Mavis Gallant - Home Truths

McLaughlin coughed and said, “He means settlers. They were sent up on this same train during the depression. But that’s nine, ten years ago. It was supposed to clear the unemployed out of the towns, get them off relief. But there wasn’t anything up here then. The winters were terrible. A lot of them died.”

“He couldn’t know that,” said Mum edgily. “For that matter, how can he tell what is French? He’s never heard any.”

“No, he couldn’t know. It was around ten years ago, when times were bad.”

“Are they good now?”

“Jeez, after a war?” He shoved his hand in the pocket of his shirt, where he kept a roll, and he let her see the edge of it.

She made no comment, but put her hand on Den’s head and said to him, “You didn’t see anyone. Now shut up.”

“Sor ’em,” the boy said in a voice as low as he could descend without falling into a whisper.

“You’ll see what your Dad’ll give you when you tell lies.” But she was halfhearted about the threat and did not quite believe in it. She had been attracted to the scenery, whose persistent sameness she could no longer ignore. “It’s not proper country,” she said. “It’s bare.”

“Not enough for me,” said McLaughlin. “Too many people. I keep on moving north.”

“I want to see some Indians,” said Dennis, sitting up.

“There aren’t any,” his mother said. “Only in films.”

“I don’t like Canada.” He held her arm. “Let’s go home now.”

“It’s the train whistle. It’s so sad. It gets him down.”

The train slowed, jerked, flung them against each other, and came to a stop. It was quite day now; their faces were plain and clear, as if drawn without shading on white paper. McLaughlin felt responsible for them, even compassionate; the change in him made the boy afraid.

“We’re getting down, Den,” said his Mum, with great, wide eyes. “We take another train. See? It’ll be grand. Do you hear what Mum’s telling you?”

He was determined not to leave the train, and clung to the window sill, which was too smooth and narrow to provide a grip; McLaughlin had no difficulty getting him away. “I’ll give you a present,” he said hurriedly. But he slapped all his pockets and found nothing to give. He did not think of the money, and his watch had been stolen in Montreal. The woman and the boy struggled out with their baggage, and McLaughlin, who had descended first so as to help them down, reached up and swung the boy in his arms.

“The Indians!” the boy cried, clinging to the train, to air; to anything. His face was momentarily muffled by McLaughlin’s shirt. His cap fell to the ground. He screamed, “Where’s Mum? I never saw anything!”

“You saw Indians,” said McLaughlin. “On the rail fence, at that long stop. Look, don’t worry your mother. Don’t keep telling her what you haven’t seen. You’ll be seeing plenty of everything now.”

When the Collier girls were six and ten they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father’s mother. Their grandmother was scrupulous about food, particularly for these underfed children, and made them drink goat’s milk. Two goats bought specially to supply the orphans were taken by station wagon to a buck fifty miles away, the girls accompanying them for reasons of enlightenment. A man in a filling station was frightened by the goats, because of their oblong eyes. The girls were not reflected in the goats’ eyes, as they were in each other’s. What they remembered afterwards of their grandmother was goat’s milk, goat eyes, and the frightened man.

They went to school in Ontario now, with children who did not have the same accent as children in Montreal. When their new friends liked something they said it was smart. A basketball game was smart, so was a movie: it did not mean elegant, it just meant all right. Ice cream made out of goat’s milk was not smart: it tasted of hair.

Their grandmother died when the girls were seven and eleven and beginning to speak in the Ontario way. Their mother had been French-Canadian — they were now told — but had spoken French and English to them. They had called her Mummy, a habit started when their father was still alive, for he had not learned French. They understood, from their grandmother, and their grandmother’s maid, and the social worker who came to see their grandmother but had little to say to them, that French was an inferior kind of speech. At first, when they were taken away from their mother, Cathie, the elder girl, would wake up at night holding her head, her elbows on her knees, saying in French, “My head hurts,” but a few minutes later, the grandmother having applied cold wrung-out towels, she would say in English, “It’s better.”

Mildred had pushed out two front teeth by sucking her thumb. She had been doing that forever, even before they were taken away from their mother. Ontario could not be blamed. Nevertheless, their grandmother told the social worker about it, who wrote it down.

They did not know, and never once asked, why they had been taken away. When the new social worker said to Cathie, “Were you disturbed because your mother was unhappy?” Cathie said, “She wasn’t.” When the girls were living with their mother, they knew that sometimes she listened and sometimes could not hear; nevertheless, she was there. They slept in the same bed, all three. Even when she sat on the side of the bed with her head hanging and her undone jagged-cut hair hiding her eyes, mumbling complaints that were not their concern, the children were close to her and did not know they were living under what would be called later “unsheltered conditions.” They never knew, until told, that they were uneducated and dirty and in danger. Now they learned that their mother never washed her own neck and that she dressed in layers of woollen stuff, covered with grease, and wore men’s shoes because some man had left them behind and she liked the shape or the comfort of them. They did not know, until they were told, that they had never been properly fed.

“We ate chicken,” said Cathie Collier, the elder girl.

“They say she served it up half raw,” said their grandmother’s maid. “Survet” said the maid for “served,” and that was not the way their mother had spoken. “The sheets was so dirty, the dirt was like clay. All of yez slept in the one bed,” said the maid.

“Yes, we slept together.” The apartment — a loft, they were told, over a garage; not an apartment at all — must still exist, it must be somewhere, with the piano that Mildred, the little one, had banged on with her palms flat. What about the two cats who were always fighting or playing, depending on their disposition? There were pictures on the wall, their mother’s, and the children’s own drawings.

“When one of the pictures was moved there was a square mass of bugs,” said the grandmother’s maid. “The same shape as the pitcher.”

“To the day I die,” said the social worker from Montreal to her colleague in Ontario, “I won’t forget the screams of Mildred when she was dragged out of that pigsty.” This was said in the grandmother’s parlor, where the three women — the two social workers, and the grandmother — sat with their feet freezing on the linoleum floor. The maid heard, and told. She had been in and out, serving coffee, coconut biscuits, and damson preserves in custard made of goat’s milk. The room was heated once or twice a year: even the maid said her feet were cold. But “To the day I die” was a phrase worth hearing. She liked the sound of that, and said it to the children. The maid was from a place called Waterloo, where, to hear her tell it, no one behaved strangely and all the rooms were warm.