by Beth Powning
Then he stood silent. Josephine asked him to step inside.
* * *
—
Once it had been decided to turn the premises into a boarding house, Josephine and Maud had joined Ellen and Flora in the row of small servants’ rooms that lined a narrow hallway—beadboard walls painted white, sun-faded quilts, one bureau in each room and a row of hooks. As the nights grew longer, the rooms grew cold, their only heat source the stovepipe that rose through the hall floor from the kitchen below.
Josephine asked Flora to bring her a cup of tea in the mornings, and to sit on the single chair by the door while she drank it so they could discuss the day’s doings.
She does not realize, Josephine thought, sitting up against her pillow and taking the cup and saucer from Flora, how the sadness in her eyes has changed to a quick attentiveness.
Or how we have all begun to rely on her.
“Thank you, Flora. I find it hard to get out of bed in this cold room.” She sipped at the tea. Felt the hot drink warm her from inside. “Did you find a man to supply wood?”
“Yes,” Flora said. “He will bring it cut, cured and split.”
“How much will it cost?”
“He will take trade. I offered onions, and weekly delivery of gingerbreads, and eggs as long as the hens are laying. Is that all right?”
“It is.”
“And I found a rooster. From the same place as is bringing the cow.”
“A cow, Flora! And you know how to milk it, of course.”
Flora looked at her hands, lying open in her lap. She curled them into fists. A hardness crept into the corners of her mouth, vanished. She nodded.
“The cow is being delivered next week, but we need hay so I thought we might ask Mr. Fairweather if he knew of someone who could bring a few loads, but I don’t know how we…how…”
“To pay for it. Yes.”
Josephine cradled the cup in her hands, as if it did not have a handle.
“I will sell a bracelet. To pay for the hay. You can tell him that.”
“And Mr. Tuck,” Flora said. “He could put a stanchel in the horse stall, maybe widen it.”
Josephine felt herself yield, incrementally. To Flora’s competence. To a sense of comfort, derived from the tea’s steam. To small losses and odd gains.
* * *
—
Twice a day, Harland went to his weather station in the veranda. He opened a ledger and wrote with his finest nib. November 7, 1888. He looked out the glass walls, saw that the flag hung limp. He tapped the barometer, checked the thermometer. He entered the statistics and then added: Skies overcast.
He pondered. He would enter: No wind. Yet he felt the poetry inherent in his pen, ink easing down the nib’s tapering slit. Instead, he wrote: Air still.
In the shadow of the fence, frost lay within declivities—cupped leaves, an empty space where he had dug up a day lily—and he saw where a cat had walked. He was tempted to write of this, the meandering black dots of a cat’s paws, how this record of an encounter between fur and ice in the autumn stillness was equivalent to his own feelings; and then he thought of the rooms of his house, the glossy furniture and the smell of dinner, his skates hanging by their laces and Permelia’s thick woollen coat which she had disinterred from the attic this morning.
Heavy frost, he wrote, bearing down so that the ink welled and made a bubble, which he blotted with the edge of a cloth. He compressed his lips. Smell of snow but no flakes as yet.
He slid the pen into its holder. He could not tell Permelia what it had done to him, being featured in Mr. Train’s articles, articles that had been read in Toronto, New York, London. White slave auction. Degrading, inhuman, unchristian. Slave driver with his long whip. She could not know how it was when he met with town officials, their pens etching for posterity the various reports—amounts gathered from the town for relief of the poor: from the Christmas day collection, from the tax on dogs, from the penalty on horses running at large. Amounts billed by him, Overseer of the Poor, for items purchased by pauper owners and due payable: twill homespun trousers, socks, shoes, burial shrouds, coffins. How, at these meetings, he read aloud his accounts written over the past months, hard voice masking his increasing shame: a chair ruined as a result of being thrown out the window of Joshua Calkin’s home by an angry pauper; a doctor’s visit occasioned by a knifepoint struggle between Abraham Guntery and Miles Perkins; ditto by two boys turned out on a winter’s night, walking twelve miles until they found someone to take them in; coroner’s charges for a man found frozen to death in a shed. He passed over his ledger for inspection, expenses neatly itemized, stories dutifully dated.
At the last meeting, after receiving back the inspected book, which he privately thought of as a codification of despair, he softly settled folded hands on its cover. He knew that with this gesture he both protected those shut within the book’s darkness and made his decision to resign as Overseer of the Poor, imagining Permelia’s fury yet forgiving her in advance, for she could not imagine these meetings: glazed eyes, yawns, arms stretched overhead pulling shirts from waistbands. Jokes and guffaws. Self-important solemnity. His own hidden self-loathing.
Or, perhaps, yes, she could imagine this, and would not find it shocking. Nor be disturbed and moved to protest.
Before leaving for the store, he asked Permelia to join him in the parlour. She sat beside a hanging ivy, absently picking through its leaves for those turned leathery and brown.
“Whyever are we sitting in the parlour, Harland? Do you want me to call for tea? Although I am replete. We only just finished breakfast.”
“I need to discuss with you a decision I have taken.”
She gave him her full attention, repressing a belch, hand against lips. They had been good friends, once. She had found Harland handsome and pleasant. That, with his promise of financial success, was enough to convince her to bring all her persuasive seductions to play, when she was seventeen and slender.
“My dear, I am going to resign my position as Overseer of the Poor.”
She glared at him over her hand.
“You are not allowed. You will be disgraced. You will…you will be forced to pay a fine!”
“Yes. And the fine will go towards the upkeep of the poor. Goodness knows they deserve it.”
“They do not deserve it. They are uneducated, lazy good-for-nothings prone to drink.”
He considered her outraged face. She had been, if not poor, then perilously close to being so: her mother’s house, in need of paint; her own dresses, painstakingly repaired. The self-righteousness, however, was occasioned by propaganda. Permelia had recently joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. He pitied those husbands now lectured upon the evils of alcohol in the home. He did not drink, did not like the way it dulled his mind. He observed the loudness of men at gatherings and the way in which they were liable to become expansive, making disastrous personal confessions, revealing alliances best kept hidden.
“Forgive me, Permelia, but you do not know of what you speak. I am familiar with many cases—”
“You always take this tone with me, Harland. You do not know of what you speak. You do not know the needs of young women, of how every cent coming into this house counts, and of what your decision may cost us. Shop at Fairweather’s Gentlemen’s Clothing? Why, he’s the man who…”
He looked out the window as she spoke. He saw the cat whose prints he had seen earlier. It was a calico, white with splotches of butterscotch and black. He watched how fastidiously it negotiated the damp leaves, as though treading upon them only out of necessity.
* * *
—
Flora was coming from the barn with a basket of eggs when a farmer drove horse and wagon up the lane. He carefully lowered a burlap bag bulging with chickens.
“Here you go, then, miss.”
“But Mr. Franklin, we didn’t order…”
“No charge, had more than I needed.”
Flora set down the eggs and reached up with both hands to accept the neck of the lively bag, which made sudden explosive heaves.
Josephine’s parents were visiting; Mrs. Linden had tiptoed upstairs to console her daughter, bearing a tin of toffee, since this morning Josephine had been unable to leave her bed.
Swinging the heavy bag before her with two hands, Flora caught sight of Mr. Linden at one of the front windows, scowling. He would not want it getting around town that his daughter was accepting charity.
“Thank you, Mr. Franklin,” Flora said. “Thank you very much.”
She stalked up the lane past the house, disgusted by this factory- owning father. Ellen, once, had hissed into Flora’s ear, furious. She’d overheard a conversation in which Mr. Linden told Josephine she was paying the piper for her husband’s mistake.
“He sees fit to let her get by,” Ellen muttered, “since he is giving so much to George…”
Remembering this now, heading for the barn, Flora wondered if Ellen’s dislike of George had begun only after Simeon’s death, when the contrast between son and daughters had been laid bare. Or if it were a part of a disliking of men in general.
Simeon, of course, and Mr. Dougan excepted…
“Shush,” she commanded the chickens, who had burst into violent squawks.
* * *
—
The following Sunday, after church, Josephine and Maud walked home together. Josephine paused in the outer vestibule, gathering herself for the ordeal of passing the boarders, who occupied the parlour. She fussed at her gloves, watching as Maud entered the house and strode down the hallway, pausing to wave at the boarders in their armchairs, reading books, perusing the newspapers, waiting for their dinner to be served.
Young people learn to accept change so easily.
She felt tears pricking her eyes.
I can’t keep telling myself that it is not fair. I have to accept, as the minister said. Be grateful for what I have. She had not recovered from the smallest of moments, grown larger in her mind as she walked up the street, when a circle of friends outside the church had taken just an instant too long to admit her, as if without Simeon she were invisible.
She slid quietly into the house, brushing at her skirt. Smell of roast chicken and apple pie. Chinking of porcelain plates being set down. She forced herself to stop in the parlour door. Peered in, made a tiny wave. The boarders looked up. Mr. Sprague placed a finger, ostentatiously, on the passage of the newspaper he was reading, his eyes clouded with some salacious story.
“Did you enjoy your services?” asked Josephine.
Mrs. Beaman went to the Catholic church. Miss Harvey and Mr. Sprague were Baptists. She did not know if Mr. Tuck attended church.
“It was lovely, yes, Mrs. Galloway.”
“Very nice, Mrs. Galloway. And you?”
They, too, like the people outside the church, made a community, like a family, and their politeness to her was another exclusion; she was their landlady, and their money gave them the privilege of coming in at the front door, using their own keys. Of spreading their belongings in the parlour. Of going up the front stairs, not bothering to tiptoe if they came in at a late hour. Mrs. Beaman slept in the marital bed. The children’s rooms were littered with the possessions of strangers. The women used the large bathroom with its hot and cold running water.
They cannot see it as my house. Mine and Simeon’s.
She went down the hall towards the kitchen. The incident at the church had quickened her grief, making her steps waver, her hand seek the wall for support. There was no room in her mind to make decisions, to consider the needs of simple living. She was, like Simeon, suspended in waters that rendered her helpless, floating without volition. She felt a kind of shame, and a rage, that she could not share her grief. It was neither wanted nor comprehensible, and no one could understand its weight, so heavy that she did not wish to rise from bed, knowing that she must take it up.
Nor could anyone understand that all the endeavours of life—polishing brass, mending, peeling apples, sewing hems—seemed now as strands in a web of deceit, netted in as fine and elaborate a mesh as possible, all for the purpose of obscuring death’s dominion.
Stop. Breathe. Look at one thing. One small thing.
She leaned against the wall for a moment, watching closely as she turned the ring on her finger. Straightening with a long breath, she opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. The dog scrambled to his feet in one convulsive motion of gladness.
* * *
—
Winter crept, seeped, silenced. Skies were grey for a week. Mornings, the grass bore a blanket of frost.
Josephine appeared in the kitchen door.
“I couldn’t sleep again last night,” she said. “Could I have a cup of tea?”
She wore a long muslin nightgown, her hair loosely braided.
Flora and Ellen were drowsy in the warmth of the wood stove, the steamy, sweet air. Their desire to gather Josephine into their contentment quivered, an arrow held to string. Ellen wiped floury hands, reached for the kettle. Flora lifted cup and saucer from a shelf. Unnecessarily, they made the tea together, Ellen pouring, Flora holding.
“Warm milk didn’t help, then?” Ellen said, handing Josephine the cup of tea.
Josephine shook her head.
“I lay awake ever so long.”
She lifted the saucer so that the steam caressed her cheek. Flora and Ellen exchanged a knowing look as she left the room and trod heavily up the stairs.
“Oh, they loved each other, they did,” Ellen murmured. She returned to the table, where she set hands back on the pillow of dough, pulling it forward, then folding it back into itself. Her face was warped, mouth awry, eyes yearning. “You never saw it, Flora. The way she could be. Laughing, like. Coming in all blowed about by the wind and never a care.”
* * *
—
Flora tipped the hen gently so that its head lay on the block. She brought the hatchet down on the cord-thin neck, saw the head drop into a bucket, golden eye still fixed on her. It was a Saturday and she could hear the tap tap of a hammer. She set the carcass upside down in another bucket and went into the barn. Jasper Tuck had fitted up the tack room as his workshop. He was gripping a ball-peen hammer, tapping tiny nails into a narrow piece of wood. Sheets of glass. A jar of putty. Strips of cedar.
Flora came up close to his bench. She wiped a hand on her skirt and reached out to touch the bright wood, reminding herself that this was not a dollhouse but a work of art—to be displayed in parlours, set in windows, lit at night and admired by passersby.
“One day, I would like to have one of your houses,” she said.
“Well. You will, then. Strikes me that you’re a girl that makes things happen. Like you do around here.” He grinned. His look was sly, containing a hidden, alternate conversation, not with her, she sensed, but with what she looked like. What people called her beauty. He was missing a wolf tooth. He slid his tongue up to cover the gap. His eyes were the colour of silty water.
“When my parents died, I learned how to make do,” Flora said.
He set down the hammer. His eyes bored into hers and she looked down, suddenly wishing she had not come here. He reminded her of men she and Enid had encountered in the village, after their parents died. Leaning against cottage walls. Coming up lanes. Their eyes crafty, their hands like spades.
“My parents died,” he said. “What do you think of that? You and me are alike. How old were you?”
“About seven.”
He was silent. She looked up; he was studying her. Her heart skipped a beat and she turned to leave, but his next words arrested her.
“That’s how old I was. Seven years old. My mother and fa
ther were drowned.”
“Oh. That’s terrible.”
“Ferry. The river ferry. Bashed in by a floating log.”
“I’m very sorry,” she said.
He returned to the meticulous, almost mincing tap tap of the hammer. She felt that he had left an opportunity for her kindness. That she should ask him if he had a brother or a sister and why he had come to this town. She hesitated, not wanting to be the subject of his scrutiny.
He looked down at the side of the little house, held in the vise. He ran his finger along the row of nail heads. His eyebrows raised and vanished under hair that had escaped his cloth cap.
“You could help if you want,” he remarked, offhand. “You got them little fingers, you could set glass into the windowpanes.”
She waved away the suggestion with a blood-speckled hand.
“I…I’ll try, but I probably can’t. I got too much to do.”
He shrugged, resumed hammering. Tap tap tap. Gentle. Like tiptoeing instead of striding.
She went back outside, relieved, conflicted.
Josephine faithfully gave her the quarterly stipend sent by the government. Other than that, Flora had only free room and board. Nothing had been said about letting her go or about her position in the household. She was pleased to find that Mrs. Beaman and Miss Harvey and Mr. Sprague often came to her for advice or information; they even complained, which she did not mind, for she was in a position to reassure, to make improvements. Mr. Tuck, now, was asking for her help, even though he usually did not need anything. He brought energy into the house. She felt it emanating from his shoulders when she set the teapot on the table. She felt it breathing from the sheets of his bed, when she stripped it.
She buried the chicken’s head. The air smelled of soil chilled by morning frosts, dead grass, blood. Lifting the carcass from the bucket, she walked back towards the house carrying it by cold claws. She flung her thoughts forward only as far as was necessary to keep her momentum, as she had when Mr. Fairweather showed her how to ride a bicycle. She saw a rolling succession of chores: Strip, gut, then drop the chicken in boiling water, add dried rosemary from the bunch; bake the squash; bring up potatoes from the root cellar. Mend Mrs. Beaman’s pillow. Put oatmeal and candles on the shopping list. And hovering, always, was a tiny image of Enid—a river, an elm tree, a farm.