Homesick

the spot.

And when that wave dashed itself against the flames, the fire popped explosively, like a flare on a night battlefield, and there stood Earl waist-deep in the wheat, awash in a hot yellow, shaking light, smoke rising from the grain surrounding him like morning mist steaming up from a marsh.

“I never seen anything catch so fast in my life,” said Mr. Stutz. “I wonder that the heat of it didn’t make him run for it.”

“I wonder,” said Monkman.

Because Earl did not run, even though the heat caused him to flinch, to turn away his face toward the three men hanging on the fence. The boy might have been blind or deaf. He gave no sign he saw them there, beckoning desperately, or heard the two of them shouting Run! while the third gripped the strand of wire and stared. Earl did not move, except to draw up his shoulders against the searing heat which pounded his back and caused him to wobble as he stood his ground. Plunged to his hips in the crop, shrinking into himself, he had looked very small to Mr. Stutz and Dover, smaller still to his father. Perhaps the great flapping curtain of greasy smoke which had gone roaring up into the sky at his back had made him seem more so – a poor, lost actor without lines to speak, made to occupy and hold a stage with nothing but his face, his hands, his eloquent silence.

In scarcely a minute the curtain had risen to such a height as to overwhelm him, a drapery of grey and white smoke flecked red and orange with bits of burning awns and chaff. The three men’s eyes followed it as it climbed into the night sky, swaying and billowing, blowing and sinking, its hem ragged, licked with fire. Their eyes were still on it when they felt the air tug about them as the blaze made of itself a firestorm, a whirlwind. The sudden convulsion ripped the curtain to rags and sparks, a violent updraught flung a spray of sparks higher and higher until they showered down about Earl and spattered the crop with more dark red poppies of fire.

Like his son, Monkman did not move. Did not move when the wire sagged and shrieked under his hands as Mr. Stutz flung himself over it. Did not move as in a fiery, smoky dream he watched Stutz run heavily forward, lurching as he panted through the wheat and over the hidden stones which twisted his ankles and wrung his knees, beating on to where Earl waited, face tight and gleaming, ringed by a dozen new patches of fire whose edges were running together and offering up a thin blue haze.

“I never lifted a hand to help, did I?” said Alec to Stutz. “It wasn’t me that went into the fire. It was you.”

“I told you before,” said Mr. Stutz, “it was shock. Thinking he was going to burn put you in shock.”

“He saw me stand at the fence,” the old man muttered. “That’s what he took away with him, me at the fence.”

“He didn’t take anything away with him,” Mr. Stutz assured him. “Don’t forget I was there. The boy had nothing in his mind. He had nothing whatsoever in his mind.”

“It’s not then I’m speaking of,” said Monkman.

12

September was a fine month. The sun shone day after day but the air remained cool and sweet as pure well water. Alec swore he could taste the air on his tongue where it succeeded in improving the flavour of everything, even tobacco and coffee. Mornings he sat perched on his front step, a mug of coffee set steaming between his feet while he smoked the first cigarette of the day, squinting up at the sky and across the yard at the goldenrod. The goldenrod flowered bold as brass all about the garden shed but this year Alec didn’t take a scythe to it. Vera had nicely requested him to spare it. “If it makes you happy to look at,” was all he had said and refrained from pointing out to her that goldenrod was a weed. It did make Vera happy, too, when she saw the plants standing erect in the autumn sunshine like golden sceptres and reflected that it was she who had saved them. She also reflected that now the days were no longer so hot she might prepare creamed chicken and dumplings for her father, a favourite dish he had been hinting for all summer like a wheedling, spoiled child. It was a sign of a temporary truce.

Throughout October the weather continued remarkably mild despite the lateness of the season, although now there were under-currents of ice in it. For days on end not a cloud curdled the soaring skies which each night’s frost seemed to dye a deeper, sterner blue. In the mornings, before the sun had gained enough strength to burn it off, Alec Monkman’s lawn was spread with a thick, white rime which exposed a stark trail of footprints when he crossed it to dig turnips left in his garden for the cold to sweeten in the ground. The old man loved this time of year, the chill baths of sunshine, the clearing away, the making ready, the long, lazy postponement of winter’s sleep.

Late one night he flung open the kitchen door and called excitedly to Vera and Daniel to come outside, quick. At the very least, Vera had expected a house fire but the street lay dim and unremarkable as ever. “Listen!” commanded her father and she saw his face tilt up to the sky under the porch light. What they heard was the last of the migrating geese high overhead, clamouring in the limitless darkness of a fall night. Daniel and Vera and Alec stood absolutely still, tracking and straining after the wild, sad calling as it faded southward and finally dissolved into space and silence. Then, just as Vera was about to speak, a last gift. A flight of stragglers came sweeping low over the roofs of Connaught, so low that the whistle and whine of surging wings could be clearly heard, startling three hearts and lifting three faces blindly to search the sky for this mysterious passage, their common breath mingling in a golden fog under the porch light. As suddenly as they had come, the birds were gone.

The people on the porch became aware of the cold. “I wanted the boy to hear,” said Alec.

“Yes,” said Vera.

With no more to say, they went to bed.

Daniel became obsessed with the Hallowe’en dance. He was pinning all his hopes on it. So far nothing at school had been as bad as he had been led to fear by his grandfather. No one had beaten him up or even bullied him. What he had been was ignored. Daniel realized that a lot of the blame was his. His pride had held him back from making overtures to anyone in case they should snub him. The mere thought of such humiliation could stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth and his feet to the floor whenever he debated with himself the advisability of approaching any of his classmates.

So he remained aloof and ran the risk of being labelled a snob, which was exactly how everyone thought of him. They knew he came from a big city in the east and they supposed he thought himself too good for the likes of Connaught. Add to that that he was the grandson of Alec Monkman who owned the delivery, the garage, the movie theatre, and the hotel, and it was not hard for them to imagine that Daniel believed he was small-town royalty. “Big shot,” the other boys silently mouthed to one another when he went past them, carrying himself rigid and tense. The girls didn’t care for him either because he made them wonder if they didn’t seem like hicks compared to the girls he had known in the city.

At the beginning of the school year Daniel had tried to show them they were wrong about him but he only ended by making a fool of himself. It happened at the first high school football game of the season. Games were held Friday afternoons and the students of both the elementary and high schools were dismissed half an hour early so they could root for the home team, the Connaught Cougars. The football field was a raw-looking rectangle mowed out of prairie grass, lined with lime and pounded to hard pan by daily practices. Getting tackled on it was like getting tackled on a parking lot. Every September it was a school tradition to let the Grade Seven and Eight boys out of school for a day to pick the rocks off the field which the frost had popped out of the ground the previous spring, but they did a cursory job, harvesting only a portion of each year’s bountiful crop, leaving behind enough stones to make a contribution to the number and severity of injuries to players. There were no bleachers, so those who had them sat on the hoods of the cars which they had bounced over the boulders and badger holes in the schoolyard to park around the field. The rest of the students formed into cliques and stood in clusters along the sidelines.

It seemed to Daniel that everyone had a group to attach themselves to except him. So that day he positioned himself five yards from the group he would have most liked to be invited to join and lingered hopefully. While he did, he made sure to cheer as loudly and enthusiastically for the Connaught Cougars as if he had spent his entire life in Connaught, lived or perished according to the team’s success or failure. He did this absolutely alone, in splendid isolation. Of all the people cheering he was the only one who was aware of his own voice. Still, it seemed to him that he must be making a good impression. Surely it must mean something to them to see him rooting so wildly for