“This bunch is going to burst, they’re drinking so much,” John observed. “And they’re still nursing off their mother. She’s the one I should be giving all this to. I’m just about done here, Buckle’s the last one needs milking.”
Mary sat down on a stool across from her uncle, brought her knees up, and encircled them with her arms, balancing herself. The last rays of the setting sun carpeted the barn floor with thin lines of pink. The satisfied kittens wrestled each other in a corner. Except for the sound of their soft bodies on the floor and the milk filling the bucket, the barn was silent.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to do the milking, Uncle John. I’m sorry you had to do it tonight after doing it all the time I was away.”
“I don’t mind. Tell me about your trip.”
“It was wonderful. We read books together at night and ate in a real restaurant twice. I made a new friend called Rachel and Aunt Beatrice sewed us all new things. Did you see my dress and boots that I was wearing when I got back today?”
“That I did, and they’re some handsome. You looked all grown up.”
“I loved it at Grandpa and Grandma Hennessey’s. I asked if I could stay a little longer but Mumma said no. I wish I could have.”
“You will another time. I remember when I was your age. I wanted to see the world, travel. And I did a bit, but always found home to be the best. You’ll learn that as the years go by. But I know what it’s like to be young and restless.”
“Who knows when I might ever go back for another visit. I’m almost seventeen and this was the first time I ever met them.”
“It’s hard to get away when you live on a farm, Mary. There’s so much to do and not a lot of money for extras like travelling.”
“I want to see things like Aunt Beatrice does.”
“And someday you probably will. But you still have some growing up to do and your Ma needs you around here. And we’d all miss you something awful.”
Mary folded her arms and pouted.
John reached out his arms and Mary walked into them.
“God knows, I understand why you’d want to stay at your aunt’s for longer. All the criticizing and complaining you have to listen to all the time around here. But time goes by, and when you get older you can make some decisions for yourself. Not everybody goes on like your father and grandmother do. You’ll see.”
He kissed the top of her head and released her.
“Now you get to the house. It’s time you went to bed. It’s been a long day.”
Mary ran across the barnyard and into the house. Her father and grandmother were now both sitting on the veranda. As always, Mabel was gossiping and complaining and Will was smoking and nodding his head. Mary mounted the stairs. Her mother was in Harry’s and Little Helen’s bedroom reading to them from the big Mother Goose book with the red cover. That too was usually Mary’s job.
Her bedroom was at the end of the long upstairs hall. She passed her parents’ room on the left, then her grandmother’s. Across the hall were two rooms full of old bed frames, baby carriages, clothes that didn’t fit anyone, farm tools, and anything else for which the family had no more use. No one knew for sure all that was in those rooms. John said that his grandmother Dempsey had, years before, started throwing things in there after her husband died and it had been added to over the years by other family members. Many times Ann said she wanted to clear one of them out and make a sewing room for herself but Mabel would not allow it. Both rooms were locked and Will had the keys. Beyond was Mary’s bedroom. Uncle John slept in a room downstairs off the pantry. He said that was all he needed and that he didn’t want to have to go up and down the stairs all the time.
In Mary’s room a small table with a drawer and two shelves sat beside her bed. Two books lay on its top shelf, a bible sent from Grandmother Hennessey when she was christened and a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. She placed The Woman in White and The Moonstone on the top of the pile.
Just then the door opened and Mary jumped away from the table. Her father stuck his head into the room.
“All ready for bed?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
Will opened the door wider and walked into the room, looking around.
“Just wanted to be sure that you were all right. You’ve had a long day.”
“I’m fine.”
He smiled. “You looked fine in that new dress of yours today. All grown up.”
“Aunt Beatrice made it for me.”
“You’re getting to be a real pretty young lady, Mary. Very pretty indeed,” he repeated, backing out of the room without taking his eyes off her.
He turned and closed the door behind him.
Mary picked up a chair. She jammed its top up under the door knob, bracing it shut. Then she walked slowly to her bed, got under the covers, and curled herself up into a tight ball.
***
The next morning when Mary went downstairs to the kitchen, Harry was seated in his wooden highchair wedged up against the kitchen table, banging a spoon on its tray.
“Just a minute, little man, it’s almost done,” Ann reassured him, stirring the porridge on the top of the stove.
“Mumma’s boy is hungry this morning.” She smiled at Mary. “Please get me a bowl from the cupboard, will you? And one for you and me too.”
Mary brought the bowls over to the stove. Ann spooned a bit of porridge into one of them.
“Blow on that, please, until it’s cool enough for him.”
“Where’s Little Helen?” Mary asked.
“I’m letting her sleep a bit longer this morning. She kept falling asleep last night as I was bathing her. She was that tired from all the travelling we did yesterday. Put a bit of molasses on that for him and stir it around.”
When Mary presented Harry with his breakfast, he immediately began to slap his spoon on the surface of the cereal. Flecks of white flew about his head.
“Feed him, please, Mary. Yours will be cool enough by the time you’re done with him.”
Ann chatted away, and was, to Mary’s surprise, drinking her black tea from one of Grandma Harney’s good pink and white china cups, the little finger of her right hand raised. Most of the time she just grabbed one of the many chipped enamel cups in the cupboard. Mary looked out the kitchen window and saw her grandmother coming towards the house, carrying eggs in a twig basket. She had been out to the chicken coop and, as usual, didn’t look pleased.
“This morning I’m going to make a couple of pies to take over to the church for the supper tomorrow night,” Ann was saying. “Mrs. Murray asked me to make something before we went away.”
Mary wrestled the spoon out of Harry’s chubby hand for the third time. There was more porridge on her apron and the floor than had managed to find its way into the baby’s mouth.
“Just a little more, sweetie,” Mary begged. “Watch the train coming into the station.” She made choo choo sounds as she moved the spoon, in intervals, towards him. Harry shook his head, placed his right arm across his forehead, and looked away.
“Good thing I wrote it down to remind myself,” Ann went on. “I had forgotten all about it until I saw the note this morning. I think I’ll make blueberry. Then I’ll have Uncle John run me over to the church later. God bless him, he milked the cows and got them out to the field this morning. Your father went to work hours ago. He’ll be gone for the rest of the week.”
Mary had missed the cows while she was at Aunt Beatrice’s. She’d be sure to fetch them in tonight and see to them. She was glad that her father was away. She had been relieved when he started working in Wallace. It meant he wasn’t home at night as much.
She had given up on trying to feed Harry and was eating her lukewarm breakfast when Mabel came into the kitchen with the eggs. She immediately started with Ann over the china cup.
“You’ll break that,
clumsy as what you are. Just because you’ve been around your fancy relatives doesn’t mean that you can destroy the few decent things I have. Those cups are for good.”
Mabel shook her head as if in disbelief, and before Ann could protest she turned to Mary.
“I want you to dig some potatoes today. You can take Little Helen with you, keep her from bein’ underfoot. Where is she anyway? Not out of bed yet?”
Mary got up from the table, leaving her mother and grandmother arguing in the kitchen. She climbed the stairs, washed and dressed herself and Little Helen, and fed her sister breakfast. Then the two girls walked up to the potato field on the hill behind the barn. Mary carried a hoe, two wooden buckets, one inside the other, and two feedbags, while Little Helen held the tiny hoe that Uncle John had made especially for her. The sun was warm and pleasant on their faces, and there was just enough wind to keep the bugs away. Little Helen, nonetheless, soon started complaining. First she was hungry, even though she had just had breakfast, so Mary gave her a bite of the buttered bread she had brought to hold them over until dinnertime. After that, the child said she was hot and sat down under the nearby alder bushes.
“Don’t wanna work.”
Mary sighed. “You don’t have to. It’s better if I do it myself, it’s faster. Just sit there and watch.”
Little Helen was soon dozing. Mary moved the hoe back and forth in the dirt in search of the blue potatoes that Uncle John had planted in June. She liked looking for the spuds. They were almost the same colour as the earth if she didn’t look too closely. She would pretend that she was on a treasure hunt. Sometimes she would break into a potato with the hoe, revealing its creamy, blue-veined interior. She also made up stories about them. Sometimes they were married to the potato next to them and the smaller spuds were their children. Mary often felt guilty for digging at them roughly with the hoe, removing them from their warm earth bed.
Later on she heard voices down in the barnyard. Uncle John was harnessing Bill and Blackie, getting them ready to take Ann to the church with her pies. She stepped out of the porch door with two baskets, each covered with a white and red checkered dishcloth. Ann looked up towards the field and waved. Mary turned away and bent over the potatoes once again.
***
St. George’s Anglican Church was an eyesore and everyone in Rockley knew it. Thirty years ago it had been just one of the many grand visions of businessman Lester Clarke. Chairman of the rectory board and said to be as rich as Croesus, Clarke wanted to construct a church he felt worthy of attendance by himself and his family. He had made good in the Boston States and retired at the age of fifty-five back to Rockley, the place of his birth, with many plans to boost the community. He started with the church. Parishioners couldn’t be grateful enough that Clarke was using his own money to provide them with a brand new place of worship and the land for a massive cemetery.
Two weeks after the ten-foot concrete foundation wall was put in place, Clarke died in his sleep. Some people said it was his heart. Others repeated the story that he had been poisoned, slowly, by his spendthrift second wife. In any case, Clarke’s was the first burial in the new graveyard. His widow and his money returned to Connecticut and the Rockley Anglicans were left with an impressive wall and no funds to build a suitable structure atop it. Finally, after years of pie socials and fundraising bazaars, they were able to cover it with a flimsy one-storey shed-roofed building and rickety wooden stairway leading up to the front door.
“Looks like my shithouse on top of the Roman coliseum,” John said once when describing it to a man from Stellarton.
To deliver her pies, Ann climbed the many stairs to the front door of the church while John waited in the express wagon. At the top she read a note on the door directing her to the rectory across the road.
“I should have known.” She sighed, turned, and took a step down from the platform. Then she tried to take another and couldn’t. The heel of her right boot was wedged into a space between two loose boards on the top step. Then heel and boot separated.
Ann felt the weight of the two baskets pitching her forward. Her right leg dragged behind the rest of her body, the kneecap hitting each step on the way down.
“No, no, no.”
The baskets were crushed beneath her and she heard glass breaking.
“Ann, are you all right?” John was kneeling beside her. “God, woman, you gave yourself an awful heist.”
He tried to lift her left shoulder to turn her over.
“No, just a minute,” she begged.
A sourness rose in the back of Ann’s throat and she felt beads of cold sweat spring out on her forehead.
“Are you all right?” John repeated.
“I…I don’t know. I just want to lie here for a minute.”
“I heard glass breaking. You have to get up, you might be bleeding.”
“Oh.”
John gingerly lifted her left shoulder and got a basket out from under her.
“Jesus.”
Then he realized that it was blueberry and not blood stains down the front of her dress.
“Oh,” Ann said, turning to lie on one side. “My ankle hurts.”
“Which one?”
“The right.”
“It’s curled up under you. Just a minute.”
They heard a door slam and feet running towards them.
“Good heavens, what happened?” asked Mrs. Murray, the minister’s wife, coming to a stop on her knees in front of Ann.
“She fell,” John answered, indicating the church with a nod of his head.
“Oh, I knew this would happen one day, with those godawful stairs. I kept telling Earl to get them fixed but no, that would be too easy. Ann, come into the house so we can get a look at you. Do you think you can walk?”
“I’ll try.”
John placed both hands under Ann’s left armpit; Mrs. Murray did the same on her right side, and together they managed to slowly lift Ann to a standing position.
“Oh, I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t put any weight on my right leg.”
“Wait a minute,” John said. “Let’s do this. Put your arms around our shoulders and we’ll make a chair with our hands to support you.”
He and Mrs. Murray bent forward and Ann put her arms around their necks.
“Now sit down,” John said.
“You can’t lift me,” she protested.
“Oh, you’re light as a feather, dear,” Mrs. Murray reassured her.
They carried Ann across the road and up onto the Murray’s veranda.
“To the left, the parlour,” Mrs. Murray directed as they made their way through the front door.
They deposited Ann on the parlour sofa, and Mrs. Murray placed two cushions under her head.
“She’ll be all right here, Mr. Dempsey. You run for Doctor Creed. I just saw him pass by here about a half hour ago so he’s likely home. I’ll make her as comfortable as I can until you get back. Where does it hurt, dear?” she asked as John slammed the door behind him.
“My right ankle and the inside of my right knee.”
“Let’s see.” She lifted Ann’s skirt and petticoat. “I’ll need to run and get a hook to undo your boot, dear. I’ll be right back.”
“I’m so sorry about all this, Mrs. Murray,” Ann said when her hostess returned. She started to cry. “The pies are ruined and I don’t have anything else for the church supper.”
Mrs. Murray smiled and began to unhook the buttons on Ann’s right boot. “My dear, pies and church suppers are the least of your worries at the moment. This ankle’s badly swollen. I’m going to wrap a cold cloth around it while we wait for the doctor. And we should get your leg raised above your heart. And please, call me Josephine. Oh good, here’s Junior.”
Through the pain, Ann saw a blond child come into the room. He stopped and stared down at her
. She had never seen such eyes before. They seemed to bore right through her. In the background, she felt more than saw Mrs. Murray scurrying around.
“Stop gawking, dear, and go over to the churchyard and pick up Mrs. Harney’s hat and bring it in to me. And be careful with it. Then take a shovel and box and scoop up those baskets and pies. Watch yourself, there’s broken glass.”
“What happened?” asked the child.
“Mrs. Harney fell down the church steps, thanks to your father. The doctor will be here any minute. Now off with you, and look lively. The Gardners’ dog is already over there sniffing around.”
As Mrs. Murray steered him towards the front door, the boy kept looking over his shoulder at Ann.
“It all goes onto the manure pile behind the barn. Thank you, dear.
“Now, let’s look after that ankle,” she said and headed for the kitchen.
***
When Will arrived home Friday evening, he found Ann sitting up on his mother’s daybed while Mabel stood in front of the stove stirring a large pot of soup. John was at the kitchen table shining his boots.
“What’s wrong with you?” Will greeted his wife.
“She’s taken a lazy spell, that’s what’s wrong,” Mabel stated before Ann could open her mouth. “Came in here last Monday bawling about her ankle being broken. And hasn’t done any work since. I’ve been run clear off my feet.”
“You haven’t done a damn thing until today when you knew he was coming home,” John corrected her. “That soup is the first thing you’ve laid your hand to all week.”
“Ann was trying to deliver some pies to the church and sprained her ankle falling down the stairs,” he told Will. “Doc Creed said she won’t be able to walk on it for a while.”
Will sat down at the end of the daybed and looked at his wife. “We should sue the bastards. How come you’re here and not upstairs?”
“I can’t go up or down stairs, Will. I can’t walk at all, except with these crutches.” Ann pointed at the wooden sticks leaning on the wall beside her. “And I have to keep my leg propped up or it doesn’t feel right.”
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