Until Niagara Falls

  Other Books by Jennifer Maruno

  Warbird

  Kid Soldier

  Totem

  Cherry Blossom Book series

  When the Cherry Blossoms Fell

  Cherry Blossom Winter

  Cherry Blossom Baseball

  Copyright © Jennifer Maruno, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image: back girl: istock.com/franz12; front girl: 123RF/Filip Filipovic; Niagara Falls: istock.com/kris1138; clouds: shutterstock.com/Flas100

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Book Printing Ltd.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Until Niagara Falls / Jennifer Maruno.

  Names: Maruno, Jennifer, 1950- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190123648 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190123656 | ISBN 9781459745933 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459745940 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459745957 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8626.A785 U58 2020 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  For the real Brenda of Niagara Falls

  CONTENTS

  1 JUNE 1960

  2 CHICKEN POX

  3 HARVEY

  4 WATERMELON

  5 QUICKSAND

  6 MISS LOGAN

  7 COUSIN AMY

  8 THE WIENER ROAST

  9 BIKER BOB

  10 SLUGS

  11 THE TENT

  12 BIRDSONG

  13 THE BIKE

  14 CHURCH CLOTHES

  15 POGEY

  16 CLUES

  17 PUPPIES

  18 THE EXHIBITION

  19 PICK A PICKLE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1

  JUNE 1960

  We live in Niagara Falls. People who visit call it the honeymoon capital of the world. People born here just call it The Falls. Gran says with all the traffic, noise, and crowds, life here is certainly no honeymoon.

  Before school was out for the summer, everyone in my class had to do a project on someone or something that made The Falls famous. Our teacher told us about Annie Taylor, who went over the falls in a barrel with her cat. She wasn’t sure if the part about her cat being black at the beginning of the ride and white at the end was true, which made us all laugh. Most of the boys signed up for the other daredevils that plunged over the brink in some kind of crazy contraption or the collapse of the Honeymoon Bridge.

  I chose Jean-François Gravelet, The Great Blondin. He was a funambulist. That’s the fancy name for a tightrope walker. The Great Blondin started with P.T. Barnum in his Greatest Show on Earth, but he was most famous for walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

  During work period, I stared at the giant June calendar on the chalkboard, trying to think of a way to get extra marks. I’d given up the idea of walking a tightrope as a demonstration. I wasn’t brave enough to try to balance on a thick rope, even if it was only a foot off the ground.

  Miss Heard, the other grade five teacher from across the hall, came to whisper something to my teacher. Miss Heard actually looked pretty when she covered her mouth with her hand. She had the worst set of crooked teeth in the world. I was relieved not to be in her class. I would never be able to stop staring at those teeth long enough to concentrate on my work.

  “Brenda,” my teacher called out. “We need your help.”

  I got out of my seat and went into the hallway. She probably wanted me to take a message to the principal’s office. I was the only kid in school who could find her way to the principal’s office and back without getting into trouble.

  “Someone in Miss Heard’s class isn’t feeling well,” Miss Wilson explained. “She’s not sure of the way home.”

  A skinny girl in a faded dress leaned against the wall.

  “Rosedale Crescent is off of your street, isn’t it?” Miss Heard said.

  I nodded.

  “You have your grandmother’s permission to walk her home,” she said, putting the girl’s thin, clammy hand into mine. “Then you are dismissed.”

  I opened my mouth in disbelief. It was only two o’ clock. We hadn’t even had afternoon recess. Most kids would have liked the idea of leaving early, but I didn’t. I would have to spend my extra time with Gran. She would make me help with some kind of housework, reminding me over and over again that someday I would have a house of my own. She didn’t know I planned to hire a servant.

  “Just a minute,” I said and ran back to my desk. I grabbed my project notes and pencil case, along with every book from my desk, and stuffed them into my school bag. I had to make it look like I had a ton of homework.

  “Her name is Maureen Sullivan,” Miss Heard said, taking us to the front of the school. Students didn’t usually use that door. It felt strange walking beside the school flower beds.

  As I tightrope-walked the curb, I couldn’t help but notice the frayed laces of Maureen’s worn running shoes. One of her socks had lost its elastic, and it puddled about her ankle, looking, I guessed, the same way she felt.

  I walked her to the corner, stopped, and waited. This was only out of habit. I had never seen a car drive up Homewood Avenue.

  The cracks in the sidewalk here were bad. In between the dandelions, billions of ants lived in small, sandy mounds. Everyone who walked to school this way said these ants bit, and then they flattened a few mounds before moving on. I wondered why the ants kept on building their homes in the same spot.

  Maureen took a big gulp of air. She looked like she might throw up.

  “Let’s take a shortcut through the park,” I said, dragging her across the road.

  “Good to know a shortcut,” she said with a thin smile. “We just moved here.”

  “Where did you live before?” Gran still used the original names of places in the city, like Stamford Centre and Silvertown, places that didn’t exist anymore. I just went by places you could swim. “Did you live up by the Cyanamid swimming pool?” I asked. It was the biggest pool in the city, with a triple-decker diving board, and because it was connected to the canal, sometimes there were real fish in the water. It was too far away to walk, and Dad wouldn’t drive me
because we had a perfectly good pool in the park at the end of our street.

  “Were you near Chippawa Creek or Dufferin Islands?”

  Maureen didn’t speak. She just shook her head slowly from side to side.

  Dad was right. The park in our neighbourhood had everything a kid could want. There was a wading pool and a huge sandbox at one end. The adult pool had a deep end with a diving board. Behind that was a tree-topped hill with grown-up swings, slides, and teeter-totters. The hill was perfect for tobogganing.

  Because of the baseball diamond and soccer field, it was a busy place in the summer. The Kiwanis Club ran a sports program. Once you turned ten you could join, and that was the trouble with having skipped a grade. Everyone in my class belonged but me.

  “This is the municipal park,” I informed her, using my best presentation voice. As soon as I was old enough to work, I planned to be a tour guide. “The swimming pool has a deep end with a single diving board.”

  “Uh-huh,” was all she said.

  We cut across the baseball field. As we walked beside the pool’s chain-link fence, I looked through the wire diamonds. A couple of buckets of paint and some rollers sat in the empty shallow end. Soon the bottom would once again be bright blue and the sides sparkling white.

  “They’re painting,” I said, dropping my school bag and clutching the wire for a good look. “You know what that means?”

  Maureen shook her head and leaned against the fence post.

  “It means when it’s dry, we can go swimming.”

  A man in paint-splattered overalls came out of the door to the boys’ change room. “Hey, you two,” he yelled. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “Hi, Jasper,” I called back. “I have to take this girl home. She’s not feeling well.”

  “Then get going,” he said. “Quit hanging around in the hot sun.”

  I turned to Maureen, who sat on the cement with her back to the fence, eating something off her finger. I figured she must have found part of a cookie in her pocket. Then I watched in horror as she scraped her fingernail along a patch of dried bubble gum and put it in her mouth.

  “You can’t do that,” I said with a grimace.

  “Do what?”

  “Eat stuff off the sidewalk.”

  “It’s just gum.”

  I didn’t offer my hand to help her get up.

  We walked under the trees and across the grass until we reached Jepson Street.

  Cars zipped up and down this street all the time. It got really busy in the summer because Jepson Street ended at Victoria Avenue, the street that took you to the falls. Here we had to wait, but I didn’t mind. Every house on the street had either an oak or an elm tree on the front lawn. The trees grew over the road, making a huge, leafy tunnel. It was the best way to go when biking to the library.

  “Where do you live?” I asked before we turned on to Rosedale Crescent. But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew. The lawn of the little green wooden house was full of furniture and cardboard boxes. A motorbike leaned against the front porch.

  Children swam about the place like tadpoles. A red-cheeked baby slept beneath a blanket spread across two kitchen chairs.

  A skinny woman in a halter top and tight pedal-pushers was sorting through the boxes. She looked up. Her blond curls had been dragged back into a ponytail. Frizzy pieces escaped all over, giving her a kind of golden halo. She had pale, freckled skin and bright-green eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Then she put her hand to Maureen’s forehead and sighed. “I guess it’s your turn,” she murmured, leading her by the hand up the porch steps. “Thank you for walking my daughter home,” she said as she opened the screen door.

  Maureen’s mom wasn’t like the other moms I knew from school. She had a kind of teenager look, one that Gran wouldn’t like.

  I looked at the baby sleeping on the lawn. She didn’t tell me to mind the baby, but I couldn’t just walk away and leave it. What if a giant dog snatched it up and ran off?

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Sullivan,” I said, when she finally came back outside.

  “Oh, goodbye,” she said to the inside of a cardboard box. Then she pulled out her head. “I hope you’ve had the chicken pox.”

  2

  CHICKEN POX

  Two days later, a sick feeling came over me. Gran stuck a thermometer under my tongue and called my father at work. She gave me ginger ale and a small pink Aspirin and put me to bed.

  I woke with sweaty eyeballs and a red, itchy rash on my stomach. The rash turned into tiny bumps that looked like mosquito bites. They spread to my back and face. They were on my head, around my mouth, up my nose, and in my ears.

  Gran tried to make a game out of it, counting each bump as she dotted it with calamine. The pink lotion was supposed to stop the itching, but all it did was dry up and flake off.

  The bumps turned to blisters. Like tiny volcanoes, they spouted clear lava, leaving thin-walled craters. Finally, the sores turned to scabs and my head stopped aching.

  I lay in bed, watching the sun sparkle behind the leaves of the maple outside. A breeze brought the soft summer air through my window, along with the smell of motor oil and the never-ending roar of the falls. I heard Harvey next door start up his lawnmower. He was always mowing his front lawn. He never touched the back. It was a good thing there was a tall hedge between our yards. His backyard grew nothing but milkweed pods and thistles, which was good for the butterflies and birds, but it was also full of dog poop. I wouldn’t step into that yard for a million dollars. When the weeds grew through the hedge, Dad knocked on Harvey’s door.

  I couldn’t believe I had missed the last two weeks of school. They were the best part of the school year. Gym classes stretched into half-day baseball games. Teachers read stories instead of giving tests. I even missed the field trip to Queenston Heights Park, with the water balloon fight under the chestnut trees. Worst of all, before I got sick, I had marked the exact spot on the Niagara River where Blondin had started his walk. I had convinced our bus driver to stop at this exact spot, where I planned to read the opening paragraph of my project: “Niagara Falls was a swarming hive … filled and overflowing with an immense throng of people, collected to witness the fourth repetition of Mons. Blondin’s daring feat of crossing the chasm upon a cable stretched between the cliffs.” They weren’t my words. It was a quote from the August 6, 1859, Buffalo Commercial Advertiser. My teacher loved quotes.

  Gran picked up my porridge bowl. The freckles on her hands were large, like brown ink splats. I have freckles on my hands, too. Sometimes I measured mine to see if they were spreading like hers. She gave me porridge for breakfast and lunch. If Dad didn’t come home, it would have probably been porridge for dinner, too. I imagined her saying magic words over a cauldron to make a sea of porridge, like in the fairy tale.

  “Can I have some ginger ale?” I called out after her as she went out the door.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. By the time Gran came back with my ginger ale, I would die of thirst. I imagined the kids from school throwing bouquets of flowers into the rushing water of the Niagara River. Maybe I should be buried in Toronto, with my mother. Tears filled my eyes, thinking of Dad having to live alone with Gran, all because of the chicken pox.

  “Wow,” a voice said from outside. “You sure have a lot of dolls.”

  Maureen was leaning on my windowsill. She had to be standing on the heavy branch of the tree that brushed our house. I thought a lot about crawling out and sitting on that branch, but was never brave enough to try. She put one leg over the ledge.

  “You can’t come in that way,” I shrieked. Sitting up fast made me dizzy. “My grandmother will get really angry.”

  Maureen shrugged and disappeared.

  I arranged my pillows and studied my collection of dolls on the shelves. It was Gran’s idea to collect them as souvenirs. I wanted posters, but she didn’t want the walls full of holes.

  My Highland dancer stood o
n the top shelf. It came all the way from Scotland from my great-aunt Mary. On the second shelf sat a rag doll from Pioneer Village, a hillbilly from the Adirondacks, and Evangeline from Nova Scotia. My dad bought me the Native doll made of corn husks at the Canadian National Exhibition. It was in the middle of a dance, with one moccasin foot off the ground. The doll had hair but no face. Tiny white and blue beads dangled from a small band around its forehead.

  Raggedy Ann lay on my twin bed. My baby doll, Suzie Q, slept in a crib beside my bed. Most of the red on her cheeks had been rubbed off, and a few of her stiff plastic eyelashes were missing. Gran had dressed her in a bonnet, sweater, and matching booties, which she had made when she tried to teach me how to knit.

  “You’ve got a visitor from school,” Gran announced. As Maureen walked past, my grandmother straightened her back, held her head high, and raised her eyebrows.

  Maureen plunked herself down on my twin bed, right on Raggedy Ann’s face.

  I draped my hand across my forehead, waiting for her to ask how I was feeling.

  She glanced around the room. “How come you got two beds?”

  “For sleepovers,” I said, striking a different near-death pose.

  Maureen lifted the Highland dancer down from the shelf. She tilted it back and forth, making the hard glass eyes blink.

  “I had a doll like this once,” she said. “The arms and legs are held together by a giant rubber band.” She tossed the doll onto my lap. “Take a look.”

  I turned the doll over and looked at the arms.

  “Here,” she said. “Pull on her arm. You can see the insides.”

  The doll dangled between us. I pulled and so did she, but instead of stretching, the elastic snapped. The doll’s head and both legs shot off, bounced on the bottom of my tufted bedspread, and landed on the floor. A tiny, kilted torso and two arms fell into my lap.

  I fell back on the pillows, feeling a different kind of sick.

  Maureen wrapped her arms around her waist and laughed like a wicked witch.

  Just then, Gran’s large hips filled the doorway. She put a tray holding two glasses of ginger ale down on my desk and crossed her great freckled arms. Her entire body demanded to know what was going on. Seeing the doll’s leg by the door frame, she bent over and picked it up. “Brenda Mary Barnhart,” she demanded. “What have you done to your wee doll?”