Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  This isn’t your place now, is it? I take it you’re just running it? He turned to Oliver as though wanting to clarify this point.

  Oliver was about to say that it was his place. To tell the man its history. The hotel had begun as an inn where Minnesota stagecoaches, traversing the land between St. Paul and Winnipeg, stopped for a change of horses. The coaches carried mail and money, settlers, politicians, speculators, surveyors, who dined on boiled potatoes and warmed their insides with bitter tea. Paddlewheel steamboats brought latecomers up the river from Illinois, from as far away as New Hampshire. Mennonites stopped to water their horses at the stables before going on into Winnipeg with their wagonloads of produce and grain. The town’s name, Union Plains, testified to the expectation that it would always be a hub, a centre through which mail was routed, goods passed, people arrived and departed.

  Oliver replied after a long pause that Henri Villebrun was the owner, not him.

  He said he was, noted the man, nodding. But you never know what Villebrun might try and pull. I’d heard he retired to Florida, but you could have knocked me over when I came across him on the golf course in Palm Springs. Small world, the man said, and his jaw began to work as though his thoughts were ball bearings he shunted from one side of his mouth to the other.

  How much for a bottle of whisky? He reached for an inside pocket of his jacket, his apparent interest in the hotel giving way to a twitchy impatience.

  Oliver remembered this man more clearly now, a heavy-set man whose sprawling legs had threatened to trip him up as he moved among the tables. What’re you doing here, kid? he always demanded. What’s your name? Speak up, kid, speak English. Get wise. You’re in an English-speaking country.

  That’ll cost you fifty, Oliver said. It was more than twice what he normally charged—Delorme had no business telling these two to look him up, and he wanted the man to know it.

  The man blinked in surprise, and then dug into his wallet and fanned several bills across the bar. I suppose you’ve got to make hay while the sun’s still shining. Just go and get the damned bottle.

  Oliver went over to the bar and gathered the bills, folded them and stuck them into his back pocket. You betcha, I’ll be right with you, he heard himself say, and thought that he sounded like a scared twelve-year-old kid.

  Look at all this stuff, will you? the man said to the woman. And to think I got it from Villebrun for a song.

  Oliver went down into the cellar, his stomach churning. Got what for a song? When he returned with the bottle, the man was gone. The woman tucked the whisky into her handbag and patted it. Don’t mind him, he can be such an arse, she said.

  Then she turned her attention to the photograph of Fine Day hanging above the bar, indecision shifting in her dark eyes. I agree with that, she said finally. She nodded at the picture. There’s no reason for a person to be shy of where they come from. But I suppose you have to be choosy about who you let know.

  Oliver saw the reflection of Fine Day in the mirror, saw his own white shoulders, the almost square shape of his dark head. The photograph was a relic he’d rescued years ago from a heap of garbage in the cellar. Villebrun had told him to get rid of it. The chief was from a band called Strike-Him-on-the-Back, according to an inscription on the back of the picture. Oliver had been taken by the name, the man’s distinct and intelligent-looking features, the way he crouched, a rifle held across his chest, one foot in front of the other as though at any moment he might stalk away.

  That’s not my history, Oliver replied. It’s something that came with the place. I fancied it, is all.

  Well, she said, and hesitated. In any case, if you want to keep it, if I were you, I’d stash that away.

  You saw Henri Villebrun? Oliver asked.

  The mean codger saw him. I only heard about it. About nothing else, since. Listen, you should know. My old man’s going to come and take an inventory of what’s here. Real soon. He might not notice if a few things went missing. She winked, and the door closed behind her.

  Oliver stood listening for a moment as the car’s engine started up. When he went into the vestibule he felt a weakness in his legs. He opened the door a crack to watch their car, a white Cadillac, lumber down the street and turn at a corner. Heading for the access road and the highway, he knew.

  This morning it was as though he were seeing the vestibule for the first time, the scarred mahogany panelling and the battered chairs lining the panelled walls. The leather that wasn’t cracked and peeling had split open revealing horsehair padding. The parquet was scored with a criss-cross pattern of slashes made by the town kids’ skates when they came in to warm up while skating on a vacant lot across the street. They begged for their blades to be sharpened, and Oliver obliged. He’d bought an electric motor and mounted his father’s stone on it to give them the pleasure of watching the sparks fly.

  He took down from the vestibule wall the notice of the meeting to be held at the school that evening, and an out-of-date announcement of an auction. There was a scuff of slippered feet on the stairs, the sound of Cecil’s phlegm-filled cough preceding him, and Oliver realized that he hadn’t entered into the books the four hours Cecil had spent tending the parlour last night. At the end of the month he’d deduct the sum from what Cecil owed for his room.

  Jesus, God, he thought. At the rate things were going, he’d wind up owing Cecil. He felt turned upside down, suspended above the ground in a rocket tumbler, the ride the kids pestered him to take them on during fair days at Alexander Morris. He went with them for the pleasure of having his pockets emptied of change, and their stomachs turned inside out. He felt that the ground lay far below him and he was about to come crashing down into it.

  Minutes later, he found himself going along the path beside the access road that would take him to the highway. Prickly spikelets of wild oats snagged his trousers and let go, creating a wake, a silvery current of movement behind him, as though a small animal scurried through the weeds trying to keep up. He needed to feel the ground moving under his feet, to fix his sights on a point and just keep going. In this way, he supposed, he was like his uncle, Ulysse, needing to move, freed from any backward or forward pull.

  He reached Stage Coach Road, which seemed a funnel for the quiet coming off the land. He crossed the highway and was well onto the river path before the silence was broken by the dull hum of an approaching vehicle. It grew as loud as the roar of the creek swollen in spring and rushing to the river. The car passed and again quiet descended. The nearby cawing of a crow seemed to be a calculated attempt to disturb it.

  Years had gone by, maybe five, six, since he’d fired a gun while hunting. There was no sense in hunting any more, no one wanted the meat, he couldn’t give it away, couldn’t get Sara to cook it. The kids screwed up their faces. He didn’t know why he had gone for the gun last night, except that the man in the cream-coloured suit had made him want to smash something. To put his fist through a wall, sweep the dishes from the supper table.

  The RCMP cruiser drifted by on the highway and the young constable, Krooke, seeing Oliver, tooted the horn lightly. Although Oliver waved in return, he knew that the shave-and-a-haircut greeting wasn’t meant to be friendly. The constable might have seen the white Cadillac either arriving or leaving Union Plains, and suspected that he’d bootlegged another bottle. Free traded, was all. He didn’t sell hooch, because he didn’t want blindness on his conscience. His brother, Romeo, and a couple of Romeo’s friends in St. Boniface kept Oliver supplied with the real stuff, which he resold for a tidy profit on holidays and weekends, when the government stores were closed.

  A roll of fat chafed against his belt and his buttock muscles cramped as the path began angling downhill. What he had a mind to do was to haul his kids off. With or without Sara. He should take them up north to the bushland, where they might become people of experience. For sure, Sonny Boy would benefit.

  What do you mean, experience? Sara had wanted to know when he’d once made the suggestion, spea
king his daydream aloud. He admitted that he’d never lived in the bush. That digging for seneca, berry-picking, cutting wood for fire and fence would likely not see them through. Nor would trapping, of which, except for rabbits and raccoons, he also lacked experience.

  But he still had the traps; his grandmother had kept her entire family going for a year with those traps. When once he’d caught Sonny Boy and George using the trap chains to hook their bike onto the wagon, he’d shown them how the traps worked. You see this? He demonstrated with a piece of firewood how the jaws of a trap were sprung, its teeth almost severing the wood. This isn’t something I want you boys fooling around with. He’d known men to lose a limb. He knew of instances where men caught by a winter storm were found frozen inside a carcass of an elk, a horse. Men in the bush had gone half-crazy from loneliness and blackflies, from the pain of an abscessed tooth.

  Even so. His instincts told him that his children would be better off living in the country. He’d take them up to the North Saskatchewan River, maybe. Near Batoche, Fish Creek, where his grandma had once lived. There were still some Vandals up there last he heard. Take his kids away from people who would want to dirty them with their hands, steal the clearness from their eyes. Sara demanded that they be given an education, which she’d been denied. Especially the boys. But it wouldn’t matter none what they took up, they’d just wind up being joe-boys to some rich man.

  And what would he put his hand to at this late date, if the hotel was shut down? Sara was suspicious of the French, and the priests, and she wouldn’t hear of living in a French town. And it wasn’t likely that he, a hotel-keeper and bootlegger, would be at home among her people, either.

  He smiled despite his worry, recalling a Sunday afternoon when he’d sat down to dinner at his sister-in-law’s table and taken an onion-and-sardine sandwich from his pocket. He unwrapped it before Katy’s and Kornelius’s astonished eyes and set it on his plate, fooled them into believing that he preferred the pungent-smelling sandwich to their farm fare. This was what people of his kind preferred to eat, he said, this, and fish eyes fried to a crisp. Fish eggs, wild mushrooms and CNR strawberries, he added. They might want to go along the track looking to pick the berries sometime, he said. When they failed to laugh, he realized that they didn’t know that was what the locals called the turds flushed onto the tracks by rail passengers.

  He was surprised, now, to find that the memory made his eyes wet. His kind of people. Those people of his. Dose people. When you’re with dose people of yours, your English, she falls apart, eh? Sara liked to tease.

  Yes. And sometimes he heard his kind of English coming from the mouth of one of his daughters. Emilie. Ida, too. His people were all gone now. His mother only a scant few years after his father. Romeo was sucked into the bottle and the drinking crowd at the Belgium Club in St. Boniface, the drudgery of a meat-packing house. His sister gone into marriage to a Ukrainian, and he hadn’t seen her in over twenty years, although only a hundred miles lay between them. She’d married a bohunk, for God’s sake. A confused fella who, on a trip to Winnipeg during the curling season, had seen so many people carrying brooms on a city bus, he’d gone out and bought a barrel of them, thinking there was going to be a shortage.

  Oliver strained against the recurring prod of guilt. He should return to town, drop by the house and see if Sara was up and about, check on Ruby and the little ones. Perhaps he’d stop at the municipal yard on the chance that Stevenson was there. Find out if, in spite of being owed for the last filling of the cistern, the man would come to do it again today. The fifty dollars Oliver had received from the souse and her man was a reassuring thickness in his back pocket, and it came to him that perhaps he should use some of the money to pay for the water.

  Then he thought that it might be better to put a bit of cash down on the grocery bill; if the grocer was going to be persuaded to stay open, he had to be paid. The Good Maker knows I’ve done my part to supply the school with students, Oliver had said at the meeting last night, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. To lighten his own atmosphere, his stomach feeling as though it were filled with lead sinkers. Maybe he’d square up for a load of coal from last winter, see what was left over for the water man. Grease the squeaky wheel, Stevenson being less squeaky than most, a good-hearted Anglican. He wouldn’t let Sara and the kids go without water.

  And then Oliver’s thoughts were disturbed by a faraway call. The silence among the willow clumps and stunted oaks on either side of the path was a shifting pool of deadness and he had to concentrate in order to listen through it. Once again, someone or something called. The sound was sharp, like the point of a pencil piercing a sheet of paper. A bird, perhaps, warning others of a predator.

  He saw in his mind the quick flutter of a sparrow coming to rest on a snowy windowsill. The memory of the bird, a candle flickering in the early morning room, filled his head. The prayers of the priest mingled with his mother’s weeping, with the sound of his father struggling to breathe. Oliver, come away from the window, come and say farewell. Your father is passing.

  Yes, and the bird knew it too.

  He recalled that winter of his ninth birthday, crossing the river in the late afternoon darkness, his white breath pulled sideways by the wind. The lit-up windows in Aubigny receded as the river curled, its ice cracking in the extreme cold and echoing along the tree-lined shore. The jars of pickled eggs he was meant to deliver to Henri Villebrun’s hotel in Union Plains clinked together in the sled box, and the sled’s runners rasped against the ice road, whose ruts were polished as smooth as marble by the passage of dray horses and wagons going to and from the ice harvest.

  His courage was such that he didn’t fear this lonely trek across the frozen channel in the fading light; rather, he drank in the look of the sky banded faintly with shades of violet and pink, the tree branches along the riverbank a filigree of silver. From Winnipeg to the border in the south, winter roads crossed the breadth and length of the river, gleaming white scars. Snowdrifts banked the shorelines, and cast down royal blue shadows in the disguise of slumbering animals.

  His mitts smelled of the brine seeping through the cheesecloth his mother had wrapped around the chunks of corned beef she’d placed in the sled, along with the jars of eggs. He paused to taste his leather mitt, and then threw himself backwards onto the snow-packed ice and looked at the sky, at the toenail sliver of a moon. He thought of his father laid out in a cold shed on a block of ice, his white and still face, his work-worn fingers blackened at the knuckles. Oliver wanted to speak. His body swelled with a desire for someone to feel what he was feeling. And all he could say was, Oh God, his voice a puny whisper.

  He scooped up snow and pressed it against his mouth, the stinging cold bringing him to his senses and to his feet. He took up the sled’s rope and continued on, facing his apprehension of arriving at the hotel, of seeing a lantern lit and hanging from a post beside Stage Coach Road, which meant that the establishment was open for business. Without understanding what the temperance movement was about, or the word prohibition, Oliver sensed restriction and danger, the unseemliness of the aspersions cast upon Villebrun’s establishment, the kinds of things that were likely to go on behind its velour curtains and in the rooms upstairs.

  He shivered in the darkness cast by the shadow of the livery stable while he waited for Villebrun to answer his knock. The back door swung open to a long, narrow room, revealing a pale orange light, releasing a pent-up and mouth-watering odour of venison stew bubbling in tubs on a stove in the kitchen. Oliver wanted to draw away from Villebrun’s proprietary clasp of his shoulder, refuse to respond to his pleasantries while he unloaded corned beef and pickled eggs from the sled.

  When he climbed the stairs to the second floor, the voices of the patrons in the room below echoed, and a sudden burst of laughter seemed to confirm the presence of the sinister. The corridor at the top of the stairs was lit by wall lamps, circles of flickering light that made the pattern on the carpet swim as he wen
t towards the suite of rooms where Madame Villebrun spent her evenings playing solitaire and sipping at dandelion wine his mother had made, the air in the kitchen tainted all summer with its perfumed must. He knew, as he waited for Madame Villebrun to open the door, that she would be wearing a green kimono.

  She greeted him with a smile and a run-on cooing of sentences meant to disarm a shy child, which only intensified that shyness. His face burned in the heat of the room and a spicy scent made his nostrils sting. The windows were hung with what looked to be tasselled shawls, opaque material the colour of skin. Ecru crocheted cushions were scattered across a copper-coloured velvet settee, and on every table was a collection of gewgaws—tiny glass clocks, their inner works spinning, music boxes, porcelain dancing ladies and dandy men, coy and majestic animals.

  She went into the adjoining room, where she kept the strongbox, and when she returned, she bent towards him and he looked away, knowing that the kimono would gape open and reveal the pendulous sway of her breasts. He didn’t understand why she always wanted to touch him, to stir his hair with her fingers, to pat him on the back. He had put the money she’d given him into his mitt, was turning and had almost made it out the room, when her fingers brushed against his cheek. You’re a good boy, she said.

  You’re a good man, Henri Villebrun said years later, when he came looking for Oliver at the taxi garage in Winnipeg, as though he was underlining the reason behind his generosity in offering Oliver the opportunity to manage the hotel in his absence. Oliver didn’t know that Villebrun had tried and failed to interest buyers in the flagging business, and that Oliver was his last hope to supplement his and Madame Villebrun’s retirement income in Florida.

  Except for the three old gentlemen bachelors, the guest rooms were vacant, and many years had passed since anyone had turned off from the highway in search of accommodations. The rooms had become home to mice who were nibbling away at the wallpaper, while outside, rabbits burrowed in the holes they’d dug all along the foundation of the building. Years had also passed since Oliver had been able to honour his agreement with Henri Villebrun to send him a biyearly accounting of the hotel’s intake and output, and deposit fifty percent of what was left in an account at a caisse populaire.