Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  A distant humming of a vehicle approaching on Stage Coach Road sounded like a finger being drawn along the rim of a bowl, the green bowl of vegetation he found himself in, the river unwinding along its bottom. The hum became a ringing as the vehicle passed by and then the sound faded. The steady putt-putt of the ferry’s engine pecked away at the silence. He planned to board and cross over and back, to do so for as many times as was necessary for the wind in his ribs to subside.

  The Red River and not Alice Bouchard was actually ABC the Goldfish. ABC the Goldfish being Abe, see the gold fish. The saying had originated with the old gents, and referred to a travelling salesman, Abe Solomon, who had once sold needles and thread in the towns along Stage Coach Road. He claimed to have seen a school of gold-coloured fish the size of bread-and-butter plates, hundreds, churning upstream as though disturbed by an eggbeater. Although Oliver often went walking in the night, he dropped by Alice Bouchard’s house no more than twice or three times in a year.

  Ulysse was the man Oliver went to see about a dog, whenever the glass eyes of the worn-out buffalo head on the parlour wall seemed to follow him about the room as he cleared away the tumblers, emptied ashtrays, washed and wiped, as though the animal were impatient for him to be finished and get started on his real life. Chief Fine Day oversaw the abandoned parlour with a proprietary air that sometimes became mocking. At such times Oliver stopped what he was doing, looked about the battered establishment and realized that this was his real life, his future. He was living it.

  He also went to the river to escape, on the days when he was fortunate enough to spot Emilie hurrying along the street, riding the ferry for as long as it took her to give up on her search for him and return home. Or wherever it was his kids went during the day in order to stay clear of Sara. In winter he kept his snowshoes ready at the back door. When he reached the river he strapped them on and went for a tramp along the wind-blasted channel, his lungs on fire with the cold, his body elastic with a youthful vigour, his corpuscles plumped with oxygen.

  He had heard from Sara the Biblical story of there once being a race of giants on earth, the offspring of angels who’d cohabited with the daughters of men. He hadn’t said that he’d heard a similar story, that the first of his kind, the true Canadians, were seven and eight feet tall. They were burly, broad-shouldered and barrel-shaped men who hunted a breed of giant buffalo, of which the bones of several had been unearthed within miles of Union Plains. The first of his kind had been giants, while the women had also been known for their size, petite and dainty as meadow buttercups, such as Oliver’s mother had been—comely and dark-complexioned, with dimpled cheeks and strong white teeth.

  The ferry nudged into the landing and a wave washed over the toes of Oliver’s boots and retreated. I seen you coming, Ulysse called, as he ducked out of the engine shack. He stretched tension from his body, rose on his toes and lifted an arm, his palm turned upward as though he were a pillar holding up the sky.

  How come you didn’t see me coming last night? Oliver teased, referring to his uncle’s sixth sense. He’d been startled to find Oliver and the two girls waiting on the shore.

  It was dark, Ulysse said, as though Oliver should know this, leaving Oliver chagrined and at the same time puzzled.

  The ferry shuddered as they drew away from the landing, churning up the yellow clay bottom that muddied the water in the way thunderclouds murk a horizon before a storm. And then they were into the deep, where the algae particles dazzled like sequins on a figure skater’s twirling skirt.

  Oliver took down an apple box from the roof of a motor shack and upended it, his usual seat, but his uncle didn’t claim his chair. He seemed lost in himself as he scanned the approaching shoreline, his walnut features crinkling in a squint against the sun. There she be, he said, and moments later a car appeared on the crest of the ferry road. The old maroon Chrysler swayed and squeaked as it descended towards the river.

  Old man Villebrun, Ulysse said. He plucked his pipe from his shirt pocket and jammed it between his teeth as though to prevent himself from saying more.

  Look who you see when you don’t have a gun, Oliver said to cover his turmoil. The car appeared to be driven by a child. Villebrun’s hands grasped the steering wheel at the level of his ears, so that only the brim of his hat was visible above the rim. The car horn blared, a hand waved and Oliver felt the man’s penetrating gaze. He was on his own, so Madame Villebrun was likely still bedridden, or perhaps she had passed on.

  Oliver got up from the box, as though wanting to flee, but there was nowhere to go except to meet him head-on. He imagined himself saying, Business has been slow. An explanation for not having written or even sent a postcard through-out the past five, six years. Maybe more, he allowed, as, moments later, Villebrun’s car brought its roar onto the ferry.

  You’ve got to understand, Oliver thought, feeling the heat of the car as it idled for a moment; its engine gave a final kick as Villebrun shut it down. The door opened with a wrenching creak of metal, a white golf shoe appeared, a brown trouser leg and then the whole man.

  Merde, a cadaver, Oliver thought, as Villebrun’s pale face turned towards his own, his features indistinct, as though dusted with a powder that absorbed the light of the sun.

  Oliver, my good man, I was on my way to the hotel to see you, Villebrun said, and extended a trembling, liver-spotted hand. Its clamminess and the tissue-paper thinness of its skin turned Oliver queasy.

  I was on my way to the hotel to see you, Villebrun said again. His voice was toneless, rusty-sounding and cracked. He’d left his hat in the car and Oliver noticed that his silver hair was long, slick with pomade and tucked behind his ears.

  Oliver had to lean towards him in order to hear. You saved me a trip, Villebrun said. His brown-suited body exuded an odour of decay, like the mould-encrusted vegetation lying in pockets in the underbrush where the land never had a chance to dry out.

  The ferry started up and Villebrun teetered with the sudden but gentle motion; he grabbed for the car and leaned into its fender. He had never been tall, but the years had shrunk him to less than five feet.

  How are things in Florida? Oliver asked. He knew Villebrun lived in a trailer park outside Palm Beach and near a golf course, and that was all he knew. The correspondence that had passed between them throughout the years had amounted to several lines on a postcard, and the brief notes Oliver sent with an even briefer accounting of the business midway and at the end of each year. An accounting of the intake and output, the resulting profit and what he had managed to deposit at the caisse populaire. Brief letters explaining why he hadn’t sent an accounting, why there wasn’t any profit, the dwindling receipts, and then he didn’t think there was any point in writing.

  Alligator, Villebrun said, and with some difficulty he opened his jacket to reveal a shiny leather belt. Got one in the car for you, he said. His obvious pleasure at the happenstance of coming across Oliver on the ferry subsided. We have to talk, Oliver, he said. We have to talk about the business.

  You betcha. For sure, we’ll have a talk, Oliver said. By and by they’d have a meeting. But first he’d have to get the books in shape. He’d ask Alvina to sit down one night and sort through the hat boxes of receipts. Enter them into the accounting book and add up the columns. She had a good head, a flair for numbers. Emilie had a flair for words and for causing trouble. She had written stories for him, verses, which he sometimes read. War stories, verses about the war, about battlegrounds she had imagined coming to life in the flash and boom of a howitzer.

  What do you want to go and write about that for? he’d asked. What he knew about the battlegrounds of the last war would fit into a thimble. Emilie knew even less. You don’t know anything about that, Oliver told her. But I can imagine, she said. No you can’t, he said. No one can imagine what it’s like to be in a war. When you make things up, you’re telling lies.

  He had Sara’s fruitfulness to thank for his own lack of experience of the real war, his ho
nourable discharge coming just as his regiment was being shipped to Hong Kong, creating a worm of bitterness that he nursed during the long train trip home. A thick and flesh-coloured worm the size of a finger, curled at the bottom of a glass of clear water—the thought of his comrades, the older chaps he’d come to appreciate, going off where he couldn’t go. He still nursed a bitterness, tinged now with a begrudging gratitude, knowing that he likely would not have got through the internment that only a few had survived.

  Oliver’s thoughts went this way and that to avoid beginning conversation with Villebrun, who’d gone over to Ulysse to exchange a word. Now Villebrun had returned. I’ve just come from the caisse populaire, he said. I closed the account. You should know this, Oliver. You should know that as of today, I have shut down the hotel. She’s closed. I’m going to arrange for a transfer company to come and empty her out. I shut her down, Oliver. I shut her down for good, he said again, and nodded. Oliver, my good man, I’m here to tell you that.

  Look here, I’ve got three lodgers, three old gentlemen. Where’re they going to go? I’ve got me ten kids, Oliver said, hearing his English come apart in the presence of this man as though he were twelve years old, stumbling for words because it was this man’s money he carried home in his pocket.

  In the silence that followed, Villebrun didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. He put them in and took them out of his pockets, flicked at imaginary lint on his jacket, scratched at the silver stubble on his chin. Then he said, Holy Mother of Jesus, by now some of them must be old enough to go out to work, eh? Couldn’t you put them to work for you?

  Sonny Boy and George were years older than what Oliver had been on the day he had left the schoolhouse for the last time. His kids wanted to know how far he’d gone, what grade had he achieved? He suspected they would deduce from that what was expected of them. He told them, I went to school three days and both days the teacher wasn’t there. They never seemed to catch the joke; he surmised from their bewilderment that they took what he’d said as fact. He’d attended school four years, and then, like most boys of the day, he had been out becoming a child of experience. He had nothing whatsoever against that, except that he wasn’t fussy on his sons gaining the type of experience he’d gained while indentured as a joe-boy to Madame Villebrun.

  She’s bad, Oliver. She costs me a mint for Madame Villebrun’s care. I’d just as soon strangle the old bitch and get her over it. But as you know, there’s a law going against that. Villebrun’s lips parted in a smile, colourless and glazed-looking. He laughed, his thin shoulders jerking inside his too-large suit jacket.

  He wiped his eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, stuffed it back into a breast pocket and continued, The old lady can’t so much as go to the bathroom on her own any more, but wouldn’t you know it, she still has all her marbles. She still runs the show, Oliver, like always. She says to tell you, don’t take this serious. She says to tell you that she will always think of you as being a son.

  A declaration that had come before, too soon after his mother’s burial and Romeo’s departure to St. Boniface, while Oliver lived alone in the almost empty house, the days interminably long and silent. Oliver had awakened thinking he heard his mother’s footsteps, the chattering of a lid on a cookpot. His breast had been swollen with such a hard ache that he could barely swallow as he ate the food he sometimes thought to prepare.

  Oliver had noticed a dusting of snow on his mother’s grave one morning, a forecasting of the pending winter. He hadn’t thought of the season changing, until then. There was movement around him in the earth and the wind, changes that had gone unnoticed, which would bring about a closing in and closing down, the earth frozen solid, the snow banking up the sides of the tiny house while he hunkered under the buffalo robe, thinking he heard his mother’s footsteps. While he waited for the Bouchard family to return from their winter spent in Boca Raton.

  He had been grateful when Henri Villebrun had come with a horse and sleigh to help him transport his few belongings across the river. A gratefulness that had given way to trepidation as he felt Madame Villebrun’s finger in his back, directing him across the room, as he was urged towards a table and the chairs set around it. I want you to think of this as being your home, she told him. The budgie bird screeched and rocked on its perch inside a cage hanging before the window. Marcel, hey, sweetie, you remember Oliver, yes? Marcel likes you, she proclaimed, when the bird came over to the door of the cage and began nipping at its bars.

  The ferry nudged into the landing, and Villebrun pushed himself away from the car and went over to its door, signalling that their business meeting had ended. Near to thirty years of Oliver’s life was finished, a marriage of sorts was over, leaving him nothing and nowhere to go. The ferry strained against the guide wires, tugged sideways by the current near the shore, and Oliver thought, cut her loose. Let the whole shebang drift downstream. He felt like an abandoned child, except that his body was not that of a child. It had lost its resilience, its ability to fly down a snowy hill on a piece of cardboard without him feeling every bump in his spine. The years had aged him faster than what was necessary to remind a person that the Good Maker had promised human beings a lifespan of three score and ten.

  Villebrun was about to climb back into his car, hesitated and then returned. He reached inside a jacket pocket and brought out a wallet, a wad of money unfolding like an accordion as he thumbed through it.

  The way she stands, Oliver, it’s clear that you owe me. But there’s no point in trying to get blood from a stone. I’m not one for that. Ten kids, my God—I guess once you learned how, you couldn’t get enough of it. He leered, his lips stretching tautly across his large yellow teeth. Madame told me that I’m to give each of your kids ten dollars, he said. You can bet your britches she didn’t know what she was getting into when she said that. A hundred smackers, he added, with a wry chuckle. Tell you what. You shut her down for me. I’ve sold the furnishings to a junk dealer I met in Florida, a fella from Winnipeg.

  I know, Oliver said. I’ve met him. He came round yesterday. The man in the cream-coloured suit and his moll, he thought.

  I was going to write and tell you, Villebrun said, looking away. Then I thought I should come and see the old girl before she’s closed. Listen, the man wrote a cheque on the spot, a thousand bucks sight unseen, I couldn’t refuse. You make sure everything goes smoothly, eh? Especially that the men at the transfer company take special care with those mirrors. You see to that, Oliver, my good man, and I’ll consider us square.

  The ferry drifted to a stop. It bumped into the platform, the swell of water rising and falling under Oliver’s feet. He was surprised to discover that the bills were warm from the man’s body, surprised when once again, just as Villebrun was about to get into the car, he hesitated, then returned to Oliver with the alligator belt. A little remembrance, he said abruptly, shoving the belt into Oliver’s hands before turning away, as though not wanting to risk a display of emotions.

  Oliver should have stayed in Winnipeg; like Romeo, he might have found a steady woman who understood his ways. They might have frequented the horse races, a bingo hall, taken in the picture shows and an occasional celebration of the Eucharist. If Romeo could turn a blind eye to the hypocrisy of a sinning priest for the sake of his soul and those of his children, then surely Oliver might have too. Stay away from that one, Romeo had warned Oliver of Father Carrière, he’s a bugger, that one.

  He chose to think this and to forget about his brother’s deep pain, his need to numb it with alcohol; his own despair when, after a night of partying, he was given a bum’s rush out into the street, the words drunken half-breed tossed out after him.

  He imagined now, with mounting acrimony, that his life might have unrolled into an ordinary carpet of events if it hadn’t been for Alice’s father. Human nature caused a person to strain against a dictate such as the one given by her father, that Oliver must prove himself, prove he was good enough, become a man of substance in ord
er to win Alice’s hand. His life would have evolved differently if his own father had been present to tell him that just being who he was was already good enough. His and Alice’s future had been determined by a man who was now unable to control his own bladder.

  Villebrun’s car sprang to life, followed by the engine of a truck parked beyond the landing, waiting to embark.

  Oliver watched as Villebrun drove away and the truck lumbered onto the ferry. He decided that he would travel across with it, as he needed time to collect his thoughts before returning to Union Plains. Sara was in bed, flat on her back with what was likely morning sickness, and a sickness of his own gripped his body. He sometimes joked that he was aiming for twelve children because he’d heard that they were cheaper by the dozen, but he hadn’t aimed for anything. The Vandals had just happened; they had happened to him while he was out seeing a man about a dog.

  Oliver wound the belt Villebrun had given him around his hand and felt the bite of its stiff leather. His eye was drawn to a radiation of ripples where a fish had surfaced. He thought about being near to the age of forty-five and having nothing to show but an expanding waistline and regret. He unwound the belt, swung it about his head and let it fly. It came down near the rippling circle and he watched it sink, imagining the fish swerving, darting down into the hidden world.

  The ferry landed and as the truck drove off, Oliver followed it. Without thinking, he took the usual route to the Bouchard house, a path running parallel to the river and Main Street, which branched off at the various houses along the way to go up an incline and through a growth of chokecherry, coming to an end at the edge of yards. When he travelled this path during the night, he was guided by the lit windows, moonlight shining on a roof beyond the trees. Today, through the trees, he was afforded a glimpse of the backyard sheds and privies, what remained of his childhood.