Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

It was a memorable party. They ate, they drank, and after they had done enough of both they began to sing and even dance. Elaborately courteous, they offered Vera ecstatic compliments in barely comprehensible English which grew less comprehensible the drunker they got. Vera understood that their grandiose praises bore little relation to the quality of her Portuguese cooking which could be, at best, only passable. Rather, they were expressions of gratitude for her willingness to attempt to please them and make them feel at home.

“Missus, is good dinner,” one after another of them reported gravely to her. Domingo, drunk by midnight and unhinged by the nostalgia evoked by the taste of boiled potatoes served with olive oil and wine vinegar instead of butter or gravy, sat by himself, surveying the scene. Suddenly he lifted a glass of wine high above his head and shouted, “You are Queen, Vera! Queen of the Portuguese!” The toast was taken up with a roar of drunken enthusiasm. “You are Queen of the Portuguese, Vera! Queen!”

The proclamation was true. After that night Vera was Queen of the Portuguese, treated with the respect owed a queen and given unswerving loyalty. From the time of the party Portuguese Vera knew these customers were hers, no one was going to entice them away from her.

Something else became plain after the party. Vera could see it was impossible for her to carry on in the fashion she had for the past few weeks. It was too much to ask Daniel to serve breakfast before school, rush back to The Bluebird during lunch hour to wait tables, and then return after school to work the supper shift. At first she had been leery of hiring staff because she could not believe that this unanticipated burst of busyness could continue, but now it seemed certain that it would, that The Bluebird really did have some sort of future. So Vera became an employer, engaging two high school dropouts as waitresses and a middle-aged woman with a history of alcohol problems as dishwasher. Daniel was relegated to lighter duties, manning the till at supper, clearing tables, mopping up the floor once the supper rush was over.

Her new employees didn’t know what to make of Vera. She expected them to match her frantic pace and when they didn’t they caught hell. Mad, Vera could strip the paint off an outhouse wall with her tongue. Irene, one of the waitresses, burst into tears several times during her first week of work. On the other hand, Vera’s workers earned more money at The Bluebird than they could anywhere else in Connaught. They started at better than the minimum wage, Vera explaining that she didn’t expect minimum work out of them so they ought to get paid better than minimum pay. As boss, she stressed one thing to her waitresses. It was their job to get the Portuguese fed and out the door as quickly as it was humanly possible. The men had to be at work by seven in the morning and back on the shovel after lunch by one o’clock. She promised her waitresses that every day they got the crew clear of the restaurant by starting time, morning and noon, they would each get a three dollar bonus, paid straight out of the till at the end of the day.

Stutz had warned her against paying higher than average wages, as if her decision was simply a bid for popularity. Yet despite paying higher salaries, despite performance bonuses for hustle, the sums of money she banked at the end of each week slowly and steadily mounted. Soon she was writing weekly cheques of fifty dollars against Stutz’s loan. Within the year she hoped her debt to him would be paid in full.

On June 1, with great fanfare, the provincial government and an American mining company had announced that a potash mine would be developed six miles south of Connaught. The choice news was that the town council’s gamble had appeared to have paid off; Connaught was chosen as company headquarters. A surge of activity followed hard on the heels of this announcement. Overnight things began to change. Strangers appeared on the streets. The entire second floor of Alec Monkman’s hotel became temporary offices for geologists, engineers, planners, while the third floor became their living and sleeping quarters.

A three-shift crew of shaft sinkers arrived. No one in Connaught had ever seen their like before. To the citizens of Connaught they were a different breed of man, grey-skinned from lack of sun, hard, wild, desperate in the pursuit of their pleasures. Drawn from all over North America, they spoke with every accent, lured by the big money which goes hand in hand with work that demands you risk your life hourly. Their hard-earned wages ran between their fingers like water and they wanted the best that life had to offer and money could buy. They ordered steak and eggs for breakfast, drank Crown Royal. Their cars were big, flashy, expensive, and neglected – Buicks and Chryslers and Oldsmobiles caked in mud or floured in dust. The dangers of the job had made them addicts to excitement so when their shifts were over they made trouble drinking and fighting. There seemed to be no let-up to the noise, the confusion, the disorderliness. Day and night, semis rolled through town bearing huge pieces of earth-moving equipment lashed to their trailers with chains, shaking people in their chairs and in their beds, making the dishes jingle in the cupboard and spoiling television reception. The town council hurriedly passed a by-law outlawing the big trucks from travel on the newly paved streets. Sometimes the drivers heeded the ordinance, sometimes they didn’t. When they did, the air was filled with rumble and clouds of yellow dust, and when they didn’t, the fresh pavement had to be patched and repaired by the crews of Portuguese.

At the hotel the mining company had started to hire. Men the locals did not recognize caused resentment when they stood in a line that stretched the length of the corridor and slithered down the stairs, each man waiting his turn to step up to the desk and state his occupation – electrician, carpenter, welder, pipe-fitter, labourer. Miners would not be needed for a long time yet. On site a chain-link fence was being raised around the property, an army of men were throwing up temporary offices, warehouses, bunkhouses, cook shacks, tool sheds. To make themselves heard above the roar of graders, Euclids, and bulldozers which wheeled and plunged and bucked all over the grounds, everyone shouted.

The people of Connaught stood by like witnesses to a catastrophic accident. In the blink of an eye, everything had changed and they weren’t sure how it had happened. On the east side of town a disorganized, ramshackle trailer court had sprung up, by day populated with frowsy women screeching at slummy kids, and by night the scene of all-night drinking parties from which husbands stumbled out in the morning, bound for work. There were rumours that there was another kind of woman out in the trailer court, the kind that lived by herself and entertained men at any hour.

On the west side of town a different kind of development was taking place. It was marked by newly excavated basements surrounded by heaps of earth and the skeletal frames of the split levels the Americans were building to house their families. Rumours mushroomed like the houses themselves. The town was making a fortune selling lots to the Yankees at inflated prices, so much money there would be a moratorium on taxes next year. You wait and see, others said, the taxes we’ll all be paying when we start laying water and sewer lines for the Americans and building them their hardtop roads. This was the viewpoint which suited the old-timers – that the mine meant nothing but heartbreak and disappointment. Wasn’t the school board already worrying where they were going to put all those unplanned-for kids when classes started in the fall? Some said there was no avoiding it, a school would have to be built next year. Then taxes would go through the roof. And prices were going up in the grocery store, going up everywhere you looked. There was too much drinking and fighting and general carrying on, nobody could deny that either. These newcomers were a bad lot and their kids were worse, shifty-eyed little buggers you couldn’t trust as far as you could pitch one of them. Wait and see what Hallowe’en is like this year. Wait and see. Your eyes’ll pop.