Nine Days

Jack Husting wakes in his childhood bedroom. The bed is too small for him, his body presses against its iron frame, but although Mum, Mrs. Husting, and Dad, Mr. Husting, have a shop full of furniture, they have not replaced it with any suitably large for a grown man since he’s been back. The room feels small. Mrs. Husting is “unsure how to mother a grown man” as she tentatively calls to Jack through the door. She’s concerned that he is sleeping so late, and asks him to come to church with her, but Jack refuses. He stands and looks out the small window across the poor, broken-down homes in Richmond. It’s not just the room that’s too small, it’s the entire place, and Jack wonders why people don’t leave. Only a few hours’ train ride away, there is clean, open air.

Through the window, Jack can see Connie Westaway, whom he knew in school but not well. He watches, entranced, as she does her chores in their little yard, tending their garden of potatoes and beans. As she sweeps the yard with the broom she pauses, stands the broom up straight in front of her at arm’s length, gives it a curtsy, and begins dancing with it. Jack is enchanted by the way she moves and the joy in her step. Even though the window is closed, he imagines he can hear music accompanying her footsteps. He even sways to it himself. However, Connie stops. Mrs. Westaway has come out of the house and is scolding her. As Connie walks inside, Mrs. Husting opens the door, saying she thought he’d fallen back asleep and was dreaming. Jack thinks that perhaps he was.

Having spent the last several years in several different boarding schools, Jack feels as if he’s had many different parents and many different homes. Between his time boarding and then working on a ranching station out west, he and his parents have both changed. The people here seem as unfamiliar to him as any, different than when he’d left. Mr. Husting is frailer and Mrs. Husting’s eyes are weaker. Although it’s they who sent him west to work in the first place, now that he’s back visiting they don’t want him to leave; they don’t want to become old “without family around.” Especially with so many men off to war, it’s difficult to find hands to run the shop.

The morning passes as Jack does menial chores, but by the afternoon Mrs. Husting has been hovering so long that he decides to walk into town for a bit of reprieve. In the streets, Jack hears the buzz of old men and women talking about the war, fretting about whether it will really kick up. Although most young men were anxious to go off and have their adventure, Jack wasn’t. He’s already seen men die, killed in accidents with livestock and machinery at the station, or from drunken stupidity or violence. He’s nearly died himself several times. He understands why boys stuck in their hometown feel such a draw to fight in Europe, but he doesn’t share it. Even so, a couple of old men harass Jack in the street for not having gone off to war yet, accusing him of being a coward.

When Jack gets home, Mrs. Husting tells him to clean up and shave. Though she’s never done that in the six weeks he’s been home, Jack complies. When he finishes, he finds his parents sitting in their living room with an attractive girl named Emily and her mother. Jack considers leaving through the front door, but instead begrudgingly sits next to Emily. Her father owns the hardware store down the street, though he only has one arm because of the Great War so his daughters work the shop. They all make small talk about hardware, washing machines, and pleasantries, and eat cake that Mrs. Husting has brought out. Although Mrs. Husting constantly references Jack, she does most of the talking while Jack sits unenthused. When Emily and her mother leave, Jack’s parents imagine together how whoever marries that girl will likely have the run of her father’s shop as well.

An hour later, Jack wears his best jacket and knocks on the Westaway’s front door, met by Kip and Francis. The boys look similar, but their demeanors are strikingly different. If Jack weren’t six years older than them, he imagines that he could’ve been easy friends with Kip, though Francis’s haughtiness would’ve earned him a quick beating from the other boys at the boarding schools.

Jack has a bag of lemons with him that he claims are extras from his parent’s tree, sent from Mrs. Husting. Kip sees that its only a pretense to meet Connie, and remarks that those lemons must’ve cost Jack a full shilling at the market. Even so, Connie is grateful, and asks Jack if he’d come help her fix a washing line in the yard, on account of his height. He goes with her to the yard, fixes the line, and they talk as he helps her fold laundry. Connie knows that Jack goes walking every night while the rest of Richmond is asleep; she sees him from the window. Connie remarks that she’d do the same if she were a man, and explore the different world that night creates.

Connie tells Jack about her job helping Mr. Ward at the newspaper with his photography. She loves photos and the way that they trap a moment in time. She states that she’ll be a photographer herself someday, at which Francis snorts, revealing that he and Kip are hiding nearby, listening. Francis plainly states that the idea of a female photographer is “stupid” and that art and pictures themselves seem a waste of time, especially compared to lawyering, which he wants to do. Jack and Kip talk about horses for a while, until Jack realizes the sun is setting and he needs to get home. Connie thanks him for the lemons, and as he leaves, Kip is still smirking to think that Jack paid a whole shilling just to meet his sister.

When Jack gets home, he asks Mrs. Husting about the Westaways and how they’ve fared since their father died. Mrs. Husting finds them respectable enough for a Catholic family, but disapproves of Connie working for an older, wealthier man, and imagines that perhaps she intends to marry him in spite of the age difference. She feels Connie should know her place. Mrs. Husting thinks very little of Kip, even though he works for Mr. Husting, and thinks that boys like Kip are the ones that ought to be sent off to war, for he’ll never make anything of himself anyway. When Jack goes up to his room, he finds that his mother fastened a curtain tight over his bedroom window while he was away.

That evening Jack goes walking again, and sees Connie’s light on in her window as he passes her house. He imagines her future as a photographer, or perhaps as Mr. Ward the newspaperman’s young wife. He thinks of Emily’s father and his one arm, forced to let his children help him do everything, and considers that he’d rather be killed outright than return from war less than whole. Although Emily is obviously a good woman, he still can only think of Connie folding laundry, dancing in the yard, and “ready to take her husband’s hand and begin her big adventure.”

The first night Jack was back in his parent’s house, he stayed up late in the night talking with Mr. Husting. When his dad wanted to go to sleep, Jack pulled out a shilling and told Mr. Husting he’d flipped for it, but Mr. Husting snatched it out of the air and went to bed. That was Jack’s “lucky shilling.”