A Bird in the House (21 page)

Half an hour later, the pipes caught fire. Excitement was never in vast supply at the Brick House, but that was one kind of excitement we could have done without. The wood furnace was old but sound, and in the coldest weather my grandfather would stoke it up high with his special mixture of birch and poplar. It took a lot of fire to keep the big house warm in winter. Upstairs, the pipes which led from the furnace were exposed and beginning to be fragile. My mother and aunt worried about them incessantly from November to April. My grandfather, who considered himself an expert in these matters, since he had spent years in running a hardware business which sold such pipes among other things, maintained they were perfectly safe, and Beth and Edna were fretting over nothing. I was finishing my homework when I became aware of a smell like scorched paint.

In my grandfather’s room the pipe was a bright light crimson. From inside its dragon throat came a low but impressive rumble. I yelled at the top of my voice.

“The pipes are on fire! Quick!”

My grandfather pounded up from the basement, then down again, then up again, proclaiming that the pipes would soon simmer down and everyone was to stop fussing this minute. My mother screamed, “Roddie!” and went in to wake and dress him in his snowsuit just in case, and he, understandably agitated at being pounced upon and muffled up in his winter toggery in what must have seemed the middle of the night, sobbed gustily. Aunt Edna kept screeching that someone positively must phone the fire brigade, but my grandfather refused even to consider the idea. What, he demanded with more force than logic, could the fire brigade do that he couldn’t do? Aunt Edna replied that if he wanted his own house burned down around his ears that was his concern and personally she wouldn’t shed a tear. I went back to my room, filled two pillowcases with precious possessions of one sort and another, put on two of my heaviest sweaters and steadied myself to flee into the night.

The pipes were gurgling redly.

“Hey! Where’s Wes?” I asked.

“Gone to fetch someone or something,” Aunt Edna replied distractedly. “I hope to Heaven he hurries. Just
listen
to them, Vanessa. Do you think you could keep Father here while I slip down and phone the fire brigade?”

“No,” I said, “but I think you ought to do it anyway. We’re going to feel pretty silly if the house really does catch fire and we have to say we never even tried to stop it.”

“You’re darned right we are,” Aunt Edna agreed.

“Well, I don’t know, Edna,” my mother vacillated, still clutching Roddie, who was still howling. “We’ve had this with the pipes before and they’ve never actually –”

The pipes were beginning to chortle evilly. The light
crimson was getting lighter and presumably hotter. The stench was terrible.

Just then the front door opened and slammed shut again.

“Wes! Where on earth have you
been
?” my aunt cried.

“I went to get some stuff we use at the station when this kinda thing happens,” he explained. “Lucky my old car started first time.”

“You’re not going down there,” Grandfather Connor said belligerently at the head of the basement stairs. The basement was his territory and his alone.

Wes pushed him aside, courteously but unarguably.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Connor,” he said, almost jovially. “If I damage your furnace you can always sue me.”

We trooped down into the basement after him. Despite my grandfather’s warnings and imprecations, Wes opened the furnace door and threw in a small boxful of blackish powder. For an instant I half expected the whole house to go up in a last mad explosion. But no. The magic powder acted swiftly. Where had it been all our lives? I could see my mother making a mental note to obtain six dozen boxes of it, whatever its cost, even if she had to pawn her pearl ring. The flame-roaring subsided. The voices of the pipes dwindled to a few chuffing wheezes and then fell silent.

“The man’s a fool,” my grandfather remarked to no one in particular. “If he’d left them pipes alone, they’d have done just the same. Can’t for the life of me see why Edna wants to go and get herself mixed up with a fellow like that.”

He was no doubt perfectly correct about the pipes. After all, it was not our first pipe fire, and the Brick House still stood. But the rest of us were not in any mood to believe him. My mother could see her worries receding to a thousand instead of a thousand and one.

“Now, now, Father,” she said, beaming happily, “you’ve got to admit it did the trick. I wonder if you can buy that stuff in town or if you have to order it.”

I could imagine her telling Aunt Edna how nice it was that Wes was so handy in a crisis. Personally, I thought it would cut a lot more ice with Aunt Edna if my mother reminded her of the way Wes had been with Grandfather Connor. But perhaps there was no need.

“Are you sure you honestly want to go to Winnipeg, Wes?” Aunt Edna was saying in the front hall. “I mean, I don’t mind one way or another. It’s up to you, I mean. It would be lovely to go, but it seems kind of a lot of money for us to go only for the one day.”

“I thought it might give me the nerve,” Wes said. “Sometimes a different place’ll do that. But now I come to think of it, maybe it would be better to go somewheres further, later on when the weather’s better, and stay longer. I got eight days holidays coming to me, I didn’t mention.”

Nothing makes heroes of us like acts of heroism, even minor ones. His trouble was, as it turned out, that he had reached an age when he wasn’t anxious to have his face slapped, metaphorically speaking. He had had the sneaking feeling that Aunt Edna was formidable. Little did he know that she was as unsure of herself in her way as he was in his. After the night of the pipe fire, he went out of his way to avoid argument with Grandfather. But none of us ever forgot. Aunt Edna, in a gesture which must have taken some doing, even learned to play “Jesus Calls Us O’er the TumuIt,” until she discovered with relief that Wes believed sufficient unto the Sabbath were the hymns thereof.

Wes and Aunt Edna were married in the spring, and she went to live at the C.N.R. station. After their honeymoon,
that is, which they spent in distant Montreal, since she could travel on his railway pass now. I missed her, but I was glad she was gone and that she had a house of her own, even if she had to sleep to the sound of shunting boxcars. It was only a pity she had had to wait so long to go. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

I had gone out with boys on rare occasions, but I had never had what might be termed a boyfriend. The boys who had taken me to a movie or walked me home after skating at the Manawaka Rink on a Saturday night were far from prepossessing. They were either shorter than I, or dandruff-ridden, or of a stunning stupidity. I was embarrassed at being seen with them, but I never turned down an invitation, for reasons of status. I would willingly have gone out with the village idiot, had there been one, rather than not go out at all. Mavis Duncan, my closest friend, was slender and short and had naturally wavy auburn hair. Anyone tall, washed, witty and handsome in the vicinity asked her out. I was five-foot seven and had naturally poker-straight black hair which I tortured excruciatingly and unsuccessfully into a limp pageboy style with aluminum rollers every night. I had decided early that I must do the best I could with what I had, which at that time did not seem to be much. During the war, when I was seventeen, the social situation in town altered beyond belief. The R.C.A.F. built an elementary training camp at South Wachakwa, only a few miles away, and on weekends Manawaka was miraculously descended upon by scores of airmen, for South Wachakwa had a school, a church and one store, and that was all. Manawaka, on the other hand, had the Flamingo Dance Hall, the beer parlour at the Queen Victoria Hotel, the Regal Café, and numerous high school girls, of whom I was one.

I used to go with Mavis Duncan and Stacey Cameron to the Saturday night dances at the Flamingo. All the girls would go this way, in groups of three or four, for moral support. The girls congregated at one side of the small slippery dance floor, and the boys jostled around at the other side. When the music began for each dance, Mavis and Stacey and I would be engaged in gay lighthearted chatter, with panicky hearts and queasy stomachs. What if no one asked us to dance? The girls who had not been asked usually whipped upstairs to the Powder Room and stayed there for as long as possible, applying and re-applying makeup, smoking, talking in our gay lighthearted fashion to other sufferers. But when we were asked to dance, despair melted like ice cubes in July, and we would go slithering and swooping across the floor in whomever’s arms, suddenly fearless and lovely.

The music seemed the only music that ever was or ever would be. I had no means of knowing that it was being set into the mosaic of myself, and that it would pass away quickly and yet remain always as mine. “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” “Skylark.” “I’ll Be Seeing You.” “I’m a Little on the Lonely Side.” “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”

It was at the Flamingo that I met Michael. He was twenty-three, taller than I, with sandy hair, and he had developed a mocking smile to camouflage his seriousness. He came from British Columbia, where he had worked in his father’s lumber business before he joined up. He told me about the lumber camps, and I could see the donkey-engines and the high-riggers and the gigantic Douglas firs pluming and plummeting down like the fall of titans, out there in the ferned forests where the air was always cool blue and warm with sun, and where the black-spined trees stood close with the light lacing through.

“I’d like to take you there, Vanessa,” Michael said.

He took me home to the Brick House instead, and kissed me, and told me he’d see me next weekend. After that, I saw him every time he could get to Manawaka. Sometimes he would manage to get over just for an hour or so in the evening, hitching a lift. In order to be alone we would walk down into the Wachakwa Valley, where the brown creek pelted shallowly over the stones, and the prairie poplars grew, their leaves now a translucent yellow with autumn. The grass was thick and high, and we could make a nest and lie there and hold one another. I never actually made love with him. I was afraid. He did not try to persuade me, although he knew I wanted to as much as he did. He accepted the fear which I could not accept myself, for I despised it but could not overcome it.

Like me, Michael wrote stories and poems, a fact which he did not divulge to his Air Force friends. When we were together, there was never enough time, for we had everything to talk about and discover. I tried not to remember that in a few months he would be going away. I had never met anyone before who was interested in the same things as I was. We read Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”

“It’s one of my favourite poems,” I said, “and yet it shouldn’t be, maybe. There’s something about it that isn’t true, not for me, anyway.”

“How do you mean, Nessa?”

“I don’t know. It sounds fine to say you think continually of those who were truly great. But you don’t. You forget them. Most of the time you don’t think of them at all. That’s the terrible thing. I guess I was thinking of Dieppe.”

The war had not affected Manawaka very much until then. Most of the Manawaka boys had joined the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, and when the casualty lists came in from Dieppe, half the town’s families were hit. MacDonald. Gunn. Kowalski. Macalister. Lobodiak. MacIntosh. Chorniuk. Kamchuk. MacPherson. All of the Scots and Ukrainian names of the boys a couple of years older than I was, the boys I had known all my life. When it happened, I had remembered that my father’s brother Roderick had been killed in the First World War. He, too, had been eighteen, like most of these. It was then that war took on its meaning for me, a meaning that would never change. It meant only that people without choice in the matter were broken and spilled, and nothing could ever take the place of them. But I did not think of them continually. Even at this relatively short distance, I already thought of them only from time to time. It was this that seemed a betrayal.

“I know,” Michael said. “And they weren’t truly great, either. They just happened to be there. Hardly any poetry that I’ve seen says it the way it really is. You know what I think? Writing’s going to change a lot after the war. It did after the First War and it will even more after this one. There aren’t any heroes any more.”

“I don’t believe there ever were,” I said. “Not in that way. I could be wrong. Spender’s talking about the Battle of Britain pilots, partly anyway, isn’t he? Maybe they were different. Why would they be, though? They were just there, too, and before they knew it, there wasn’t any way to get out.
Like the clansmen at Culloden. Or Ulysses’ spearmen. Maybe even Ulysses, if he ever existed.”

Michael looked up at the sky, where even now the training planes were skimming around like far-off bluebottle flies.

“I don’t know whether you’re wrong or not,” he said. “I don’t know how other guys feel. It isn’t what you call a topic for conversation. I only know how I feel. Every damn time I go up in one of those little Tiger Moths I can’t stop sweating. What an admission, eh? If I’m like that on training planes, what the hell will I be like on bombers?”

He turned to me then and I held him tightly. There was nothing I could say to him. Too much had been said already, but perhaps it had not harmed him to speak the words. All I could do was hold him and hope that the force of my love would get through to him and have some value. What I really wanted was to marry him before he went away, but I was not yet eighteen, and we both knew my mother would not give her consent for me to marry anyone at my age. After the war seemed a time too distant and indefinite to contemplate, a time that would never arrive.

When Michael had a weekend pass he would stay at the Brick House, sleeping in Aunt Edna’s old room. He got on well with my mother, and she always welcomed him and did her best to shield him from Grandfather Connor. This was not always possible. At meals, my grandfather would make muttering remarks about people who freeloaded on other people’s food. The rocking chair trick was used fairly often, and when my mother and Michael and I were doing the dishes we would hear the reproachful
screee-scraaaw
coming from Grandfather’s cavern.