Miriam Toews - A Boy of Good Breeding

Max said he’d heard Tom say “Damn ticker” once just before he died, but Dory said he wouldn’t have used either of those words.

S.F. was sure he’d been trying to sing, and Knute was sure he’d told her he loved her.

At 5 A.M. on July first, anyone floating over Algren would have been impressed. All along Main Street, Canadian flags in the form of red and white petunias sparkled with dew and reflected the sun, which was beginning to rise. The new Algren Feed Mill Summer Theatre, at least the outside of it, really looked like a theatre, and over at the edge of town a white horse flew through the sky. For a few minutes, anyway, until the colour of the sky changed and the water tower became visible and the horse was revealed as a decal. But it was an interesting few minutes of optical illusion, and why not? Surrounding the little town were fields of yellow and blue so that if you were floating over you could pretend you were on a sandy beach in Rio. Nobody was out and about in Algren at that time except a black dog who stood next to a farmhouse on the edge of town, jumping up from time to time and snapping at a few bugs, and a little girl who sat on the front step of that farmhouse, stretching and yawning and laughing at the dog, and waiting for her mom and dad to get out of bed.

Hosea didn’t hear the phone ring because he was fast asleep, too, with his arms around Lorna and his face buried in her hair. He slept until the sun was well up and so bright that the white horse on the water tower was all but obliterated by its rays. Later in the day he returned the phone message from Ottawa with one of his own.

“Hosea Funk here, not to worry, things come up, maybe next year. Please wish him a Happy Canada Day from the mayor of Algren.”

MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of three novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award), A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award) and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and finalist for the Giller Prize) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters , and The New York Times Magazine , and received the National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.