A Boy of Good Breeding (12 page)

“Well good, you better,” said Mrs. Cherniski. “Last night I had thirty people in my store, you know the Whryahha clan up for the son’s wedding, a private booking. I was serving roast beef and lobster bisque and damned if that dog isn’t sitting outside right there on the sidewalk, his rear end twitching in the wind. Then, dammit, he’s hunkering down in front of all the Whryahha’s in their Sunday best, and I see he’s having a shit right there on the path.”

Hosea adjusted his hat and glanced at his chunk of ice. He shook his head in mock alarm for Mrs. Cherniski’s sake and said, “Hmmmph, that’s not very good.”

“No it isn’t,” said Mrs. Cherniski. “A tableful of those Whryahhas just up and left, they couldn’t finish their meals and they weren’t about to pay for them, having to eat while a mangy mutt craps away right there in front of them. I damn well lost close to two hundred dollars last night, not to mention my reputation. Thank God I’m the only café in town, but Jesus, Hosea, you have to do something about that dog.”

“You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Cherniski. I’ll see to it pronto. In the meantime, you might want to try shooing it away, maybe a little kick.”

“A little kick, my ass,” muttered Mrs. Cherniski. “I’ll plug the goddamn thing right between the—” but she was back inside. Slam went the back door of her café in Hosea’s face.

Adjusting his hat, he went over to his ice chunk and gave it another kick towards home. He looked up at the water tower and wondered what colour to paint it when and if he ever found the money for paint. Bright red would be nice, maybe with a huge decal of a white horse that would wind itself around the tower’s entire circular top. He looked at the boarded-up feed mill and thought of turning it into a type of make-work project for the youth of Algren during the summer months. Perhaps they could turn it into a junior summer stock theatre for tourists passing through, on their way west to Vancouver, or east to Toronto. A quaint prairie play, maybe Lawrence Hamm could donate an old thresher that they could paint and put in the front of the theatre as a symbolic monument to a bucolic past. Now Hosea’s mind began to spin.

He passed a couple of kids walking down the street. Their jackets were open and they were wearing rubber boots. “Hello there,” he said, “beautiful spring day, isn’t it?” The kids smiled and said, “Hi.” They knew who he was but they didn’t respond to his comment about the beautiful day. As a rule, thought Hosea, and he must remember this in the future, kids do not
respond to comments about the weather. He stole a glance over his shoulder, making sure the kids weren’t looking back at him, and then quickly retrieved his chunk of ice from the gutter of the road. He had overkicked. Suddenly Hosea wondered to himself what Euphemia had done all day when he was away in school.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she’d say to him when he came home from school, and he’d smile and make something up and she’d give him a nickel or a dime but he never asked her what she was thinking about.

One day Hosea came home early because he had an earache, and he found Euphemia doing a handstand on a kitchen chair, gripping the nubby edge of it with her fingers and bicycling her legs around and around up in the air above her head. When she noticed him staring at her, she slowly brought her legs down to the floor and put the chair back beside the table. Then she’d laughed. “You know how it is, Hosea,” she’d said. No, he didn’t. He had not been amused. He was uncomfortable and alarmed. Why was his mother doing handstands on the kitchen chair? Had she lost her mind? Was she planning to run away and join the circus? Was she a freak? A Buddhist?

He had not been too impressed with that display of athleticism, yet later that evening he tried to do the same thing and could not. Therefore, he surmised at the time, it wasn’t something someone could just do on command, and so she must spend her days practising this sort of thing. This is what she must do while I’m in school, he’d concluded. His question answered. But why?

You know how it is, Hosea, she’d said. Now, as Hosea walked along kicking his piece of snow, he understood. Handstands on kitchen chairs, chunks of ice we can’t let disappear until we’re
home. That’s how it is at a certain age. We’re forced to create a challenge for ourselves and meet it. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Actually, Euphemia didn’t have as hard a time living in Algren as might have been expected. Nobody in the Funk family had told anyone about Euphemia being Hosea’s real mother, not even Minty with her big, flapping, eleven-year-old mouth. Even if one of her little brothers had paid attention to the whole brouhaha the night the truth was revealed and then, innocently, mentioned to one of their friends’ mothers, “You know what, my sister Phemie is Hosie’s real mom,” the friend’s mother would have said sweetly, “that’s right, dear, she is, of course she is, now run along and play.”

Euphemia’s father had made arrangements for Euphemia to live in the house on First Street rent free. The owner of the house, in exchange, was given a few acres of land by Euphemia’s father. Euphemia’s father farmed the land but anything reaped from those acres was sold and the money given to the owner of the house.

Just about everybody in Algren, except Leander Hamm—but he didn’t really give it much thought—was under the impression that Euphemia had taken it upon herself to raise this child, Hosea. She was an unmarried so-called mother of a mystery boy. She had committed no sin, of course, because the boy wasn’t hers biologically, they thought. The people of Algren were moved by her generosity and her devotion to the boy. It was a simple story with a familiar heroine, one of their own. A mysterious man on a horse gives Euphemia Funk a newborn baby when she’s outside using the biffy, and Euphemia, a trooper from the start, accepts her lot, smiles at her fate, and raises the boy. Not only does she raise the boy, she raises him to be the mayor of Algren and the man responsible for its claim to fame, a fame that overshadows that unfortunate cockroach
story laid out in the encyclopedia, a fame that makes the Prime Minister and the entire nation take note, a fame that comes with being the smallest town in the country.

But at the beginning, when Hosea was a little boy, the townspeople had no idea he would become their mayor. All they knew was that Euphemia Funk, a girl with so much going for her, had sacrificed it all to raise a child alone. And, furthermore, she didn’t seem to mind.

The local churches brought her meals two or three times a week, the wealthier folks in town brought her their ironing and had her do their Christmas baking and sew their curtains and babysit their kids when they went to the city for a night out. Euphemia was almost always paid extravagantly for these jobs and was always promised more work in the future. Euphemia’s neighbours would shovel her walk and trim her hedges and clean her eavestrough and mow her lawn in the summertime. Tom’s mom gave Hosea all of Tom’s old clothes and some new ones, and baked Hosea’s favourite meal, Pork Diablo, whenever he stayed for supper.

At first, when Euphemia’s parents and brothers and sisters would come to visit, her father would stay outside in his truck, picking his teeth, taking apart some tool or another, or having a nap. He would set Euphemia and Hosea up with a house to live in and drive by at night from time to time just to see what he could see, but he would not go inside and pretend nothing had happened. He missed Hosea more than he thought he would, and a very small and non-verbal part of him admired Euphemia for her spunk and her amazing lie that wasn’t really a lie. But he would not set foot in that house. After all, he could make a statement, too. Let Euphemia’s mother and Minty and the boys traipse in like they were going to a Sunday school picnic and not the quarters of an unmarried mother and her bastard son, arms full of cookies and sweetmeat pies and strong coffee, table games
and crokinole, good cheer and hugs and kisses. He would sit in his truck. Until one day Tom’s mother who lived right across the street came by and poked her head into Mr. Funk’s cab.

“Have you got an aversion to family gatherings, Mr. Funk? Or are you afraid someone will steal your truck if you leave it alone for a minute? You know, I could have my boy Thomas watch it for you, ha ha ha. Like New York City. You know, where you pay a little boy from the ghetto a nickel to make sure nobody nicks your automobile, or strips the hubcaps—”

“I was just going in,” Mr. Funk growled. “Thank-you for your consideration.”

From that day forward, Mr. Funk dutifully entered Euphemia’s house along with his wife and the kids and set himself up in the dining room as the king of crokinole. He taught the kids, including Hosea and Tom, the combination shot, the straight-to-the-gonads shot, the right-between-the-eyes shot, and the triple lutz. It was the perfect appointment for him. He could avoid conversation and, at the same time, could release his frustration and self-righteous indignation each and every time he curled his middle finger to his thumb and let fire another crokinole rock.

Euphemia and Minty and Mrs. Funk drank coffee in the kitchen and talked and laughed and the words “oh well,” “one more cup,” “what’s the rush” were always punctuated with the vicious crack of a crokinole piece from the next room.

Well, thought Hosea as he walked along kicking his piece of ice, she must have done more than handstands on kitchen chairs. He was just about home now and Lorna’s face came pushing and shoving into his thoughts and the picture of Euphemia upside down churning her long thin legs in the air was gone. Hello, Lorna, I’m sorry, Hosea said to the image of her face in
his mind. His piece of ice had made it and just before he went into his house he gave it one last kick up and over his little fence into his neighbour’s yard.

“Hey, Hosea, didja hear?” He whirled around to face his other neighbour, Jeannie, who had appeared on her front steps from out of nowhere.

“What’s that, Jeannie?”

“Veronica Epp,” she said. “She’s had her triplets.”

“Oh?” said Hosea.

“That’s right, three,” said Jeannie. “And they’re all okay. All boys. The last one had to be delivered C-section, you know, but he’s okay, too. Can you imagine giving birth vaginally to not one but two babies, and then on top of all that having to be cut open to have the third?” Jeannie shook her head and stared at the ground.

“No. No, I can’t,” said Hosea.

“Who could?” muttered Jeannie, still staring at the ground and shaking her head. Hosea was about to say Well, can’t be easy or something like that and go inside but Jeannie wasn’t finished. “They were going to rush her to the city, but, you know, they didn’t. No time.”

“Ah,” said Hosea. “Well.”

“So Veronica says seeing as how she went to so much work to have these three babies, she should at least be able to name one of them. Makes sense to me, right, but you know Gord her husband always does the naming, he’s that kind of a guy. And he likes names like Ed and Chuck and Dirk and Todd, you know, names that sound like farts. So Gord says, Well, maybe one of them. I heard all this from Rita, you know Rita from the labour pool, she works with Dory, Tom’s wife?”

“Hmmmm,” said Hosea.

“So he says, Well, maybe one of them, right? And she says, Then again, maybe I should name them all, seeing as I’m the
one who says their names the most, like all day every day and I like to say names I like, if I’m going to say them over and over again, she says to Gord, right, according to Rita. And Gord says, No way, you can name one, the one with the slow start because he’ll probably turn out to be a mama’s boy, anyway. Okay, so this makes Veronica really mad, right, and she says What do you mean by that? And he says Well, you know, kids with lung problems, wheezing and clinging and skinny, the slow starter had some lung problems, the doctor says. But that’s all taken care of, she says, and she’s really mad, right, and tells Gord to leave the hospital.”

“Right,” said Hosea.

“In the meantime, she names all three of the boys, fills out the forms for vital stats and gives them to the nurse to mail to the city and get this, Hosea, their names are … are you ready?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Hosea.

“Their names are, now let’s see if I remember, their names are Finbar, you know after that saint of lost souls or whatever he is, Callemachus, after I don’t know who, somebody Greek, and Indigo. Like the colour, you know, of jeans?”

Hosea was quiet for a moment. Jeannie was staring at him with her mouth open in one of those frozen poses of suspended laughter and shock where the one suspended waits for the other to twig and then they both collapse in hysterics. Hosea didn’t understand this type of gesture, however, and said, “Um, is there more?” His hand moved to his chest and he managed to tug at his jacket with his Thinsulate gloves.

“No, Hosea, that’s it. I thought it was funny. You know, Gord will freak when he hears their names, of course he’ll probably illegally rename them or something or refuse to call them by name at all, but Rita told me—”

“Wait,” said Hosea. “It is, you know? Now that I think of it, it’s very funny. Very funny.” Hosea tried to laugh. “Ih, ih.
Boy, thanks for telling me, Jeannie, that’s rich, Finbar, Callesomething, and, uh … well, good-bye.”

“Say,” said Jeannie, “hold on, where’d you get that hat? Isn’t that whatsisname’s, the—”

Hosea let the door slam behind him.

Hosea hung up his jacket and laid his gloves and Leander’s old hat on the bench in the hallway. He heard the fridge heave and shudder. The kitchen lights flickered for a second while the fridge sucked every available bit of energy in the house. Hosea looked inside his fridge. Half an onion, dry and curled at the edges, a tub of expired sour cream, and the leftovers of the last meal he had shared with Lorna. There’s something wrong with my fridge, he thought. All this energy for a rotting onion and love’s leftovers. The phone rang. Lorna, thought Hosea. He picked up the phone and said hello.

“Jeannie here,” said Jeannie. “One more thing. Apparently the Epps aren’t thrilled with Dr. François. They say Veronica should have been transferred to the city and they’re just lucky all three boys survived. So, are you there?”

“Yes,” said Hosea.