Throughout October the weather continued remarkably mild despite the lateness of the season, although now there were under-currents of ice in it. For days on end not a cloud curdled the soaring skies which each night’s frost seemed to dye a deeper, sterner blue. In the mornings, before the sun had gained enough strength to burn it off, Alec Monkman’s lawn was spread with a thick, white rime which exposed a stark trail of footprints when he crossed it to dig turnips left in his garden for the cold to sweeten in the ground. The old man loved this time of year, the chill baths of sunshine, the clearing away, the making ready, the long, lazy postponement of winter’s sleep.
Late one night he flung open the kitchen door and called excitedly to Vera and Daniel to come outside, quick. At the very least, Vera had expected a house fire but the street lay dim and unremarkable as ever. “Listen!” commanded her father and she saw his face tilt up to the sky under the porch light. What they heard was the last of the migrating geese high overhead, clamouring in the limitless darkness of a fall night. Daniel and Vera and Alec stood absolutely still, tracking and straining after the wild, sad calling as it faded southward and finally dissolved into space and silence. Then, just as Vera was about to speak, a last gift. A flight of stragglers came sweeping low over the roofs of Connaught, so low that the whistle and whine of surging wings could be clearly heard, startling three hearts and lifting three faces blindly to search the sky for this mysterious passage, their common breath mingling in a golden fog under the porch light. As suddenly as they had come, the birds were gone.
The people on the porch became aware of the cold. “I wanted the boy to hear,” said Alec.
“Yes,” said Vera.
With no more to say, they went to bed.
Daniel became obsessed with the Hallowe’en dance. He was pinning all his hopes on it. So far nothing at school had been as bad as he had been led to fear by his grandfather. No one had beaten him up or even bullied him. What he had been was ignored. Daniel realized that a lot of the blame was his. His pride had held him back from making overtures to anyone in case they should snub him. The mere thought of such humiliation could stick his tongue to the roof of his mouth and his feet to the floor whenever he debated with himself the advisability of approaching any of his classmates.
So he remained aloof and ran the risk of being labelled a snob, which was exactly how everyone thought of him. They knew he came from a big city in the east and they supposed he thought himself too good for the likes of Connaught. Add to that that he was the grandson of Alec Monkman who owned the delivery, the garage, the movie theatre, and the hotel, and it was not hard for them to imagine that Daniel believed he was small-town royalty. “Big shot,” the other boys silently mouthed to one another when he went past them, carrying himself rigid and tense. The girls didn’t care for him either because he made them wonder if they didn’t seem like hicks compared to the girls he had known in the city.
At the beginning of the school year Daniel had tried to show them they were wrong about him but he only ended by making a fool of himself. It happened at the first high school football game of the season. Games were held Friday afternoons and the students of both the elementary and high schools were dismissed half an hour early so they could root for the home team, the Connaught Cougars. The football field was a raw-looking rectangle mowed out of prairie grass, lined with lime and pounded to hard pan by daily practices. Getting tackled on it was like getting tackled on a parking lot. Every September it was a school tradition to let the Grade Seven and Eight boys out of school for a day to pick the rocks off the field which the frost had popped out of the ground the previous spring, but they did a cursory job, harvesting only a portion of each year’s bountiful crop, leaving behind enough stones to make a contribution to the number and severity of injuries to players. There were no bleachers, so those who had them sat on the hoods of the cars which they had bounced over the boulders and badger holes in the schoolyard to park around the field. The rest of the students formed into cliques and stood in clusters along the sidelines.
It seemed to Daniel that everyone had a group to attach themselves to except him. So that day he positioned himself five yards from the group he would have most liked to be invited to join and lingered hopefully. While he did, he made sure to cheer as loudly and enthusiastically for the Connaught Cougars as if he had spent his entire life in Connaught, lived or perished according to the team’s success or failure. He did this absolutely alone, in splendid isolation. Of all the people cheering he was the only one who was aware of his own voice. Still, it seemed to him that he must be making a good impression. Surely it must mean something to them to see him rooting so wildly for their heroes.
After a bit, however, he began to suspect how foolish he must look, jumping up and down, yelling his head off like a lunatic, all utterly alone and apart. He felt exposed, ridiculous. It wouldn’t take a genius to see what he was up to, what he wanted. But having once started he couldn’t just quit. Quitting would be to admit that his display of loyalty and enthusiasm was insincere, false, downright sneaky. It was necessary to carry on, follow through, no matter how hard the ordeal. Face burning with shame, he shouted louder, hopped about on his patch of brown grass more grotesquely, waved his arms more frantically. “Crush ’em Cougars! Go team!” He was aware that people were starting to stare. A knot of Grade Seven girls were whispering and giggling. He pretended to be oblivious to all of this. There was no stopping now. Something was driving him to go on punishing and humiliating himself this way in front of everyone. Even during yardage measurements and lulls in play, his voice, which he had begun to lose, was the only one to be heard croaking and rasping encouragement to the team.
The crack of the starting pistol announcing half-time finally released him. He was free to slink off home. With every blundering step that hurried him across the schoolyard Daniel could feel the mortification he had repeatedly swallowed wobbling like a large stone stuck behind his breastbone. All wrong, all a mistake. Tittysucker, geek, fruit, he pronounced himself in a rage. That’s what he should have written on the yellow wall which bore his Uncle Earl’s name, not Daniel Miller, because Daniel Miller was too pathetic and stupid to deserve a place anywhere.
If he could only dance. Dancing you had a person all to yourself; you could have a private conversation and prove that you weren’t really stuck-up, or a lunatic like you acted at a dumb football game. And being that it was a girl you danced with, that was in your favour, too, since girls were easier to persuade than boys. They were more understanding, more capable of overlooking past mistakes and bad first impressions than boys were. Girls had a knack of seeing what was really inside you. They were always doing it with James Dean and Montgomery Clift in the movies. Dancing was one way of getting a girl alone so you could talk to her. But he didn’t know how to dance. Was it possible to fake knowing how? Would they be able to tell? He knew he couldn’t fake jiving with all its complicated twists and turns, but waltzing didn’t look so hard, a sort of walk around the floor together. And waltzing was good for conversation the way jiving wasn’t. Daniel had noticed in the movies how often the most important things between a man and a woman got said while they were waltzing.
Daniel practised faking it. He closed the door to his bedroom and propped a chair under the knob so nobody could come busting in on his privacy. Positioning himself before his mirror he raised his left hand into the air, made a cradle of his right arm, and propelled himself with mincing, shuffling steps backwards, forwards, sideways, all about his bedroom.