A Good House: A Novel

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

1949

1952

1955

1956

1963

1970

1977

1986

1995

1997

Also by Bonnie Burnard

Praise for Bonnie Burnard’s A Good House

Copyright

For Anne Szumigalski (1922–1999)

1949

FED BY THE rolling fields and the running miles of shallow country ditches to the east of town, Stonebrook Creek approached the town aslant, cutting down through Livingston’s gully, then flowing past the burning mounds of garbage at the dump, a ripe, evolving depth of trash that came alive at night with the industrious plunder of raccoons, an afternoon home-away-from-home for the town’s mostly good-natured dogs. Beyond the dump, the creek narrowed and angled sharply west to hug the bottom of Bald Hill.

Then it twisted its way through the recently rehabilitated nine-hole golf course. The course had been closed during the war years but when the men returned, crews of volunteers had worked long hours to bring it back to its pre-war self, the greens shaved close and graded to fool the eye and framed by sand traps, the creek a recurrent water hazard crossed by pretty wooden bridges.

Nettles and cattails and goldenrod and Scotch thistle grew on the banks down close to the water and in high summer there were orange lilies and buttercups and thick, hovering clouds of dragonflies, and butterflies. And you didn’t have to follow the current far to see suckers or catfish or carp. There were snakes, of course, and muskrats, and the slight fear of drowning. But at the very worst the water was deemed only a mild hazard, just something natural, something that could safely be ignored.

As it left the golf course the creek passed under the narrow, handsomely arched highway bridge that marked the town’s southern outskirts and finally it entered the town proper, flowing behind the canning factory down near the double row of tracks and then past the Vinegar Works and the foundry and the last remaining barns.

Dominion Canners was still in business in the forties and a canning factory was a significant thing for a town to have because it meant jobs for men and women both, dirty, respectable, seasonal jobs processing fruit and vegetables. The work was well paid, but because it was entirely dependent on markets and the yields of particular crops, production ebbed and flowed. Jobs had been steady only during the war years, when tons of fruit and vegetables were trucked in to be dehydrated and shipped to the men fighting overseas.

In the winter months, at Turnball’s barn, kids who had bundled themselves in bulky, wet-smelling wool rested their lit flashlights in the crotches of the willows that lined the frozen creek to shovel the snow up onto the sloping banks, diligently chipping at the hardest ridges of ice to make the surface smooth enough for skating under the winter sky, which was never black but always the darkest possible navy blue. Brothers and sisters fought for their turns with the family skates and bright red mitts got dropped in a December thaw and then forgotten until they could be seen again through the cloudy ice, trapped, waiting for spring under the barren, overhanging branches of the trees. Some nights, when the illumination sent by the faraway moon and stars bounced off their high-banked snow like thrown bolts of wedding dress satin, the kids switched their flashlights off, proud to be out in the night alone, made safe by the natural light.

But soon there would be no need to shovel Stonebrook Creek clean because people were starting to talk about a Memorial Arena, to honour the war dead.

Sixteen of the town’s sons had been killed overseas this last time and another thirty had been wounded, many of them seriously. Amputees were a common sight now, as were torn, badly healed, once-handsome faces and eyes gone hesitant or vacant and, in the heat of summer, out at the lake, backs and chests and limbs defiled by pulpy ridges of flesh which had been pulled shut over wounds by military doctors working without the luxury of time, without the care that time allowed. Many families were slowly and quietly learning how to make their way around small, unanticipated explosions fired by edgy nerves and some of the wounded had been sent home carrying in their toughened bodies the extra weight of shrapnel, which doctors at the big vets’ hospital in London were still busy excavating four years after the fighting was done, often, by necessity, one shard at a time.

Stonebrook Creek did not have in it the force of industry. Stonebrook had never been a mill town. The creek did offer good dependable drainage, which mattered a great deal now that so many new houses were going up, and it did provide a bit of work for the town’s men, whose many responsibilities included occasional attention to the creek’s banks, to hip-high weeds in the summer, and sometimes to discarded, rusted chunks of sharp-edged machinery parts and, once in a while, deep in the current but stopped by stones, a tightly tied burlap sack filled with carcasses, the lazy disposal of an unwanted litter, lazy because the lake was such a short drive away and rowboats so easily rented.

The creek touched a few properties. Before it finally left town to make its way over to Lake Huron to empty itself, it turned sharply north to run behind one long street of houses, to move across the bottom of their sprawling backyards. But the houses built on that street were as good as any.

Stonebrook held perhaps five hundred houses in 1949, brick or painted frame and mixed together, big with small, new with old, good with bad. Normally they sat well back on very big lots, sheltered from the weather by five or six fully matured trees, planted maples, sometimes elms or walnuts, the occasional hickory or chestnut. Forty or fifty of the houses were new since the war, and although these had been built on more modest, modern lots, most of them had fancy up-to-date kitchens and laundry chutes and high, dry basements and wall-to-wall broadloom carpet for the living rooms. Almost all the residential streets had been resurfaced and graced with brand new poured-cement sidewalks, and the tall poles that carried the heavy telephone and hydro wires, slung between them and from them to the corner of each roof, were interspersed now with streetlights.

Down near the Vinegar Works, five or six places had been let go too long to be brought back and these could be picked up for next to nothing by a man who had to settle, who had to have some kind of shelter for his family, even if the linoleum floors did slope in many puzzling directions, even if the rooms did hold the stench of all their previous inhabitants.

The magnificent houses, the three old-money brick houses, each with a small turret and a wraparound porch, had been built uptown near the churches when the town was younger and smaller, before the Great War. The wraparound porches were there to hold rainy-day children and morning tea carts and quiet late-evening conversation, cosy, discreet conversation which could not easily take place in front rooms or kitchens or bedrooms, certainly not on the street.

Sitting on one of these porches, hidden in covered darkness, you could feel the weight of the wet summer air on your skin, you could smell it, the soft scent of toilet water and mown grass and lilacs and honeysuckle in that air. You could listen to the endless ringing of a million crickets, hear birdsong flying from nest to nest in the highest branches of the trees, and sometimes you could hear the low mumble of a car or a door slamming or people shouting, streets away. If you sat there long enough, if you were a patient person, you could see through the dark. You just had to start with the most prominent, most easily recognized shapes, the shapes anyone would know, and then concentrate, hard.

*   *   *

THE CHAMBERS HOUSE, a storey-and-a-half white frame with a grey shingled roof, was halfway down the street that backed on Stonebrook Creek. Like almost everyone else in town, the Chamberses had two big maples out close to the new sidewalk and a few decorative evergreen shrubs planted under the big front window to soften the line of the foundation. In the backyard, which stretched in a gentle slope down to the creek, there were two more maples, one horse chestnut, one pussy willow, three very old hickories, and, on the shallow creek bank, two majestic willows overhanging the water.

A narrow gravel driveway led along the side of the lot back to a too-small garage, which was really just an oversized shed. But this was common. Not many garages had caught up to the bulk of the new postwar sedans. If there were extra people around, and there often were extra people around, they just pulled their cars over onto the grass. The grass had to be tough enough to survive this, to thrive without pampering, because no one paid any attention to it. It was there primarily to keep the weeds down and to reduce the likelihood of mud.

Across the front of the house there was a large living room with three small, leaded windows on the side yard and a big, recently installed picture window facing the street. Since the war, lots of perfectly adequate living-room windows had been replaced with these picture windows, which were said to both nicely frame the view to the street and open the rooms to sunlight.

In the long living room there was a marble fireplace that didn’t draw very well, with delicate tulip sconces on either side, and a wide archway leading to the front hall and to the vestibule, which had a mullioned, bevelled-glass door and then a heavy front door that was permanently locked and never answered, except maybe at Christmas, or to a stranger.

The staircase, which turned halfway up at another pretty leaded window, this one translucent with patterned glass stained green and deep rose, and the glowing hardwood steps fanned to make the turn, led from the vestibule up to a small central hall and off the hall to a bathroom and three bedrooms with extra-large closets cut into the sloping roof. This was the quiet part of the house, where voices were muted, where privacy was sometimes sought and found.

At the back of the house, behind the living room, there was a dining room with a slippery hardwood floor, a swinging door into the kitchen, and a wide window which overlooked the sprawling backyard. In the winter when the trees were bare, if you lifted the new, silky sheers, you could see Stonebrook Creek from this window, at least you could see where the smooth blanket of snow became the frozen surface of the current.

Sylvia Chambers’ kitchen had most of the modern conveniences: an adequate stove, a brand new porcelain sink, an almost new, half-price Frigidaire which Bill had brought home from the hardware store, half price because of the small, harmless dent in the side. The kitchen was big enough to hold the oversized pine table where the family ate most of their everyday meals and anyone who came over was expected to use the never-locked kitchen door.

All the walls were painted plaster, smooth as silk. The staircase and the trim were oak, the baseboards eight inches high. You could run in a circle on the main floor, from room to room to room, around and around. Small children liked to do this, and visiting dogs.

It was a good house. Bill and Sylvia Chambers had bought it in 1941 when Patrick was four, Daphne one, and Paul just born. The bank loan had looked manageable, and although the war in Europe was well under way and not threatening to wind up any time soon, Bill and Sylvia had both felt a guarded optimism about their lives when they signed the papers that fall.

Neither of them had ever lived anywhere else. Their distant ancestry, an unexamined mix of quiet, hard-working Irish and sanctimonious Scots with the occasional black sheep thrown in, either boisterous, bothersome, speech-making Irish or Scots turned soft, was seldom actively present in anyone’s thoughts. Bill’s paternal grandparents had farmed eight miles north of town but because there wasn’t land enough for all the sons, his father had slowly bought into the hardware store, where Bill now worked. That was before the misery of the thirties.

After the thirties, with the hardware let go for a song, Bill’s father had started to sell cars and trucks up at the Chev Olds and he’d loved it, the wheeling and dealing, the good cigars, the flask of celebratory rye in the top drawer of his otherwise empty desk. He was now, in late middle age, a minor partner, with no serious thought of retirement.

Sylvia’s Ferguson grandparents had moved up from the Chatham area when they were just young to take over the grocery store, which her father had recently sold to the Clarkes, although he’d reluctantly agreed to continue on for a couple of years as their butcher.

Bill and Sylvia had married in 1936, the year King George died, because Sylvia was pregnant with Patrick, a situation which was not especially desired but certainly not unusual. Sylvia’s father adjusted himself to the circumstances quickly, he didn’t see any reason to go too deeply into these matters, but her mother thought Sylvia, because she was so very pretty, could have done better and like a fool she said so.

Sylvia had to pull her mother down on the front porch steps to try to convince her once and for all that Bill Chambers was a very decent man, a kind man, that while he was obviously neither traditionally handsome nor brilliant he was everything else a woman could want, and then some. Saying these last words she had smiled and raised her eyebrows in an impudent gesture which was both rare and immediately understood for what it was, and which settled the question for good.

Bill Chambers signed up to go overseas in 1942, very soon after they’d bought the house, just when Sylvia was starting to find ways to believe in the life they were making. He wasn’t any kid, he was almost thirty. To explain himself, he told Sylvia he simply couldn’t stand not going. He left by train, was sent first out to Halifax to be too hurriedly educated by his country, too quickly taught about ships and depth charges and German U-boats, and then he was shipped over with all the others like him to try to apply what he had too quickly learned.

When it was finished, finished for him, he came back to Sylvia and the kids left-handed. In the organized chaos of an attack from the air, in the bitterly cold, loud, black, bloody mess that was a battle in the North Atlantic, the caution Bill had taught himself, the deliberate, sober, rational maturity he’d thought he would need was wasted. He watched the three most useful fingers of his right hand leave his hand, watched two of them land on the deck at his feet, and just before the guy beside him kicked them overboard he had snapped a mental picture that would make itself available to him for the rest of his life: the bloody fingers rolling slightly with the heave of the ship, the pulpy, mangled flesh that was no longer his own split open like burst sausage, the nails, blue-white and still almost real, holding firm.

But none of this made Bill Chambers extraordinary. He had come home alive, to his family, to his job, to his comfortable house on Stonebrook Creek. And in 1949, with the war mercifully over and won, the only cost to Bill those three fingers and the time it took to train his left hand, with the country ready to enter an unprecedented boom and Sylvia confident that she could get her children safely through their childhood, comfortable was what the Chamberses were hoping against hope to be.

1952

THE NEW SIREN was installed in Stonebrook’s Town Hall tower on the first good Tuesday in April, after the rains had soaked and softened the fields and then abruptly ended, leaving the spring sun behind to warm the soil for planting.

The old cast-iron bell, the original, was not to be replaced but augmented by this new technology. The bell would continue to announce twelve noon but the siren would signal the fires and emergencies. The siren would call the volunteers from their work or their supper tables or their ball games or their beds.

The councillors agreed they could justify the expense, which was substantial, because a tornado had cut through the county the previous July and people complained for months afterward that they had not heard any warning at all from the Town Hall, not a blessed sound above that wind. The councillors and everyone else who had given it any thought believed that the wail of a siren would be more likely to carry, would probably ride the wind undiminished.

Because there were regulations to meet, because it had to be done right the first time, the installation contract had gone to a company from Sarnia, and when the men from Sarnia pulled up to the Town Hall curb at seven-thirty on Tuesday morning with the thing crated up in the back of a truck, there was a small semi-official party waiting on the Town Hall steps to meet them, to unlock the doors and turn on the lights and lead them up the three flights of stairs to the top of the bell tower. The mayor was there and the two councillors who had pushed hardest for the siren. Norma Fawcett, who had worked forever up at the town office taking receipt of the taxes and keeping the town books and scribbling the minutes at the council meetings, had been asked to come along in case they needed someone to fetch coffee and maybe something from the bakeshop. Charles Taylor, the town’s quiet, well-mannered simpleton, had been dressed in his slacks and shirt and tie and sent up to watch the installation by his mother, who strongly believed that Charles had as much right as anyone to take part in things. And Archie Stutt made sure he was in attendance because as the town’s de facto maintenance superintendent, you could bet he would be left in charge of the thing after the experts from Sarnia pulled out.

Bill Chambers joined the delegation on the steps just as the siren was being taken off the truck. He had made his own breakfast and left the house for the hardware store an hour early, walking a slightly different route uptown in order to arrive at about the right time. He was there with the other men not in any official capacity but because two years earlier he had climbed the two flights with Archie Stutt to measure and make an estimate on the lumber needed for a new tower staircase and that day he had seen the old bell up close for the first time and he had admired it.

It wasn’t brass like a show bell but the more lowly cast iron. The dull pewter sheen had been fouled here and there with the crusty smear of bird droppings, but it was nevertheless a beautiful thing. Its weight was self-evident, it was three feet across at the base. The clapper was the size of a softball. Bill wasn’t convinced anyone would want to harm the bell, the town council had vowed to keep it and they’d said the siren would not in any way interfere with its workings, but sometimes people got wacky, spur-of-the-moment ideas, sometimes people had to be tamed down a little. He thought he’d just stand around quietly for an hour or so and watch out for the bell.

Like the library and the churches, the Town Hall had been built to be taken seriously. The windows and doors and roof line were not elaborate but purposeful, symmetrical, calming. There was a substantial cornerstone and intricate although not ostentatious brickwork around the double front doors and at all the corners and up under the eaves. There were generous concrete steps with sturdy balustrades and, on each side of these, chained-off space and good, regularly renewed soil for tidy beds of geraniums and snaps and pansies.

Inside the Town Hall there was an office on the main floor where people paid their taxes and complained about storm sewers, and another office where the town constable kept a desk and a couple of overstuffed filing cabinets and where he might be reached by telephone if he wasn’t in the barbershop or walking up and down Front Street, gossiping. There were four jails cells which were cleaned occasionally but rarely used. There was a two-stall washroom which for many years was made available to kids who’d got caught too far from home.

The auditorium up on the second floor held thirty rows of shiny, hard, dark brown chairs with squeaky flip-up seats. The rows of chairs were attached to runners and these runners were designed to be bolted to the floor, but they were not bolted because sometimes they had to be removed in an afternoon and stacked at the sides of the hall for a demonstration of some kind or a crowd too large to be seated or a big dance, although now the dances were usually held in the Memorial Arena, which had been built down near the fairgrounds. The new dance floor in the arena was top-of-the-line hardwood and it had been constructed right at ground level, which meant a lot less disconcerting spring when there was a big crowd. There was a raised platform for a five-piece band and on the platform an upright piano which had been purchased the year before with the proceeds from a raffle on a humble Christmas turkey.

The arena was the newest public structure in town. Since the war, all across the province dozens of memorial arenas had gone up because hockey was big and would, no question, get bigger. Through the months of fund-raising and construction both of Stonebrook’s newspapers gave a running account of activities, and when the doors were finally thrown open the editors proudly put the total value at fifty thousand dollars, careful to include in their valuation loads of gravel and electrical supplies delivered without an invoice, all the cash donations, large and small, some of these sent by expatriates from as far away as California or Calgary, and freely offered manual labour tagged at seventy-five cents an hour. Bill Chambers had taken Patrick and Paul over with him several times to mix cement or haul lumber, and Sylvia and Daphne had spent a few evenings pounding nails. Fifty thousand dollars was still substantial money in 1952. You could build a perfectly adequate house for under six thousand; you could get yourself a loaded Cadillac like Doc Cooper’s for somewhere around four thousand.

*   *   *

THE INSTALLATION PEOPLE from Sarnia had turned out to be pros. And not one of the men who assembled that morning had mentioned the old cast-iron bell one way or the other, the talk was all about the siren. But nevertheless Bill was glad he’d gone. It had been something to see.

In just under two hours, including a half-hour break for coffee and banter and bran muffins hot from the oven of the bakeshop across the street, the men had the siren securely mounted and wired in and set to go. Bill didn’t stay around for coffee. He couldn’t spend the entire morning guarding the tower bell. By the time the guy in charge was ready to give the siren its first test run, shortly before ten, Bill was at his job at the hardware store, patiently trying to get two confusing lumber invoices sorted out with the steadfast bookkeeper, Margaret Kemp.

Sylvia Chambers heard the siren’s first wail, pausing with her hands on her hips over the long bed of tulips that lined the far side of the driveway, wondering about the possibility of peonies.

Patrick Chambers was at his desk at the back of the room over at the high school, sitting behind Murray McFarlane, conjugating aloud the Latin verb to win with the rest of the university-bound grade tens.

Daphne in grade seven and Paul in grade six were standing out in the dusty fenced playground with all the other kids from all the other grades, listening. After their principal had got the courtesy call from Norma Fawcett up at the town office he had walked from classroom to classroom to forewarn his teachers, and as they stood in the playground listening many of these teachers were preparing a brief, impromptu civics lesson: the purpose and function of a Town Hall, how people must work together in communities, for progress, for safety, for the good of the group as a whole. Most of the kids were quiet, their arms at their sides and their faces upturned as if such a sound was something that came from the sky.

Two hours later, when the tower bell chimed twelve just as it had the day before and every other previous day, Bill was already out on Front Street. If he could manage it, he usually left the hardware store a few minutes before noon because he liked to hear the sound of the bell clearly, in the outside air.

With a dinner of pork chops and last year’s apple jelly and mashed potatoes and creamed corn set to go the minute they all came in the door, Sylvia stood on the back step taking the last of the clothes off the line, snapping and folding shirts and pants and aprons and pyjamas and nighties and underwear, dropping them into the wicker basket at her feet. She had guessed right, it had been a good breezy morning for wash. She could smell the morning in the clothes.

Patrick had split off from his friends to walk the last few blocks from the high school alone. As he walked, conscientiously planting exactly two steps in each new square of cement, he was trying once more to successfully tell himself a story in Latin. The story had to be about war because almost all the verbs and nouns he had learned that year from the dour Mr. Stewart lent themselves best to war.

Paul and Daphne, each of them having just received a quickly conceived civics lesson, were walking the few blocks side by side, not a word shared, their coming home together unusual because long-legged Paul walked so fast. He liked to be where he was going now, liked to eat dinner quickly so he could get himself back to the playground to join his rowdy friends. Daphne had to take two or three steps for each one of his but that was all right, she could do that.

Spotting the kids, Bill had stood on the sidewalk at the front of the house to wait as they approached from their different directions and when they all came around the corner of the house Sylvia stopped folding clothes to watch them. She liked to watch her kids come and go, she did it regularly. Occasionally, in the hope that this might allow her to see them differently, maybe as other people saw them, just as they were, she tried to pretend that they didn’t belong to her at all.

Paul came up the steps first, taking them double, six steps in three. On an April whim he stopped on the porch to open the door so his mother could go into the kitchen first and then Patrick slammed into him and he was stuck holding the door open for Daphne and Bill. As soon as his father was clear, Paul threw Patrick off to beat him into the kitchen. There was a time when he always lost to Patrick, to his confidence rather than his strength, but those days were over.

They all took their places at the table and waited until Sylvia left the stove and removed her apron to sit down with them. This waiting was a rule, one of very few. Bill lifted the bowl of potatoes toward Daphne to start things off and after all the food had been around the table he passed his plate down to Sylvia so she could cut up his chop and asked, of everyone, And where were you when the siren went off?

Each of them told their stories in turn and then Paul, reaching for the bottle to pour himself a most-days-discouraged third glass of milk but thinking about the playground, about who might be back there already, said, What’s it matter?

It’s just a habit you could get into, Bill said. Remembering where you are.

*   *   *

NEITHER THE CHAMBERS kids nor any of their friends gave much thought to remembering, or to the development of habits. They were content to keep pushing forward through undisciplined time, and anyway, habits were what you caught hell for, biting your nails to the quick, picking at scabs to keep the sore going, sneaking down to Stonebrook Creek in your pyjamas to watch the moonlight shiver on the dark water. The kids used their time to do the things they needed to do. They occupied the town on their own terms.

Most of the adults believed that as long as no one got any big ideas, and if everyone kept a general eye out, the worst that could happen would be a dog bite or a bee sting or a superficial slash from some broken glass left lying around in an alley somewhere. They did not want to load the kids up with the burden of possible but highly unlikely danger because most of them disapproved of exaggeration generally. Nothing good came from blowing things out of proportion. Right after the war a partially deaf drifter who had not been able to find steady work had hanged himself under the grandstand down at the racetrack, and no one had forgotten the day he was found and cut down, but most people had decided that, as bad as it was, his decision was pretty much the kind of thing that had nothing to do with anyone, least of all the kids.

As well as the Town Hall and the arena, the kids were familiar with miles and miles of train track and with the smoky, always burning fires over at the dump, with the canning factory and the Vinegar Works and the foundry, the stores on Front Street, the racetrack, the churches, the Rotary Park, the library. They chased after pea wagons on their way to the canning factory, pulled at the tangled vines to feed on pods of sweet new peas. Their pockets empty but their heads crammed with schemes, they drifted into stores, left if they were told to, returned the next week entirely uninsulted.

And they knew the intricacies of Bald Hill and Stonebrook Creek. In the winter, the hill was called Toboggan Hill because what could be more enticing than the threat of a good soaking at the end of a fast ride? The wide toboggan run, pristine under the bright haze of a winter sun, was flanked on either side by tall, descending, close-set spruce and fir and pine and the new snow fell from the hovering clouds to a smooth, blinding whiteness. The kids did not go to the hill so regularly in the spring after the snow disappeared, but when they did wander across it, taking a shortcut, if they saw that the evergreens that lined the sides of their toboggan run had tried to reproduce themselves, if seedlings had taken root, they just ripped them out.

They followed Stonebrook Creek through unfenced backyards and out into the countryside hunting for mysteries, for bloodsuckers or two-headed toads or unfamiliar skeletons or, please just once more, a boxed-up, thrown-out stash of dirty magazines.

It was Daphne who discovered the dirty magazines. Wandering alone one morning along Stonebrook Creek a mile out of town she had spotted something new, a box that hadn’t been there the last time, and she’d crawled down and stretched out over the bank to pull the box open. Patrick and his friends soon took the magazines away from her but this find did provide Daphne with a brief reputation, a bit of status. She’d got the boys something they wanted.

They had all run back to the creek together, Daphne in the lead, and when they shoved her aside and knelt down to grab at the soggy