A Boy of Good Breeding

by Miriam Toews

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Where?”

  Max took a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “Right here,” he said, blowing out smoke.

  Knute pointed to the kitchen. “With Johnny?” she whispered.

  “No, no, he’s leaving,” said Max. “That’s the thing. And he’s offered me his place. Us his place. If you want it.”

  “Well, sure,” said Knute, “okay,” and then they laughed for a while thinking of themselves as farmers and Johnny came back into the living room with some snacks. Eventually Knute remembered that S.F. and Jo and Bill Quinn were sleeping in the car. Johnny threw them out at four in the morning, said he had to pack. Knute drove Max and Jo home. Bill Quinn went with them. And then S.F. woke up and said she was going with the dog, so that night she slept over at Max’s. And Knute went home alone.

  fifteen

  Knute slept until noon the next day without S.F. around to wake her up, and when she went into the kitchen there was a note that said:

  Dear Knutie, S.F. will stay over at Max and Jo’s for the day. Tom says he doesn’t mind staying alone for the afternoon while we’re at work. And Hosea called, would like you to pick up more cockroach spray and give the petunias one more squirt on your way into the office. Love, D.

  P.S. I know about yesterday, so relax. And what’s this about S.F. having a dog? I’m having a few people from Friends of Houdini over tonight.

  She had written something else about someone in town stepping on a rusty nail and having a strange reaction to the tetanus shot, but she had crossed most of it out, and written “Oh never mind” underneath.

  Knute peeked into Tom’s room and asked him if there was anything he needed before she left. He shook his head and smiled. She told him about Max and her and S.F. moving into Johnny’s house and looking after his farm, and he gave her the thumbs-up sign and said, “That’s great.” He seemed short of breath and she asked him if he was okay and he nodded. She kissed him good-bye and left for work.

  When Knute got to the office Hosea was there and he said, “Did you find him?”

  “Yup,” answered Knute. “At Johnny’s house.” And then she told him about the plan to move in with Max and he, too, was very happy about it.

  “How’s Tom doing today?” he asked, and Knute said she didn’t know.

  “It’s hard to know anything about him these days,” she said. Hosea told her that they had the smallest town, they had fifteen hundred people, as soon as Johnny left, anyway. The count would happen in the next day or two and that would be that. The Prime Minister would be coming to Algren on July first.

  “Well then,” said Knute, “all is well.”

  “Quite,” said Hosea, formally, and kind of sadly, and Knute put up her hand for him to slap, you know, high-five, but he said, “Oh, you’re going?” And he waved back.

  Which was one of the funnier things that had happened to Knute in a while.

  Hosea sat at his desk and felt the warm midday sun on his back. As randomly as I was conceived, he thought, as randomly as I was named, as randomly as … he heard a horn honking under his window and he got up and walked over to have a look. “Hey, Hosea!” shouted Johnny Dranger. “I’m leaving! I’m gone!” Hosea waved and yelled, “Good luck! Come back alive! And send me a postcard from time to time!”

  “I will!” yelled Johnny. “So long!” And he was gone.

  The phone rang and Hosea hoped it would be Lorna. “Hello?” he said.

  “May I speak to Mayor Hosea Funk, please?” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  “Speaking,” said Hosea.

  “Ah,” said the woman, “I’m calling from the Prime Minister’s Office. Your town, as you know, is one of Canada’s smallest and is one of the contestants in our smallest town competition.”

  “Yeah, yes, I know that,” said Hosea, and added, “thanks.”

  “One of our census people will be in your town tomorrow to do an official, uh, count, and who shall we tell her will be the person to contact when she arrives?”

  “Oh,” said Hosea, “that could be me.”

  “Yourself?” said the woman.

  “Yes,” said Hosea. He coughed. “Yes, myself.”

  “Very good then,” said the woman. “And the address of your office being?”

  “Office being?” said Hosea.

  “Yes,” said the woman.

  “Oh,” said Hosea, “okay.” And he gave her the address.

  “Our counter should be there at ten o’clock, Mayor Funk, is that convenient for you? Mayor Funk? Hello, Mayor Funk? Mayor Funk!”

  “Oh yes,” said Hosea. “Sure thing. Thank-you.”

  Hosea hung up the phone and two seconds later heard the scream of Algren’s one and only ambulance as it ripped through the torpor of the day. Before Hosea could make it to the window, the ambulance had passed and the street was, once again, as dead as a ghost town.

  Hosea ran out of his office and towards the hospital. The siren had stopped and Hosea could hear birds singing and an airplane flying directly behind him, maybe it was a crop duster, why was it following him? And a stampede of horses. Or was it his heart? One kid stopped playing in his yard and looked up at the strange sight of Hosea Funk sprinting down the sidewalk like an escaped parolee, and a couple of women visiting outside stared at him and shook their heads. “That Hosea Funk,” one said, but Hosea, by that time, was nearing the hospital, and then he was there, running up the stairs, then through the front door, towards the emergency room, and shouting, “No! No! No!”

  Tom lay on the stretcher surrounded by machines and cords. Dr. François was pounding on his chest and checking levels on one of the machines. Nurse Barnes was injecting Tom with something and another nurse was standing next to the doctor, watching a machine and opening up a small package. A third nurse was on the phone to another hospital and Hosea heard her say, “… massive cardiac …” and then some numbers. Then the doctor speaking to the nurse beside him, softly, and … Tom, just lying there. The doctor turned around and saw Hosea standing in the doorway and said, “For God’s sake …” and turned back to Tom. After a few seconds, the doctor said to Hosea, “Find Dory,” and then he and the nurses surrounded Tom, and Tom disappeared inside them.

  Twenty minutes later, Dory and Knute stood in the waiting room, waiting for the news. The doctor was sure Tom was going to die, there was no way he could survive that much trauma to the heart, and, in fact, Tom had been dead for a minute or so, but came back to life.

  “If he’d been taken to Winnipeg right off the bat would he survive?” asked Dory.

  “He wouldn’t have made it to Winnipeg,” the doctor answered. He told them that Tom had called the hospital himself before he had the heart attack, saying he was feeling very strange, and when they got to him he had been dead, for that minute.

  So, there they were. Tom was on a lot of morphine and lay there with his eyes closed, but Dory and Knute squeezed his hands and kissed him and said good-bye. They were in shock, complete shock. Hosea came in for about a minute, that’s all the doctor would allow him, and he touched Tom’s arm and looked at Tom. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then he was asked to leave the room.

  But then things got weird. Tom wasn’t dying. Knute and Dory could tell Dr. François was getting sort of nervous because he probably figured he should have transferred him to Winnipeg after all. Not that the doctor wanted Tom to die, he just seemed a little confused. So Tom remained alive and eventually Knute even left to get some coffee for herself and Dory. The doctor came in and by then a few doctors had come from other towns, and one from Winnipeg, and they huddled around Tom, speaking in hushed tones, telling Knute and Dory that they had to admit they were puzzled. That the heart had sustained so much damage, they didn’t know how it was capable of functioning. Knute and Dory were still so overwhelmed that they just nodded and stared at Tom and, well, just waited.

  Hosea tried to make himself comfortable in the waiting room. The doctor gave him updat
es on Tom’s condition, but mostly Tom was just still alive. “Still alive?” Hosea would ask, and the doctor would nod and go back into Tom’s room. At one point Dory came out and asked Hosea if he would sit with Tom while she went to the cafeteria to get some more coffee. Knute had left to get Max and Summer Feelin’ and bring them to the hospital. Hosea sat down next to Tom. Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Tom whispered, “What time is the count?” Hosea, startled, grabbed at the front of his shirt and cleared his throat. He looked at Tom, and said, “What? What did you say, Tom?”

  Tom, exhausted by the effort he had made to speak, began again. “What … time …” He took a deep breath, and then was quiet for a long time.

  Hosea held his hand and squeezed. “… Is the count?” he whispered in Tom’s ear. Tom nodded once.

  “At ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” said Hosea. “They called me today from Ottawa … but how did you know … how do you know about the count?” Tom didn’t say anything. He’d heard it all the other night, every word, thought Hosea. He knows the Prime Minister is my father. He knows what’s going on.

  “Tom,” he whispered, “you don’t—”

  Just then the doctor came into the room with Dory and said to Hosea, “Okay, Hose, let’s not tire him out,” and Hosea nodded and went back to the waiting room.

  Tom stayed alive all night, although he had developed a fever. Dory sat in a chair beside his bed, and held his hand and put small flakes of ice between his lips from time to time. Knutie slept on another bed in Tom’s room, Max took S.F. home and tried to console her, doctors and nurses walked in and out quietly, adjusting levels, writing down information, and Hosea curled up as best he could on a sweaty vinyl couch in the lobby of the hospital, where he spent the night alone and dreaming.

  He was dead. Right after he died, he said, “I don’t want to be put into a box and buried in the dirt,” so they pumped him full of helium and tied a steel cable to his ankle and cranked him up into the sky so he could float around the world and check things out, without getting lost, and losing Algren. He checked out a Mexican circus and New York City and lost tribes and a few hundred wars and a housing project in New Orleans. And then he felt a gentle touch, a hand on his shoulder. He had a short-wave radio with him, propped up on his stomach, and he lay on his back and floated for a while over mountains somewhere in the world and listened to police calls on his radio, and then Knutie’s voice on the other end saying, “We need you here in Algren, we’re bringing you back,” and the cable jerked on his ankle and the short-wave radio fell off his stomach and they started cranking him back down to earth. Iris Cherniski was squirting a little WD-40 into the crank machine and saying, “That’s it, that’s it, easy does it,” and Max was there with a microphone and holding S.F. in his arms, saying, “Perfect two-point landing, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for flying with CorpseAir, we hope you enjoyed your flight.” And there were Peej and Euphemia playing concentration on the curb, smiling shyly at each other and ignoring Hosea entirely, and then there was John Baert, standing beside Euphemia, asking if he could play, and Hosea tried to undo the steel cable from his ankle and go over there, “Those’re my folks,” he said to Max. “I gotta get this thing off. Today’s the day. Help me get this thing off.”

  “But, Hosea,” said his Aunt Minty, who had just showed up, “you’re still pumped full of helium, if we take it off you’ll float away.”

  “Then empty me!” yelled Hosea. “C’mon, help me, Minty!”

  “Oh, Hosie,” said Euphemia, finally looking up, “relax, sweetheart, you’re dead.” She smiled sweetly at Peej and John Baert and said, “He’s so dead …”

  “Tough shit!” yelled Hosea. “So are you, get this damn thing off me!”

  And Minty said, “Well, we could take the head off and let some of the pressure out, but I don’t know …” and she disappeared, and in her place was Lorna. She put her hand out to Hosea to touch him and she said, “You’re so round, you’re so bloated, like me, look,” and Dory brought coffee out for everyone and Hosea could hear Dory say, “I like my stories happy, the sadness comes creeping out of the cracks in the story like blood, happy stories are the saddest.” And then it began to snow and Max said, “Excellent, Dory! Excellent!”

  In the morning Hosea asked if he could see Tom. Dory was asleep in the other bed now and Knutie had gone into the hall to make some phone calls to friends and relatives of Tom. Hosea passed Knute in the hallway, at the payphone, and he was about to say something, but Knute smiled wearily and put her hand up to stop him. “Hello?” she said. “Uncle Jack?” Hosea smiled back and nodded. He pointed to Tom’s room, but Knute had turned her back to him and was talking to Uncle Jack. Hosea went into Tom’s room and stood beside him. He wanted to tell Tom he didn’t have to stay alive if he didn’t want to, if it was too hard, but he knew he couldn’t say these words out loud, not with Dory there, not with the way things were. That is, the way life was, the way life was that precluded us from saying things like that out loud. And besides, what he meant was that Tom didn’t have to do this for him, for his cockeyed plan to see his father. But instead, he leaned over and whispered, “Tom, I’m going to my office now.” He’d wanted to say something more, something poignant and earth-shattering, words that conveyed the love he felt for Tom, and the gratitude. Instead he said, “So long, Tom,” and turned to go. But then he heard Tom’s voice. “Time,” he said, not moving his lips so it sounded like tie. Hosea stopped and looked at Tom. “Tie,” he said again.

  “Time?” said Hosea. “Well, uh, the time is 9:45, Tom.” He cleared his throat and looked over at Dory who was waking up in the other bed. “It’s 9:45,” he said again.

  “Okay, thanks,” said Dory. “My goodness, I slept too long. How is he?” Hosea was about to answer her, then noticed that she was talking to the doctor who had come into the room and was standing behind him, writing something again, and so he mumbled a garbled good-bye and left Dory and the doctor to discuss Tom’s condition.

  Hosea walked out into the beautiful day to meet his census-taker, and do the count. The counter’s name was Anita and she told Hosea she had a sister who was also an official counter and was doing a count somewhere in Nova Scotia as they spoke. “A contender,” she said. The two of them walked the dusty streets of Algren, knocking on doors, getting information from the neighbours of people who weren’t home, and referring to Hosea’s notebook. Anita raised her eyebrows when she saw the orange Hilroy scribbler and said, “Geez, Mr. Funk, you want this bad, don’t you?”

  You don’t know the half of it, lady, were words that came to Hosea’s mind, but he smiled and said, “Well, we’d all love to see the Prime Minister come to Algren. It would be a special day for all of us.”

  “Well, then,” said Anita, “let’s hope this one’s a promise he keeps.” She laughed and said, “I’m kidding.”

  And Hosea laughed, too, and said, “Good one.”

  That evening it was on the news. Algren was the winner with an uncanny fifteen hundred exactly. How did it happen? It doesn’t matter, it did. It was the last item on the news, the feelgood piece to put people to bed with, to leave them with the impression that not all was as bad as it seemed.

  Tom died that night, too. His last words were, “Where is …” and something Dory couldn’t understand, but sounded like “… horses.”

  Max said he’d heard Tom say “Damn ticker” once just before he died, but Dory said he wouldn’t have used either of those words.

  S.F. was sure he’d been trying to sing, and Knute was sure he’d told her he loved her.

  At 5 A.M. on July first, anyone floating over Algren would have been impressed. All along Main Street, Canadian flags in the form of red and white petunias sparkled with dew and reflected the sun, which was beginning to rise. The new Algren Feed Mill Summer Theatre, at least the outside of it, really looked like a theatre, and over at the edge of town a white horse flew through the sky. For a few minutes, anyway, until the colour of the sky ch
anged and the water tower became visible and the horse was revealed as a decal. But it was an interesting few minutes of optical illusion, and why not? Surrounding the little town were fields of yellow and blue so that if you were floating over you could pretend you were on a sandy beach in Rio. Nobody was out and about in Algren at that time except a black dog who stood next to a farmhouse on the edge of town, jumping up from time to time and snapping at a few bugs, and a little girl who sat on the front step of that farmhouse, stretching and yawning and laughing at the dog, and waiting for her mom and dad to get out of bed.

  Hosea didn’t hear the phone ring because he was fast asleep, too, with his arms around Lorna and his face buried in her hair. He slept until the sun was well up and so bright that the white horse on the water tower was all but obliterated by its rays. Later in the day he returned the phone message from Ottawa with one of his own.

  “Hosea Funk here, not to worry, things come up, maybe next year. Please wish him a Happy Canada Day from the mayor of Algren.”

  MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of three novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award), A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award) and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and finalist for the Giller Prize) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters, and The New York Times Magazine, and received the National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2005

  Revised Edition Copyright © 2005 Miriam Toews

  Original Copyright © 1998 Miriam Toews

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