A Good House

by Bonnie Burnard

  It wasn’t brass like a show bell but the more lowly cast iron. The dull pewter sheen had been fouled here and there with the crusty smear of bird droppings, but it was nevertheless a beautiful thing. Its weight was self-evident, it was three feet across at the base. The clapper was the size of a softball. Bill wasn’t convinced anyone would want to harm the bell, the town council had vowed to keep it and they’d said the siren would not in any way interfere with its workings, but sometimes people got wacky, spur-of-the-moment ideas, sometimes people had to be tamed down a little. He thought he’d just stand around quietly for an hour or so and watch out for the bell.

  Like the library and the churches, the Town Hall had been built to be taken seriously. The windows and doors and roof line were not elaborate but purposeful, symmetrical, calming. There was a substantial cornerstone and intricate although not ostentatious brickwork around the double front doors and at all the corners and up under the eaves. There were generous concrete steps with sturdy balustrades and, on each side of these, chained-off space and good, regularly renewed soil for tidy beds of geraniums and snaps and pansies.

  Inside the Town Hall there was an office on the main floor where people paid their taxes and complained about storm sewers, and another office where the town constable kept a desk and a couple of overstuffed filing cabinets and where he might be reached by telephone if he wasn’t in the barbershop or walking up and down Front Street, gossiping. There were four jails cells which were cleaned occasionally but rarely used. There was a two-stall washroom which for many years was made available to kids who’d got caught too far from home.

  The auditorium up on the second floor held thirty rows of shiny, hard, dark brown chairs with squeaky flip-up seats. The rows of chairs were attached to runners and these runners were designed to be bolted to the floor, but they were not bolted because sometimes they had to be removed in an afternoon and stacked at the sides of the hall for a demonstration of some kind or a crowd too large to be seated or a big dance, although now the dances were usually held in the Memorial Arena, which had been built down near the fairgrounds. The new dance floor in the arena was top-of-the-line hardwood and it had been constructed right at ground level, which meant a lot less disconcerting spring when there was a big crowd. There was a raised platform for a five-piece band and on the platform an upright piano which had been purchased the year before with the proceeds from a raffle on a humble Christmas turkey.

  The arena was the newest public structure in town. Since the war, all across the province dozens of memorial arenas had gone up because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger. Through the months of fund-raising and construction both of Stonebrook’s newspapers gave a running account of activities, and when the doors were finally thrown open the editors proudly put the total value at fifty thousand dollars, careful to include in their valuation loads of gravel and electrical supplies delivered without an invoice, all the cash donations, large and small, some of these sent by expatriates from as far away as California or Calgary, and freely offered manual labour tagged at seventy-five cents an hour. Bill Chambers had taken Patrick and Paul over with him several times to mix cement or haul lumber, and Sylvia and Daphne had spent a few evenings pounding nails. Fifty thousand dollars was still substantial money in 1952. You could build a perfectly adequate house for under six thousand; you could get yourself a loaded Cadillac like Doc Cooper’s for somewhere around four thousand.

  * * *

  THE INSTALLATION PEOPLE from Sarnia had turned out to be pros. And not one of the men who assembled that morning had mentioned the old cast-iron bell one way or the other, the talk was all about the siren. But nevertheless Bill was glad he’d gone. It had been something to see.

  In just under two hours, including a half-hour break for coffee and banter and bran muffins hot from the oven of the bakeshop across the street, the men had the siren securely mounted and wired in and set to go. Bill didn’t stay around for coffee. He couldn’t spend the entire morning guarding the tower bell. By the time the guy in charge was ready to give the siren its first test run, shortly before ten, Bill was at his job at the hardware store, patiently trying to get two confusing lumber invoices sorted out with the steadfast bookkeeper, Margaret Kemp.

  Sylvia Chambers heard the siren’s first wail, pausing with her hands on her hips over the long bed of tulips that lined the far side of the driveway, wondering about the possibility of peonies.

  Patrick Chambers was at his desk at the back of the room over at the high school, sitting behind Murray McFarlane, conjugating aloud the Latin verb “to win” with the rest of the university-bound grade tens.

  Daphne in grade seven and Paul in grade six were standing out in the dusty fenced playground with all the other kids from all the other grades, listening. After their principal had got the courtesy call from Norma Fawcett up at the town office he had walked from classroom to classroom to forewarn his teachers, and as they stood in the playground listening many of these teachers were preparing a brief, impromptu civics lesson: the purpose and function of a Town Hall, how people must work together in communities, for progress, for safety, for the good of the group as a whole. Most of the kids were quiet, their arms at their sides and their faces upturned as if such a sound was something that came from the sky.

  Two hours later, when the tower bell chimed twelve just as it had the day before and every other previous day, Bill was already out on Front Street. If he could manage it, he usually left the hardware store a few minutes before noon because he liked to hear the sound of the bell clearly, in the outside air.

  With a dinner of pork chops and last year’s apple jelly and mashed potatoes and creamed corn set to go the minute they all came in the door, Sylvia stood on the back step taking the last of the clothes off the line, snapping and folding shirts and pants and aprons and pyjamas and nighties and underwear, dropping them into the wicker basket at her feet. She had guessed right, it had been a good breezy morning for wash. She could smell the morning in the clothes.

  Patrick had split off from his friends to walk the last few blocks from the high school alone. As he walked, conscientiously planting exactly two steps in each new square of cement, he was trying once more to successfully tell himself a story in Latin. The story had to be about war because almost all the verbs and nouns he had learned that year from the dour Mr. Stewart lent themselves best to war.

  Paul and Daphne, each of them having just received a quickly conceived civics lesson, were walking the few blocks side by side, not a word shared, their coming home together unusual because long-legged Paul walked so fast. He liked to be where he was going now, liked to eat dinner quickly so he could get himself back to the playground to join his rowdy friends. Daphne had to take two or three steps for each one of his but that was all right, she could do that.

  Spotting the kids, Bill had stood on the sidewalk at the front of the house to wait as they approached from their different directions and when they all came around the corner of the house Sylvia stopped folding clothes to watch them. She liked to watch her kids come and go, she did it regularly. Occasionally, in the hope that this might allow her to see them differently, maybe as other people saw them, just as they were, she tried to pretend that they didn’t belong to her at all.

  Paul came up the steps first, taking them double, six steps in three. On an April whim he stopped on the porch to open the door so his mother could go into the kitchen first and then Patrick slammed into him and he was stuck holding the door open for Daphne and Bill. As soon as his father was clear, Paul threw Patrick off to beat him into the kitchen. There was a time when he always lost to Patrick, to his confidence rather than his strength, but those days were over.

  They all took their places at the table and waited until Sylvia left the stove and removed her apron to sit down with them. This waiting was a rule, one of very few. Bill lifted the bowl of potatoes toward Daphne to start things off and after all the food had been around the table he passed his plate down
to Sylvia so she could cut up his chop and asked, of everyone, “And where were you when the siren went off?”

  Each of them told their stories in turn and then Paul, reaching for the bottle to pour himself a most-days-discouraged third glass of milk but thinking about the playground, about who might be back there already, said, “What’s it matter?”

  “It’s just a habit you could get into,” Bill said. “Remembering where you are.”

  * * *

  NEITHER THE CHAMBERS kids nor any of their friends gave much thought to remembering, or to the development of habits. They were content to keep pushing forward through undisciplined time, and anyway, habits were what you caught hell for, biting your nails to the quick, picking at scabs to keep the sore going, sneaking down to Stonebrook Creek in your pyjamas to watch the moonlight shiver on the dark water. The kids used their time to do the things they needed to do. They occupied the town on their own terms.

  Most of the adults believed that as long as no one got any big ideas, and if everyone kept a general eye out, the worst that could happen would be a dog bite or a bee sting or a superficial slash from some broken glass left lying around in an alley somewhere. They did not want to load the kids up with the burden of possible but highly unlikely danger because most of them disapproved of exaggeration generally. Nothing good came from blowing things out of proportion. Right after the war a partially deaf drifter who had not been able to find steady work had hanged himself under the grandstand down at the racetrack, and no one had forgotten the day he was found and cut down, but most people had decided that, as bad as it was, his decision was pretty much the kind of thing that had nothing to do with anyone, least of all the kids.

  As well as the Town Hall and the arena, the kids were familiar with miles and miles of train track and with the smoky, always burning fires over at the dump, with the canning factory and the Vinegar Works and the foundry, the stores on Front Street, the racetrack, the churches, the Rotary Park, the library. They chased after pea wagons on their way to the canning factory, pulled at the tangled vines to feed on pods of sweet new peas. Their pockets empty but their heads crammed with schemes, they drifted into stores, left if they were told to, returned the next week entirely uninsulted.

  And they knew the intricacies of Bald Hill and Stonebrook Creek. In the winter, the hill was called Toboggan Hill because what could be more enticing than the threat of a good soaking at the end of a fast ride? The wide toboggan run, pristine under the bright haze of a winter sun, was flanked on either side by tall, descending, close-set spruce and fir and pine and the new snow fell from the hovering clouds to a smooth, blinding whiteness. The kids did not go to the hill so regularly in the spring after the snow disappeared, but when they did wander across it, taking a shortcut, if they saw that the evergreens that lined the sides of their toboggan run had tried to reproduce themselves, if seedlings had taken root, they just ripped them out.

  They followed Stonebrook Creek through unfenced backyards and out into the countryside hunting for mysteries, for bloodsuckers or two-headed toads or unfamiliar skeletons or, please just once more, a boxed-up, thrown-out stash of dirty magazines.

  It was Daphne who discovered the dirty magazines. Wandering alone one morning along Stonebrook Creek a mile out of town she had spotted something new, a box that hadn’t been there the last time, and she’d crawled down and stretched out over the bank to pull the box open. Patrick and his friends soon took the magazines away from her but this find did provide Daphne with a brief reputation, a bit of status. She’d got the boys something they wanted.

  They had all run back to the creek together, Daphne in the lead, and when they shoved her aside and knelt down to grab at the soggy women in black panties, their frantic enthusiasm made her stomach quiver, although she knew better than to let on. She just left them to it, walked away whistling.

  It was not unusual for the kids to learn something important from the carelessness of adults. Most of them eavesdropped with considerable skill, easily recognizing the cadence, the tone of voice that indicated a desire for privacy. Given the opportunity of a morning alone at home or a neighbour’s house left empty, many of them could snoop through a closet or a chest of drawers without a trace of remorse.

  In spite of the efforts of their teachers, most of what they learned about the outside world they learned Friday or Saturday night at the movie theatre, a sloped, narrow space wedged between Taylor’s Fine China and the Legion, with tight rows of hard seats and dusty red velvet drapes framing the big screen. War movies were big in 1952, and jungle movies and Westerns. You could usually count on a tough but beautiful, big-breasted, dark-haired woman the hero couldn’t bring himself to love and, in the Westerns, close to the end, a gunfight or a fistfight on the top of a fast-moving train. Good guys didn’t like to talk much and bad guys died slowly, often in quicksand, their repentance loud but useless because they could never be saved. Even the bad guys themselves knew no one would save them.

  The kids were haphazard in their play and quietly disorganized. Their eager enthusiasms died as quickly as they had been born. They got to know each other on their own.

  There were tough kids and kids not nearly tough enough, but most of them were assumed to be somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. If there were quarrels or fights, and occasionally there were, these were not reported back to parents because parents never did anything anyway. Parents couldn’t save you. When kids came home muddy and soaking wet or bleeding from an unusual wound or cranky or worried or defeated, there was no great fuss. A dish of ice cream, a bowl of cereal, a joke, a bath, a bandage, a good night’s sleep, these were the solutions.

  * * *

  PATRICK AND DAPHNE and Paul Chambers came together in play just the one summer, the summer of the circus. Along with a couple of dozen other kids they had been seduced by Murray McFarlane, who had previously been more or less invisible to them, negligible. For no reason anyone could have named, Murray was the summer’s sudden leader.

  After his grade-ten exams, as a reward, Murray’s parents had taken him to Detroit where they had shopped for clothes and eaten in restaurants and gone to see a Hollywood film called The Greatest Show on Earth. Home from Detroit with the dialogue almost entirely forgotten but the big-top scenes still throbbing in full Technicolor through his brain, Murray remembered and imagined and dreamed and then carefully described to the others, at first just a few of them sitting on the Town Hall steps, a circus, the possibility of a circus. In spite of the fact that he didn’t play hockey or ball, or perhaps because he didn’t, Murray was prepared to claim his time in the sun.

  Patrick was soon to be fifteen, Daphne was twelve and Paul was eleven. Their separate clusters of friends, normally grouped according to small but significant age gaps and assumed to be distinct for good reason, were joined by Murray into one mass of kids, eager and serious, performers and workers alike cooperating for the larger cause.

  Murray was quite a bit taller than the other kids, with a long torso and gangly arms and skinny, long-boned legs. And like his notorious Uncle Brady, who had come home from Italy with just one eye and then died at a railway crossing too drunk to get his car door open, he was very badly coordinated. He was Patrick’s age but not in Patrick’s cluster. He usually roamed Stonebrook alone, attaching himself to other kids only when he felt the urge and then abruptly leaving them, as if he’d thought of something more important to do. They would see him wandering down along the creek or sitting on the Town Hall steps or sometimes up in the balcony at the arena, watching the game or, more usually, watching the crowd watch the game. Occasionally on a summer night, just as the sky got as dark as it was going to get, just before everyone had to start home, he would sit with them on the swings at the Rotary Park for a while and listen to the taunting innuendo and the dirty jokes. He could laugh easily when he was supposed to, when it was time. But he was quiet. He contributed nothing worth repeating or remembering.

  Murray’s comings and goings w
ere of no concern to Mrs. McFarlane, who was much older than the other mothers and who suffered from debilitating migraine headaches. He was just out somewhere, that’s what he told her and what she believed.

  After a few nights of talking on the Town Hall steps, certain now of his authority, Murray advised the other kids that if the circus was going to be any good, everyone would have to agree to do what they did best. He called the first meeting after supper one dreamy evening in late June under the water tower.

  Patrick Chambers’ friends, five boys at the mercy of growth spurts who represented the widest possible range of height, weight, intelligence, and confidence, were held together mostly by their skill with mockery. But they had been mesmerized by Murray, by his surprising ability to talk, to tell everyone exactly what could happen, what they could make happen. They’d heard about the meeting at the water tower and they turned up, took their positions just outside the circle of kids gathered tight around Murray, and before any of their repertoire of snide remarks had a chance to kick in they all had circus jobs, responsibilities assigned by Murray with a seriousness which was new to them and compelling in its novelty. They were caught up in the crucial early stages of planning and thus lost their momentum. A few of them had once or twice played at maturity, usually in response to some contrived expectation from a parent or some other adult, but this was different. They knew it and were ready for it.

  Daphne and her friends sat at Murray’s feet, their faces summertime brown, their sleeveless blouses lifted and tied up at their midriffs and their bright cotton shorts dusty, soiled since midmorning. Some of the younger girls, the ones who still wore braids or pigtails, were particularly untidy because girls this age were done up just once a day, by their mothers, right after breakfast. All of the girls huddled and squirmed on the packed dirt, begging for some important part to play. They understood that this could be their chance to shine, to wear flashy, glamorous outfits, to show people what they were really like, inside.