The beauty of it, too, was that it wasn’t even really a lie.
“I went out late in the evening to use the outhouse and a mysterious man on a horse gave me his baby. All he said was ‘Thank-you.’ Then he was gone.”
Well, that was more or less the situation that had occurred nine months earlier at the harvest dance at the Algren Community Dance Hall.
Euphemia hadn’t planned to abandon herself to lust that evening. And it wasn’t really lust she had abandoned herself to, anyway, but curiosity and maybe a bit of hope that the mysterious stranger might be her ticket off the farm. It was with the same shrug that her family used in almost all situations calling for decision that she allowed herself to be taken by the hand to the edge of the canola field behind the dance hall.
Euphemia was the last, well, maybe not the very last, girl in the area anyone would have called immoral. She did her chores, obeyed her parents, had lots of friends, and was pretty, a good runner, and playful. She won spelling bees and quilting bees, and had never even had a boyfriend in her life. In the forties girls like Euphemia Funk did not allow themselves to be led by the hand to dark fields behind dance halls.
She had stepped outside to use the outhouse. The little building was a ways from the dance hall, down a dirt path, towards the canola field. The stranger had been leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette, and before she could even get to the outhouse, he had wandered over to her and put out his hand. She knew he had been at the dance. She and her friends had seen him and wondered who he was. Probably a relative of someone around there or a farm hand. He had nice eyes and a beautifully shaped back, they thought. “It tapers, it really does,” said Euphemia’s friend Lou. And he obviously bought his shoes in the city. No, he couldn’t have been a farm hand. Not with shoes like that. Euphemia had seen him talking to Leander Hamm, so maybe he was a horse breeder or a horse buyer or maybe he owned racehorses in America. But he looked so young, just a few years older than she was. Euphemia liked the way his thighs filled out the tops of his pants and the way his legs were shaped, vaguely, like parentheses. There was a bit of a curl to his hair at the bottom and it was longer than the hair of any of the boys from around there. Euphemia liked those curls, at the bottom, the ones that rested against his neck.
She just hadn’t said no. Nobody had come along to discover them. The night was very dark and warm. The stranger was handsome and sure of himself. Euphemia couldn’t think of any reason not to take his hand. She had tried to come up with a reason, but couldn’t. Afterwards, he retied the bow in Euphemia’s hair and wiped the grass and leaves off of her skirt. It had hurt, but she hadn’t cried. She hadn’t made a sound. And neither had he. She had kept one hand cupped firmly around the curls on his neck and her other hand beside her, on the ground. Afterwards they sat together, and Euphemia said, “well,” and turned and smiled at him. And the stranger smiled back and squeezed her hand and said, “Thank-you.” Then he walked over to where his horse was tied up, just on the other side of the dance hall, and rode away.
Euphemia hadn’t told a soul about what happened. She hadn’t felt a second of guilt. She was thrilled with herself.
“He said ‘Thank-you,’ and that’s all, that was it?” asked Euphemia’s mother, as she and Euphemia and Euphemia’s brothers and sisters peered down at the baby, now resting in the Funks’ old cradle.
“Yes, and then he rode away on his horse.” Euphemia couldn’t stop herself from smiling, but as she did so she widened her eyes for effect.
“Hmmmm, very odd. What a peculiar man. The boy is barely a day old, Phemie, are you sure he didn’t say who he was or why he was giving you this child?”
“Yes, Mother.”
Euphemia had successfully been delivered of the baby’s placenta and had taken it and the clothes that had blood on them and buried them behind the machine shed. With trembling fingers she had tied a knot in the baby’s umbilical cord and wrapped him in one of the sweaters she had been wearing just before he was born. The baby hadn’t cried, not really. He had made a few creaking sounds, but nothing that could be called a real wail. By the light of the barn lantern, Euphemia saw the baby open one eye. The other wouldn’t open for a few hours. The fingers on his hands moved almost constantly and his head, too, swivelled from left to right, back and forth, towards the lantern’s light and away again.
Euphemia put her face to his. She breathed on him and felt his tiny puff of breath in return. She put her index finger against his lips and he tried for a moment to get it into his mouth. She moved her lips and her cheek against his damp head and prayed to God to keep him from all harm. Still, she was not afraid. She would protect him. At the time Euphemia hadn’t noticed the baby’s black hair curl on his neck and hadn’t thought for a second about the stranger, the baby’s father, at the dance hall. For the second time in a year she was thrilled with herself.
Euphemia knew that she could not breastfeed the baby. She would have to find a way to wrap her breasts and get rid of her milk. The postpartum bleeding could be explained as normal menstrual blood, if it was explained at all. Bleeding, women’s bleeding, was another thing the Funk family shrugged off as one of those things, which it was.
For now she would wrap her breasts in strips of gunny sack and cotton and pray to God they wouldn’t start to leak as she sat at the supper table with her family. She would, inconspicuously, drink a lot of black currant tea and if the pressure grew too great, she would squeeze the milk out herself in the john. Maybe she could even save some of it and mix it in with the formula when nobody was looking. Over time she would squeeze out less and less milk as though she were weaning a baby. Euphemia hoped her breasts could be fooled. When Flora Marsden’s baby was born dead, she had drunk huge amounts of black currant tea to stem the flow of her milk. Euphemia remembered her mother talking about it to a friend of hers. Her mother and her mother’s friend had been outraged that a neighbour of Flora’s had suggested she hire herself out as a wet nurse to mothers too busy farming to feed their babies. “I know I was never too busy to feed my own baby, that’s for sure,” Euphemia’s mother had said in a rather convoluted, self-serving indictment of Flora’s neighbour.
“Well, he’ll need a name, won’t he, Phemie?” asked Minty. The sun was coming up now. Euphemia’s mother went to the china cabinet and came back to the cradle with the black Bible. She yanked a bobby pin from her hair and stuck it into the shiny pages of the big book. It opened at Hosea. “There,” she shrugged, “Welcome to the world, Hosea.” And she stuck the bobby pin back into her hair.
Hosea Funk lay in his bed in his house on First Street, watching the sun come up over Algren. Thank God that health food store hadn’t worked out, he thought. If the couple running it hadn’t packed up their rice cakes and moved back to Vancouver Island last week, the recent arrival of Knute and her daughter would have put Algren’s population at fifteen hundred and two, and that would have been two too many. Hosea closed his eyes and thought about his letter, the one from the Prime Minister. Well, okay, it wasn’t a personal letter, it was a form letter, but Hosea’s name was on it, and so was a photocopied signature of the Prime Minister’s name, John Baert.