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.