Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  On one of these walks, she got to the point where the path opened to a clearing and to a large building with flags fluttering from posts. The pavilion, Mrs. Ashburn explained later. On the second floor there was a dining room where Sara might purchase ice cream, or a sandwich, Mrs. Ashburn said, forgetting that the small weekly allowance she doled out would hardly allow for such an expense.

  The next time she went to the park, Sara brought a book and a sweater, which she spread across the grass in the field facing the pavilion. She was surprised at how chilled the air had grown—already it held the distinct odour of a pending frost. Several branches of trees had turned chokecherry-red and bright gold. She opened the book, intending to read, but her attention was drawn to a man running through the field towards her pulling a kite.

  The yellow kite kicked along the grass and then lifted. It soared straight up, its tail snapping as the man reeled out more line and young boys around him shouted encouragement. The kite began to dip and climb across the sky, while the children gazed heavenward. Gerhard, Johann, Daniel and Peter. Sara’s brothers, wearing middies and knee-high socks, just as these children were wearing. A photograph in Katy’s trunk showed her brothers dressed that way too, laid out in their narrow caskets, throats and heads bound, hands folded and still against their chests.

  Sara snatched up her sweater and looked about, her breath rising. The book lay open on the grass, its dense paragraphs of print, walls erected to shut her out, each word a stone that needed to be pried loose and examined before she could go on to the next one. Devil! she shouted, and heaved the book, watched it arc and thud to the ground, its pages fluttering. Quickly, she left the park.

  SIX

  By chance

  HE TWENTY OR SO GIRLS who attended the Home Away from Home Club had become upstairs and downstairs maids, chore girls, assistant cooks and nannies, in order to repay the Canadian Pacific Railway company for their passage. Like Sara, they were required by their families to do so, leaving their brothers free to go to school or to work on the farm. Sara had to repay her passage fee and to help with those of her sister Annie, and her grandparents, who’d barely survived the trip. The Mennonite girls’ reputation for honesty, intelligence and meticulous cleanliness made them suitable to become servants to coal barons, land speculators, grain dealers and proprietors of large commercial enterprises.

  The girls had once benefited from the cheap labour of Russian servants in their own homes, and now they were servants. The Home Away from Home Club provided a place for them to air their concerns, any instances of mistreatment or misunderstandings, or unusual or embarrassing requests made by their employers.

  Concerns and needs and embarrassments of which I have none, Sara wrote to Katy. I have nothing I want to air. Least of all her underwear, she did not add, which in her opinion was what the young women were doing.

  She was especially unwilling to take part when the hostess, Frieda Wiens, encouraged them to talk about what had happened to them and their families in Russia. The other young women did so eagerly, hushed and forlorn, seated in a circle in the small room, several on the floor with their legs curled beneath them. They all assumed that because Sara was forced to listen to their stories, she was obliged to tell them her own. Most of them knew what had happened to her family, but hoped for some new detail, something they hadn’t already heard, which they could take back home and spread through their towns and villages. Their body heat warmed the room, which became overpowering with the mingling odours of talcum, crepe and wool, the sweetish thick smell of menstrual blood. Their swollen features and tears made Sara want to slam doors.

  She began leaving the room during these moments of sharing, climbing the stairs to the second floor to use the bathroom and then daring to venture down the hall, sometimes hearing a cough, a shuffle of sound behind closed doors.

  Once she was startled to come upon an open door and a man seated at a table with his back to it, his sand-coloured and bristly hair accentuating his decidedly square-shaped head. The floorboard creaked under her foot, and he turned to look at her. A square jaw, too, rough with whiskers. He moved his chair away from the table to face her, a friendly curiosity lighting his features, his arms coming up to cradle the back of his head.

  Well, what brings you here? Are you lost? he asked, speaking in Low German, a language she returned to whenever she went home to the farm. His grin revealed large even teeth and an apparent good nature.

  The young women’s voices rose up the stairwell, dominated by that of the hostess.

  Nein, not lost, Sara told him. I’m just tired of sitting.

  What’s your name? he asked, as she turned to leave.

  She knew the girls would be glancing towards the staircase, sending silent messages between them, as they did whenever anyone was absent from the room for an undue length of time. Every time she returned to her place, someone would touch her lightly on the knee as she passed or pluck at her sleeve. It was meant to signal their concern—concern being a wedge they used to lever their way inside another person for the sake of being able to say they had done so.

  Their concern was a way of keeping Sara safe inside the Mennonite family, the chorus of rosy-cheeked females whose beauty relied entirely upon the whim of nature and their crocheted and lace collars. The girls’ descriptions of a sunset, a favourite Christmas, could be counted on to be similar, right down to the choice of words. They sang the same songs, and married their own kind, or remained single if necessary. They hoped to perpetuate in Canada a way of living and believing that had begun centuries ago, during the Reformation.

  The square-headed man’s features softened as she told him her name. You’re from the Vogt family, yes? From the Abram Sudermann estate. It wasn’t a question but a knowing, and Sara thought that likely he’d been told. Yes, from the estate, she thought. A place she barely remembered. A collection of buildings, a big house, her father singing as he went across a barnyard, Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

  When she nodded, he said, I knew your sister. Margareta. My name is Peter Goosen. Margareta and I were baptized in the same church and on the same day, You resemble her very strongly.

  Yes, I know. There was a box of photographs in Katy’s trunk at the farm, though her sister seldom took it out; she hoarded the images as though the family had belonged only to her.

  Did you know my father? Sara thought to ask. She became aware of the rumple of blankets on his bed and his shoes tipped on their sides in front of the bureau. She took in the length of his body, the soft-looking mound at his groin, and she imagined putting her hand against it. She had to leave before her eyes gave away what she was thinking.

  Sara, you’ll come and talk to me again, won’t you? Peter Goosen asked.

  From then on she anticipated the weekly meetings of the Home Away from Home Club, feeling the time passing too slowly between them. Each week she watched her reflection in the trolley-car window, her hands cold as she screwed the pearl earrings into place and then slid the blue scarf under the collar of her dress and knotted it. She was aware of the new luminosity of her eyes, the enigmatic pout of her mouth, and the presence of a man sitting across from her, attentive with admiration. I’m pretty, she thought, the realization always new. Her act of daring, however, was always eroded by apprehension, and whenever she neared the boarding house she took off the earrings and scarf.

  Peter Goosen. She repeated his name while looking out at the display windows of the stores on Portage Avenue, the people strolling along the sidewalks, just as she and Peter Goosen would do. During the weeks she occasionally stopped whatever chore she was doing to say, Peter Goosen. He knew Kornelius too, and remembered her grandparents. But I don’t remember you, he’d said, in a teasing voice, when next she had come upon him in the upstairs hall. You must have been just a schnigjelfrits, he said, meaning a cute little person.

  She replaced Kornelius’s face with Peter’s while she indulged in her nocturnal manipulations. She winced with the agon
y of intense pleasure, the release of it, then rubbed her stomach and breasts to feel her hands against her skin. She took in the sounds of life going on beyond the house while she, Sara Vogt, lived in this tiny room of her body and longed to enter the huge beating heart of the city.

  Peter and Sara Goosen, she said to herself. Where would they live? She realized that she didn’t know what he did. All she knew was that he was often reading, and there always was a pile of books on the floor beside his bureau. He wasn’t a farmer, and that, for now, was enough to know.

  On this warm autumn day, the trolley rounded the corner and entered Main Street, where crowds of people milled about. She was taken by the air of festivity, the cars nosed into the curbs, many festooned with banners and ribbons. Men stood leaning against the cars, their shirt sleeves rolled to their elbows.

  It’s the Labour Day celebrations, the man sitting across from Sara said, his admiration making him bold as he leaned towards her, his features narrow and slick with humidity. He’d read her mind, guessed that she didn’t know, surmised that she wasn’t from here.

  The trolley came to a stop and as several people got on, before she had time to argue with herself, she rose from her seat and stepped into the street. Into a cacophony of people jabbering, calling to one another overtop the sound of music, a brassy jolting tune coming from a gramophone on a table beside a shop door. She swerved to avoid a black dog threading its way among the legs. The day was the colour of a ripe apricot, the light diffused, softened by moisture-filled air that smelled of overripe fruit. There was a resulting mellowness in the faces of the men, women and children collecting in groups beside the bedecked cars.

  Usually she got off the trolley at William Avenue, having watched for a large red-and-gold sign on a saddlery store that had a relief of a full-size white horse. She began to walk, confident that she’d soon come upon the sign and know where to turn. But as time passed, the scenery she had viewed from a streetcar window became unfamiliar in its details. She hadn’t noticed this wrought-iron gate across the entrance to a bank, or the lamppost at its door. Or the impish-looking faces peering down at her from the cornices of a building, or the particulars of the wares displayed in its windows.

  She crossed through several intersections, walked for what seemed longer than necessary. The heel of her foot burned where the skin had become abraded as it rubbed against her shoe. Now she was nearing a large building with an ornate façade, which she should have remembered seeing from the trolley. Its white brick trim reminded her suddenly of another building, of going walking with her father in Russia along a tree-lined street. I’ve gone too far, she told herself, and felt her heartbeat rise.

  She retraced her steps, thinking that she’d somehow missed the saddlery sign and the horse; the stores she’d just passed by moments before remained unfamiliar. Her own stricken features reflected in a window, with the pearl globes at the ears and eyes wide with fear, seemed to belong to someone else. In the street behind her, balloons bobbed, and when she turned she saw that they were tied to a vendor’s cart. Standing beside the cart was a man wearing a top hat and a black-and-white striped jacket.

  Why hadn’t she noticed the vendor the first time? The ornate building, the garish-looking vendor, seemed as unreal as apparitions from a faraway land, a dream. There were ice-cream vendor’s in St. Petersburg, and in Alexandrovsk. In Montreal, where they’d stayed for a little while before boarding a train, an unrelenting stream of vehicles had passed by in the streets and they’d been afraid to cross. Here, there was a similar noise of engines, of car horns honking.

  This was not the Winnipeg she’d come to recognize. Nothing here was familiar, not a word on a sign, not the colours of a storefront. Where was the green awning that should have identified the hotel entrance; the barber pole in front of a shop? A man and woman came towards her, holding hands. They separated to go around Sara, and she felt their heat as they went by, heard their laughter. So this wasn’t a dream—she could walk out of this strangeness if she kept her wits. What she needed to do was return to the stop where she’d got off the streetcar.

  At last she recognized Portage Avenue, which meant that she had gone past that stop. Again she retraced her steps, her heel now blistered. The vendor’s multicoloured balloons bobbed in the distance, and she became aware of several people sitting on the sidewalk near the vendor, where, only moments ago, there hadn’t been any people.

  The men sat cross-legged, their long hair matted and heavy-looking, their coppery features unreadable as they squinted against the sun and seemingly ignored the crowd of people beginning to gather on one side of them. There was a burst of laughter, and several among the crowd called out to the men, who didn’t reply. As Sara grew nearer, she realized that the men sitting on the sidewalk were Indians.

  She’d seen Indians before. Occasionally there’d been a straggle of stoop-shouldered people going past the farm, the dog raising a hullabaloo. Sometimes the women among them ventured down the lane in the hope that Kornelius’s cattle dog was out working, or asleep. The women begged for food, for water; took notice of what was in the yard and in the house that might be worth stealing, according to Kornelius. If Katy saw them coming, she headed them off, made them wait at the top of the lane while she went back to the house and returned with a loaf of bread.

  A red-haired man in a gold houndstooth jacket stepped out from the crowd. He strutted rather than walked over to the Indians, and looked down on them. He turned and spoke to someone among the crowd, and then he set his foot against an Indian man’s shoulder, and pushed. The Indian toppled over, as though made of wood. The ensuing laughter was cruel. Sara had heard similar laughter, seen similar acts. People wearing rags, their faces gone stark bony from hunger, the unseeing eyes of men who were drunk.

  She turned from the scene and ran out into the street, into the path of an oncoming car. From a corner of her eye she saw it, and she threw her arms up in the air. She felt the engine’s heat, the car’s fender passing through the inches of air between them. She stood frozen, on her tiptoes, arms raised as the car came to a stop. Something was falling through the air towards her, something grey and transparent, a turmoil of motion, a sphere of bladelike wings that wheeled both counter-and clockwise. She felt the air moving as it descended, and then suddenly it stopped, backpedalled and disappeared.

  The driver came round the front of the car, his voice raised in a question and sounding as though it came from a distance. Her eyes remained fixed on the air above her head as she relived the swirling movement she’d just witnessed, the transparent sphere of grey wedges tumbling towards her. Whatever had come falling from the sky had a mind that realized at the last moment that it had made a mistake. During that instant of hesitation, Sara had felt its surprise, before it gathered itself up and away.

  That could have been a guardian angel, Katy would one day tell Sara when, in a moment of weakness, Sara described what she’d seen. Sara had just given birth, and Katy had come to Union Plains to assist, bringing with her a Mennonite midwife. Oliver had delivered Alvina by accident, but when he’d delivered Sonny Boy by design, Katy had said it wasn’t fitting. Oliver had graciously acquiesced, and awaited news of the next birth at the hotel. The birth of son George, which proved to be more difficult than usual. Forty hours of labour, the last ten hard.

  Afterwards, Sara wondered if her life was going to ebb away, slow and hot, into the bedsheets. Was this the time it would happen? Now? She gazed into the rafters of the unfinished room, remembering the swirling sphere of wings. Would the ball of wings descend today, as it had on the day when Oliver almost ran her down in the street? Katy entered the room, bringing the swaddled baby, Sara’s second son, and set him into her arms.

  Why not name this one Johann? she suggested gently, her eyes brimming.

  Because I wish a better end for him, Sara replied, the words coming out like wooden blocks. Likely there had been many swirling balls of knives descending from the sky on that November day in the o
ld country. She didn’t need a constant reminder of it. Of her brothers and sisters standing out in the open, unprotected, while she and Katy cowered in a hole in the ground.

  Oliver leapt from the taxi and hurried round the front of it, and when he saw the shaken Sara, pale, her arms outstretched as though to embrace the sun, he swore a string of French in sheer relief. Collecting himself, he removed his cap and nodded, his thick dark hair falling across his forehead.

  What’s happening? Sara said in German. She had meant to ask where she was, who she was. Oliver came towards her, a hand extended, as though offering her an explanation, comfort, begging to be pardoned.

  And then she was in the back seat of his taxi, and they were going along the street. She hugged herself, still in shock, more from what she had seen falling from the sky than from the near accident. Gradually she began to notice Oliver, a blue birthmark on the back of his neck in the shape of an acorn. He would take her wherever she needed to go, he said. She objected but he wouldn’t be denied. Mademoiselle, it’s the least I can do.

  As they drove along the street, the buildings became familiar to Sara again; the green awning over the entrance of the hotel appeared, then the barber shop. As they went past, a man leaning against the barber pole waved, and Oliver tooted the car horn in reply. He pushed his cap to the back of his head and began to whistle a tune softly, through his teeth.

  Everyone’s going to the train station, he said moments later, likely heading up to Victoria Beach for the last weekend of the season. I’d give my eye teeth—whitefish the size of washtubs, he said, as though Sara understood what he meant. Where was she from? he asked. Before she could reply, he added, Everyone in this city comes from some-wheres else. The Jews, Ukrainians, Icelanders, Poles, Hungarians, the English, he recited, his hand rising from the wheel to indicate both sides of Main Street. This hadn’t been the case when his people came, he said. The French had settled early, near a town called Aubigny. His family was the first of three families that settled there. I’m a Vandal. A fifth-generation Canadian, he told Sara, as though trying to convince her of something.