Liberty Street (5 page)

The voice of a frog? What
?

It warms up that day, and the skiff of snow that fell the day before melts. The new barn kittens are now big enough to take away from the mother cat, so Frances goes to the hay shed and gets her favourite. She takes the kitten to the bare caragana hedge where she has a tree house (which is really a platform on the ground) and names it Marilyn, and she pretends that she and Marilyn have all kinds of fans wanting autographs. That night she sleeps in her parents' bed again, and she wakes up in the darkness and her father isn't there. She hears a sound coming from the living room and realizes it's her father crying. She puts a pillow over her head and wraps herself up in a blanket like a mummy. Later, she hears him come back to bed, and he unwinds her so he can get under the covers.

In the morning, they have scrambled eggs. When Frances asks what her mother is having for breakfast, her father says that she's eating Cheerios somewhere, as usual. Later that afternoon, she comes back. Frances is in the hedge again with Marilyn when she sees her mother's car come through the trees. She's about to run to the car, but then she feels
suddenly shy, and she hides in the hedge and watches as her mother stops at the house and gets out. Her father is at the barn and Frances waits for him to come, but he doesn't. Maybe he hasn't heard the car. She decides someone has to welcome her mother home, so she steps from the hedge, and as she does her mother turns toward her, still wearing her sunglasses and what must be a new blue scarf. She holds out her arms—“Franny, Franny, come here,” she's saying—and it's as if she's been gone for a month, maybe two, and Frances does run to her. Her mother is carrying the white overnight case and also a shopping bag (which Frances later finds out has new clothes in it), so Frances can't fall into her the way she wants to, and she stops herself and is shy again and doesn't know what to do, so she blurts out, “How was the drive?” the way her father might.

Her mother laughs. “How was the drive? Is that all you have to say? Not, I'm glad you're back and I'm so happy to see you?”

Frances doesn't like being laughed at. She starts to cry. Her mother puts her bags on the ground and says, “Oh, for heaven's sake, stop your wailing. I've only been gone a few days. Come here and give us a proper hug.”

Instead, Frances runs back to the caragana hedge, where she discovers that Marilyn has gone missing. She crawls around on her hands and knees in the muddy hedge until she finds her, and then she takes her back to the hay shed. The mother gives Marilyn a couple of licks on the head, but then she wanders off, which Frances thinks is mean, but she knows cats do that when the kittens get big.

When Frances finally goes to the house, her jeans are so muddy she has to take them off at the door. Her father is
watching the news and something is cooking on the stove, and it's as though her mother had never left. Frances pulls out one of the chrome chairs to sit at the table, but it tips over and makes a loud bang as it hits the floor, and her mother says, “Those darn tippy chairs.” Frances can feel the dark building inside her—a storm, a big angry tornado. She hates the chrome chairs, hates the way you always have to think about how you move them away from the table, always have to be careful. Other people's chairs don't tip over, even when you're sitting on them and not being careful, and she gives the chair a good kick, and then another, and before she knows it she's shouting about how she hates these stupid chairs and why can't her mother once and for all buy some new ones so they don't all break their necks.

Her mother stands staring at her, the stew ladle frozen in her hand.

“Hey, hey, hey,” her father says, getting up from his chair.

Her mother puts the ladle in the pot. “Okay,” she says. “You're mad.”

Frances stops kicking and says, “You can bet that Kitty Wells doesn't have chairs like these.”

“Kitty Wells?” her mother says. “What does Kitty Wells have to do with this?”

“Pick up the chair, Frances,” her father says. “There's no point taking it out on a chair. They may be stupid, but they're the only ones we have.”

Frances picks up her chair and sits on it, still in her socks and underwear because she's taken off her muddy jeans.

“Aren't you cold?” her mother asks.

“No,” Frances says. “I'm boiling.”

After that, her mother puts the meal on the table and
they all eat in silence. At bedtime, Frances wants to sleep in her parents' bed, but they make her go back to her own. Her mother reads aloud a chapter from
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
, which means it's not an ordinary night, and then she closes the book and says, “Nashville? Honestly, Frances, don't you think if I were going somewhere that far away, I'd just go back to England?” She must have seen the look on Frances's face, because she adds, “Oh, don't you dare start worrying about that. I'm home now and I'm not going anywhere. Do you understand? Tell me you do so we can all sleep tonight.”

Frances nods, but that's not good enough and her mother makes her say it out loud.

“No one is going to Nashville or back to England,” Frances says.

“Right,” says her mother. “No one is going anywhere.” And that's that. Out goes the light.

But oh, Frances would love to hear what her parents are talking about. She climbs out of bed and opens her door just a crack—just enough to hear—and there's her mother, standing in the hallway with her hands on her hips, looking right at Frances's door.

“Get back in bed right now and go to sleep,” she says, so Frances gives up.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, her mother shows her the new clothes she bought in Yellowhead—a skirt and bolero jacket (“All the rage, according to the lady in the shop”), a sweater set, and a new pair of high-heeled shoes. (“Pumps, they're called. Who knows where I'll wear them.”) She has a present for Frances: a package of underwear, seven pairs, each a different colour and each
with the day of the week embroidered near the waistband. Today is Thursday, the day Frances was born, but she puts on Monday because Monday is pink, and also Monday's child is fair of face. Thursday's child has far to go, whatever that means. Who would ever want to be born on Thursday?

After supper that evening, while her mother is having a bath and Frances is alone with her father, he tells her that Alice hadn't really been missing, that she'd just gone on a little shopping trip, and she'd meant to leave a note but had forgotten, and Frances is not to worry anymore, or talk to anyone about it, especially not about Nashville.

“Do you understand me, Frances?” he asks.

Frances nods.

“Tell me you understand,” her father says. “Out loud.”

“No one is going anywhere and I'm to forget about it and not talk.”

“You can talk,” her father says. “Just not about . . . well, you know.”

Then her mother comes out of the bathroom and sits down beside her on the wagon-wheel couch, and when Basie goes to the kitchen for a glass of water, Alice says to Frances, “Stop looking at me like that. It's not like I did something wrong, is it?”

Frances isn't sure.

When her father comes back, they watch
Country Hoedown
, which is set inside a barn. Frances wants to know if the barn is in Nashville, and her mother says no, it's a fake barn set up in a TV studio in Canada.

Maybe there is no real Nashville, Frances thinks. Maybe it's just a place on television or the radio. When the Singin' Swingin' Eight come on TV, her mother grabs her and they
do-si-do around the living room. She didn't realize her mother knew about square dancing, but it's fun.

The shopping trip is not mentioned again. It disappears just like the cowboy hats, the ones Frances has never been able to find. Too bad. They would have come in handy for the do-si-do.

F
RANCES
'
S FATHER HAS
a brother in England. His name is Vince, and there's lots of excitement when Vince says he's coming to Canada for Christmas. When they pick him up at the train station in Yellowhead, he tells Basie he sounds like a proper Canadian now and then he turns to Frances and says, “Give us a speech, luv, so I can hear what you sound like.” But she's too shy to say anything. On the way home, Uncle Vince keeps whistling his admiration of Frances's mother's blue-and-white Fairlane—“You don't see cars like this in England”—and also they learn that he is not just staying for Christmas, he's moving here. To help with the farm, he says, until he can buy his own place nearby. Frances's father says, “Well, that's just great news, Vince,” but her mother does not look entirely happy (although she looks happy enough later, when Vince unpacks and gets out a box of canned fish and pies from Marks & Spencer, and for Frances there's a rag doll that he calls a golliwog). They have steak-and-kidney pie for supper, and when it's bedtime, Uncle Vince sleeps on the top bunk in Frances's bedroom. He groans in his sleep. Frances tells her mother he sounds like a bear.

After New Year's, when Vince has been there for two weeks, Frances overhears her mother say to her father that the house isn't big enough for three adults (especially
when one of them is in his cups as much as Uncle Vince is—which means, she tells Frances when she asks, that he drinks too much coffee). Uncle Vince has his own money, so he should get looking for a place to live if he's serious about staying.

Then Uncle Vince comes in the door with a letter in a blue airmail envelope from a woman named Bertie, and he says he's asked Bertie to marry him.

Frances can tell that her mother is surprised, but she manages to hide it and says, “Well, then, you've got a reply there, I imagine. Has she said yes?”

Uncle Vince's glasses are all steamed up. He takes off his new winter coat and hangs it on a hook by the door. “She's thinking about it,” he says. He takes off his glasses and cleans them on his shirt. “Did I say her name is Bertie? You'll like her. She's more fun than monkeys in a coconut tree.”

Monkeys in a coconut tree do sound like fun to Frances, but not, apparently, to her mother. She says four adults can't possibly all live under the same roof. Frances thinks she's being rude, but Uncle Vince says, “No, no, right you are. I'll get on that. Bertie will want her own place and all.”

A week later, another letter comes from Bertie.

“Still thinking about it,” Vince reports.

The problem is that Bertie is afraid to live out in the country due to wild Red Indians, even though Vince has assured her that they've been tamed. She wants to live in a town. In fact, she will say yes to his proposal only if he promises her a place in town.

Frances's mother has an idea. She remembers something about a veterans' subdivision in Elliot. Vince is an English veteran, not a Canadian one, but maybe that won't matter.
She's heard the lots are inexpensive. Vince could work with them on the farm—God knows, they need the help—but he and Bertie could live in the veterans' subdivision.

Vince says, “Brilliant.”

He looks into the veterans' lots and learns that what Alice heard is true. Years ago, Elliot had somehow acquired a strip of land along the rail line, but it wasn't much use because it was separated from the town by the tracks, so after the war, the council had come up with the idea of honouring its young returning veterans by offering them cheap, tax-free lots on the vacant land. The town built a road, surveyed, ran the power line, and erected a light standard and a street sign that said Liberty Street. From a clerk in the town office, Vince learns that in the years since the war they hadn't sold a single lot—because the veterans were all farm boys and didn't want to live in town—but the tax-free offer is still in place. The clerk is beside herself with excitement when Vince tells her he's interested. It might be the start of something, she says, who knows, one purchase leads to another and, yes, absolutely, he can buy a lot even though he was in the British army, not a problem, it's the Commonwealth, after all, and all the boys were fighting the same enemy, weren't they.

When Vince takes Frances and her parents to look at his lot, they have to walk up Liberty Street in the snow because it hasn't been ploughed. There is a line of bush between the tracks and the lots, and the trees are bent to the ground with snow blown about by the passing trains. The lots themselves are empty. Basie says he hopes they don't flood when the snow melts.

Alice, a bit bewildered by the desolation, even though the town is just across the tracks, asks, “Which lot is yours?”

Vince says he doesn't know, and he doesn't suppose it matters—one is as good as another—but he and Basie check the paperwork so they'll be sure to put the foundation on the right lot in the spring. As they're studying the map Vince was given at the town office, a train goes by and they have to stop talking. Frances watches the blankets of snow that fly up all around the train as it passes.

“Bertie is going to love this,” her mother says under her breath.

Frances hears her and wants to know, What is it that Bertie will love?

“Oh, the fresh Canadian air,” her mother says.

Because the survey stakes are covered by snow, Basie and Vince have to guess at the location of the lot he's bought. Once they've decided, Vince wants to put stakes at the corners, even though they'll fall away when the snow melts. They cut some willow shoots with Vince's pocket knife and stand them in the snow, and by the time they're done, their feet are all frozen. Vince stands with his shoulders hunched up and his hands in his pockets looking at his lot, and announces that he's going to build his bride-to-be an English country cottage so she'll feel right at home.

“With shutters and window boxes and all,” he says. “She likes flowers. She's a hundred pounds soaking wet. She'd get lost in a big house.”