He’d only been there for a moment when a familiar sound came from the lit hall, its ceiling creaking beneath someone’s step. One of her sisters, her mother, perhaps, had come to stand at the top of the stairs. To cough, to clear her throat and let him know she was aware of his presence; there was a scuffle of slippers against wood as the person retreated. Some things remained the same. As promised, he’d always been welcome in this house—and always welcome to leave.
Alice encircled a cup of tea with her hands as though to warm them, the presence of the cup causing Oliver to wonder if she had been waiting. Throughout their long courtship the three light raps would always bring her, but he hadn’t been altogether certain whether tonight would be the same.
I wasn’t cut out for city life, Oliver said to her.
You didn’t come here just to go through all that again, Alice said, her voice low and impatient.
True.
From an adjacent room came the sharp ticking of a clock.
I’m sorry. That’s what he’d intended to say. He cooled his burning fingertips against his forehead.
She exhaled loudly and then breathed in deeply, as though she was starved for air. What are you sorry for? she asked, and he was startled to realize that he’d spoken.
The basket of eggs. He remembered Sara’s basket of brown eggs resting on the floor inside the door. Remembered Sara perched uneasily on the edge of his cot, hair undone and brushing her white shoulders. The fullness of her breasts, pale nipples gone flat and as large as silver dollars. She got up from the bed, the curve of her spine giving way to plump buttocks.
She looked up at the sloped ceiling as the piano music began, hearing Alice counting out the beat of the song. Oh, her, Sara said, knowing that Alice had rented the Villebrun’s’ former suite of rooms. The two women had come upon each other once, as Sara was leaving his room and Alice was descending the stairs, both of them equally surprised. Alice took in Sara’s attempt to smooth her dishevelled hair; the egg basket in her hand. So it’s Sara, the egg girl, she said, with a tight smile, connecting the egg girl with the Sara she’d met for the first time at Romeo’s party in the city.
Oliver wondered if Sara suspected that Alice’s presence in the suite upstairs was why he’d coaxed her into his room, petted and kissed away her protests until she agreed to a hurried bit of love, while her sister Katy went about town delivering pints of cream. He wanted Alice to be playing the piano, Moonlight Sonata, Drink to Me Only, or a student of piano to be plinking up and down the scales, which would mean that Alice was present on the bench, her pencil poised above the keys, ears turned to the sound of their shenanigans. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Oliver thought. He was giving Alice something to chew on.
The buffalo robe where Sara had sat, and the insides of her legs, were streaked with semen as she shivered into her clothes, mouth soft from their hard kisses while her eyes remained a blur of anguish, worry, fear.
He was sorry for that.
And he was sorry for Sara’s longing, such an intense smouldering that he feared it might suck the air from him. A longing he felt even when she wasn’t present. Do you love me? Her question seemed to mean so much more than that.
And he was sorry for a particular afternoon when a timid and halting rendition of a well-known song in Villebrun’s suite had suddenly turned him angry. He swore, heaved himself over Sara and up from the bed. He pulled on his trousers, ignoring her whispers, her alarm that he intended to leave the room shirtless and in bare feet. He’d gone thumping up the scale of the stairs, astonishing Alice when he burst into the parlour. She stepped away from the piano, a rash of blood rising in her neck as he nudged the inept piano player aside on the bench.
He demonstrated as he played by ear, and with a flourish that was entirely his own, how the piece was meant to be rendered, as the student shrugged into her cloak and rushed from the room, armed with a new tale of Union Plains’ most-talked-about bachelor.
Goodnight, Irene, Für Elise, Claire De Lune. Oliver played on, his fingers knowing which notes to reach for, the sharps and flats, the ascending and descending harmonies. He possessed strong and nimble fingers, a muscular yet slender body suitable for the back of a pony, or to pull oars for two smokes of the pipe without tiring.
Oliver’s people had once been known as the true people of the west, admired and respected, but with the arrival of the Orangemen they were cheated, humiliated, murdered and chased off the land. Ignorant men from Ontario pressed their inferior stamp on everything and everyone, proud to be strutting around in the dung of their vulgarity. Some of his people had gone to the rodeo circuit in America as ropers, trick riders, sharpshooters. Those who were whiter of skin and clever enough melded into the streets of St. Boniface among the self-important French, who, should they catch a whiff of smoked meat among them, would turn up their aristocratic noses. Most of the Metis disappeared into cities and northern towns, into bushland, or parked their tents along road allowances and dug in for a life of poverty.
Alice stood at the window while Oliver played, her face working as she watched the student hurry across the street to a waiting car. Yes, you have talent to burn, Alice said to the window. Whatever you put your hand to seems to come easy. But you’re all show.
She turned to him, her features swimming with emotion as she gathered music books from a side table and held them against herself as though for protection. Oliver began playing a nickelodeon song with a plinking lightness he didn’t feel. It was true, he was jack of all trades and master of none.
As easy as breathing, he told her when he’d finished. A person doesn’t need to go to an academy to learn music. He’d spoken in English, because she had come over to the English side of the river to teach piano to English-speaking kids. When in Rome.
This he had learned while working for a short time as a barber in Winnipeg, with people who said bison when they meant to say basin. Say, Oliver, old chap, why don’t you bring me a bison of hot water so I can shave this man? He’d learned to speak like them, and while doing it almost ruined his hands, swollen twice the size by the end of the day. He’d been so naive to think that the barbering trade would make him a suitable candidate for Alice’s husband. He found himself working in a tiny room with four chairs, the space between them hardly large enough for a man to pass through. He’d paid an arm and a leg for his tools, for the laundering of barbering clothes and towels. He came home at the end of the day with the stink of other people’s hair on his body, an odour that made dogs growl and bare their fangs when he passed. And so he’d put his hand to driving taxi, where a man could be his own boss.
I don’t need to do this, Alice said now, as she reached the door. The nuns send me as many students as I have the time for. I don’t need to come here for the pleasure of teaching the tone-deaf. Her throat clicked as she swallowed.
He heard Alice open the door, he would soon hear it close. And so why did you? he asked.
There was a pause. Through the tightness in her throat, she said, I thought it might be a way for my father to get used to the idea of my being over here. The door closed behind her.
Oliver suddenly thought of Sara in his room under the stairs, waiting for him to whisk her out the back door, listening to their talk. He thrummed the piano keys—a sound of impending danger, a train rushing towards a woman bound to railway tracks, a car speeding through a busy street about to crash into an unsuspecting woman. Oh bugger, oh for the love of the Good Maker, all he’d wanted was a little piece of life.
You stink, Alice said to him now.
For a moment he thought she was teasing him in the old way, when she had made a show of waving him off when he went to embrace her, clearing the air of the fumes he’d brought with him, the dankness of the hotel, the odours of malt and cigar. Then he realized she was angry.
Again footsteps crossed the upstairs floor, and Oliver was surprised to find anger rising in him too. He wanted to pace, to raise his voice, let those upstairs hear, he didn’
t care. He was a man of twenty-five years, what did she expect, keeping herself away from him? Demanding that he measure up to some mark her father had put on a wall. What in hell was a man of substance? If not a barber, or a driver of a taxi, then surely it was a man who’d been given the opportunity to run a hotel.
I’m not meant for the city, he’d told her as they walked among a grove of trees beside the academy in Winnipeg where she studied. The sanded path was strewn with leaves; a crisp sound underfoot heightened his awareness of her cool hand inside his, the way her shoulders were squared—against him? Against her need for him? He didn’t know. He’d been struck silent by the henna in her hair when he’d come upon her in a practice room. He didn’t care for the colour. It made her look handsome, almost mannish, and too pale. The green cape she’d taken from a coat tree in the front hall and flung around her shoulders concealed the shape of her body, as much as did a nun’s habit.
He didn’t tell Alice that he feared that, if he remained in the city, he would become a drinking man. What began as a get-together after work to let off steam degenerated quickly into a determination to get soused. After several drinks Romeo’s lopsided grin gave way to surliness, his pupils dilated and became tunnels of black. Meanwhile, several drinks imbued Oliver with a love for the entire world. He left Romeo to simmer and went visiting among the tables, encouraged by the laughter his joshing roused, his generosity stretching beyond a sensible limit if he should happen to notice a man who had drunk down to the last bit of change on the table and still nursed a deep thirst. He seldom turned aside a challenge at billiards, and although he usually went away with empty pockets, he refused to be bothered by it. It’s just money, is all. There’s nothing a person can do with money, except spend it.
On too many occasions, he’d awakened to find himself on a sofa in a house he didn’t recognize. A half-dressed child staring him in the face, its inner arms crusted with eczema; a baby going about unattended in a sopping diaper, whimpering to be fed. He’d awakened to the sight of a woman’s breasts spilling across the sheet beside him, and not known who she was. He worried, the days following, lest there be signs of the clap.
When Alice had gone to study music for a year at the academy, Oliver had followed her, hoping that the distance between Winnipeg and Aubigny might weaken her father’s influence. Although he’d found many opportunities to go past the academy while driving taxi, he’d never turned into its long driveway, or climbed the stairs to the second floor, until now. He followed a mishmash of music erupting from the practice rooms. A soprano voice sighed up and down a scale, while several pianos competed to be heard. He followed the music, an odour of incense, its scent hinting at the secret lives of the nuns lived out above the classrooms, as mysterious as the dimly lit corridors branching off from the practice rooms.
He wanted to pull Alice into himself while he told her about Villebrun’s offer to let him manage the hotel so he and Madame could retire to Florida. But he found himself stirring through the leaves with his foot as he blurted the news outright, instead of doing as he’d intended, asking Alice to come to Union Plains as his wife.
But Oliver, you’d still be nothing more than a joe-boy to that man, she said.
Hours later, Oliver sat in the darkness of a movie theatre, tears streaming down his cheeks as he watched Charlie Chaplin eating a piece of watermelon. His muscles ached from laughing as the clown dug watermelon from his ears, speared a turkey off a banquet table with his walking stick. When he danced with Miss Moneybags, his legs flew out from under him, or else he kicked himself in the arse. Oliver began to anticipate the laughter of the audience, felt the joy that lingered after the moment when it erupted, a lightness in the air. There was something good to be said about a person who could do what Charlie Chaplin did.
He emerged into the glare of the day feeling hollow, but the ache put there by Alice was gone. He went to the taxi garage, washed and polished the car and gave notice that he was leaving. Then he donned his uniform in a curtained cubicle, for a last time, and set off for the remainder of the day and evening. He thought he would stop in at the barbershop on Main Street and put another dollar down on what he still owed there. There was no reason for him not to see Sara bounding into the street in front of his car, except that one moment she wasn’t there, and the next she was. The little DP girl he’d seen on the ferry had become a woman seemingly throwing herself in his path.
The heat in the kitchen made his eyes grow heavy, and he noticed that light was beginning to dawn in the window. Some kid, or the ice cutter, would soon venture out onto the river and come upon his skate blades stuck on end in the snow and wonder why they’d been left. He couldn’t afford to come too near the edge again. Drinking or otherwise. He breathed in deeply to gain the courage to say why he’d come.
You stink, Alice had said, the words riddled with hostility. Now she said, with a flatness, The woman is pregnant, isn’t she. It was not a question.
Yes. That she is. She’s in the family way, Oliver answered. And he was the family-maker. Whatever had kept him tethered to Alice throughout the years snapped. He hadn’t anticipated this flooding of relief, a sudden light rising as it now rose in the window. Daylight.
Her hands flew up to her face, she bent over the table, and he realized that she was weeping.
Don’t, he said. But he felt none of the attending rush of anxiety, the need to squat beside her while she cried; to pick bits of gravel from a scraped knee and sponge it with warm water.
I’m going to die here, she said, the words amplified and distorted by her cupped hands. They want to keep me here for the sake of their old age. I’ll go crazy.
Do something, she had pleaded on a winter day long ago, when a dog had got into a rabbit hutch. But he couldn’t undo the ripped-apart bodies, the bits of fur and spatters of blood on the snow. And so, in anger, he’d chased down the dog and shot it. Well, there was no way he was about to do the same to himself.
The chair scraped against the floor as he got up to leave.
I’ve always loved you, she told him when he’d reached the door. I’ll never stop loving you.
Yes, but unlike Sara, she had never loved him enough in the here and now. Unlike Sara, she’d not been willing to go against her family’s wishes in order to take a flyer on the likes of him.
He returned from Alice shortly after sunrise, his body aching for sleep. He planned to rest, to eat, and then he would strap on his snowshoes and travel along the river to the farm and put an end to the shame of having evaded Sara all these weeks. The snow on his trousers had melted in Alice’s kitchen and froze on the walk home; the trousers became stiff and beaded with ice. His fingertips still stung like fire. He didn’t recognize the horse and wagon parked across the street from the hotel, but he could guess who they belonged to.
Where I come from, we have ways to deal with matters such as what you’ve done to Sara, Kornelius said. Those being his first words when Oliver stepped into the hotel foyer. There was a horsewhip lying on the floor between his feet.
Rusty sardine-can lids, a straight razor—Oliver was familiar with the means and ways by which a man could be persuaded to take up his responsibility; in his case it was an unnecessary persuasion. He knew it wouldn’t matter what he said. Forever after, Kornelius would believe that his visit had been the deciding factor. Oliver told him, Sir, there’s no need to get your shirt in a knot. I intend to do the right thing.
TEN
Two weddings
HOUSE ISN’T A HOUSE without a piano, Oliver decided, recalling the many Sunday afternoons spent at the keyboard in the Bouchard living room. And so it should not have been surprising that the second purchase he made for the house was a piano, the first being a wood-burning stove. He continued to live at the hotel during the week leading up to the first of his two weddings to Sara, and made daily trips to the small house to stoke the fire, and went again during the night, to ensure that its walls warmed sufficiently by the time the instrument arrived a
t the train station.
Oliver had chanced upon the piano in a second-hand store in Winnipeg, a bell tinkling above the door as he and Romeo stepped inside to a confusing display of household paraphernalia. Romeo had met Oliver at the train station, anticipating that they would play billiards and then he’d treat his young brother to a meal at a snazzy restaurant, and they’d join up with the meat-packing crowd at the Belgium Club. Treat Oliver to what was to be his last roaring time as a bachelor.
On Romeo’s advice, Oliver sought out the second-hand store in the hope of finding a wedding present, as he’d already spent a considerable amount at a tailor shop for a suit, shirt and tie, and put out good money for his first pair of proper shoes, black oxfords that seemed flimsy and treacherously light on his feet. After walking the distance of an aisle and back, he declared that they were just what the doctor had ordered. I’ll take them, Good Sir, he said, his tone matching the proprietor’s enthusiasm, while Romeo looked on in amusement.
The upright Heintzman sat against a wall, surrounded by paintings and photographs. Landscapes of misty, meandering streams, flower-dotted meadows, old-world scenes whose subdued colours seemed too soft to be actual depictions. Portentous-looking people glared out at the clutter of housewares and furniture, their photographs put on show for the value of the picture frames.
The piano was covered in dust and the top of it was being used as a display shelf for various items. The instrument had seen better days, its keyboard spent. Consequently its touch was too light and its tone jangled, a sound suited for honky-tonk, the proprietor said. Oliver played several chords and allowed that it was blown out, but imagined himself playing waltzes, teaching Sara to play a duet. Romeo looked dubious, questioning his brother’s wisdom in considering a used-up piano as a wedding gift. He thought Oliver should be perusing jewellery, in particular a bracelet of cut glass that sparked different colours when Romeo turned it to the light in the window.
Children of the Day Page 18
