by Beth Powning
Fingers pressed against her lips, Ellen took a long breath.
“…sat on his head.”
Flora covered Enid’s hand with her own, sliding her fingers into the grooves between the knuckles.
“…flopped around…Then he was dead. She untied his arms and legs. Put the pillow back on the bed. Not a one of us, not me nor her nor me brother, not a one of us ever said a word. We went to the funeral and not a person in the village as didn’t pity us.”
“Good for her,” Maud breathed.
“I’m as good as a murderer, you see.”
“He would have killed your mother one day,” Flora said. “Oh, I heard stories in the workhouse. Your mother was as good as dead, Ellen, and she knew it. She had no choice.”
Josephine, shocked, sat with hands clasping her face.
“Oh, Ellen. To have seen such a thing as a child.” She drew a long breath, shaking her head. “Oh, Ellen. Terrible. And no one…”
She broke off, as if searching for stronger words.
“No one, believe me, Ellen, no one would blame you. Flora is right, she was only saving herself. And saving you. She did it for you and your brother. So you wouldn’t be killed.”
“Well. ’Tis many years ago now and not a night goes by I don’t pray to the good Lord to watch over her in heaven.” A tear glistened on Ellen’s cheek and she removed her glasses and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Now. I’ve told it. How many years I’ve been keeping that inside me is a thing I wouldn’t want to tell.”
“Not Mr. Dougan?” Maud said, suddenly. “You never told Mr. Dougan?”
Ellen shook her head and began to laugh. “He always said I was like to be a murderer myself, the interest I took in crime.”
They heard a shriek and a burst of laughter from the front parlour.
“He’s done it again,” Enid murmured. Mr. Sprague manoeuvred the Ouija board shamelessly.
Ellen dropped the stork scissors into her basket. She rose, shook tea leaves into the brown pot and filled it with boiling water.
“What are we going to do?” Josephine asked.
Maud lowered the cloth from her forehead and glanced at her mother.
Ellen, Enid and Flora exchanged glances.
“Me, my children, and you three,” Josephine continued. She poured the tea. The kitchen rang with the tinkling percussion of cup and saucer. Outside, the last light had faded from the sky. “Maud and Lucy and I have discussed this. Of course, I have not had a chance to talk to George.”
George seldom visited, citing busyness.
“Lucy and Maud have told me that they do not intend to sell the house when they reach maturity, even if George…well. That’s as good as done, then, since all three must make the decision. I intend to stay on here, and will continue taking in boarders. Maud’s grandparents have recently informed me they will pay for her to attend the Ladies’ College in Sackville next year. As for Lucy, we don’t know her plans but I do not expect her to return to Pleasant Valley. It is my hope that you three—Ellen, Flora, Enid—that you three will stay here, and do as you think best. It is my dream that you, Flora, will assume a larger role in running this establishment and that beyond room and board I might someday offer a share of whatever income we can glean. And it is my hope, too, that you, Enid, will go to school. Perhaps even starting this year.”
Flora set her teacup back in its saucer. She noticed dried pie dough on her sleeve, picked at it.
“I know you are not my daughter, Flora,” Josephine said. “But you are no more a servant to me than is Ellen. As I understand it, and from what I have learned from Cousin Carrie, as we try to be persons we must become something new. I am not a wife. I am not a homeowner. I’m just…we’re just…friends, I suppose. Pieces of the same puzzle.”
Making a life.
Flora brushed her sleeve. She said nothing.
What, after all, she thought, had she imagined for herself other than two things—one, hazy as sunshine through mist, was a house of her own; the other, the one that had nurtured her through the long, lonely years with Ada and Henry, had been to find Enid, whom she had betrayed without meaning to—Enid, running up the road in her dream, always vanishing. Enid was solid, now, at her side, murmuring with an anxious tone—Flora?—as if it were she who must care for Flora and not the other way around.
Josephine’s offer was the second choice of her life, she realized. The first choice had been based on Maria Rye’s story, a bright concoction spun of things that a pauper child might desire. This new offer, however, was a real possibility, and such possibility, she saw, was also what a pauper child might desire, and now she knew its truth: the tall windows, the verandas and linden trees, the claw-footed tub with its iron spigots, the maple-leaf dresser handles, the oak telephone. Too, she herself was no longer a lost child, but had been saved, and had herself saved Enid, and might say that just as Josephine was no longer only a widow, she was no longer only an English orphan.
The dream of a white house with roses and a chicken pen shrivelled like a drawing crumpled and tossed onto a fire, and all that was left of it was a sock weighted with ill-gotten money which, she saw now, must be taken from beneath the floorboard and given to the police.
She skipped several stages of her answer to Josephine. Her eyes focused on the shapes she drew on the table with the tip of her finger, a large square with lines drawn across it.
“We could make Mr. Dougan’s tack room into a cottage so we could take on more boarders. I know we could barter for work. We’d need a carpenter and a mason. You could put two bedrooms, like this, and this. If we…give me your pencil, Enid.”
TWENTY-FOUR
A Different Outcome
ENID STOOD BENEATH THE trellis on the back stoop nervously clutching a book bag to her chest. It was fall, and the school year had already begun. Flora, standing in the doorway, remembered Enid at the parsonage table, her hair in hanks, flour-sack dress hanging from bony shoulders. Her mouth, a slash of misery. Now, shiny blonde hair was parted in the middle and caught back in a chignon, like Josephine’s. Enid had starched and ironed a green plaid dress herself.
She looked neither at Flora nor at Maud, but out towards the street. Her lips trembled, her breath was rapid. Excitement, fear—each mitigated the other, making her uncertain.
Maud, one step lower, hitched her own books and held up a hand.
“Come,” she urged. “I’ll show you the way.”
* * *
—
Flora found a mason and a carpenter who were willing to transform Mr. Dougan’s tack room (as they called it, now, never Mr. Tuck’s workshop) for a steady supply of bread, eggs, preserves, socks, and pickles.
Work began in November, just as the first snowflakes wavered into view.
Ellen and Flora made forays to the attic. They brought down chairs in need of scrubbing, paint or upholstery; found abandoned paintings, moth-eaten blankets, a frayed braided rug. After supper, in the early darkness, they stitched or scrubbed or painted. They carried the finished articles to the back shed and covered them with sheets—surveyed the growing pile, pleased.
“Now if only Mr. Dougan were here to see this.”
Miss Harvey and Mr. Sprague announced their engagement, but stated their intention to wait a year before marriage.
Josephine was invited to join a newly formed reading club. Members took turns choosing a program of readings and invited other members to stand at the front of the room and read aloud their given selections. The club rotated from month to month, house to house. Dress was formal—black tie, gowns. Husband and wife were not allowed to sit next to one another, and seating rotated after each segment of the evening.
“Harland and Permelia Fairweather are members,” Josephine told them, over supper.
“Are you going to join, Mother?”
“It means I will have to h
ost, you know. We will have to serve wine and spirits and use my marriage tea set and polish the silver.”
Her voice quivered, very slightly, and she picked a thread from her sleeve, not meeting anyone’s eye.
* * *
—
December 4, 1889
Dear Mother,
And Maudie, Flora, Enid and Ellen, for I know Mother reads my letters aloud! I have been continuing my studies of Blackstone’s Commentaries and I have conceived the desire to become a lawyer. How I will do this I do not know for my wages are barely enough to pay for food and you should see how thin I have become but never fear, I am filled with the energy of conviction! The petition has now been circulated over the entire province and Carrie and I continue to travel on Sundays to speak about it. We will bring a copy to you with the latest wording. It states: “Your petitioners therefore humbly pray your honourable body to enact a law providing that full parliamentary suffrage be conferred on the women of New Brunswick, upon the same terms and under the same conditions as that now accorded to men…” Isn’t it fine!? I am SO EXCITED. There are a few men in the legislature who we are quite certain will support the petition. One of them recently stated that a law that debars one-half of society from the franchise is “unjust”; another man said it was his “fixed principle” that women should have equal rights with men in “every walk of life.” Mother, I’m sure that when a few men have the courage to state such things, they are speaking for other men less bold. It is a sign of the times, I’m sure of it.
As for my work, it continues to be hot and difficult. I have been having dizzy spells from not eating enough. I fell the other day and have a bruise on my temple. I don’t know how I could keep going at this if it were not for my dreams of how I might organize the other women. I am not doing this, yet. I don’t know how I could do it without being fired. I am always a little set apart from myself, as if I’m hovering overhead and seeing this slave labour for what it is. Don’t worry, Mother. I realize I will not last long here. I will either become too weak to work or will have to admit that I can’t exist on such wages. Although other women do! Thus, so should I. I will try, since what I will do next I do not know.
Josephine’s hand gripped her mouth. She drew a long breath, shaking her head.
Come home, my darling, she thought. You can always come home.
I know that my life will change once we receive the franchise. I feel that I will be the happiest I have ever been on that glorious day and that I will be freed of the weight of injustice.
My hand tires, as does the wick of my lamp, so I will send you all my love.
Your,
Lucy
* * *
—
Editorials appeared in the papers citing police incompetence and the rush to convict in the case of the man hanged for the crime of murdering Mrs. Elsa Cavanaugh. In parlours, barbershops and railway carriages all across Canada, Mr. Jasper Tuck was indicted.
Jasper Tuck vanished.
Flora told Enid a story to put her mind at rest. “This is what I think happened, Enid. He was walking in the dark and he saw a carriage coming along the road. He bolted into the woods, to hide, and there he…”
They sat in their flannel nightgowns, hair in braids, feet in socks. Flora lifted her hands, shaping the story, and shadows rose and fell on the wallpaper.
“…tumbled down a steep hillside that he couldn’t see. He broke his leg. He…”
“…tried to crawl…”
“…and then he lay back, played out, and just then…”
“…a pack of wolves.”
They listened to the spatter of icy snow on the window, the fluting moan of wind.
“Most likely he was too far from a farmhouse and he starved to death,” Flora said. “His body is being covered with snow right now. In the spring someone will find his skeleton with nothing but boots and a belt.”
* * *
—
Josephine warned George as soon as he arrived.
“The boarders have finished their own Christmas dinner. We’re just resetting the table.” Her voice was slightly breathless. She held his hat as he shrugged from his wool coat. “Today, we are using the dining room.”
“Don’t you alw—”
Lucy and Maud ran into the hall. They patted George on the back.
“Merry Christmas, George!”
They were flushed from the heat of the kitchen, floury with last-minute preparations.
Ellen rang the dinner bell.
I am used to this new family, Josephine thought as they assembled around the table, a haze of steam rising from serving bowls. She watched as George pulled out his chair, smiling stiffly, attempting to hide his discomfort at sitting down with women who once would have served him. Maud had made her usual place settings, names written on cardboard, decorated with water-coloured sprigs of holly. George was not sitting at the head of the table. Rather, Maud had placed Ellen where, all the years of George’s childhood, his father had sat.
“I did it by age,” Maud said. “See? Enid is at starvation corner.”
Flora laughed. “What does that mean?” She had forgotten to remove her apron, worked at the knot.
“The last to be served.”
“But you will still say the blessing, please, George,” Josephine said.
After the blessing, Josephine filled the plates, which were passed all the way around the table, pausing at Ellen’s end for the addition of gravy. Finished, she sat back, smiling. She broke a roll and spread it with butter.
“Mother,” George said. He had been glancing around the room. “I noticed shingles missing on the veranda roof.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And one of the storm windows has a broken pane.”
Maud waved her roll, swallowed. “A branch smashed into it, George. In that November storm, the big one.”
He cut his turkey into small pieces. He held himself close, elbows, mouth, eyes. Josephine noticed the parting in his hair, a white line, as if drawn with a ruler.
“Oh, Ellen. I have missed your rolls! And your gravy,” Lucy said.
“Flora makes the gravy now,” Ellen said. She sent Lucy a tight smile, avoiding looking at George.
“But who do you have for these things?”
“For what things, George?” Josephine asked.
“House maintenance. There’s no Mr. Dougan. You can’t let the place…just…”
“Run down?” Maud said. She did not wait for Lucy to speak first, as she once would have. “You think we are letting the place run down, George?”
“It will, with no man on the property.”
Josephine’s and Maud’s eyes touched.
“You…” Maud began. Her nostrils flared. “Have no idea…”
Josephine held up a hand, interrupted. “Did Cousin Carrie and her husband go down to the coast for Christmas, Lucy?”
“No, Mother. Aunt Azuba and Uncle Nathaniel went to St. John. Carrie has an important meeting between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s to do with the petition.”
“What petition?” George asked.
“The suffrage petition, of course. Oh my goodness, George. You need to leave the office more often.”
“The office, as you call it—”
Maud interrupted. “Did she convince him?” she asked Lucy, as if continuing a conversation.
“Mr. Turner? Yes, she did! That’s what I was about to tell you. Yes, she did! He will speak up for us in the legislature. He has great influence.”
Josephine saw that Flora and Enid would remain silent if she did not draw them out.
“Mr. Turner is a member of the legislative assembly for St. John,” she explained.
“You don’t honestly think it will pass in the legislature,” George remarked, at the same instant.
> Maud began, “You just interrupted Moth—”
“Why not?” she demanded. Flushed.
His tone, Josephine thought. Exactly like my father’s.
“It…” George spoke directly across the table, addressing Lucy. He had not looked at Ellen, who sat on his left. Or at Flora, on his right. “It would be like asking you to climb up a ladder and fix those shingles. Or take down that storm window. You wouldn’t want to do it, once you saw what it really required. You wouldn’t, for example, want to have to…” He, too, flushed. His voice rose. “…manage a floor of factory workers. Like I have to.”
Lucy and Maud laid down their forks and looked at one another.
George smiled, slightly. He worked at a piece of crisp skin with knife and fork. “You see, it is just the way—”
“No,” Lucy said. “It is not the way. Not any more, George. You forget that I work on a factory floor. I see children working on a factory floor. You may think you treat your workers well, and perhaps you do, but other men do not. Men make laws, for example, that render married women the property of men.”
Maud drew a breath and opened her mouth. She leaned forward, hands in fists beside her plate.
“Girls,” Josephine said. “It’s Christmas. It’s the first time we’ve all been together since…”
A different silence.
“And now we have Flora and Enid. And it’s Enid’s first Christmas with us.”
“All right, Mother, I understand,” Lucy said. Dangerously. “But one last thing and then we will talk of…of the weather.” She pointed across the table at her brother. “You are wrong about us. I will prove it to you.”