Extensions

by Myrna Dey

  She dishes out portions onto three plates, knowing how much each will eat. She puts a spoonful of barley and a tomato slice on her own, hoping no one will notice she doesn’t touch it. Her appetite is rapidly being replaced by nausea. It spreads from her stomach through her chest to her throat, where it mingles with congestion in her nose. She coughs again, using an overused hankie from her apron pocket to cover her mouth. She asks Sara about Black Beauty as a distraction from the aversion she feels to the food. She has not experienced such queasiness for — for nine years.

  Could she be pregnant?

  She looks across at Roland, intent on his food, and blushes. In six weeks, she will be forty years old and the prospect of a latecomer like Gomer had never occurred to her. If it is to be, she must stay strong to spare her daughters from raising a sibling as she was forced to do. And now her younger brother in Victoria might as well be dead to her, if indeed he is still married to Thelma and working in the family business there. Even Ladysmith seems a world away when it comes to travel and inclination, but at least Roland brings occasional news of Tommy through the mine circuit.

  Janet jumps up from the table to ladle more water into their drinking glasses, taking the last from the pail. The pump at the sink is jammed and Milt has made his outside well available to them. Will Milt repair theirs before he leaves, as he promised? Jane hopes so, because Roland is oblivious to such inconveniences. Sara watches Jane. “Mama, why aren’t you eating? Don’t you feel well?”

  “Maybe I sampled too much while I was cooking. I’m not very hungry.” She shivers and coughs.

  Sara sets her fork down. “I’m finished too.”

  “Come now, you’ve only eaten a little. You can do better than that.” Jane stands as close as she can to the stove without burning herself. “I’m cold is all. Must have caught a chill when I went out to the root cellar for pumpkin. Eat up now; you know how you like pumpkin pie for dessert.”

  “Mama, you’re sick. Your face is red.”

  “It’s from the hot stove.” Jane cannot confess to the source of her blush, but does not deny the dizziness in her head. She must sit down on the sofa where she can lean back and pull her feet up. “I’ll rest a bit and be well in no time.” This new life in her womb is testing her properly at such an age.

  Roland and Janet also leave the table, and Roland covers her with an afghan she and Janet made from crocheted squares. Sara brings a comforter from the bedroom.

  “I’ll make some tea,” says Janet.

  “No, darling, I don’t want anything. I’ll just lie a spell.”

  Roland brings the sitting room stove to full blaze, his own faded eyes ablaze with fear. By now the whole world knows the symptoms. He crumples the Free Press, with its latest flu statistics, for kindling. Sara and Janet dart nervously around the house. They had been playing nearby when Auntie Marjorie rubbed her forehead, and that was the last they ever saw of her. Jane’s bewildered smile contemplates a different source of warning signs.

  “Mama, Janet will cut up some onions.”

  Understanding now, she laughs at Sara offering her sister’s services. “Oh no. If it is the flu, it won’t last long. I’ll see to that.”

  She believes her words, since she has never been sick in her life other than blood poisoning. But Roland, frantically stoking the fire in the kitchen stove hears them over the crackle as “I won’t last long.” His thin neck swivels jerkily and he begins to pace. Talk everywhere is just this. How whole families are found lying on the floor, unable to feed themselves or tend fires. How two women went out dancing at night and one was dead in the morning. How new vaccines are not working against the virus, and isolation proves just as useless. How Aspirin powder is now being sold by the Bayer Company in tablets and helps with aches, but is not a cure. How last week he took his lunch break with a fellow miner who three hours later had to be carried out of the mine. He’s getting better, Roland has heard, and so will Jane. So will Jane.

  From the couch, she recognizes her husband’s powerful need of a drink. Not just the diluted beer he’s been imbibing, but something stronger from the blind pig at the harbour. “Roland, I’ll be fine, if you want to go out. My nurses here will take care of me.” Sara has brought a pillow for her head, and Janet is pulling her father’s warm woollen socks over her mother’s lisle stockings. Jane loosens the garter belt that has become binding around her waist.

  His cheek twitches in surprise. “Well, awright, I might just do that, if you think you can manage. And I’ll pick up some camphor gum and Aspirin at the chemist. Could be quinine’s back in stock.” Blinking now with justified purpose, he starts out of the overheated house. Then he turns back.

  Jane says it for him: “You’ll need more money. Camphor’s gone up from ten to fifteen cents an ounce. And we’re almost out of carbolic.”

  He jingles the change in his pocket, wanting to cover his wife’s medicine, but his thirst causes him to reach for the money tin. He returns it empty to the shelf and leaves.

  From the pillow, she issues more instructions to her daughters. “Get the masks from the press in the bedroom. They’re clean.” Ideally, masks were to be changed every two hours, but usually by then they were cast aside. “And we need to wash hankies.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Janet. “I know how.”

  “You’ll need fresh water and use just a few drops of carbolic until Papa brings more. Pour out the soak pail water, and mind you don’t touch the hankies when you put them in the fresh. I’ll drop mine in when you’re ready.”

  Sara in a pink tunic and Janet in blue move like Rose Red and Snow White through the house with masks, throwing supper remains in the slop pail and wiping the counters with bleach. Two pumpkin pies remain untouched in the pantry. Jane wants to tell them to sit down, that she will be all right, but in truth, the pounding in her head has become blinding. Unbidden, Sara lays cold cloths on her forehead, and after tending to the handkerchiefs, Janet brings willow bark tea, then a cup of hot water containing a few drops of liniment. Both know the remedies, not only because of what their mother did for Aunt Marjorie, but from friends at school before it was closed. Everyone has a stricken relative. On such hearsay, Sara has taken an enamel bowl and the fire tongs to the open stove until Jane stops her.

  “But Mama, brown sugar and kerosene on hot coals will cure you.”

  “You’ve done enough for now, dears, both of you. Get into your nighties and to bed so you’ll have strength for tomorrow if I require your help again.”

  Janet heads obediently to the bedroom, but Sara starts to cry. “The fire will go out. Papa won’t be home for hours and you’ll get cold.”

  Jane knows she can’t win against Sara’s will, and her own is failing fast. She cannot raise her head from the couch to crawl into her own soft bed. “All right. Put on your housecoat and slippers and bring the cot and blankets. You can sleep in here if you keep your face at the other end away from mine.”

  Most mine houses possess fold-up cots for extra sleeping space in small areas. They are made of heavy canvas with a thin, flexible mattress on a metal frame. As Sara snaps it into place, Jane resists thinking of it as her bier. Marjorie and all the other women she has provided with food ended up on cots in their cramped kitchens. And there they lay down and died.

  Is this it, then? Is this the unknown realm she has cried over as a helpless bystander? Can she make her daughters and Roland understand that the weakness overrides all the alternatives that terrify them? That her position is not easier but clearer. From the centre of the cocoon that will release her, she must leave them outside to guess with dread and fear at its mystery. But how did it happen so fast? Just hours ago, she was reading her son’s letter with a dripping nose. And wasn’t it only yesterday she was running up the green hills of Wales picking wild pansies?

  Janet emerges from the bedroom in a long blue flannel nightgown. She whimpers when she sees Sara installed on the cot next to their mother. “I can fit too.”

 
Jane is firm with Janet, knowing she will listen. “Not tonight, sweetheart. It’s too crowded and no one will sleep well.”

  Her daughters settled, she drifts in and out of the pain in her head. It crests like a hundred hammers until fitful sleep stills the swell briefly. The prospect of Aspirin consoles, but not in the state it will be delivered by Roland. When he is away at night, she leaves the coal oil lamp barely lit on the kitchen table to prevent him crashing into furniture on his return. Tonight it is just enough to see the bright eyes of Sara on her whenever she becomes restless. More than once, she hears her rise quietly to add more coal to the stove.

  What will be the added cost for heat if they go over their limit of fuel from the company? Instead of the anxiety she expects from such extravagance, the thought opens a memory of Chase River. Her mother is telling her she must quit school because the extra coal needed to bake and cook in the pre-dawn sleeping household is setting Thomas back too much. It unfolds like a scene in a play without the crushing disappointment she felt at the time.

  Either the unaccustomed heat or the fever is turning Jane’s limbs from blocks of ice to shafts of fire. She kicks her covers to the floor, startling Sara.

  “Mama?”

  “I’m warm now, darling. Go back to sleep.”

  Jane tries to lie as still as possible, directing the heat in her body to consume the throbbing in her head. As she does, patches of memories pull loose from a wall that has confined and protected her for twenty-four years. Chase River grows clearer through the widening cracks.

  She sees a curing shack, primitive, dark, filled with dead meat and weapons. A proper stench, if she could smell, but she cannot. She observes only. In hiding, her thumb catches on a rusty hasp and bleeds while her friend, her dead friend, lies in the dark. She cannot feel the horror of that night in the forest but sees it in a bundle of clothes in the snow, her blood spilling onto his. Back home, she collapses from her wound. Her mother catches her, administering the touch and scent of love and of Wales in a bottle of iodine.

  Sara’s adenoidal breathing grazes her reverie but does not puncture it. It blends into the grey and leaden weeks she lay lifeless, to be miraculously awakened by her first kiss. A kiss from a golden prince. The scene is clear: the cabin of her friend Louis, her dead friend. She has stolen away from her mother’s care for a walk in the fresh March air. Adam is there packing his father’s few belongings. Alone. Adam is alone and Jane is alone. Until they are not alone, but two becoming one. She cannot tell him of his father’s murder because her high fever has trapped and sealed all traces of it. Was a second high fever its only entry?

  Jane does not feel the rapture, but she sees it in Adam’s wondrous face and soft gaze. She cannot hear the tender words on the old porch later, but sees their blush in the lilac bush next to it, bestowing tenderness upon all lilac blossoms and anything lilac-coloured. She knew back then that magic is fleeting and most often an illusion. And they both knew this magic would vanish. Jane Owens and Adam Strong were not meant to be a couple beyond the rough edges of a log cabin soon to be demolished for the Extension mine.

  But the bloom did not vanish, and Jane did the only thing she could think of: walk into the open arms of Roland Hughes. She cannot feel the betrayal or revulsion of that moment, but can see it in the nervous eager tic in Roland’s cheek. Nothing was said when the plumpest, bonniest baby she has ever held arrived six weeks earlier than expected — the question she feared about complexion becoming nothing against the fear of his irregular breathing. And how did she bear the horror of watching that breath stop altogether, blaming the midwife for not slapping him hard enough at birth? She cannot feel the bottomless anguish in her seventeen-year-old heart, but sees her favourite cat Velvet in the cradle and wants to strangle her for not being her baby.

  Except for sight, all sensation and emotion have been leached from the pictures. Even then Jane views them behind her eyes and not through them. The image of her lost baby causes her to cry out. Sara leaps to her mother’s side.

  “Just a bad dream,” Jane whispers. Sara lays a cold cloth on her forehead. She holds her hand until a punch on the warped door just before dawn announces her father.

  Sara springs to her feet, but Jane does not have the strength to mediate in his drunken entrance tonight. She wishes only for Aspirin. Her headache has dulled and given way to a heaviness in her chest: as if the sofa were on top of her and not the other way around.

  Roland shouts, “What the hell happened to the fire? Do I have to supervise every minute in this house or it falls apart? Your mother is sick, or haven’t you noticed?”

  Jane says quietly in short breaths: “I told her to let it burn down because I was warm with fever. She’s kept it going all night.”

  “Some job she did.” He stumbles to the coal box, scoops a few pieces into the scuttle, dropping as many as he grabs. Sara nestles up against her mother on the couch for safety.

  “Did you get the Aspirin, Roland? And carbolic?”

  “Just my luck, the chemist was closed. Guy I ran into later says there’s no quinine to be had in Nanaimo. Where are the onions? Doesn’t anybody do anything when I’m away?”

  He lurches to the kitchen where he has not chopped an onion in twenty-three years, brandishing a knife he has found after slamming all the cupboards. Jane tells him the girls will look after it. Janet has been wakened by the commotion and comes out hurriedly in her nightgown and housecoat to begin chopping. Sara huddles closer to her mother until Jane sits up abruptly with her head back, blood streaming from her nose.

  “Get some rags from the sewing room.”

  Janet begins to cry because she has not taken the clean handkerchiefs from the laundry line in the kitchen, inadequate as they are now for the flow. She starts toward them, then turns back fretfully to the onions, not knowing which to do first.

  With a handful of clean rags, Sara whispers to her mother: “Papa’s a beast.”

  “He’s scared,” says Jane. “He acts worse when he’s scared.”

  “I’m scared too, but I’m not mean.”

  “No, you’re not, and I want you always to stay this way. Papa didn’t have a mother to tell him not to be mean.”

  “But we have you, Mama, and we always will, won’t we?” Sara begins to cry and lays her head on Jane’s lap.

  Masks forgotten, she strokes her daughter’s hair and removes the rag from her nose long enough for a quick breath-held kiss on her head. “And I’ll be with you even if I’m not with you.”

  She knows the signs, as sure as those of birth, each a mysterious, unalterable step to the transition itself. The cough, the aches — head, back, joints, chest — the bleeding, the short breath, and the final suffocation from mucus in the lungs. Some say bleeding noses help with recovery, but not in Marjorie’s case. And if she is with child, as Marjorie was, it’s well known she is more susceptible to the pernicious virus. How poignant that another man’s son should start her life with Roland and his own seed should hasten its end. She must trust the strong fibre that has served her so well for forty years to accomplish her final mission.

  “Sara,” she speaks through the rag to her daughter still sobbing on her lap. “Please move the cot to the kitchen. Soak a sheet in whatever carbolic is left, wring it out, and hang it on the laundry line. Janet will help you.”

  Roland has passed out in the bedroom to everyone’s relief. As her daughters set up her corner in the kitchen, Jane rises from the couch and moves slowly toward her sleeping husband. Raucous snores insure that he will not see his wife step out of her brown hopsacking skirt and petticoat, pull her bloodstained white blouse and shimmy over her head, slip into a clean cotton nightgown, and change her underwear. No man has ever seen her naked. And only three midwives. Even alone she does not prolong the changing or bathing process, at times ruing her innate modesty because her body is firm and trustworthy. She stuffs her clothes into an old pillowcase and carries them out to the porch to be burned.

  The
exertion causes Jane to collapse on the cot. Having piled the clean handkerchiefs neatly on the counter, Janet steps outside for fresh water to wash the sheet. Jane calls Sara away from the onions.

  “Please bring me my writing tablet and pen from the desk.” While Sara fetches them, she props herself up against pillows in readiness for her task.

  At that moment a coarse cough precedes Roland’s sluggish footsteps into the kitchen. He spies Sara with the paper and pen and snatches them away. “Is this what you do for a sick woman? Tax her strength with foolery? To draw pictures, I s’pose.” He stuffs the writing paper into the cookstove. “Make yourself useful for a change. Make your dear mother some violet tea, get some soup into her, and finish that poultice.”

  Sara chokes back tears, having learned from her mother that explanations only inflame her father’s rants. Jane says quietly: “Roland, the stores will be open soon. Would you try again for carbolic? We’re fresh out.” She is too weak to ask if he has any money left and no solution if he doesn’t. Hangovers from bootlegged liquor are as vile as its other stages. The open air is best for him.

  “I s’pose that’s a reminder I didn’t get the Aspirin too.” He stops short, seeing his wife’s heaving chest, takes the jacket he has flung over a chair, and escapes.

  “Sara,” Jane whispers when he’s gone. “Bring me the scribbler you use for your lessons. Papa dropped the pen over there. It’s important.”

  Sara runs quickly to her bedroom and brings back a lined notebook.

  “I want to write a letter to my sister Catherine in Wales. It’s my heart’s desire that you will meet her and Margaret and your cousins someday.”

  “Don’t talk, Mama. Save your strength until you get better. We can take you to our school where there are nurses and doctors.”

  Jane shakes her head. The makeshift hospitals offer more hope than remedy, and she is beyond both. Janet comes in from the porch with a damp sheet in her hand, disinfectant fumes escorting her.

  “It’s wrung out, Mama. Sara can help me hang it up.” She sees the scribbler in Jane’s trembling fingers. “Sara! Mama can’t be helping you with lessons now. She’s too sick.” Her tone carries a burst of hostility — finally warranted — toward lessons.