Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

At The Palladium there’s no activity either. Over the summer, when the farmers are so busy, the theatre only opens for twice nightly showings on Friday and Saturday. It’s one of the things that Daniel misses about the city, the choice of movies and movie houses. Connaught is so deep in the sticks the movies they show are at least a year old. This weekend they’re screening The Young Lions , which he and his mother saw months and months ago in Toronto. His mother never misses a war movie. She has a thing about the war.

Daniel has decided that just to see Montgomery Clift again he’ll spend the money he earned hoeing the old man’s garden. Clift was great as the guy who everybody picked on in the barracks. Daniel could identify with that, it wasn’t much different from living with his old lady.

Montgomery took it all pretty quietly until the four biggest goons in the company stole the twenty dollars he’d been saving to buy his wife a Christmas present. That severely pissed off old Montgomery. Enough was enough. It didn’t matter that he was a skinny, 120-pound weakling, he challenged them to fight. Four nights in a row he took them on, one a night. Even though he always got the snot pounded out of him he was back the next night, ready to fight. Dean Martin kept telling him he was nuts but he just kept coming back. By the last night he looked like death warmed over. His lips were split and one eye was swelling out of his head, black and blue, but none of that counted against principles. Daniel wondered if he’d ever have the guts to do something like that, for honour.

The reason everybody picked on Montgomery Clift was because he read books and was a Jew. Daniel knows his father was a Jew. His mother told him. He doesn’t know what that makes him.

At the end of the street he turns left. Across the road and on his right the railway track runs. The whitewashed stock pens which usually hold cattle for shipment to the slaughter houses in Winnipeg waft a stink of manure and piss-damp straw to his nostrils. This evening the pens are empty but some nights when they are full the cattle can be heard bawling clear across town, hour after hour, late into the night. Daniel passes a barbershop, a vacant lot of weeds wreathed in discarded popsicle wrappers and bits of cellophane, a lumberyard stacked with planks smelling of sawdust and resin.

When he reaches the Legion Hall he climbs the steep steps and seats himself in front of the blue double doors. From this vantage he can look out over the railway line and into open countryside. At the foot of the steps is Connaught’s memorial to two World Wars, a mortar anchored in a slab of cement. The neck of a Coke bottle protrudes from its muzzle. Kids can’t resist stuffing it with garbage. Daniel estimates the trajectory of the bottle if it were really a shell. He sees it launched over the rails, soaring over a mile of tired, over-grazed, beaten-down pasture and wolf willow, landing like thunder on a dun-coloured knoll outcropped with headstones and crosses. The second bomb to go off there in the last ten days.

Daniel shakes his head at the thought and reaches into his shirt pocket for the cigarette he hooked from his mother’s package earlier that day. Before lighting it he casts a nervous, furtive glance up the street. He always comes to the steps of the Legion Hall for his evening smoke because from here he can see for a block in both directions up the street. He doesn’t want to be taken by surprise by his mother. When it comes to her there is no such thing as being too sure. Daniel wouldn’t put it past her to tail him if she noticed that her cigarettes had gone missing.

He sits, hugging his knees, smoking. When he feels lonely, as he does now, Daniel thinks of himself as Montgomery Clift. When his mother makes him mad he thinks of himself as James Dean. The thing about James Dean is the anger and pride of his apartness. The thing about Montgomery Clift is the sadness and loneliness of his apartness. Tonight Daniel is more Montgomery Clift. He hunches himself up like Montgomery Clift and toys with and broods over his cigarette the way Montgomery Clift does. The evening is a sort of Montgomery Clift evening, too, quiet and still and slow. A kid in a Yankees baseball cap goes by, pedalling his bike so lazily that he has to crank the front wheel from side to side just to keep himself upright, steering with one hand and ringing the bell on his handlebars with the other, simply making noise to keep himself company. If he could see Daniel huddled at the top of the steps he would stop muddling along in a dream. But he doesn’t. He just goes on ringing his bell the length of the street. The fainter it grows the more sweetly it chimes until it ripples so plaintive and frail that Daniel can’t be sure he is hearing it or the memory of it. And then a car drives by with its windows rolled down and teenagers laughing and a radio playing and that is nearly as good as the bell.

Daniel grinds the cigarette out beneath his heel. He has one more stop to make before returning home. He wants to visit the wall.

During his first days in Connaught Daniel had come upon the back of the hardware store (what he thinks of as the wall) by accident, taking a shortcut home down the alley behind Main Street. There were two things unusual about the wall. It was all blank brick except for a single tiny window set high on the second floor and its brick was not the common, reddish variety but a brick the colour of certain kinds of raw clay, a strong yellow. Still, he might never have noticed it if it hadn’t been for the little boy crouched on his haunches before it, intently scraping away at the brick with some sort of tool.

Daniel had halted in the lane and listened to the dry, persistent scratching. What’s he up to? Daniel had asked himself. For several minutes curiosity kept him standing there, absolutely still, observing the child work. Then, as people will, the kid had sensed that someone was watching him. He froze. Then slowly his toes began to edge around in the dust, his face twisted around over the point of his shoulder. Seeing Daniel, a big boy, and, worse, a stranger, he settled lower on his heels, trying to shrink, trying to make himself disappear against the bold, glaring, yellow backdrop of the wall. All Daniel had been able to make out were two eyes peering over the tops of knees, two dirty hands clenching shins.

“What you doing, kid?” Daniel had said, trying to make himself sound friendly. He took a step forward.

Question and step were too much for the boy. He broke for it. There was a wild, high, flickering kick of heels, a whirling and circling of arms as he swerved around the corner of the hardware and vanished.

“Hey!” Daniel had called out regretfully. “Hey!” But it had been no use, he was gone.

When Daniel had approached the wall for a closer examination, the first thing he had noticed was an old awl lying at the foundations where the boy had dropped it before he ran. It seemed he had been doing something forbidden.

Then Daniel raised his eyes up to the wall. It was a blur of scratches. To the height a man could reach and for its entire length it was written all over. Scarcely a brick was untouched. Amazed, Daniel had not been able to resist stretching out his hand and running his forefinger along the deep grooves that had been worked into the brick.

What a strange effect those words and signs, those scrawled fucks and sentimental, arrow-stricken hearts, those names and dates had had on Daniel who had never felt he had belonged anywhere. All those things collected there, year after year, by common consent. Everyone agreed that there was the place to leave your mark and say your say. In the very centre of the wall was the earliest date which Daniel could find, accompanied by three names: Avery Toper, Sam Kyle & J.S. Vance , he had read, Enlisted Oct. 9, 1915. For King and Country . They must have been the beginning of the tradition, the fathers of all the rest, because from that date and those names later dates and other names spiralled outward like the funnel of a tornado spinning out from the calm, unchanging eye of the storm. Daniel had counted forty-three names of men announcing enlistment between 1914 and 1918.