Free Homesick by Guy Vanderhaeghe

hungry for newsreels, and hungrier still for entertainment to push the newsreels out of mind. No, he only believed that running a picture show would help fill the interminable spaces which his evenings, deprived of Martha, had become. The movie theatre would give him something to do, he told himself. It gave him too much to do. He grew pale and drawn with the strain of doing. By day he lifted and shifted ton upon ton of dead weight; by night he sat tense in a projecting booth high above the rows of heads communing with and adoring the bright images he cast into the darkness.
    It was a family affair, The Palladium. Alec ran the projector and Vera sold admissions and popcorn. Earl, who couldn’t be trusted to do much because he was flighty and couldn’t keep his mind on things, sat in the foyer, kicking his heels on the rungs of a chair, watching the people troop in. Generally he slept through the second showing of the picture curled up in a seat in the back row of the theatre. Alec had tried to persuade Earl to stop at home but he wouldn’t. Ever since his mother died he was afraid to be by himself. He said alone in the house he heard things. When he was downstairs he heard his mother walking upstairs, and when he was upstairs he could hear her moving in the kitchen, opening and shutting the cupboard doors.
    Monkman did not know what to make of this talk of ghosts, except that the boy wanted mothering. Mothering would put him right. The year Vera finished her Grade Ten he took her out of school to run the house and mother little Earl. After all, she had more schooling than he had ever seen and he knew of no earthly reason for her to venture further into the realms of geometry-trigonometry, Hamlet , or Latin.
    For this his daughter never forgave him. She tried to persuade him to leave her in high school, to permit her to graduate. Vera assured him she could manage it, school, the house, Earl. He would not hear of it, would not yield. “It’s too much for a girl of sixteen,” he said, “to run a household and go to school. You’d endup ruining your health. I won’t have it, Vera. That’s all there is to it.”
    To Vera it felt like a death sentence. She loved school. It was the one thing which lent her life a sense of movement. Turning back over the pages of a notebook in June she could say to herself, “Here is all I know now that I didn’t know before. This is how far I’ve come.” The notion that one thing built on another, that the second theorem of geometry was predicated on the first, and the third on the second, was a comfort to her. Vera was attracted to order and valued knowledge that could be measured – so many lines of “Lycidas” committed to memory, so many French verbs conjugated. French was Vera’s favourite subject. Walking home, striding into a blustery March wind on long, ungainly legs, she would imagine herself pacing the windswept deck of an ocean liner, speaking French to a dark man. “ Je ne sais quoi ,” she would say softly to herself, and then laugh a sophisticated laugh, rehearsing the future. But her stupid, stubborn father snatched that away. “Earl needs you,” he argued. “He’s just a little kid. He needs a mother.”
    So get him one, Vera thought. Do I look like a mother?
    “He’s not happy,” her father added.
    Vera had always been his blunt and fearless child. “Little wonder,” she said.
    “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
    “You ought to quit riding him around the country at night. That’s what I mean.”
    “Watch your step, miss.”
    “You don’t want to know – don’t invite me to tell.”
    For the moment she could see he was ashamed. Well, he ought to be. Doing as he did. Sometimes she truly believed he’d gone clean off his head. When her mother was alive Vera had never seen him drunk even once. Not at a wedding, not at Christmas, not at New Year’s. Now, once a month, regular as clockwork, he could be expected to go on a scandalous rip,