Homesick by Guy Vanderhaeghe Page A

written on lined pages torn from a school exercise-book, the words thick and clumsy-looking because of theheavy-handed way Earl drove his fountain-pen across the paper. The childish, immature way in which he expressed himself was never remarked by Vera. In her mind, he grew no older, was as she had left him.
Got better marks from the new teacher. Mr. Mackenzie joined up on the school trustees so we have a lady teacher now. She is not so strict and owly as Mackenzie. I got specs now. Catch better with them than before, but still am no great shakes at ball. Isn’t in the cards I guess .
    No, Vera supposed it wasn’t. Earl had sent along a photograph of himself in his baseball uniform. She was shocked to see him suddenly shot up tall and thin as a reed, his Adam’s apple looking like an orange in a Christmas stocking, and his new glasses throwing sun back into the camera in a brilliant blur. It was typical of Earl to have a picture of himself taken in baseball uniform, not wearing his glove but absent-mindedly clutching it by the webbing so it hung, limp dead leather, like a trophy of the hunt, a strange beast pulled from the sea, or huge bat plucked from darkness. Oh dear, Earl, Vera thought, shaking her head.
    Reading between the lines, Vera could not always piece together the actual state of things in Connaught. Much of what Earl told her was communicated offhand, by the by. In January of 1944, in a letter written to thank Vera for the present she had sent for his fifteenth birthday, Earl passed on the momentous news that his father had taken over the town garage and hired himself help.
Dad has taken on a man with a glass eye. Dad says men are hard to come by with the war but since this one has a glass eye he can’t fight. His name is Mr. Stutz and he comes from somewhere down the line, Kimberley I think .
We got him because Dad says he is tired of doing bull-work his time of life. From now on Dad says Mr. Stutz can haul freight and he will sit on his behind doing the easy stuff like showing pictures and pumping gas for a living. Dad says Mr. Stutz is a good worker but has opinions. I seen him smoking so he isn’t a Jehovah’s Witness although he’s death on drinking. That’s how he lost his eye. Somebody drunk poked it with a pencil or something .
Mr. Stutz is stronger even than Dad. Friday he carried an engine block across the shop on a dare. Was Dad ever mad when he heard. He said he could of hurt himself and been laid up and lost to him .
    Mr. Stutz figured prominently in Earl’s letters from that time on. He had clearly made an impression on her brother and perhaps beyond. In one of Earl’s letters she came across a cryptic line. Dad is better since Mr. Stutz came . How exactly was this to be taken? Did he mean her father was feeling physically better now that Mr. Stutz had relieved him of heavy work, or did he mean that Mr. Stutz was exerting some kind of steadying influence on her father, discouraging his wild, erratic behaviour? She wished she knew. Vera often worried about Earl, partly out of guilt, she supposed. Her brother had always needed someone to look out for him, to take his side. Maybe Mr. Stutz was doing that. Often during lulls in the clamour of the kitchens, she thought of the man she had cast in the role of her brother’s protector. However, try as hard as she might, she could only imagine him one way – as a man moving stiff-legged in a sailor’s rolling walk, arms pulled straight by something heavy – a keg of nails, an anvil, an icebox which buffeted his thighs with every lurching step he took. That was Mr. Stutz to Vera.
    But Vera had more to worry about than just Earl. By now she was a sergeant with a sergeant’s responsibilities – that is, she had to run things in a way that allowed the officers to believe they were actually in charge. She had to manage people with an easy or heavy hand, whatever the situation required. There were times when she was all at sea. What to do about the