enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

CBC LITERARY AWARDS

For over 20 years, CBC Radio has celebrated the best of Canadian writing talent. For a third year enRoute is proud to sponsor the CBC Literary Awards / Prix littéraires Radio-Canada by publishing the winning texts in English and French. Watch for award-winning short fiction and poetry in upcoming issues.

The views expressed by the writers do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.

The Bob Weaver
Fiction Prize

THE LOST BOY

Text: JANE EATON HAMILTON

1 | 2 | 3 | MAY '04

I love my mother, but she does not love me, or any of us, in the way that she loves Nobby. We are all girls, and about this nothing can be done. She has had five babies without a boy, and she is soon to have another, likely, she says, another girl. Girls, she says, are her punishment. For what? I want to know. She doesn’t answer, just thins her lips, but my father told me she once lost a boy. "Lost?" I asked. "Lost how?" "You must never, ever repeat what I have told you," he said. When I was younger I looked for my lost brother everywhere, at church, in my father’s boat, in my mother’s garden. My mother has eyes the colour of film negatives.

Nobby has no mother. We didn’t even know him until the government boarded us together, but now my mother looks after his whole family, Nobby and his motherless sisters and his wifeless father just as she looks after us.

The government issued two blankets apiece, but it is not enough in this uninsulated shed of green shiplock through which winter stabs, so my father has given both of his to keep us warm. The room is tiny and has just the single bunk bed, a hanging cradle, and my parents’ cot. Even a child has to walk sideways to fit between the beds. Tonight the smaller children are all asleep except for the baby, who lies in the crook of my mother’s arm in the rocking chair my father built. I can hear her nursing, wet slurpy sounds my mother would be disturbed to think are audible. I lie awake watching ice crystals form on the inside of the windows. I can see the moon through gaps where the slats have shrunk. I dream about the lost boy sometimes, about seeing him as a ghost, blinking on, blinking off in the reflection of a mirror, or of watching him fly. My mother hums a lullaby to the baby. I listen to the pretty, unaccustomed sound until something melts in me; some hard place unties and floats, angelic on air. I am so in love with her. I want her to lie next to me and stroke my hair. I want her to float kisses down onto my cheek, to tickle me. I imagine her eyes lighting up at the sight of me, although in truth, the only time her eyes flicker with that kind of pleasure Nobby is certain to be near. I scoot over to steal some of my next-in-line sister’s warmth.

"I don’t want to live with the Kamegayas anymore," I tell my mother. Nobby gets me behind the outhouse and rubs bony knuckles across my scalp. His sisters pull at me. His father smells funny, like wet tar.

"What are you doing awake?"

"Nobby’s mean to me." I want to ask if he looks like her lost boy. Where is her lost boy? "I hate Nobby."

My mother speaks in her voice that accuses me of not being a dutiful daughter. "Nobbysan is not your beeswax."

"I don’t like him." My father, who was born in Canada, is teaching my mother English idiom, which she calls English idiot.

"It’s not your business to like or not like. Girls do not have an opinion."

But I do, lots of them, opinions like flakes in a snowstorm, swirling and angry. "When’s Dad coming home?"

"Nobby is wonderful boy, wonderful," my mother says. "If I could just have a boy, I would wish him to be like Nobbysan." She breaks the baby’s suction on her breast with a fingertip, then moves the bundle up to her shoulder for burping. She sighs hugely. "Your father is still at the meeting."

One of the little girls in the other bedroom coughs, and one of my sisters coughs in return. Everything that happens in this house happens in twos. If our father smokes at one end of the table in our shared central kitchen, making smoke rings, Mr. Kamegaya smokes at the other end. When children are sleeping, five sleep in our leftside room and three sleep in their rightside room. There are just the three rooms. A cloth separates us from the Kamegaya bedroom, and it is lowered when Mr. Kamegaya or Nobby are within. Although it is our job to pretend deafness, in reality we can hear everything–the scoldings and squabbles and laughter. "How come Nobby got to go with Dad and Mr. Kamegaya and I didn’t?"

"Nobby is nearly a man and must learn. You are just an eleven-year-old girl."

What is to win talking about Nobby? She is in love with Nobby. She likes his cowlick, his brown eyes, his freckles. He is a fifteen-year-old boy, but I think she wishes Nobby was her husband instead of my father, her real husband whom she badgers incessantly. Bring more wood! Why you not start fire? Why I have to do everything? Why are you fiddling with that useless guitar again? "The meeting to write Mackenzie King? To say they want their boats back?"

"Boat, house, car, truck–even wedding dishes gone," she says.

"I want to go to school," I say.

"You can’t go to school," my mother says, pulling the baby off her shoulder and moving her to the other breast. "Eight children, what you think? Spend all day drawing pictures, adding numbers?" My mother is barely visible in the dark, smudged behind the coil of black oil that rises from the lantern because the wick isn’t trimmed, but I don’t need to see her to know her sour expression. I have memorized it. But still, her skin is as soft as rose petals, and her hair smells of lavender. When she lets me serve her tea, I am dizzy.

I screw up my courage. "Mom, tell me the story about your lost son."

She jumps to her feet so fast the baby’s head ratches back. Her accent is thicker. "I not have lost son. What you say, speak crazy? Get out of bed."

I don’t know what’s coming. A spanking, maybe. A face slap. The floor is frigid. My mother pulls my braid and hisses into my face, "I don’t have lost boy. Okay? Okay? No lost boy. Say it."

So I do. She doesn’t have a lost boy.

1 | 2 | 3 | MAY '04