Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

“You know what I sor?” said the child patiently. “Well, the train must of stopped, see, and some little men with bundles on their backs got on. Other men was holding lanterns. They were all little. They were all talking French.”

“Shut up,” said Mum. “Do you hear me?”

“Sor them,” said the boy.

“You and your bloody elves.”

“They was people.”

“Little men with bundles,” said Mum, trying to dress again. “You start your fairy tales with your Dad and I don’t know what he’ll give you.”

It was this mythical, towering, half-remembered figure they were now travelling to join up north.

Roy McLaughlin, travelling on the same train, saw the pair, presently, out of his small red-lidded eyes. Den and his Mum were dressed and as clean as they could make themselves, and sitting at the end of the car. McLaughlin was the last person to get up, and he climbed down from his solitary green-curtained cubicle conspicuous and alone. He had to pad the length of the car in a trench coat and city shoes — he had never owned slippers, bathrobe, or pajamas — past the passengers, who were drawn with fatigue, pale under the lights. They were men, mostly; some soldiers. The Second World War had been finished, in Europe, a year and five months. It was a dirty, rickety train going up to Abitibi. McLaughlin was returning to a construction camp after three weeks in Montreal. He saw the girl, riding with her back to the engine, doing her nails, and his faculties absently registered “Limey bride” as he went by. The kid, looking out the window, turned and stared. McLaughlin thought “Pest,” but only because children and other men’s wives made him nervous and sour when they were brought around camp on a job.

After McLaughlin had dressed and had swallowed a drink in the washroom — for he was sick and trembling after his holiday — he came and sat down opposite the blond girl. He did not bother to explain that he had to sit somewhere while his berth was being dismantled. His arms were covered with coarse red hair; he had rolled up the sleeves of his khaki shirt. He spread his pale, heavy hands on his knees. The child stood between them, fingertips on the sooty window sill, looking out at the breaking day. Once, the train stopped for a long time; the engine was being changed, McLaughlin said. They had been rolling north but were now turning west. At six o’clock, in about an hour, Dennis and his mother would have to get down, and onto another train, and go north once more. Dennis could not see any station where they were now. There was a swamp with bristling black rushes, red as ink. It was the autumn sunrise; cold, red. It was so strange to him, so singular, that he could not have said an hour later which feature of the scene was in the foreground or to the left or right. Two women wearing army battle jackets over their dresses, with their hair piled up in front, like his mother’s, called and giggled to someone they had put on the train. They were fat and dark — grinny. His mother looked at them with detestation, recognizing what they were; for she hated whores. She had always acted on the desire of the moment, without thought of gain, and she had taken the consequences (Dennis) without complaint. Dennis saw that she was hating the women, and so he looked elsewhere. On a wooden fence sat four or five men in open shirts and patched trousers. They had dull, dark hair, and let their mouths sag as though they were too tired or too sleepy to keep them closed. Something about them was displeasing to the child, and he thought that this was an ugly place with ugly people. It was also a dirty place; every time Dennis put his hands on the window sill they came off black.

“Come down any time to see a train go by,” said McLaughlin, meaning those men. “Get up in the night to see a train.”

The train moved. It was still dark enough outside for Dennis to see his face in the window and for the light from the windows to fall in pale squares on the upturned vanishing faces and on the little trees. Dennis heard his mother’s new friend say, “Well, there’s different possibilities.” They passed into an unchanging landscape of swamp and bracken and stunted trees. Then the lights inside the train were put out and he saw that the sky was blue and bright. His mother and McLaughlin, seen in the window, had been remote and bodiless; through their transparent profiles he had seen the yellowed trees going by. Now he could not see their faces at all.

“He’s been back in Canada since the end of the war. He was wounded. Den hardly knows him,” he heard his mother say. “I couldn’t come. I had to wait my turn. We were over a thousand war brides on that ship. He was with Aluminium when he first came back.” She pronounced the five vowels in the word.

“You’ll be all right there,” said McLaughlin. “It’s a big place. Schools. All company.”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean it all belongs to Aluminum. Only if that’s where you’re going you happen to be on the wrong train.”

“He isn’t there now. He hates towns. He seems to move about a great deal. He drives a bulldozer, you see.”

“Owns it?” said McLaughlin.

“Why, I shouldn’t think so. Drives for another man, I think he said.”

The boy’s father fell into the vast pool of casual labor, drifters; there was a social hierarchy in the north, just as in Heaven. McLaughlin was an engineer. He took another look at the boy: black hair, blue eyes. The hair was coarse, straight, rather dull; Indian hair. The mother was a blonde; touched up a bit, but still blond.

“What name?” said McLaughlin on the upward note of someone who has asked the same question twice.

“Cameron. Donald Cameron.”

That meant nothing, still; McLaughlin had worked in a place on James Bay where the Indians were named MacDonald and Ogilvie and had an unconquered genetic strain of blue eyes.

“D’you know about any ghosts?” said the boy, turning to McLaughlin. McLaughlin’s eyes were paler than his own, which were a deep slate blue, like the eyes of a newly born child. McLaughlin saw the way he held his footing on the rocking train, putting out a few fingers to the window sill only for the form of the thing. He looked all at once ridiculous and dishonored in his cheap English clothes — the little jacket, the Tweedledum cap on his head. He outdistanced his clothes; he was better than they were. But he was rushing on this train into an existence where his clothes would be too good for him.

“D’you know about any ghosts?” said the boy again.

“Oh, sure,” said McLaughlin, and shivered, for he still felt sick, even though he was sharing a bottle with the Limey bride. He said, “Indians see them,” which was as close as he could come to being crafty. But there was no reaction out of the mother; she was not English for nothing.

“You seen any?”

“I’m not an Indian,” McLaughlin started to say; instead he said, “Well, yes. I saw the ghost, or something like the ghost, of a dog I had.”

They looked at each other, and the boy’s mother said, “Stop that, you two. Stop that this minute.”

“I’ll tell you a strange thing about Dennis,” said his mother. “It’s this. There’s times he gives me the creeps.”

Dennis was lying on the seat beside her with his head on her lap.

She said, “If I don’t like it I can clear out. I was a waitress. There’s always work.”

“Or find another man,” McLaughlin said. “Only it won’t be me, girlie. I’ll be far away.”

“Den says that when the train stopped he saw a lot of elves,” she said, complaining.

“Not elves — men,” said Dennis. “Some of them had mattresses rolled up on their backs. They were little and bent over. They were talking French. They were going up north.”