Of course, now, with Tom’s heart attack, the balance might have shifted. Tom was feeling fragile, while Hosea was still running around town taking care of business. Knute thought Tom was kind of uncomfortable with Hosea showing up like that, unannounced. He probably would have liked to have changed out of his polo pajamas at least and maybe shaved. But Hosea always just showed up. Making his rounds, enjoying a cup of coffee, passing the time. He liked to know what was going on in his town. People were used to Hosea dropping by for a visit.
“So, Hose, what are you up to these days?” asked Tom. Knute could hear him from the kitchen.
“Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve got a lot on the go right now. I’ve, uh … well, you could say I’m working on a major project, Tom.”
“Good for you, good for you,” said Tom, and Knute imagined him grimacing, wishing he had a major project besides staying alive, and Hosea tugging, wishing he had something more to say and quickly, too, like a great conversationalist, a real charismatic public figure.
Tom had begun to say something else, though. “Are you ready to divulge the nature of your major project, Hose, or—” But just then, Summer Feelin’ came barrelling in through the front door, made a beeline for Tom’s lap, leapt, and landed square on her target, knocking off Tom’s glasses. Tom let out a big “oooph” and Dory came running from the kitchen thinking it was another heart attack, and Hosea stood there all nervous, tugging, tugging, tugging, until everyone realized what had
happened and they began to laugh and S.F. tried on Tom’s glasses and coffee was served and the conversation turned to gossip and did you know that so-and-so was let go at the bank, after thirty years? No one’s saying why, and did you know that Sheila Whatsername has left her husband and is seeing a therapist in the city, but she looks great, she really does. And Hosea’s major project was forgotten.
At the end of the visit, they all stood clustered around the door for what seemed like hours. This was what Tom and Dory always did with their guests. Knute wondered why Dory didn’t serve another couple rounds of coffee or why they didn’t just sit down there on the floor in the front entrance area. Coats would be done up, then undone slightly, undone completely, sweat would form on the upper lip, the coats would be taken off and slung over their arms, then a hand on the doorknob, the coats would be on again, all the way, then undone an inch, mittens would be slapped together purposefully, then removed, bodies would stand erect, close to the door, then one leg would buckle and they would slouch against the wall. Well, the visitor would say like he or she meant it this time, “I’m outta here,” and then, “Oh! Did I tell you …?”
Summer Feelin’ fell asleep in the hallway on the floor between Dory’s legs.
“Excuse me,” said Knute, “I’m gonna take her to her bed.”
And with that, the three of them, Tom, Dory, and Hosea, began to flutter, and Hosea said, “Okay, yes, the poor kid, here I am keeping her up, keeping you all up, really, I should go.” This time Tom and Dory didn’t say, “Oh, Hosea, there’s no hurry.” Tom reached for the door and opened it, not caring at this point whether he got a chill and risked his life.
But just before Tom could close the door gently on him, Hosea turned around and said, “Say, Knutie, if you need any part-time work while you’re in town, let me know, I may be able
to set you up with something.” And then he was gone. Tom and Dory went running for Tom’s evening medication, and Knute watched through the large picture window in the living room as Hosea walked away, into the night, through the few empty streets of his town, Canada’s smallest.
The baby. Naturally Euphemia had a plan. She had had nine months to figure out elaborate plots, twists and turns, casts of characters, acts of God, all to explain the sudden arrival of this baby. In the end, however, she didn’t use any of her fancy stories to explain the baby. Her family had always shrugged off any changes in their lives. If there was no explanation offered they couldn’t be bothered to hunt it down or make one up. Of course, the mysterious arrival of a baby in the household was not a small deal. But Euphemia decided to take a chance. A chance on simplicity. Instead of coming up with a thousand details, which could be forgotten or repeated in the wrong order and arouse suspicion, she decided to give her family only one.
The beauty of it, too, was that it wasn’t even really a lie.
“I went out late in the evening to use the outhouse and a mysterious man on a horse gave me his baby. All he said was ‘Thank-you.’ Then he was gone.”
Well, that was more or less the situation that had occurred nine months earlier at the harvest dance at the Algren Community Dance Hall.
Euphemia hadn’t planned to abandon herself to lust that evening. And it wasn’t really lust she had abandoned herself to, anyway, but curiosity and maybe a bit of hope that the mysterious stranger might be her ticket off the farm. It was with the same shrug that her family used in almost all situations calling for decision that she allowed herself to be taken by the hand to the edge of the canola field behind the dance hall.
Euphemia was the last, well, maybe not the very last, girl in the area anyone would have called immoral. She did her chores, obeyed her parents, had lots of friends, and was pretty, a good runner, and playful. She won spelling bees and quilting bees, and had never even had a boyfriend in her life. In the forties girls like Euphemia Funk did not allow themselves to be led by the hand to dark fields behind dance halls.
She had stepped outside to use the outhouse. The little building was a ways from the dance hall, down a dirt path, towards the canola field. The stranger had been leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette, and before she could even get to the outhouse, he had wandered over to her and put out his hand. She knew he had been at the dance. She and her friends had seen him and wondered who he was. Probably a relative of someone around there or a farm hand. He had nice eyes and a beautifully shaped back, they thought. “It tapers, it really does,” said Euphemia’s friend Lou. And he obviously bought his shoes in the city. No, he couldn’t have been a farm hand. Not with shoes like that. Euphemia had seen him talking to Leander Hamm, so maybe he was a horse breeder or a horse buyer or maybe he owned racehorses in America. But he looked so young, just a few years older than she was. Euphemia liked the way his thighs filled out the tops of his pants and the way his legs were shaped, vaguely, like parentheses. There was a bit of a curl to his hair at the bottom and it was longer than the hair of any of the boys from around there. Euphemia liked those curls, at the bottom, the ones that rested against his neck.
She just hadn’t said no. Nobody had come along to discover them. The night was very dark and warm. The stranger was handsome and sure of himself. Euphemia couldn’t think of any reason not to take his hand. She had tried to come up with a reason, but couldn’t. Afterwards, he retied the bow in Euphemia’s hair and wiped the grass and leaves off of her skirt.
It had hurt, but she hadn’t cried. She hadn’t made a sound. And neither had he. She had kept one hand cupped firmly around the curls on his neck and her other hand beside her, on the ground. Afterwards they sat together, and Euphemia said, “well,” and turned and smiled at him. And the stranger smiled back and squeezed her hand and said, “Thank-you.” Then he walked over to where his horse was tied up, just on the other side of the dance hall, and rode away.
Euphemia hadn’t told a soul about what happened. She hadn’t felt a second of guilt. She was thrilled with herself.
“He said ‘Thank-you,’ and that’s all, that was it?” asked Euphemia’s mother, as she and Euphemia and Euphemia’s brothers and sisters peered down at the baby, now resting in the Funks’ old cradle.
“Yes, and then he rode away on his horse.” Euphemia couldn’t stop herself from smiling, but as she did so she widened her eyes for effect.
“Hmmmm, very odd. What a peculiar man. The boy is barely a day old, Phemie, are you sure he didn’t say who he was or why he was giving you this child?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Euphemia had successfully been delivered of the baby’s placenta and had taken it and the clothes that had blood on them and buried them behind the machine shed. With trembling fingers she had tied a knot in the baby’s umbilical cord and wrapped him in one of the sweaters she had been wearing just before he was born. The baby hadn’t cried, not really. He had made a few creaking sounds, but nothing that could be called a real wail. By the light of the barn lantern, Euphemia saw the baby open one eye. The other wouldn’t open for a few hours. The fingers on his hands moved almost constantly and his head, too, swivelled from left to right, back and forth, towards the lantern’s light and away again.
Euphemia put her face to his. She breathed on him and felt his tiny puff of breath in return. She put her index finger against his lips and he tried for a moment to get it into his mouth. She moved her lips and her cheek against his damp head and prayed to God to keep him from all harm. Still, she was not afraid. She would protect him. At the time Euphemia hadn’t noticed the baby’s black hair curl on his neck and hadn’t thought for a second about the stranger, the baby’s father, at the dance hall. For the second time in a year she was thrilled with herself.
Euphemia knew that she could not breastfeed the baby. She would have to find a way to wrap her breasts and get rid of her milk. The postpartum bleeding could be explained as normal menstrual blood, if it was explained at all. Bleeding, women’s bleeding, was another thing the Funk family shrugged off as one of those things, which it was.
For now she would wrap her breasts in strips of gunny sack and cotton and pray to God they wouldn’t start to leak as she sat at the supper table with her family. She would, inconspicuously, drink a lot of black currant tea and if the pressure grew too great, she would squeeze the milk out herself in the john. Maybe she could even save some of it and mix it in with the formula when nobody was looking. Over time she would squeeze out less and less milk as though she were weaning a baby. Euphemia hoped her breasts could be fooled. When Flora Marsden’s baby was born dead, she had drunk huge amounts of black currant tea to stem the flow of her milk. Euphemia remembered her mother talking about it to a friend of hers. Her mother and her mother’s friend had been outraged that a neighbour of Flora’s had suggested she hire herself out as a wet nurse to mothers too busy farming to feed their babies. “I know I was never too busy to feed my own baby, that’s for sure,” Euphemia’s mother had said in a rather convoluted, self-serving indictment of Flora’s neighbour.
“Well, he’ll need a name, won’t he, Phemie?” asked Minty. The sun was coming up now. Euphemia’s mother went to the china cabinet and came back to the cradle with the black Bible. She yanked a bobby pin from her hair and stuck it into the shiny pages of the big book. It opened at Hosea. “There,” she shrugged, “Welcome to the world, Hosea.” And she stuck the bobby pin back into her hair.
Hosea Funk lay in his bed in his house on First Street, watching the sun come up over Algren. Thank God that health food store hadn’t worked out, he thought. If the couple running it hadn’t packed up their rice cakes and moved back to Vancouver Island last week, the recent arrival of Knute and her daughter would have put Algren’s population at fifteen hundred and two, and that would have been two too many. Hosea closed his eyes and thought about his letter, the one from the Prime Minister. Well, okay, it wasn’t a personal letter, it was a form letter, but Hosea’s name was on it, and so was a photocopied signature of the Prime Minister’s name, John Baert.
The Prime Minister had promised to visit Canada’s smallest town on July first, and Algren, the letter had noted, was one of the preliminary qualifiers in the contest. Everybody in Algren knew it had been short-listed, why wouldn’t it be? After all, check out the sign on the edge of town. Even the Winnipeg daily paper had mentioned, in one line, on a back page, that Algren had been picked as a nominee for the Prime Minister’s visit. But the people in Algren went about their business with very little thought of July first, other than looking forward to the holiday from work, and the rides and the fireworks. If Algren had the smallest population at the time of the count, great. If not, who really cared? After all, they thought, the Prime Minister had made promises before. Of course, they
knew Hosea Funk was extremely proud of Algren’s smallest-town status, he was proud of everything about Algren. Good for him, they thought, usually with a smile or a raised eyebrow. Might as well be. But nobody in Algren knew what Hosea knew, or what he thought he knew, or just how determined he was to be the winner.
Hosea wanted to relax, to savour the early morning calm, to stretch out in bed, enjoy his nakedness, and happily welcome the new day. A small part of him wished his mornings resembled those in the orange juice commercials where healthy clean families bustle around making lunches and checking busy schedules, kissing and hugging and wishing each other well. But he was alone. And he hated orange juice. It stung his throat.
So Hosea lay quietly in his huge bed. For the last year or so he had been working on his panic attacks. Mornings were the worst time for them. And for heart attacks. His buddy Tom had had his in the morning just about an hour after waking up. Hosea suspected, however, that his determination to stay calm was a bit like overeating to stay thin and so he tried not to think about it too much. Instead he tried to relax his entire body starting from his toes and working his way to the top of his head. The alarm on his clock radio came on, as usual, ten minutes after he woke. It was set to a country station, and Emmylou Harris was wailing away, Heaven only knows just why lovin’ you would make me cry, and Hosea thought, Ah Emmylou Harris, a voice as pure as the driven snow, a real class act, all that hair and those cowboy boots with the hand-painted roses …
Hosea lay naked in his bed and whispered Emmylou, Emmylou a few times and closed his eyes and mumbled along with her, Heaven only ever sees why love’s made a fool of me, I guess that’s how it’s meant to be … He thought of Lorna and the last time they’d made love and then tallied up the days, and the weeks. Almost two months.