The Stubborn Season

by Lauren B. Davis

  She looked around, satisfied. She would tear down the ribbons and the mistletoe next.

  24

  Irene’s eyes snapped open to find her mother’s face hovering over hers, her lips nearly on top of her own. She looked like a feral cat trying to suck the breath out of a baby. Irene’s heart thumped.

  “Slain. Sacrificed,” Margaret hissed. “He was murdered by God for his sins. He was nailed to a cross and left for the crows to pick out his eyes. Crows are filthy.”

  “No, Mum, I’m sure that’s not it,” Irene said, struggling for words, struggling to decipher what her mother was talking about, for, although frightened, she was still soggy with sleep. Cautiously, she slipped out from underneath her mother’s face. She tried to speak normally. “Come and get some breakfast.”

  “I’m all right,” said her mother.

  “Yes. Of course you are.”

  “I don’t have to go to the bug-house.” Margaret tugged at the sleeve of Irene’s nightgown with her bandaged hands.

  “No, of course not.” She disentangled herself and put her robe on while her mother stood watching her. “Why don’t you go downstairs, Mum. I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “I’ll wait for you.”

  Irene went into the bathroom and ran the water so her mother, standing just on the other side of the door, would not listen to her urinating. She flushed, splashed water on her face and rinsed her mouth. I can’t take much more of this. She opened the door. Her mother stood there, arms wrapped around herself as though she were cold.

  “Where’s your robe, Mum? Get your robe.”

  Margaret dutifully walked back into her room and picked up her robe from where it lay crumpled on the floor. She put on her slippers. “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Yes, good. We’ll go have breakfast, shall we?” Irene went downstairs and the older woman followed like a beaten dog.

  Irene was heartened that her mother was talking now, even if she had scared the bejesus out of her. Margaret had been a passive zombie ever since the doctor had been by that night Irene came home to find the house near-wrecked and her mother huddled in a corner of the dining room, muttering “God is a bastard” and bleeding from her torn palms.

  The doctor had prescribed phenobarbital. “An effective treatment of anxiety. A teaspoon as necessary. But not too often. It can be addictive. We’ll see how she is in a week or so, shall we? And then, if there’s not much improvement, I think you may have to consider other options.”

  Irene had stayed home from the shop since then, for she didn’t trust her mother alone.

  “I heard the doctor,” Margaret said, looking up at Irene.

  “What did you hear?”

  “I heard him say I’d go to the bug-house.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “He said that.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “I won’t go there.”

  “No, of course not. You’ll be fine. You’re just tired, is all.”

  “Yes. I’m just tired.” Margaret put her elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. “My head hurts. It’s so hard. The fighting all the time.”

  “We’re not fighting.”

  “I’m fighting. I have to fight. I won’t go there. They’ll put needles in my head and I’ll die screaming. God’s crows will eat my flesh.”

  Irene shivered. “Oh, Mum, you won’t. It’ll be all right.”

  “Give me time, Irene. I’ll make her go away. I can make the dinners again.”

  Make who go away? “You can make dinner whenever you want.”

  “Don’t go away, Irene. Tell me you won’t go away.”

  Irene slammed the cupboard door harder than she meant to. Then she opened it and slammed it again. Again. It was a good, sharp, clean noise. “Goddamn it, Mum!” she shouted. “Stop it for just a minute, can’t you! Can’t you, please? For the love of God! Just stop asking me for every goddamn thing! I can’t take much more of this! Leave me alone!”

  Her hands were in fists. She swung around to look at her mother. Margaret’s bandaged hands were drawn up to her chest and her mouth and eyes were wide.

  “Aw, Mum. I’m sorry.” She went over, knelt down and took her mother’s hand. “I didn’t mean it. Don’t look like that. It’s all right.”

  “Why did he have to die? Why do they all go away? Everyone goes away.” Margaret’s eyes filled with tears again, just plain old ordinary grief and not the jagged edges of raving.

  “I don’t know, Mum. Look, I won’t leave you, but I have to get back to the store or we won’t have any money.” She stood up and pressed her fingers into her temples, trying to massage out the tension. “I have to get back to work.”

  “Yes. But stay with me today.”

  “I’ll stay today. Tomorrow, though …”

  “I can win soon. If you come home. Will you come home?”

  “Yes, Mum. I’ll come home.”

  “I think I need some medicine,” said Margaret, scratching the back of her hands.

  She spent most of the day in the living room, watching every move Irene made. Late in the afternoon she went up to her room and closed the door.

  Irene heard the chair being put under the handle.

  “Are you all right, Mum?” she called.

  “Yes. I need to be here. I’m all right.”

  Irene went back downstairs and tried to lose herself in a book, but found she couldn’t concentrate with her mother in the room overhead, crying and speaking as though bullying someone. She crept back upstairs, but before she reached the door her mother called out to her.

  “Irene, you’re not going to go out!”

  “No, Mum. I just want to make sure you’re all right.” Irene made an effort to sound cheerful.

  “Don’t leave the house. Stay in the house.” She sounded breathless.

  “I’m right here, Mum. Do you want to open the door?”

  “No. I’ll take my medicine. I’ll go to sleep.”

  Irene heard her mother getting into bed then, heard her taking her medicine, and then no more. She stood there until she heard her mother’s soft snoring and felt her own shoulders relax.

  On Wednesday, Margaret sat quietly. Irene hated to look at her face, it was so full of fear. Once when she wondered aloud what had happened to Uncle Rory, her mother yelled, “No, no! I don’t want to hear his name. Don’t say that name.”

  By Thursday, Margaret was well enough that Irene could go back to work. The next day she had taken a bath and put on clean clothes. She changed her clothes again today. She took less and less of the pink medicine, “the friendly sleep,” as she called it. Irene could see the effort it cost her, could see how every small step was hard won against the urge to slip back down the slope.

  Everything was going wrong, Irene thought. Harry first, of course, but she would not let herself think about that. Then the renters she had found for the upstairs rooms, a man and a woman and their two-year-old boy, nice people, she’d thought, until they did a midnight runner and took two of her kitchen chairs with them. And now this. Her mother so much worse again. Uncle Rory’s death. Irene had cried herself to sleep for three nights.

  She just had to know what had happened to him, although part of her was afraid of what she might find out. The mystery was a fish hook pulling at her skin. She took the scrap of paper out of her pocket. She made up her mind. As soon as her mother could stand being on her own a little longer, she would go and find him, if he was still there.

  25

  Irene had never been to Kensington. Of course, she was aware it existed, everyone knew of the Jewish market in Kensington, and it was just a mile or so from her own house, but it could have been on another continent completely. It wasn’t until she arrived nearer the neighbourhood and found herself with Jewish people right and left and all around her that she realized why David hadn’t told her his last name. Did he think she’d treat him differently if she knew? And would she have?

 
She walked along College Street to the intersection of Spadina. A woman walked toward her, pulling two heavily bundled-up boys along behind her. Her boys had little skullcaps on their heads and long curls on each side of their face.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  The woman looked her up and down. “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for the market area, for Baldwin Street, near Shoichet.”

  “Near what?”

  “Shoichet Street.”

  The woman laughed. “So now the chicken killer’s got his own street, heh? That’s a good one. But you ain’t looking for no shoichet, I’m thinking. I bet I know what you’re looking for, sure.”

  “I’m looking for a house owned by the Gutkind family.”

  “What you’re looking for I shouldn’t send you to, bad for you but good for business, yes? Fine. Your funeral. You go this way”—she pointed south—“three blocks, then you turn in, see? Then go one block. It’s in the lane, see, behind like. You ask, they’ll tell.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, darling. Don’t thank me.”

  Irene pulled her coat around her more tightly. It was getting dark quickly, and although the wind had died down, it was very cold. She walked in the direction the woman had indicated, but felt less sure of herself with every step.

  Soon she was in the midst of the market area. It was a narrow, labyrinthine network of streets and alleys. Even in the cold air, the smells were so strong she could taste them on her tongue. Chickens and rabbits and pigeons in cages, fish and rotting garbage, cooking cabbage and meat. The little tilting houses were pushed right up to the sidewalk, which was covered with pickle barrels and half-frozen rotting lettuce leaves and a steaming pile of what might have been chicken guts and newspapers written in an odd squiggly script. Children ran every which way, and junk dealers and vegetable sellers pushing carts hawked their wares in loud voices with words Irene didn’t understand. People looked at her and tried to get her to come into their shops. Mothers yelled at their children and children cried and old women stood in gaggles, laughing loudly, covering their mouths with their hands. Everywhere she looked there were bearded men in long dark coats and women with scarves on their heads and young boys with those long strange curls and bits of yarn hanging down from their jackets.

  Irene felt a little dizzy and tried to get her bearings. A boy stood near the entrance to an alley, stamping his feet and warming his hands. She held out the paper with the directions on it.

  He winked at her and pointed up the narrow lane. “What you want is up there.”

  “Up there? There’s a house there?”

  The boy gestured for her to hurry in.

  Her breathing was shallow and her heart pounded as she walked into the alley. It was a cul-de-sac, fenced in on three sides by the backs of the buildings. It was dark and dirty and smelled foul. Behind one small building two women stood talking, dead chickens dangling from their baskets.

  Irene felt sure the chicken house couldn’t be where David was staying. It must be the bigger house next door. She went up, but before she could knock, a stout woman with dark hair streaked grey opened the door.

  “Come on, get in out of the cold, darling,” she said.

  “I’m looking for—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know, we know.”

  Irene found herself in a small, warm kitchen. At the table sat two men, with glasses in their hands and a bottle on the table. Three small children sat on the soiled wooden floor near the stove, playing with some string and several jacks. A little girl put a jack in her mouth. Her brother slapped her arm and made her spit it out, and she began to cry.

  “What’s it gonna be?” said the woman.

  “I don’t think I’m in the right place,” said Irene. The men at the table were, if not drunk, certainly well on their way.

  “You want something to warm you up? I got something good. Real stuff, not bathtub stuff.”

  “I’m in the wrong place. I’m terribly sorry.”

  “You no want a drink?” said the woman, standing firmly in her path.

  “No, no, I thought I knew someone here. I’m awfully sorry. I won’t say anything. I promise!”

  “Who you know, sweetheart?”

  “David.”

  “David Hirsch?”

  “I don’t know, maybe, yes, probably.”

  “David upstairs.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Sure, sure, he and some of the boys they stay upstairs. Rent a nice clean place to sleep, heh? You want to see him, you go up. Go on, darling.” She pointed to a narrow flight of stairs.

  “Could you call him for me?”

  “Go on up, won’t kill you.” The woman turned back to the men at the table and demanded money from them before another drink would be poured. Irene climbed the rickety stairs.

  At the top were two doors; one was open, showing an untidy room with three beds and a washstand. None of the beds was made and the sheets were grey with wear and old dirt. It was nearly as cold up here as it was outside. On the floor lay a child’s porcelain doll with the legs broken off.

  She knocked on the other door.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “David? It’s Irene MacNeil.”

  She heard a sudden movement and the door swung open. David wore his jacket and held a newspaper in his hand.

  “Irene! What are you doing here?”

  “You gave me your address. I thought I’d come. I wanted …” She wrapped her arms around herself. She didn’t want to touch anything. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No, it’s all right. I gave you the address? What the hell was I thinking? You want to come in, maybe?”

  The room behind him was in a dreadful state. Irene could see several dirty mattresses on the floor and one iron bed, on which a fat man lay with his back to them. There was a bucket in the corner with a lid on it. The walls were stained and the old paper peeled.

  “No, of course you don’t want to come in. What’s the matter with me? Come on, we’ll get out of here.” He folded the paper and stuck it in his jacket, then stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. “Come on,” he said again, heading down the stairs.

  “Mrs. Gutkind, I’ll be back, yeah? Don’t give my bed away.”

  “I would do such a thing? You paid for it, you got it,” the woman said, not turning to look at either of them.

  They walked down the alley without saying anything. As soon as they got back on Baldwin Street, Irene said, “I came because I want to know about my uncle.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “Where are we going?” She caught his sleeve and he stopped walking.

  “I don’t know.” He looked up and down the teeming, noisy street. “I don’t know a place around here where we can go. So, maybe you want to go to your house?”

  “No, we can’t go there. My mother …”

  “Yeah, how’s she doing?”

  “All right. I guess. I don’t know. It changes day to day.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “We could go to my shop.”

  “You’ve got a shop? Nice.”

  “Didn’t my uncle tell you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “It used to be a drug store, but it’s not anymore. We could go there.”

  “Fine. Anywhere you want.” He sounded a little angry.

  They walked for a time without saying anything.

  “Look,” he said at last. “I’m no bootlegger, okay? I just flop there because I’m broke and it’s a cheap place.”

  “You don’t have to explain to me.”

  “Not that I’ve got anything against a little honest bootlegging. People have mouths to feed. I don’t see much wrong with it. It’s a lousy place, I know that, but I don’t have any options just now, you understand?”

  “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” he said.

  At the shop, Irene turned o
n the hot plate she kept in the back and made them some coffee. When it was ready she took a seat across from him at one of the small round tables.

  How could she explain that she wanted this death to have some reason to it, some message attached? So many bad things had happened, so quickly, that she needed to believe it wasn’t just all random disaster in the world.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

  She knew if she cried, and he was able to comfort her, it would make it easier on him, but she didn’t want it to be easy. She wanted someone else to have a chest full of jagged things. The only light came from the storeroom, and he sat in the chair near the window, and the light from the street lamp fell on him alone, and it was in this way, in the shrouded comfort of grey shadow, that she was able to listen.

  He talked about how he’d first met Rory, up in a relief camp in northern British Columbia.

  “He called himself Bob then, because he’d been ratted out as an organizer for the Workers’ Unity League in another camp and couldn’t use his own name anymore.” He shrugged. “Lots of guys went from camp to camp that way, either because they were union men or they were looking for a camp better than the last. Course, there were no better camps.”

  He told her about clandestine meetings where things like strike dates were decided by men with names like Slim Evans and Big Bill Haywood. She heard about the Relief Camp Workers Union, work and wages, work and wages, the words kept repeating themselves as David squirmed and told his story. He told her what they wanted, these men who lived in the camps: fifty cents an hour for unskilled labour, a thirty-hour week, first-aid equipment in the camps, the end of military control.

  “That wasn’t so much to ask, was it?” he said.

  David told of the small army of men who’d gone to Vancouver in dribs and drabs and then in a great torrent, massing over train cars like ants. All had come from relief camp walk-outs that had been staged throughout the west. They stayed in the port city for the best part of two months, until it was clear they’d have to go to Ottawa and confront the prime minister himself.