by Myrna Dey
Janetta’s face, still half-turned toward me, held the same awe I felt at being here. But in the end, there was no more to see of this forgotten colony.
“We’ve got time for lunch before the ferry,” said Lawrence, climbing the road out of Extension and swinging back onto the Trans-Canada Highway. “There’s a good fish and chip shop in Departure Bay.”
“Never thinks of cholesterol with all this sausage and fried food.” Janetta winked at me.
As we indulged, she reviewed all our findings and promised a visit to the Nanaimo cemetery on my next trip to the island. Jane Hughes was buried there, but finding the grave would take some time. When they dropped me at the ferry, she squeezed in one more mission with her strong hug. “Mona Mingus has two more letters. Be sure to let me know what you can get from her.”
Easy for the followers to say. The Pied Piper had roads to travel and work to do.
“FIVE MORE DEATHS,” says Roland, tossing a bag of sugar on the kitchen table.
Jane’s elation at the sight of the scarce commodity is frozen by his words.
“Two in combat, three from flu.”
Jane knows the wire would come directly to them if Llewellyn were among the casualties, but she holds her breath. “Any we know?”
“Not the soldiers. Young fella from Lantzville and a lumber man with a big family from Ladysmith. Tommy would know him.”
“And the flu deaths?” She still does not exhale.
“Black, white, and purple.”
“The black?” she whispers, impatient at Roland’s stalling with the colours of sashes on doors to denote a dead adult, child, or senior citizen.
Roland nods and says softly. “Marjorie.”
Jane’s breath is expelled in a sob. Roland puts his spindly arms around her until she collects herself and wipes her eyes with her apron.
Her best friend. Just four mornings ago they were cleaning their adjoining cabbage patches when Malcolm Stockand, a snooty bookkeeper, strutted down the street past them and tripped on a piece of horse manure. The look on Marjorie’s face provoked a giggle from Jane, triggering such an explosion of laughter that Sara, Janet, and Marjorie’s daughters stopped playing tag to stare at their mothers doubled over, holding their sides. Then, suddenly, Marjorie, still laughing, clutched the sides of her head and said, “I must have burst a blood vessel behind my eyes from all this laughing we do.”
When the pain in Marjorie’s head removed the smile from her face, Jane’s went with it. And when Marjorie’s nose began oozing blood, Jane followed her through the gate they never shut between their properties and replaced her sopping handkerchief with her own clean one. Since then Jane’s head has been filled with prayer.
“When?”
“Just now. Kids were at the store lined up for sugar with the rest of us when Milt came to get them. Saddest thing to see your camphor necklaces swinging on them all. Like inmates escaped from prison.”
As a precaution against the rampant disease, Jane had wrapped camphor gum in flannel and tied it to cords to be worn around the necks of the Gilchrist family. She also made masks out of gingham muslin to elude the airborne virus — enough for her family and for Marjorie’s mother, who came from Comox two days ago to help. The house was now in quarantine, much to the dismay of Sara and Janet, who spent every possible minute with Suzanne and June, including walking to school together. Jane wore gloves when she handed food and pans of ground onions for chest poultices across the threshold to Milt or Mrs. Osler, speaking through closed lips.
She thinks then of the white and purple deaths. “Who else?”
“Jack Gilmour’s kid in Wellington and Minnie Ellis.”
She winces at Minnie’s name: a spinster just retired from a long career running a millinery shop in Nanaimo. “Where will it end? Both calamities — overseas and here at home? Did you check the post office?”
Roland shakes his head, as he has done every day since their last letter from Llewyllyn two months ago. He watches his wife nervously spinning around the kitchen, touching every surface aimlessly.
“The girls — where are they?”
Sara’s wails from the end of the garden reveal their whereabouts. Soon they fill the house. “Suzanne and June’s mother is gone. And she’s never coming back.”
Janet follows behind, tears in her eyes. She hugs Jane’s waist. “I’m glad it’s not you, Mommy.”
“We must go to Uncle Milt and the girls to see what we can do for them.”
“But not inside the house. It’s full of germs,” cries Sara. “June told us not to come in yet. Their grandma’s washing Aunt Marjorie’s bedding in carbolic acid.”
“Food, food, what can I take?” Jane continues circling. “I’ve got onions ready in the icebox for her.”
Roland hands his wife a cardigan from a hook in the porch. “They won’t be needing onions, and food can wait. Let’s just pay our respects to Milt for now.” He slips on his jacket, one side hanging lower than the other, and guides her out the back door. The twins fix themselves to her arms, Sara snuffling loudly. At the bottom step, Jane stops and covers her eyes. The death wagon has stopped at the front of the Gilchrist house. Milt helps the driver carry a flat, blanketed form on a stretcher through the front door. They slide it onto the back of the wagon where two more bundles rest.
What’s left of Marjorie is the very least of her. Jane did not know she had a funny bone until four years ago when they moved next to the Gilchrists in Five Acres. Marjorie made gardening, canning, quilting, knitting, and even drunken husbands amusing. And now she is gone, just like that: one of thousands of corpses piled up across the continent in this fashion, while funerals are stalled and wakes discouraged for fear of contagion.
The blonde heads of Suzanne, age nine, and June, age seven, huddle together at the side door, crying. Stopping to speak to them, their grandmother emerges onto the stoop with a basketful of wet sheets and towels, which she proceeds to hang on the line. Disinfectant fumes reach their nostrils through the crisp September air. Everywhere the strong smell has replaced the season’s usual fragrant scent of fresh apples. When she sees the girls, Sara breaks away from her parents and runs across the two large garden lots. Save for some squashes and pumpkins and a few turnips left in the ground, both yards have been cleaned and readied for winter by Jane and Marjorie. Janet, still clinging to her mother, accompanies her parents to the front of the house, where Uncle Milt takes a black sash from the death wagon driver and nails it to the door.
At the sight of his neighbours, the new widower dissolves. The spectacle of massive Milt Gilchrist collapsing into her parents’ less robust arms drives Janet to safety at the back with the other girls. Milt requires support from both Jane and Roland, whose own strength is only up to the task because of the relative sobriety inflicted upon him by Prohibition. Occasional binges at a blind pig in Nanaimo make him wilder than ever, but at this moment Jane regards the flask of moonshine he extracts from his jacket pocket as being worth the consequences.
“Milt, take a shot of this to calm your nerves.”
Milt straightens up at the prospect. “At the woodshed, then.” He nods in the direction of his teetotalling mother-in-law outside the side door.
Jane joins Mrs. Osler, a short, rotund woman, in a tearful embrace. With her longer arms, numb from the weight of Milt, she pins the last of the linens to the line. Fear of germs forgotten, the young girls bunch together on a swing Marjorie had installed from her favourite oak tree.
Marjorie’s mother lowers her voice, still rippling with a Scottish burr after forty years in Canada. “And did ye know she was expectin’?”
Jane’s face shows she did not.
“Nobody knew. Not something she would share until she was sure. And she would hae taken the secret with her, ’cept the baby came out last night. Blood all over my poor darlin,’ from her nose, from her ears, and then — ” Mrs. Osler’s stiff upper lip begins to tremble.
Stunned by this report, Jane cannot
help feeling let down that Marjorie didn’t confide in her.
Or did she?
On that first evening when Jane took across stew, blueberry cobbler, and onions, Marjorie requested her cot be in view of the door. Removed at the back of the kitchen from drafts and from spreading infection, she still had the strength and will to communicate. Milt stepped aside for Jane to blow his wife a kiss from the stoop. Marjorie raised herself against a pillow. She pointed to her nose, which she was still blotting with the other hand, thrust a finger into her mouth to indicate vomiting, and finished by poking it into her ear, shrugging comically at all these orifices spewing forth. For once Jane couldn’t manage a smile, especially since the ear finger came out red as well. Marjorie shrugged again, this time more seriously. Checking to make sure Milt and the girls were out of range, she pointed between her legs. The curse, Jane translated, to top everything off. And when Marjorie drew a bulge over her stomach with her hand, Jane assumed she meant the bloating that went along with the monthlies. Then a coughing fit threw her back against the pillow, ending the pantomime and sending Jane home through a tear-blurred dusk.
Why did people have to lie down to die? Or “lay down and die,” as she had heard so often during this epidemic from people who hadn’t found grammar class as interesting as she had. The indignity of Marjorie trapped helplessly on the cot put Jane in mind of a graceful prancing pony felled by a broken leg, then humiliated that it could not get up again. She should have stayed away after that, for her last delivery of food has left her haunted by Marjorie’s face: trying to smile from the pillow, blue from pneumonia, coughing up blood-tinged froth that would finally clog her lungs and drown her.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, putting her arm around Mrs. Osler.
“Milt might be too shy to talk to you about it. Or too upset. But she would want ye to know. She loved ye like a sister, Jane.”
“And I loved her. She’s the only one to fill the emptiness I felt from leaving my sisters behind so many years ago in Wales.” Her heartache swells at the thought of Catherine and how they have not been in contact for so long.
“’Tis such a pity the demon Blitz Katarrh singles out pregnant women. A neighbour o’ mine in Comox, four months gone, started coughing one day and was dead the next. Aye, why does it strike those in the prime o’ their lives first? Why not take an old lady like me?”
“You’re not so old, Mrs. Osler,” says Jane, aware that the virus does hit those between twenty and forty most severely. Like many British, Marjorie’s mother chooses the German word for the scourge, consolidating her loyal opposition to the two enemies being fought. Jane eschews that term, catarrh touching her too personally as the only physical weakness she has ever known. She has read in the newspapers its many labels: Flanders Grippe by British troops, Naples Soldier by the Spanish, and its most accepted name, Spanish influenza or Spanish Lady. Despite the occurrence of cases in China, France, the U.S., and Britain before the first public report from neutral Spain, those countries, being at war, censored their press.
“Still, I’d gladly hae gi’en my remaining years to Marjorie, if I could. I hope ye’re not wi’ child, dearie.”
Jane blushes. Until recently she could say no for certain. But two Saturdays ago, she and Roland had gone to a wedding dance at the Hare-wood Hall. Marjorie had insisted on it by inviting Sara and Janet to sleep over at their place. Wartime demand for coal made the Harewood mine operational again and Roland had left Extension to work there, closer to their home on Five Acres. A young miner he had taken under his wing was marrying a girl from Victoria and wanted him as best man.
“The kid makes me think of me with Tommy,” he told Jane when she voiced her objections to being in a public place, “so I want to be there.” Marjorie had backed him up, saying friendship was a gift not to be ignored; to console Jane, she would brew some preventative tonics for them when they brought the girls over. “Dr. Gilchrist’s orders,” she clowned, forcing her concoctions on them: oil of cinnamon gargle, salt water up the nose, washed down by a mixture of warm milk, ginger, sugar, pepper, and soda.
The potions served two purposes: to protect them from the virus and to free them for a few hours from the past and future. Home ownership, steady work, and Prohibition have given Roland a composure he cannot completely subvert with a few nasty benders at a speakeasy. Jane knows that unspoken fear intensifies his indulgence: a long silence from Llewyllyn or trouble at work adds to his underlying disappointment in himself. But that night, sipping on fruit punch, he was toasted by a host of young miners for his experience — he could still hold his own with the new diggers — and his wit in tight spots.
“That’ll be news to my wife because I haven’t got a smile out of her for twenty years,” he said for Jane’s benefit. But he did get a dance — several, in fact — reminding Jane of their own wedding and what an unhappy occasion it had been except for those few masterful spins with Roland. She thought of the many dance floors that had been deprived of his slight, graceful Welsh figure, so much more smooth and agile than the stolid men in her family. They glided and two-stepped to songs Jane had only swayed to on the radio alone in the kitchen: “After You’ve Gone,” “Hindustan,” “Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” “Johnson Rag,” “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” The dance finished with a medley of patriotic songs — “Over There,” “Oh! It’s a Lovely War,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “Mademoiselle from Armentières” — and couples still clung together after the last chord of “Till We Meet Again,” no one ready to go home. As if the harvest moon and local musicians had thwarted the world’s dark elements to cast a spell of redemption on the celebrants in Harewood Hall.
The end of the evening flashes into her mind. In the darkness of their bedroom, the pulsing rhythms continued. Ardour, abandon, and opportunity combined and ignited for only the second time in Jane’s life, reviving phantoms of the first.
She looks down when she answers Marjorie’s mother: “No, ma’am, I’m not in the family way.”
“Ye mind yerself nonetheless. Numbers aren’t on yer side. Yer husband, on the other hand, seems to keep himself pickled against all disease.”
Jane is taken aback by Ethel Osler’s bluntness until she remembers her status on the Temperance League. Marjorie joked about her mother winning the presidency over two Finnish women, usually the Prohibition champions. She and Jane would shuffle their bottle or two of homemade blackberry wine from Jane’s root cellar during her mother’s visits back to her own, out of Roland’s reach. Often at the end of the day, the two women met for a few sips, safely camouflaged in teacups. Such times produced in Jane a cautious admission that she might actually be experiencing bliss as it happens. Remembered bliss, like her childhood in Wales, does not hold the same power as a gasp of wonder at a sunset, or an enormous, misshapen beefsteak tomato. Or a shudder of joy from the shrieks of four little girls mingling with the delectable smoke of a wiener roast. Or the physical convulsions brought on by a preposterous comment from Marjorie. An awareness of sensations like these repeated over a stretch of days, months, and even years must surely define happiness, a state she had never claimed for herself before this.
“Ye know all the preventions, I hope.”
Jane nods, but Mrs. Osler continues in her crusader’s voice: “Personally, I swear by violet tea meself. It’s kept Len and me safe. And onions, o’course. Heard of a mother who saved her family by burying them for three days in raw onions and forcing onion syrup down their gullets all the while.”
She too has heard of these remedies, but listens politely as if it is new and helpful to her.
“And d’ye know about sprinklin’ hot coals with sulphur? Smoke fills the house and kills the germs. A woman up in Saanich saved her family that way. That and a lot o’ prayer.”
But none of these measures could save our beloved Marjorie, Jane thinks to herself, and all were tried. Are we the failures then?
She knows the futility of contradicting a true be
liever like Ethel Osler. Opposing arguments slip into Ethel’s mind like a stone into water: a quick splatter without any effect whatsoever on her thinking. Jane’s sister-in-law Lizzie falls into that category, allowing no discussion about any of her opinions. If she were to get religion, she would be swallowed up entirely and take everyone else with her. All the more pity for Tommy. He will have it hard when their new baby arrives in the new year. As if his wife were not demanding enough through her first two confinements, she will now feel entitled to slavish service at her advanced age.
And what could be bringing on all these pregnancies later in life? Dear Marjorie was thirty-six, four years younger than Jane herself will be in two months, and Lizzie two years older at forty-two. Is it the Grippe driving couples to frantic, unprecedented clinches? She reddens again, considering herself eligible.
“What about the girls?” she asks Ethel Osler.
“Pray, how can a man underground take care of two wee girls? They’ll be comin’ back to Comox with me for now. Me daughter Josie in Vancouver has only one o’ her own. She might be willin’ to take them.”
Jane’s limbs go cold at this triple loss. Suzanne and June will have no more say in the shuffle than family pets. She has met Marjorie’s sister Josie: an exact replica of their mother in shape and attitude. Practical, hard-working, responsible, outspoken. And humourless. The girls’ needs will be met without softness or gaiety; she cannot bear to think of their deprivation. Her own selfish loss of their mother fades beside the many years they must live without her. She cannot permit herself to imagine Sara and Janet being dispossessed this way.
“Can I help? Could I take them while Milt is at work?”
“Lord knows the wee lasses are like four sisters themselves. But ye’ve got enough to worry about, dearie, wi’ him and all.” She nods toward the front of the house where she last saw Roland, and Jane instinctively steps in that direction to prevent any view of him leading her son-in-law astray.