Remembering the Bones

  Ally and I were required to do more housework now that Phil worked at the store, and this meant that we had to stay inside to learn to appreciate the power of elbow grease. As seriously as Grand Dan doled out the chores, we made light of them. When we dusted, we sang. If we were told to wax and polish floors, we wrapped thick rags around our slippers and shuffled across hardwood, bumping hips every time we made a pass around the room, batting at the velour that blocked the doorways.

  At night in our bedroom, Ally sometimes read aloud from Queen of Home, which was about the proper way for a young couple to set up house. She had not yet assigned the housework duties for the villa in Boca, and we were determined that neither of us would be stuck with a mop and bucket in hand.

  I knew some of the dialogue by heart: “I hate housekeeping, answers the young wife.”

  Ally piped up: “Pardon me, please, but if this be the case, you have no right to marry at all.”

  This made us laugh out loud, even though we were beginning to think that perhaps we did want the right to “marry at all.” Not then, but someday.

  Grand Dan did not help out at the store, but she kept up the garden in the yard. When we came home after school in late spring and early summer, she was often outside, planting or watering or tending to the wagon-wheel garden that encircled her rose bushes. In no time at all she had us both weeding, one of our after-school chores. The garden was important to all of us. We were living through the Depression; there were few extras on the table, despite our parents doing everything possible to keep the store running and money coming in.

  Ally and I tried our own hand at being providers, the summer after our mother began to work in town. In early June, unexpected company dropped in late one Sunday afternoon and had to be invited for supper. There was no extra vegetable to serve with the meat and potatoes that we always had. Butterbeans weren’t ready; lettuce had not come up. From the kitchen window, I watched Grand Dan go outside and kneel between rows, where she began to tug up her tiny baby carrots. While she was destroying her own garden, I thought of her reciting: “A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted.” I was certain I had seen her wipe her eyes. A half-hour later, when the carrots were served—small and stubby as knuckle joints—I refused to eat a single one.

  Because of seeing Grand Dan weep, I devised a plan later in the summer and persuaded Ally to join me. Peas were grown on the farm past Mott’s and, at harvest time, the wagons had to travel the main dirt road to get to the canning factory. We stood in the veranda until we saw a team of horses approach, the wagon behind stacked with peas as high as a load of hay. We ran out to the road and waved up to the driver and a second man who sat on the wagon seat beside him. A hot dry wind was blowing, and there was a good deal of noise from the rattle of the wheels. We began to chase the wagon, and ran alongside, ducking down, grabbing at vines, dropping them as we ran. We were hot from running, and laughing from the sheer craziness of stealing. The men could see us perfectly well, and one of them craned his head back and shouted down at us from the wagon, but we couldn’t hear because of the noise. Ally was doubled over. I looked at her hands full of pea vines, her wrists drooping, and I thought of the wrist bone in Gray’s that was likened to a pea and I shouted “Pisiform!” and Ally understood and shouted back.

  “Pisiform!” we yelled at the top of our lungs. “Pisiform! Pisiform!”

  We hollered into the hot wind and aimed our indecent bone at the wagon, and the men looked back and smiled and waved. We stopped running and laughed and laughed and tried to catch our breath and retraced our steps along the road to pick up the vines we’d dropped. Each of us had a huge armload and we carried the tangled mess around to the back of the shed, where we separated pods and chucked peas into a bucket, eating while we worked. We were not prepared for Grand Dan’s reaction when we carried the peas triumphantly to the house. “They fall off the wagon anyway—sometimes,” we said, in our own defence. “And the men didn’t mind—they just laughed at us.” We did not mention hurling our indecent bone.

  But that was not good enough. Our punishment was to sit outside on the stoop and read the Ten Commandments aloud. Even so, the five of us dined that night on every stolen pea. And good-for-nothings that we were, in the bottom of the serving bowl, we left an extravagant puddle of melted butter.

  EIGHTEEN

  Yes, we stole those peas. I would steal water now if it were reachable. I own a kitchen sink, a tap, a shower, a tub, a garden hose hooked up in the backyard. And what do I have to show for myself? Cracked lips and damp clothes. Store-bought clothes that are thick enough, but my veins and my bones are chilled through and through.

  The clothes Ally and I wore were homemade, though we longed for store-bought. Phil and Grand Dan were creative about piecing together leftover bolt-ends from the store, plaids and solid colours, odds and ends of velvet with wool, rickrack trim on cottons. Even so, I have a distinct memory of being held together precariously. During high school years, a cache of safety pins was kept on the kitchen windowsill so that Ally and I could solve last-minute problems of missing buttons and sagging hems on the way out the door. Later, during the war years, when we had no nylon stockings, we drew pencilled lines down the backs of our bare legs, practising on each other. We were beginning to be on the lookout for love.

  We swapped jewellery, exchanged blouses and sweaters, added and removed collars and belts, painted our toenails and left a half-moon. Despite being younger, I was two inches taller than Ally, which meant that she could not wear my skirts. At thirteen, I was five-seven and growing, and acutely aware of the fact that I had inherited Grand Dan’s genes for long bones—she was five-ten, long and spindly. I opened Gray’s to recheck the femur, which stretched the length of a page, top to bottom, and resembled a club that could be swung through air. When I did stop growing, I was a half-inch shorter than Grand Dan. I was comfortable with my height because of Grand Dan’s example, but felt unusually tall when someone short stood beside me. Whenever this happened, I inched off sideways, like a crab. I did the same at the community dances, held at the church hall.

  I’d been attending the dances from the time I was six years old, when we first moved to the country. The hall was adjacent to the Anglican church, and children attended along with everyone else. At the first sound of the fiddle, a man whom you wouldn’t expect to have a hope of staying in step would put a hand to his partner’s waist and, with a straight-armed push, steer her around the room as if she had no more substance than a Bernhardt scarf. That was how light you felt, if you were the woman. If you were on the sidelines, what you saw was a roomful of men, faces earnest and intent, going about the business of pushing their women around the floor as if they were featherweights. You’d think foot patterns had been laid over the wooden floor, because everyone danced exactly the same way: seventy-year-olds, high school students, children, young couples, widows, widowers. After the start of the war, we knew that soldiers and sailors and their girls in the towns and cities were learning the new dances. But country dances stayed the same and that is a fact. Every person in the County knew the two-step, knew how to square dance and how to face off for a Virginia reel. Even our father danced—in the years before he became ill—and that was something, Phil’s short body being pushed around by the unsmiling Conrad Holmes, easily spotted on the dance floor because of his black patch, and rumoured to be a German spy because of his first name, even though the Conrad part did not start with a K.

  The only person who did not dance was Grand Dan, although she attended and sat on a hard-backed chair at the side of the church hall. “There’s a time to dance, and a time to mourn,” she told me, with a nod that meant she was quoting from the Bible. Publicly, she neither danced nor mourned. It was simply understood that no man dared to stand before her and proffer his arm. Grand Dan’s legs had been bandaged since she’d received the War Office telegram—from the First War, not the Second—and her feet no longer danced.

  She loved music,
however, and listened to dance music on our big radio. We all did, especially on Saturday nights when we sat in the parlour listening to Guy Lombardo and his band, broadcast from the Roosevelt Hotel, hundreds of miles away in New York. Ally and I sprawled on the rug; Father stretched out on the sofa; Grand Dan and Phil sat in armchairs. No one said much, but there was foot tapping and occasional shoulder swaying. We glanced up at one another every now and then. Most of the time our eyes were focused on some vague spot on the rug. When I think back to this—could it have been a single moment?—I think of peace, even happiness. The picture stills; it is complete. This was the family I’d been graced with. This was where I belonged.

  James Cagney, too, danced during the war years. He danced up the walls at both ends of the stage in Yankee Doodle Dandy. When the movie came out in the early forties, I saw it twice, at the Belle—the same theatre Case now owns. I was with Ally the first time. The second time, I returned alone for a matinee, just for the pleasure of sitting by myself. I wanted the moment before the velvet curtains split at centre stage; I wanted the pause before the lights went down. I wanted to watch the talented Mr. Cagney dance across the stage. No one thought of him as a dancer, but I did then and I still do now. So much energy in one small body. Such an unlikely looking man for being so light on his feet. I didn’t care so much about the Yankee Doodle story or what happened next, though the story was good enough. Even the sounds of the knitters behind me, their needles clacketing in the dark as they knitted socks for the boys overseas, could not ruin my enjoyment. I was there to see Cagney dance.

  Lives had been changing since the beginning of the war, and changing quickly, everywhere we looked. Older girls Ally and I had known from school were leaving for the city to take up factory jobs, and were allowed to wear trousers to work. Older boys were enlisting. This included Wade Trick, whom Ally swore she was going to marry at the end of the war. She had known him since high school, and he’d been one of the first to sign up. After he left for overseas, he wrote to Ally every week, and told her he was learning a trade in the army. He would soon be a qualified electrician and said that when he got home it would be easy to find a job. She immediately wrote back and assigned him electrical duties in Boca, putting him in charge of dealing with power outages after hurricanes. She still had not assigned the housework duties, but she wasn’t worried. She said she’d find someone eventually.

  Wash floor after dark

  Bring sorrow to your heart

  Who said that?

  Grand Dan. I heard her voice just now. Uncle Fred believed in spirits, and so can I.

  Grand Dan truly might have believed that everything turns to sorrow. She had lost her husband to one war and then watched Phil—and all of us—lose Mr. Holmes at the end of the next. The women were queens reigning over the household, but men headed the family; there was no disputing that. Many people believed that households headed by women were not meant to last.

  The store did not recover from the Depression and business did not improve after the war began. Because of his age and his blind eye, Mr. Holmes had not been able to join up. He was sensitive about his German-sounding name, and took extra measures to proclaim his loyalty to the citizens of Wilna Creek. Not that anyone doubted his patriotism; he frequently donated a portion of the store’s meagre earnings to war causes. In the main display window at the front of the store, he went so far as to put up a large government poster that portrayed a huge white elephant. A tiny man and woman at the bottom of the poster peered up at a For Sale sign tacked to the elephant’s side. The elephant had a placid but jolly expression on its face and the caption read: IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, DON’T BUY IT. People on the sidewalk frequently stopped to look up at the elephant, and from inside the store I saw them nod their heads as they moved on and did not stop to shop.

  To display such advice was not sound business practice, and I overheard Grand Dan say to our mother one morning, “He’s shot himself in the foot, Philomena. The man has shot himself in the foot.”

  Grand Dan telephoned Mott and asked him to drive her to town. She walked along the sidewalk to my father’s store, stood for a meaningful five minutes outside the window, and stared in around the edge of the giant elephant, to prove her point. She did not enter the store, but neither did Mr. Holmes remove the poster. Citizens of Canada had been urged to be mindful of extravagance, to buy bonds, to save waste paper, not to gossip, to still our tongues. Mr. Holmes wanted to prove that he was as loyal as the men who marched up the street in uniform with bands playing behind them.

  He brought home printed instructions to save waste bones, because bones could be made into glue for aircraft. To please him, we promptly began to drop chicken bones and ribs and thighs into a pail with a lid. The pail had to be kept outside the door because of the stench, and animals came round at night. Phil fainted one day when the lid was left off. Despite my anatomical interest, we stopped saving bones because we had been given no advice about where to send them once we’d amassed a collection. Ally and I buried them at the edge of the refuse pit, and shouted as we dug, “Pit and all do stinketh!”

  One afternoon, while our parents were at the store, Aunt and Uncle Fred arrived unexpectedly. They planned to stay overnight and had left the boys at home, with the eldest in charge. When Uncle Fred came into the house, he produced a bottle of dark rum, which he called “Nelson’s Blood,” from his Gladstone bag.

  “Come here, Girl,” he said. “And bring some glasses to the table.” Ally and I brought glasses, but every one of them was chipped. He picked one up, ran his finger around the rim and set it down. He picked up another and did the same.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said. “We’re going shopping. Get in the car, Girl.”

  Ally and I both climbed in, happy to have a drive to town. He took us to the grocery store, where he walked up and down the pickle aisle and put eight jars of mustard into the cart. Each jar was shaped like a drinking glass; each was decorated with diamonds, hearts, spades and clubs, and had thin red and black lines painted around the rims. Uncle Fred paid for the mustard, drove us home and asked for a mixing bowl. He pried off the lids, emptied the eight jars of mustard into the bowl, took the glasses to the sink, rinsed them out and shelved all but one in the kitchen cupboard. “There,” he said, pleased with his own ingenuity. “Now you have a set of glasses and a full bowl of mustard, too.” He poured himself a drink, had a minor fight with Aunt Fred about the mustard jars—“Why didn’t you just go out and buy a set of glasses!”—and waited for my father to come home from work.

  When Mr. Holmes arrived, he sat at the kitchen table with Uncle Fred and drank a glass of Nelson’s Blood.

  “Here’s to the spirits inside us, the ones that warm our bellies,” said Uncle Fred, and they clinked mustard glasses. There was an air of precarious jollity in the room.

  I believe Father liked the rum, though he sat stiffly, like a soul conflicted. Even so, he seemed to enjoy the story Aunt and Uncle Fred had to tell. On the way to our house, a great fight had taken place on the King’s Highway. They knew every pee stop on that highway, between our town and theirs. They knew where the washrooms were clean and where they were filthy, where to find homemade raisin pie and where the spice cake was stale. Uncle Fred swore that the best liver-and-bacon breakfast was served in a service-station diner. Aunt Fred said there wasn’t a handle on a toilet she couldn’t flush with her shoe.

  The fight took place at a pancake house, miles from nowhere. They quarrelled; Aunt Fred shouted, stood up, dumped a bowl of syrup over my uncle’s head and walked out. She got into the car and locked the door, but when she started the engine, she remembered that she had left her glasses in the restaurant and couldn’t drive without them. Inside, Uncle Fred was wiping syrup off his skull. The waitress brought a damp cloth so he could clean himself up. He left his pancakes, paid for the uneaten meals, scooped up my aunt’s abandoned glasses and stomped outside. He circled the car, threatening, until Aunt Fred rolled her window down an i
nch and then unlocked the doors. At the same moment, she spied a drop of golden syrup that had landed inside one of his huge ears. She hooted with laughter, which made him angry all over again. By the time he was sitting behind the wheel and she had slid over onto the passenger side, the two of them were exhausted. They locked the car and went inside once more, this time to share a pot of tea. They had lost their appetites, and the tea calmed them down. Just as they pulled onto the highway again, the wings of a great blue heron unfolded from the landscape at the side of the road. Uncle Fred was certain that this was a positive sign.

  They took turns recounting these things until I asked, “What was the argument about?”

  There was silence. Neither could remember. “It must have been something small,” Aunt Fred said. She lowered her brows and looked Uncle Fred in the eye, which meant that he wasn’t to tell.

  “I guess it wasn’t important,” Uncle Fred said, while we waited for an answer.

  But Aunt Fred told me later, out of earshot of my uncle, that she did remember the sensation of risk that had rolled through her like a wave when she held the syrup bowl in her hand and knew what she was about to do. I tried to imagine Phil dumping syrup over the skull of Mr. Holmes, but the image would not be conjured.

  After we’d all had our supper, we moved to the parlour so that we could listen to Boston Blackie, Uncle Fred’s favourite radio program. He refused to miss an episode, whether he was home or a visitor in someone else’s house. He and Aunt Fred sat quietly, not a hint of old quarrel in the air.