Patterns of Swallows by Connie Cook

Author:Connie Cook [Cook, Connie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 1475089929
Amazon: B007O3UASI
Barnesnoble: B007O3UASI
Goodreads: 14429720
Published: 2012-03-22T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

The Weaver family immigrated to Canada from Poland shortly before the start of the war.

Their name hadn't been Weaver, then, of course. It had been something that sounded, to Anglophone ears, like a cross between a sneeze and an expletive. One of Jozef Weaver's first acts in Canada was to learn the English word for their Polish name and change the name accordingly. And so the family became the Weavers.

Bohusz was the oldest of the young Weavers. He hadn't yet reached school-age when the family moved from Poland. The two girls that came after him were both born in Poland, but they were tiny when the family immigrated, and the other three children were all born in Canada.

Being bright children, the little Weavers, when they entered school, all took to learning English as naturally as ducklings take to water, but Jozef's wife, Rahel, had never had the opportunity or the need to learn a great deal of the unreasonable language. Only Polish was spoken in the home, and she had her children or her husband to speak for her when she wasn't at home.

Jozef was a thinking and resourceful man with excellent foresight (as evidenced by the prompt name change). Those characteristics were also evidenced by the Weaver family's timely departure from Poland. Before the rest of the world was sitting up and taking notice of Hitler and his plans for invading (at least, before those members of the rest of the world that had their heads in the sand), Jozef understood the encroaching danger.

Jozef was a well-educated man. In Poland, he'd been an architect. But his knowledge of English was only moderate when he first arrived in Canada, and after settling on Arrowhead as the family's new home, he'd been grateful just to find a job on the metaphorical bottom rung of the metaphorical ladder of A. A. Turnbull Enterprises, feeding the scrap lumber and chips into the "wigwam" chip burner. And that was as far up the metaphorical ladder as he got – though he was often much higher than the bottom rung of the literal ladder on the "wigwam." And that ladder was an unsafe one.

After his death, Rahel, having a poor command of English and five children (plus one more whose presence was, as then, unrealized), found herself helpless. She was reasonably young for a widow with six children. She'd been an attractive woman, and she still was. She resorted to the means of supporting herself and her six children that many a destitute woman before her had resorted to – though, being that she was living in Arrowhead, perhaps not as blatantly as many of those other destitute women.

Her means of support largely consisted of several series of "men friends" who looked after her and the children by seeing they had money for necessities. These "men friends" often overlapped in their tenures.

But blatant or not, it wasn't how women in Arrowhead behaved. At least, if they did, it wasn't for the sake of supporting themselves or their children.

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