A Bird in the House (17 page)

My mother cared about him a great deal, but her immediate thought was not for him.

“When I think of you, going up to Shallow Creek that time,” she said, “and going out camping with him, and what might have happened –”

I, also, was thinking of what might have happened. But we were not thinking of the same thing. For the first time I recognised, at least a little, the dimensions of his need to talk that night. He must have understood perfectly well how impossible it would be, with a thirteen-year-old. But there was no one else. All his life’s choices had grown narrower and narrower. He had been forced to return to the alien lake of home, and when finally he saw a means of getting away, it
could only be into a turmoil which appalled him and which he dreaded even more than he knew. I had listened to his words, but I had not really heard them, not until now. It would not have made much difference to what happened, but I wished it were not too late to let him know.

Once when I was on holiday from college, my mother got me to help her clean out the attic. We sifted through boxes full of junk, old clothes, school-books, bric-a-brac that once had been treasures. In one of the boxes I found the miniature saddle that Chris had made for me a long time ago.

“Have you heard anything recently?” I asked, ashamed that I had not asked sooner.

She glanced up at me. “Just the same. It’s always the same. They don’t think there will be much improvement.”

Then she turned away.

“He always used to seem so – hopeful. Even when there was really nothing to be hopeful about. That’s what I find so strange. He
seemed
hopeful, didn’t you think?”

“Maybe it wasn’t hope,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

I wasn’t certain myself. I was thinking of all the schemes he’d had, the ones that couldn’t possibly have worked, the unreal solutions to which he’d clung because there were no others, the brave and useless strokes of fantasy against a depression that was both the world’s and his own.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just think things were always more difficult for him than he let on, that’s all. Remember the letter?”

“Yes.”

“Well – what it said was that they could force his body to march and even to kill, but what they didn’t know was that he’d fooled them. He didn’t live inside it any more.”

“Oh Vanessa –” my mother said. “You must have suspected right then.”

“Yes, but –”

I could not go on, could not say that the letter seemed only the final heartbreaking extension of that way he’d always had of distancing himself from the absolute unbearability of battle.

I picked up the tiny saddle and turned it over in my hand.

“Look. His brand, the name of his ranch. The Criss-Cross.”

“What ranch?” my mother said, bewildered.

“The one where he kept his racing horses. Duchess and Firefly.”

Some words came into my head, a single line from a poem I had once heard. I knew it referred to a lover who did not want the morning to come, but to me it had another meaning, a different relevance.

The night must move like this for him, slowly, all through the days and nights. I could not know whether the land he journeyed through was inhabited by terrors, the old monster-kings of the lake, or whether he had discovered at last a way for himself to make the necessary dream perpetual.

I put the saddle away once more, gently and ruthlessly, back into the cardboard box.

W
hen Peter Chorniuk’s wagon clanked slowly into our back yard that September, it never occurred to me that this visit would be different from any other. Peter Chorniuk lived at Galloping Mountain, a hundred miles north of Manawaka, and he was one of the few men from whom it was still possible to buy birch, for the trees were getting scarce. Every autumn he came down to Manawaka and brought a load of birch for our furnace. Birch held the fire better than poplar, but it was expensive and we could afford only the one load, so my grandfather burned a mixture. I watched the man whoa the team and then climb into the back of the wagon and begin throwing down the cordwood sticks. The powdery white bark was still on and in places had been torn, exposing the pale rust colour of the inner bark. The logs thudded dryly as he flung them down. Later my grandfather and I would have to carry them inside. The plebeian poplar was kept outside, but the birch was stacked in the basement.

I was lying on the roof of the tool-shed, reading. An enormous spruce tree grew beside the shed, and the branches feathered out across the roof, concealing anyone who was
perched there. I was fifteen, and getting too old to be climbing on roofs, my mother said.

“Hi, Mr. Chorniuk,” I called.

He looked up, and I emerged from the spruce boughs and waved at him. He grinned.

“Hi, Vanessa. Listen, you want a dog, eh?”

“What?” I said. “Has Natasha had pups again?”

“Yeh, that’s right,” Mr. Chorniuk said. “There’s no stopping Natasha. This is her fifth litter. This time she got herself mixed up with a Husky.”

“Gee.” I was impressed. “The pups are half-Husky? What’re they like?”

“Come and see,” he beckoned. “I brought one for you.”

I slid quickly down from the tool-shed roof onto the fence and then to the ground. The pup was in a cardboard box in the front of the wagon. It was very young and plump, and its fur was short and soft, almost like the down on a chick. It was black, like Natasha, but it had a ruff of white at its throat, and white markings on its head. I picked it up, and it struggled in annoyance, trying to escape, then settled down and sniffed my hands to see if I was friendly.

“Can I really have it?” I asked.

“Sure,” Mr. Chorniuk said. “You’ll be doing me a favour. What am I going to do with six of them? Everybody up at the mountain’s got all the dogs they got any use for. I can’t drown them. My wife says I’m crazy. But I’d as soon drown a kid, to tell you the truth. Will your mom let you keep it?”

“Oh sure,
she
will. But –”

“Think
he
won’t?” Mr. Chorniuk said, meaning Grandfather Connor. My mother and brother and I had lived in the Brick House with my grandfather ever since the death of my father.

“Well, we’ll soon know,” I said. “Here he comes now.”

Grandfather Connor came striding out of the house. He was in his late eighties, but he walked straight, carrying his bulky body with an energy that was partly physical and partly sheer determination. His splendid condition, for a man of his age, he attributed to unceasing toil and good habits. He touched neither tobacco nor snuff, he spurned playing cards, and he based his drinking of only tea on the Almighty’s contention that wine was a mocker and strong drink was raging. It was a warm day, the leaves turning a clear lemon yellow on the Manitoba maples and the late afternoon sun lighting up the windows of the Brick House like silver foil, but my grandfather was wearing his grey-heather sweater buttoned up to the neck. His face was set in its accustomed expression of displeasure, but it was still a handsome face – strong heavy features, a beaked nose, eyes a chilled blue like snowshadows.

“Well, Peter, you’ve brought the wood.” It was his habit to begin conversations with a statement of the obvious, so that nothing except agreement was possible.

“Yep. Here it is.”

“How much will it be this time?” Grandfather Connor asked.

Mr. Chorniuk told him the price and my grandfather looked stricken. He had never accepted the fact that he could not buy anything for what he paid forty years ago, so he had the permanent conviction that he was being cheated. He began to argue, and Mr. Chorniuk’s face assumed a look of purposeful blankness. Just then my grandfather noticed the dog.

“What’s that you’ve got there, Vanessa?”

“Mr. Chorniuk says I can have it, Grandfather. Can I? I promise I’ll look after it myself. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“We don’t want no dogs around the place,” my grandfather said. “They’re messy and they’re destructive. You’d only be making work for your mother. You might consider her for a change.”

“If she says I can, though?” I persisted.

“There’s no
if
about it,” he decreed flatly.

“Part Husky, that one,” Mr. Chorniuk put in, trying to be helpful. “He’d make a good watch dog. Nor worry about pups. It’s a him.”

“Husky!” Grandfather Connor exclaimed. “I wouldn’t trust one of them things as far as I could see it. Tear Roddie to bits, more than likely.”

My brother Roderick was five and a half and exceptionally fond of animals. I was pointing this out, arguing hotly and passionately and with no more tact than my grandfather himself, when Roddie and my mother came out into the yard. My brother, sizing up the situation rapidly, added his pleas to mine.

“Aw, come on, Grandfather. Please.”

“Can I, Mother?” I begged. “I’ll look after him. You won’t have to do a thing. Cross my heart.”

My mother was always torn between her children and a desire not to provoke my grandfather.

“Well, it’s all right as far as I’m concerned,” she said uncertainly, “but –”

What made my grandfather finally and untypically change his mind was the delay involved.

“Take the blamed thing away, then, Vanessa, for mercy’s sake, or this wood won’t get unloaded before tomorrow morning. But he’s only to go in the basement, mind. If I catch him in the rest of the house, you’ll have to get rid of him, understand?”

“Yes, yes!” I fled with the pup. My brother followed.

The pup explored the basement, snuffling around the crate of apples on the floor, burrowing behind the sacks of potatoes and turnips, falling over his own infant-clumsy feet in his attempt to scurry in every direction at once. Roddie and I laughed at him, and then I picked him up to try him in his new bed and he nervously wet all over the blanket.

“What’re we going to call him, Vanessa?”

I pondered. Then the name came to me.

“Nanuk.”

“
Na-nook
? That’s not a name.”

“It’s an Eskimo name, dopey,” I said abruptly.

“Is it really?”

“Sure it is.” I had no idea whether it was or not. “Anybody knows that.”

“You think you’re so smart,” my brother said, offended.

“What would you suggest, then?” I asked sarcastically.

“Well, I was thinking of Laddie.”

“Laddie! What! A corny old name like that?”

Then I became aware that my own voice carried some disturbing echo of my grandfather’s.

“Listen, Laddie’s okay for a collie or like that,” I amended, “but this one’s got to have an Eskimo name, on account of his father being a Husky, see?”

“Yeh, maybe so,” my brother said. “Here, Nanuk!”

The pup did not even look up. He seemed too young to own any kind of a name.

Harvey Shinwell delivered our papers. He was a heavily built boy of about sixteen, with colourless eyebrows and a pallid mottled face. After school he would go and pick up the papers from the station and deliver them on his old bicycle. He was somebody who had always been around and whom I had never actually seen. Until that winter.

Nanuk had the run of the yard, but the gates were kept closed. The picket fence was high, and the wooden pieces were driven deep into the earth, so Nanuk could neither get over nor tunnel under. I took him out on walks with me but apart from that he stayed in the yard. This did not mean he was too much confined, however, for our yard was nearly an acre. One day I got home from school just as Harvey Shinyvell had come to the gate and thrown the Winnipeg
Free Press
onto our front porch. He didn’t get back on his bike immediately. He was standing at the gate, and when I approached along the sidewalk I could see what he was doing.

In his hand he held a short pointed stick. He was poking it through the bars of the gate. On the other side was Nanuk, only four months old, but snarling in a way I had never heard before. He was trying to catch the stick with his teeth, but Harvey withdrew it too quickly. Then Harvey jabbed it in again, and this time it caught Nanuk in the face. He yelped with the pain of it, but he was not driven away. He came back again, trying to get hold of the stick, and once more Harvey with a calm deliberation drove the wooden javelin at the dog.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I yelled. “You leave my dog alone, you hear?”

Harvey looked up with a lethargic grin and mounted his bike.

“He tried to bite me,” he said. “He’s dangerous.”

“He is not!” I cried, infuriated. “I saw!”

“Why don’t you run and tell your mother, then?” Harvey said, in phony falsetto.

I went inside the yard and knelt in the snow beside Nanuk. He was getting too big for me to lift him. He seemed to have forgotten the stick. He welcomed me in his usual way, jumping up, taking my wrist gently between his jaws
and pretending to bite but holding it so carefully that he never left even the faint marks of his teeth.

I forgot about the stick then, also. Nanuk was enough of a problem because of my grandfather. Their paths hardly ever crossed, but this was only due to the organisational abilities of my mother, who was constantly removing the dog to some place where my grandfather wasn’t. Sometimes she would complain irritably about this extra responsibility – “If I’d ever realised, Vanessa, how much work this creature would mean, I’d never have agreed –” and so on. Then I would feel wounded and resentful, and could scarcely bear the fact that the trouble the dog caused her was my fault.

“Okay, give him away,” I would storm. “See if I care. Have him chloroformed.”

“Maybe I will, then, one of these days,” my mother would reply stonily, “and it would serve you right for talking like a lunatic and saying things you don’t mean.”

Having scared each other more than either of us intended, we would both give in.

“He’s really very good,” my mother would admit. “And he’s company during the day for Roddie.”

“Are you sure?” No amount of assurance was ever enough for me. “Are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather –”

“Oh yes, of course. It’ll be all right, Vanessa. We mustn’t worry.”