Later in the day I decided that it could wait till Monday.
I walked home after work, over the Main Street Bridge and the Norwood Bridge to our home on Ferndale Avenue. When I got there I found my dad with Mr. Larkin, who lived down the street, staring at a pile of lumber in the backyard.
Dad had been talking lately about building a garage. He didn’t like to see his new automobile covered with bird droppings and sap from our neighbours’ Manitoba maple, not to mention the ever-present dust that worked its way inside.
“It doesn’t smell like a new car anymore,” my dad had complained a few days earlier. “It smells like dust.”
A worker from Toupin Lumber had delivered the wood and Mr. Larkin offered to help. He was an English professor at the University of Manitoba, so was off on summer holidays.
My dad was taking a few weeks away from the office. Things were slow for him that summer. He worked mostly in property law, sometimes trusts and estates. Few people were buying land in the summer of 1936; few people were buying anything, just trying desperately to hold on to what they had. Dad felt a little guilty about the shiny Buick in our backyard at a time when so many were in dire straits.
“All the more reason to put it inside a garage,” I had said when he brought it up.
We had lived through the coldest winter on record that year. That was what got him started on it. He didn’t use the car in the bitter cold — he walked to St. Mary’s Road where he caught a streetcar — but he convinced himself it needed shelter whether he drove it or not.
So there they stood: the attorney and the professor. My dad couldn’t help his lawyerly look, his work clothes being former suit pants that had turned shiny and were frayed at the edges and a scruffy white shirt that Aunt Helen had cut off and hemmed above the elbows. Mr. Larkin wore overalls but they were brand new without a stain on them, and his scholarly glasses, graceful hands, and cheerful poetic quotes gave him away. Neither of them had ever approached a manual labour job of that magnitude.
It was nearly time for supper. Helen was inside, busy with cold roast beef and salad preparations.
“We can’t begin now,” said my dad. “Let’s leave it till tomorrow, shall we, and get a good early start?”
“Right then, Will. That makes sense to me.” Hedley Larkin rubbed his perfectly clean hands against the spotless cloth of his overalls.
There was something about beginning in the late afternoon that didn’t sit well with either man, even though there were hours of daylight left. My theory was that they had no idea where to begin.
Chapter 3
They started work the next morning, a hot cloudless Saturday. At lunchtime on that first day I took salmon sandwiches and iced tea out to them on a tray. They looked to have rearranged some lumber and scratched out a drawing or two in pencil on a scrap of paper, but they hadn’t cut a single piece of wood or hammered one nail by that time.
As I drew near, I heard them discussing the ideas of Bertrand Russell. They were talking about machines and emotions and whether they could exist together side by side. Or something like that. Maybe the Buick had set them off; pretty much anything could. Mr. Larkin was consulting a book:
Skeptical Essays
it was called.
“I’m going to leave this with you, Will,” he said. “I know you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.”
“Ah, Violet,” said my dad when he saw me coming. “Just the ticket. Ready for a bite, Hedley?”
They sat under the branches of the poplar tree to eat their lunch. The mosquitoes were frightful in the shade but preferable to the relentless dusty rays of the sun. Both men had slathered Potter and Moore’s anti-mosquito cream on any exposed skin.
Two figures approached from the lane; they moved slowly in the steamy noonday heat. It became clear to us as we watched them come closer that they were strangers, two men feeling the weight of their journey. When they were near enough to see the pile of wood they offered their help.
“Is it a garage you are to build?” said the older of the two, speaking with a French-Canadian accent.
This type of offer wasn’t unusual. There were countless men on the move looking for any kind of work and often they travelled in pairs. These two didn’t have the look of tramps. There was a keen light reflecting from the eyes of the one who did the talking. It seemed to shine off their surfaces more than from any depth. Like off flat blue glass. I wanted to understand that but I didn’t want to stare. He was perhaps twenty-nine years old and so thin I couldn’t get a sense of the shape of him inside his clothes.
“I worked as a builder in Montreal till not so many weeks ago,” he said. “Till the work ends. My friend and me, we are going to Alberta. We hear there are sugar beets to hoe.”
Men from the east went west; men from the west went east. Little opportunity awaited them in either direction.
When I looked at the friend something shifted inside of me, as if my intestines were sorting themselves out in a new way. He appeared to be eighteen or so with a darkish complexion, light brown hair, and deep chocolate eyes. I loved the lightness of his hair. He wasn’t very tall, perhaps about my height — five foot seven. He was sturdy, healthy-looking, didn’t look like he had been suffering any from life on the road. Also, his rucksack was well-made and looked quite new, as if he had just bought it for this trip. Maybe he was a pretend rambler, I thought. He was beautiful; I forced myself to look away. He was probably tired of girls staring at him.
“So, you’ve had some experience then,” Mr. Larkin said to the thin man.
“Yes, sir. I have.” He moved toward the pile of wood and began to ask questions about dimensions and roof slant.
My dad and Mr. Larkin were stumped by most of his queries but the conversation got them realizing how little they knew about the job ahead of them.
I made it my business to keep the flies off the sandwiches till they were done talking.
“Well, maybe we can work something out,” said my dad.
I knew he was struggling. He wanted their help, but he didn’t want them staying with us.
“In the meantime,” he went on, “have a sandwich. Violet….” But I was already heading to the house for more of everything.
Aunt Helen came out to meet them. They were eating like famished refugees.
“Welcome, men,” she said. “These two could certainly use the help.” She nodded at my dad and Mr. Larkin.
My dad’s face said that he hadn’t decided yet, but Aunt Helen took care of that.
So they stayed. They pitched their tent in the backyard. It was a bell tent — once white — the kind soldiers used in the Great War. It was like the tents in Aunt Helen’s pictures of those times. This one was torn in spots and there was evidence of some rough mending. I saw Helen notice this and knew that she would fix it for them before they left.
The younger of the two, the handsome one, had no construction work experience but he assured us that he was a fast learner and his mate vouched for his good intentions.
“Jesuits teach him,” he laughed. “How bad can he be at anything?”
The handsome one looked as though he would just as soon not have his Jesuit education out there as public knowledge, but I think my dad was glad of it. Maybe he thought they could have some good talks about the sorts of things that concerned Jesuits. Dad was interested in pretty well everything. As was Mr. Larkin. That’s probably why they were such good friends.
“Did you two meet up on the road?” asked my dad. “Or have you been friends for longer?”
“No,” said the older man. “We met in a camp at Sudbury. We are both stuck there for some days and we —what are the words? — hit it off.” He smiled.
I knew my dad had way more questions. They were such an unlikely pair. But he left it at that for now.
He introduced me as his daughter and Helen as his sister so there wouldn’t be any mistaking who was who and what relationship we all were to each other. It seemed important to him that they know Helen wasn’t his wife. Helen was nine years older than my dad. He had come along when my grandparents no longer expected him.
The men settled in to our backyard and worked on the garage and ate my aunt’s meals and used our bathroom.
After dark that first night I stared for a long time out my bedroom window at the tent. Moths collided with the screen over and over again and left their silken dust behind. I wondered if they would die without it. The murmur of the men’s voices and the smell of smoke from their hand-rolled cigarettes wafted up on the muggy moonlit air.
The worst that could happen, I figured, was that they would kill the three of us in our beds and rob us of all our valuables. Or no, they would kill Dad and Helen and leave me deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed, but with my brain intact.
They worked all day Sunday. No one among them seemed to have any qualms about working on the Sabbath. I could see it made my dad nervous, but only because of the neighbours.
When Mrs. McTavish walked by on her way to church he waved to her and called, “Good morning, Mrs. McTavish! Pretty hot already, eh?”
She rewarded him with a tightening of her lower facial muscles.
“You get your work done when you can, I guess,” he said a little less heartily. He sighed and wiped his brow with a handkerchief as she tottered off on her stout church-going legs.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” I said. “Mrs. McTavish is an old boot.”
She had been my Sunday school teacher when I was younger and she was far too strict for a United Protestant. I think her parents had been something else, Baptists maybe, or Methodists, a type of religion where neither fun nor work was allowed on Sunday. But there weren’t all that many churches to choose from in our neighbourhood, just the United, the Anglican, and the Catholic, as far as I knew, and maybe one or two odd duck religions housed in grimy basements.
The other men were oblivious to my dad’s discomfort, even Mr. Larkin, who hummed “Comin’ Thro the Rye” quietly to himself as he measured and marked the lumber according to Benoit’s directions. That was the name of the older man, the one who had been a builder in Montreal: Benoit Bateau, or Benny Boat as I called him to myself.
His friend, the Jesuit, was called Jackson Shirt. I guess either Jesuits worked on Sundays or Jackson was struggling inside without letting on. Or maybe he was a lapsed Jesuit. He didn’t look like he was struggling. My best guess was that Jesuits worked on Sundays. I pictured them in long brown robes like Friar Tuck working together in manly camaraderie in a forest without any women looking down their noses at them like the righteous Mrs. McTavish.
Jackson said “ouch” quite often and even “dang” once or twice as he missed a nail with the hammer my dad had provided for him. But he didn’t swear out loud and his small outbursts were fewer and farther between as the day wore on.
That night, their second night, I crept downstairs, stole my dad’s pack of Sweet Caporals and took them out to the front steps. It was as close to the men as I dared go. They were out back but we breathed in the same dusty lilac air.
A dog barked from way across the night. Maybe it was choking on the dust. Topsoil covered everything; it rode in on the hot wind from the prairies where the farmers’ crops would come to nothing. It didn’t have to be this way, according to Mr. Larkin. The natural turf of the prairies should have been used only for grazing. When the farmers ploughed it under the way they did there was nothing left to hold the soil in place and the wind blew it away. He said that the misuse of the land in that way was the main cause of the dust storms.
A dark figure startled me as it moved clear of the shadows. It was Jackson, stepping out from beneath the willow tree. I hoped I hadn’t been mumbling aloud about Hedley Larkin’s agricultural theories.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi. You scared me, looming up like that.”
“Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Mmm, no. It’s pretty hot upstairs.”
“It’s pretty hot everywhere,” he said.
“Yeah.”
His voice was quiet; I had to strain to hear him. I loved his voice.
“I don’t sleep,” he said.
“Not ever?”
“Not ever.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
He smiled and I loved his smile.
“Can I have one of those?” He pointed to the tailor-made cigarettes sitting on the step beside me.
“Sure.” I had stolen them for him.
He had a wooden match in his shirt pocket. He got it going with one hand and no aids other than his fingernail. I cringed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“I don’t like fingernails,” I said. “I have a thing about them.”
He moved to light my cigarette for me. I cupped my hand around the flame and looked into his eyes as he did it. I’d seen someone do that in a movie. Maybe it was Bette Davis in
Dangerous
. Jackson’s eyes were on mine, so the cigarette didn’t catch the flame. Real slick, the both of us. He lit another one and this time we got the job done.
“What kind of a thing about fingernails?” he asked.
“It’s nothing,” I said, wishing I hadn’t mentioned it.
He took my hand, the one without the cigarette, and with his thumb tried to push back the fingernail on my index finger. I snatched my hand away and he smiled again.
“I know someone else who doesn’t like that,” he said.
“Who?”
“No one. A faraway friend.”
I noticed that his smoking fingers were stained an ochre colour, like my friend Isabelle’s. My best friend, Gwen, didn’t smoke, and she thought I was an idiot for trying it.
Mr. Steeples from three doors down walked slowly by with his cane and his cigar. I know he saw us but he didn’t say hello. I could feel his displeasure. What was it for? I wondered. What was so great about him and so bad about us? I wanted to shout out that Jackson was a Jesuit.
“How old are you?” I asked Jackson, after the pale darkness had swallowed up Mr. Steeples.
“The same as you.”
“How old am I?” I asked.
“You don’t know how old you are?”
“Yes, but I don’t believe that you know.”
“You don’t believe a lot,” he said.
“I do if people tell me the truth,” I said.
“Seventeen.”
He sat down on the grass too far away. I wanted him closer; I wanted to breathe his dark skin.
“Me or you?” I said.
“Both of us.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Maybe not.”
He was right. He laughed. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows.
“What’s it like being a Jesuit?” I asked.
“I’m not a Jesuit,” he said. “I just went to a Jesuit school — a school run by Jesuits.”
“Oh.” I didn’t want him to be ordinary. Please don’t be ordinary.
“Kind of like if you were to go to a school run by nuns,” he said.
“Oh. Like St. Mary’s Academy,” I said.
“Whatever.”
“Did you wear a uniform?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What was it like?” I asked. “I can’t picture you in a tie.”
He chuckled and at the same time I heard the screen door open behind me.
“Violet?” It was my dad.
“Yes.”
“What are you doing out there?”
I could hear the contained panic in his voice.
“Nothing. Talking,” I said.
“You better come in.”
“Talking about Jesuit school,” I went on, almost certain that wouldn’t make it okay.
It didn’t.
Jackson was silent. I wished he would speak, say something innocent and upright.
“Yes, all right,” I said when the quietness became too much. I stood up and smoothed my skirt.
None of us said goodnight. It would have seemed phony, out of place.
My dad locked both doors behind us, something he seldom did.
“Keep your distance, Violet. We don’t know these men very well.”
“Jackson isn’t a man. He’s seventeen.”
“He’s a man, all right. Now, go on upstairs.”
I couldn’t sleep. I looked out my bedroom window at the tent. Someone was humming quietly. Jackson. It was something with a pretty melody, a song from the radio. I wanted to know him. I wanted to know him through and through. He seemed like the world to me, the whole wide world that I didn’t know at all.