A Bird in the House Read online

  As we were going down the back stairs, we heard the front door open, and Grandfather’s voice saying, “Well now, well now –” and then another voice. Aunt Edna gasped.

  “Don’t tell me. Oh heavenly days, it is Uncle Dan. Now all I need is somebody from the government coming and telling me I owe income tax.”

  “I thought you liked Uncle Dan,” I said curiously.

  “I do,” Aunt Edna said, “but it’s not a question of whether you like a person or not.”

  We emerged into the kitchen. My mother had stopped carving the pork and was standing with the silver knife in her hand, motionless.

  “He’s certainly had a few, judging from his voice,” she said. “Why on earth does he do it? He knows perfectly well how much it upsets Mother.”

  “One of these days Father is going to tell him to get out,” Aunt Edna said. “But I’d kind of hate to see that happen, wouldn’t you?”

  “He’ll never do that. Blood is thicker than water, as you may have heard Father mention a million times.”

  “That’s not why he lets him come around,” Aunt Edna said. “Seeing Uncle Dan reminds him how well he’s done himself, that’s all. Lord, I must stop this – I’m getting meaner every day.”

  “Well, I suppose we’d better go and say hello to the old fraud,” my mother said. “He can have Ewen’s place at the table.”

  Uncle Dan was Grandfather’s brother, but he was not upright. He had a farm in the South Wachakwa Valley, but he never planted any crops. He raised horses, and spent most of his time travelling around the country, selling them. At least, he was supposed to be selling them, but Aunt Edna said he had horse-trading in his blood and couldn’t resist swapping, so he usually came back to Manawaka with the same number of horses he had started out with, only they were different horses, and no money. He had never married. I liked him because he always carried brown hot-tasting humbugs in his pockets, usually covered with navy fluff from his coat, and he sang Irish songs. I liked him only when none of my friends were around to see, however. In the presence of the other kids, he embarrassed me. He was older than Grandfather, and he did not keep himself very clean. His serge trousers were polka-dotted with spilled food, and when his nose ran, he wiped it with a sweeping motion of his claw hand. He never cleaned his fingernails, although sometimes he brought out his jackknife and pared them, dropping the shavings on Grandmother’s polished hardwood floor and causing her to utter the only phrase of protest she knew – “Now Dan, now Dan –” Sometimes when I was downtown with him he walked and talked waveringly, and bought an Eskimo Pie for me and a packet of Sen-Sen for himself, and I was not meant to know why, but naturally I did, having among my friends several whose fathers or uncles were said to be downright no-good.

  Uncle Dan was smaller than Grandfather, but his eyes were the same blue. They bore a vastly different expression, however. Uncle Dan’s eyes hardly ever stopped laughing.

  “Well, Dan, you’re back,” Grandfather said.

  “I’m bad, I’m back,” Uncle Dan carolled. “Just got the niftiest black two-year-old you ever seen. Got him from old Burnside, over at Freehold. Swapped him that grey gelding of mine.”

  “No cash, I’ll wager,” Grandfather said.

  “Well, now, Timothy, how’ve you been?” Uncle Dan cried, cannily changing the subject. “You’re looking dandy.”

  “I’m well enough,” Grandfather said. “Minding my own business. I sold the store, Dan.”

  “Yeh, you done that before I went away. Taking life easy, eh?”

  Under her breath, Aunt Edna said, “Red rag to a bull –” and my mother said, “Shush.”

  “I keep busy,” Grandfather said furiously. “Plenty to do around here, you know. Got two loads of poplar last week, and I’m splitting them for kindling. A man’s got to keep busy. I got no use for them fellows who just sit around.”

  “Well, well, you’ll have the biggest woodpile in Manawaka, I wouldn’t doubt it for a second,” Uncle Dan said in gay malice. “By jiminy, here’s Vanessa. You’ve grown, macushla, and so you have, to be sure.”

  “Oh Glory,” said Aunt Edna in a low voice. “Macushla, indeed.”

  “And Beth and Edna –” Uncle Dan cried. “By the Lord Harry, girls, you’re getting more beautiful with each passing day!”

  My mother, stifling a laugh, held out a hand. “Good to see you, Uncle Dan. We’re just going to have dinner. Do you want to go up and wash?”

  “In a minute. Where’s Agnes?”

  Grandmother had not come out into the front hall. She still sat in the living room. The Book was on her knee, but she was not reading. Uncle Dan swept her an unsteady bow.

  “Hello, Dan,” she said. Then, apparently without effort, as though she refused to set bounds to her courtesy, “It’s nice to have you with us.”

  Uncle Dan’s eyes stopped smiling and grew moist with self-sorrow. “Ah, no, it’s you that’s the nice one, to be sure, opening your door to an old man.”

  His voice quavered; he looked as though he might faint with sheer fragility.

  “If he goes on like that,” Aunt Edna whispered angrily, but unable to suppress a small belch of acid mirth, “I’m walking out, so help me.”

  “He’ll be all right once he’s had some food,” my mother said.

  Dinner was very entertaining, with Uncle Dan tucking his serviette in at his chin, and spilling gravy on the clean damask cloth, and burping openly and then saying, “Par’n me, as the fella says.” He told jokes of the kind I was not supposed to understand and which in fact I did not understand but always pretended I had, by rude guffaws for which I was reproached. Grandfather kept saying, “Mind your language, Dan,” or “Mind your elbow – that water tumbler’s going over – there, what did I tell you?” My mother and Aunt Edna kept their heads down and ate hurriedly. After dinner, Grandfather and Uncle Dan settled down side by side on the chesterfield, while Grandmother sat in her golden-oak armchair. Uncle Dan drew out his pipe and the oilcloth roll of tobacco. Aunt Edna, gathering up the dishes, glanced into the living room and began muttering.

  “That damn pipe of his. It reeks to high heaven.”

  “Grandfather never lets anyone else smoke,” I said, “so why Uncle Dan?”

  “Don’t ask me.” Aunt Edna shrugged. “It’s one of life’s mysteries. Maybe it’s his present to Uncle Dan – the booby prize.”

  I went into the living room to wait until the dishes were stacked and ready to begin drying. Grandfather and Uncle Dan were chatting, after their fashion.

  “We’re neither of us as young as we used to be, Dan,” said Grandfather, who specialized in clear but gloomy statements of this kind.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Uncle Dan replied, sucking at his pipe and sending up grey clouds like smoke signals. “I feel pretty near as good as ever.”

  “You don’t look it,” Grandfather said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I said you don’t look it. You’re getting hard of hearing, Dan.”

  Uncle Dan puffed silently for a moment. Then, with deliberation, he removed the pipe from between his yellowed teeth and held it in his hands, stroking the briar bowl.

  “Well, sir, maybe you’re right, at that,” he said reflectively. “I used to be able to hear a fly when he walked up the wall, but now I can only hear him when he rustles his wings.”

  I snickered, and Uncle Dan looked down at the footstool where I was perched.

  “There’s my girl,” he said. “What about a song, to while the happy hours away?”

  Not waiting for my agreement, he struck up at once, in a reedy old-man’s voice, sometimes going off key, but sprightly nonetheless, tapping out the rhythm with one foot.

  With the tootle of the flute and twiddle of the fiddle,

  A-twirlin’ in the middle like a herring on a griddle,

  Up, down, hands around, crossing to the wall,

  Oh, hadn’t we the gaiety at Phil the Fluter’s Ball!

  I clapped,
feeling traitorous, not daring to look at either of my grandparents. Uncle Dan, encouraged, sang “MacNamara’s Band,” in which he always put himself instead of MacNamara.

  Oh, me name is Danny Connor, I’m the leader of the

  band,

  Although we’re few in number, we’re the finest in the

  land –

  He sang it very Irish, saying “foinest,” and when he got to the line “And when we play at funerals we play the best of all,” he winked at me and I winked back.

  “Sing with me,” he said, before the next song, but I shook my head. I could never sing in front of anybody, for I always thought I might sound foolish; and I could not bear to be laughed at.

  Uncle Dan kept right on, and now he was really enjoying himself. He sang “Nell Flaherty’s Drake” with great vigour, especially the part about the curse that’s laid on the person who stole and ate the bird.

  May his pig never grunt,

  May his cat never hunt,

  May a ghost ever haunt him at dead of the night,

  May his hens never lay,

  May his horse never neigh,

  May his goat fly away like an old paper kite –

  All at once Grandfather slapped his hand down hard on the arm of the chesterfield, making it wheeze.

  “That’s enough, now,” he said.

  Uncle Dan continued his singing.

  “Enough!” Grandfather shouted. “Are you stone deaf, man?”

  Uncle Dan stopped, looking perplexed.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Sunday wouldn’t make no difference to you,” Grandfather said, “but you needn’t forget where you are.”

  “Well, now, Timothy,” Uncle Dan said, “you needn’t be like that about it.”

  “I’ll be any way I please, in my own house,” Grandfather said.

  I judged this to be the right moment for me to go to the kitchen and help with the dishes. Now the two old men would sit and argue, and Grandmother would have to listen to the thing that distressed her more than anything in this world – a scene, a disagreement in the family. I knew quite well what would happen. Grandmother would remain as outwardly placid as ever, but later in the evening she would go out to the kitchen and call Aunt Edna and say, “I wonder if you would have an aspirin handy, pet? I’ve a little headache.” When she had gone back to the living room, Aunt Edna would say to no one in particular, “She’s been sitting there for hours with a splitting head, I don’t doubt.” And then, if I was in luck, my aunt would turn to me and say, “C’mon, kiddo, let’s drown our sorrows – what do you say to some fudge?”

  The dishes had been started. Aunt Edna handed me a tea-towel.

  “Let’s not break our necks over them, eh?” she said, and I knew she wanted to dawdle so she would not have to go back into the living room. But we did not dawdle, for my mother was a fast washer and we had to keep up with her.

  “Was Uncle Dan born in Ireland?” I asked, conversationally.

  My mother and Aunt Edna both laughed.

  “Mercy, no,” Aunt Edna said. “The closest he ever got to Ireland was the vaudeville shows at the old Roxy – it burned down before you were born. He was born in Ontario, just like Grandfather. The way Uncle Dan talks isn’t Irish – it’s stage Irish. He’s got it all down pat. Macushla. Begorra. He even sings rebel songs, and he a Protestant. It makes no earthly difference to him. He’s phoney as a three-dollar bill. I really wonder why I like him so much.”

  “You always told me I was half Irish,” I said reproachfully to my mother.

  “Well, you are,” she replied. “You’re Scottish on your father’s side. You take after the MacLeods as much as the Connors. You’ve got your father’s reflectiveness. And in looks, you’ve got your Grandfather MacLeod’s hands and ears –”

  She looked at me, as though to make certain that these borrowed appendages were still there. The idea of inherited characteristics had always seemed odd to me, and when I was younger, I had thought that my Grandfather MacLeod, who died a year after I was born, must have spent the last twelve months of his life deaf and handless.

  “You’re Irish on my side,” my mother continued. “Your grandfather’s parents were born there. Do you remember Grandma Connor, Edna? She lived with us for the last few years before she died.”

  “Only vaguely,” Aunt Edna said. “What was she like?”

  “Oh, let’s see – she was a tiny little woman with a face like a falcon, as I recall, kind of fiercely handsome. Father looks quite a bit like her. She used to go out each year to the Orangemen’s parade, and stand there on Main, cheering and bawling her eyes out.”

  “My Lord,” Aunt Edna said. “What did Father think of that?”

  “He was mortified,” my mother said. “Wouldn’t you be? There was this small ferocious old lady, making a regular spectacle of herself. She always wore a tight lace cap on her head. She didn’t have any hair.”

  “What?” Aunt Edna and I cried at the same time, delighted and horrified.

  My mother nodded. “It’s quite true. She’d had some sickness and all her hair fell out. She was bald as a peeled onion.”

  We were still laughing when we heard the shouting from the living room. I found it hard to switch mood suddenly, and could not take the raised voices seriously. Tittering, I nudged my mother, wanting the shared hilarity to continue. She did not respond, and when I looked up at her, I saw her face was rigid and apprehensive. The joke was over as though it had never been. My mother and my aunt went reluctantly into the living room, and I followed.

  “What beats me,” Grandfather was saying, “is how you’d the nerve to ask. Easy come, easy go – that’s what you think. It never come easy to me, and it’s not going easy, neither!”

  “Steady, Timothy,” Uncle Dan said, as though he were speaking to a horse that had turned mean. “Steady, boyo.”

  “Steady, nothing. You think because I sold the store that I’ve got a fortune stowed away. Well, I’ve not. And what I’ve got, I’m hanging on to. The taxes on this house alone – it don’t bear thinking about. Who’s to look after things, if I don’t? Here’s Edna, keeps claiming she can’t get work. And Beth and Ewen, having another baby they’ve no business to be having if Ewen can’t even get people to pay their doctor bills. I’d make them pay up, I’ll tell the world, either that or I’d stay away from the woman entirely –”

  “Oh God –” my mother said, her face white.

  “Steady,” Aunt Edna said, grasping her by the arm. “And now you,” Grandfather went on. “All of you, picking away, picking away, wanting something for nothing. I never got it for nothing. None of you know that. Not one of you knows it.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Uncle Dan protested. “I never said give, I said lend. You’d have the horses for security. You done it before, Tim.”

  “The more fool I, then,” Grandfather retorted. “I hoped you’d make a go of things. But no. It all went up in smoke or down in booze.”

  “That ain’t true!” Uncle Dan said.

  But there was something feeble about his voice. And I realised that it was true, what Grandfather had said.

  “No use in talking,” Grandfather said. “You can get out right now.”

  In the long silence, I looked at my grandfather’s face. He looked surprised, as though he could hardly believe he had spoken the words. Then his expression altered, grew set and stubborn.

  “I will,” Uncle Dan said slowly, “and I’ll not be coming back.”

  “So much the better,” Grandfather said.

  Uncle Dan rose, walked out to the hall alone, and began putting on his coat.

  “We can’t let him go like that,” Aunt Edna whispered. “He’s got no one –”

  “Who’s going to argue it?” my mother replied bitterly.

  The front door closed behind Uncle Dan, and everyone in the house stood quite still. Then a very unexpected thing happened.

  “Timothy,” Grandmother said, “you’d best go after
him.”

  Grandfather swung around and stared at her.

  “You’re out of your mind,” he said.

  “You’d best go now,” Grandmother said firmly, “before he gets too far.”

  For a moment I thought Grandfather was going to rage again, but he did not. He looked taken aback, almost stunned.

  “You never liked his ways, Agnes,” he said.

  Grandmother did not reply. She made a slight gesture towards the door, and that was all. How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle. The line slid stealthily into my mind, and I felt a surge of spiteful joy at it. Then I looked again at my grandfather’s face, and saw there such a bleak bewilderment that I could feel only shame and sadness. His eyes chanced upon me, and when he spoke it was to me, as though he could not speak directly to any of the adults in that room.

  “When he gets too old to look after himself, it’ll be me that pays to have him kept in a home. It’s not fair, Vanessa. It’s not fair.”

  He was right. It was not fair. Even I could see that. Yet I veered sharply away from his touch, and that was probably not fair, either. I wanted only to be by myself, with no one else around.

  Grandfather turned and looked at Grandmother.

  “I never thought to hear you take his part,” he said. Then he walked outside and we heard his flat unemphatic voice, speaking Uncle Dan’s name.

  When Uncle Dan and Grandfather had come back to the living room, the three old people settled down once more and sat silently in the blue-grey light of the spring evening, the lamps not flicked on yet nor the shades drawn. I went upstairs with my mother and Aunt Edna. The air in the bedroom was still sweet and heavy with Attar of Roses.

  “Mercy, do I ever need a cigarette,” Aunt Edna said.

  “If I didn’t know Mother better, I’d say it was revenge,” my mother said.

  “Know her? What makes you think you know her? Maybe it was just that.”

  “Maybe,” my mother said, “but I’d hate to think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” my aunt said. “I’d cheer like sixty.”

  “Anyway, there’s more to it than that,” my mother said. “We always just naturally assumed she loathed the sight of Uncle Dan, but she said to me once, ‘Whatever his faults, he’s a cheerful soul, Beth, always remember that.’ I’d forgotten until now.”