Homesick

Vera was learning it was impossible to hide anything in the Army, or hide from anything. Like sex. She was getting sick and tired of being importuned and bothered by soldiers. The young ones were no better than beggars, all beseeching mouths and beseeching hands. They fumbled at you on the dance floor and in ill-lit doorways. What was worse, they struck sentimental poses and talked of dying because their bragging, lying friends told them that never failed to produce the desired result. To Vera it was exasperating and wearying, fending off this desperate stroking and fondling. They were nice enough boys but fools. Couldn’t they see that all this talk of death sounded ridiculous standing under a lamppost in Kitchener?

If you steered clear of the young heroes, that left only the tough rinds and peels, the vets of the Great War who had reenlisted, been judged unfit for active service, and assigned duties as drill and gunnery instructors. Vera preferred them to the boys. They were more patient and charmingly persistent. A number of times when she had drunk too much Vera had permitted them liberties. For none of these old men did she feel an individual passion but at certain times she was aroused to an impersonal excitement when a hand crept to a stocking top, or closed on her breast, muffled in its khaki tunic. Eyes pressed tightly closed, she would ask herself, Why not? Why not find out? Why not get it over with? But she didn’t. Vera was put off by the element of struggle in it all, by their I win, you lose attitude, by the feeling they wanted to take her, to have her. That was the one satisfaction they would never get.

Not surprisingly, none of this found its way into her letters to Earl. The picture she drew of herself was incomplete. In reality, the correspondence of Vera and her brother was the correspondence of shadows, a record of one memory speaking to another, of two people who grew dimmer and dimmer as the months became years and the memories grew more unreliable. Their father was the wall upon which the shadows met. Because Vera knew he read her letters to Earl, she could never ask the questions that plagued her. How is he treating you, Earl? Are things better now that I’m out of his hair? Earl, are you happy? She had to rely on what she could divine from the notes written on lined pages torn from a school exercise-book, the words thick and clumsy-looking because of the heavy- handed way Earl drove his fountain-pen across the paper. The childish, immature way in which he expressed himself was never remarked by Vera. In her mind, he grew no older, was as she had left him.

Got better marks from the new teacher. Mr. Mackenzie joined up on the school trustees so we have a lady teacher now. She is not so strict and owly as Mackenzie. I got specs now. Catch better with them than before, but still am no great shakes at ball. Isn’t in the cards I guess.

No, Vera supposed it wasn’t. Earl had sent along a photograph of himself in his baseball uniform. She was shocked to see him suddenly shot up tall and thin as a reed, his Adam’s apple looking like an orange in a Christmas stocking, and his new glasses throwing sun back into the camera in a brilliant blur. It was typical of Earl to have a picture of himself taken in baseball uniform, not wearing his glove but absent-mindedly clutching it by the webbing so it hung, limp dead leather, like a trophy of the hunt, a strange beast pulled from the sea, or huge bat plucked from darkness. Oh dear, Earl, Vera thought, shaking her head.

Reading between the lines, Vera could not always piece together the actual state of things in Connaught. Much of what Earl told her was communicated offhand, by the by. In January of 1944, in a letter written to thank Vera for the present she had sent for his fifteenth birthday, Earl passed on the momentous news that his father had taken over the town garage and hired himself help.

Dad has taken on a man with a glass eye. Dad says men are hard to come by with the war but since this one has a glass eye he can’t fight. His name is Mr. Stutz and he comes from somewhere down the line, Kimberley I think.

We got him because Dad says he is tired of doing bull-work his time of life. From now on Dad says Mr. Stutz can haul freight and he will sit on his behind doing the easy stuff like showing pictures and pumping gas for a living. Dad says Mr. Stutz is a good worker but has opinions. I seen him smoking so he isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness although he’s death on drinking. That’s how he lost his eye. Somebody drunk poked it with a pencil or something.

Mr. Stutz is stronger even than Dad. Friday he carried an engine block across the shop on a dare. Was Dad ever mad when he heard. He said he could of hurt himself and been laid up and lost to him.

Mr. Stutz figured prominently in Earl’s letters from that time on. He had clearly made an impression on her brother and perhaps beyond. In one of Earl’s letters she came across a cryptic line. Dad is better since Mr. Stutz came. How exactly was this to be taken? Did he mean her father was feeling physically better now that Mr. Stutz had relieved him of heavy work, or did he mean that Mr. Stutz was exerting some kind of steadying influence on her father, discouraging his wild, erratic behaviour? She wished she knew. Vera often worried about Earl, partly out of guilt, she supposed. Her brother had always needed someone to look out for him, to take his side. Maybe Mr. Stutz was doing that. Often during lulls in the clamour of the kitchens, she thought of the man she had cast in the role of her brother’s protector. However, try as hard as she might, she could only imagine him one way – as a man moving stiff-legged in a sailor’s rolling walk, arms pulled straight by something heavy – a keg of nails, an anvil, an icebox which buffeted his thighs with every lurching step he took. That was Mr. Stutz to Vera.

But Vera had more to worry about than just Earl. By now she was a sergeant with a sergeant’s responsibilities – that is, she had to run things in a way that allowed the officers to believe they were actually in charge. She had to manage people with an easy or heavy hand, whatever the situation required. There were times when she was all at sea. What to do about the girl who was sending gifts of chocolate and perfume to another? How to uncover a barracks room thief? There were sleepless nights enough. And then there was the final worry. With every day that passed it was becoming clearer the war was drawing to a close. There were pictures in the newspapers of Russian and American troops shaking hands and posing as comrades beside the wide, slaty waters of the Elbe.

Still, no one yet dared to think of it as finished, not with Japan holding out. On the radio sonorous voices reminded them all of the terrible price in blood which must still be paid. It was difficult to think of life outside the Army as anything but far distant. Then, very soon, Vera had to imagine it. Two bombs dropped, two unearthly flashes of light, two storms of heat and dust and it was over.

This sudden peace took her unprepared. The Army began to melt away around her. It was like waking from a dream. A week never passed that Vera wasn’t down at the train station to see another of her discharged girls off home. She pressed cigarettes and bags of peppermints on them, brusquely shook their hands, and called them by their surnames before they climbed aboard. The shuddering, panting locomotives jerked forward, the carriage couplings rang, and Vera was left feeling like autumn, like those stark days when the leaves have fallen but the snow has not.

Then in 1946 it was Vera’s turn. She was out on civvy street, her winter uniform carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied up in string, and laid in the bottom of a drawer in a rooming-house in Toronto. There was only one thing clear in her mind. She was not going home.

Vera would have preferred to remain in the Army if that was a thing women did, but women didn’t.

7

Every night after supper Daniel walked and figured. It was his best chance to be absolutely alone because everybody else in Connaught was still indoors eating, he had the streets to himself. In Alec Monkman’s household supper was served earlier than in other households because he refused to eat at six o’clock when everyone else in Connaught did. In other houses it was the custom to seat yourself for the evening meal when the “supper siren” blew at the Town Hall. Three times a day a siren sounded from one end of Connaught to the other: at noon, at six, and at nine in the evening when it reminded children that there was a curfew for kids under sixteen years of age. Daniel had never heard of anything so weird, so backward. His grandfather had strong opinions about the siren, too. He said that eating at exactly the same time as eight hundred other people made him feel just like one more pig at the trough. All that snuffling and chewing, he could hear it. It put him off his own feed, he claimed. That was why at their house they ate at five.

Daniel had a route he followed on his figuring walks. Down his grandfather’s street and past the RCMP detachment he went, the sun settling at his back, his shadow long and spidery-legged. In the evening calm the red