Alison Preston - Norwood Flats 04 - Sunny Dreams

by Alison Preston

  Anyway, that day in grade four I forced myself not to turn around and look at Margie Willis. Look at me, how great I am. I’m not staring at the dirty girl.

  Some kids made up a song at recess:

  Polio Joe, from Mexico

  Hands up, stick ’em up, Polio Joe.

  That was the extent of it. It was just a redo of some other stupid song about cowboys. I couldn’t join in singing it. I knew if I did, I would get polio for sure and end up in braces or worse, like the children in the pictures that Nurse Peeler showed us. The worst that could happen, the worst that polio could do to you, was cause you to not be able to breathe or swallow. In that case, you died.

  Chapter 8

  The hospital kept Jackson for a few nights. There was a reluctance to discharge him until some certainty of his living situation was established. Plaster casts on both arms went up past his elbows. The break in his right arm was near his wrist and less severe than the break in his left. The doctor felt certain that in four weeks the one cast could be replaced by another that would stop below Jackson’s elbow, allowing some use of his right arm.

  But for the next month he would need help. Aunt Helen insisted that he stay with us. Not in a tent in the backyard, but in the spare bedroom upstairs.

  “I am a nurse,” she said. “I am more than qualified to look after Jackson’s needs.”

  The “I am a nurse” statement was starting to grate on my nerves but I was rooting for her. Jackson living in our house for at least four weeks!

  When Helen made her announcement on the Wednesday following the accident we were eating supper at the dining room table. Potato salad, cold chicken, and peas.

  My dad’s usually hearty appetite was suffering. He pushed the food around on his plate like he used to get after me not to do. One pea tumbled over the edge and landed on the tablecloth. He pierced it with his fork and placed it back among the others. It left a tiny green stain on the white linen.

  “I don’t know, Helen,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger sleeping down the hall.” He glanced at me and pushed a little chunk of potato off his plate.

  “For goodness’ sake, Will, stop fiddling with your food!” said Helen.

  They could have been children again, the small boy and the older sister who was left too soon to look after her little brother. My dad had been only twelve when my grandpa drowned. My grandmother had survived the sinking of the Titanic only to die a few months later from pneumonia. So at the age of twenty-one Helen had had to adjust her dreams and plans to accommodate the needs of a twelve-year-old boy.

  “Jackson isn’t a stranger,” she said now. “And it was your rickety old ladder he fell from, Will, your garage he was helping to build.”

  “He should go home to Montreal,” said my dad. “He should be in touch with his parents about this.”

  “Maybe there’s a rift between them,” said Helen. “Maybe they’re estranged.”

  “He’s too young to be estranged from his parents,” Dad said.

  “You know better than that, Will.”

  They both looked at me then as if there was some deep dark secret about familial estrangement that I wasn’t supposed to know about.

  This fight didn’t need me. I gnawed away on my drumstick.

  “I’m going to broach it with him,” said my dad. “The idea of him speaking to his folks, going home. I could front him a little money if need be.”

  They were quiet for a while as we dealt in our own ways with the food on our plates.

  “What about Benoit?” Dad said quietly.

  “Benoit can stay in the tent until the garage is finished and then go or stay as he pleases. He isn’t our worry. Jackson is.”

  My dad didn’t like the set-up Helen had in mind; he didn’t like it one bit. But he looked up to his older sister and I think he knew deep in his heart that it was the right thing to do. First, though, he insisted on discussing with Jackson the possibility of his heading back east to his family.

  Outside the dining room window I could see Benny sitting at the picnic table with his supper in front of him. His eating alone out there seemed wrong somehow, but I knew now wasn’t the time to mention it. One stranger at a time.

  In the days after Jackson’s accident Benny stayed very silent except for his hammering. He went into more trances than usual. I guess he was looking harder than ever for a fissure to slip through that would free him, however briefly, from his difficult life.

  The three of us went to the hospital after supper: Dad, Aunt Helen, and me.

  We let my dad talk first.

  Jackson did not want to go home.

  “I can’t go back home yet,” he said. “I need to complete what I started.” He didn’t elaborate on what that was and none of us asked. Good manners, I guess. Surely it wasn’t work on the garage or hard labour in the sugar beet fields that he cared about finishing.

  It seemed to me as though he was trying to prove something to someone, his parents maybe, someone back home who had perhaps accused him of being less than who he was supposed to be. He wanted to show someone what he was made of. A girl? An employer? That was my current theory. Or maybe he didn’t want the life that a wealthy background offered him.

  He finally coughed up that he lived with his mum in Westmount and that his dad was dead. He had died the previous winter from a massive heart attack. That was as far as he would go. He knew his broken arms changed things drastically, but he said he would rather live with his broken arms in a hobo jungle than go home before he had done what he’d set out to do.

  “What exactly is that, Jackson?” asked my aunt. Yay, Helen! I could feel all of our ears perking up.

  But Jackson didn’t respond. In fact, he closed his eyes and for a moment I thought he had drifted off to sleep.

  My dad shook his head slightly from side to side. “We need to contact your mother, Jackson She at least needs to know what’s happened to you.” He spoke in a louder than usual voice.

  “She’s not well,” said Jackson.

  When he saw the look on my dad’s face he quickly added, “She has lots of help.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to insist, Jackson. You’re only seventeen.”

  “Yes, all right.” He recited the Montreal telephone number. My dad scrambled for a pencil to write it down. He had one in his shirt pocket, along with a tiny leatherbound pad of paper with his initials on it.

  “I should mention that my mother wasn’t there when I left.”

  “What do you mean she wasn’t there?” asked my dad.

  “She sometimes goes to the hospital for extended stays.”

  No one knew what to say to this, but finally Jackson continued. “She’s mentally ill, my mum. She goes to a sanitarium sometimes when she gets really bad.”

  “I see,” said my dad. “Do you have any older brothers or sisters, Jackson?”

  “No, sir.”

  A nurse came in to plump Jackson’s pillows and ask him if he needed anything and that gave us all a chance to partially digest this new information. When she left, Aunt Helen began to present her case for Jackson staying on with us in the house.

  My dad leapt up from his chair.

  “Stop, Helen!” he interrupted. “At least till I’ve spoken to…someone in Montreal.”

  He left the room then for a few minutes, maybe to talk to someone at the nurses’ station, maybe just to cool down; I don’t know.

  Helen kept on.

  At first Jackson argued against staying with us.

  “I couldn’t,” he said.

  “Nonsense!” said Helen. “What else are you going to do if you won’t go home? Stay in the hospital? They’re likely to insist that you go home.”

  The reality of what it would be like must have sunk in as the nurses bustled around him taking care of his every need.

  “Would you feel more comfortable if I hauled my nurse cap out of storage?” Helen asked.

  Jackson smiled. “No, you don’t have to do
that. But…”

  “Don’t worry, Jackson,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “What about Mr. Palmer?” he said.

  “You leave him to me,” said Helen.

  Whatever situation Jackson left behind must be seriously untenable, I thought, for him to entertain the idea of staying with us and allowing Aunt Helen to help him with his private business. And any worries he had about putting us out and withstanding my dad’s judgments also seemed to pale in comparison. He was very definite about his mission away from home. Whether it was something he was running from or running to, was impossible to say.

  It occurred to me that he might be more comfortable with a man looking after him, like, say, Benoit, but he blanched when I suggested it.

  The last thing he said before we left him was, “I’ll pay board. I insist on paying room and board.”

  When we got home my dad called the number Jackson had given him. A woman answered the phone. She introduced herself as Mrs. Dunning, the housekeeper, and said that Mrs. Shirt was not at home. When my dad said he had news about Jackson, the housekeeper kept my dad waiting while she went to confer with someone. The butler? The cook?

  Talking on the telephone all the way to Montreal was not cheap. My dad grew more impatient by the second. Finally he started shouting, “Hello!” down the line and Mrs. Dunning finally came back.

  “Is Jackson all right?” she asked.

  Dad explained about his situation at our house and Jackson’s broken arms and he left our number with her. Mrs. Dunning confided that Mrs. Shirt was in a “rest home” indefinitely. She said that she would convey the message to the family lawyer.

  “Thank God it’s just his arms,” she went on.

  That struck Helen and me as odd when my dad related what she’d said after he’d hung up in frustration.

  “Maybe she’s glad it’s just his arms because everything else going on in that house is infinitely worse than broken arms,” said my dad. “That’s what it sounds like to me. Imagine her saying she would pass the message on to the family lawyer!”

  “Perhaps the family lawyer is also a family friend,” said Helen.

  “Perhaps,” said my dad.

  No one called back.

  The next day Helen and I prepared the spare room for Jackson: aired the mattress and the bedspread in the still of early morning during a lull between dusty winds, fitted the bed with clean sheets, chose a few books we thought might interest him. We even put a vase of poppies on the dresser. Helen fetched his knapsack from the tent and rested it at the end of the bed. The knapsack tempted me with its plump contents and secret folds.

  That evening, Helen went to the church to help organize tables for a rummage sale. Dad was in the backyard with Benoit. I could hear their hammers and the odd pocket of conversation. I didn’t catch much.

  Dad: Blah, Mrs. Shirt seems to be blah, blah…

  Benoit: He has not blah, blah…about his life blah…We mostly talk about blah, blah….

  My dad was obviously trying to pump Benoit for information about the Shirts, but Benoit either had little to give up or he was good at keeping things to himself. I suspected a bit of both.

  After I finished doing the dishes I went upstairs and stared at Jackson’s knapsack through the open door of his room. There was a tear in the new material that needed sewing up. He wouldn’t get very far without losing something, the state it was in. That would be my excuse if I got caught entering the room and emptying the knapsack out on the bedspread: mending intentions.

  It was mostly clothes that made up the bulk. The other contents were few. There were two pocket books that looked to have a western flavour — cowboy stories. And a tattered bible. I opened it to the cover page and found this inscription: To Jackson, from Mummy, 1924. Maybe she gave it to him the year he headed off to school with the Jesuits. He didn’t seem like a bible reader now, but carrying the book with him didn’t necessarily mean that he was. He may just have wanted to bring something of his mother with him, odd duck though she seemed to be. It sounded possible from what Jackson had said that she was a full-fledged lunatic.

  One page stuck out a little further than the others and when I examined it I found that it wasn’t a page at all, but a photograph of a slender young boy that was tucked in for safekeeping. His hair was slicked back from his sad delicate features and he was dressed in his Sunday best. A thin current of recognition zigged through my brain. Was it Jackson in earlier times?

  I turned the picture over and found the same writing that inscribed the bible: “Bertram” (1935), it read. It must be Jackson’s younger brother, I thought. He hadn’t said he didn’t have any younger brothers or sisters, just older. Bert. Bert Shirt! No wonder he had a sad look about his eyes. That couldn’t be an easy name to live with. What had his parents been thinking when they named him? And why on earth was his name in quotation marks?

  The rest of the stuff was uninteresting: clothes, hankies, dull pencils, a notebook with no writing in it, cigarette papers, tobacco, two packages of ready-made cigarettes, a comb, shaving gear, an old Juicy Fruit wrapper, a package of Sen-sen, a toothbrush. I stuffed it all back into the knapsack along with the cowboy books. Then I looked at the photograph a little longer before placing it back inside the bible and the bible inside the knapsack.

  There was something weird about that little boy besides his name. And those quotation marks bothered me. I wondered what Bert was doing while his family disappeared around him. Was he in Mrs. Dunning’s care? I couldn’t ask Jackson or he’d know I’d been snooping.

  Chapter 9

  Benny took off just one day after Jackson was released from the hospital. The garage was finished except for the paint and my dad didn’t really want to pay someone for painting that he could do himself; he enjoyed painting. Benny stuck to his original plan of heading out to Alberta for the sugar beets. It was decided that he would come back for his friend in four weeks’ time.

  My dad gave Benny some cash and, speaking with a French-Canadian accent, wished him well. He didn’t hear himself do the accent and denied it when I pointed it out. But it was something he always did. At the butcher shop he spoke like an eastern European with very good English, like Mr. Fortensky, the man behind the counter. It was a funny thing about my dad, the way he fell into another person’s way of speaking. It was as though he wasn’t sure where he ended and the next person began.

  Jackson didn’t have polio when he came home, just the two casts up past his elbows. He spent very little time in his room; he wasn’t sick, after all. And he was a young man full of energy, so he mostly used his room for sleep, like the rest of us.

  Sometimes I didn’t think I could bear the wait until I saw him again: the overnight hours, my time at work, any few minutes when he left a room before he walked back into it again. My whole being would concentrate itself on the future moment when he would again fill my vision. My head ached with anticipation and my body squashed in on itself.

  We played checkers. He told me which man to move and I moved it for him. He was good at checkers. And I read to him, mostly Thomas Hardy. He listened carefully and watched me as I read.

  Unlike Benny’s eyes, Jackson’s seemed to shine from within. I guess it was that the light somehow entered his eyes and caught specks of gold on his irises. I couldn’t figure that out, still can’t, the way light changes from one set of eyes to the next.

  It was a little unnerving at first, getting used to the warm light from his eyes falling all over me. But I got to like it. I prepared myself for the readings — made sure my face was shining clean in spite of my new ideas about dirt. It was easy to get a grimy face during those hot damp days when even the sun was obscured by dust. I wanted him to admire me.

  We talked, too, about high school and college (he wanted a break in between the two), songs from the radio (we both liked “Summertime”), broken bones we’d had. We talked about who was a worse prime minister, Bennett or King, and about Jackson’s parents. He told me that
his dad had been a lot older than his mum and that he had been a big shot with the Canadian Pacific Railway. And he said that his mum should be permanently locked up in an insane asylum. Life at his home had become way harder to take after his dad had died.

  “My mum no longer tries at all,” he said. “She doesn’t try at all.”

  Some of the things he told me were lies; I was sure of it. I think the lies were just to make him seem more worldly to himself and to me. He hinted at experiences with older girls and women, experiences I was almost certain he hadn’t had. If it was true, why didn’t he at least try to kiss me? Was I so unappealing? I would have helped.

  I told him about my sister. He was interested in Sunny, in what had become of her. We speculated on that and we touched on the worst things that could happen.

  He said that what was going on with him right now was pretty bad, not being able to do anything for himself and all.

  That’s when I told him that my mother had killed herself the summer when Sunny was kidnapped.

  He turned white, as though every ounce of blood had left his head and gone south.

  “That’s so much worse than my broken arms, I feel embarrassed having complained about them. And you folks are being so kind to me during it all. It can’t even compare.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

  Although I must say I was a little surprised that he mentioned his arms after my Sunny story. Surely Sunny’s plight, in itself, was much more devastating than his paltry broken bones that were going to heal completely. I hoped that I hadn’t told him about my mother in a one-upmanship kind of way. It seemed a terrible way to use her and I regretted it.