Sunny Dreams (6 page)

On the second Saturday of the men’s stay I went over to visit Gwen. The sun beat down on my bare head; I should have worn a hat. The morning was hot and steamy and there was no breeze on the baked streets.

I hoped to find her home alone. I didn’t feel much like running into Mrs. Walker. Gwen’s mother, Gert, was my least favourite person in the world. Tippy didn’t like her either. The dog cowered when she came around and that was proof enough for me that she was genuinely bad.

The air in the yard was heavy, but free of Godawful Gert, as I thought of her. Warren and Tippy were poking around in the backyard.

“Hi, Warren. Hi, Tip.”

“Hi, Violet.”

I bent down toward Tippy and she leapt up and gave my face a quick lick before settling back down to watch Warren, who had a few old pieces of lumber in front of him, seven dead gophers, an axe, a hammer, and some nails.

“Whatcha doin’?” I asked.

“I’m lookin’ for a suitable piece of wood.”

“What for?”

“Gopher tails.”

Warren was small for his age. I kept thinking he was younger than he was.

He chose the sturdiest piece of wood and tossed the others in the direction of the shed. Then he picked up the axe and chopped the tails off the gophers, one by one. These he began to nail to the wood, in an evenly spaced row.

“Is this some sort of project for Boy Scouts or something?” I asked.

Warren chuckled. “Nah. Scouts is for blockheads.” He paused in his hammering. “The manager over at the golf course gives me two cents a tail. The gophers are really chewin’ up the course this summer.”

“That’s really impressive, Warren.” I wasn’t kidding. “How do you catch them?”

“I pour water down one hole and they come out another. When they do, Tippy grabs ’em in her teeth and breaks their backs. Simple.”

“Gosh.”

I sat on the stoop and watched him for a while.

“How are the men getting on, building your garage?” he asked.

“Good,” I said. “You should come over and watch them sometime.”

“I do,” he said. “They even let me do the odd thing.”

“Really? That’s great, Warren! What kinds of things do they let you do?”

“Oh, fetch tools, lug lumber around, stuff like that.”

“Golly, that’s more than they let me do. All I get to do is bring them food and drink.”

“Your dad said mostly you’re at work at Eaton’s.”

“Yeah, rotten old work. I think I’d rather build a garage.”

“Building a garage is men’s work,” said Warren.

“Maybe so,” I sighed. “Maybe so.” I pictured two of the men, my dad and Mr. Larkin, with their clean fingernails and sunburnt noses. And I pondered divisions of labour, allotment of tasks. There had to be more to it than gender, didn’t there?

“Is your mum at home?” I asked Warren quietly.

“Nah. I wouldn’t be doin’ this here if she was. She’d be yellin’ at me that I was lowerin’ the tone of the place, makin’ us look like Polacks.” He shook his head as though that were the craziest notion he’d ever heard.

“What the heck’s a Polack?” I asked. I knew but I wanted to hear what Warren would say.

“I dunno. Somethin’ that lowers the tone.”

When he was done he set off over the field to the golf club with the mounted gopher tails over his shoulder. Tippy went too, veering off to nose about in the scrub.

“What about these dead fellas?” I called out after Warren, looking at the mess he’d left behind. The sight caused a slight queasiness in my stomach.

“I’ll bury ’em when I get back,” he shouted over his shoulder.

Warren stumbled but caught himself, probably tripping on a gopher hole. Tippy seemed to notice too, and raced back to Warren. She trotted along the rest of the way by his side.

The wind was up again by now. It only ever seemed to die down for short spells or when everyone was in bed and too sleepy to enjoy the calm.

Gwen shouted out the kitchen window for me to come in.

“That’s some little brother you have,” I said as I sat down at the kitchen table.

She placed a cup of instant coffee in front of me. Maxwell House. “Yeah. He’d be rich if he didn’t give all his money to my mum.”

I tried to talk about Jackson.

“Hmm,” Gwen said, and muttered something else under her breath.

“What?” I said.

She didn’t answer and I said it again, louder. “What?”

“Well, don’t you think it’s kind of…strange having tramps living in your backyard?”

My mouth opened and I stared at her.

“They’re not tramps!” I shouted. “Holy Hell, Gwen! You sound like your mother.” I felt my face heat up and I began to sweat in a way that wasn’t weather-related. “I guess you think they’re lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, like Warren’s gophers.”

“Don’t yell,” Gwen said.

I got up and paced the small kitchen floor. I felt sick.

“Your face is all blotchy,” said Gwen.

Jackson didn’t fit into the world that she and I occupied together. I wondered for a second if it would make a difference to her that he came from a wealthy family in Westmount. But I wasn’t going to try to explain him or excuse him. It was Gwen and her mother that were the low-life scum.

“I hope to God your mum doesn’t succeed in poisoning Warren like she has you,” I said. “He said ‘Polack’ a few minutes ago.”

“So?”

This was the worst fight Gwen and I had ever had. In fact, I didn’t think we’d had one before. When I realized that I was the only one doing the fighting I sat back down.

“Your mum isn’t home, is she?” I whispered to Gwen, double-checking.

“No. We wouldn’t be having coffee if she was. But you don’t have to be scared of her. She doesn’t hate you or anything.”

“I wish you wouldn’t listen to her mean ways,” I said, stirring my coffee. “She’s unchristian-like.”

Gwen laughed. “Since when do you know so much about unchristian-like behaviour?”

“Since forever,” I said. “That’s what Sunday school was for. Maybe you should have gone more often.”

I sipped my coffee. “This tastes like poo,” I said. All that cream and sugar and it still wasn’t any good. Gwen made terrible coffee — weak — I guess so Gert wouldn’t notice that any was gone.

“It’s not that I’m scared of her,” I went on, realizing for the first time that I was. “I just think she thinks I’m a bad influence on you and that’s so boneheaded. She’s the one that’s a bad influence.”

Gwen ignored that. “Fraser Foote wants to go out with you,” she said.

“How do you know?” I took one last sip and pushed my coffee aside.

“He told Dirk.”

“Well, why doesn’t he tell me?”

“He wanted Dirk to get me to feel you out on the subject. Apparently he doesn’t want to ask you out if you’re going to say no.”

“I like Fraser,” I said.

“So you will?”

“I guess so.”

“For sure?”

“Yeah, I guess. Why’s he such a scaredy cat? That’s not very appealing.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Wilma hurt him so badly when she left him for Quintano.”

“How could she like Quint better than Fraser?” I said. “He’s so…swarthy.”

“Beats me,” Gwen said. “I guess she sees something in him. He is a bit of a go-getter.”

“Kind of like your brother, but older and with more goop in his hair.”

Warren walked in the back door.

“Who’s like me?” he asked.

“You don’t wear any goop, do you, Squirt?” Gwen said and tousled his dusty hair.

He slipped away from her and made a big production out of counting his earnings at the table. Two nickels and four pennies.

“Fourteen cents,” he announced.

Gwen tried to swipe it off the table and he swatted her hand away.

“How old are you now, Warren?” I asked. “Around nine or so?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’m wearin’ on to eleven.”

“Yeah, wearin’ on to eleven next May,” said Gwen. “You’re ten years old, Warren. Now go outside and bury those gophers before Mum gets home. She’ll throw a fit if she sees them practically lying on top of the horseradish. And don’t swear,” she called after him.

“Hell isn’t a swear word,” he yelled back.

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s a place.”

“Who said?”

“Jackson said.”

“See?” Gwen said to me.

“See what?”

“He’s been hanging around at your place,” Gwen said. “If my mum finds out she’ll kill him.”

Gwen and Warren didn’t have a dad. Mr. Walker had died a long time ago, before Warren was born and before I got to know the family. That’s all I knew: their dad was dead. No details. Gwen wouldn’t let me bring up the topic of dead fathers, especially around her mother. I suspected that it wasn’t true that her dad had died. I don’t think she ever had one. My theory was that Gert Walker was a slattern in her younger days and had two kids by different fathers. Maybe she had even been a prostitute. That’s probably how she had saved enough money to buy the tiny house on Lawndale Avenue.

Now she was a cleaner at Earl Grey School. And she thought she knew everything. I shuddered to think. She probably taught the kids who passed her in the halls to be mean to those less fortunate than themselves and, why not? to those more fortunate as well.

During the summer months she cleaned houses to make extra money. That’s probably where she was now, at a big lemon-scented house in Crescentwood, polishing newel posts and scrubbing toilets. I didn’t usually mention it because it embarrassed Gwen that her mum cleaned other people’s houses.

But now I said, “So is Gert on scrubwoman duty today?”

Gwen pretended she didn’t hear me. She was next to impossible to get a rise out of.

It would have been great if Gwen had had a mother that I liked. I had Aunt Helen, but it seemed to me that you could never have too much in the good-mother department.

I stood up to leave.

“Okay,” Gwen said. “So the official word is that you will say yes if Fraser asks you out.”

“Well, I don’t know about official. What if I’m doing something else when he wants to go out, what if I’m time travelling, what if I die, what if the world ends, what if he dies?”

“I’m going to tell Dirk that you’ll say yes.”

“Dirk’s a gink,” muttered Warren as he let the screen door slam behind him.

“Wash your hands,” said Gwen.

I laughed, but didn’t say that I agreed with Warren. Gwen thought for some reason that the sun shone out of Dirk’s rear end, probably just because he was good-looking to her way of thinking and his dad was a city official of some kind who cut the occasional ribbon.

Dirk wasn’t ugly, but his even features often had a sour look to them, the type of expression where if he lived at our house my dad would say, “If you’re not careful your face will stay that way.”

And his hair was too short, his lips were too thin, and his trousers were pulled up way too high. Also, his voice had no rise and fall to it; he sounded like a corpse would sound if it could talk. He disturbed me.

“Tippy doesn’t like him,” Warren said. “She growls when he comes around.”

“Be quiet,” said Gwen.

“Does she like Fraser Foote?” I asked Warren.

“I don’t know if she’s met him,” said Warren, “but I like Fraser. He’s a good egg. He helped me fix my wagon once when a wheel fell off near his house.”

“Yeah, he is a good egg,” I said. “I’ll see you folks later.”

As I walked home it occurred to me that I didn’t like either Mary’s boyfriend or Gwen’s. Was I just jealous because they were attached, because they had someone to hold their hands in public? People said “Mary and Perry” or “Gwen and Dirk” in the same breath. They were couples. It seemed unlikely that I would ever be part of a couple, a taken-for-granted part of a couple. But I also knew that, as Warren said, Dirk Botham was a gink, if not worse, and Perry Toole was a gink for sure.

“Violet and Jackson,” I said out loud. I liked the sound of it. “Violet and Fraser,” I tried next. That sounded good too, but it didn’t light up the inside of me in quite the same way.

My friend Isabelle wasn’t part of a couple. She had no time for that, what with helping to support her family and looking after her brother and sisters. During the school year she collected cardboard boxes in her spare time. There wasn’t big money in it, but maybe a bit more than in gopher tails. Boys liked Is; she was an adventuress. But I think they were afraid of her, too; at least the boys I knew.

She lived in a rough-and-tumble apartment block on Taché Avenue. Her family was way poorer than even the Walkers. Gert would look down on her for sure.

My step lightened as I thought of a possible date with Fraser. Then I grew achy with thoughts of Jackson. My body had no doubt where I wanted to be, however hard my brain fought it.

“Hey there, Skipper,” shouted Jackson from high on the ladder.

“Hi, young fella,” called Benoit from the door he was framing.

I turned around and realized that Warren had followed me home.

By the end of the weekend, the garage was nearing completion. At lunchtime on the hot and windy Sunday Helen held the door for me as usual and then went back inside. I carried a tray piled high with ham and lettuce sandwiches.

The eyes of all the men turned towards me. Jackson was at the very top of the wooden ladder. He turned too quickly and too far and he fell, slowly, it seemed to me, with his arms stretched out in front of him.

“No, don’t!” It was his arms that caused me to shout. He was going to land all wrong.

He hit the hard dirt and we all heard the crack of bone breaking. I put the tray down on the stoop. We all rushed to his crumpled form.

“Helen!” shouted my dad.

Jackson had landed hands first. His eyes were closed and I thought for a moment he was dead. I crouched down beside him. Aunt Helen flung herself out the back door and over to where we had all gathered.

“Oh, my land!” she said and knelt down next to me. “He’s broken both his arms.” She smoothed the hair back from his forehead where dirt mixed with sweat. I wished I had done that, but I was paralyzed with fear and love and not wanting to upset my dad.

“All right, Jackie dear,” said Aunt Helen.

Jackie. I didn’t like that.

She took off her apron and then mine and tenderly secured his arms to his body so they wouldn’t flop around.

“Let’s you men get him into the Buick,” she said, “and we’ll take him to the hospital.”

“Rotten Buick,” I said and my dad looked at me, bewildered.

If it weren’t for the car none of this would have happened. But if it weren’t for the car and the garage Jackson wouldn’t be here and I never would have met him at all. Yes, I would have. We were meant to be, as he said he and Benoit were. I believed that.

As the garage had taken shape I had been dreading Jackson’s departure. I had even devised a scheme where I would scout the neighbourhood for Benny and him, drumming up business. I had already approached Mr. Foote, Fraser’s dad, about his dilapidated shed. That was before I knew Fraser wanted to ask me out. Mr. Foote was still thinking about it. I was sure if I kept at him he would come around.

But Jackson would be out of commission for at least six weeks. I knew how broken arms worked; I’d had one of my own when I was twelve.

“For God’s sake, be careful with him,” Helen said with her hands covering the lower part of her face as the men clumsily placed him on the back seat of the car. That was the first time I ever heard her use the name God in that way.

It was decided that she would go with my dad and Jackson to St. Boniface Hospital.

“I’m a nurse,” she said.

“Big deal,” I said quietly.

Helen set herself up in the back seat with Jackson’s head resting on her shoulder. At her orders I ran inside for a cold cloth and she held it against his forehead as they drove off.

Benny and Mr. Larkin and I sat with the lunch tray, but we didn’t eat. We sipped lemonade for a while and then the men went quietly back to work. I put a tea towel over the sandwiches and took them inside to the fridge. I’d offer them again later after the horror had died down.

I was positive that all of us were thinking about the same thing: how was Jackson, with casts on both arms, going to feed himself, wash himself, dress himself, hold himself to pee, wipe his bum after using the toilet? Dad and Aunt Helen would be thinking it, too, as they bumped down Taché Avenue to the hospital. Jackson may have been lucky enough to lose consciousness for a little while, to save himself from those dreadful thoughts for a short time longer.

But those musings paled next to what I decided was the worst that could happen: Jackson would contract polio while in the hospital, the worst kind, where you can’t talk or swallow or breathe, and death is a certainty.

I didn’t know anyone personally who had polio but I’d heard about the victims, like I’d heard about the people who died from the heat that summer. Heat prostration was what they called it in the paper when they reported new cases. They even counted the horses, dogs, and cats that died.

It seemed to me that the people who died from the heat always came from the poor side of town. They were the ones who were on relief and lived on streets with names like Alfred and Logan and Battery and Martha. That didn’t need any explaining.

But the polio victims usually seemed to come from Ashland and Rosewarne and Chestnut Street, where regular folks like us lived. And that puzzled me. When I mentioned it to Aunt Helen she suggested that perhaps Winnipeg’s middle classes were a bit too concerned with cleanliness and didn’t give themselves a chance to build up any resistance to the disease.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“An early exposure to the virus could build up an immunity to it,” she said, in her nurse-like fashion, “a protection that people like us might not have because we clean away any chance of that exposure.”

I liked that theory. I liked the idea of letting a little dirt build up here and there and having an argument for it.

“Is this true, Helen, or is this something you made up?” I asked at the time.

“It’s true and I made it up,” she said.

When I had first heard the word
polio
, the same spring that I got stuck in the mud in my new rubber boots, I thought it had a jolly sound to it. Poli-oli-oli-o! Poli-oli-I-over! Like it belonged in one of our skipping songs. But that didn’t last long.

The school nurse, Miss Peeler, came into our grade four classroom to tell us how not to get that dreaded disease. It was very contagious, she said. Don’t go swimming, stay squeaky clean, and don’t hang around with people who aren’t. At that point practically everyone in the class turned around to look at Margie Willis because she was the dirtiest person most of us knew. She was the younger sister of the Willis twins, the neighbourhood bad boys. In those days they lived in the same rickety old house on Cromwell Street that they lived in now with their exhausted-looking mother and maybe a grandfather. An old man, anyway. None of us had ever seen a dad, unless the old man was the dad.

Once, when I was walking home from the Piggly Wiggly store, way back when, I passed their house and the grandfather was sitting on the back stoop cutting his toenails. There was nothing unusual about that, I thought, just bad manners doing it outside where anyone could see. What was unusual was the tool he was using to do the job. It was a pair of pruning shears like the ones Dad used to trim the shrubs. Aunt Helen called them secateurs. It made me feel kind of sick. I don’t ever want to have toenails so big and coarse that a garden tool is needed to cut them.

Anyway, that day in grade four I forced myself not to turn around and look at Margie Willis. Look at me, how great I am. I’m not staring at the dirty girl.

Some kids made up a song at recess:

Polio Joe, from Mexico

Hands up, stick ’em up, Polio Joe.

That was the extent of it. It was just a redo of some other stupid song about cowboys. I couldn’t join in singing it. I knew if I did, I would get polio for sure and end up in braces or worse, like the children in the pictures that Nurse Peeler showed us. The worst that could happen, the worst that polio could do to you, was cause you to not be able to breathe or swallow. In that case, you died.