by Beth Powning
“Who is it? Who you talking to?” A woman’s voice.
“Shut up.”
Mrs. Mallory’s face appeared in the window, distorted by the glass, cheeks smashed to purple, open bleeding wounds around her eyes. She gripped her mouth with bloody fingers.
Mr. Mallory took another reeling step. “Get off out of here.”
Flora backed away.
“Mr. Mallory, I was told that Enid Salford was here. I need to see her.”
Whiskey, sour breath. Shirt half-unbuttoned. Black hairs on his chest. A streak of blood on his cheek.
“Perley Hayes bring you? Cunt bastard. I’ll see to…”
The dog came up from the barn, a silent energy, like wind. Flora screamed, flailed her arms, felt teeth on her forearm. She tore from the dog’s grip, ran towards the house. The woman pulled the door wide. Flora tripped, fell over the threshold. The woman snatched a cloth from the stove bar, thrust it at Flora. Mr. Mallory followed Flora into the house, slammed the door behind him, rammed a bolt over the bar latch. Flora huddled on the floor, pressing the dishcloth to her wound. The dog hurled itself against the door.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Silence. The click of the dog’s nails.
Mr. Mallory sat at the table. He picked up a stoneware jug and tipped it to his mouth.
“All night,” the woman hissed at Flora. Accusing. “This been goin’ on all night.”
She huddled against the wall, hands to bleeding mouth. Smashed crockery. A broken chair, its rush seat ripped loose. A bowl of stew on the floor, its contents congealing on the rug.
Flora’s mind became a ray of light, searching. The door, locked. Could she pull the bolt back? The dog, waiting. Another door, leading into a hall.
Drinking all night.
“What to do with her,” he muttered to himself. “What in the hell am I going to do with her. Fuckin’ women.” He roared at his wife. “You let the girl out of your sight. She’s gone and told. They sent this…this…”
Pointing at Flora.
“No one sent me,” she said.
“No one sent me.” He tipped the jug back until she could see the matted underside of his beard.
“Alright, then,” he whispered. “Two women I got to dispose of. How to…though…uhh. Dispose…”
He sat forward, abruptly, elbows on knees, head in hands. He shook his head, muttering.
“…deal with Hayes…horse…whore bitch…”
The woman and Flora looked at one another. The woman’s eyes went to the poker, hanging on the back of the stove. Flora’s eyes. She signalled to the woman with the slightest lift of a forefinger. Wait.
“Mr. Mallory?”
“How the fuck you know my name? Where you from, anyway. Never seen you around…”
“I’m not from here. I don’t know anything about you, except that…”
She took a deep breath.
“…that you have my sister.”
Stillness, suddenly. Mr. and Mrs. Mallory, shocked into complicity.
“What sister?” he said.
“Enid Salford is my sister.”
“You ain’t one of them people who’s in charge of them English kids?”
“No. I’m Enid Salford’s sister, and I’ve been looking for her for a very long time. I was told she was here at your farm.”
“Well, then, you got her to blame.” He tipped forward until his feet were beneath his torso; rocked himself up and staggered over to his wife. Bracing himself with one hand against the wall, he kicked her with each word. “She-let-that-damn-girl…” Harder. “Out-of-her-sight. Her-ignorant-slut-fault.”
Flora scrambled to her feet. She seized the back of his shirt.
“Stop that. You’ll kill her.”
He turned and gripped Flora by the shoulders. She tore from his grasp, knocked the jug from the table. It broke into three large pieces. She picked up a piece, backed away, holding it towards his face. He punched her in the stomach. Her skirt tripped her as she doubled over, turning to run, the bolt beneath her fingers, trying to shove it back, screamed as she felt a stab in her shoulder, the point raking down through the fabric of her sleeve. Bloody shard in his hand.
Men’s voices, horses.
She screamed. Mrs. Mallory screamed.
“Help! Help us!”
Mr. Mallory thrust her aside. She knelt, clutching her shoulder. The door wrenched open, his boots on the dirt, a stagger, shouting, running, the shard in his hand like a spear.
“Off my property! You got no—”
Air on her face, the smell of summer.
Mrs. Mallory on her side, furled, like a caterpillar. Mr. Mallory, stumbling across the clearing, waving his arms as if the men were crows and could be frightened away. Two men flinging themselves willy-nilly from their horses, running towards him.
Perley Hayes, then.
Horse and wagon coming around the bend.
SEVENTEEN
Fresh Bread and Freedom
AS SOON AS THE doctor finished cleaning the dog bite and stitching the stab wound, Perley Hayes drove Flora to the parsonage.
Mrs. Wallace hurried out, tightening her apron.
“Thank heavens,” she said. She stepped forward, cupped Flora’s face, examining the bandage. “You are white as a ghost.”
“I need to see her.”
Flora followed Mrs. Wallace down the hallway. Her heart began a rapid beating. Her shoulder began to throb. She felt faint, ran one hand along the yellow-flowered wallpaper.
“I couldn’t give her a bath,” Mrs. Wallace whispered, finger to lips, just before they stepped into the kitchen. “She ate oatmeal, had some tea.”
A girl perched on the edge of a spool-rung chair. The chair was pushed back from the table, as if she were about to jump up. She clutched her hands in her lap.
Purple shadows beneath her eyes. Knuckles, elbows, the bones of her arms. A wide mouth, drawn downwards. Matted hair.
“Enid?”
The girl’s eyes held her, without recognition. Flora stared back. She was not certain, herself, whether this was her sister.
She pulled a chair from the table and sat beside the girl. Sunshine washed over a loaf of bread, a spray of crumbs.
“Are you Enid Salford?”
“I am.”
“Did you come from England? Did you come from a workhouse in Tetbury?”
“I did.”
Flora drew a shaky breath.
“Enid. I am Flora! I am Flora.”
“My sister Flora?”
Hope in the girls’ eyes, a flicker. Flora remembered the feeling as it had once been for herself—irrepressible, treacherous.
Flora laid her hand on the girl’s clenched fist.
“Enid, I am your sister. I truly am. I came looking for you. I’m Flora.”
The minister came from a front room, holding a pen. He sat at the end of the table, looked from girl to girl.
“I’ve been writing to her for years,” Flora said. “I don’t think anyone ever sent my letters. ’Cause I never got a reply.”
“Why did you run away from the Mallorys, Enid?” he said. He spoke as if he had asked this question several times already. “We need to know if they have done something that needs to be brought to the attention of the police.”
She would not tell them what she had seen, Flora realized. One could not speak of evil. She knew the isolation of horror, remembering how Matron’s helpers had held a little girl, working a bar of soap into her mouth. Or how they fondled your private parts when they bathed you. You hid it away, even from yourself—worked it into the deepest soil of your mind.
Sunshine slanted through coloured panes, making a nimbus of the girl’s matted, filthy hair. Flora noticed that it was the same light colour as her own. Tears welled in the
girl’s eyes, slid down her cheeks. She was staring at Flora as if seeing her for the first time. Hope, stronger. Eager.
“My sister? My Flora?”
The girl suddenly rested her cheekbone on her hand, as if she were too tired to hold her head up. She sprawled forward, head on folded arms.
They stared at the girl lying amidst jam and bread, in the clean kitchen with its white wainscot and checkered curtains.
Flora looked at Mrs. Wallace’s stricken face, and spoke softly.
“She’s only asleep.”
* * *
—
The girl slept for hours at the parsonage before coming to Flora’s room at the inn. Flour-sack dress clutched tightly around her gaunt frame, she huddled at the window’s edge, peering down. It was late afternoon, and the bricks of the dry goods store across the street were flushed a warm red. A top hat, a parasol—people passed, below, on the sidewalk.
“He’s down there, looking for me.”
Flora joined her at the window.
“Do you see him?”
“No.”
She could not rid herself of the stunned feeling that this fourteen-year-old girl, almost as tall as she was herself, was an imposter. Yet in the rich light she could see that the girl’s face bore a similarity to her own.
“I’m going to run you a bath.”
“Run me a bath?”
The girl spoke nervously, and Flora wondered if she was remembering the brutal scrubbing she had received at the workhouse.
“I’ll let you bathe yourself,” Flora said. She went into the bathroom and turned the spigots. The girl followed her, stood in the bathroom door. “Hot, see. Cold. I wish Ma could see this.”
“Ma. Did we call our…our mother Ma?”
“We did. Ma and Papa.”
“I don’t remember a father.”
Your little hand, Flora thought, running her own hand back and forth in the light-rippled water. The river stones, knocking against one another. The grave’s raw dirt. No relatives, only the priest and some people from the farm where Papa worked. She rose and left the bathroom to this unknown girl who was neither the child Flora remembered, nor Enid as she had imagined her. She heard a small, dunking splash. Then silence.
“Is it all right? The temperature?”
The girl did not answer and Flora turned to see that she was bent forward in the tub, weeping, beating her forehead with the heels of her hands.
Flora wet a cloth made of knitted string, rubbed it with soap, passed it up and down the girl’s back, squeezed it onto her shoulders. She dipped it again. Aroma of coconut. Eased the cloth along the knobby spine. Bug bites on the back of her neck, but no marks of whip or hand.
The girl clutched her legs, buried her face in her knees. Her body shook, she wept in spasms that Flora’s cloth could not subdue.
“He were cruel to him, beat him with a big belt. I saw them in the…’n then he…the boy, he…”
Flora asked no questions. It would have to be coaxed out, Reverend Wallace had told her in the parsonage kitchen while the girl slept. If there were some wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Mallory, he’d told Flora, they would have grounds to keep Enid from his custody.
“Sit back so I can wash your face.” She tugged gently at the girl’s shoulder.
The girl sat up and tipped her head back, eyes closed as Flora passed the cloth over her face in slow, coaxing strokes, like a cat’s tongue. The water was turning brown.
“I remember my first time in a tub,” Flora murmured. “I remember the first time I saw water coming from a tap. It was at the place I live now. Lift up your foot.”
She knelt, lifted the girl’s foot and worked the cloth between each toe.
“Now the other one.”
She made the girl lie back in the water with her fingers in her ears.
“Now, bend forward. I’m going to wash your hair.” Flora circled the soap bar over the matted tangle, raised a froth with her fingertips. Scabs, on the girl’s scalp. Knots, to be gently pulled apart.
“Smells nice,” the girl murmured. She cupped water in her hands, lowered her face into it. Her shoulders relaxed.
“You wash the rest of yourself,” Flora said, when she had rinsed the soap from the girl’s hair. She waited in the bedroom until the girl appeared in the doorway wrapped in the towel. Flora snugged a blanket over the girl’s shoulders and gently steered her to a chair. She pulled another chair close and sat, facing her. They braved each other’s eyes.
A fly buzzed on a curl of sticky paper suspended from the ceiling. The strip circled, touched by a breeze. The breeze carried the four-beat clop of hooves and the plaint of gulls.
“You talk different,” the girl said.
Her cheeks sheened, apple blossom pink; her hair lay in wet-dark slabs. Her eyes struggled past the surface of Flora’s, seeking the sister of memory.
Flora leaned forward, placed a hand on the girl’s knee.
“What do you remember about that Tetbury workhouse?”
“Me and my sister, we went outside everyday and we walked round and round. In a circle. There were walls we couldn’t see over.”
“What did you and your sister do for work?”
“Hemmed gloves.”
“You are my Enid. Your poor little hands. I remember them. Tiny little red…They tore you away from me. You were screaming.”
She grasped Enid’s hands. Her voice shook, her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Enid, I shouldn’t have gone. I shouldn’t have. They told me I would better myself in Canada and they would send you to me. They told me you would come over the very next year.”
She wept, openly. She could not speak until her sobs subsided.
“They lied to me.”
Enid glanced down at their clasped hands and then up at Flora. A layer dropped from her face, like mist, clearing. “I remember that. I do. There were a box, a green box. You packed. I cried. You went in a carriage.”
“Yes.”
“Was it a lady, like, who said you would better yourself?”
“Yes, a lady.”
They sat, holding hands a little longer, feeling the beat of each other’s heart.
“Let’s get you dressed.”
Enid stood and the blanket dropped. Flora glanced, quickly looked away. Spasmodic shuddering, ribs, the mound of pubic hair a forlorn extravagance between bony thighs.
Leg by leg, lifted. Underpants. Arms, lifted. Tentative, flinching at Flora’s touch. One of Flora’s dresses, dropped over Enid’s head. Flora fastened buttons and ribbons, while tears gathered in Enid’s eyes and spilled over her cheeks. She said nothing, only sat as Flora began working at her hair, cutting out mats and snarls with her sewing scissors until, finally, it could be brushed, and became a thickness filled with light and air, the strands floating, crackling. Flora’s fingers flew, separating, braiding, winding the braid to Enid’s head, pinning it in place.
“You can blow your nose,” Flora said, giving her a handkerchief.
Enid did, then wiped her eyes.
“No, wait, you…”
Flora handed her a fresh handkerchief.
Enid rose and looked down at the full skirt, touched the white collar at her neck, arms willow-slender in the cotton sleeves; and Flora saw that she was not the wild, fierce girl the flour-sack dress had made her appear to be.
“Let’s go get our supper,” Flora said.
“He’s going to come for me. I should stay hid.”
“You’re safe. He wouldn’t dare come right into the Pictou Inn.”
She reached for Enid, but the girl drew back, her mouth tightening. She wrapped her arms around her own waist and made herself small, looking down. Desolate, terrified.
“Come,” Flora said, gently, taking her by the hand. “You’ll be safe.”
>
In the hallway, the soles of their shoes clicked like hooves on the varnished floor. The smell of chicken pie and biscuits rose from the dining room.
Be patient, Flora told herself. Touch was a thing from which one recoiled. At the workhouse, you learned to wait, to be invisible, to do only what you were told. Eyes that met your own did not do so out of love. Enid’s fear was a thing that Josephine and Ellen might know how to treat.
There was the long train trip to come.
There was the little room to show her, the bed with the quilt. The veranda shaded by lilacs and vines. Raspberry crush, the kitchen, the hens and the cow. Fresh bread.
And freedom.
EIGHTEEN
Someone Else’s Happiness
“ ’TWAS ONLY KINDNESS I was showing.” Ellen flipped a butter knife over and over. Breathless, her mouth working. “Saying she hates my good custard.”
Only silence came from the dining room; evidently the boarders had broken off their dinner conversation to listen to the fracas in the kitchen. Yelling. The dog’s barking. The crash of broken crockery.
Maud was on her hands and knees, picking up the pieces of a shattered bowl. Strawberry custard dripped from the cupboard drawers. Josephine stood in the kitchen door watching the sisters going down the hall—Enid, a swirl of rage, apron torn off and fluttering onto the floor, Flora stooping to pick it up.
“I was only asking,” Ellen said. “Did she remember her parents. Does anyone ask me if I remember my parents? I wouldn’t say no to a question or two. Just to show, you know.”
“What? Show what?” Maud sat back on her heels. Her face was pained, confused. She had been excited to welcome a “little sister” into the household.
“Who a person is. Alls I wanted to know. Who is this girl who talks only to Flora. Who looks up from her good food only to say I don’t want any more. Never a thank you.”
“She’s like a stray dog,” Maud said. “Just afraid, I guess.”
Josephine resumed her seat at the table. She had no appetite for the rest of her custard.
Enid had arrived two weeks ago. Still she would not meet their eyes. She sat hunched at the table, pleating her skirt into fans and then smoothing it out. Creasing, smoothing, creasing. Her face did the same thing, anxious ridges forming on her forehead, clearing away when Flora whispered to her, then rising up again.