A Good House Read Online Free PDF

everyone lined up to get in to see the show.
    One of the scout tents was hauled from the scoutmaster’s garage and set up as a change room and Archie gave them a long length of his own greasy rope which they strung to cordon off the performance area. Strings of Christmas lights, enough to cover a dozen trees, were draped from girder to girder to telephone pole to make a canopy.
    The girls who couldn’t cartwheel created elaborate signs with circus scenes and information, the date, the time, and the price of admission, or they organized a stand for Freshie, the ice-cold coloured water that people would buy at five cents a glass, distribution of profit to be decided later. Murray’s father, who owned the feed mill, was a very busy man and only vaguely aware that the kids were up to something behind the Town Hall but at his wife’s insistence he threw in the money for hot dogs and buns and onions. The hot dogs were to be cooked on the Rotary grills by two other fathers and sold at a substantial mark-up to pay for the things Murray had needed to buy with his own money: a roll of yellow admittance tickets, a box of bandages, extension cords for the Christmas lights, some twine, a few cans of cheap tuna for the cats, and soup bones for the dogs.
    *   *   *
    THEY BEGAN THEIR performance at seven-thirty sharp the Thursday night before the weekend of the Town Frolic, which was always held down at the fairgrounds. Everyone but the performers and the babies and the two fathers who were cooking onions and hot dogs was supposed to pay Paul twenty-five cents to walk past the telephone pole. The bread man, whose daughter was one of the sign painters, had loaned him a money belt with chrome cylinders, which he’d loaded up with the quarters and dimes and nickels Murray had solemnly counted out to start him off, a float, Murray called it. Just before people began to arrive, after he was into his clown suit with his face painted on, Paul took a few minutes behind the tent to practise sliding the coins into the cylinders and pushing the thumb-sized levers to release them down into his palm. Murray had admonished him that it had to be right, it had to balance. He said they should know how many people attended, to plan for next year.
    Nearly everyone showed up: parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, bachelors and old maids, babies in buggies, teachers, the ministers, the priest, the old priest. A few summer cadets from the army camp out at the lake came, which sent the older girls into spasms of dreamy hope, for a walk home in the dark after the circus was over, for an arm over a shoulder, or the very serious promise of letters after the boy had left the army camp to go back to his real life in Peterborough or Toronto or Galt.
    Several kids from the reservation had got themselves into town and they stood around quietly, mixed in with the crowd separately or in pairs. People slipped them quarters to get in or to treat themselves to Freshie and hot dogs.
    Standing on the stump waiting for Murray’s signal, Paul took the expected abuse from the people waiting in the line-up. Several of the women said loudly how much they liked his clown suit and when Margaret Kemp, who had worked at the hardware store with Bill Chambers for years, said, “That’s Sylvia,” another woman said, not exactly kindly, “Yes, isn’t it just.” The bank manager, who knew full well who Paul was, asked him, “How do we know you’re not some stranger? How do we know you won’t pocket our money and vamoose?” Charles Taylor stood close beside Paul on the stump like a guard.
    When he got the signal from Murray, Paul didn’t hesitate to make everyone wait so he could add and subtract properly. One guy, some rich farmer he didn’t even know, gave him a five-dollar bill, told him to keep the change.
    They had what was called a full house. Murray wore the satin-lined wool cape and an old black