Tides of Honour (23 page)

THIRTY
-
THREE

Mick was pacing the front
room when Danny stepped through the door. The newspaperman's hair was freshly slicked back and his eyes darted restlessly. He'd apparently finished his work, and a fresh stack of crisply typed pages stood on their dining table. At sight of Danny, Mick clapped his hands together.

“Danny!” he said. “I'm feeling fine tonight. Let's go out for supper.”

“Oh, I can't do that, Mick. You know I can't afford—”

He winked and jerked his thumb at the paper. “The paper'll pay me a pretty penny for this. Dinner's on me.”

“Nah. Come on, Mick. We have some ham in here, I think, and—”

“I feel like going out, and I'll not do it alone. Let's go.” He slapped Danny on the back, and Danny gave in, persuaded as always by his friend's contagious charm. They strode into the early evening, moving fairly quickly; Mick had a definite destination in mind. As they walked, Danny brought up his question from earlier on.

“You ever hear of any bad business going on with the orphanage?”

Mick frowned. “Like what?”

“Well,” he said, scratching his head. “It's just that those kids don't seem to be getting enough to eat, from what I can see. And they have barely anything to wear, even though I was pretty sure they were getting donations.”

“Yeah, they're supposed to be. Government money and all. The committee looks after most of that. You think there's trouble?”

“I don't know. I mean, well, you know there's always stuff going on at the docks. I get that. It's the liquor and things. But I never thought of it affecting the kids at all. I don't know,” he repeated. “Maybe it's just me.”

Mick shrugged. “I ain't heard of nothing, but it sure is something I can check into.”

“Thanks, Mick,” Danny said.

“Think nothing of it, my friend.”

Mick led them down the street to a tavern. Its windows had been temporarily replaced by thick planks. As Mick opened the door and they stepped inside, Danny had to admit a warm meal and a cold drink wouldn't go amiss.

It seemed a few other people had had the same thought. Four tables were already occupied by rough-looking men deep in conversation. Danny thought he recognized a few of them.

“Well, there he is,” one man said, standing. “Mick, my lad. Won't you and your friend join us for a little supper?”

“Hey, that's Danny Baker,” another said, standing up so fast his chair tumbled over behind him. Danny recognized him at once as one of the boys he'd taken on a time or two down on the docks. One of the man's friends grabbed his arm.

“Now, now, Sam,” he said. “We're all together now, huh? We're not picking each other apart anymore. That's the way it is. You and Baker should shake hands and make friends now.”

That was just fine with Danny, whatever it meant. The last
thing he felt like doing was fighting. He'd had more than his share of this day.

Sam gave Danny a long look. “Yeah, well, he steps outta line and I'll—”

“You'll what?” Danny asked, contempt darkening his sneer. “Go on. What you gonna do, tough guy?”

“Come on, Sam,” his friend said. “Sit down. Let's have a whisky, shall we?”

Slightly mollified, Sam sat, but he kept a wary eye on Danny. Danny shook his head and looked away, wishing he'd stayed home.

“What are you having, boys?” the waiter asked, approaching Mick and Danny. The man was maybe in his mid-fifties, his curly brown hair streaked with white. He had a bandage wrapped around his neck. His knuckles, curled over an order pad, were thick with arthritis, and he had a bit of a stoop to his back. The posture was vaguely familiar, and Danny figured the waiter had once been a fisherman, just like him.

Mick offered his most winning smile, bright in his craggy face. “I'll have a whisky, if you please. And one for my friend as well. And you got any of that steak and kidney pie? We'll have a couple of those, if we could.”

“Coming up,” he said, tucking a pencil behind his ear and heading toward the kitchen.

Danny frowned at Mick, still uncomfortable at having his meal paid for.

“Danny,” Mick said loudly. “I brought you here to meet some of the lads.”

“Nice to meet you,” Danny muttered, lighting up a cigarette.

Mick grinned at his friends. “Some of you know Danny, some of you don't. He's a man of few words and unshakable integrity. A man who saved my life more than once in France.”

“I did not,” Danny said.

“You did,” Mick said quietly. “You just didn't realize it when you were doing it. Anyway,” he said, turning back to the rest of them, “Danny's a dock man like some of you, and now he does construction. Danny works fifteen-hour shifts and goes home with less money every week.”

“For Pete's sake, Mick!” Danny cried. “You gotta air my dirty laundry in front of all these guys? What's the matter with you?”

“Hang tight, Danny,” Mick said, his voice still raised. “The thing is, these boys are in the same spot you are. They're working harder all the time, getting less money all the time, but they can't quit because there ain't any other jobs around. Ain't that so?”

There were grunts of assent.

“So what?” Danny said. “We're here to whine about our circumstances? Because yeah, I could use the money. But I'm awful glad I can still walk and talk and see and not spend the rest of my life hiding burns from people. I did just fine, Mick. I got nothing to complain about.”

“There's a hero, boys. He can still walk, even though he left a leg in France.”

“For crying out loud, Mick,” Danny said, standing. “I'm getting outta here.”

“Okay, okay. Set yourself down, my friend,” Mick said, giving Danny a wink. “I'll leave off on you now. But the thing is, we're all here because we got the same problem. We ain't getting paid near enough to feed families, or even ourselves—”

“Except for you, apparently,” Danny muttered.

That stopped Mick for only a moment, then he raised his brow in acquiescence. “Well, a newspaperman ain't a dockworker, is he? We got rules about how much we get paid, right? There are systems and things that regulate how a man like me gets paid. You guys hang in there, hoping for work, and no one owes you
nothing, because no one has ever said they did. What if someone started talking about that? What if we was to have a union start up around here?”

“A what?” Sam asked.

“Come on,” Mick said, shooting him a look. “You've never heard of the unions getting power all over the place? Big companies are scared silly after the Bolshevik thing—”

“Heh?”

“Russian people taking power, tossing the czar onto the street,” Danny informed Sam.

Mick looked pleased. “You've been reading,” he said.

“What else am I gonna do when you keep throwing newspapers at me?”

“So what's this Bowl-shivvy thing? What's it got to do with us?” Sam's friend demanded. “I ain't no Russian.”

Other men spoke up at that, making it clear they weren't Russians, no way. Good Canadian citizens, they were. Proud of their country.

Danny studied each man while Mick explained the idea of unionism. Such proud Canadians. Yet other than Mick, he could see only one man, sitting near the back, who carried that cold look of someone who'd been in the war, that expression of one who doesn't feel quite connected to the world and might never again. The man looked up, sensing Danny's eye, and gave him a slow nod of recognition. The nod not of a man who'd met him before but of a man who knew where he'd been. Danny looked away.

Out of all these proud Canadians, only three had taken up arms to protect her.

He picked through the pie, but he wasn't really hungry after all. He ate because he knew it might be a while before he could have such a meal again. He was getting by with less and less, even
though, as Mick had said, he was working harder than ever. If it weren't for Audrey, Danny would have left the whole stinking mess behind. Get back to Jeddore and dig a hole in the ice, try to tempt out a few smelt. Anything but here.

But she was here. Dead or alive, she was here, and he wasn't going to leave without her.

THIRTY
-
FOUR

Those little boys, he thought
wryly. They had planted a seed in his head that germinated and sprouted overnight. They were good little souls. They deserved a good life. A good family.

Danny had plenty to do that morning, what with construction and all, but he went instead to the dark brick Social Services building a block away from the orphanage, where people posted signs and searched for lost family members. A sheaf of papers lay stacked in an open box on one side of the unmanned desk, and Danny grabbed a few of the top sheets. He carried them over to a bench, then sat so his peg jutted out in front. He barely noticed it anymore. It had been over a year since the war had taken that chunk out of him, and since then so much more had been taken from his life. The leg hardly seemed to matter compared to the loss of Audrey and Johnny. He'd give his other one to have them back.

Danny stared down at the papers in his hands, corners curled by so many desperate thumbs. He'd been through them before, but every time he saw new pleas, new drawings and descriptions of loved ones. He had always come in looking for news of Audrey. Today he had a different purpose, though he still scanned
every page for sign of her. Today he started digging deeper, looking for anyone who might know “his” little boys. He knew the orphanage would have sent out notices for all the children, but Danny hoped maybe he could help in some small way. He flipped through the pages then went back for more, but there was no mention of missing twin boys. Even if their family was dead, Danny figured someone must know of them. Sure, the broken-down homes of the North End had barely been used, since their owners were so often out working, but these two boys would have been hard to miss.

Blank pages lay in another open box with a stack of sharpened pencils beside it. Danny set to work describing the boys and their baby brother, then left the building and headed down the street toward the newspaper offices.

Danny asked the woman at the reception desk to please tell Mick he was there. After a moment, the newspaper man swaggered through a door at the back of the lobby, cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. He looked completely at home in the melee of paperboys, reporters, a clattering telegraph, and even a telephone. Danny had only ever seen one of those before. Crazy contraption, he thought. Wouldn't that be a wonderful idea if it were good for anything at all.

Mick was all smiles, clapping Danny on the shoulder and welcoming him to the pandemonium as if he were the ringleader of the entire circus. “Come for a job, have you?”

“Nah,” Danny said. “I've come to give you a job.”

“Oh? What's that?”

“I've got a little money this week,” he said pointedly. “And I think I'd like to—what did you call it? Buy some words.”

Mick frowned. “Buy some—oh! Buy an advertisement?”

“Yeah,” Danny said, grinning. “I'd like to buy an advertisement. For these boys. I want to find them a home.” He unfolded
the paper he'd tucked into his jacket pocket and showed it to Mick. “They've gotta have family somewhere.”

Mick studied Danny's drawing, stroking the line of his chin with thumb and forefinger. “Not much of an artist, are you Danny?”

“And you're not much of a comedian,” Danny countered. “What do you think? Can I do that?”

Mick kept staring at the paper a moment more, then muttered, “Well now, I wonder.”

Danny smiled to himself. That was a sure sign he'd caught Mick's interest.

“That orphanage is pretty full of these little tykes, ain't it?” Mick asked, looking up from the paper.

“Sure is.”

“Tell you what, Danny,” Mick said, mind made up. “Your money's no good here.” He snagged his cigarette between two fingers and pulled it out of his mouth, dropping a chunk of grey ash on the floor. Mick wagged a finger at Danny, his eyes slightly glazed, as an idea formed in his head. “Here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna have to pass this by the editor, sure, but he'll say yes. Heck, it's a great human interest angle.” His eyes clicked back into focus. “See, look. Here's what it is, Danny. I'll come down to the orphanage and do a story on each kid, then run a series of them. Someone's bound to pay attention if the column is running all the time.”

Mick was as good as his word and better. He even brought along a photographer. The stories were a column long, usually on the third page, and they ran the column every day for a month. Beside each of these, they ran a public and private sector appeal, asking for donations for the orphans.

They hadn't expected a miracle, but within the first two weeks, four children had been identified and brought to their rightful families. Mick's editor was so impressed with the results,
he started sending the columns out to other provinces and some of the United States. Over time the newspaper began receiving notes from relatives far away, stepping up to do their familial duty. Children were packed up and sent via train to the homes of aunts and uncles thousands of miles away.

But not the twins or their baby brother. No one came for them. Nobody said a word. The boys had no idea what was happening, and Danny was glad about that. They seemed not to notice that the other children were disappearing even though they stayed, but they did seem less and less willing to see Danny go at the end of his daily visits. They drew pictures for him, and Danny brought food and made them more toys whenever he could. They needed him.

All he'd thought about before was Audrey. About finding her, about their life together, and about his part in their own personal disaster. Now there was so much more to think about. The boys, well, he felt them twisting into the fibres of his soul, intertwining with his nerves. Seeing their little faces brought a pulse back to his heart. He needed them just as they needed him.

Social Services was more than willing to give him the paperwork for adoption. What they were less willing to do was consider his application. Not only was he without sufficient funds, he was without a wife. The children would need a mother, they said. If Danny could do something about that, well, then they'd speak with him again.

That made Danny smile, though it didn't make him happy. He could only imagine Audrey's reaction if he finally found her, then asked if she could please come along and adopt these three little boys. It would be too much. Even if she were alive—and Danny had begun to secretly doubt that possibility—she might not be willing to go back to a louse like him, let alone take on three little boys.

Construction around the city was an amazing sight to behold. After the devastation had been mostly cleared, buildings seemed to pop up almost overnight. Streets began to look like streets again, instead of long, bare stretches of flat rock and fallen timber. They began to frame neighbourhoods again, and Danny was able to look at the buildings without remembering France quite so often.

Life in the north end of Halifax began to resume. A few automobiles puttered through, cutting wide curves around working horses who were back to hauling supplies instead of corpses.

Typically, most of the people from the wealthy south end of the city stayed away from the north. That had always been the way. But recently a few curious southerners had started dropping in, wanting to see what all the fuss was about. Some came with donations, some came to help build. Others came merely to stare, to tut their tongues at the horrible waste, to stare with pity and disgust at the hundreds of maimed and blind inhabitants.

The workers toiled on, though it was sometimes difficult to stomach the sight of fur-clad women stepping gingerly from shiny automobiles and into the construction areas, accompanied by gentlemen with fancy hats and walking sticks. Grumbling remarks were made by the workers regarding the new posters that were being hammered up, ordering citizens to stop offering alcohol to the workers. Fortunately, the posters didn't stop the process, only quietened it a bit.

Mick's meetings at the tavern increased in both size and frequency, and he eventually gave up his podium to make way for more forceful leaders. He had to be careful about what he wrote, because the newspaper had some wealthy connections, and there were laws discouraging open dissent. He would be of no use to his cohorts if he were inside a jail cell. He fell into the comfortable position of writing articles, of detailing the troubles the workers
faced, the progress they made. The labourers made formal complaints to the government about low wages, but those went largely ignored. Danny understood that, in a way. After all, how could the government worry about regulating wages when thousands of people were still homeless. A lot were jobless too, now the sugar refinery and other factories had been destroyed. And then there was the steady stream of soldiers who kept arriving in town, returning from the front, usually ruined either physically, mentally, or both. There was no work for them either.

Mick's crew wasn't easily dissuaded. Sure, money needed to go to the homeless. But Danny and the other construction workers were busy, trying hard to ensure that soon there would be no problem with homelessness at all. On the other hand, when they went home at the end of the day and couldn't afford dinner for themselves and their families, something had to be done.

“You see the boys just gettin' home off the boats?” Mick asked him one day.

“What, the lame ones like me?”

Mick gave a short bark of laughter and blew out a puff of smoke. “Yeah. Those ones. Who's lookin' out for them boys?”

Danny shrugged. “No one I know of. They sleep fine, I guess, at the Exhibition Grounds with all the tents.”

“Well, I've seen some of them just sittin' around on the street, doin' nothin'. You seen 'em there, Danny? What do you make of that?”

“Why? You think they're lazy? Nah. At least you and I had something to come home to. What's left here for these boys? It's blown apart, just like France, only more women and kids stuck in the middle.”

Mick nodded and one side of his mouth curled up, giving Danny that pirate look. “I'm gonna go talk with them. I'm gonna bring them on side.”

“What, join your group of thugs?”

“Yeah, my group of thugs. That's exactly it. After the war, they're like you and me. They ain't afraid of nothing anymore, those soldier boys. They won't be afraid to complain, at least. And they look plenty hungry, so they'd have something to complain about.”

Danny didn't see much point in it, but he went with Mick anyway. If nothing else, they were reaching out to some fairly lost souls, men who needed at least a friendly voice to keep them afloat.

There was talk of unions, of revolutions, of public protests. From what Danny read, it seemed to be happening all across the country. Mick stayed on top of everything and made sure Danny was right there with him.

“There's a town hall meeting tonight,” Mick said once.

“Yeah? So what?”

“So we're going, the bunch of us. We're gonna make a noise they can't ignore.”

Danny shrugged, then went along. He had nothing better to do.