A Bird in the House (14 page)

“I’ll tell you something else,” Piquette went on. “All the old bitches an’ biddies in this town will sure be surprised. I’m gettin’
married this fall – my boyfriend, he’s an English fella, works in the stockyards in the city there, a very tall guy, got blond wavy hair. Gee, is he ever handsome. Got this real classy name. Alvin Gerald Cummings – some handle, eh? They call him Al.”

For the merest instant, then, I saw her. I really did see her, for the first and only time in all the years we had both lived in the same town. Her defiant face, momentarily, became unguarded and unmasked, and in her eyes there was a terrifying hope.

“Gee, Piquette –” I burst out awkwardly, “that’s swell. That’s really wonderful. Congratulations – good luck – I hope you’ll be happy –”

As I mouthed the conventional phrases, I could only guess how great her need must have been, that she had been forced to seek the very things she so bitterly rejected.

When I was eighteen, I left Manawaka and went away to college. At the end of my first year, I came back home for the summer. I spent the first few days in talking non-stop with my mother, as we exchanged all the news that somehow had not found its way into letters – what had happened in my life and what had happened here in Manawaka while I was away. My mother searched her memory for events that concerned people I knew.

“Did I ever write you about Piquette Tonnerre, Vanessa?” she asked one morning.

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied. “Last I heard of her, she was going to marry some guy in the city. Is she still there?”

My mother looked perturbed, and it was a moment before she spoke, as though she did not know how to express what she had to tell and wished she did not need to try.

“She’s dead,” she said at last. Then, as I stared at her, “Oh, Vanessa, when it happened, I couldn’t help thinking of
her as she was that summer – so sullen and gauche and badly dressed. I couldn’t help wondering if we could have done something more at that time – but what could we do? She used to be around in the cottage there with me all day, and honestly, it was all I could do to get a word out of her. She didn’t even talk to your father very much, although I think she liked him, in her way.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Either her husband left her, or she left him,” my mother said. “I don’t know which. Anyway, she came back here with two youngsters, both only babies – they must have been born very close together. She kept house, I guess, for Lazarus and her brothers, down in the valley there, in the old Tonnerre place. I used to see her on the street sometimes, but she never spoke to me. She’d put on an awful lot of weight, and she looked a mess, to tell you the truth, a real slattern, dressed any old how. She was up in court a couple of times – drunk and disorderly, of course. One Saturday night last winter, during the coldest weather, Piquette was alone in the shack with the children. The Tonnerres made home brew all the time, so I’ve heard, and Lazarus said later she’d been drinking most of the day when he and the boys went out that evening. They had an old woodstove there – you know the kind, with exposed pipes. The shack caught fire. Piquette didn’t get out, and neither did the children.”

I did not say anything. As so often with Piquette, there did not seem to be anything to say. There was a kind of silence around the image in my mind of the fire and the snow, and I wished I could put from my memory the look that I had seen once in Piquette’s eyes.

I went up to Diamond Lake for a few days that summer, with Mavis and her family. The MacLeod cottage had been
sold after my father’s death, and I did not even go to look at it, not wanting to witness my long-ago kingdom possessed now by strangers. But one evening I went down to the shore by myself.

The small pier which my father had built was gone, and in its place there was a large and solid pier built by the government, for Galloping Mountain was now a national park, and Diamond Lake had been re-named Lake Wapakata, for it was felt that an Indian name would have a greater appeal to tourists. The one store had become several dozen, and the settlement had all the attributes of a flourishing resort – hotels, a dancehall, cafés with neon signs, the penetrating odours of potato chips and hot dogs.

I sat on the government pier and looked out across the water. At night the lake at least was the same as it had always been, darkly shining and bearing within its black glass the streak of amber that was the path of the moon. There was no wind that evening, and everything was quiet all around me. It seemed too quiet, and then I realized that the loons were no longer here. I listened for some time, to make sure, but never once did I hear that long-drawn call, half mocking and half plaintive, spearing through the stillness across the lake.

I did not know what had happened to the birds. Perhaps they had gone away to some far place of belonging. Perhaps they had been unable to find such a place, and had simply died out, having ceased to care any longer whether they lived or not.

I remember how Piquette had scorned to come along, when my father and I sat there and listened to the lake birds. It seemed to me now that in some unconscious and totally unrecognised way, Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons.

I
never knew I had distant cousins who lived up north, until Chris came down to Manawaka to go to high school. My mother said he belonged to a large family, relatives of ours, who lived at Shallow Creek, up north. I was six, and Shallow Creek seemed immeasurably far, part of a legendary winter country where no leaves grow and where the breath of seals and polar bears snuffled out steamily and turned to ice.

“Could plain people live there?” I asked my mother, meaning people who were not Eskimos. “Could there be a farm?”

“How do you mean?” she said, puzzled. “I told you. That’s where they live. On the farm. Uncle Wilf – that was Chris’s father, who died a few years back – he got the place as a homestead, donkey’s years ago.”

“But how could they grow anything? I thought you said it was up north.”

“Mercy,” my mother said, laughing, “it’s not
that
far north, Vanessa. It’s about a hundred miles beyond Galloping Mountain. You be nice to Chris, now, won’t you? And don’t
go asking him a whole lot of questions the minute he steps inside the door.”

How little my mother knew of me, I thought. Chris had been fifteen. He could be expected to feel only scorn towards me. I detested the fact that I was so young. I did not think I would be able to say anything at all to him.

“What if I don’t like him?”

“What if you don’t?” my mother responded sharply. “You’re to watch your manners, and no acting up, understand? It’s going to be quite difficult enough without that.”

“Why does he have to come here, anyway?” I demanded crossly. “Why can’t he go to school where he lives?”

“Because there isn’t any high school up there,” my mother said. “I hope he gets on well here, and isn’t too homesick. Three years is a long time. It’s very good of your grandfather to let him stay at the Brick House.”

She said this last accusingly, as though she suspected I might be thinking differently. But I had not thought of it one way or another. We were all having dinner at the Brick House because of Chris’s arrival. It was the end of August, and sweltering. My grandfather’s house looked huge and cool from the outside; the high low-sweeping spruce trees shutting out the sun with their dusky out-fanned branches. But inside it wasn’t cool at all. The woodstove in the kitchen was going full blast, and the whole place smelled of roasting meat.

Grandmother Connor was wearing a large mauve apron. I thought it was a nicer colour than the dark bottle-green of her dress, but she believed in wearing sombre shades lest the spirit give way to vanity, which in her case was certainly not much of a risk. The apron came up over her shapeless bosom and obscured part of her cameo brooch, the only
jewellery she ever wore, with its portrait of a fiercely bearded man whom I imagined to be either Moses or God.

“Isn’t it nearly time for them to be getting here, Beth?” Grandmother Connor asked.

“Train’s not due until six,” my mother said. “It’s barely five-thirty, now. Has father gone to the station already?”

“He went an hour ago,” my grandmother said.

“He would,” my mother commented.

“Now, now, Beth,” my grandmother cautioned and soothed.

At last the front screen door was hurled open and Grandfather Connor strode into the house, followed by a tall lanky boy. Chris was wearing a white shirt, a tie, grey trousers. I thought, unwillingly, that he looked handsome. His face was angular, the brines showing through the brown skin. His grey eyes were slightly slanted, and his hair was the colour of couchgrass at the end of summer when it has been bleached to a light yellow by the sun. I had not planned to like him, not even a little, but somehow I wanted to defend him when I heard what my mother whispered to my grandmother before they went into the front hall.

“Heavens, look at the shirt and trousers – must’ve been his father’s, the poor kid.”

I shot out into the hall ahead of my mother, and then stopped and stood there.

“Hi, Vanessa,” Chris said.

“How come you knew who I was?” I asked.

“Well, I knew your mother and dad only had one of a family, so I figured you must be her,” he replied, grinning.

The way he spoke did not make me feel I had blundered. My mother greeted him warmly but shyly. Not knowing if she were expected to kiss him or to shake hands, she finally did
neither. Grandmother Connor, however, had no doubts. She kissed him on both cheeks and then held him at arm’s length to have a proper look at him.

“Bless the child,” she said.

Coming from anyone else, this remark would have sounded ridiculous, especially as Chris was at least a head taller. My grandmother was the only person I have ever known who could say such things without appearing false.

“I’ll show you your room, Chris,” my mother offered.

Grandfather Connor, who had been standing in the living room doorway in absolute silence, looking as granite as a statue in the cemetery, now followed Grandmother out to the kitchen.

“Train was forty minutes late,” he said weightily.

“What a shame,” my grandmother said. “But I thought it wasn’t due until six, Timothy.”

“Six!” my grandfather cried. “That’s the mainline train. The local’s due at five-twenty.”

This was not correct, as both my grandmother and I knew. But neither of us contradicted him.

“What on earth are you cooking a roast for, on a night like this?” my grandfather went on. “A person could fry an egg on the sidewalk, it’s that hot. Potato salad would’ve gone down well.”

Privately I agreed with this opinion, but I could never permit myself to acknowledge agreement with him on anything. I automatically and emotionally sided with Grandmother in all issues, not because she was inevitably right but because I loved her.

“It’s not a roast,” my grandmother said mildly. “It’s mock-duck. The stove’s only been going for an hour. I thought the boy would be hungry after the trip.”

My mother and Chris had come downstairs and were now in the living room. I could hear them there, talking awkwardly, with pauses.

“Potato salad,” my grandfather declaimed, “would’ve been plenty good enough. He’d have been lucky to get it, if you ask me anything. Wilf’s family hasn’t got two cents to rub together. It’s me that’s paying for the boy’s keep.”

The thought of Chris in the living room, and my mother unable to explain, was too much for me. I sidled over to the kitchen door, intending to close it. But my grandmother stopped me.

“No,” she said, with unexpected firmness. “Leave it open, Vanessa.”

I could hardly believe it. Surely she couldn’t want Chris to hear? She herself was always able to move with equanimity through a hurricane because she believed that a mighty fortress was her God. But the rest of us were not like that, and usually she did her best to protect us. At the time I felt only bewilderment. I think now that she must have realised Chris would have to learn the Brick House sooner or later, and he might as well start right away.

I had to go into the living room. I had to know how Chris would take my grandfather. Would he, as I hoped, be angry and perhaps even speak out? Or would he, meekly, only be embarrassed?

“Wilf wasn’t much good, even as a young man,” Grandfather Connor was trumpeting. “Nobody but a simpleton would’ve taken up a homestead in a place like that. Anybody could’ve told him that land’s no use for a thing except hay.”

Was he going to remind us again how well he had done in the hardware business? Nobody had ever given him a hand,
he used to tell me. I am sure he believed that this was true. Perhaps it even was true.

“If the boy takes after his father, it’s a poor lookout for him,” my grandfather continued.

I felt the old rage of helplessness. But as for Chris – he gave no sign of feeling anything. He was sitting on the big wing-backed sofa that curled into the bay window like a black and giant seashell. He began to talk to me, quite easily, just as though he had not heard a word my grandfather was saying.

This method proved to be the one Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came, which was often, Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out and having the known world unimaginably fall to pieces. He would not argue or defend himself, but he did not apologise, either. He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere. Fortunately there was very little need for response, for when Grandfather Connor pointed out your shortcomings, you were not expected to reply.

But this aspect of Chris was one which I noticed only vaguely at the time. What won me was that he would talk to me and wisecrack as though I were his same age. He was – although I didn’t know the phrase then – a respecter of persons.

On the rare evenings when my parents went out, Chris would come over to mind me. These were the best times, for often when he was supposed to be doing his homework, he would make fantastic objects for my amusement, or his own – pipecleaners twisted into the shape of wildly prancing midget men, or an old set of Christmas-tree lights fixed onto a puppet theatre with a red velvet curtain that really pulled. He had skill in making miniature things of all kinds. Once for
my birthday he gave me a leather saddle no bigger than a matchbox, which he had sewn himself, complete in every detail, stirrups and horn, with the criss-cross lines that were the brand name of his ranch, he said, explaining it was a reference to his own name.