Liberty Street Read online

  FRANCES’S MOTHER DECIDES that they should rent out Uncle Vince’s house, which was tied up in what her parents called probate for a long time, and now belongs to them. It’s had a For Sale sign in front of it for months, but no one wants to buy it, perhaps because it’s still the only house on the street—a poor advertisement for a subdivision. Their first renter is the new bank manager, but he doesn’t like the noise from the freight trains passing in the middle of the night and moves out almost soon as he’s moved in. After that, there’s a year of single male renters who work in the bush or the lumber mill. They pay their rent, but they have a tendency to leave cigarette burns on the windowsills and holes in the plaster when they move out. Frances’s mother gets good at patching holes with plaster and doing spot paint touch-ups.

  One Saturday afternoon in August, Frances and her father leave her mother at the house fixing holes for the next renter, and they drive across the tracks to the post office for the mail. On their way back, Frances’s father goes through the town’s one and only stop sign and runs smack into a red truck, and who should get out, hopping mad, but Dooley Sullivan. No one is hurt, but Dooley’s truck got the worst of it, and they have to call the RCMP to come and take their statements for the insurance. Frances’s father pulls his truck over to the curb to wait. He says, “I feel badly about this, Frances. I hear Dooley fixed that old truck up himself.” Then he adds, “He shouldn’t have been driving so fast.”

  Frances hasn’t seen Dooley since he finished grade eight and moved across the schoolyard to the high school, and she watches him as he paces around the street, his red truck stalled in the middle of the intersection. He stops pacing periodically to glower at his hanging front bumper and the truck’s hood, which is popped up and buckled. He’s wearing a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and has a cigarette pack stuck in the roll. He has some kind of oil in his dark hair to keep it slicked back. He doesn’t look like the same boy who jumped out the window.

  It’s hot inside Frances’s father’s truck. The two of them get out to wait on the bench in front of the bank. Frances sits in the shade next to her father and watches Dooley. The memory of him falling through the air outside the bathroom window is vague now. Maybe she’d just imagined that he was close enough she could have touched him.

  Several people have gathered on the sidewalk in front of the bank to watch the action, to stare at Dooley and his truck. One man says, “You could see that coming,” and Frances’s dad says, “Apparently I didn’t.” They laugh, and Dooley sees them and strides to the bench, saying, “You think this is funny, do you?”

  Frances’s father says, “No, Dooley, of course not.”

  Frances slides closer to her father on the bench and wonders whether Dooley remembers her, the girl in the window, the girl under the table. He says to her father, “That’s a new paint job. Candy apple red. You stupid farmers. Don’t you know what a stop sign is?”

  Dooley’s cigarette pack is threatening to fall out of his rolled-up sleeve, and Frances doesn’t know whether to point this out.

  “Candy apple red,” Dooley says again, and then—plop— the cigarette pack lands on the sidewalk, right at Frances’s feet. She picks it up and holds it out to Dooley, but when he goes to snatch it from her, his hand hesitates for a just a second and she thinks, He does remember. Then he takes the pack without saying thank you. He lights a cigarette and strides off again to pace another circle around his truck. He throws back at Frances’s father, “Where the hell did you learn to drive anyway?”

  Where did the old Dooley go? she wonders. The funny one who could make the whole school laugh. Is this what happens when boys go to high school?

  Finally, an RCMP officer comes and takes statements, and after that Frances and her father can leave, but Dooley has to stay and wait for a tow truck. As they get in their truck, Frances hears Dooley say, “You’re going to let him drive away? Don’t you know he’s blind as a bat? Everyone knows that. And he’s got that little girl with him.”

  The policeman says, “You haven’t been drinking, have you, Dooley?”

  Once they’re across the tracks and on their way up Liberty Street, Frances’s father says, “I don’t know what all that candy apple red was about. I suppose he should have painted the truck powder blue and then it wouldn’t have been such a tragedy. Let that be a lesson to him.”

  Frances wonders if Dooley was right—if her father’s bad eyes caused the accident.

  “No need to tell your mother about this,” he says.

  They pick up Frances’s mother at the rental house and she doesn’t notice the damage. When they get back to the farm, Frances’s father right away takes the truck to the shop to bang the dent out of it, but someone phones and tells Alice about the accident, and then she’s the one who’s mad.

  “Anyone can go through a stop sign, Alice,” Frances’s father says.

  When Frances wakes up in the middle of the night, she discovers that she can’t turn her head without it hurting. In the morning, her mother notices and asks her if she has a stiff neck and she says no, but it’s clear she does and her mother gives her a piece of an Aspirin tablet.

  FRANCES STANDS IN the kitchen of Uncle Vince’s house with her father, leaning up against his pant leg, one arm wrapped around him. A man has rented the house, the Indian man who works at the lumberyard—the one who delivered the lumber to Uncle Vince and winked at Frances when he was leaving. There are several coat hooks by the door and his green plaid cap has fallen from one of them to the floor. She stares at the cap, too shy to look at its owner, wondering what it is about Indians that made her mother not want to rent the house to him until Basie convinced her that he was a hard-working man with a steady job.

  Her father says, “Frances, this is Mr. Chance,” and Silas nods to her. He hands her father a white envelope containing cash for the rent. He has a checkerboard on the kitchen table, and when he sees Frances looking at it, he asks her if she knows how to play. She shakes her head and he says, “Don’t they teach checkers at school anymore? I’ll have to show you, then. Which colour, red or black?”

  “Black,” she says.

  “Good choice. Black goes first. You’ll probably beat me.”

  “Next time, Frances,” her father says. “We have to get home now.”

  Then Silas produces a nickel from behind Frances’s ear and gives it to her. A nickel! After that, she’s not shy anymore and she steps away from her father to pick up the green cap and hand it to Silas. He twirls the cap on his finger the same way her father does, round and round like a pinwheel, before he hangs it back on the hook.

  On November 11, there’s a Remembrance Day ceremony in town, at the cenotaph, where the names of the seven local men who were killed in the war are engraved on a brass plaque. Frances and her parents attend because of Uncle Vince. Frances thinks Uncle Vince’s name should be on the plaque because he’s not here to be remembered in person, but her mother says that’s not how it works, and there are rules about these things, and besides, he was in the British army.

  Frances looks through the small crowd to see if any other grade threes are here, and she spies Silas Chance, wearing his war medals.

  “I didn’t know Indians fought in the war,” she says, not being able to put the painted movie Indians on horseback in the same war as marching soldiers in uniforms. When Silas sees her looking at him, he winks. Frances waves then, and her mother notices and grabs her hand and holds on to it.

  There’s a cold wind and the sky is heavy with grey November clouds. A boy from the school band plays a hymn on his trumpet after they read out the names of the men who’d sacrificed their lives for freedom. When the ceremony is over, everyone goes to the hall for coffee, glad to get in out of the cold. Frances stands by her father while he visits with a man she doesn’t know, and when people start lining up for coffee and sweets, he says to Frances, “Be a luv and bring me a piece of cake. And no eating all the frosting on your way back.” She squeezes into the li
ne and loads a paper plate with a big piece of white cake topped with chocolate. She sticks her finger in the chocolate and licks, and then she sees Silas Chance come in the door and stand at the back of the room with his cap in his hand. Instead of taking the cake to her father, she crosses the room to Mr. Chance and holds it out to him.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just takes the plate and nods. Frances holds his cap for him while he eats the cake with a plastic fork. After it’s gone, she thinks he might do the nickel trick again, but he doesn’t. He puts his cap back on, tousles her hair, and leaves. The cold air blows in the door. Frances goes back to the lineup to get another piece of cake for her father.

  A few weeks later, Silas Chance dies. Her parents say he was hit by a car when he was walking on the highway, and that’s all they know. Frances listens to her mother talking on the phone about Silas—“I just can’t fathom what the man was thinking, walking on the highway in the cold and dark; something’s not right about that”—and then the topic changes. To Dooley Sullivan.

  “His poor grandfather,” her mother says. “Tobias Sullivan is not my favourite person, I’ll grant you that, but still. The boy would have ended up in foster care if it weren’t for him. Well, that’s what happens when teenagers mix cars and alcohol. It’s a good thing he did hit that bridge or everyone would be blaming Silas Chance on him. It’s a good thing he has an alibi.”

  After her mother gets off the phone, Frances asks, “What? What about Dooley Sullivan?”

  “He was driving drunk and crashed into a bridge,” her mother says. “A good Samaritan happened along and pulled him out of his truck just before it burst into flames. He’s lucky to be alive. And the Samaritan too.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “No. Now stop thinking about him. Stop thinking about this whole ugly business.”

  Frances wants to know what foster care is, and her mother says never mind. She wants to know if Silas is dead for sure—maybe there’s been a mistake and the man on the highway was someone else.

  Her mother says, “These things happen, don’t they?”

  Frances can’t help it; she starts to cry.

  Her mother says, “What’s this about? You didn’t even know the man. He was the renter.” She goes to put her hand on Frances’s head, but Frances pulls away.

  That afternoon, two RCMP officers come to the farm to ask Frances’s parents some questions, because Silas Chance lived in their house. Then Frances’s father goes away with them, following their police car in his truck, to open the door to the rental house so they can look inside. When her father gets home a few hours later, he says it’s true what they’d heard—that Silas Chance had died as the result of a hit and run and the police were searching for the driver. He looks as though he might be about to say more, but then Frances’s mother looks in her direction and says, “Little pitchers and their ears.”

  After she’s had a bath that night, Frances lies in bed and listens to the murmur of her parents’ voices. She knows they’ll be talking about Silas, and also Dooley. She keeps picturing Silas being hit on the side of the highway, flying through the air and landing in the snow. And then she thinks about Dooley being pulled from his red truck just in time, and she can see it in flames and Dooley’s clothes on fire and his bones all broken. And then she thinks of Uncle Vince, collapsing in front of the post office and landing right on top of his letter from Bertie, and her father saying, “If I go first.” She still remembers that. She tries counting and tapping her fingers, but she doesn’t believe in it anymore. That was for babies, grade ones. She falls asleep, but she wakes up screaming and her parents let her get into bed with them.

  “Go to sleep, Frances,” her mother says. “Nothing bad is going to happen to anyone in this house.”

  She tries to go to sleep, but she can’t. She pictures Dooley wrapped up in bandages in the big hospital in Yellowhead, not the one in Elliot. She wonders who hit Silas, and whether the police will catch him. Then she thinks about her father and his eyes, and how he hit someone once—Dooley in his truck.

  She whispers to her mother, “Will they think Dad did it? Because of his eyes?”

  She’d thought her father was asleep, but he sits up then, in the dark.

  “This is your fault, Alice,” he says, throwing back the covers and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Frances, in spite of what your mother tells you about my eyesight, I have never hit even a rabbit, so you can get that thought out of your head.” Then he adds, “Other than Dooley Sullivan’s truck that time—but he was driving too fast.” Then he leaves and goes to sleep in Frances’s bed.

  “Your father never drives at night, Frances,” her mother says. Then she says, “Stop thinking about all this or you’ll make yourself sick.”

  The next week, Silas’s sister comes to the farm to get a key to the rental house so she can clean out her brother’s things. Frances’s mother is in town. Frances stands next to her father in the yard while he talks to Silas’s sister, who does not smile, not once. Her father says they’re very sorry about Silas; he was a good tenant, and never caused them any trouble.

  Silas’s sister snaps, “Did you expect him to be trouble?”

  Frances’s father is taken aback and says, “No, we didn’t expect anything in particular.”

  Then he goes into the house for the key and Frances is left alone with Silas’s sister. She seems to be studying Frances. “I’m a teacher,” she says. “What grade are you in? Grade three, I’d guess.”

  Frances nods, wary now of being in the presence of a teacher. She says, “My dad’s going blind.” She’s not sure why she says it.

  “You mean he can’t see? He doesn’t look blind to me.”

  “He never drives at night,” she says, because now it’s possible that Silas’s sister will think her father hit Silas on the highway, and it’s her fault for spilling the beans. She is about to say, “My dad didn’t do it,” but then Silas’s sister says, “Well, that must be hard—being blind on a farm. It sounds dangerous.”

  “You know what the blind carpenter said?” Frances asks.

  “No, what?”

  “I picked up a hammer and saw.”

  Silas’s sister doesn’t laugh.

  “He was going to show me checkers,” Frances says.

  “Silas was?”

  “Yes, because we don’t play checkers at school.”

  Frances’s father comes back then with the key. Silas’s sister takes it, saying she will leave it under the mat at the rental house when she’s done.

  When her mother gets home, Frances tells her about Silas’s sister stopping by for the key.

  Frances says, “She’s a teacher,” and her mother says, “Oh, I don’t think so. Where did you get that idea?” Before Frances can answer, her mother says, “Well, it’s over and done with. The man’s things are out of the house, and the less I hear about it the better.”

  But not all of Silas’s things are out of the house. The checkerboard and its pieces have been left on the table for Frances. Her mother wants to throw them out—“It’s morbid”—but Frances insists on keeping them. She takes the game home in a plastic bag.

  And it isn’t over and done with either, as her mother had hoped, because Silas’s sister speaks to a newspaper reporter in Yellowhead and says that her brother was left to die on the highway because he was an Indian. “Civil rights are not just for Negroes in the United States,” she says. “It’s time you people here woke up.” Flyers start appearing around town, stapled to power poles and board fences, saying Silas Chance, Someone Knows and giving a phone number. There’s one on a pole outside the school, close to where the school buses line up at four o’clock, and Frances stops to stare at it several days in a row, thinking about the meaning of “someone knows,” until a bus driver—not hers—sees her and gets out of his bus to tear down the flyer.

  “They shouldn’t be putting these up by the school,” he says, crumpling the poster. “Anyway, it was Doole
y Sullivan, that’s who. They just got the time wrong.”

  “It wasn’t Dooley,” Frances says.

  “Hurry up, get on your bus,” the driver says. “You’ll make everyone late.”

  She stomps her foot. “It wasn’t Dooley Sullivan. You should have to take that back.” She feels like she did that time she’d kicked over the chair in the kitchen after her mother came home from her shopping trip. If there were a chair handy, she’d kick it now.

  “Don’t you sass me, missy,” the bus driver says, looking stern now, but not sure what to do with her. He’s saved when her own bus driver calls to her, “Frances, train’s leaving the station. All aboard. Them that’s late get left behind.”

  Frances likes her driver. She gets on the bus.

  A week later, the CBC sends men with cameras and microphones, and footage of Elliot appears on the national news, a reporter walking up Liberty Street until he comes to the one lonely house: Uncle Vince’s house. Frances’s mother doesn’t like her house being on the news. People in Elliot don’t like being on the news either; it makes them look bad. And what was Silas Chance doing on the highway in the dark anyway? they ask. He should have known better. Maybe he was drunk. Frances’s mother claims that people in town are giving her suspicious looks, as though it’s all her fault because of the house. As though the house is some kind of disgrace.

  Basie says, “Judas Priest, give the damned thing away, then.”

  Instead, she locks it up and waits for people to forget about Silas Chance.

  Frances’s father teaches her to play checkers.

  MARCH COMES, THEN Easter holidays from school. Alice decides to give the house a makeover. Frances watches as the hardware man claps the paint cans in his machine and shakes them up the way her mother shakes eggs in a jar for scrambling. When all the paint colours are mixed, Frances and her mother drive to Uncle Vince’s house and unload the cans and set them on the kitchen floor. Frances looks at the empty coat hooks by the door and thinks of Silas’s green cap.

  The next day, Sunday, they take other supplies into town from the farm—paintbrushes, a stepladder, old sheets and rags. They drape sheets over the furniture, and after that, Frances and her mother go to town every day to paint the house. Pastel colours, a different one for each room. Pastels are all the rage, according to the magazines.