Sunny Dreams (5 page)

In the morning the Sweet Caps were still on the steps. I was glad; I very badly didn’t want Jackson to be a thief.

The men weren’t up when it was time for me to leave for work. Aunt Helen had made breakfast so she prepared a tray for them and handed it to me.

“Run this out to them, would you, Violet? Maybe it’ll help them get a move on.” She fussed with the tea towel that covered the biscuits. “It’s high time they were up and around.”

My dad seized the tray from my hands without a word and took it out to the backyard. I followed him and set off down the lane.

“Breakfast is ready, men,” he announced in an unfamiliar voice.

“Thanks, Mr. Palmer.” It was Jackson who replied. He sounded wide awake. Maybe he was waiting around for Benny to wake up, not wanting to show him up.

I did a little hop, skip, and jump as I made my way to St. Mary’s Road to catch a streetcar downtown.

Mary fussed all day long about her weekend with Perry.

“He doesn’t want kids,” she said. “I had no inkling of this before Friday night.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“I want kids more than I want Perry.” She rubbed the green stain on her ring finger.

It was important for me not to show my pleasure. “I’m so sorry, Mary,” I said. “But I know someone spectacular will come along who’ll want the same things that you do.”

“All I’ve ever wanted is kids.”

“They can cause a lot of heartache, you know,” I said. I had told Mary about Sunny and all that had happened.

“I won’t lose my babies,” she said and then felt bad for the rest of the day. She couldn’t apologize enough and I let her keep trying till the five o’clock scramble for the door.

When I got home from work I sat in the shade of the poplar and watched them build. For most of the day our next door neighbours’ maple tree shaded the area where they worked.

Benny Boat really seemed to know what he was doing and he ordered the others around. But he never stopped calling my father “sir,” which was good. No one wanted my dad to feel as though he had lost control of anything.

Jackson Shirt didn’t have to work very hard to win my heart. He almost had it the first time I saw him. Sometimes after hammering a nail in successfully, he glanced over at me and smiled. I smiled back. When my dad caught this he tried to find something else for me to do.

“Violet, why don’t you go inside and see if Helen needs a hand with supper?”

We ate with the men that evening at the picnic table in the backyard. It was cooler there in the shade of the trees than it was in the house. Mr. Larkin couldn’t stay.

“Are you sure, Hedley?” Helen said. “We’d love to have you.”

“And I’d love to stay.” He smiled. “But Enid would skin me alive if she roasted a chicken and I wasn’t there to eat it.”

The Larkins had no children, so it was up to him alone to enjoy her meals.

My dad cleaned himself up for supper. Both the visiting men washed their hands and faces, but they were getting pretty stinky by this time.

It occurred to me that they must be wondering where my dad’s wife was, my mother. But I didn’t know how to fit it into the conversation so I thought I’d leave it to my dad or Helen. I didn’t think it was any of their business where Sunny was. They had no reason to suspect that she existed, but they must have been curious about my mother.

“My mother is dead,” I blurted out. So much for leaving it to one of the others. “She died almost eleven years ago.”

“Violet,” said my dad and covered my hand with his.

“Well, I thought they might be wondering where she was. I didn’t want them thinking she ran away on us or anything.” They didn’t have to know how she died.

Jackson flushed a deep red all the way down into his open-necked shirt.

And Benoit said, “Sorry. So sorry. I am…you miss her.”

Jackson nodded as though to say, “Me too.” And gradually his colour returned to normal.

I thought he must have found my bluntness about my mother’s death embarrassing. A lot of people I knew found talk of death to be difficult.

We piled our plates high with bubble and squeak.

I loved it; it was one of my favourite suppers, but I was afraid that one or both of our men wouldn’t like cabbage. It seemed to me a risky food to serve to guests. I’d heard of people who hated cabbage; for instance, Mary’s horrible Perry hated it. It reminded him of bohunks, he’d said. Watching the way both men shovelled it in, I saw I had nothing to worry about.

Besides, as Helen had said to me in the kitchen when I voiced my concerns, “They’re not guests; they’re hired hands. They’ll eat what’s put in front of them.”

“If you fellows would like to have baths, please go ahead,” she said now to shift the talk away from my mother’s death.

To use the bathroom they needed to go upstairs to the second storey of the house where our bedrooms were. That seemed almost unbearably familiar to me and I wondered how my dad could stand it.

“You should find everything you need in the bathroom,” she went on.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the men said in unison and then laughed.

My dad squirmed, but thank goodness he held his tongue.

“We both need a good wash,” Benoit said, a little discomfited, I guess, knowing we were conscious of the pungent odour fixed to them both like a second skin.

Later that evening I was in my bedroom reading an old issue of
McCall’s
. It contained an article about unladylike behaviour that had caught my eye.

Jackson was the first to have a bath. I heard him running a tub and scrupulously cleaning it afterwards. I loved that he did that. If he hadn’t, I would have, just to see what sort of dirt he left behind.

“The Dutch Cleanser is almost empty, ma’am.” I heard him say this to Aunt Helen when he went downstairs.

“Thank you, dear,” she said. “I’ll pick some up tomorrow. I have some other shopping to do.”

We had a Dutch Cleanser backup. I knew we did. Aunt Helen wasn’t the type of housekeeper who ran out of things that were possible to get. She was just being kind, making Jackson feel as though he was being helpful. I wanted to ruin it by shouting out, “We’ve got a backup, you morons!” But I didn’t, of course.

I wished I could call him “dear” like Aunt Helen did. It was easy for her: she was in her forties.

“Is there anything either of you boys would like?” she asked. “My meals aren’t very fancy, I know.”

So much for her “they’ll eat what I put in front of them” statement, I thought. And when did her “men” turn into “boys”?

“Your meals are plenty fancy for us, ma’am,” Jackson said. “You’re a wonderful cook. Good healthy meals.”

I heard Helen giggle and I imagined an accompanying blush. A sick slop water feeling flipped my insides and took me by surprise. I hustled down the stairs to insinuate my skinny presence into the kitchen where they were talking.

Jackson’s long hair was wet and combed straight back from his face. Always after his baths — he quickly got into the habit of taking one every evening — his hair started out that way and then softened and curled around his handsome face.

Benoit wasn’t so keen on baths. He thought Jackson overdid it. My dad thought so too.

We settled into a kind of routine. The men worked all day on the garage. Mr. Larkin came by most days and helped a little, but more often than not he and Dad would sit under the poplar, drinking orange Kik and chatting about Mackenzie King or the old age pension or the “Fred Allen Show” that they had both listened to on the radio on Sunday night. And Benoit and Jackson sawed and hammered away.

I went to work and hurried home so that I could help Helen with supper and hang around the men as much as I could without upsetting my dad. Everybody ate well and there was a certain peace around the place with small pockets of restlessness and worry rearing up from time to time: the restlessness from me and the worry from my dad.

“What’s a boy like Jackson doing on the road?” he asked Helen one evening. They were sitting on the verandah and didn’t know I was listening through an open window.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Helen said.

“He has as much as admitted that he comes from a family that’s well-to-do,” my dad went on. “They live in the Westmount area of Montreal, for heaven’s sake. Why would he want to throw his lot in with all the desperate men on the road looking for work when he doesn’t have to?”

“Maybe he just wants to get a taste of the country at large, gain experience,” Helen said, “see how the other half lives.”

“But we aren’t really the other half, are we? We’re probably not all that different from his own family, class-wise, I mean.”

“Well, his exploits aren’t likely to end with us, are they, Will? The boys talk about heading out to hoe sugar beets after the garage is finished. That’s darned hard work. Do you think that would be a difficult enough job to suit your needs for Jackson?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Helen.”

“You’re the one being ridiculous, Will. If you want explanations from the boy, for goodness’ sake, ask him. I seriously doubt there’s anything sinister about his motivations. But I certainly don’t have any answers for you.”

“Why would anyone choose to ride the rails if he didn’t have to?” Will went on. “I just don’t get it.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to get,” said Helen.

He let it go for the time being, didn’t mention it again for a while, but I’m sure it was stewing around inside his head.

Helen and the two visiting men-boys and Mr. Larkin moved about in the heavy air like the inhabitants of a watercolour. They felt the heat, certainly, but seemed easy with it and appeared oblivious to the idea that anything could threaten this time of safety and wellness and work. It wasn’t an especially pretty watercolour, but endlessly interesting, to me, anyway. I’d for sure have hung it on a wall.

My aunt was glad of the extra company around the place. She grumbled good-naturedly to my dad about the added work, but she didn’t mean it. She was blooming. My dad and I weren’t enough for her after her nursing adventures. Before the Queen Charlottes she had been back at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal for a year upgrading her skills. That’s where she had taken her training. It gave her something else to talk to “the boys” about. I even heard her fumbling about in French with Benny one time.

Both men were bilingual. French was Benny’s first language and he struggled some with English. English was Jackson’s first language but I didn’t know if he spoke French with an English accent. It didn’t sound to me like he did. I asked Benny and he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.

I couldn’t decide in those first days if Benny was dim-witted or really smart. He seemed to vacillate between the two. I came to realize that the apparent dullness was more like a trance that he slipped into where he wouldn’t or couldn’t acknowledge the world around him.

At night I would hear the two of them murmuring together from inside the tent, sometimes into the wee hours. I couldn’t help but wonder what they found to talk about for so long and so seriously.

Benny knew an awful lot about many things, like building, for one, and geography, for another. When he wasn’t in a trance he could be very talkative. On more than one occasion I heard him and Aunt Helen talking about the ocean life off the Queen Charlotte Islands.

And he went off on tangents that sometimes sucked me right in. He told me that he believed that all of time — past, present, and future — existed at once, together. The linear passage of time was an illusion, he said. And if you believed with all your might and trained hard you could move through holes in the atmosphere into the future and into the past. It was a matter of concentration, he said, and being able to identify and connect with a portal, an entryway.

In other words, he believed in time travel. He hadn’t managed it yet, but he spent a lot of time sitting quietly on his own and he explained to me that during those times he was preparing himself for a trip, a sideways trip. He was convinced and he almost convinced me that it would happen someday. So that was what his trances were all about.

The past interested him more than the future, as it did me. I wanted to travel through time too. Who wouldn’t? But I couldn’t quite believe in it so I didn’t bother trying to train. I figured I’d wait and see if Benny met with any success before I went that far.

He nagged me some about it because I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I was pretty sure his idea was daft. He wanted me to sit with him but I always came up with excuses not to: my dad wants me to wash the car, Aunt Helen asked me to bake cookies, Gwen invited me over to see their new pups. It was always someone else’s fault that I couldn’t take the time to go into trances with him. That way he couldn’t talk me out of my excuses.

Gwen lived one street over on Lawndale Avenue. Her brother’s dog, Tippy, had indeed had pups, but that was over a year ago now and they had all been given away.

There weren’t all that many houses at Gwen’s end of Lawndale in 1936; it was just a dirt road that edged onto the field next to the golf course. When we were younger we’d hunted for golf balls on summer days. Then we would try and sell them back to the golfers who were generally pretty good about humouring us with some coins. It seemed like it was mostly rich people who golfed, so we didn’t feel bad about taking their money. I still felt like scouting for balls sometimes; it was fun. But we were too old now for that type of play. It was best left to the younger kids like Gwen’s brother Warren and his friends.

I could always use Gwen as an excuse to get away from Benny and his ideas. She was fully in the picture. I hadn’t told her how I felt about Jackson, though. Those feelings were too fragile to voice. It would take almost nothing to wound them. Also, he had asked me what her name was once after she had been at our house; he had noticed her. Gwen was a lot prettier than I was and I decided it was best if I kept them apart.

I wondered what Jackson’s thoughts were on time travel. He wouldn’t give me an answer when I asked.

He just said, “Benoit is really smart. I’m lucky to have hooked up with him.” Once he even said, “I think it was meant to be that Benoit and I found each other in Sudbury.”

That sounded religious to me; whether Jesuit-related or not, I didn’t know.

My best guess was that Jackson was skeptical about the time travel business, but he admired Benny and didn’t want to admit to doubting him so he went along with him on his tangents. Quietly. He had found a good travelling companion, which couldn’t have been easy, and he didn’t want to jeopardize that in any way.

Also, he didn’t want to commit either to strange beliefs or to any kind of narrow-mindedness. He was, after all, only seventeen. My age. How much more than me could he possibly know? Lots, maybe. He’d had way more experience than I’d had, that’s for sure. But I felt as though I was as smart as Jackson, just not as self-assured. It was self-assurance that gave people the appearance of being clever.

During those hot and dusty days one of my jobs when I was around was to make sure the men always had cool clean water to drink and to dip their faces into. My job at Eaton’s was really starting to interfere. I wanted to quit, but by now my dad thought it was a good thing: it got me out of Jackson’s sight for the working day. He didn’t admit to that as a reason. He said he thought the job was good for my self-esteem. I had given him my speech about self-assurance and now he was using it against me.

So it was only on certain days that I could help Aunt Helen with the midday meals. Halfway through the mornings we fed them bread and cheese and fruit.

Jackson called me “miss” in front of my dad.

“Ah. Here’s our Violet,” Dad would say when the screen door closed after me. Helen held it open till I was safely clear with the tray.

“Thanks, miss.” Jackson would wave from his precarious perch on the quickly forming roof of the garage. I wanted to sit with them while they ate, but I saw that my dad was uneasy with that so I left them to it.