Watching Jimmy (8 page)

W
hen Mom sees the sign, she puts her coat on over her flannelette pajamas. She stuffs bare feet into boots and slams our front door so hard that both houses shake. I watch from the front window as she tries tugging the sign out of the ground. Then she tries to knock it over with one good kick. Finally she grabs the garden rake and swings it like a baseball bat, splintering bits of wood across the lawn. She stuffs the sign and what’s left of the stake into our garbage can. Then the two of us troop over to Aunt Jean’s for coffee and breakfast.

Mom goes into the kitchen to put on the kettle. She’s making a big, big racket in there.

I discover Aunt Jean dressed and dozing in a chair in the parlor. The curtains are drawn and there’s only a faint
glow of orange coals in the fireplace to warm the room. Poor Aunt Jean. She looks wizened and old, her mouth open, her glasses, which usually hide some of the puffiness under her eyes, rest on an end table. Gently, I tuck a quilt around her.

She stirs, but doesn’t open her eyes. “Is … that … you … dear?” Every word has a sigh and a pause in it as if there’s just too much — too, too much effort required to form the word and push it out of her mouth.

“Yes, Aunt Jean. Guess what? It snowed last night. It’s a winter wonderland outside.”

“I know dear. I … saw … it….”

We both know we are not talking about the snow but the for sale sign. A single tear leaks from her eye, catches in a wrinkle furrow, slips off her chin and onto her bosom.

“I wonder if he’ll let us stay until Christmas.”

“Where will you go?” I whisper. I can’t imagine what the answer to this question will be.

Nor can Aunt Jean. “Help me up, dear.”

I brace her under the elbow and lever her to a standing position. I think that my shoulder will crumple with the weight of her body leaning on mine.

Aunt Jean is distracted at breakfast. She manages one
bite of toast and a sip of tea that I lift to her lips. I look at my mother for help. She shrugs her shoulders as if to say “What can I do? What can anybody do?”

Aunt Jean smacks the table top with her two palms. “I want to go to church.”

I know she’s in no condition to go to St. James. I beg her to come with me to St. Olave’s instead. “It’s not far. You can hear me singing. I’m in the choir and I have to get going pretty soon.”

“Jean, be realistic,” Mom says. “You aren’t well enough to travel downtown on the streetcar. Let me call Ted and he can drive you.”

“Over my dead body!” There are no pauses in Aunt Jean’s words now. They come out in a rush.

Aunt Jean agrees to a compromise. She’ll rest all day and she and I will take a cab to the streetcar loop in time to catch evensong at St. James. That way, she can save her energy and her pennies. While we’re gone, Mom will stay home with Jimmy and they can catch a nap.

At three o’clock, Aunt Jean’s dressed and waiting for me. She’s applied some powder and lipstick to her face, which only makes the paleness of her skin more pronounced. She’s dressed in black from top to bottom and
smells faintly of mothballs. The netting from her old hat is askew. There’s nothing fashionable about what Aunt Jean is wearing today. She’s no competition for the Rosedale ladies.

The taxi man is kind. He speaks with an Italian accent, but he turns the meter off and waits quietly until the King car arrives so Aunt Jean won’t get chilled. He helps her up the stairs. She gives him a coin from her purse and I can tell he’s surprised. He doesn’t expect a tip from a sick lady who is clearly so poor.

Outside the cathedral, the bells are rocking, rocking so exuberantly that I imagine them whipping horizontally back and forth, calling Aunt Jean and me to pray.

Surely, the bells can be heard all the way to Swansea.

People stream into the church and I’m surprised at the number of parishioners. The sunlight flickers weakly through the stained glass. The church is drafty. The candles wavery and smoky. When the bells finally stop and the organ takes over with a funereal dirge, I want to weep,
but as I said, I’m not the weeping kind. Instead, I roll, I twist my lace gloves in my hands until they resemble one of Jimmy’s bedsheets, “warshed” clean of urine and squeezed dry of soap and water, ready for the clothes line.

“Let us pray.”

It’s a luxury to sit in my seat beside Aunt Jean listening to the Men and Boys Choir. Evensong is all about music and I don’t have to be interrupted once to check up on Jimmy. I’m glad we’ve left Jimmy home. I feel a prickle of guilt thinking that, and then it’s gone with one phrase of celestial notes.

The boys — just the boys, mind — chant all on one note. I find myself putting words to the tones. Not the Latin words of the magnificat, but ordinary words with weight and melody. “Lin — ol — e-um-mm-mmm-mmmn. Win — der — me — re-re-re-re. Thun — der — bir-d-d-d-d-d.” These three-and four-syllable words don’t sound like nonsense when chanted. They make about as much sense as the words in Latin coming from the boys’ mouths. Do they know what they’re singing? Some of them are so young, they can’t know how to read music. How do they sing at all?

“Di-ap-per-s-s-s. Un-der-wear-r-r-r-r. Tor-on-to-o-o-o-o.” Words with natural interval changes. Words to
play with. Words for rhythm, for nonsense. “El-bow. El-bow to that!”
El-bow
makes as much sense as
A-men
, musically speaking. What does
Amen
mean? Where does it come from? Grandpa would know. That’s exactly the kind of thing he would have been able to tell me, but he’s dead now. The boys might as well be singing “H-um-ber,” a soft-sounding name for the river that winds its way to Lake Ontario.

Lost in this kind of thinking, I’m startled when the General opens our box and sits down with us. I didn’t know he came to the evening service, too. He nods at Aunt Jean and gives me a wink. He’s rubbing his hands together with excitement. He’s
so
glad I’ve come. He whispers in my ear that a good old friend of his from out west is preaching tonight. That’s why the church is so full, he tells me. There’ll be history in the making tonight, according to the General.

The General does the “reading” from the Bible. While eyes flash from face to face. He’s memorized his contribution. After he’s finished, there’s much clucking and coughing and rustling of clothes in anticipation of the guest speaker delivering the sermon. I check my sheet.
The Right Honourable, the Right Reverend Tommy C. Douglas, Premier of Saskatchewan.

I’ve never heard of him, but Aunt Jean has. There’s a spot of color in her cheeks and she’s gripping her purse so tightly, you’d think someone was trying to snatch it from her.

Mr. Douglas grips the side of the lectern and jumps right into his speech about Christianity and war, because as he says, November the 11
^th
is just around the corner. We’d better not forget.

Mr. Douglas’s fist is raised in the air and he thumps it hard on the podium. There is a long silence before he continues.

There’s no sound in the church now, and Mr. Douglas takes off his glasses and points at us with them. I feel like he’s speaking to me alone at the kitchen table over a cup of tea and oatmeal cookies.

People are rustling now. Could there be fifteen hundred million hungry people in the world? I mean
really
hungry not just like me and my mom who have beans and eggs for dinner sometimes when we’re waiting for the next paycheck?

I’m like a sleepwalker leaving the cathedral. I don’t protest when the General offers to drive us all the way
home. I listen to the General tell Aunt Jean how disappointed he is that Tommy Douglas didn’t talk about Medicare — free health care for all.

He pats Aunt Jean’s hand. “Too political a topic for him at church, I guess, with all those Rosedale Tories sitting in the pews. I’ll take you to a rally, Jean. Oh, how he can get a crowd going.”

I don’t listen to Aunt Jean and the General discussing her troubles. I don’t even flinch when I see a new for sale sign pounded into Aunt Jean’s front lawn.

Doctors for free? My head spins with the oratory, the persuasiveness, and the good sense of this Premier of Saskatchewan, this former Baptist minister.

I’m half full and half hungry, for more of his words. For more of his ideas.

I
f it wasn’t for the cardboard boxes packed and shoved under the bed and the occasional young couple touring the house, I’d forget that Aunt Jean and Jimmy have to move. Where they will go has been decided. Uncle Ted has an investment property in Mimico. They’ll live above a hardware shop. And as much as it galls Aunt Jean to take charity from the likes of Ted, the price is right. Free. She’ll have none of moving in with us. After we make the bread for the week, Mom and I are going to visit the apartment to see what needs to be done. After we do our chores.

My mother bakes the most heavenly bread. I help her assemble all the ingredients. The flour. The butter. The cake of yeast. The sugar. The salt. A clean tea towel. A big bowl for mixing. And then I stay out of her way. My
favorite part is the kneading. I pretend to read a book, but mostly I sneak peeks at my mother. There’s a sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. Her arms quiver like junket. I know not to disturb her until the minute-minder dings to say that ten minutes is up. Mom is a stickler for kneading bread ten minutes precisely. She’s experimented and this seems to work best.

The bread is elastic but firm when she’s done. Four loaves. Two for Jimmy and two for us. Side by side, they look like the buttocks of twin babies, plump and rounded. Mom always gives them a little love pat and they jiggle like a baby’s bum too.

“That’s that!” she says.

It’s my job to cover them with an ironed tea towel and set them by the radiator. I use exactly the same place my grandmother did, in the front vestibule before you go up the stairs.

My mom is much more relaxed after she’s kneaded bread. The process calms her. I put the kettle on the stove. While I wait for the whistle, I take a fancy plate from Grandma’s dining-room hutch and two English bone china cups and set them on the oil cloth of the kitchen table. There are day-old Chelsea buns in the bun warmer
and the smell of sugar and cinnamon is sending signals to my stomach.

The time after my mother kneads bread is the only time in the week that I can talk to her and be sure that she’ll answer my questions. Otherwise, there are too many things to do with shift work and housecleaning and laundry and trying to catch up on some sleep. I have big questions to ask her because I need to understand about Ted.

I warm the teapot with boiling water and swish it around to make sure it’s good and hot. I fill the silver tea ball with tea leaves and hook the chain over the rim of the pot. The kettle is shrieking on the stove but I dare not move it off the element until everything is ready. The water must be roiling boiling to make the best tea.

I put raspberry jam Thumbelina cookies on the plate. Jimmy and I made them when we were little, and we were allowed to push our thumbs into every cookie before the jam was spooned in. I called them our little Thumbelinas and the name stuck.

My mom and I sit across from each other. She pours milk into the cups, way more for me, and then from a height, pours the tea. She takes three sips and sets down her teacup in the saucer.

I pass her the plate of cookies.

“Now, tell me about your whole life, lovey.”

Normally, we talk about school. Or what I’m reading. She doesn’t get much time to read anymore so I tell her stories. She likes mysteries. But today, as I said, I have a different plan. Today, we are going to talk about Ted.

“What was Ted like when he was a kid?”

My mom peers at me over the rim of the cup. She’s considering why I’m asking these questions. Why now?

“He was all right. He was considerably older than I. Bertie and I were more of an age, although even he was four years older. We tobogganed in the park and skated, of course, for hours on end. Ted was very protective of Bertie. He really took it to heart that he was the uncle. Ted was seven when Bertie was born. That’s how come everyone calls him
Uncle
Ted. The name stuck, I guess because he was an uncle at such an early age.”

“A seven-year-old uncle seems silly.”

“Yes, well it happens. Ted and Bertie might have been brothers, really. Jean and her husband, Jake, worked long hours getting the hardware business up and running, so Jean’s mother watched them. Those were hard years,
making enough money to buy the house next door. And we know how that turned out.”

“So, Ted used to be a nice enough guy?”

My mom makes a face like the tea is scalding her mouth. “He was okay. He was good with his hands. Always building and fixing stuff. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s done well in the building trade.”

“So what happened? How come he’s such a crank now?”

“I’m not absolutely sure. I know that Ted had a falling out with Bertie when Bertie enlisted in the service. Ted had been turned down flat because of his feet. Folks say that it galled Ted that his nephew went off to war and not him.”

“It was like they changed places.”

“I guess. Really, it’s a closed book. Jean won’t talk about it.”

I pull apart a Chelsea bun and nibble around the edges like a mouse. “What do you think really happened?”

“I don’t know, Carolyn. You ask too many questions. All I know is, there’s more to the story.” My mother stands and begins clearing up the tea things leaving me to ponder how anybody could be mad that they didn’t get to
go to war, especially when the person who did go to war got shot down dead. How could you stay angry about that all these years later? As I said before, boys can be so dumb. They can be dumb about Thunderbird convertible cars. And they can be dumb about war.

We take a bus and a streetcar and another bus to get to Mimico and Aunt Jean’s new apartment. It’s like we are in another city altogether.

We have to walk up a narrow flight of stairs to get to the apartment. The lock on the door looks flimsy, but it opens easily enough when Mom turns the key. The walls are dark green and sunlight only comes in through the front and back windows of a very long and narrow space. There’s one toilet, mean and rusted, and a tiny back kitchen with an ancient stove and peeling linoleum. The kitchen is filthy and stinks of cabbage and onion. My mom runs her fingers along the window ledge, peeling and black with mold.

“A coat of paint or three will help get this place ship shape.” I can tell that Mom is attempting to be brisk and efficient and positive thinking.

I stand by the window that overlooks a gravel parking lot. As far as the eye can see, there are laneways and rusting tin roofs. No grass.
NO
safe place to play.

“Jimmy won’t like this,” I say.

“Neither will Aunt Jean. There are no flowers or trees.”

“I hate Ted.” I say it matter-of-factly as an honest expression of how I feel. Mom doesn’t reproach me. “Besides, there’s a big problem.”

“What?” Mom asks.

“There’s no laundry room.”

My mom lets out a long breath. Both of us are trying to visualize Aunt Jean wrestling with Jimmy’s daily sheets and diapers, stowing them in the rusty old bathtub and then lugging them to the launderette way down the street.

“It’s not fair,” I say.

“Life is not fair, Carolyn, love. I’m sorry that there are some things I just can’t change.”

I don’t accept that. I will not accept that. I’d rather die than accept that. Every day I struggle with how
I
can make things better for Aunt Jean and Jimmy. How can I, a kid, make something good happen for them? I know that my measly choir money, which I save in my piggy bank, will never do it. But it’s a start. As Aunt Jean says, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will take care of themselves. One day I will, I will have enough to pay a doctor to help Jimmy. If you don’t believe me, just watch.

And when I’m done worrying about Aunt Jean and Jimmy, I worry about me. What’s going to happen to me when Mom goes to work? Who’s going to take care of me? Aunt Jean will be in another school district entirely. I can’t take streetcars there every day after school and then back in the morning. It’s not sensible. Not sensible at all.

I feel guilty for thinking about me in the face of their troubles.

Mom picks up some newspaper and garbage littering the postage-patch of weeds outside the apartment door. She introduces herself to the hardware store owner but I stay outside on the sidewalk with my back to the building.

It’s all I can do to sweet-talk myself into being positive. This is just a lay-by for Jimmy and Aunt Jean. And me, of course. We’ll get through.