A Bird in the House

  “No,” she said, with unexpected firmness. “Leave it open, Vanessa.”

  I could hardly believe it. Surely she couldn’t want Chris to hear? She herself was always able to move with equanimity through a hurricane because she believed that a mighty fortress was her God. But the rest of us were not like that, and usually she did her best to protect us. At the time I felt only bewilderment. I think now that she must have realised Chris would have to learn the Brick House sooner or later, and he might as well start right away.

  I had to go into the living room. I had to know how Chris would take my grandfather. Would he, as I hoped, be angry and perhaps even speak out? Or would he, meekly, only be embarrassed?

  “Wilf wasn’t much good, even as a young man,” Grandfather Connor was trumpeting. “Nobody but a simpleton would’ve taken up a homestead in a place like that. Anybody could’ve told him that land’s no use for a thing except hay.”

  Was he going to remind us again how well he had done in the hardware business? Nobody had ever given him a hand, he used to tell me. I am sure he believed that this was true. Perhaps it even was true.

  “If the boy takes after his father, it’s a poor lookout for him,” my grandfather continued.

  I felt the old rage of helplessness. But as for Chris – he gave no sign of feeling anything. He was sitting on the big wing-backed sofa that curled into the bay window like a black and giant seashell. He began to talk to me, quite easily, just as though he had not heard a word my grandfather was saying.

  This method proved to be the one Chris always used in any dealings with my grandfather. When the bludgeoning words came, which was often, Chris never seemed, like myself, to be holding back with a terrible strained force for fear of letting go and speaking out and having the known world unimaginably fall to pieces. He would not argue or defend himself, but he did not apologise, either. He simply appeared to be absent, elsewhere. Fortunately there was very little need for response, for when Grandfather Connor pointed out your shortcomings, you were not expected to reply.

  But this aspect of Chris was one which I noticed only vaguely at the time. What won me was that he would talk to me and wisecrack as though I were his same age. He was – although I didn’t know the phrase then – a respecter of persons.

  On the rare evenings when my parents went out, Chris would come over to mind me. These were the best times, for often when he was supposed to be doing his homework, he would make fantastic objects for my amusement, or his own – pipecleaners twisted into the shape of wildly prancing midget men, or an old set of Christmas-tree lights fixed onto a puppet theatre with a red velvet curtain that really pulled. He had skill in making miniature things of all kinds. Once for my birthday he gave me a leather saddle no bigger than a matchbox, which he had sewn himself, complete in every detail, stirrups and horn, with the criss-cross lines that were the brand name of his ranch, he said, explaining it was a reference to his own name.

  “Can I go to Shallow Creek sometime?” I asked one evening.

  “Sure. Some summer holidays, maybe. I’ve got a sister about your age. The others are all grownup.”

  I did not want to hear. His sisters – for Chris was the only boy – did not exist for me, not even as photographs, because I did not want them to exist. I wanted him to belong only here. Shallow Creek existed, though; no longer filled with ice mountains in my mind but as some beckoning country beyond all ordinary considerations.

  “Tell me what it’s like there, Chris.”

  “My gosh, Vanessa, I’ve told you before, about a thousand times.”

  “You never told me what your house is like.”

  “Didn’t I? Oh well – it’s made out of trees grown right there beside the lake.”

  “Made out of trees? Gee. Really?”

  I could see it. The trees were still growing, and the leaves were firmly and greenly on them. The branches had been coaxed into formations of towers and high-up nests where you could look out and see for a hundred miles or more.

  “That lake, you know,” Chris said. “It’s more like an inland sea. It goes on for ever and ever amen, that’s how it looks. And you know what? Millions of years ago, before there were any human beings at all, that lake was full of water monsters. All different kinds of dinosaurs. Then they all died off. Nobody knows for sure why. Imagine them – all those huge creatures, with necks like snakes, and some of them had hackles on their heads, like a rooster’s comb only very tough, like hard leather. Some guys from Winnipeg came up a few years back, there, and dug up dinosaur bones, and found footprints in the rocks.”

  “Footprints in the rocks?”

  “The rocks were mud, see, when the dinosaurs went trampling through, but after trillions of years the mud turned into stone and there were these mighty footprints with the claws still showing. Amazing, eh?”

  I could only nod, fascinated and horrified. Imagine going swimming in those waters. What if one of the creatures had lived on?

  “Tell me about the horses,” I said.

  “Oh, them. Well, we’ve got these two riding horses. Duchess and Firefly. I raised them, and you should see them. Really sleek, know what I mean? I bet I could make racers out of them.”

  He missed the horses, I thought with selfish satisfaction, more than he missed his family. I could visualise the pair, one sorrel and one black, swifting through all the meadows of summer.

  “When can I go, Chris?”

  “Well, we’ll have to see. After I get through high school, I won’t be at Shallow Creek much.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Chris said, “what I am going to be is an engineer, civil engineer. You ever seen a really big bridge, Vanessa? Well, I haven’t either, but I’ve seen pictures. You take the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, now. Terrifically high – all those thin ribs of steel, joined together to go across this very wide stretch of water. It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s there. That’s what engineers do. Imagine doing something like that, eh?”

  I could not imagine it. It was beyond me.

  “Where will you go?” I asked. I did not want to think of his going anywhere.

  “Winnipeg, to college,” he said with assurance. The Depression did not get better, as everyone had been saying it would. It got worse, and so did the drought. That part of the prairies where we lived was never dustbowl country. The farms around Manawaka never had a total crop failure, and afterwards, when the drought was over, people used to remark on this fact proudly, as though it had been due to some virtue or special status, like the Children of Israel being afflicted by Jehovah but never in real danger of annihilation. But although Manawaka never knew the worst, what it knew was bad enough. Or so I learned later. At the time I saw none of it. For me, the Depression and drought were external and abstract, malevolent gods whose names I secretly learned although they were concealed from me, and whose evil I sensed only superstitiously, knowing they threatened us but not how or why. What I really saw was only what went on in our family.

  “He’s done quite well all through, despite everything,” my mother said. She sighed, and I knew she was talking about Chris.

  “I know,” my father said. “We’ve been over all this before, Beth. But quite good just isn’t good enough. Even supposing he managed to get a scholarship, which isn’t likely, it’s only tuition and books. What about room and board? Who’s going to pay for that? Your father?”

  “I see I shouldn’t have brought up the subject at all,” my mother said in an aloof voice.

  “I’m sorry,” my father said impatiently. “But you know, yourself, he’s the only one who might possibly –”

  “I can’t bring myself to ask Father about it, Ewen, I simply cannot do it.”

  “There wouldn’t be much point in asking,” my father said, “when the answer is a foregone conclusion. He feels he’s done his share, and actually, you know, Beth, he has, too. Three years, after all. He may not have done it gracefully, but he’s done it.”

&nbs
p; We were sitting in the living room, and it was evening. My father was slouched in the grey armchair that was always his. My mother was slenderly straight-backed in the blue chair in which nobody else ever sat. I was sitting on the footstool, beige needlepoint with mathematical roses, to which I had staked my own claim. This seating arrangement was obscurely satisfactory to me, perhaps because predictable, like the three bears. I was pretending to be colouring into a scribbler on my knee, and from time to time my lethargic purple crayon added a feather to an outlandish swan. To speak would be to invite dismissal. But their words forced questions in my head.

  “Chris isn’t going away, is he?”

  My mother swooped, shocked at her own neglect. “My heavens – are you still up, Vanessa? What am I thinking of?”

  “Where is Chris going?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” my mother evaded, chivvying me up the stairs. “We’ll see.”

  He would not go, I thought. Something would hap pen, miraculously, to prevent him. He would remain, with his long loping walk and his half-slanted grey eyes and his talk that never excluded me. He would stay right here. And soon, because I desperately wanted to, and because every day mercifully made me older, quite soon I would be able to reply with such a lightning burst of knowingness that it would astound him, when he spoke of the space or was it some black sky that never ended anywhere beyond this earth. Then I would not be innerly belittled for being unable to figure out what he would best like to hear. At that good and imagined time, I would not any longer be limited. I would not any longer be young.

  I was nine when Chris left Manawaka. The day before he was due to go, I knocked on the door of his room in the Brick House.

  “Come in,” Chris said. “I’m packing. Do you know how to fold socks, Vanessa?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Well, get folding on that bunch there, then.”

  I had come to say goodbye, but I did not want to say it yet. I got to work on the socks. I did not intend to speak about the matter of college, but the knowledge that I must not speak about it made me uneasy. I was afraid I would blurt out a reference to it in my anxiety not to. My mother had said, “He’s taken it amazingly well – he doesn’t even mention it, so we mustn’t either.”

  “Tomorrow night you’ll be in Shallow Creek,” I ventured.

  “Yeh.” He did not look up. He went on stuffing clothes and books into his suitcase.

  “I bet you’ll be glad to see the horses, eh?” I wanted him to say he didn’t care about the horses any more and that he would rather stay here.

  “It’ll be good to see them again,” Chris said. “Mind handing over those socks now, Vanessa? I think I can just squash them in at the side here. Thanks. Hey, look at that, will you? Everything’s in. Am I an expert packer or am I an expert packer?”

  I sat on his suitcase for him so it would close, and then he tied a piece of rope around it because the lock wouldn’t lock.

  “Ever thought what it would be like to be a traveller, Vanessa?” he asked.

  I thought of Richard Halliburton, taking an elephant over the Alps and swimming illicitly in the Taj Mahal lily pool by moonlight.

  “It would be keen,” I said, because this was the word Chris used to describe the best possible. “That’s what I’m going to do someday.”

  He did not say, as for a moment I feared he might, that girls could not be travellers.

  “Why not?” he said. “Sure you will, if you really want to. I got this theory, see, that anybody can do anything at all, anything, if they really set their minds to it. But you have to have this total concentration. You have to focus on it with your whole mental powers, and not let it slip away by forgetting to hold it in your mind. If you hold it in your mind, like, then it’s real, see? You take most people, now. They can’t concentrate worth a darn.”

  “Do you think I can?” I enquired eagerly, believing that this was what he was talking about.

  “What?” he said. “Oh – sure. Sure I think you can. Naturally.”

  Chris did not write after he left Manawaka. About a month later we had a letter from his mother. He was not at Shallow Creek. He had not gone back. He had got off the northbound train at the first stop after Manawaka, cashed in his ticket, and thumbed a lift with a truck to Winnipeg. He had written to his mother from there, but had given no address. She had not heard from him since. My mother read Aunt Tess’s letter aloud to my father. She was too upset to care whether I was listening or not.

  “I can’t think what possessed him, Ewen. He never seemed irresponsible. What if something should happen to him? What if he’s broke? What do you think we should do?”

  “What can we do? He’s nearly eighteen. What he does is his business. Simmer down, Beth, and let’s decide what we’re going to tell your father.”

  “Oh Lord,” my mother said. “There’s that to consider, of course.”

  I went out without either of them noticing. I walked to the hill at the edge of the town, and down into the valley where the scrub oak and poplar grew almost to the banks of the Wachakwa River. I found the oak where we had gone last autumn, in a gang, to smoke cigarettes made of dried leaves and pieces of newspaper. I climbed to the lowest branch and stayed there for a while.

  I was not consciously thinking about Chris. I was not thinking of anything. But when at last I cried, I felt relieved afterwards and could go home again.

  Chris departed from my mind, after that, with a quickness that was due to the other things that happened. My Aunt Edna, who was a secretary in Winnipeg, returned to Manawaka to live because the insurance company cut down on staff and she could not find another job. I was intensely excited and jubilant about her return, and could not see why my mother seemed the opposite, even though she was as fond of Aunt Edna as I was. Then my brother Roderick was born, and that same year Grandmother Connor died. The strangeness, the unbelievability, of both these events took up all of me.

  When I was eleven, almost two years after Chris had left, he came back without warning. I came home from school and found him sitting in our living room. I could not accept that I had nearly forgotten him until this instant. Now that he was present, and real again, I felt I had betrayed him by not thinking of him more.

  He was wearing a navy-blue serge suit. I was old enough now to notice that it was a cheap one and had been worn a considerable time. Otherwise, he looked the same, the same smile, the same knife-boned face with no flesh to speak of, the same unresting eyes.

  “How come you’re here?” I cried. “Where have you been, Chris?”

  “I’m a traveller,” he said. “Remember?”

  He was a traveller all right. One meaning of the word traveller in our part of the world, was a travelling salesman. Chris was selling vacuum cleaners. That evening he brought out his line and showed us. He went through his spiel for our benefit, so we could hear how it sounded.

  “Now look, Beth,” he said, turning the appliance on and speaking loudly above its moaning roar, “see how it brightens up this old rug of yours? Keen, eh?”

  “Wonderful,” my mother laughed. “Only we can’t afford one.”

  “Oh well –” Chris said quickly, “I’m not trying to sell one to you. I’m only showing you. Listen, I’ve only been in this job a month, but I figure this is really a going thing. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it? You take all those old wire carpet-beaters of yours, Beth. You could kill yourself over them and your carpet isn’t going to look one-tenth as good as it does with this.”

  “Look, I don’t want to seem –” my father put in, “but, hell, they’re not exactly a new invention, and we’re not the only ones who can’t afford –”

  “This is a pretty big outfit, you know?” Chris insisted. “Listen, I don’t plan to stay, Ewen. But a guy could work at it for a year or so, and save – right? Lots of guys work their way through university like that.”

  I needed to say something really penetrating, something that would show him I knew the passionate tru
th of his conviction.

  “I bet –” I said, “I bet you’ll sell a thousand, Chris.”

  Two years ago, this statement would have seemed self-evident, unquestionable. Yet now, when I had spoken, I knew that I did not believe it.

  The next time Chris visited Manawaka, he was selling magazines. He had the statistics worked out. If every sixth person in town would get a subscription to Country Guide, he could make a hundred dollars in a month. We didn’t learn how he got on. He didn’t stay in Manawaka a full month. When he turned up again, it was winter. Aunt Edna phoned.

  “Nessa? Listen, kiddo, tell your mother she’s to come down if it’s humanly possible. Chris is here, and Father’s having fits.”

  So in five minutes we were scurrying through the snow, my mother and I, with our overshoes not even properly done up and our feet getting wet, We need not have worried. By the time we reached the Brick House, Grandfather Connor had retired to the basement, where he sat in the rocking chair beside the furnace, making occasional black pronouncements like a subterranean oracle. These loud utterances made my mother and aunt wince, but Chris didn’t seem to notice any more than he ever had. He was engrossed in telling us about the mechanism he was holding. It had a cranker handle like an old-fashioned sewing machine.

  “You attach the ball of wool here, see? Then you set this little switch here, and adjust this lever, and you’re away to the races. Neat, eh?”

  It was a knitting machine. Chris showed us the finished products. The men’s socks he had made were coarse wool, one pair in grey heather and another in maroon. I was impressed.

  “Gee – can I do it, Chris?”

  “Sure. Look, you just grab hold of the handle right here.”

  “Where did you get it?” my mother asked.

  “I’ve rented it. The way I figure it, Beth, I can sell these things at about half the price you’d pay in a store, and they’re better quality.”

  “Who are you going to sell them to?” Aunt Edna enquired.

  “You take all these guys who do outside work – they need heavy socks all year round, not just in winter. I think this thing could be quite a gold mine.”