Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  Your Oliver is a real character, Florence told Sara during one of their first visits, as though it was important that she know this. According to Florence, during Oliver’s bachelor days he was sharp at billiards. For a time he played a circuit and travelled about the countryside toting a cue in a case engraved with his name. Word of Oliver’s prowess reached Minnesota Fats and, unexpectedly, the man came up on a train from Minneapolis to engage Oliver in a game of billiards, and lost. Florence’s husband was one of the few men to witness that midnight game, the defeated Minnesota Fats grinding out a cigar on the table and retiring to his room without uttering a peep. Oliver denied the rumour when Sara repeated it, but in a way that hinted that it pleased him.

  But there it was, the pool hustler’s name appearing on the billboard he erected to attract travellers going by on Stage Coach Road. Why pay city rates? $6.00 per night! Pool Room and Billiards. Frequented by Minnesota Fats! What the sign didn’t say was that a guest couldn’t expect more than a cup of coffee.

  Since the health inspector had closed down Florence Dressler’s nip-and-chip stand, the nearest place to purchase something to eat was a café in Alexander Morris.

  It was also known, Florence said, that Oliver used to float downriver on his back while reading the newspaper. This in face of the fact that he got rid of his rowboat when a fortune teller at the Alexander fair predicted that he would die by drowning.

  Sometimes Sara and Oliver go for a walk, the children gathering in the yard to see them off, unsettled at the sight of their parents going away from them, as though Sara and Oliver were embarking on a voyage to a foreign country.

  Their shoulders almost touch, they’re that close when they walk. Close enough for conversation. However, Sara isn’t interested in what Oliver wants to point out during their infrequent rambles onto the land. The things he learned from his father and Ulysse. Moss grows on the north side of a tree, the saucers of mustard-coloured fungus stacked up the side of a trunk are edible. Oliver names the grasses, the trees. There are owls burrowed in the ground five to ten feet down. The nocturnal birds shelter in the holes of other animals, a fact that brings Sara to a halt, her shoulders bunching in fear of an unexpected flapping of wings about her head.

  He tells her that before his uncle Ulysse was a ferry man, he’d been a walker, until his legs gave out.

  When word reached him at the Roseau Reserve that the municipality was looking to replace the aged one-armed ferry operator, he claimed to be a distant relative with a right to the job, and walked back into Oliver’s life one winter morning, stepping into the kitchen suddenly and soundlessly, an apparition wearing layers of what looked like sackcloth. Icicles and snot matted his grey moustache and beard, which moved when he spoke what sounded like French—his mouth being rigid with cold caused the words to come out square. The English phrase by golly jumped out of a series of clanking sentences as he held up a string of fish. When he shook it, the fish clattered like wooden chimes.

  By golly, nephew, long time no see, Ulysse greeted Oliver when he came downstairs to investigate the commotion. The heat of the kitchen turned Ulysse’s cheeks the colour of wine and began penetrating the layers of his clothing. As the various shirts warmed, odours were released—fish, woodsmoke, his unwashed body, his advanced age.

  He’d brought the string of fish for Oliver’s woman to cook for supper. In the meantime, he’d welcome a hot breakfast. Eggs and bannock. Did Sara have flour in the house?

  He stayed for the remainder of the morning, on a chair beside the kitchen cupboards, drinking tea and consuming the bannock he’d made, having taken over from Sara when she appeared not to understand his instruction. As the morning progressed, Ulysse began to draw off layer after layer of clothing, the first being a duffel jacket bound at the waist with a soiled and worn sash, and a pair of leather leggings. Then he removed a flannel shirt whose buttons were missing, the shirt fastened with stovepipe wire. When he peeled down to one shirt, Sara realized that the man was nothing more than skin and bones.

  Throughout the morning Ulysse’s attention had been taken by the children. Ruby crawling about in a playpen set up in the centre of the room. Simon and Manny amusing themselves at the play table. Ulysse would laugh, for no reason Sara could discern. He seemed pleasant enough, and showed an interest in the fruit plaques on the kitchen wall, and took it upon himself to rearrange them, while Sara was out of the room.

  By the time Oliver and the children collected around the two tables for supper, Sara was terse and fierce in the eye. He wears four shirts, she said. Each one of them equally dirty. Their meal of fish was consumed without Ulysse, who had excused himself to go out back to use the privy. When he failed to return, Oliver followed his footprints in the snow past the privy and through Florence Dressler’s yard, and onto the prairie. Good riddance, Sara said. She had seen the likes of Ulysse before, in Russia—long-haired and dirty peasants, their fingers stained with nicotine, men who erupted suddenly and made demands, made a shambles of whatever house they entered. Thieves who came snooping and returned later with others, with horses and wagons to carry off what they claimed rightfully belonged to them. Her grandparents’ bed had been loaded onto one of those wagons and hauled off down the street.

  That has nothing to do with this, Oliver interrupted, speaking quietly, as though he expected Ulysse would materialize through the wall. Oliver wanted to put a damper on what he feared she might go on to say. Sara was a cat dragging a dead mouse to a meal table. Don’t bring the old country into this, he warned.

  She might have told Oliver that, during the revolution, people her family had known for years had changed. Ordinary men turned into animals, their features swollen with lasciviousness, sharp with cunning or blunted by rage. They’d become evil. She thought of this when Ulysse’s features turned hawklike and his eyes ferocious with concentration.

  Ulysse had tapped his teacup with a spoon to gain Sara’s attention, and pointed at the clock. The hour hand inched across its face, passed through all the numbers, and then it stopped. You see what a person can do if they have a mind, Ulysse said, his English halting as he struggled for the necessary words. As Sara recounted this to Oliver, her eyes grew wide. He made the plaques move in the same way, she said, in a whisper.

  What Sara wants during her and Oliver’s infrequent walks into the country is to try to understand their children, who seem to resist all her efforts to raise them in a fitting way, in the way her sister raised her children as obedient, mild-tempered and respectful of their elders.

  Ours are good kids. They’ve got strong spirits. There’s nothing wrong with that, Oliver says.

  Sara has come upon a pack of cigarettes in Emilie’s drawer. Where did she get it? No amount of questioning or swatting or pinching will make her say. Sara worries that Emilie hangs around with boys more than girls. She hears herself saying things to Emilie she sometimes wishes she could take back. You’re going to wind up pregnant. You’re going to throw your life away. Slut. She’s puzzled and shamed by her cruelty, but it seems that once she gets started, she just can’t stop. Not even at the look of bewilderment, Emilie’s hands covering her ears.

  They all go through that, Oliver claims.

  Stealing? Well, I certainly never did. Did you?

  Not everyone’s the same, Oliver concedes.

  Ida got her period, Sara announces.

  You don’t say. Oliver thinks Ida will make a dandy wife. She reminds him of his sister, anxious for a head start and out the door and married at the age of fifteen.

  Don’t you think it’s time to start a hopeless chest for the girls? he asks. Six girls—ye gads and little fishes! He’s never put a thought to the fact that he’ll be responsible for six weddings.

  Hopeless is right, Sara says, and adds, I never had one.

  Twice now, Sonny Boy has come home with what Sara suspects is the odour of beer on his breath.

  A little beer never hurts, Oliver says. You let him have one at home now and then, and
he won’t see the need to go out drinking with the Bogg brothers in the car. It’s safer to do it at home than in a car. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

  As usual, he thinks.

  TWELVE

  Shopping

  OW WAS WORK? Sara asked Oliver, thinking of the trip she would take to Winnipeg tomorrow. The scarf she meant to return to Emily Ashburn lay on the bureau across the room, along with the paper patterns she’d made of the children’s feet. She hoped to buy the girls sandals, the boys runners, for the coming summer months. To take the trolley car down Crescent Road and see how the elms had grown. Go as far as the park gates, perhaps, and walk back along the crescent to the Ashburn house. What had changed, if anything? she wondered. She’s changed. That’s what has changed. She’s older, wiser, a woman. A mother of ten children and owner of a house.

  Oliver said, Comme ci, comme ça, and flicked his hand. While he didn’t want her to worry, he didn’t want her to entertain thoughts of going on a spending spree, either. I bring the money in the front door and the little woman shovels it out the back, he liked to joke, concealing the worry that sawed away at his ribs. Years had passed since he’d last heard from Henri Villebrun, and then last month he had received a letter, a few lines of greeting and news of Madame Villebrun. News that he feared would bring repercussions tramping down the road.

  I heard from Villebrun. The old lady has had a stroke. She’s bedridden, he said, his voice not betraying his feelings, a sense of vindication. He thought, the old sow, she finally got hers. He recoiled from the memory of the woman’s powder-caked face leaning too near his own, her lipstick bleeding into the creases of her mouth as she pursed her lips in an invitation for a kiss.

  Sara let this reference to a person she’d never met go without a comment. She rose on an elbow to peer at the luminescent hands of the clock on the bureau. It’s late, she said. After all these years she was still unable to let this go.

  I know. I had me a walk. To the river, to jaw with Ulysse for half an hour or so, he didn’t say. Ulysse had heard talk of a bridge being built and the ferry being shut down.

  Sara slid a leg against his to draw in its outdoor coolness. He must be fed, she thought. In order to keep him in his usual good mood, she must feed him before she left, and when she returned. While he encouraged her to go shopping in Winnipeg, he was always distant when she came back, as though punishing her for being away. To keep him from wandering, she must see to it that his hunger for sex was appeased. He turned to her, threw his leg over her thigh, and moments later she felt his testicles moving, his member growing thick.

  Afterwards he slept immediately, while Sara imagined flowers on the wall, foliage composed of the light and shadows cast by moonlight through lace curtains. She’d memorized the shopping list she had made after supper, and ran through it now. Fishing lures. A brassiere for Ida. She thought of what she would wear tomorrow, something smart and stylish to impress Emily Ashburn.

  She thought of Coral, of meeting the woman nearly a year ago at the bus depot when she’d arrived early and, wanting a bite to eat, had gone into the coffee shop. The only information Coral had volunteered about herself, she had offered on that first meeting, when she parked her enormous derrière on the stool beside Sara. She had nodded towards a window and a man coming across the parking lot walking sideways, obviously drunk. Poor soul, she said. I’m from Trinidad. Where’re you from? Sara felt her sideways appraisal. From Russia. She was startled to find herself talking to the bus depot’s cleaning lady. That makes us both DP—two dumb people, Coral said. Two dirty people, Sara countered, surprising herself. Coral’s heavy eyelids closed and she hummed, then stopped, her smile revealing large even teeth. But you know of course, girl, that we’re all sheep. And some of us have gone astray, but there’s nothing dirty about us when we’re walking in the footsteps of the Good Shepherd.

  Astray, oh yes, Sara thought. The closer she came to being forty, the stronger was the feeling that somewhere in her life she had taken a wrong turn. If Coral weren’t black, she wouldn’t have told her stories about her life, in the way rural women were apt to do. It was easy to know who among the shoppers were country women by the way they engaged sales clerks in long tales of their families, their illnesses, the trials and errors of distant relatives. They were oblivious to indifference, the clerk’s condescension, which made Sara stare at the back of the talker’s head and will her to stop making a fool of herself. But Coral was black, and Sara didn’t want to appear reluctant to talk to her.

  She recalled telling Coral about Florence Dressler’s sister going to the Holy Land, and bringing back the bundle of palm leaves. I want to go there too, she thought, the idea just occurring. She couldn’t ever go back to the country of her birth. But there were places she could go in order to find the past. To the manger where Jesus was born, to the hill far away where he was crucified, as described in an Easter hymn. She would visit Bethlehem, Golgotha, and find out if such places actually existed.

  How’re them kids of yours doing? she imagined Coral asking.

  Fine.

  How’s Emilie?

  I love all my children.

  That’s not what I asked.

  Yes, I know. But that was what came to her mind whenever someone asked. I love them all, Sara thought. As though they were eggs in a basket she hovered over in adoration, but thank God—she needed to breathe sometimes—Winnipeg was only miles away, and tomorrow she would board the bus and be there within thirty minutes.

  The following morning Oliver walked Sara down the access road to the highway, to wait for the bus. It’s going to be a good one, he said, meaning the day. Warm for June. He fished in his back pocket and gave her his leather pouch, and when she put it into her purse, she saw the blue scarf. I might take a later bus home, she told him.

  Suit yourself. Don’t go spending the money all in one place, he said, which was meant as a joke but this morning didn’t sound like one. Both of them turned at the sound of an approaching vehicle.

  Stevenson, the water man, cranked down a window of his truck as he came alongside. If they wanted a lift, he was taking a load down to Alexander Morris, he said, all the while knowing that Sara was off to Winnipeg on one of her shopping trips.

  He was actually alerting them to the fact that another family had moved out of Union Plains. This here’s their stuff, Stevenson said, motioning to the jumble of furniture and boxes secured by a lashing of rope. He told them that the widow Anderson would likely be the next to leave, as her son and his family had driven all the way from Arizona to help the woman pack up.

  Sara and Oliver fell silent as the truck entered Stage Coach Road and went south, not wanting to acknowledge that the rumours about Union Plains seemed to be coming true. They waited beside the highway, the air warming quickly as the sun burned mist from the outlying fields.

  When the bus came to a stop beside them, Oliver noticed the nuns on board and insisted on escorting Sara to her seat. He stopped in the aisle to greet the two sisters, saying, How do? How do?, old-world courtly and respectful, as though, with this homage, he could stave off whatever uncertainty he might be required to face during the coming months. Sara found her own seat as he lingered to address the nuns in French, his voice softening and lilting with a cadence that, to Sara, sounded put on.

  As the bus pulled away she refused to acknowledge his exaggerated salute. He thought that she was stupid, that she couldn’t recognize the difference between a joke and mocking. His deferential greeting to the nuns, the snappy salute in her direction, left her fuming.

  Hours later she was riding a trolley down Crescent Road, having taken the blue scarf from her purse to fold it and press it between her hands in the hope that its creases would ease. She thought that if Emily Ashburn invited her for tea, she would ask to see the room where she’d stayed. Of course, the messages behind the baseboard would likely be gone, including her own. Sara and Oliver, she’d written, then folded the strip of paper so that their names
touched.

  But perhaps the bookcase remained in the hall outside the door, along with the pitifully few books she’d managed to finish reading. Little Women, Lorna Doone, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, novels whose worlds were equally puzzling in their unfamiliarity. She felt a prickle of embarrassment now as she recalled the moment she’d come across a photograph in a book by Sir Walter Scott. A photograph of an enormous oak tree, which had set her heart racing. She had thought she recognized the tree, had taken it to be an old oak growing in her grandparents’ town. A tree well known for its age and size, for being a meeting place. Known by most of her kind, who’d dwelled in over three hundred towns and villages spread across southern Russia.

  She went hurrying downstairs to show Penny, and found her in the dining room, setting the table for dinner. See, this is what Russia was like. It was very green, I remember, and the trees were huge. She sat down at the table trembling, while Penny read aloud the inscription beneath the photograph, an inscription Sara had failed to notice in her excitement. The King’s Oak, at Woodstock.

  Not many days after, when Sara entered her third-floor room, she saw that a book had been left on her bed. She knew without needing to pick it up that it was a reader. She knew from the two years she’d attended school that it was a second-grade reader. Likely Penny had said something to Emily Ashburn, who had concluded that Sara was unable to read.

  There was a tug of movement as the streetcar took off at a stop, empty of passengers now except for an elderly man sitting near the front. She felt the heaviness of her purse resting on her lap, the burden of the bulging shopping bags wedged between her feet.