Waiting for the house in Alexander Morris is a vacant lot beside the United Church of Canada, and a basement already poured and ripened. A recreation room will be built down there and furnished so that the Vandals will have a place to entertain themselves on rainy days and during hard winters. The Wrecked Room, Oliver has already named it. That’s where the television set will go, and perhaps a ping-pong table. Anything to keep Sonny Boy home. Kornelius chose that particular lot because of its proximity to the Alexander Morris Composite High School. He purchased the land for the Vandals because he understands from his old-country experience what it means to have land pulled out from under your feet and claimed by others.
A third truck in the convoy carries their possessions, the roller skates flung into a crate, the piano swaying, the washing machine jammed against it in an attempt to keep it steady. Chairs and tables, bunk beds, mattresses; melamine dishes clatter like bones in a box. Sara’s china dishes and Morningstar silverware are rolled into bed linens and crammed into the Servelle refrigerator, which is bound shut with skipping ropes.
A fourth and last truck is the water man’s one-ton vehicle, its tailpipe spurting blue smoke. Some of the Vandals ride in the back, while Sara and Oliver and the two youngest girls ride in the cab. Sonny Boy and George walk behind the truck on the lookout for traffic approaching from the rear, their job being to direct it to go round them. Manny and Simon, like Alvina, watch Union Plains recede, while Ida’s and Emilie’s faces shine with anticipation of the town of Alexander Morris rising from the earth.
Emilie thinks that, should people in their new town make a list of her characteristics, well, at some point in her future she may need a dose of smarten-up pills. That’s what Oliver called the rabbit droppings clustered around the hotel’s foundation. You see those? You take one of those, and you’ll get smart.
Dad, how can a rabbit turd do that, eh?
Well, you take one and likely you won’t take another, right?
Why not?
Sheesh. Presumably you’d be smarter, that’s why.
Of course. Of course! Emilie laughs now at her own density, finally getting the joke. Because of the taste, that’s why she wouldn’t want a second one. And presumably she is smarter now, and will not get into a car without knowing where she’s really going. Slowly, inch by inch, the Alexander Morris grain elevator rises on the horizon, and she imagines going to a café after school with friends, sipping an Orange Crush float and eating chips with gravy.
Alvina watches Union Plains growing smaller, Ruby wedged between her knees, and she tries not to pay attention to Sara snuggled against Oliver in the cab of the truck. She’s crying, Alvina knows. Crying even when she smiles. Your mother’s been cranked up to cry for years, Oliver has explained. Just let her go and eventually she’ll run out of gas.
Alvina tucks Ruby’s braids into her T-shirt to prevent them from gathering dust, while Simon and Manny sit on sacks of potatoes, their hands and arms smeared with dirt. Simon wanted to bring his school desk, and Manny a young rabbit he’d spotted coming out of a burrow beside the hotel, and Sara allowed them that. A rabbit each, which the decrepits, before leaving to live in a veterans’ home in Winnipeg, had helped them snare. They made crates for the rabbits, which the two boys now hold firmly between their feet.
Alvina knows that for a time she will have to settle for singular, disconnected beads of silence. Moments snatched here and there. Moments when everyone is asleep and she can study in peace with The Other One at the dining-room table. In September she’ll begin matriculation at the high school, a year behind, but nevertheless, she thinks. Nevertheless.
For moments she’s been seeing a thin trail of grey smoke climbing across the sky above Union Plains. Now suddenly the smoke balloons into a tarry-looking roiling cloud, and she sees orange flames.
She leans over Ruby to rap at the back window of the truck and calls, Dad! A fire! Look.
Oliver turns, glances at the sky, which rapidly turns black. He shouts, I can’t stop. Not without chancing a rear-end collision with some maniac driver in a hurry, his kids going shooting out the back of the truck like bowling pins.
Everyone but him look towards Union Plains now, Sonny Boy and George walking backwards, while Manny thinks, I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. His hand wraps around Oliver’s loupe in his pocket, and he brings it out, concealed in his small fist. He pokes a hole in the half-rotten gunny sack of potatoes, and pushes the eyepiece in amid the mush of last year’s spuds.
Is all, Oliver thinks, as he turns his attention back to the highway and the vehicle in front of him. The whole shebang. The past is past. He’ll hang out his shingle with Delorme after training in Winnipeg at the Marvel School of Beauty. Oliver Vandal, Master Barber. It will be his first diploma and likely his last, but better late than never.
Flames shoot out the hotel windows, lick up its velour curtains, consume the buffalo head on the parlour wall. The image of Chief Fine Day turns brown, and as the glass melts the photograph curls and becomes ash. Oliver’s broom-closet office is the first to be obliterated, the stairwell above it collapsing as everything inside it burns or melts.
I didn’t do it, Manny says, this time aloud. In the distance the sound of a siren rises and grows louder. Of course you didn’t, Emilie says, without knowing what he’s referring to. She pats Manny on the shoulder and feels his relief. He turns and flashes her a grin. Constable Krooke’s cruiser screams up from the south on Stage Coach Road, coming to investigate the fire. Someone has called. The volunteer brigade from Alexander Morris will soon follow in their red truck.
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Oliver thinks as the cruiser approaches, its lights flashing.
Sit down, you’ll get us all in trouble, Alvina yells to Manny. She fears that the constable means to pull them over. The absolutely, positively shitty man is going to give Oliver shit again. But the cruiser speeds by and goes on and on. When it turns onto the access road at Union Plains, it disappears.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to the authors whose books I have turned to during the writing of this novel, among them: The Métis: Canada’s Forgotten People, by D. Bruce Sealey and Antoine S. Lussier; Vanishing Spaces: Memoirs of Louis Goulet, by Guillaume Charette, translated by Ray Ellenwood; and Buffalo Days and Nights, by Peter Erasmus.
I am grateful for the remembrances of my great-grandmother, Mrs. Estienne Desmarais. Several paragraphs in Chapter Six, “By chance,” appeared in a short story, “A Necessary Treason,” published in the collection of short stories The Two-Headed Calf.
I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of The Canada Council and The Saskatchewan Arts Board.
And a special thanks to Anne Collins, for her insight and gracious patience, and to Denise Bukowski, whose enthusiasm and wit came at the right moment. And thank you, Jan Nowina Zarzycki, my partner and friend, whose passion for story is as fierce as ever.
Copyright © 2005 Sandra Birdsell
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review Published in 2005 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited.
Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
Random House Canada and colophon are trademarks.
www.randomhouse.ca
The opening lines from William Stafford’s poem “From the Wild People” from Even in Quiet Places are used with the permission of Confluence Press.
Copyright 1992 by The Estate of William Stafford.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Birdsell, Sandra 1942–
Children of the day / Sandra Birdsell
eISBN: 978-0-307-37532-2
I. Title.
PS8553.I76C44 2005 C813
′.54 C2005-902312-0
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One - The Vandals
Chapter Two - Oliver Going Around with a Shadow
Chapter Three - Emilie the Opaque
Chapter Four - Ruby the Tightrope Walker
Chapter Five - Sara Now and Then
Chapter Six - By Chance
Chapter Seven - Ruby and the Water Man
Chapter Eight - Alvina’s Examinations
Chapter Nine - Female Matters
Chapter Ten - Two Weddings
Chapter Eleven - Housekeeping
Chapter Twelve - Shopping
Chapter Thirteen - Alvina Contemplating
Chapter Fourteen - Seeing About a Dog
Chapter Fifteen - Fending for Themselves
Chapter Sixteen - Unfinished Business
Chapter Seventeen - A Family Gathering
Chapter Eighteen - Moving Day
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Children of the Day Page 31
