After reading it, Lomax sends the infuriating card spinning from the high window of his suite, watching it flutter to the street like a crippled dove. It’s unlike Lavern to be impatient, and this is the last thing he needs with Mr. Holt breathing down his neck for results. And besides, he knows very well there is plenty of money kicking around the house for groceries, as well as coins to put under Angie’s pillow. Lavern should be grateful that their children know their father at all, not to mention the fact that they eat to their hearts’ content and needn’t work like Lomax did as a boy. Still, to keep the peace, he telephones down to the hotel operator and wires his wife a hundred dollars of Mr. Holt’s stipend money, as well as cabling to say that he loves her and he’ll likely be back home in the next few weeks. Though he’s beginning to suspect that this matter may draw him farther from his beloved home than he’s ever been.
THE CITY
EVEN IN THE dark, Everett knows from its particular bouquet of greenery—beech and balsam and huckleberry with a hint of white pine—that his freight train is passing near Kingston, and the woodlot where he and his brother spent their boyhood with Mrs. Craig. And it surprises him that after all this time, he can call to mind every shade of green contained in that forest. How the stream tasted of copper and of the trees it ran through. And he wonders if Harris can still picture it himself, or if the remembrance withered away after he lost his sight, like a plant shut away in a closet. Harris’s mind has probably become too clogged by greed for him to call up the chestnut that overhung the log cabin they built, the one that dropped its conkers on their tin roof, which always made them bust up laughing.
By the time the train arrives in Toronto, both the bottle of buttermilk and the egg sandwiches that the woman packed back in Quebec are gone. Everett collects the baby, leaves the boxcar, and trudges through a sprawling stockyard of steaming cattle into the city. The first two rooming houses he approaches declare full occupancy, though he suspects that the cinder burns on his coat, his raccoon mask of coal soot, and the odd, wriggling bulge at his stomach aren’t helping matters. Everett ventures into a more run-down area of the city, where sun-heated trash cans stand putrefying on the sidewalks and custard-yellow undergarments flap in alleys. A trolley bangs over a puzzle-board of tracks and the baby shudders at the noise. A nightpan is dumped from above and a torrent of filth misses them narrowly.
To his eyes, the Crash has hit Toronto even harder than Saint John. It’s as though an artillery shell has gone off, loaded not with gunpowder but despair and squalor. On benches and stoops, atop overcoats, waxed cardboard, and crosshatched sticks, people sleep. They wake with bird droppings blotching their coats, pavement pock-marking their cheeks, newsprint blackening their skin. Everett spots a woman no older than twenty run aground in a park—either unconscious or never to be conscious again—a dark stain blooming in her crotch, a fresh flower in the buttonhole of her lapel.
Finally, the clerk of a decrepit rooming house allows Everett to sign a fake name to the register. “No booze, no girls, no children,” the man says, pointing to the sign behind him that must indicate the same. He guides Everett up to a large communal room, where a grid of thirty mattresses is arrayed on the floor. At the washbasins filthy men cup water-filled hands to their faces, making loud sputtering noises. When the clerk exits, Everett turns his back to the others at the corner basin and unwraps the baby before scrubbing her with the woman’s lavender soap.
That evening, the baby nestles against him as shadowy shapes sweep in to fill every mattress, the room roiling with their animal stench and nocturnal emissions. Deep in the night, a man drags a girl to the adjacent mattress, jostling and hissing at her for an hour. Momentarily, the child wakes to the scene and Everett stops her ears with his palms until the man groans and tells the girl to leave.
Later, Everett wakes with the baby’s fingernail fish-hooked painfully in his nostril. Most of the lodgers are already off begging, working, or some combination of the two. After the week’s deposit on the rooming house and this morning’s pint of goat’s milk, the woman’s silver dollars are nearly spent. Out on the street he hears a man calling from a truck with an electric megaphone: “The Holt coke mill requires fifty men in Fredericton! A buck thirty-five a day! That includes free rail transport!”
“I can’t go working for that nasty old Holt, now can I?” Everett says to the child. “Seeing how he hung you out in the cold like that?”
After a morning spent hunting for work, Everett feeds the baby on a park bench where a number of unemployed men have gathered to share loose newspaper pages and scavenged cigarettes. Before long, a man riding on an inoperable Model T being pulled by a piebald mare calls from the road: “Seeking work?” None of the reclining men stir, and though Everett knows this disinterest is perhaps an ill omen, he approaches the wagon.
“I am,” he says. “But I’ve got an infant that needs minding.”
“That’s fine,” the man says. “I know a woman, though I expect she’ll charge half the daily rate I’ll give you.”
“Doesn’t bother me. What’s the job? Freighting?” he says, gesturing at the wagon hitched to the horse-drawn car, which is constructed mostly of salvage wood banged together crudely with threepenny nails.
The man shrugs. He’s portly, oily-faced, with mossy teeth and sludgy lips. His eyes are cloudy and small, and look like they’ve been spooned out, fried in bacon grease, then shoved back in. “There ain’t never no one job,” he says. “Not during hard times. We’ll do a touch of everything. Some hauling. A little tinkering. Tear-downs. Buildups. Bit of pick and shovel work. Mostly moving some shit from somewhere to somewhere else. That suit you?”
Everett hops up beside the man, who introduces himself as Sinclair Monahan. He drives the buggy to a three-storey red-brick tenement, where out front a thin Mediterranean woman of about forty kneels on a patch of grass, spoon-feeding two toddlers.
“What I call her?” the woman, Mrs. Papadopoulos, asks Everett when they’ve settled the terms of the baby’s care.
“Call her anything you like,” Everett says, climbing back onto the wagon. “Won’t bother her.”
“Yessir, these hard times will make a saint spit on the cross,” says Everett’s boss as they set off, his loose suspenders slipping from his round shoulders as he speaks. Everett ascertains early that the hardships of the age will be his primary oratorical subject. Not that he minds the chatter. He prefers someone else doing the talking, and Monahan’s back is strong and he’s smart with his horse and knows the city.
From behind a boathouse they load some planed boards into the wagon bed and cart them to a nearby lumberyard. Next, they haul three claw-foot tubs out of a condemned hotel, each heavy enough to flood Everett’s head with sparks when they lift them. By mid-morning, the clouds have burned off; the two sop their brows with their shirtsleeves and the draft horse lathers under its collar as it drags the tubs to the salvage yard. Apart from the work he did on the Frenchman’s farm, Everett has been stuck playing nursemaid for too long, and he’s cheered by this job’s physicality. While it’s not yet clear whether they’re stealing, repossessing, or donating these things they’re hauling, Everett knows not to ask.