Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

But Vera had more to worry about than just Earl. By now she was a sergeant with a sergeant’s responsibilities – that is, she had to run things in a way that allowed the officers to believe they were actually in charge. She had to manage people with an easy or heavy hand, whatever the situation required. There were times when she was all at sea. What to do about the girl who was sending gifts of chocolate and perfume to another? How to uncover a barracks room thief? There were sleepless nights enough. And then there was the final worry. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer the war was drawing to a close. There were pictures in the newspapers of Russian and American troops shaking hands and posing as comrades beside the wide, slaty waters of the Elbe.

Still, no one yet dared to think of it as finished, not with Japan holding out. On the radio sonorous voices reminded them all of the terrible price in blood which must still be paid. It was difficult to think of life outside the Army as anything but far distant. Then, very soon, Vera had to imagine it. Two bombs dropped, two unearthly flashes of light, two storms of heat and dust and it was over.

This sudden peace took her unprepared. The Army began to melt away around her. It was like waking from a dream. A week never passed that Vera wasn’t down at the train station to see another of her discharged girls off home. She pressed cigarettes and bags of peppermints on them, brusquely shook their hands, and called them by their surnames before they climbed aboard. The shuddering, panting locomotives jerked forward, the carriage couplings rang, and Vera was left feeling like autumn, like those stark days when the leaves have fallen but the snow has not.

Then in 1946 it was Vera’s turn. She was out on civvy street, her winter uniform carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied up in string, and laid in the bottom of a drawer in a rooming-house in Toronto. There was only one thing clear in her mind. She was not going home.

Vera would have preferred to remain in the Army if that was a thing women did, but women didn’t.

Every night after supper Daniel walked and figured. It was his best chance to be absolutely alone because everybody else in Connaught was still indoors eating, he had the streets to himself. In Alec Monkman’s household supper was served earlier than in other households because he refused to eat at six o’clock when everyone else in Connaught did. In other houses it was the custom to seat yourself for the evening meal when the “supper siren” blew at the Town Hall. Three times a day a siren sounded from one end of Connaught to the other: at noon, at six, and at nine in the evening when it reminded children that there was a curfew for kids under sixteen years of age. Daniel had never heard of anything so weird, so backward. His grandfather had strong opinions about the siren, too. He said that eating at exactly the same time as eight hundred other people made him feel just like one more pig at the trough. All that snuffling and chewing, he could hear it. It put him off his own feed, he claimed. That was why at their house they ate at five.

Daniel had a route he followed on his figuring walks. Down his grandfather’s street and past the RCMP detachment he went, the sun settling at his back, his shadow long and spidery-legged. In the evening calm the red ensign draped limply around the police flagpole. Mr. Stutz had been eager to tell him all about the police headquarters, had acted as if it had something directly to do with him. Daniel knew there were two cells in the basement, one of which had actually held a wife-murderer for several days before he was transferred to jail in Regina. He knew that every other month up on the second floor a judge tried minor offences, meted out fines and punishments. Whenever court was in session Mr. Stutz took a day off work and occupied a folding chair in the makeshift courtroom with its picture of the Queen on the wall and the simple desk which saw duty as a judge’s bench. Mr. Stutz had told Daniel that, if he cared to, he could accompany him to court next sitting.

One of the things that Daniel tried to figure as he walked was what he and his mother were doing in Connaught. There had been no warning of a move. All of a sudden she announced they were going, the furniture was sold to a second-hand dealer, and they loaded themselves onto a bus. Why? Maybe the fight with Pooch over the toenail polish had something to do with it, although he couldn’t be sure. His mother had never provided a reason. Reasons were not things he expected from her. “Because I said so” was about the best you got.

He hadn’t wanted to go. His mother said, “You’ll make new friends. Better ones than you could here. Kids in small towns are so much friendlier.” Which wasn’t true. He knew he wasn’t the sort to make new friends. Maybe because she had never let him get any practice at it, learn the knack of it, keeping him locked up in a dumpy apartment waiting for her to come home from work. How was he supposed to get the trick of it? Deep down maybe he was a loner like James Dean and Montgomery Clift.

Now he was passing the little shacky houses where the old foreign ladies lived, the ladies with the peach-pit faces and the kerchiefs (babushkas, Stutz called them) knotted under their chins on even the hottest days. According to Mr. Stutz, a lot of these old women could scarcely speak more than a few words of English. English had been for their husbands. But now the husbands were dead and they had no men to interpret for them, no men to trail along after in kerchiefs, brown stockings, black dresses printed all over with tiny, dusky-red flowers. They seemed to spend all their time in their gardens. Front yards were planted with sunflowers and poppies. Back yards were full of onions, beets, dill, cabbages, cucumbers, potatoes, and the rusty tin cans they screwed into the earth to protect bedding plants. Because of the cans the back yards seemed to Daniel to be a cross between a vegetable patch and a dump.

During afternoons, if the old foreign ladies happened to be pecking in the dirt with their hoes and Daniel went by, they all straightened up and stared at him suspiciously and narrowly as if he were an alien from outer space. Which he may as well have been, his mother said sarcastically, Daniel not being native-born to Connaught.

But at present there is no sign of the foreign ladies as he passes. They are indoors, eating soup and sausage, thinking their thoughts, and remembering in some language other than English. Still, despite their strangeness, Daniel is certain that none of them could feel any more a stranger than he does himself.

The way people acted here. He couldn’t get the hang of it. So different from the city. Take the other day when that man had stopped him in the street and asked, “You the one that’s Alec Monkman’s grandson? Vera’s boy?” Asked him point-blank, right out of the blue. When he answered, Yes, that was him, the man said, “I went to school with your mother. Name’s Mel Jessup.” And that was all there was to it, nothing more. It seemed the man just wanted to pass on that bit of information.

It doesn’t end on the street either. Two nights ago he wakes up at three in the morning in a strange bed and a strange room he isn’t quite used to and gets the shock and fright of his life. This thing is standing in his bedroom door, watching him. He doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind. It’s worse than the worst horror movie he’s ever seen and he’s seen plenty. Everything else helps to put the chill in his blood. A moon is shining cold light through his window and the curtains are blowing around, whipping the wall with shadows. He can’t move, he can’t breathe. Then the thing shifts itself in the doorway enough to catch a little moonlight. He sees it’s his grandfather in his gotch, hard old belly pushing out, and the thick white hair all down his chest shining in the light of the moon like frost on dead grass.