Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

One has only to read the first page of Guy Vanderhaeghes Homesick to see why his books have garnered him international awards.

Regina Leader-Post

If great art is that which holds a mirror up to nature, as was once said, then Homesick is great art.

Daily News (Halifax)

[Vanderhaeghes characters] lift themselves by pride and love from the ordinariness of their world.

Ottawa Citizen

Vanderhaeghe has an unerring eye for the prairie landscape and a shrewd ear for the ironies of small-town conversation. He balances his dramatization of the cycle of life with exuberant storytelling.

London Free Press

His stories and novels are character studies par excellence.

Andreas Schroeder

Guy Vanderhaeghe writes about what he knows best: people, their sense of mortality, their difficulty in being good during a difficult time. The dialogue and the characters are eclectic and real.

Vancouver Sun

Beautifully written Vanderhaeghe writes in a spare, poetic prose that is deceptively simple. He uses his medium very effectively to capture both the icy harshness and the warmth of family life. Homesick is an unexpectedly powerful work. His extraordinary talents deserve wide recognition.

Whig-Standard (Kingston)

NOVELS
My Present Age (1984)
Homesick (1989)
The Englishmans Boy (1996)

SHORT STORIES
Man Descending (1982)
The Trouble With Heroes (1983)
Things As They Are? (1992)

PLAYS
I Had a Job I Liked. Once. (1992)
Dancocks Dance (1996)

Copyright 1989 by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Cloth edition published 1989
This trade paperback edition published 1999

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 1951
Homesick

eISBN: 978-1-55199-567-0

I. Title.

PS 8593. A 5386 H 6 1999 C 813.54 C 98-932930-5
PR 9199.3. V 36 H 6 1999

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M 5 A 2 P 9

v3.1

To Margaret, as always

I would like to thank the Canada Council and the Saskatchewan Arts Board for their generous financial assistance during the writing of Homesick.

I would also like to express my thanks to my editor Ellen Seligman for her careful and thoughtful labours.

Portions of this novel have previously appeared in the following: a slightly altered version of Chapter 1 was read on CBC Radios Speaking Volumes and Aircraft; Chapter 3 previously appeared in Books in Canada.

A n old man lay asleep in his bed. This was his dream:

He is young again, once more an ice-cutter laying up a store of ice for the summer. The Feinrich brothers and he drive their sledges out on to the wide white plain of the lake. The runners hiss on the dry snow, metal bits in the harness shift and clink, leather reins freeze so hard they lie stiff and straight as laths down the horses backs. Before them the sky lightens over purple-shadowed, hunch-shouldered hills.

When the sun finally rises, so does the wind, bitter and cutting. On the lake there is no place to escape it, no trees, no sheds, no bluffs to hunker down and hide behind. On the lake there is only flatness, a rushing space that squeezes eyes into a squint.

There it is now, the first long drawn-out sigh of breath tumbling over the hills, the faint breeze setting snow snakes writhing out over the ice and hard-packed drifts to meet them. By fits and starts this wind gathers force, the skirts of coats billow and snap, its fierce touch penetrates every layer of clothing, drives nails of cold through coveralls, trousers, woollen combinations. It raises gooseflesh and tears the manes of the horses into ragged, whipping flags. It pounds the drum-skins of tightly drawn parka hoods.

They halt. The horses stamp on wind-polished ice. Down from the sledge, standing on bare, clean ice he can feel the cold rise through the soles of his boots, seep through stockings, sting toes. Walking over the ice he can sense the yaw and pitch, the tilt, the gentle undulations that cannot be seen but must be felt, things the eye skates over, fails to register. It makes him feel uneasy, unsteady. He thinks of the waves which ran one after another in slow succession to shore until winter laid its dead hand upon their backs, binding up the heaves and swells, arresting motion. He sees the long rivers of fracture, the widely flung tributary cracks.

He chops a hole for the saw. The axe makes a terrible ringing on the ice, a clash like metal striking metal. With each blow, shards of ice leap like sparks in the air. He opens the lake for the ice-cutters, water spurts and gurgles in the wound. By the time he raises the axe above his head, the water splashed on the blade freezes in a glassy sheath.

The saws squeak. The first block is lifted dripping and gleaming. A square of black water opens wide at his feet. His feet are numb with cold.

So he dances. Dances to heat his feet. A polka right there on the huge ballroom floor of the lake, an imaginary partner cradled in the curve of his arm as he whirls round and round, boots clattering and heels flicking, the Feinrichs laughing and clapping time with their cow-hide mitts. Faster and faster he goes. The horses nostrils smoke surprise, their eyes roll, their heads jerk as he flashes by. Faster, faster. He throws back his head and sees the last faint stars, the pale silver moon spin with him. Dance with him.

Then he falls. A sudden stunning breath-robbing descent through searing cold and blackness. It blots away moon and stars. A slow, buoyant, bubbling rise which ends with a bump under the ice.

He stares up. Ice. He is under the ice, groping and scrabbling with his nails, searching for the cut-hole, a way out. He snuffles and gulps the thin scraps of air captured between ice and water, kicks his legs frantically. He butts his head madly, desperately against the ice. Water rolls and churns over his shoulders. Out, out, out.

At last, exhausted, he can only hang in the water, suspended in silence and cold. His boots are buckets, pulling heavy on his ankles. His trouser legs balloon with cold and water. It is a silence like he has never heard, a cold like he has never felt. He grows colder by the second and guesses this means he is dying. This is a different kind of cold under the ice, you dont go numb with it. The colder you get, the more it hurts. The more you die, the more you feel.