A Boy of Good Breeding Read online

  ALSO BY MIRIAM TOEWS

  Summer of My Amazing Luck

  Swing Low

  A Complicated Kindness

  For Neal

  one

  Algren was Canada’s smallest town. It really was. Canada’s Smallest Town. It said so on a big old billboard right outside the town limits and Knute had checked with one of those government offices in the blue pages and they said fifteen hundred is what you need for a town. And that’s what Algren had. If it had one less it would be a village and if it had just one more it would be a bigger town. Like all the rest of the small towns. Being the smallest was its claim to fame.

  Knute had come to Algren, from the city of Winnipeg, to look after her dad who’d had a heart attack. And to relieve her mom who said if she spent one more day in the house she’d go insane.

  She was twenty-four years old. Her mother, Dory, had intended her name to be pronounced “Noot uh,” but nobody got it so it became just Knute, like “Noot.” Even her mom had given up on the “uh” part but did from time to time call her Knutie or sometimes, and she hated this, Knuter.

  Knute had a daughter, Summer Feelin’, and Summer Feelin’ had a strange way of shaking when she was excited. She flapped her arms, and her fingers moved quickly as though she were typing to save her life, and sometimes her head went back and her mouth opened wide and sounds like aaah and uh-uh-uh came out of it.

  When she first started doing it, Knute thought it was cute. Summer Feelin’ looked like she’d lift right off the ground. But then Knute started worrying about it and decided to take her to a specialist, a pediatric neurologist. He did a number of tests, including an encephalogram. Summer Feelin’ liked the wires and enjoyed the attention but told the doctor that flapping was just something she was born to do.

  Eventually after all the results came in and the charts had been read and analyzed, he agreed with her. She was born to flap. There was no sign of strange electrical activity in her brain, no reason to do a CAT scan, and all accounts of her birth indicated no trauma had occurred, nothing untoward as she had made her way through Knute’s birth canal and into this world.

  Every night Knute lay down with Summer Feelin’. That was the time S.F. told Knute stories and let her in on her big plans and Knute could feel her daughter’s body tremble with excitement. It quivered. It shook. It was out of her control. Knute would hold Summer Feelin’ until she stopped shaking, maybe a twitch or two or a shudder, and fell asleep. The specialist said S.F.’s condition, which wasn’t really a condition, was very rare but nothing to worry about. Then he’d added, in a thoughtful way, that the condition or lack of condition might be the precipitator to that rare phenomenon known as spontaneous combustion. So Knute worried, from time to time, about S.F. bursting into flames for no apparent reason. And that was the type of concern she couldn’t really explain to people, even close friends, without them asking her if she needed a nap or what she’d been reading lately or just plain laughing at her.

  March was the month that Knute and Summer Feelin’ arrived in Algren. Tom had had a heart attack (or his heart attack, as Dory called it) in December. He’d been putting up the last decorations on the tree and BAM, it happened. He fell over, and because he was sort of clutching at the tree it fell on top of him. Ten days later, in the sterile intensive care ward of the hospital, nurses were still finding tiny pine needles in his hair and in the many creases of his skin. He picked up a nasty infection called septicemia in the hospital and, as a result, his lungs malfunctioned and he was put on a respirator. Of course, he couldn’t talk, but in his more lucid, pain-free moments he could write. Sort of. All he ever wrote, in a barely legible scrawl either stretched out over the whole page or sometimes scrunched up in the bottom corner, was “How is the tree?” Or “Is the tree okay?” Or “Is the tree up?” Or “I’m sorry about the tree.”

  One day in the hospital Dory told him, “Tom, it’s Christmas Day today. Merry Christmas, sweetheart.”

  His eyes were closed but he squeezed her hand. She said, “Do you remember Christmas, darling?”

  And he opened his eyes and looked up at her and shook his head. Yet the next day, again, he wrote about the tree. He couldn’t remember Christmas, but he knew a tree should, for some reason, be erected in his living room.

  Gradually he could remember a bit more and he could spell “world” backwards and count by sevens and all those things they’d asked him to do in the hospital when he was off the respirator and out of intensive care, but still he had a strange scattered memory, like, for instance, he knew he must, absolutely must, shave every morning, but he was unsure why. He reminded Dory to check the battery in the smoke detector, but when she said, “Oh, Tom, what’s the worst that can happen if our battery is dead for a day or two?” he didn’t have an answer. So he was caught in a bind where he was committed to doing what he’d always done but he couldn’t remember why he was doing it. His life, some might have said, had no purpose.

  Neither did Knute’s, really. Summer Feelin’ was in a day care that she hated and Knute was working full time as a hostess in a busy downtown restaurant where everybody was used to seating themselves. She wasn’t aggressive enough to say, “Hey, can’t you read the sign? It says ‘wait to be seated,’” and so, pretty much, she just stood there all day smiling and feeling stupid. From time to time she moved the sign right in front of the door, but people would walk into it and then move it back out of their way. Sometimes the waitresses got mad at her because she wasn’t seating anybody in their sections or because everybody was sitting in their section and they were run off their feet trying to keep up with the orders. Then, for a while, Knute would try to keep people from walking past her and she’d say things like, “Please follow me,” or “A table will be ready in a minute,” or “How many of you are there?” Usually there would be two and when she asked how many of them there were, they’d look at each other like she was nuts, then they’d hold up two fingers or point at each other and say, “one, two,” in a loud voice.

  “Two!” Knute would say, “okay, two, hmmm … two, you say,” like she was trying to figure out how to seat twelve. Then she’d meander around and around the restaurant with them behind her, suggesting possible tables, and she’d say, “Oh no, I think, well, no, well, yes, okay, sure, right here is fine. Wherever you want, really, I guess.”

  Her boss’s wife and all the waitresses and the dishwasher and the two cooks kept telling him to fire her, but her boss kept giving her more chances. He told Knute she’d get the hang of it in a while, just get in their faces and make them wait. “They’re like pigs at the trough,” he said. “You gotta keep ’em under control.”

  On her first day Knute had actually managed to lead an old couple to a table. But somehow they got their wires crossed, and Knute pulled a chair away from the table just as the man was going to sit on it. In slow motion he fell to the ground while Knute and his wife stared, horrified. As he fell, he knocked over the fake flower arrangement and the vase shattered.

  Knute’s boss came running out and picked the old man up, cleaned up the glass and told them lunch was on the house. Then he took Knute into the kitchen, made her a salami sandwich on a bagel, sat her down on a lettuce crate and told her not to worry, not to worry, this was her first day, she’d work out the kinks. But she never did. Anyway, it was a lot better than pumping gas. The one time Knute tried that she accidentally filled up a motor home with gas—not the gas tank, but the interior of the motor home itself. She had stuck the nozzle into the water-spout hole instead of the gas tank hole. The woman driving the van hadn’t noticed until she lit up a cigarette and her motor home exploded, partially, and her leg ended up needing plastic surgery. Her husband sued the gas station and won a
bunch of money, of course. Knute was let go and told, by her supervisor, that she should get tested for brain damage.

  On her way home from the restaurant, Knute would pick up Summer Feelin’ and listen to her tell lies about the day care. How Esther, one of the workers, had punched her six times in the face, how Justin, one of the twins, had made her put her tongue on the cold swing set and it had stuck and they left her out there all alone all day, how a terrible man with purple skin and horse feet had come and killed seven of the kids.

  “Summer Feelin’,” Knute would say, “I know how much you hate it, but for now you have to try to find something good about it. It can’t be that bad.”

  Knute was tired from standing around stupidly all day. But she felt she had to make it up to Summer Feelin’, so for an hour or two before bedtime the two of them would play in the park or get an ice cream, maybe rent a movie or walk to the library. And that wore Knute out even more. Her favourite days were when Summer Feelin’ would relax and they could just sit at their little table and talk. Summer Feelin’ would tell her funny stories and shake with excitement and then, in the evening, they’d curl up together with Summer Feelin’s soft head under Knute’s chin. Knute would try not to fall asleep because that would mean that was it, the day. If she didn’t fall asleep she’d get up very quietly and make herself a cup of coffee and phone Dory, collect, or her buddy Marilyn, who just lived a couple of blocks away but had a kid and so was housebound like her in the evenings. Sometimes Marilyn and Knute watched TV together over the phone.

  When Dory called and suggested Knute and Summer Feelin’ come back to Algren and live with her and Tom for a while, Knute felt like someone had just injected her with a warm, fast-acting tranquilizer. It felt like she had just put her head on a soft feather pillow and been told to go to sleep, everything would be fine. Dory made it sound like she needed Knute desperately to help with Tom, to protect her sanity, and it’s true she did. But Dory also had a sense that Knute was tired, really tired. That all she was doing was spinning her wheels. It took Knute about fifteen minutes to quit her job, cancel Summer Feelin’s spot at the day care, tell her landlord she was moving, and pack their stuff. When she told Summer Feelin’ that she could kiss her awful day care good-bye, she flapped like crazy, and Knute had to put her in a nice, warm bath to calm her down. She told Marilyn she was going to her mom and dad’s for a while and Marilyn asked if she could go, too. The next day Summer Feelin’ and Knute were on the road.

  Not for long, though, because Algren was only about forty miles away from Winnipeg. Knute and Summer Feelin’ peered out the car windows at the clumps of dirt and piles of melting snow and S.F. said it reminded her of the moon.

  When they got to the outskirts of Algren, which was really the same thing as the town, they saw Hosea Funk, the mayor, standing in a ditch of water with hip waders, gazing soulfully at the billboard that said, Welcome to Algren, Canada’s Smallest Town. Of course there’s not a lot to be done when people die or when they’re born. They come and go. They move away. They disappear. They reappear. But more or less, give or take a person or two, Algren was the reigning champ of small towns. Well, there was another famous thing about Algren but it wasn’t as impressive (if you can call being a town whose population consistently hovers around fifteen hundred people impressive): Algren was also the original home of the Algren cockroach. The Algren cockroach was one of only three types of North American cockroaches. Apparently it was first brought to Algren on a plant or a sack of potatoes or something a hundred years ago from Europe and the rest was history. In the encyclopedia under “cockroach” it listed the Algren cockroach and mentioned Algren as a small town in southern Manitoba. No mention of its being the smallest town in Canada, much to Hosea Funk’s chagrin.

  As they passed Hosea standing in the ditch, Knute honked the horn and waved. “Who’s that?” S.F. asked.

  “The mayor,” said Knute. “He’s an old friend of Grandpa’s.”

  The horn startled him out of his reverie and Hosea straightened his golf cap and started up the side of his ditch. He didn’t wave back. He tugged for a second at the front of his jacket and then nodded his head, once. That’s how the men in Algren greeted everyone, friend or foe.

  As a kid Hosea Funk would say, “okay … okay … okay …” before leaving the house to walk to school, just sorting it out in his head and coming to terms with it. In the playground and at the skating rink he was very cautious. He would creep around the rink clinging to the boards, not caring what the other boys and girls thought. He was keeping himself alive, saving himself for something big. He wanted to make sure he was okay down the road because he knew he had things to do. And because he was all that his mother had.

  Hosea Funk was born in the middle of a heat wave on June 11, 1943, in a machinery shed belonging to his mother’s parents. The shed was long gone by now and in its place was a large rectangular-shaped patch of dead grass, discoloured and flattened and strewn with rocks and scraps of metal. Euphemia was eighteen years old when Hosea was born and sure her father would kill her, quite literally, if he found out she had had a baby. Getting pregnant in September was a lucky thing for her because all winter she was able to hide her body away in big coats and sweaters. But it was a good thing that Hosea was born when he was because if she’d had to have worn that huge woollen coat a day longer in that heat wave, she would have died for sure. As it was, her parents were so concerned about her health, thinking she must be very ill to need so many clothes in that heat, that they forbade her to leave the house and had a neighbour or a relative watching her just about every minute of the day. Getting to the machine shed to have her baby had not been easy.

  Euphemia had had nothing to prepare her for Hosea’s birth. Well, almost nothing. Once, as a girl, she had wandered into the barn where her father was helping a mare give birth to her foal. Just about his entire right arm was stuck inside the horse. His left arm he used to brace himself against the horse’s buttocks. The mare was kicking him and screeching and her father was purple in the face, cursing the horse and the reluctant foal. Euphemia stood and stared in horror. Would it be possible to stick her own arm inside herself and pull the baby out? There was nobody else to help her, after all. Hadn’t some of her father’s mares given birth without any help? And hadn’t she heard her friends talking about walking out to the field and finding a new calf or piglet or whatever happily sucking milk from its mother and nobody had even known the cow or the sow was pregnant? So, it could be done, Euphemia thought.

  Euphemia lay in her bed, in the heat, in her sweaters and coats. She stared at the dark wood and flowered wallpaper of her bedroom. She could smell chicken noodle soup. She could hear her brothers hollering in the yard and things clanking. Her sisters had gone to town and her mother was rummaging around downstairs. Things were as they usually were and it all would have been comforting except for the sticky circle of blood staining Euphemia’s cotton underwear. That evening she went into labour.

  The pain had started after supper. By now Euphemia’s meals were being brought to her in bed, to save her strength. How long would this mysterious fever last, anyway? her parents wondered. They asked her if she thought she might be feeling better and if perhaps she could join them at the supper table. But she said no, if anything she was feeling worse and really needed to be alone. One after another, her brothers and sisters came to her room and left again, shrugging their shoulders, going back to their business.

  By nine o’clock the pain was almost unbearable. Euphemia’s lower back, pelvis, stomach, and uterus together had turned into a rigid two-thousand-pound stick of dynamite going off at first intermittently and then continuously. Iron cannonballs were rocketing around inside her body, pounding and bashing, desperate for a way out. If anything, the dull warning pain that preceded each explosion terrified Euphemia the most. She whimpered and moaned. She dug her fingernails into her thighs and almost passed out holding her breath. She cried and prayed to God to help her survive. B
eside her, in another twin bed, lay her younger sister, Minty, still asleep, but tossing and turning a bit more with each of Euphemia’s muffled moans. Euphemia knew that somehow she had to get out of the house.

  By this time it was ten-thirty. Her parents and her other brothers and sisters would be in bed, if not asleep, and if she was stealthy enough she could creep down the hall, down the stairs, and out the back door. If she had time she could make it to the machinery shed.

  Euphemia managed to get out of her bed and tiptoe to the door, hunched over, in agony, in tears, but on her way. Just as she crossed the threshold, her little sister woke up. “Phemie?”

  “Minty,” said Euphemia, “I’m going to the john, go back to sleep. I’m coming right back.”

  But Minty said, “Wait, Phemie, take me with you. I gotta go, too.”

  Oh God, thought Euphemia. If she said no, Minty would start to cry and wake up her mother and her life would be over. But she couldn’t bring her with her. Of course not. Euphemia clutched the door frame, trying not to cry. “Listen, Minty, if you promise to go back to sleep right now, tomorrow morning I will give you the best present in the whole wide world. Okay?”

  Minty stared at Euphemia and asked excitedly, “What is it, what is it, Phemie?”

  Euphemia put her finger to her lips. “Shhh, Minty, it’s the best thing in the world, I told you, but I can’t bring it to you until you go to sleep. Please, Minty?”

  “You promise?” said Minty. “Yes, Minty, yes, I promise.”

  Euphemia made it out of the house. In the darkness she stumbled and lurched, cupping her belly with one hand, in an attempt to keep the baby in, until she could make it to the machine shed, to the little bundle of hay she had tossed in one corner months ago, before being confined to her bedroom. The effort of opening the heavy shed door helped to break her water. Inside the shed, Euphemia ripped off her coat, her two sweaters, her wet woollen leotards, and stained cotton underwear and sank to the floor, naked, on her hands and knees. It was pitch-black inside the shed. Euphemia, her face twisted sideways on the cement floor, screamed into the darkness, and Hosea Funk was born.