by Beth Powning
“Listen to them blackbirds,” Flora murmured, sending her toast down with a swallow of tea. “Those blackbirds, I mean.”
“Now the axe murder,” Ellen continued, as if she had not heard. “That was a thing to read, now. Did the accused leave the gate open or shut. Oh, first he said one thing and then another. First he says when he left the house his clothes were hanging on a hook. Then someone else says they saw the clothes on the floor. Every single thing on her dresser, I can see it all. A reel of white cotton thread, a fine comb…Even the print over the bed, St. Patrick in the robes of a bishop. Oh, I can see it all. And the blood. Nearly a large pailful, do you remember? Mr. Dougan loved that part the reporter wrote, something about Shakespeare, oh, you know, like how he must have seen some such tragedy to have had Lady Macbeth say her piece: Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?”
Flora watched her, both hands on her teacup. Ellen missed not only the daily drama of the axe murder, but Mr. Dougan. The story had bonded them in anticipation, like one of Charles Dickens’s serials.
Ellen sat back and swept closed the newspaper. She ran her hand along the fold, creasing it; smoothed the pages, like a pillow, with a brisk stroke. Straightening, hand to back, she set the newspaper on the table beside Josephine’s chair.
“And what are you about today?” she asked Flora. Sharp, with a worrisome cognizance.
Everyone, Josephine, Maud, the boarders, knew that Mr. Tuck was building a replication of Hilltop. No one could quite believe that he would be up to the task and yet, intrigued, they had clamoured to see his drawings, which he spread out on the parlour floor. He held a new status in the household, as if, consorting with the sisters, he was dusted like a bee with the pollen of superiority. Flora kept the money Mr. Tuck paid her in a sock, beneath a loose floorboard in her bedroom. He had forbidden her to deposit it in the bank. After every payment, she lifted the board, slid coins or notes into the sock, hefted it in her hand, pushed it back into the dusty darkness.
Flora sipped her tea. She was determined that one day she and Enid would no longer work in someone else’s house but would have one of their own, with white-painted shingles, a yard with raspberry canes and a vegetable garden. A chicken house would be concealed by red rambling roses, like the ones hiding Hilltop’s laundry yard. Enid would work in the office of the boot and shoe factory; she herself would be in charge of the women working at Mr. Tuck’s miniature house factory. She pictured a summer’s afternoon, Enid coming up the path to their house, chin raised, shoulders back, accustomed to the need for courage.
“Josephine was blessed the day the likes of you walked in her door.”
Startled, Flora looked up. Ellen was looking at her, fondly.
“It was me was blessed. What if that man at the auction had got me? He was enormous. He had a big, nasty fat face. Mr. Fairweather slammed down his gavel before the bidding had ended.”
“Disgusting, now. That you should even have such things in your brain. That our Flora should have sat there in front of all them men.” Ellen dug in the flour crock with a scoop. It made a dry scrape. “You working on that little house today?”
“Yes, but I will do all my other things, too, Ellen. You know I will.”
Flora carried the cup and saucer to the sink, rinsed them in a trickle of cold water. Neither spoke of what was most on their minds, that Josephine had come down early this morning, gotten her cup of tea and explained that she was going back to bed, since she had lain awake most of the night. Such occurrences happened less frequently, although pain was visible in the shape of her mouth and the uncertainty of her steps as she drifted about the house adorned in black. She had only one dress in spring weight, which grew dirty, grease- spattered, speckled by an unfortunate spray of ink. The first thing that seem to have brightened her, it seemed to Ellen, Maud and Flora, who discussed her in whispers, was the suffrage petition. For this, her suffering quickened, was of use, its darkness like a timber beneath a bridge. Mr. Fairweather’s efforts to find Flora’s sister, too, brought her back to her old self—capable, steady. But yesterday, she had expected a visit from George. She had invited him to tea, and Ellen had made a sponge cake, and George had phoned, just as they were setting out the tray, to say he could not come. He was too busy at the office. She had hung up the telephone and sat by the instrument for a long time, while Ellen and Flora, in the kitchen, paused. Hands hovering, the cake uncut, a napkin half-folded. Josephine had been disproportionately devastated. She had gone upstairs for a nap, instead.
“There was a letter from Carrie this morning,” Ellen remarked, measuring cinnamon.
“Thank goodness. I’ll see that she gets it as soon as she’s up. Well, I’m off to do the rooms,” Flora said, tucking pins more firmly into her hair. “Oh, I will be glad when Maud is done school for the summer. Four hands are so much better than two.”
Ellen tipped the cinnamon into a bowl of flour, her expression wry.
“Maud will be married as soon as can be. Then, Flora, you’ll be thanking the Lord for your sister.”
* * *
—
After dusting the boarder’s bedrooms, smoothing their coverlets, sweeping their floors, Flora ran downstairs, tearing off her apron, stopping in the kitchen to pick up a bag of dried peas.
My garden!
The new cow stood in the pasture, sides heaving as she stretched her neck in shuddering moos. Flora ducked under the fence, put her arms around the cow’s neck, stroked the sleek hide.
“Shush, shush, it’s all right. You’ll have another calf.”
She left the cow and went to the garden. Sun broke through the clouds; snowmelt sharpened the soil’s scent. People actually do kind things, right out of the blue. Last week, a farmer arrived with horse and plough and turned the soil. He returned the following day with a harrow and chopped the rolled slabs into friable earth. Then he brought a wagonload of seasoned manure. Ellen baked him two rhubarb pies. Flora gave him a dozen eggs and a pair of socks. He turned red, protested. Said he took them only for his wife. Save her some knitting—tucking the socks into his coat.
Flora set sticks at either end of the plot, a string stretched between them. She raked a furrow, knelt and worked her way along the row on her knees, dropping last summer’s pale, wrinkled peas.
Wind lifted a new bang from her forehead, cut by Maud. The bang curled.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
The Hilltop sisters used the word often, referring to her. She had become a go-between, hurrying back and forth to Hilltop with Mr. Tuck’s drawings, upon which they pencilled changes. They insisted she have a cup of tea, gazed at her as she drank it. Oh, my dear, but do you know your own beauty? They murmured about it to one another, discussing the fashions she could wear. Once, they placed a feathered hat on her head and bid her look into the mirror. It was play to them, Flora saw. They assumed an equivalency between beauty and happiness. In her bedroom was a mirror on a stand, two little drawers for hairpins. Arms up, sweeping her hair into a chignon, she saw not a beautiful face but the expression in her eyes—a dark, puzzled yearning.
* * *
—
“I had a lot to do today,” she apologized, slipping into Mr. Tuck’s workshop. Dusty windows hazed the light, muted the blackbirds’ joyful burble.
“I seen you running back and forth, in and out,” he remarked. He dipped a brush into a can of glue.
“You want me to work on these shingles?”
He pursed his lips, nodded very slightly, drawing the bead of glue.
He had made a cardboard template. Diamonds, today. She laid the pattern over paper-thin cedar and picked up a knife. She set her feet on the chair’s rungs, leaned forward, concentrating. It did not, in fact, seem like work. There were parts of the house that she longed to be allowed to assemble. Setting the completed glass windows into their frames. Gluing batting o
nto the bed frames to make the quilts appear mounded.
“They’re nice,” she remarked. “The sisters. I was so scared to go there but I don’t mind, now.”
“Give you biscuits, do they?”
She flushed.
“I’m not a dog, Mr. Tuck.”
“Just teasing. Never say the right thing, do I. Why I never married.” He spoke without expression, as if he were reading lines in a play. He pinched his brush between finger and thumb, dipping it daintily into the glue can: he was surrounded by all things miniature—fine-tipped paint brushes, arranged by size; a small mitre box with a sharp-bladed saw; a rack of chisels; boxes filled with copper brads.
The sisters had paid a substantial advance.
“How long will it take, do you think?” she asked.
“Four months, maybe. Five.”
Enid would be here for its completion. Enid could help sew the quilts. She could go with Flora and Mr. Tuck to present the finished house to the sisters.
Mr. Tuck put down his brush, wiped his hands on a rag and walked to the window. He made a clearing in the dust and stood looking out, his forehead pressed to the glass.
“Racket,” he remarked. “Them birds.”
Those birds, she thought, but said nothing. Mr. Tuck was not a person with whom you became more familiar the longer you knew him, but rather less so. She could not reconcile all the parts of his personality; fussy, tough. Crooning teases, then hands grinding her shoulders. He was like a dog into whose eyes you could not gaze for fear of a sudden bite. And yet, he’d rescued the other boarders, lost in the storm. He kept his room immaculate. He paid his bills. Perhaps it was because he was alone in a place where every person had parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. A place where people’s minds were dense and rich with memories whose recounting formed a language of its own—sentences that need not be completed; names, words or remarks that evoked laughter or the shadow of remembered grief. A place where, as a single man, he should be a member of something—church, civic group, club, skating team, cornet band—and was not. Perhaps, she reassured herself, it was only his solitude, like her own, that she pitied. And feared.
PART III
June 1889 – August 1889
FOURTEEN
Turrets and Gables
JASPER TUCK WORKED LONG into the evenings, a lingering twilight reflected in the workshop window until almost ten. It was June, and the miniature house was framed, sided and roofed. He was making the intricate turrets and gables.
Flora sat at the kitchen table. She was polishing silverware that she’d soaked in a solution of salt and baking soda, then washed in warm, soapy water. In the half-dark, a sugar bowl shone as she rubbed it with a piece of cotton. She was working late to make up for the time she’d given Mr. Tuck during the afternoon. She felt a gathering frustration, a longing to be preparing for Enid.
The next day, as she worked for Mr. Tuck, he noticed a slip of her knife.
“You got to take your time,” he said. “I ain’t got wood to spare.”
She hunched over her table, folding her lips between her teeth, slicing cedar into fine strips.
“Sorry.”
Sighing, stretching, she looked out the window. Fat raindrops were battering the lush summer leaves. She watched with a flicker of envy as Maud let herself out the back door, raised an umbrella, and set off down the lane with a basket over her arm.
Making windows, cutting strips of wood, laying down glue with a toothpick, teasing the squares of glass into place. Her fingers, though much smaller than Mr. Tuck’s, were less dextrous. She could not draw the glue in as fine a stripe. Her knife, held less firmly, was too easily misdirected by twisted grain.
He ran a metal file along a board’s edge with short, practised strokes.
“You hear anything about your sister?”
“Nothing more. We know where she is but no one answers our letters. Mr. Fairweather must find a time to go get her. Or maybe search for her.”
He hung the file, cleared the dust from his work table with a piece of flannel. She noticed that he eradicated every trace of creation, just as he made the miniature house to be so perfect as to bear no mark of its maker.
“I got something for you,” he said. “Not for you, exactly.” He rose from his workbench.
She only half heard what Mr. Tuck said. She sat back, sighing, hunching her head into her shoulders, drawing her shoulder blades together. Nubs for sprouting wings, her mother had said. One day you will have angel wings. After their mother died, Flora had told Enid that their mother had grown wings. White, like our chickens, but much bigger.
“Did you have a little brother or sister?”
She could not contain the question. She would have asked it of whoever was in her presence at that moment.
He paused and studied her, tongue thrust over his upper teeth, a snakelike plumping. He returned to his chair and sat back, one leg crossed over the other. Blue trousers, sawdust-speckled. Shirt open at the neck, the sleeves rolled. His hair was oily, slicked back over his forehead.
“I did. He was…”
He drew a finger along the edge of the workbench.
“What? He was what?”
“I told you my mum and da died on the ferry. Drowned, eh?” He tipped his head back until his mouth slacked open. “I had a little brother. I didn’t tell you about him, did I?”
“No.”
He sighed. He closed his eyes and pressed fingers to forehead, his lips moving against the palm of his hand.
“He was just a baby. I remember him. I was big enough to pick him up. There was a little boy used to come to our house. He was the child of my ma’s best friend. On this one day, when I wasn’t home, the women were gabbing or drinking tea or some such in the front room. The baby’s carriage was in the kitchen, by the stove. It was winter. The baby was fast asleep and that little boy lifted our baby out of its carriage so carefully the baby didn’t make a peep. He went out the back door and carried him down the road and threw him over the railroad bridge into the river.”
“Oh.” She cried out, horrified. “Oh, Mr. Tuck.”
“Shouldn’t have told you. You’ll have fits like me mum.”
Pattering rain. Smell of drenched lilacs.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Your poor mother.”
He came over and touched her shoulder, lightly. She did not flinch, consumed by the thought of him bearing this monstrous story all his life.
“I have something for you, like I said.”
He squatted by a chest, lifted the lid. She heard a rustle of paper. He stood, a dress laid over his arms like a limp girl.
“I want you to try this on.”
“Whatever for?”
“For you to wear when you go to them fancy places.”
She rose, slowly, and took the dress from him.
“I’ll go stand under that tree.” He pointed. “You can see me from the window. I’ll keep my back to you.”
“You’ll get wet.”
He went out and shut the door behind him, jiggling the latch to ensure that the door was secured.
He crossed the lawn and stood under the tree, facing the street. She retreated to the far corner. Rows of buttons to be slid from their holes; silk lining, the frou-frou of a petticoat. She stepped into an underdress of blue velvet, reaching behind to snag hooks into eyes. Then an overskirt of soft white wool, draped from pleats at the waist to expose the blue dress. A short jacket of the same soft white, reaching only to the edge of her breasts, connected across the blue velvet underdress with wide tabs. Like a fruit, half-peeled, she thought, working at the buttons. At the jacket’s neck was a stiff lacy frill. She tugged at the skirts, patted them in place, and looked up to see a girl precisely her age, staring at her. Shock conveyed an instantaneous impression, the girl like the heart’s lon
ging made visible, barely flesh, a blue mist of loveliness in the dim, dusty light. Mr. Tuck had stood a floor-length mirror at the back of the workshop.
She lifted the dress to keep it from the floor, went to the door and opened it.
He turned. She could not see his expression as he stood with his arms folded, looking across the sodden grass.
* * *
—
June 10, 1889
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
Dear Mr. Fairweather,
I rec’d yours of the first concerning Enid Salford. I am happy that she has been located and I trust in your good intentions to unite her with her sister, Flora. It is difficult when running an enterprise as complex as my own to keep track of every child after they have been placed, especially if their people do not take the time to write or they fall into circumstances beyond my control, as with these girls.
It is good people like yourself that I trust and expect to come forward in this fine country. Please know that Enid was sent with a kit worth £8. If you take her yourself I will send you all that I have concerning her parentage. If you decide upon adoption perhaps you would be so good as to remunerate me this amount. Excuse the brevity of this letter, I am in much haste due to a shipment of children arriving this morning.
Yours truly,
Maria Rye
* * *
—
On the brilliant, windy day of June 20, the regatta began at nine a.m. sharp in St. John harbour.
Harland and Permelia stood on the deck of the paddle wheel steamboat David Weston, off her thrice-weekly St. John–Fredericton run. Luncheon would be served in the dining room on the saloon deck, windows flung wide so diners could watch the races. Harland lifted his binoculars to observe the sculling teams in their red, blue, yellow, or white jerseys, their striped caps. Oars flashed as the rowers pulled out into the harbour, circled, jockeying for position near the start off Reed’s Point at the foot of Prince William Street. The falls, reversed by high tide, made no roar. Three canoes emerged from the shadow of the cliffs, passed close by the steamer. He had noted, in his program, a one-mile canoe race—Indians only.