1930
It was Sunday afternoon, and Rory Cameron, Margaret’s younger brother, sat on the porch with Douglas, while Irene and her mother made supper. Douglas sat on an old cane chair that he meant to repaint someday. Rory sat on the top step, his back resting against the support post. Rory had a wide forehead and thick hair that came to a widow’s peak in the middle. He was dark-haired and blue-eyed, like his sister, but where she was pale as watered milk, his skin was ruddy, with the early evidence of lines around his eyes.
It was a warm day, thick with the smells of melting snow and the winter’s debris that lay beneath.
“How are things going down at the factory?” said Douglas as he sipped his whisky.
“Not so good.”
“Oh?”
“There’s been some layoffs, and more to come.” He took a long drink of beer.
“What about your job? Are you all right?”
“We’ll see,” Rory said. It was hard to explain, but he’d be almost relieved to find a pink slip waiting for him in his pay envelope. There were no other jobs to be had these days, but Rory didn’t mind so much, if the truth be told. He hated the box factory. He hated the big building on King Street that looked more like a prison than a factory. He hated the enormous arm-eating machines, the noise, the poisoned fog of blue smoke that hung in the air, the acrid smell of the printers’ ink. He hated seeing the children working there, no more than twelve some of them, working on “need permits,” which meant the government recognized they had to support themselves. Rory’s job was to feed cardboard flats into the jaws of one of the cutting machines and then to withdraw his hands before the press came down and pulled them in along with the paper. So far he’d been lucky, but the noise was deafening, and after only six months on the machines he had a ringing in his ears day and night. He worked from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Saturday and earned ten dollars a week.
“What are you two talking about?”
Margaret stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a red-and-yellow tea towel.
“Nothing, Peg, just moaning about the job.” He didn’t want to say more to her about his troubles. He could see the signs of strain in her face, the circles under her eyes.
“There have been layoffs,” said Douglas.
“You’re not going to lose your job!”
“Mum, what is it?” Irene peeked out from behind her mother. The look on her face was so much like her mother’s, thought Rory. His sister clutched the girl to her, in a gesture more dramatic than he thought necessary, and Irene stiffened, not pulling away but not clinging to her mother either.
“Now, Peg, it’s all right. I won’t lose my job.” Rory hated it when his sister got like this; there was something selfish about the level of worry, like she wanted everyone to stop their own worrying and console her.
“What would you do if you lost your job? You’d have to move in here. How would we cope?”
“I haven’t lost my job, for Christ’s sake!”
“But you could, anyone could!”
He thought this would be a perfect time for Douglas to do something, but Douglas never seemed to do anything. Rory stood up and went over to hug his sister. Irene scuttled out from the embrace like a mouse narrowly escaping a trap.
Margaret clung to him for a moment, and then stepped back. The angry look on her face surprised him. Her moods changed so quickly these days. She’d always been prone to fits of temper, even when they were children. He used to find it sort of funny, even though he had a bit of a hair-trigger himself. But he didn’t think it was so funny now. She went back inside the house and Irene followed her. Rory looked toward Douglas, but he was staring down into his glass.
As Irene left the house one morning a few weeks later, her mother’s commands rang in her ears.
“You come straight home from school, do you hear me?” Margaret stood in the kitchen doorway, a copy of Ladies Home Journal in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
“But Mummy . . .,” Irene would have stamped her foot had she not known it would lead to a smack on the bottom.
“Don’t but Mummy me. You’re too cheeky by far these days, my girl. If I tell you to do something, you do it.”
“Yes, Mummy.” Irene slipped on her plaid jacket and did up the toggle buttons.
“I won’t have you out there with those ragamuffins. You are not to go to the lot. No baseball. Understand?”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“Good. Now get along, you’ll be late. And give me a kiss.”
Irene trudged to school on the verge of tears. Something was wrong and nobody would tell her anything. How could her father say to go along with it for just a little while? A little while? It had been months and months and forever. It was so unfair. Something was changing.
Irene knew she was changing, and this was a strange thing to know. As her mother became more and more nervous, as her father referred to it, Irene became very good at several things. She made a list of them as she walked along. She was good at being small. At being quiet. And it was as though she had another set of eyes and ears, attuned to things outside the range of normal seeing and hearing. Like cats who could see ghosts or dogs that could hear whistles too high-pitched for humans. She was getting very good at being able to detect, from even the smallest signals, what sort of mood her mother was in. Because she wasn’t always unhappy. She wasn’t always mean. Sometimes she laughed and laughed and wanted to dance to jazz music on the radio. But when she was nervous it was important to know as quickly as possible, so that Irene could adjust herself accordingly.
Irene also knew that she must not speak to her friends about what was the matter at home, because, as her father kept telling her, nothing whatsoever was the matter. He’d made that very clear. Should anyone ask, nothing was wrong.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with Mrs. MacNeil no way,” said Jimmy Thompson, who tried to sound tough. He wore the same grey flannel pants and navy blazer as the other boys, but his trousers had a torn knee and there was a smear of jam on his jacket. There were rumours about what Jimmy’s father did for a living. Some said he was a bootlegger, but most agreed he ran an illegal gambling operation. These things gave Jimmy Thompson a certain mystery and authority. “Nothing wrong in her body anyways. She’s just nuts. Me and Charlie saw her burying something out in the garden late one night. I swear it to God.”
“Don’t swear, Jimmy, it isn’t nice,” said Violet, who always wore something to match her name. Today it was ribbons tied at the end of her thick brown braids.
“I bet it was a body,” piped up Charlie, Jimmy’s younger brother. They had the same freckled faces and might have been gap-toothed twins except that Charlie was so much smaller.
“Wasn’t big enough,” said Jimmy as he picked his grimy fingernails with a pocketknife. “I’ll bet it was a box of money.”
“Coulda been a baby,” insisted Charlie, thrilled at the horror of it.
“What were you two doing out at night?” said Ebbie Watkins. “You live over on Prospect Street, you can’t see Irene’s yard from your house, and besides, your mother makes you go to bed at eight.”
“We can get out if we want to. My mother don’t have to know everything.”
“Oh, you’re just telling tales, Jimmy Thompson. You don’t know anything about Mrs. MacNeil.”
“I know that lady’s crazy. My ma says so.”
And nobody said much after that, because it was true that Irene’s mother was different. It used to be that she would send out pitchers of lemonade