Somewhere I Belong (4 page)

“I don't see the trouble with young Percy.” Mr. White smiled at Aunt Gert. “Seems he's sweet on Miss Lanigan here, anyhow.”

Aunt Gert blushed and stared at her plate.

“Have a bit of cider, Gertie,” Uncle Jim said.

“I will not,” she replied.

Mr. Dunphy held out his tumbler. “A fella would die of thirst without you Lanigans.”

“Don't you think you've had enough, Charlie?” Aunt Gert said.

Mr. Dunphy stared straight at her. “As a matter of fact, I don't.”

Aunt Gert and Granny disappeared into the kitchen under a load of dirty dishes. They returned with the apple pie and served it. Alfred fell asleep with his face in his plate. Ma plucked him out of his chair
and carried him upstairs. Aunt Kate followed with Helen. The men
and the jug of cider retreated to the parlour for cards.

Mr. Dunphy grabbed Uncle Ed's arm and staggered across the hallway. “Tell Mrs. Giddings her pie was delicious.”

Mr. White eased out of his chair and waited for Larry. “You look like a big, strong fella. You wouldn't help an old man into the parlour, wud'ja?”

Larry obliged. At a loss for anything else to do, I followed.

Larry helped Mr. White into the same overstuffed chair Aunt Gert had retrieved him from before supper. Uncle Jim placed the jug of cider on the coffee table; the remains of a game of solitaire lay strewn over it. He moved to an armchair next to the pot-bellied stove and sat opposite Mr. White. Mr. Dunphy hobbled toward the settee and sank into it, dead centre. Uncle Ed squeezed in beside him, forcing Mr. Dunphy to yield some space. Larry and I knelt on the hand-hooked rug on the other side of the coffee table, facing Uncle Ed and Mr. Dunphy.

Mr. Dunphy poured himself another drink, sat back, and sipped it. Then he slammed his tumbler onto the table. “Have you heard this one?” He grinned at Larry and me, then lifted his hands into the air and started singing. “The farmer in the dell, we're all going to hell. Hi-ho the Derry-o, we're all going to hell.”

“Hold on, now, Charlie,” Mr. White protested. “You'll get us all in
trouble.”

“Not in front o' the boys,” Uncle Jim said. He laughed so hard, I
wondered if he was serious.

Mr. Dunphy ignored them and kept on singing.

“Cut it out, Charlie; you're loaded,” Uncle Ed said.

“You fellas have no sense o' humour,” Mr. Dunphy said. He heaved himself out of the settee and staggered through the parlour and into the kitchen. Several minutes later, Aunt Gert shrieked, and Uncle Ed
rushed from the room. He helped Mr. Dunphy on with his coat and
escorted him out the back door.

I drifted between wakefulness and sleep on the hard, lumpy mattress
most of that first night. Alfred whimpered and sucked his thumb beside me. He rolled over and hogged the covers, forcing me to fight for my share. The brick Aunt Gert had heated in the cookstove, wrapped in a tea towel, and placed at our feet soon went cold. And I shivered between the cool, damp sheets. Before long, a rooster crowed in the distance. Someone shuffled along the upstairs hallway and lit a kerosene lantern that cast light through our open bedroom doorway. Muffled sounds
drifted up from downstairs. It felt like I had just gone to bed, and
already it was morning. I buried my face in the feather pillow and tried to block out the light and the sound. The smell of kerosene seeped in as I drifted off to sleep. Soon I was back home, sitting on that bottom step, hanging onto the banister. Everything around me moved in slow motion, in black and white and grey. Everyone was there except Dad.

Ma was standing in the kitchen, staring at the broken window with a hand to her face. Her lace curtains were sheared and the curtain rod hung at an awkward angle. Her good china lay in shards across the floor amidst the shattered glass from the window and broken jars of her homemade preserves. A single unbroken teacup sat on the floor beside her. It teetered back and forth and then stopped.

There was an eerie silence in the house and in the neighbourhood around us. Grey light seeped through the broken window, bringing in the cold winter air. Ma lifted Alfred away from the broken glass. He clung to her neck and wrapped his bare feet around her waist as she held him and edged toward the window. Larry, Helen, and I stepped
around the broken shards toward the kitchen counter and peered
over Ma's shoulder.

The sky was as cloudy as it had been when we walked home from school. The house next door hugged the sidewalk, partially blocking our view. It looked unharmed as did the houses that lined the other side of the street. Our place seemed more shaken and wrecked than anything outside. In the distance, grey-black smoke mushroomed into the air.

Then we smelled the fumes of burning oil.

Ma clutched Alfred and put a hand to her face. “Mother of God.” She didn't so much say it as breathe it out.

Alfred tightened his grip on her. Helen's face drained to a deathly shade. Larry bit his lip and straightened his glasses. I shifted slightly to get a better view and stared in disbelief. The only sound I heard was the beat of my own heart as the five of us stood and stared out that window.

Thick, black smoke gathered in dark clouds above where Dad had gone to work that morning. It billowed across the sky and blackened it. Flames shot up and disappeared into the smoke.

There was a second blast. It went off like a cannon and the house shook again. We fell against the counter and clung to it. A single chair toppled over by the kitchen table. Ma grabbed the counter to steady herself. Larry gripped her elbow. Helen put a hand to her face to stifle a cry and moved closer to Ma. Smoke poured up in a second stream so that it looked like there were two huge fires in the distance. It mushroomed skyward, then floated down and into the neighbourhood like a black, ghostly fog. A siren rang out.

A kettle screamed, startling me awake. I rolled over and smelled smoke so thick I could taste it. It stung my eyes and made it hard to breath. I pulled back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed, and wondered why
nobody had sounded an alarm. Someone rushed through the front
hallway and into the parlour.

“Heavens, I forgot that damper again.” Aunt Gert.

I eased out of the bed, tucking the covers around Alfred, then picked my clothes off the floor, pulled them on over my long johns, and crept out of the room and down the stairs in my stocking feet. The familiar smell of molasses and oatmeal mingled with the sooty smell of smoke from the pot-bellied stove. Aunt Gert was standing at the front door waving smoke out with a rug. Granny was standing by the kitchen sink
waving a tea towel at an open window. Helen was shivering by the
cookstove, still dressed in her bathrobe and slippers. A book Larry had been reading lay open, face down, on the table, but he was nowhere in sight. The mudroom and the back doors stood wide open, airing the place out.

“What happened?” I asked. “Where's Ma?”

“Well, look who's up.” Granny closed the window and placed the tea towel on the counter. “How'd you sleep?” She moved to the mudroom and closed the back door.

“Fine,” I lied. My back ached and I was tired from the long trip and the lousy sleep. My eyes still stung. And nobody had told me where Ma was. I asked again.

“Your mother's still in bed,” Aunt Gert said. “She's likely tired; we'll let her sleep.”

Uncle Jim banged through the back door, followed by Larry. Their cheeks were raw from the cold; steam rolled off their clothing.

“It's freezin' in here,” Uncle Jim said. He sniffed the air. “Someone tryin' to burn the place down?”

Larry pulled off his boots and lined them up in the mudroom beside Uncle Jim's.

“Where'd you go?” I asked.

Larry tossed me a sheepish look. “Chores.” He unwrapped his scarf in an offhand manner. “Feeding and watering Big Ned and Lu, and the cows. And milking them.”

“You could have woke me up, you know.”

“I don' know.” Uncle Jim winked at Larry. “Pius James here wouldn't be up to it. What d'ya think?” I figured he was joking, but I felt excluded just the same.

Larry smirked and shook his head.

I swallowed hard. This was the first time I had seen my older brother come close to bragging.

“Don't you worry, there's plenty to do for the both o' youse.” Uncle
Jim put a hand on my shoulder and gently squeezed it. “We'll take
another trip out to the barn after breakfast.”

Granny's place seemed like something from the olden days, like from
even before Ma was born. For starters, there was no electricity. Back home, we had ceiling fixtures in every room, lamps on bedside tables in the bedrooms, and a floor lamp in the parlour. Granny's place depended on kerosene for light. There were fancy brass lanterns with heavy porcelain shades that hung from the ceilings in the kitchen and in the dining room and sat on solid pine side tables in the parlour. The lanterns in the bedrooms and the upstairs hallway were plain tin with long, loopy handles. These ones could be carried from room to room and out to the outhouse after dark.

Alfred was mesmerized by the flame that danced behind the delicate glass cylinder of the lantern Ma used when she took him upstairs to bed. But as soon as he had said his prayers and she had read him a story and tucked him in, she carried it off, leaving me to grope my way upstairs in the dark. She didn't trust me to carry it alone. She said I'd singe my fingers or, worse, drop it and burn the whole house down.

Back home it was only really cold early in the morning before Dad got the furnace up to a full roar. I'd lie in bed and listen for the groan of the cast-iron radiators as the hot water began to flow through them.
Soon the whole house was warm, and it stayed that way for hours.
At Granny's, it took forever for the cookstove in the kitchen and the pot-bellied stove in the parlour to warm up the downstairs. Heat rose through a single grate in the upstairs hallway floor, but it never reached the bedrooms.

For water, Aunt Gert filled a pail from the kitchen faucet in the
evening and set it in the pantry. In the morning, she took an axe to the ice that had formed overnight, poured water into the hand pump, and cranked the handle to prime it. The one hand pump and faucet provided water for cooking, drinking, and washing. And it came out in a great, freezing gush.

The bathroom situation was worse. At home we had a porcelain
toilet you could do your business into and flush. At Granny's, there was a shabby little stinker of an outhouse some thirty feet from the back door and an enamel-coated thunder bowl under the bed for emergencies at night. The outhouse had a hole cut out of a wooden counter, at bum height—if you were an adult. If you were a kid, you had to hitch yourself up with both hands and hang on tight so you didn't slip back
and get jammed in that hole. There wasn't even a real seat. There
were cobwebs across the ceiling and in the corners. Which made me wonder where the spiders were when I suspended my backside over that hole. A bucket of lime sat on the floor. And no matter how much of it you poured over all that business down there, it still stank like holy Hannah. But I much preferred using the stinker behind the house than squatting over the thunder bowl in the same room where Alfred and I slept, smelling it for the rest of the night, and trotting it out the back door in the morning.

And the chores were endless. Back home, I grumbled about having to clean up my side of the room
and
Alfred's, while all Larry and Helen had to do was clean up their own messes. Larry got to read books all the time. And Helen's only other job was to catch the wet clothes on
washday when Ma put them through the ringer. When we needed food, Ma wrote a list and telephoned over to McCormack's Grocer
next door in the morning. The groceries were boxed up and delivered to our front door in the afternoon. There was lots of time for making snow forts in the backyard. And depending on the season, we played hockey on the outdoor rink or baseball on the diamond at Glendale
Park. Even Ma put her feet up in the parlour in the afternoons and
listened to
Ma Parker
on the radio. And Dad smoked his pipe and read the
Everett Leader Herald
in the evening. At the Lanigans', one task fell directly onto another, and the entire series moved in a continuum just to keep everyone warm, fed, clean, and clothed. Then there were the barn chores and the general upkeep of the buildings, the fences, and the equipment.

Larry and I were expected to pitch in right away. After breakfast on Saturday morning, Uncle Jim scribbled out a long list of chores and posted them on a bulletin board in the kitchen. He specified which ones were for mornings and which ones were for after school. And he told us how we could spend all of those idle hours we had on Saturdays. He laughed and said, “We wouldn't want you fellas gettin' soft on us,” like he thought it was funny. Then he took us both out to the barn.

“Animals need lots of attention,” he said as we followed him across
the yard. “The bigger they are, the more they need. They're a huge
responsibility.”

The barn was as bad as the outhouse, only bigger. The moment I stepped through the door, it hit me straight on. All those big animals doing their business in their stalls through the night built up a powerful stench. I couldn't walk anywhere where there wasn't a cow patty or a clump of horse turd. Uncle Jim ploughed right over it all in his thick gumboots. Larry and I found patches where the manure had hardened into the floor and stepped around the fresh stuff.

“Now Lu, here, just loves to be fussed over.” Uncle Jim opened her stall. “She's just like a woman.”

He slipped on her halter, led her out to the aisle, and tied her to
ropes that hung from posts on each side of it. Lu took up so much
space there was barely room to move around her. She seemed even bigger closed up in that barn than she did outside.

“When you groom these here horses, you gotta check 'em for cuts 'n' sores. When you clean out their hoofs, you gotta make sure everything's good 'n' firm—no cracks, no growth. When you feed 'em, you gotta wet down their hay so it ain't dusty. You measure out their grain morning 'n' evening. And they're big, so they need plenty o' water, so you're always refillin' their pails. But you leave that to me. I don't want neither o' you boys goin' near that old well—it ain't safe. And I haven't gotten around to fixin' it.

“The thing with any animal is getting to know 'em real good,” he continued. “You should know their habits—how much they eat 'n' drink; when they rest; whether they lie down or stand up to sleep; 'n' whether they're calm 'n' sociable. If any of this changes, you know there's somethin' wrong.

“Lu's real friendly. If she don't come right up to you when you go up to 'er stall, or if she's walkin' 'round in circles and noddin' 'er head up and down, that's when somethin's wrong. The trick is to find out what.”

He took my hand and placed it over her halter. “Take a hold of 'er.
Pat 'er, talk to 'er. You gotta make eye contact with 'er, Pius James.
Get 'er to trust you. You take good care of 'er and she'll be your best friend.” He nudged me closer to her. “Don't be scared—she won't hurt you. I want you to get to know 'er real well, 'cause you're gonna be lookin' after 'er.”

Lu stood perfectly still as I held her halter and stroked her. Uncle Jim showed me how to get her to lift up her huge hoof by running a hand down her leg. When he pinched it just above her fetlock, she lifted her hoof without a fuss. He rested it on a knee, grabbed a pick, and dug mud and manure from it. He watched as I did the same with the other three. Then he handed me the brush and showed me how to groom her thick winter coat, stroking it hard down her huge girth and under her belly. I stepped up onto a stool and groomed her back and neck.

Our uncle seemed bent on teaching us everything there was to know on that first afternoon. It seemed like a lot to remember. Ma hadn't told us how long we were staying. But I figured we'd be going home soon, so I didn't see the sense in learning all that farm stuff. But the next thing I knew, I was grooming Lu and talking to her and thinking how working in the barn with the animals wasn't so bad. Larry tended to Big Ned in his stall.

When I had finished, I stood next to the horse and waited anxiously as Uncle Jim checked her over. “You got her tidied up nice, Pius James.” He handed me a shovel. “Now let's get after that stall.”

As hard as it was, Uncle Jim whistled through the work and encour
aged Larry and me to whistle too. He said it made the time fly. But
whistling required that you take in a great big gulp of that horse-cow-pig-poop air before you could produce a sound. It was disgusting, and how Larry managed to do it without throwing up, I'll never know.

“You boys are seeing the lazy part o' the year,” Uncle Jim said. “These horses might be doin' a lot of standin' around '' eatin', but come spring, it gets plenty busy 'round here. They'll show you what they're worth.”

There wasn't anything about the place that seemed lazy to me—it was a load of hard work. My hands soon blistered and my shoulders ached. And the only source of heat in that barn was the animals. Steam rolled off their bodies in a steady stream, but it was still damp and cold.

We got to play a game after each task. This I liked. For mucking out the stalls and laying down fresh bedding, we got to swing on the rope tied to a rafter in the barn. When we finished milking the cows, we got to ride the horses bareback around the yard while Uncle Jim held the lunge lines and directed them in a slow circle. He held on tight to those lines, slowly turning, keeping an eye on the horses and us, and clicking his tongue and saying, “Walk on, Big Ned” or “Walk on, Lu,” when either of them got lazy.

“Get a good grip onto 'er with those scrawny legs o' yours, Pius James. Larry, you show Big Ned there who's boss, or he'll take right over.”

Lu felt strong and steady beneath me. She loped around in a large circle, head up, ears forward, her huge hooves breaking through crusty snow. Even so, it felt a little scary being so high up on her. I sat with my legs stretched over her broad back, hung onto her thick mane with both hands, and tried not to show her how nervous I was.