by Alan Cumyn
On the dark ride to Elgin, Owen tried not to think of what he would say if he happened, by chance, to knock on Sylvia’s door.
He thought about explaining to Sylvia that he had written her a Christmas card but had forgotten the stamp. He still had the remnants of the card, without sparkles, in a drawer underneath his socks, and wondered now if he should have brought it with him to present to her in person. Better late than never.
“Where do you want to start?” Lorne asked him when they got to Elgin.
“I don’t know,” Owen said.
They drove down the main street. The gears groaned and the truck had a bad habit of veering into the wrong lane when Lorne looked too hard at the buildings and signs. Then he would turn the wheel violently in correction, and Owen had to hug the door to keep from getting an elbow in the face.
He peered in the darkness to try to see the street names. He saw Lansdowne and Sellwig and Tuttle and Ramsworth, but nothing that started with a River.
Lorne let him off on Bunton Avenue. Owen didn’t carry the whole box with him, just a few calendars. He walked up one long, snowy lane and mounted the front steps. The house looked old and dark, like a trap.
Owen pressed the ringer and stood back. He turned around to make sure that Lorne was still sitting in the truck in case he had to make a run for it. Who knew what kind of murderer was living behind that door?
But there was no answer. The house was deep in gloom and silence. Owen rang the bell again, just to be sure, and then a third time because he was pretty certain now that no one was home.
Just as Owen turned away, the door opened and a woman older than dust hissed at him, “What do you want?”
She was hunched almost double, with one shoulder knotted to just below her ear. Her hands looked like gnarly tree roots wrapped around a cane.
Owen stared at her in a panic.
“Well?” she spat.
“I need to go to Japan!” Owen blurted, and he waved a calendar at her.
She looked at him with hatred. “Catch my death because of you,” she said, then disappeared behind the gloomy door.
Owen ran back down the lane and vaulted into Lorne’s truck.
“Let’s try another street!” he said urgently.
Lorne drove him to one called Maple Grove. The houses looked friendlier and had snowmen in the front and scatterings of Christmas lights, even though Christmas was over. Owen decided to try the house with several hockey sticks stuck in the snowbank lining the driveway. He rang the bell and lifted himself on tiptoe to peer into a round window on the door. Instantly a light went on in the hallway and he could hear footsteps approaching.
He heard barking, too.
Suddenly the little round window in front of his face was filled with the snarling teeth of a killer dog. When the door opened a few inches, the teeth filled the gap level with Owen’s throat.
“Don’t mind him. He’s very friendly,” a man’s voice said. Owen could see a big hand straining to hold the dog’s collar. “What can I do for you?”
Owen mumbled something about Japan, and tractors, and a calendar.
“A what?” the man said over the snarls and barking. “You’ll have to speak up.”
Owen tried to show him the 1939 yellow Farmall A, but the man wasn’t able to open the door wide enough to see.
At the next house Owen was invited in by an old man who was very interested in the calendar. He used to be a farmer in the area, he told Owen. His hands shook while he talked, as if he were sitting on top of an old tractor in full throttle.
“You know, I used to have one of these,” he said, looking at June’s model. “I bought it new in 1926, I think it was.” Then he looked at it some more. “No, no, it was ‘24 and I borrowed the money from my uncle Mort.” He looked at Owen, the sagging skin on his throat shaking like a turkey neck. “Or was it Uncle Bart?”
He had pictures of his own tractors, which he got out to show Owen. The album was all black and had a thick cover with wide pages filled with old snapshots of many different pieces of farm machinery.
“This one here,” the man said, “I bought at the start of the Great Depression, when everything was cheap. But I never had more trouble with a tractor. I swore this one had a will of its own. It was like a donkey let loose from the gates of hell. There was one time I got stuck in a ditch, and when I got off to try to free the wheels this demon lurched suddenly —”
The hands sped forward. Owen jumped.
“— and then I was trapped, you see, right beneath the wheel. Good thing it was muddy. I had a little room to slide and slither. And I was pretty thin back then.” He looked to Owen like a bundle of sticks now. “I tried to sell her,” the old man said. “But back in those days nobody had two nickels to rub together. If we didn’t grow our own food we would’ve starved. Don’t know what people would do now if those days ever came back. Hardly anybody lives on a farm anymore.”
Owen said that he lived on a farm. Lorne honked the horn outside.
“So you’re up at five milking the cows and doing your chores?” the man asked.
Owen said no, it wasn’t that kind of farm. “We just live there,” Owen said. The man went on to tell him all about the work that he had to do starting when he was four years old. He fed the chickens, and when it was thirty below the chickens came in to take over the spare bedroom.
Lorne honked the horn several more times and Owen thanked the man for looking at his calendar and telling him such interesting stories. The old farmer had stories of other tractors he had owned over the years, and Owen had a hard time making it out the door.
Back in the truck Owen said to Lorne, “I heard there were good families living on a street called River-something.”
“That’s a strange name for a street,” Lorne said.
They drove around some more. Owen saw several houses that looked like they might need a tractor calendar, but he felt shy now and wasn’t sure whether he should try them. It was getting late and he had sold exactly no calendars. He really wanted to try Sylvia’s house, if he could find it. Lorne drove near the river but the streets were called Hainsworth and Meadowfare and Beamsbrook.
Finally, on a hill quite a distance from the river, was Riverside Place.
“1837 would be a good house to try, I think,” Owen said.
“Really?” Lorne said.
He drove them slowly down the street until 1837 stood out like a beacon drawing Owen out of the truck and down the walkway to the front door.
It was a new house with shiny sides and an enormous garage. Somewhere in the back, Owen knew, was a swimming pool — frozen over possibly into Sylvia’s own personal skating rink. At that very moment she might even be spinning like an Olympic skater in a fuzzy blur of impossible beauty. She had probably grown taller than him and wouldn’t want to be disturbed.
Owen gazed back at Lorne in the truck. His uncle was looking at him to see what he was going to do.
So he tried to find the ringer. He searched all over, then finally opened the screen door and rapped with his knuckles. The sound seemed to be swallowed by the night.
Owen knocked again much louder, and then louder still, and as he stepped back he saw the doorbell lit in red right in front of his eye.
Before he could ring it, the door opened, and Owen looked up at Mr. Tull.
“Good evening,” Owen said formally. Then he cleared his throat. “I wonder if I might have a word,” he said. He meant to pause and prepare himself to explain about the tractors and Japan. But his mouth kept moving. “With your daughter,” he said.
“With my daughter?” Mr. Tull said in surprise. “Does she know you?”
“I think so,” Owen answered. He thought of trying to correct his mistake by somehow indicating, briefly, the depth of his undying love. But he had no idea how to begin.
“Sylvi
a!” Mr. Tull called and stepped back from the door. Mr. Tull invited him in and asked his name.
“Owen Skye.”
“Owen Skye,” Mr. Tull said, rolling it around in his mouth as they stood together in the hallway. “That sounds familiar.” Then he called out again, “Sylvia! There’s an Owen Skye to see you!”
The house was enormous with white carpeting everywhere he could see, clean as fresh snow. The walls were white, too, and the ceilings had sparkles like gleaming frost. In the living-room was a fireplace ringed with shiny brass that nobody had kicked a dent in yet or even smudged. Nothing looked banged up or peeling or cracked or used in any way.
Sylvia came around the corner then, and Mr. Tull and the rest of the house fell out of Owens vision.
She was not wearing a skating outfit but a white flannel nightgown, arid her feet were bare, and her hair shone darkly golden, looking like it had just been brushed a hundred times.
“Owen?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Owen dropped his calendars and picked them up again and then looked at her more closely. He felt as if he were standing at a fountain in the middle of the desert and had to drink as much as possible in a very short time. He tried to memorize the blueness of her eyes, the easy smile on her face, the slope of her shoulders and even the smoothness of the skin on her neck.
She wasn’t taller than him at all. She was wearing a thin gold chain, which seemed exotic and beautiful.
And at the end of the chain, almost disappearing into the collar of her nightgown...
... was the copper wire ring that Owen had fashioned by hand and given to her when they had walked down to the river together the day she moved.
Owen managed to drop the calendars again.
She bent down and picked them up, and the ends of her perfect hair brushed against his snowy boots.
“What are these?” she asked, straightening up.
Owen swallowed hard and looked at her. “I came to give you a tractor calendar,” he said, and thrust several at her at once.
She took one, delicately, and handed the others back, and then examined a September model that was pulling an enormous hay wagon.
“Well,” she said in a puzzled way, and looked at him again.
“We’re going to Japan,” he announced, trying to sound authoritative. I’m the vice-president.”
“Of Japan?” she asked.
“I wrote you a Christmas card,” he said, and watched her eyes narrow into an unasked question. “But I forgot the stamp.” Then, in mounting panic, he asked, “Do you like tiddlywinks?”
“Tiddlywinks?”
Without knowing how, quite, he was on the walkway, then running back to the truck.
When Owen was safely inside, Lorne asked him if he had been successful.
“Oh, yes,” Owen gulped, stuffing the remaining calendars back into the box.
Lorne fired up die engine for the trip home. “So you sold one finally?” he asked.
Owen looked back to see Sylvia staring at him from the doorway, her features even at this blurry distance burning once again into his memory.
“What?” Owen asked.
Welcome Home
WEEKS slipped by and the class was no closer to Japan. Michael Baylor had to explain that the pen-pals who were all but confirmed were now less confirmed than before. But no one was to worry, because Michael Baylor’s father had connections with another class that was almost certainly confirmed, and they would know within a few days. The letters to the unknown Japanese students had been composed before Christmas and said things like “I don’t know what Santa will bring me,” when in fact all those details were now quite known and almost forgotten. So Miss Glendon had them write new letters.
On Michael Baylor’s insistence Miss Glendon kept a large chart marking how many calendars everybody in the class had sold. After a number of weeks Michael Baylor was up to nineteen, but no one else got past five. Owen’s total remained stubbornly at one. He paid for Sylvia’s calendar out of money from his own savings plus another dollar and a quarter that Horace had given him for cleaning out the garage.
Horace had never paid such high wages before. Owen thought he must have felt badly about making fun of the Japan trip.
But many people now seemed to be making fun of the Japan trip, and of Michael Baylor. It was hard to know how it started, but several days into the calendar campaign people began whispering, “Calendars! Calendars!” whenever he passed by, and his neck would turn hard red even when he was pretending he hadn’t heard. Owen wanted to laugh, but it was not difficult to imagine that if he had given his speech first, he would now be the one trying to tell the class how to sell things door-to-door.
“My dad taught me how to do it,” Michael Baylor said proudly, standing in front of everyone. “First of all, you have to be determined not to leave a house without selling at least one calendar. My dad taught me a little song to keep in my head. One, one, one would be fun! But two, two, two are for you!”
Titters spread through the classroom. Michael Baylor shifted nervously.
“Also, don’t stand too far away from a customer,” he said. “Lean in toward the door so it’s hard for a person to shut you out.” He leaned in toward them, and Martha Henbrock laughed through her nose until snot leaked out. “You need to have a good opening line,” he said angrily, but then he couldn’t seem to remember what his favorite opening line was.
“How about buy this stupid calendar and I’ll stop bothering you!” Martha Henbrock blurted. Too many people laughed.
But no one had any better ideas for raising money. There were meetings and more meetings. Miss Glendon talked with Mr. Baylor, and a committee of parents was formed. They were supposed to meet on a Wednesday evening, but no one was free to come. So the meeting was postponed until the following Tuesday, and then the Thursday after that.
Neither Horace nor Margaret went to that meeting, but Owen heard from some of the others that difficult questions had been asked but not answered, that adults had shouted, that some people had left upset.
Miss Glendon called another meeting of the Junior Achievers Club, but this time she did all the talking.
“I’m sorry I let this go as far as it did,” she said. “It was an experiment and I didn’t want to hold you back, but I can see now that it was my fault that I didn’t give you more guidance. I’ve apologized to Michael and I don’t want to hear another person making fun of him or of the Japan trip. Is that understood?”
She was a serious person, like all teachers, but Owen could see there was something even more solemn about her now. The air felt thick as gravy. Michael Baylor sat staring at his fingernails. He didn’t look so much like a president anymore.
“Is that understood?” Miss Glendon asked again. Murmurs fluttered nervously throughout the class.
“People who dream big dreams,” Miss Glendon said, “who take risks for the sake of others, who do things out of the ordinary — we need to encourage, not make fun of them. Not shoot them down. Now I’m sorry that we aren’t going to Japan. Frankly, it would have been a miracle if we had. But Michael had the vision and you supported it, and I wanted you to try to work together to have some good things come out of it. Even if we had just made contact with a Japanese class, that would have been something. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
There was a long silence. Owen thought he did understand. She was the first teacher he had ever known who admitted to making a mistake. It made her seem completely different.
“I’m sorry to say,” she continued, “that Michael has told me he wants to resign as president. I can understand his feelings. I’ve asked him to stay on, to try to pull something positive out of this experience, but he has refused, which is his right. I think we have two options now. We could disband the Junior Achievers and forget about it. Or the vice-president, Owen, co
uld step forward as president, and as a class we can discuss what we’d like to do next. We still have some money raised through calendar sales.”
“Forty-two dollars,” Michael Baylor said glumly from the back of the class.
Miss Glendon turned to Owen. She was asking him with her eyes and he felt strangely calm.
“I think Michael should stay president,” Owen said immediately. “I think we should thank him for everything he has done, and have a big party — to celebrate the fact that we aren’t going to Japan.”
There was silence. Everyone looked at Michael who looked straight back at Owen. Michael’s fingers tapped frantically, but Owen held his gaze until they stopped.
Finally Michael said, “I don’t want to be president anymore.” He smiled weakly. “I’d like to be vice-president, if that’s all right. “I’d like to help out with the party but not be in charge.”
Miss Glendon looked hopefully from Michael to Owen, from Owen to the rest of the class.
Finally Owen nodded and everyone started talking at once. They could use the money to buy food and drinks and decorations. Dan Ruck said he’d ask his father and uncles if they wanted to bring in their fiddles after all. Owen said he would ask his uncle to come in and teach them bird calling. He declared that everyone could bring in games, whatever they wanted. It would be this Friday afternoon so that nobody would worry too much about the details.
“We’re going to be completely disorganized!” Owen said happily.
The work for the week fell away in the face of the preparations for the party. Owen kept expecting Miss Glendon to stop suddenly and say, “Now, we really must spend some time on long division,” but she didn’t. She seemed more caught up than anyone in buying the streamers and hanging them around the classroom, and making other decorations out of Styrofoam cups and paper plates and strings of painted macaroni. There were banners, too, brown paper signs that the children covered in layers of paint and then spelled out in giant letters, “Welcome Home!” and “So Glad to Be Here!”
Owen called up Uncle Lorne and asked him if he could teach bird calling at the party on Friday afternoon.
