And Minty said, “Well, we could take the head off and let some of the pressure out, but I don’t know …” and she disappeared, and in her place was Lorna. She put her hand out to Hosea to touch him and she said, “You’re so round, you’re so bloated, like me, look,” and Dory brought coffee out for everyone and Hosea could hear Dory say, “I like my stories happy, the sadness comes creeping out of the cracks in the story like blood, happy stories are the saddest.” And then it began to snow and Max said, “Excellent, Dory! Excellent!”
In the morning Hosea asked if he could see Tom. Dory was asleep in the other bed now and Knutie had gone into the hall to make some phone calls to friends and relatives of Tom. Hosea passed Knute in the hallway, at the payphone, and he was about to say something, but Knute smiled wearily and put her hand up to stop him. “Hello?” she said. “Uncle Jack?” Hosea smiled back and nodded. He pointed to Tom’s room, but Knute had turned her back to him and was talking to Uncle Jack. Hosea went into Tom’s room and stood beside him. He wanted to tell Tom he didn’t have to stay alive if he didn’t want to, if it was too hard, but he knew he couldn’t say these words out loud, not with Dory there, not with the way things were. That is, the way life was, the way life was that precluded us from saying things like that out loud. And besides, what he meant was that Tom didn’t have to do this for him, for his cockeyed plan to see his father. But instead, he leaned over and whispered, “Tom, I’m going to my office now.” He’d wanted to say something more, something poignant and earth-shattering, words that conveyed the love he felt for Tom, and the gratitude. Instead he said, “So long, Tom,” and turned to go. But then he heard Tom’s voice. “Time,” he said, not moving his lips so it sounded like tie. Hosea stopped and looked at Tom. “Tie,” he said again.
“Time?” said Hosea. “Well, uh, the time is 9:45, Tom.” He cleared his throat and looked over at Dory who was waking up in the other bed. “It’s 9:45,” he said again.
“Okay, thanks,” said Dory. “My goodness, I slept too long. How is he?” Hosea was about to answer her, then noticed that she was talking to the doctor who had come into the room and was standing behind him, writing something again, and so he mumbled a garbled good-bye and left Dory and the doctor to discuss Tom’s condition.
Hosea walked out into the beautiful day to meet his census-taker, and do the count. The counter’s name was Anita and she told Hosea she had a sister who was also an official counter and was doing a count somewhere in Nova Scotia as they spoke. “A contender,” she said. The two of them walked the dusty streets of Algren, knocking on doors, getting information from the neighbours of people who weren’t home, and referring to Hosea’s notebook. Anita raised her eyebrows when she saw the orange Hilroy scribbler and said, “Geez, Mr. Funk, you want this bad, don’t you?”
You don’t know the half of it, lady, were words that came to Hosea’s mind, but he smiled and said, “Well, we’d all love to see the Prime Minister come to Algren. It would be a special day for all of us.”
“Well, then,” said Anita, “let’s hope this one’s a promise he keeps.” She laughed and said, “I’m kidding.”
And Hosea laughed, too, and said, “Good one.”
That evening it was on the news. Algren was the winner with an uncanny fifteen hundred exactly. How did it happen? It doesn’t matter, it did. It was the last item on the news, the feelgood piece to put people to bed with, to leave them with the impression that not all was as bad as it seemed.
Tom died that night, too. His last words were, “Where is …” and something Dory couldn’t understand, but sounded like “… horses.”
Max said he’d heard Tom say “Damn ticker” once just before he died, but Dory said he wouldn’t have used either of those words.
S.F. was sure he’d been trying to sing, and Knute was sure he’d told her he loved her.
At 5 A.M. on July first, anyone floating over Algren would have been impressed. All along Main Street, Canadian flags in the form of red and white petunias sparkled with dew and reflected the sun, which was beginning to rise. The new Algren Feed Mill Summer Theatre, at least the outside of it, really looked like a theatre, and over at the edge of town a white horse flew through the sky. For a few minutes, anyway, until the colour of the sky changed and the water tower became visible and the horse was revealed as a decal. But it was an interesting few minutes of optical illusion, and why not? Surrounding the little town were fields of yellow and blue so that if you were floating over you could pretend you were on a sandy beach in Rio. Nobody was out and about in Algren at that time except a black dog who stood next to a farmhouse on the edge of town, jumping up from time to time and snapping at a few bugs, and a little girl who sat on the front step of that farmhouse, stretching and yawning and laughing at the dog, and waiting for her mom and dad to get out of bed.
Hosea didn’t hear the phone ring because he was fast asleep, too, with his arms around Lorna and his face buried in her hair. He slept until the sun was well up and so bright that the white horse on the water tower was all but obliterated by its rays. Later in the day he returned the phone message from Ottawa with one of his own.
“Hosea Funk here, not to worry, things come up, maybe next year. Please wish him a Happy Canada Day from the mayor of Algren.”
about the author
MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of three novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck (nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award and winner of the John Hirsch Award), A Boy of Good Breeding (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award) and A Complicated Kindness (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and finalist for the Giller Prize) and one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life (winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction). She has written for CBC, This American Life (NPR), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters, and The New York Times Magazine, and received the National Magazine Awards Gold Medal for Humour. Miriam Toews lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.