by Beth Powning
“It is because of what we expected,” Josephine said, pushing her bowl away. “Maud, put down that rag and come sit.”
Josephine noticed Maud and Ellen exchange a glance of surprise at her tone.
It had crept over her, gradually, her own understanding of why Enid did not smile, not at beauty—the bee-laden blue delphiniums, the trellis smothered with roses—nor at new dresses, her bed with its bright quilt, Ellen’s desserts. Enid was filled with a story too dreadful to tell, with resentment for the story itself and rage for those who had created it. The child knew neither what was expected of her nor of how she fit into this household.
“Ellen, I believe you have done the right thing to show her that you are interested in her. Perhaps we need to…”
She cupped her cheek, gazing out the window. Lilac leaves drooped in the still air. Sailor, standing, alert, stirred his tail.
“Let her be. Ask her nothing. Be as kind as we can. Leave the disciplining, if there is need for it, to Flora. One day, she will begin to shed her fear and anger.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” Ellen said. She picked a bit of hull from a strawberry. “They be sisters, alright.”
After they washed up, Josephine found Flora sitting on the bottom tread of the stairs with her head in her arms. Josephine paused. Her heart had not yet resumed its normal pace after the scene in the kitchen. She lowered herself next to Flora, tucking up her bombazine skirt. Flora did not look up but held out a hand for Sailor, who trailed Josephine without fail, the click click of his claws percussion to the rustle of her skirts. The dog licked Flora’s hand, once.
“She won’t listen to me.” Flora’s voice was muffled.
Josephine thought of her advice to Maud and Ellen. She was accustomed to a different way of speaking with Flora, as if Flora were her partner, someone she might go to with questions of her own. The air was tense, as if Enid’s sulking wafted down the stairs; and she realized, suddenly, the extent to which the girl had shattered the household’s hard-won peace.
“I could not do without you, Flora,” she said. She drew a breath, not knowing what she intended to say next.
Flora raised her head, clearing her face with both hands. She stroked Sailor. Her hand trembled.
“Are you thinking that you should send me and Enid away?”
“No. No! Certainly not.” Josephine realized that she had revealed conflicted feelings.
“I’m trying,” Flora said. She did not blink, fighting back tears. “I’m trying to see her as the Enid I remember. But she’s not.”
“She’s probably doing the same. Trying to see you as the sister she lost.”
“We were both lied to. Stolen. Used like animals.”
“How used?”
“Why do you think they name it the work house? We did nothing but work. Like we were being punished for something we never did, but we felt bad about ourselves anyway. Like it was our fault being poor, being orphaned. Like it happened because we were bad children. We made gloves. Every day. Hour after hour. You should have seen the bruises on Enid’s hands.”
Josephine sensed an outpouring long in the making.
“Then we were used again. Told we should come over here to have a better life. Oh, here, here with you, it is better. But…”
“Oh, Flora.”
“I see clean faces, happy faces. People who enjoy life and think people are good. You think people are good, don’t you? You think the world is made of people like you and…” She made an encompassing gesture. “People who live in these houses. Mr. and Mrs. Fairweather.”
Flora’s eyes were dark. Her voice raised. Sailor scrambled to his feet, panting.
“I have never, ever in my life felt like I belonged anywhere. I’ve never ever felt like I had the right to shop in a store, or walk down a street. I’ve been looked at like I were a…dangerous dog…rabid, wild. Or else a thing to be used. I came to Canada because I was told I would get a better life. I dreamed of it. All the way over in that ship, I cried, thinking of little Enid, left behind, and then I hoped, I hoped, I imagined a pretty house and kind people who would help me and send for my sister. I saw myself saving money. She told me that’s what was going to happen. That lady who came to the workhouse. She lied. When I got here, I was made to work, worse than in the workhouse. To do things I had never done before. We got no training in England. We got no training in the workhouse. We was treated like cows. Fed, told to walk in circles for exercise. Got stood in washtubs and our privates felt up by nasty women. Got fed less than you would feed Sailor and sent to bed.”
They watched through the screen door as Mr. Tuck walked across the grass and entered his workshop. Evening light saturated the red rose petals, their sun-baked sweetness filled the hall.
“Only thing we learned was to sew gloves,” she whispered.
Josephine pulled Sailor close, put an arm around him, ran her fingers through his black fur.
Flora took a long breath, watching the sunlight casting the screen’s pattern onto the floor in trembling trapezoids. She hunched forward, her arms still clasping her legs. There was no sound from upstairs and she wondered if Enid had stolen to the top of the stairway and was listening.
“Something happened to Enid,” she said quietly. “Something to do with that horrible man in Nova Scotia. She told me she weren’t…wasn’t ruined. I asked, and she said no, she wasn’t ever ruined but the boy were ruined. What boy, I said. What do you mean, he were ruined? How can a boy be ruined? And she won’t tell me. And I think there was something else, more bad. ’Cause there was no boy there. And she won’t say what become of him.”
Josephine’s hair was coming loose from its pins. Strands clung to her forehead, damp with perspiration. She picked crumbs from her sleeve. She felt reckless, the casting off of propriety. Carrie would be pleased. Two woman sitting on the back stairs, sharing their truths.
“I’m sorry, Flora. Sorry that I never took the time to ask you.”
Flora buried her head again.
“We can’t hurry Enid. We have to wait for her to know that she can trust us. Realize that her life has changed. As I have myself been waiting, ever since Simeon died. Waiting for things to change within myself. It’s something that you can’t rush. Like vegetables, you know, seeds…”
Josephine’s voice was uncertain, treading on uncertain ground.
Flora straightened, suddenly. She locked eyes with Josephine, her own pleading, yet firm, forceful.
“I got to keep her here with me, Josephine. I got to. Please don’t send us away.”
Josephine felt a wave of sadness, not grief, but a simpler sorrow, the longing to put things right.
“Flora, not only do you have the right to be here, but your presence has been a necessity. Without you, I might still be huddled in my bed. You make me feel that I am cared for, not because I am a mother, or a…captain’s wife…”
She reddened, treading too close to emotion. Flora was watching, intently. She was listening, Josephine realized, only for assurance.
“I will not send you and Enid away. Of course I won’t.” She drew a breath. “I said to Ellen that we must not ask Enid any more questions. No matter how well intentioned. We will wait for her to tell us her story. Can you…Flora, can you try to teach her some things? Only you should speak to her about her table manners. Only you should teach her how to behave. Teach her politeness. Respect.”
“Yes,” Flora said. “I have been trying but I’ll do more. Ada taught me some of that. I were…I was at that farm for five years. I got the odd smack. Didn’t hurt me none.”
“Any,” corrected Josephine. “We’ll ask Maud to teach her grammar.”
* * *
—
Flora and Enid sat cross-legged on their beds, whispering in the darkness, all the summer nights. They told small stories, long ones. At first, in mid-July,
the sky was light enough so they could make out each other’s features as silence lengthened between the ending of one story and the beginning of the next. Then August came, with towering thunderheads and the smell of goldenrod. They wore flannel nightgowns and whispered until they realized darkness by loss, their faces without expression, only the hint of eyes and teeth.
What was it like the day after I left? Who took my bed? Who sat next to you at the dining table? Did those three girls keep picking on you? Did that woman still secretly help you, remember how she’d prick the leather with her awl?
They sat listening to the crickets while Enid sifted the contents of her memory. They were mean to me. Yes, she helped. I dunno, can’t remember. The stories released and rose, random as bubbles. Enid told how she had been met by Mr. Mallory at the train station after she had watched the passing farmhouses, all the way from Halifax, and hoped that hers would be as pretty, with red and green trim, rose bushes and apple trees. She said nothing more about the boy other than he was named Freddie, had disappeared, and had something to do with the shovel leaning against the house on the first day that Flora arrived.
* * *
—
Flora was snipping carpeting into squares and oblongs, making more miniature rugs.
“You should get your sister to help,” Mr. Tuck suggested. “I’ll pay her.” He spoke with an easy tone, as if he did not care whether she took up his suggestion.
“My sister is too busy in the house.”
She told Enid not to have anything to do with Jasper Tuck. She asked Ellen to give Enid extra sewing in the evening.
* * *
—
Tired, Flora walked heavy-footed up the stairs and along the quiet hallway, passing the washroom that smelled of lavender and the crack of light around Ellen’s door. In their room, Enid sat on her bed bent over a lesson book. She had begun to fill out, her cheeks firm. She read a sentence out loud, proud, then slapped the book shut and fell back on her pillow, arms behind her head. She watched as Flora undressed.
“What are we going to do, Flora? You and me going to live here the rest of our lives?”
Flora pulled her nightgown over her head and did up the laces under her chin.
“I have a plan,” she said. “I think we’ll have our own house someday, Enid. I’m saving money.”
She went to the corner beside the dresser, lifted the floorboard, took out the sock and sat on Enid’s bed.
“This is money that Mr. Tuck pays me. He’s got a new plan, now. He’s going to have me go to fancy homes and show off the miniatures and get more people to order them. He got me a beautiful dress to wear.”
“Where is it? Can I see it?”
“It’s…he keeps it in his workshop.”
“Has Josephine seen it?”
“No. It’s something I…I don’t think…It’s a secret, like, this money. It’s because…I saw something.”
Between them, suddenly. A less than perfect understanding.
“Enid, it’s for our own good. I’ll tell you someday, but if you don’t know, no one can make you say. It’s just something that I shouldn’t have seen. For some reason Mr. Tuck doesn’t want anyone to know how much he pays me. It’s only money, I tell him, but…”
She examined the sock, absorbedly, not looking at Enid.
“He wants to have a factory, one day, where he makes the little houses, and he will hire me to work there. It’s all I can think to do, Enid, to become independent. So we can have our own house.”
“Don’t Josephine know that he pays you?”
“Doesn’t. Doesn’t Josephine know.”
“Doesn’t Josephine…”
“Yes, but I pretend that it’s just a little bit. Pocket change. I told her it’s fun for me. Fun to work on the little houses.”
Flora knelt and slid the sock back beneath the floorboard. She wished, suddenly, that Enid were younger, a little girl she could tuck into bed, a child who would do everything she asked her to do, who would believe anything she told her.
She climbed into bed and pulled up the blanket. She folded her hands on her chest. Enid, too, settled beneath her covers. They listened to the crickets.
“He were just a little boy,” Enid murmured, sleepily. She yawned, rolled over and burrowed into her pillow. “One time there was a screaming in the night and I thought it was a woman. He come into my bed and we pulled the covers over our heads. He said it was a bobcat.”
Flora waited, but heard only Enid’s slow, deepening breathing.
“We pretended he was my little brother,” Enid murmured.
“Did he do that often? Come under the covers?”
“Only that one time.” Her voice grew faint with sleep. “I wasn’t supposed to talk to him.”
* * *
—
Josephine was wakened by a sharp cry. A fox. She lay, listening, but the sound did not come again. It was too early to get up. Even the dawn chorus had not yet started, only the first tentative chirps. She lay in the hard, narrow bed watching as the wallpaper, the dresses and petticoats hanging on hooks and the pine chest of drawers gained colour in the rising light. She pondered her life. It drained away, the status she had enjoyed—daughter of a factory owner, wife of a sea captain. Now she was becoming—who? what? The matron of a boarding house. Would she grow old in this house? Would she and Ellen become like an old married couple, growing closer and closer as their roles merged?
She heard the sound again. Human, not fox. An anguished, half-strangled shriek.
She threw off the covers, ran into the hall. The cries increased in volume, coming from Flora’s room. She rushed in, found the sisters on Enid’s bed, Flora holding Enid in her arms, rocking her.
“Shh, Enid, Enid, it’s only a dream.”
Josephine slid onto the bed, stroked Enid’s head.
“Night terrors, they are so awful. You’re awake now, Enid, aren’t you? You’re here with me and Flora.”
“Fred,” Enid choked. She drew a long, shuddering breath. “Freddie.” She sat, covering her face with her hands, rocking forward and back. Wailed. “Can’t stop it, can’t stop it.”
Flora took Enid’s hands and drew them from her face. “Look at me, Enid. Look. You are in our bedroom. Josephine is here with us.”
Enid’s eyes were stricken.
“I see it over and over and over and over. The same—”
“Tell us,” Flora said, softly. She stroked her sister’s cheek. “It will make it stop if you tell us.”
“We made a swing, in the barn. It was a rope, to haul things up into the loft. We swang on it. He were sleeping in the barn, they didn’t want him in the house. I found kittens, I knew Mallory would send us to drown them so I got up early and I took one out to him.”
Hands, gripping her mouth. She began to rock and moan.
“Tell me. Tell me.”
“He hanged hisself. He hanged hisself on our swing. Oh, Flora. His feet were…I run in and told them.”
“Oh. Oh, Enid.”
“I seen him carry Fred off. Fred under one arm. Shovel in the other hand. Doreen and me, we watched from the door. He said he’d kill me and her if we ever told. It happened the day before you come, Flora.”
“Oh, Enid.”
“I should’ve gotten up earlier. Oh, Flora, if only I’d gotten up earlier.”
* * *
—
Later that day, Josephine walked to Harland’s store and told him the story.
“And this happened the day before Flora arrived. It accounts for the man’s violence.”
He sat at his desk, hands in fists on either side of the blotter. He watched her, barely blinking, his mouth drawn down at the corners. When she had finished, and fallen silent, he dropped his forehead in his hands.
Josephine heard the voices of his daugh
ter and a customer. She saw the pages of a ledger, opened to today’s date.
He drew a long breath and sat up.
“I will contact the Pictou constabulary,” he said. “If I need to go to Nova Scotia, I will.” His voice was grim and she imagined that this time he would brook no objections from Permelia.
His face hardened and he did not see her, even though he stared straight into her eyes.
* * *
—
The next morning, Josephine slid her legs over the side of the bed and stood, all in one motion. She stretched her arms over her head.
For the first time, she did not think immediately upon waking about Simeon’s absence, but rather about Enid and the boy in Nova Scotia. The words themselves had been so difficult. They did not relate to one another. Boy. Rope. Hanging.
She tried to imagine what could make a child want to die. We look forward. Like reading a book, we want to know what comes next. Fred, she thought, knew the answer—what came next was only despair, and he could no longer face it. There was no one he could turn to for help, and never would be. Like a kitten drowned in a pillowcase, he knew he would vanish without anyone noticing his absence.
Josephine slid open a drawer and studied its contents.
No child should ever have such feelings.
The boy had not a single person to love him save Enid, whose friendship had been forbidden. His life was of value simply to service the man: milking, weeding, lugging, even—Josephine closed her eyes and drew a breath—fulfilling his sexual urges.
I am choosing my clothing, she thought, suddenly realizing that this was a step forward. She had not taken the wrinkled bombazine mourning dress from its hook—a habit, by now—but pondered a fresh shirtwaist, a green skirt.