Liberty Street

by Dianne Warren

  “This house is our backup plan,” Frances’s mother tells her. She’s wearing rolled-up blue jeans and is halfway up a ladder in the kitchen with a paintbrush in her hand and a scarf on her head to protect her hair from the drips. “We can’t farm if your father goes blind as a bat. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  “I thought you said he wouldn’t go blind.”

  “He might. You’re old enough to understand that. Just don’t tell him what I said about the house, the backup plan. He says wild horses won’t get him into a house in town.”

  Frances doesn’t want to live in town either.

  “I’m bored,” she says.

  “We’re not here to play old maid, if that’s what you’re thinking. Walk to the playground if you like. Maybe you’ll see some schoolmates.”

  “I won’t,” Frances says. “Anyway, I don’t like them. I’ve told you.”

  “How do you know you don’t like them? You haven’t tried.”

  Frances puts on her coat and boots and goes outside.

  Across the street from the house and just beyond the unsold lots, there’s a little rise, and at the top of it is a shrine to Our Lady of the Hill, who is Mary, according to Frances’s mother. Mary is special to the Catholics, she says—the holy mother. The shrine consists of a fieldstone shelter with a neatly painted wooden Mary tucked into an alcove. It’s there, according to Frances’s mother, because a long time ago a young girl had a vision when she went to get the family’s milk cow. She had the vision three evenings in a row, and then her sick mother got better. Frances’s mother says the girl no doubt had been sick herself when she had the visions, and had seen Mary in a fever.

  The snow starts falling again, and when Frances gets to the top of the hill, she studies Mary in her house, looking out at the snow, she wonders how the visions work, whether the wooden Mary turns into the real Mary. Whether, if Frances were Catholic, Mary would speak to her, and if so what she would say.

  Frances knows about mazes from a library book and the idea comes to her to create a maze in the snow with Mary in the middle. She pretends there are hedges where her boot tracks are and wonders if she’d be able to find her way out of her own puzzle if the hedges were really there. She makes the maze in a circle around the hill and is just about at the bottom when she sees three boys from school watching her from the road. When Frances sees them coming toward her, she knows her maze is done for.

  “Hey, it’s Looney-Moony,” one of the boys says as they approach. He crosses himself before he joins the other two in stomping all over Frances’s paths in the snow. She knows there’s no point saying anything and leaves.

  “I hate boys,” Frances says when she gets inside the house.

  “That’s good,” her mother says. “Keep it that way for about another twenty years, or at least until you get a good education.”

  Her mother is always talking about education, as though it’s the answer to everything. There’s a health inspector who comes to check the barn and change the certificate on the wall of the sterile room, a woman, and after she’s gone Frances’s mother always says, “That could be you someday, Frances. A university education will get you a good job. I wish I’d had that chance.”

  Frances doesn’t want the job of inspecting cow barns.

  There’s a crow on a telephone pole outside the window. She can see his beak opening in a caw, but of course she can’t hear anything. It’s still too early in the spring for crows. She knows about camouflage. They should wait until after the snow is gone to come back, because a black crow on white snow is not good where nature is concerned.

  “I wonder if a magpie is partly white because of winter,” Frances says. She knows magpies stay year-round, at least some of them, and they don’t change colour like bush rabbits do.

  Her mother says, “Of course, you can always marry a farmer and work your fingers to the bone three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”

  “I wouldn’t marry a blind one,” Frances says.

  Her mother shakes her paintbrush at her and says, “You watch what you say about your father, young lady.” Pale yellow paint specks appear on the linoleum.

  She hadn’t meant to criticize her father. She looks at the crow, but then she starts to feel sick.

  “I might throw up,” she says.

  Her mother looks at her and then jumps down from the ladder. “You’re white as a sheet,” she says, grabbing Frances with one hand and setting down the loaded paintbrush. She runs her to the bathroom and holds Frances’s head over the toilet, but nothing happens.

  They return to the kitchen and her mother gets up on her ladder again. “You’re sure you’re not sick?” she says. “It’s flu season.”

  There’s a bag of Fig Newtons on the table and Frances takes one to prove that she’s fine. Her mother’s empty teacup is on the table by the cookies, along with several old copies of the Yellowhead newspaper. The top one now has a splat of white paint on it from when her mother shook her brush at her. She picks up her mother’s cup and reads her tea leaves. “You’re going to kiss a stranger,” she says. It’s the only thing she knows about tea leaves.

  There’s an article about Silas Chance on the front page of the old paper, so Frances sits down at the table to read it. It says lots of things she already knows, but there are a few new details. There were tire tracks at the scene, as though someone had stopped and then drove on again, and footprints. A person might have left his vehicle to see what he’d hit. And Silas hadn’t died right away—there was evidence suggesting he’d tried to get to town for help and hadn’t made it. The police are asking anyone with information to call in. Silas’s sister, whose name is Darlene Cyr, is also pleading for someone to come forward. She says that her little brother was a good man and a war veteran. She says that leaving him without help is the same as murder, and she will not rest until she knows who killed him, and someone out there knows.

  “What are you reading?” Frances’s mother asks.

  “About Silas,” Frances says. “His sister’s name is Darlene Cyr.”

  “His sister has gone a little crazy with grief,” her mother says, getting down from the ladder to take the newspaper away from Frances. “She needs to put this behind her for her own good. Anger causes cancer.” She puts the paper on the floor and plunks her can of paint on it and then taps down the lid, being careful not to splatter paint.

  Anger causes cancer? What?

  “Are we going home now?” Frances asks. “I want to go home.”

  “Soon,” her mother says. “I have to clean up.”

  Frances puts on her outdoor clothes again and goes outside to wait. There’s no point going up the hill to check on the maze. Instead, she walks down Liberty Street and away from town, in the direction of home. She walks in the ditch and pretends it’s a path in a maze. A crow flies along the road in front of her (is it the same one?) and she pretends it’s a magic bird that can lead her to the exit of the maze. Or maybe the crow is really Mary, and she’s seeing a vision. It starts to snow harder, and it gets more difficult to see in front of her, but Frances thinks if she just follows the ditch she’ll get home. Then her mother’s car pulls up alongside her, and even though her mother is angry, Frances is happy to get in because her ears are cold and her feet are getting numb.

  “What if this snow had turned into a whiteout, Frances? Or what if someone came along and hit you because they couldn’t see you?”

  “You mean like Silas?” Frances asks.

  “Yes, but please, let’s not talk about that anymore.”

  Frances thinks about Silas’s sister saying, “Someone out there knows.” It must be true.

  “Was it snowing the night Silas died?” Frances asks.

  “No,” her mother says. “Well, maybe. Maybe that was it.”

  The land between town and the farm is a mix of bush and cultivated fields. Frances looks out the window and watches a snowy field flash by, and then a line of trees, a push-up pile from someone’s rece
nt clearing, another field, a frozen slough, another line of bush. Everything passes in a blur of falling snowflakes that look as though they’re travelling sideways, parallel to the ground, and not down from the sky.

  She’s wondering why this is when her mother slams on the brakes and the car fishtails and stops, and Frances almost ends up on the floor. When she looks out the front window, there’s a huge bull moose not more than a few feet in front of them. Its back is white with snow, and it’s in the middle of the road, staring at them. Everything is perfectly still and quiet, even the car, because it has stalled.

  “Are you all right?” Frances’s mother asks in an almost-whisper. Frances nods. Then her mother says, again in a whisper, “Don’t move,” which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Where is she going to move to? Still, Frances finds herself holding her breath. When the moose turns and trots into the ditch and away across the field, she watches its long legs lifting and reaching until it disappears, floating, into the white world outside the car windows.

  “Well, that was close,” Frances’s mother says, this time in her normal voice. “Look at my hands. They’re still shaking. I have no idea where it came from. I almost hit it.”

  That night, Frances throws up in her bed and it turns out she really is sick. She has a stomach flu that lasts a week, and then her mother gets it and can’t finish the painting in the Liberty Street house until they’re both better. By the time she’s able to get back to work on the house, the temperature has dropped again and Easter break is over and Frances doesn’t want to walk from school to the house, so she takes the bus home as usual. She wonders what would have happened if she and her mother had hit the moose, and whether they would be dead now, the poor moose too, and her mother’s car all smashed up and sitting on the Texaco lot next to Dooley’s burned-out truck. She, Frances, disappearing the way the moose had, only really gone, not just hidden in trees and snow.

  She has a dream about Kaw-Liga that night, skating around on her father’s slough. Frances is cleaning the snow off the ice and she keeps hitting wet patches where the ice is thin. Then Kaw-Liga hits one and falls into the slough, and he’s gone.

  Like Uncle Vince.

  Like Silas Chance.

  But not Dooley Sullivan. Word circulates a few days later that Dooley has come home to the hospital in Elliot, and without telling anyone what she is doing, Frances takes a quarter from her piggy bank and goes to the drugstore at noon and buys a get well card.

  “Who’s this for?” the clerk asks and she says no one.

  She sits on the bench in front of the bank and writes, carefully, To Dooley, I hope you feel better soon, and signs it, Frances Mary Moon. On the envelope, she writes Dooley’s name, and then she walks to the hospital and hands the card to the nurse at the reception desk, who looks at the name and at Frances, and then takes Frances’s hand and squeezes it and says, “Thanks, sweetie. I’ll be sure to give this to him.”

  She’s late getting back to school and tells the teacher she was “running an errand.” It’s a phrase she’s heard her mother use. It works.

  She gets out her speller and tries to concentrate on the new words the teacher is writing on the blackboard.

  Thankful that not everyone dies.

  3. Dooley’s Window

  FRANCES’S MOTHER IS on the telephone, trying to rent Uncle Vince’s house again, even though the last renter—an evangelical pastor named Billy Helper who’d lived in the house for a year—ran off in his flea-bitten fur coat before Alice got a chance to throw him out on his ear for writing her several bad cheques. The Not-So-Reverend Helper had generally caused a commotion in town when he failed to heal the many unfortunates who had given him Sunday dinner and what he called “donations.” He’d offered to lay his hands on Frances’s father and heal his failing eyesight, but Basie had said no thanks, and then later, when Alice said she’d found the offer presumptuous, he said, “I imagine we should just turn a blind eye to it,” which Frances thought was hilarious.

  What Frances hadn’t liked about Billy Helper—besides the fact that he resembled a mangy hulking animal in the fur coat—was that he called her Girlene no matter how many times she said her name was Frances. She likes to think that he was the one who hit Silas Chance on the highway, even though she knows it isn’t true. Billy Helper didn’t own a car. After Frances’s mother gets off the phone with the potential new tenant, she reports the gist of the conversation as this:

  “I’m an old woman but not ancient, don’t get that idea. Does the house have stairs?”

  “One bedroom upstairs under the peak,” Alice said. “But the main bedroom and bathroom are on the ground floor. Four steps up to the front door with a good handrail. It’s a quaint house—a cottage, really.”

  “I’m quaint myself, so that much is a match.”

  Then Mrs. Esme Bigalow—“Call me Esme, I insist”—told Alice that she’d recently had her hip replaced and found herself disinclined to remain in her own home in Yellowhead, which had the bedrooms and bathroom upstairs, not to mention a roof that needed new shingles and a yard the size of Buckingham Palace. She needed a new place to live before winter set in. She liked small towns. She’d grown up on a farm and taught for years in a country school.

  “You sound trustworthy,” she said to Alice. “Is there any reason I shouldn’t rent your house?”

  “Do you drive a car? It’s a bit of a walk to Main Street.”

  “Walk, walk, walk, the doctor tells me. He says it will keep the Grim Reaper in the hold. I don’t know where he got that idea.”

  “The house is fully furnished,” Alice said. “Wouldn’t you want your furniture?”

  “Sick of the lot of it.”

  Alice reluctantly agreed to rent her the house—reluctantly because the whole thing sounded a little fishy to her. Why would an old lady want to move to Elliot?

  A few days later, a cheque for three months’ rent arrives in the mail along with a letter from Mrs. Bigalow explaining that it will take her that long to get her house organized and her hip rehabilitated. Alice is impressed that the letter is neatly written, and that Mrs. Bigalow hasn’t asked for the house to be held, rent-free, for that period of time. Maybe she’d been wrong to be skeptical.

  But toward the end of September, a week before Mrs. Bigalow is scheduled to move into the house, another call comes from her at suppertime. Frances and her father listen to her Alice’s side of the conversation with interest because they can tell some complicated negotiating is going on. It begins with “Oh dear, that is a problem,” and “I’m not sure what I can do to help you out,” and somewhere in the middle Alice says, “Well, I suppose I do have some shopping.” The conversation ends with her scribbling directions on a piece of paper and saying, “All right, then. I’ll be there on Saturday, early in the afternoon,” and then the receiver goes back on its cradle.

  The look on her face means she’s agreed to do something she doesn’t want to—that is, provide transportation for the new tenant and her possessions.

  On Saturday, Frances and her mother drive to Yellowhead to collect the Widow Bigalow, which is what Basie has been calling her. They shop first at the bulk grocery store so Alice can stock up on baking supplies, and then they go to the A&W drive-in and order a Mama Burger and a Teen Burger, even though Frances is only ten and not close to being a teenager (so stop pretending that you are). A girl brings their order on a tray and hangs it on Alice’s driver’s-side window, and after the girl is gone, Alice says, “That’s what university education is for—to keep you from jobs like this.”

  After the A&W, they follow Mrs. Bigalow’s directions and find her sitting on a wooden rocking chair in her empty living room with her cane across her lap, her suitcases and belongings around her, and an orange cat in a wire carry case.

  She introduces herself and tells Frances to call her Esme.

  “You call her Mrs. Bigalow,” her mother says.

  There’s a pickup truck loaded with furniture out front, and
for a moment Alice worries it might be Mrs. Bigalow’s furniture and she’s decided to take it with her, but it belongs to the new owners. Mrs. Bigalow won’t let them move it in until she’s gone. She says that even though she’s glad to be leaving, she doesn’t want to see anyone else’s possessions in her house. They load her boxes and suitcases into the car, and when only the rocking chair is left, Mrs. Bigalow says she’d like to take it along, it’s the chair she rocked her babies in, and how can Alice say no to that. The driver of the pickup sees her struggling with the chair and comes to help, and they decide the only place it will fit is the front if they slide the bench seat all the way back, so that’s where it goes and Frances gets in the back between Mrs. Bigalow and the cat. The neighbour’s dog barks at them the whole time they’re packing the car, and as they pull away from the house Mrs. Bigalow says, “I won’t miss that dog, that’s one thing.”

  “I bet the cat won’t either,” Frances says, poking her fingers into the cage. The cat spits at her.

  Alice says that she feels a bit ridiculous with only the rocking chair for company in the front seat. Then she asks Mrs. Bigalow about her family, and the new tenant tells them that she had two sons who’d both passed away. “The younger one signed up and was killed in the war,” she says. “My husband never got over that, and I don’t suppose the other boy did either. He developed a problem with the drink, and his liver killed him.”

  “That’s terrible,” Alice says. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Well, it was his own fault, wasn’t it? Men are foolish, I find.”

  “We got bombed in that war, in England,” Frances says. “In London.”

  “Not we, Frances,” her mother says. “You weren’t born yet. But yes, in the Blitz. We moved to Canada after the war.”