Uprooted - a Canadian War Story

  When she spoke like that I had to obey her. I couldn’t not. I started back. The ground felt soft – I sensed the bottomless bog under me. I’d never felt so afraid. I stopped dead. The moss-cushion rocked. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t turn to look at Mummy and Hank.

  I stared at the track where Cameron had disappeared. I strained my ears. How far was it back to the Kaldors’ store? How fast could Cameron run? How long would it take? I heard Laddie barking and barking behind me. Barking his danger signal. Its note seemed to go higher and higher.

  I turned to look. Mummy had reached the place where Cameron had been standing on the moss. Hank had almost sunk to his armpits. His face was as grey as the dried grass. He had his arms stretched towards us. Could he sink all the way, with his arms stretched out like that?

  Mummy lay down flat on the moss and reached out both hands. Hank gripped them with both his. Laddie stopped barking. He was running and jumping around the boggy hole. Every now and then he seemed to try to stretch his neck out to grab Hank. Once he reached too far and his front paws went into the mud, and he yelped and got himself back on dry ground.

  Hank was still sinking. I’ve never seen such a look of terror on a man’s face, even in the scariest movie. I was looking at someone I knew, who thought he was going to die.

  What if he pulls Mummy in with him?

  And then I heard it – the grumbling roar of Mr Kaldor’s truck. Mummy looked over her shoulder. Hank’s head came up. Laddie left the bog and raced over the mosses to meet the truck as it came round the bend. Cameron jumped out of the passenger seat. He was holding the end of a rope. He ran past me and seemed to bounce on the moss-mounds till he reached Hank. How lucky was it that Hank still had his hands free and could wrap the rope around himself under his arms and tie it!

  Mummy crawled backwards. Mr Kaldor was frantically fastening the other end of the rope to the front bumper of the truck. He jumped back behind the wheel like a young man and I heard the gear lever grind. The truck moved slowly backwards. I watched the rope go taut with a sort of twang. And slowly, slowly, it began to pull Hank out.

  The muskeg didn’t want to let him go. It was like something hanging on to his body, gripping it, trying to suck it down. I couldn’t look, I was so sure the rope would break! I did pray then.

  “St Barnabas, I don’t hate him, save him I pray, even if he kisses Mummy another day!” It was a desperate prayer, the best I could think of.

  With a weird squelchy burping noise, the muskeg let Hank go and he was dragged out on to solid ground. He lay there for a moment, his face in the moss. Then he slowly and shakily stood up. Below his chest he was a mud-man.

  “Didn’t I tell you look out for de muskeg?” Mr Kaldor scolded out of the truck window.

  He gave us a lift home in the back of his truck. None of us spoke. Hank sat there with the mud drying on him and stared at Mummy without seeming to see her. I wanted to tell Cameron how wonderful I thought he was but I couldn’t break the silence. It was too solemn. That was the closest I’d ever come to death. Even Laddie seemed subdued. He lay there with his nose across Hank’s feet.

  When we got back to our cabin Mummy said, “Hank, the best thing for you would be to go into the lake, and wash off the mud.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Leeches can’t seem so bad after what I’ve been through.”

  So he went for a swim in all his clothes. He stayed close to the jetty.

  Mummy made supper and we ate it silently. Next door someone was playing something slow and sad … Hank said, “That’s real pretty. Guess when you’ve nearly drowned in mud you can get a taste for the better stuff. Kinda brings you nearer to –” He pointed up towards heaven.

  That was his last day. Next morning he packed up his stuff and kissed us all, even Cameron. The one he gave Mummy wasn’t a kissy-kiss. But it was loving just the same. Then he rode away on his motorbike. I realised I’d never had a ride on it, and I’d wanted one. But I had a feeling of relief sharp as pain, that he’d gone.

  When we got back to Saskatoon at the end of the summer, we found a pile of letters. Mrs Lynch, our landlady, hadn’t bothered to send them on, so they’d just piled up. We often got them in batches like that, when a ship had come.

  We couldn’t open them at once – there was a fuss about Laddie to deal with first; Mrs Lynch objected to having a dog in the house.

  We stood about in the downstairs hall with Laddie, who was panting with thirst, the letters clutched in Mummy’s hand, while Mr Lynch argued with his wife. We’d hardly had anything to do with him till now, because he worked nights and slept all day. It took time, but eventually he won the row and Laddie was allowed inside. Then, finally, we went up to our flat, and, before unpacking or anything, we settled down at the kitchen table to read our mail from home.

  I had a letter from Daddy! It was mostly about how he’d started ‘going to the dogs’. This meant greyhound racing. He said he went with a bunch of men friends and that it was gambling. I didn’t like the sound of that, but then he said, Last night I won three-and-fourpence! This silly amount was obviously to make me laugh, and it did.

  He also told me our house was rented, and that the people had dug our lawn up to plant vegetables. Dig for victory! Daddy wrote. Auntie won’t dig up her prize hydrangeas but she scrounges stuff from my tenants. She cooks me a lot of vegetable stews. I wish you could still buy whale-meat off the ration; I wouldn’t grumble now. I’m so sick of potatoes and carrots. That was his only bit of a moan about the war.

  Then he asked about school and how we’d spent the summer and sent love, and at the end, he wrote something odd.

  Take good care of Cameron. He’ll need lots of love just now.

  Just as I read these words, Cameron, who was reading a letter from Auntie Millie, suddenly jumped up from the table and ran out of the room. We heard his bedroom door slam. I stood up to go after him, but Mummy shook her head. She still sat there even after we could hear noises from beyond his door.

  “He’s crying! What’s happened?”

  Mummy was frowning and biting her lip. She reached for a cigarette. There was a long silence. Laddie went out and we heard him scratching at Cameron’s door.

  At last Mummy said, “Auntie Millie and Uncle Jack are getting divorced.”

  Divorced? Auntie Millie and Uncle Jack had been part of my life always.

  “But why?”

  “I can’t tell you. It’s private between them.”

  “But did they tell Cameron why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s been coming a long time. I suppose Millie just—” She stopped.

  “Just what?”

  But she wouldn’t say any more.

  I could see that there was a letter from Grampy, a long letter. I wasn’t shown it. When the days went by and Cameron stopped being Cameron and became a person shut behind a wall, not talking, not playing, not looking at anyone, hardly eating, I wanted so badly to read Grampy’s letter that I nearly stole it from Mummy’s handbag where she kept it. But I didn’t.

  I asked Cameron. I wanted him to talk to me. I wanted to give him love and sympathy. But he wouldn’t let me in. He told me to leave him alone. I could hear in his voice that any mention of his parents made him want to cry so I stopped. It was like living with a black cloud of unhappiness.

  We were back at school. My life was normal. I was in Grade Eight now, at Victoria School. I served on the culture committee. I was in the drama club, doing a play called Child Wonder. (I was going to play the mother and was worrying how I could be made to look old enough.) I wriggled out of PE as often as I could.

  Poppy and I were still friends and I had a bit of a new gang now. We had parties at her place. Before we came, her mother put polish on the parquet floors and then made us take off our shoes and shine it by dancing in our socks. We jitterbugged to records. I tried not to think of Hank teaching me. I tried not to think of Hank at all, and as he didn’t phone any more that got easier.

 
“Why doesn’t he phone?” I asked Mummy, and she just shrugged.

  “They keep him busy, I guess,” she said.

  But I thought, maybe he’d realised he loved Mummy and it couldn’t work except in some bad way.

  I kept thinking of one of O’F’s Irish jokes, about two IRA men who had orders to shoot someone from a rooftop. They waited there two days and nights and on the third day one of them said, “Sure and I hope nothin’s happened to the poor fella!” I felt that about Hank. I had wanted him to disappear and he had, but now I wondered if anything had happened to him.

  I went back to my Saturday job at Pinder’s Drug Store and with the money I phoned Willie every few days, from a phone box so I could be private. I told her everything. She’d had a happy summer at a posh country club with the Blundells, but no adventures, and she was agog (our new favourite word) about ours. She said she’d give anything to have a dog like Laddie, but there was no chance in the Blundells’ beautiful home.

  Laddie was a special dog. He really was. He absolutely knew Cameron was miserable. He slept on his bed, and Mummy didn’t say a thing, even though Mrs Lynch had said, “All right, then, but not on the beds!” Mummy just spread an old rug on top of the bedclothes and shook it out over the balcony every morning.

  We went for walks on the riverbank. Cameron didn’t come, but he sometimes took Laddie for an extra walk by himself. One night, long after I’d gone to bed, I woke up to hear Cameron and Mummy talking. He must have got up and gone into the living room where she was writing.

  “… Don’t tell Lind,” he was saying.

  “I’m afraid I already have.”

  “But not why?”

  “Of course not, Cam. I wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “They won’t know from me.” Then she said, “Is the music helping at all?”

  “A bit,” he said.

  Cameron, whatever else, never, ever missed his piano lesson. And when I asked him, he told me that the Classics-lovers Club had six members now. It seemed to be all that mattered to him. I asked if I could join, but he said, sorry, it was only for boys.

  And then one awful day I came home late after a rehearsal of Child Wonder and met Mummy coming along Eleventh Street to meet me. She looked as if a giant leech had sucked all her blood.

  “Cameron’s run away,” she said.

  It felt as though my heart stopped. But not from surprise.

  He’d left a note.

  Dear Auntie Alex, I’m very sorry but I can’t stand it. I have to try to get home. Please don’t worry. I’ll be fine. I’m sure I can get on a ship. I’m sorry I’ve been a trouble to you. Love Cameron. PS Did Mum tell you Bubbles is ill?

  “Of course Bubbles would have been the last straw. Poor, poor Cameron! Oh, but he’s crazy! He’s so clever, he’s so clever, and yet he thinks he can do a thing like this! Oh God, oh God, what am I going to tell Millie?”

  I was so upset – and so furious with Cameron – I could hardly choke out words.

  “Nothing,” I said. “How can you? By the time you could write to her it’ll all be over, he’ll be back. Besides, it’s her fault. How could she tell him about Bubbles too? And if she and Uncle Jack hadn’t decided to get divorced he wouldn’t have dreamt of doing this!”

  “That’s not true,” Mummy said, puffing on her cigarette as if she was drowning and gasping for air. “He’s never been happy here from the very beginning. He’s always had it in his head to go back. I know he has. I just didn’t think he’d be stupid enough not to realise he can’t.” And she burst into tears.

  I put my arms around her. I didn’t know what to say.

  Mummy needed a grown-up to help her decide what to do, and I knew this had to be O’F.

  I’d got a bit of a shock when we first went to visit him after the lake. He looked older somehow. And frailer. But he was still himself, kind and sweet as ever, sitting in his little flat puffing his pipe, petting Laddie, and telling us he’d missed us.

  Now when Mummy and I rushed round to consult him he put the pipe down and roved about the sitting room.

  “Where would he go?” he asked. “Where would Matt have gone? This is Matt all over again!”

  “Who’s Matt?” we asked.

  “Matt was my baby brother. The youngest in our family – fifteen years younger than me. He ran away to sea when he was fifteen. Not the navy, the merchant navy. They take them very young. But not as young as Cameron! Oh, poor boy. He must have been desperate. His need to go home knocked all the sense right out of his head.”

  “What am I to do? We must find him!”

  “Well. He can’t get far without money. Has he any money?”

  “No. He spends every penny he gets on his piano lessons.”

  “Then he’ll have to hitchhike.”

  Mummy stared at him in horror.

  “Now, Alex, my dear, don’t get too upset. Everyone hitchhikes in Canada, and there’s every hope that some sensible driver will find out what he’s up to and will march him into the nearest police station. If you take my advice you’ll stay close to the telephone.”

  I slept that night. But Mummy clearly didn’t; next morning she looked a wreck. No make-up and she’d been smoking and pacing the floor all night.

  “I thought he might just change his mind and come home sensibly, but he hasn’t. I’ve got to report him missing.”

  After she rang the police and they came round and interviewed us, we just had to wait. And waiting was awful. Nothing that had happened to us so far since we arrived in Canada was as bad as this.

  I couldn’t even tell Willie. It seemed disloyal. So I didn’t ring her. So then she rang me and I had to pretend nothing was wrong.

  But she guessed.

  “What’s eating you? You sound funny,” she said.

  “Cameron’s gone and it’s my fault!” I burst out.

  To Willie and Willie alone I poured out my guilt.

  “I had this quarrel with him when we were at the lake! He said he wanted to go home and I said ‘Go on then!’ I was as good as egging him on to go!”

  “But it’s lover boy’s fault too. That great dumbo should never have let the idea into his head, even as a joke, that he could get on a ship.”

  “I know. But now he’s gone and we don’t know where he is and we don’t know what to do, and I miss him, Willie, I miss him so much!”

  I started crying. Willie let me cry for a bit and then she said, “Phone Dumbo.”

  “What? No!”

  “Yes, you should. He’s in the navy. And he’s a man. And he loves your mum and probably you two too. And you’re right, it’s partly his fault. Tell him.”

  “I don’t know how to phone him!”

  “Your mum has his number written down somewhere.”

  This idea, of phoning Hank, that I’d never have dreamt of doing, got into my head and pushed me to do it. I should have just suggested it to Mummy but I still didn’t want her talking to him. Instead I looked up his number in Regina in her address book, and next time she went out shopping for food, I phoned him.

  It took so long for him to be called to the phone I nearly hung up. But at last – just as I was going to – I heard his voice.

  “Alex?” He sounded as if he knew already.

  “No, it’s Lindy.”

  “Lindy! What’s happened? Why are you ringing?”

  “Cameron’s run away.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “He wants to try to get back to England. He thinks he can get on a ship somehow. You put that in his head.”

  There was a long silence. Then he said, “Did he take any money?”

  “He didn’t have any.”

  “Yes he did,” Hank said. “I gave him a hundred dollars.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I thought it would be to help your mom and you. The man of the house – you know. It – it was my way of helping you without – well – embarrassing your mother. Oh, Je
sus. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry. Let me talk to Alex.”

  As soon as she got home, I confessed. I told her what Hank had said.

  “Oh, that generous idiot! We must tell the police about this. He won’t have had to hitchhike. He could have got a train straight to Montreal. Would they let him travel, three days, a boy of twelve alone? The police in Montreal must be told—”

  “Will they find him? They must find him!”

  She sat down and drew me close to her.

  “Lindy, you love him, don’t you?”

  “More than anyone, except you and Daddy.”

  “Do you think – you could send him … thoughts – to make him get in touch with us? Make him come back?”

  I shivered. Mummy had once told me she was psychic. But talk like that made me feel all spooky.

  “But I love him more than he loves me,” I said. “Wouldn’t he have to love me more, for that to work?”

  She let me go. “He does love you, he just doesn’t know how to show it,” she said. “But could you try it?”

  I tried. I sat with my head pressed between my hands so hard I trembled, and I sent come-back thoughts with all my might. I didn’t think it could do any more good than praying, but still, after that I did pray. I prayed to St Barnabas.

  Oh, St Barnabas, be my speed

  And come to me in my hour of need!

  Cameron’s gone, he’s left his room,

  Him being missing is a doom.

  He’s trying to get home to Cheltenham,

  To be in England with his mum.

  But that’s impossible and dangerous, too,

  So find him and send him back, I beg of you!

  I stopped. This was all in my head, of course. I suddenly wanted Cameron more than I had until now. I wanted to tell him my prayer and have him say, “Yes, that’s good, only that last line doesn’t scan.” Through the lump in my throat, I added, out loud:

  “If you do this one great boon,

  I’ll ask no more neither late nor soon.

  Oh, St Barnabas be my speed

  And come to me in my hour of need!”

  Then I cried my eyes out. How could he do this to us? How could he?