be cajoled—didn’t think of stroking or flattering her as if she were a girl.

Even with her cooperation, it was nothing like as easy as they had imagined. Sam became convinced that the story about Chrissie was a lie, even though Edgar was invoking Chrissie’s name at the moment.

“Come on,” Edgar said. “I’ll show you what I do to my girlfriend. Here’s what I do to Chrissie.”

“I bet,” said Callie sourly, but she let herself be pulled down on the narrow mattress. The elastic of her winter bloomers had left red rings around her legs and waist. A flannel vest, buttoned over an undershirt, her brown ribbed stockings, held up by long, lumpy suspenders. Nothing but the bloomers was taken off. Edgar said the suspenders were hurting him and went to undo them, but Callie cried out, “Leave those alone!” as if they were what she had to protect.

Something very important is missing from Sam’s memory of that morning—blood. He has no doubt of Callie’s virginity, remembering
Edgar’s struggles, then his own, such jabbing and prodding and bafflement. Callie lay beneath them each in turn, half-grudging, half-obliging, putting up with them and not complaining that anything hurt. She would never do that. But she would not do anything, specifically, to help.

“Open your legs,” said Edgar urgently.

“They’re open already.”

The reason he doesn’t remember blood is probably that there wasn’t any. They did not get far enough. Callie was so thin her hipbones stood up, yet she seemed quite extensive to Sam, and unwieldy and complicated. Cold and sticky where Edgar had wet her, dry otherwise, with unexpected bumps and flaps and blind alleys—a leathery feel to her. When he thought of this afterward, he still wasn’t sure that he had found out what girls were like. It was as if they had used a doll or a compliant puppy. When he got off her, he saw that she had goose bumps where her skin was bare, all around that tuft of dead-looking hair. Also, that their wet had soaked one stocking. Callie wiped herself with the dust rag—granted, it looked to be a clean one—and said it reminded her of when somebody blew their nose.

“You’re not mad?” said Sam, meaning partly that, and partly, you won’t tell?“Did we hurt you?”

Callie said, “It would take a lot more than that stupid business to hurt me.”

There was no more skating after that. The weather got too mild.

Miss Kernaghan’s rheumatism was worse. There was more work than ever for Callie. Edgar got tonsillitis and stayed home from classes. Sam, on his own at the business college, realized how much he had come to enjoy it. He liked the noise of the typewriters—the warning of the bells, the carriages banging back. He liked ruling the account-book pages with a straight pen, making the prescribed heavy and fine lines. He especially liked figuring out percentages and quickly adding up columns of numbers, and dealing with the problems of Mr. X and Mr. B, who owned a lumberyard and a chain of hardware stores, respectively.

Edgar was out of school nearly three weeks. When he came back, he had fallen behind in everything. His typing was slower and sloppier than it had been at Christmastime, he smeared ink on the ruler, and he could not understand interest tables. He seemed listless, he grew discouraged, he stared out the window. The lady teachers were somewhat softened by his looks—he was lighter and paler since his illness; even his hair seemed fairer—and he got away with this indolence and ineptitude for a while. He made some efforts, occasionally tried to do homework with Sam, or went to the typing room at noon to practice. But no improvement lasted, or was enough. He took days off.

While he was sick, Edgar had received a get-well card. It showed a green dragon in striped pajamas propped up in bed. On the front of the card were the words “Sorry to Hear your Tail is Draggon,” and inside “Hope that Soon, You’ll have it Waggon.” Down at the bottom, in pencil, was written the name Chrissie.

But Chrissie was in Stratford, training to be a nurse. How would she know Edgar was sick? The envelope, with Edgar’s name on it, had come through the mail but had a local postmark.

“You sent it,” Edgar said. “I know it’s not her.”

“I did not,” said Sam truthfully.

“You sent it.” Edgar was hoarse and feverish and racked with disappointment. “You didn’t even write in ink.”

“How much money have we got in the bank?” Edgar wanted to know. This was early May. They had enough to pay their board until the end of the term.

Edgar had not been to the college for several days. He had been to the railway station, and he had asked the price of a oneway ticket to Toronto. He said he meant to go alone if Sam wouldn’t go with him. He was wild to get away. It didn’t take long for Sam to find out why.

“Callie might have a baby.”

“She isn’t old enough,” said Sam. Then he remembered that she was. But he explained to Edgar that he was sure they hadn’t been sufficiently thorough.

“I’m not talking about that time,” said Edgar, in a sulky voice.

That was the first Sam knew about what had been going on when Edgar stayed away from school. But Sam misunderstood again. He thought Callie had told Edgar that she was in trouble. She hadn’t. She hadn’t given him any such information or asked for anything or made any threats. But Edgar was frightened. His panic seemed to be making him half sick. They bought a package of cake doughnuts at the grocery store and sat on the stone wall in front of the Anglican church to eat them. Edgar took one bite and held the doughnut in his hand.

Sam said that they had only five more weeks at college.

“I’m not going back there anyway. I’m too far behind,” said Edgar.

Sam did not say that he had pictured himself lately working in a bank, a business-college graduate. He saw himself in a three-piece suit in the tellers’ cage. He would have grown a mustache. Some tellers became bank managers. It had just recently occurred to him that bank managers did not come into the world ready-made. They were something else first.

He asked Edgar what kind of jobs they could get in Toronto.

“We could do stunts,” Edgar said. “We could do stunts on the sidewalk.”

Now Sam saw what he was up against. Edgar was not joking. He sat there with one bite out of his doughnut and proposed this way of making a living in Toronto. Stunts on the sidewalk.

What about their parents? This only started crazier plans.

“You could tell them I was kidnapped.”

“What about the police?” said Sam. “The police go looking for anybody that’s kidnapped. They’d find you.”

“Then don’t tell them I’m kidnapped,” Edgar said. “Tell them I saw a murder and I have to go into hiding. Tell them I saw a body in a sack pushed off the Cedar Bush Bridge and I saw the men that did it and later I met them on the street and they recognized me. Tell them that. Tell them not to go to the police or say anything about it, because my life is at stake.”

“How did you know there was a body in the sack?” said Sam idiotically. “Don’t talk anymore about it. I have to think.”

But all the way back to Kernaghan’s Edgar did nothing but talk, elaborating on this story or on another, which involved his having been recruited by the government to be a spy, having to dye his hair black and change his name.

They got to the boarding house just as Alice Peel and her fiance, the policeman, were coming out the front door.

“Go round the back,” said Edgar.

The kitchen door was wide open. Callie had been cleaning the stovepipes. Now she had them all in place again, and was cleaning the stove. She was polishing the black part of it with waxed bread papers and the trim with a clean rag. The stove was a wonderful sight, like black marble set with silver, but Callie herself was smudged from head to foot. Even her eyelids were black. She was singing “My Darling Nellie Grey,” and she made it go very fast, to help with the polishing.

Miss Kernaghan sat at the table, drinking a cup of hot water. Besides her rheumatism, she was troubled with indigestion. Creaks came from her joints, and powerful rumbles, groans, and even whistles, from her deep insides. Her face took no notice.

“You boys,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

“Walking,” said Edgar.

“You aren’t doing your stunts anymore.”

Sam said, “The ground’s too wet.”

“Sit down,” said Miss Kernaghan.

Sam could hear Edgar’s shaky breathing. His own stomach felt very heavy, as if all work on the mass of doughnuts—he had eaten all but one of them—had ceased. Could Callie have told? She didn’t look up at them.

“I never told you boys how Callie was born,” Miss Kernaghan said. And she started right in to tell them.

“It was in the Queen’s Hotel in Stratford. I was staying there with my friend Louie Green. Louie Green and I ran a millinery shop. We were on our way to Toronto to get our spring trim. But it was winter. In fact, it was a blizzard blowing. We were the only ones for supper. We were coming out of the dining room afterwards and the hotel door blew open and in came three people. It was the driver that worked for the hotel, that met the trains, and a woman and a man. The man and the driver were hanging on to the woman and hauling her between them. She was howling and yelling and she was puffed up to a terrible size. They got her on the settee, but she slid off it onto the floor. She was only a girl, eighteen or nineteen years old. The baby popped right out of her on the floor. The man just sat down on the settee and put his head between his legs. I was the one had to run and call for the hotelkeeper and his wife. They came running and their dog running ahead of them, barking. Louie was hanging on to the banisters afraid she might faint. Everything happening at once.

“The driver was French-Canadian, so he had probably seen a baby born before. He bit the cord with his teeth and tied it up with some dirty string out of his pocket. He grabbed a rug and stuffed it up between her legs. Blood was coming out of her as dark as fly poison—it was spreading across the floor. He yelled for somebody to get snow, and the husband, or whatever he was, he never even lifted his head. It was Louie ran out and got her hands full, and when the driver saw what a piddling little bit she brought he just swore at her and threw it down. Then he kicked the dog, because it was getting too interested. He kicked it so hard it landed across the room and the hotel woman was screaming it was killed. I picked the baby up and wrapped it in my jacket. That was Callie. What a sickly-looking thing. The dog wasn’t killed at all. The rugs were soaked with blood and the Frenchman swearing a blue streak. She was dead but she was still bleeding.

“Louie was the one wanted us to take her. The husband said he would get in touch but he never did. We had to get a bottle and boil up milk and corn syrup and make her a bed in a drawer. Louie let on to be very fond of her, but within a year Louie got
married and went to live in Regina and has never been back. So much for fond.”

Sam thought that this was all most probably a lie. Nevertheless it had a terrible effect on him. Why tell them this now? Truth or lies didn’t matter, or whether someone had kicked a dog or bled to death. What mattered was Miss Kernaghan’s cold emphasis as she told this, her veiled and surely unfriendly purpose, her random ferocity.

Callie hadn’t stopped work for one word of the story. She had subdued but not entirely given up her singing. The kitchen was full of light in the spring evening, and smelled of Callie’s harsh soaps and powders. Sam had sometimes before had a sense of being in trouble, but he had always known exactly what the trouble was and what the punishment would be, and he could think his way past it. Now he got the feeling that there was a kind of trouble whose extent you couldn’t know and punishments you couldn’t fathom. It wasn’t even Miss Kernaghan’s ill will they had to fear. What was it? Did Edgar know? Edgar could feel something being prepared—a paralyzing swipe. He thought it had to do with Callie and a baby and what they had done. Sam had a sense of larger implications. But he had to see that Edgar’s instincts were right.

On Saturday morning, they walked through the back streets to the station. They had left the house when Gallie went to do the weekend shopping, pulling a child’s wagon behind her for the groceries. They had taken their money out of the bank. They had wedged a note in their door that would drop out when the door was opened: “We have gone. Sam. Edgar.”

The words “We have gone” had been typed the day before at the college by Sam, but their names were signed by hand. Sam had thought of adding “Board paid till Monday” or “Will write to parents.” But surely Miss Kernaghan would know that their board was paid till Monday and saying they would write to their parents would be a tip-off that they hadn’t just gone home. “We have gone” seemed foolish, but he was afraid that if they didn’t leave something there would be an alarm and a search.

They left behind the heavy, shabby books they intended to sell at the end of term—
Accounting Practice, Business Arithmetic
—and put what clothes they could into two brown-paper bags.

The morning was fine and a lot of people were out-of-doors. Children had taken over the sidewalks for ball-bouncing, hopscotch, skipping. They had to have their say about the stuffed paper bags.

“What’ve you got in them bags?”

“Dead cats,” said Edgar. He swung his bag at a girl’s head.

But she was bold. “What are you going to do with them?”

“Sell them to the Chinaman for chop-cat-suey,” said Edgar in a threatening voice.

So they got past and heard the girl chanting behind them, “Chop-cat-suey! Chop-cat-suey! Eat-it-pooey!” Nearer the station, these groups of children thinned out, vanished. Now it was boys twelve or thirteen—some of the same boys who had hung around the skating rink—who were loitering near the platform, picking up cigarette butts, trying to light them. They aped manly insolence and would not have been caught dead asking questions.