by Susan White
Rachel had no idea what Amelia was talking about. She was still stuck on the fact that she would have to keep the fire going. Not only had she been dropped into this other world, with a crazy lady who didn’t seem to stop talking, but she had been pushed back a couple of centuries. Is there even electricity here? she wondered.
The light bulb sticking out from a white socket on the wall answered that question for her. There was a little chain hanging down from the socket. The two windows in the room gave enough light so there was no need to pull that chain to see if it actually worked. This is going to be like being in some kind of country bed-and-breakfast jail, Rachel thought to herself.
“The other kids are out picking raspberries. Zac will come by tomorrow morning and get whatever they pick today and take them to the Farmers’ Market and sell them for us. With the few strawberries we have, along with the raspberries, the eggs, the chickens and turkeys, and the vegetables from our garden we do pretty good this time of year. You’re lucky you came today. It’s grocery day. Zac buys surprise treats for the kids every week but believe me they don’t last long. Just leave your box and bags here on the floor. You can unpack later. Let’s get you outside to meet the kids, the dogs, and the other beasts that make up this funny farm. Oh, I’ll show you where the bathroom is first. You probably need to go after that long drive from Saint John. The toilet is a bit finicky. During World War II a German submarine was sunk due to a malfunction of the toilet. No fear of that, though, that flood last week was a bit of a nuisance.”
Rachel considered her options as she sat on the toilet. If she tried to run away, she wasn’t sure she’d even remember the way back to the ferry. But if she did get that far, she knew she could walk to the highway and probably hitchhike her way back to the city.
Rachel hadn’t even seen a phone here yet. There was that house with the green roof they had passed, Rachel remembered. The people who lived there probably had a phone—if she ran away from here, maybe she could go there. But who would she call? She remembered her grandmother’s phone number, but she doubted Hilda Garnham would even remember she had a granddaughter. It had been easy to forget that, apparently, since she hadn’t even come to see Rachel since the day she’d driven her to the first foster home, three weeks after the accident. She’d called the first year on Rachel’s birthday, but not a call, a card, or anything else came for the birthdays or Christmases afterwards. And there had been six birthdays and five Christmases, not that Rachel cared or was counting. She’d given up counting a while back when April 18, the date of the accident, and all the days and months afterward had become too hard to think about. What was the point? It didn’t change anything about her shitty life.
Not even one of the four social workers she’d had would want to take a call from her. The list of foster mothers and fathers and the one lesbian couple would not be thrilled to hear from her either. And the Harriets would get their number changed immediately if she dared to call them.
Maybe this Zac guy Warty was talking about has a big trunk in his car, Rachel thought. I could hide in there and get a drive somewhere when he comes with the groceries. She shook her head and laughed at herself. With my luck, he probably drives a horse and buggy.
Rachel headed out to the bushes she’d seen from the upstairs window. There were about six paths fenced off through the thick growth, and as she got closer to them she realized they were raspberry bushes. A big black dog and a shaggy grey dog were sleeping in the sun nearby, and they just slightly raised their heads when she approached. Amelia was kneeling beside the bushes, placing small green cardboard boxes full of berries in a wooden tray. The three people whose heads Rachel had seen from the window were standing there, each holding another full box. Two of them were girls who looked like mirror images of each other, except one was wearing pink shorts and a purple tank top and the other one was wearing purple shorts and a pink tank top. Their identical heads had massive tangles of red curls and they looked like they should break into a chorus of “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow.” The other was a boy who was as wide as he was tall.
“This is Chelsea, Crystal, and Raymond,” Amelia said as she passed Rachel an empty box.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and Balloon Boy, Rachel thought as she started dropping raspberries into the box Amelia had passed to her, getting the unspoken message that she was to start picking.
“And our lazy dogs are Sam and Bud. Not guard dogs by any means. I just read somewhere yesterday that in a town in Oklahoma you could be sent to jail for making an ugly face at a dog.”
Rachel had picked two boxes of raspberries before she heard the call for lunch. Amelia was draining a pot into the white enamel sink when she entered the kitchen. Chelsea was filling glasses with ice water and Crystal was carrying a plate of chicken to the table. Raymond was already sitting down, slathering half a pound of butter onto a roll.
“Rachel, get the pickles from the fridge please,” Amelia instructed, turning slightly toward a doorway at the end of the kitchen. “The bowls are on the middle shelf in the pantry. Get one for mustard, one for chow, and another one for the beets.”
Again it seemed to Rachel that Amelia was speaking a different language. What’s chow? she wondered as she walked toward the ancient-looking fridge. The handle on the Frigidaire pulled down stiffly and when the heavy door opened she began her search for something that looked like what she guessed were some kind of pickles.
Amelia came up behind her with a bowl of steaming potatoes in one hand and reached in the fridge with the other, lifting a jar off the shelf. “These mustard pickles are my grandmother’s famous recipe. I never thought I could make them as well as she did but after about 30 years of practice I’ve got it down pat. This is our last bottle of last year’s batch. We’ll have to get started on this year’s supply next week. I asked Zac to get me lots of sugar and white vinegar at the grocery store today. We’ve got lots of cucumbers in the garden still, though some of them are getting too big. I don’t like the great big ones. Speaking of big things, the largest living thing on the earth is a mushroom underground in Oregon that measures 3½ miles in diameter.”
Rachel took the bottle from her thinking, Does this woman ever shut up? Amelia passed her a larger bottle and then pulled out a third one and carried it across the room and into the pantry, setting the potatoes on the table as she walked by. “This is green tomato chow-chow. We made that last week. We made 15 bottles, but I gave Zac 5 of them. Chow is his favourite and as good a cook as he is he doesn’t try to make pickles or jam. I’m happy to do it for him, though. God knows he does enough for us.”
The pantry was a small square room with shelves on three sides. The end wall had a wide counter that came out about a metre past the bottom shelf. There was a large wooden board on it that was covered with flour and bit of dough. Beside the board sat a rack with more of the rolls Raymond was eating. At least there’ll be some left for me if Balloon Boy devours the whole basketful on the table by the time I get there, Rachel thought to herself.
Amelia set three bowls on the counter and opened the jar of chow-chow. Then she walked out of the pantry, grabbed two pots from the stove, drained them into the sink, and put the contents in bowls. She was sitting down by the time Rachel had filled the small bowls with the pickles and carried them to the table.
Everything smelled really good. There were pieces of chicken covered with a light-brown coating, potatoes, peas, and yellow and green beans. There was also a bowl of some sort of orange-coloured lumpy stuff that Rachel didn’t recognize. They had been lucky to get any vegetables at all at the Harriets’, and if they did they came from a Green Giant bag.
“Pass the squash to Rachel, please, Raymond. Eat up now, kids. You worked hard this morning. 31 boxes. It looks like our raspberry crop will be good this year. Whatever we pick tomorrow we’ll either use for jam or put in the freezer for later. We wouldn’t want to be caught short for the winter by ge
tting greedy and selling them all. There is nothing like the smell of raspberries on a cold February day to give you the hope of summer.”
Rachel filled her plate and even tried the squash, which was something she had never tasted before. She spooned some mustard pickles beside her potatoes but stayed away from the chow and the red round things she assumed were the beets.
Amelia just kept talking though the whole lunch. Rachel wasn’t sure how she had time to take a bite of food between sentences. Chelsea and Crystal didn’t say a word but seemed interested in the conversation. Raymond laughed at something Amelia said but never stopped chewing long enough to speak. Rachel just ate quietly, consumed by thoughts of how to escape this nuthouse and barely hearing what Amelia was saying.
“I suppose we will have to start peeling the potatoes soon,” Amelia said to Rachel, breaking through her thoughts and bringing her back to the conversation. “I love the new ones that we can eat skin and all. We are going to have a good crop this year, I think. Raymond has kept them well hoed up and I haven’t found a sunburned one yet. The largest potato grown was in Lebanon. It weighed 24.9lbs. We’ll be lucky if a couple of our turkeys weigh that much.”
Rachel noticed that Amelia always said we—we this, our that. Most of what she was saying meant nothing to Rachel, who wasn’t going to be a part of this we, no matter what Amelia said. She wondered how long the others had been here and if they felt like they were part of the we. Mrs. Thompson had said on the drive out that Miss Walton had been taking in children who had nowhere else to go since she had left her job at the New Brunswick Protestant Orphanage in the early 70s. Apparently Social Services had complete faith in her methods and she had done wonders with some very difficult children.
Rachel had not missed the emphasis Mrs. Thompson had put on the words very difficult. The funny part was that Social Services seemed to have complete faith in the Harriets’ methods, too, and Rachel was quite sure if they really knew what some of those methods were, that wouldn’t be the case. Is it a good method to tie an 18-month-old boy to his crib by both legs to keep him from trying to climb out? Rachel wondered. Should Bob really buy his cigarettes and beer with the birthday money of a kid too stupid to tell anybody?
Amelia stood up and took her plate to the sink. Then she walked over to the stove, swung down the door of a long compartment, grabbed a potholder, and pulled out a still-warm pie. The crust was light brown with blotches of deep blue juice that had bubbled in places on the sides and top.
“My grandmother always said it’s not a good blueberry pie if it doesn’t boil over in the oven. If that’s true, then this one is going to be excellent.”
Crystal got up and poured the boiling water from the kettle into a brown teapot. Then she grabbed a cup and saucer covered with purple flowers from the pantry and set it down in front of where Amelia had been sitting. Rachel stared at the pie as Amelia started cutting generous pieces, placing them on small glass plates. She had not seen a homemade pie in any of the other places she had lived. Looking at the golden crust, she remembered when she and Caleb would get on stools on either side of their mother and watch her roll pastry out with a rolling pin. She would always let them take a turn rolling and if they messed up she would laugh and patch the crust together. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it just matters if it tastes good,” she would always say.
Chelsea got up, poured the steaming tea into the cup, and passed Amelia a plastic bottle that looked like a beehive. Without a word they both sat back down and started eating their pieces of blueberry pie. What were they, wondered Rachel, the tag team tea girls?
“A cup of tea on Walton Lake Road,” Amelia said to Rachel. “What could beat it, except I suppose high tea at the Empress Hotel? I’ve always dreamed about having high tea at the Empress Hotel. But these girls are the next best thing. They always make me a lovely cup of tea with just a spoonful of honey—and always in my favourite cup and saucer. Pansies have beautiful expressive faces and I always see sweet faces on the pansies on this beautiful cup. Honey is the only food that does not spoil. Honey has been found in tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs and when tasted by archaeologists they found it to be still edible.”
Chapter 2
Wet Dogs and Underwear
Rachel was up to her elbows in hot soapy water. Raymond held a red checked dishcloth and dried each dish she set on the drainer as if it were a treasured family heirloom. After he dried it, he passed it to Crystal, who would walk into the pantry to put it away on the shelf. This laborious exercise, combined with the silence, made the task seem almost dreamlike to Rachel. Maybe this is a dream, she thought to herself. And soon I’ll wake up back in my bedroom at the Harriets’ and none of the crap of the last few days will have taken place. She had long given up hoping a dream would take her back to waking up at 619 Regent Street with her Mom’s or Caleb’s voice breaking through her sleep. In fact, she had long since forgotten what either of those voices sounded like.
Amelia had gone to lay down for a nap. Before going upstairs, she had explained to Rachel that Chelsea had asked for her hour today right after lunch. The hour thing apparently was one of the two so-called rules that Amelia had. The first was that everyone was required to spend one hour a day alone at the lake. The second was “Do Your Part.” Rachel thought both rules sounded really stupid. An hour alone at the lake. What kind of a rule is that? Rachel wondered.
Amelia had told Rachel that when Chelsea came up from the lake she could go down for her hour. Apparently they took turns choosing their hours in order of their birthday months. She’d said that tomorrow Rachel would get first choice and then they would continue with their rotation. It didn’t seem to Rachel like such a big thing to get first choice of when you could sit by a lake for an hour by yourself.
Rachel was just washing the roasting pan that the chicken had been cooked in when Raymond let out a squeal that sounded sort of like the name Zac. It was the first word that had been said in the kitchen since Amelia had left the room. Raymond threw the dish towel down on the drainer and rushed out the door. Rachel could hear a man’s voice holler, “Hey, Buddy!” from the yard and she looked out the window to see a tall skinny man with shoulder-length hair who she assumed was Zac passing a box of groceries to Raymond. Not much wonder he’s so excited, Rachel thought. The kid obviously loves food.
Crystal walked out the door and Chelsea came around the corner of the house at the same time. They both hugged Zac before grabbing boxes of groceries from the back of his truck. Rachel let the lukewarm water out of the sink and rinsed the grime from the sides. If nothing else, Margaret Harriet had taught her how to clean stuff. Rachel wondered who was doing her dirty work now.
Raymond was talking a mile a minute as he told Zac all the exciting news of the day: 31 boxes of raspberries, Sam killed a mole, a chicken got out, and he had seen the loons at the lake this morning.
“You must be Rachel,” Zac said as he walked into the kitchen. He extended his arm for a handshake. Rachel wiped her wet hand on her pant leg and clumsily shook Zac’s hand. “Amelia said I should get some extra groceries and something as a special treat for you. I bought you some peaches. You haven’t tasted heaven until you’ve had Amelia’s peach cobbler smothered with whipped cream. This basket is all yours, though, so you can decide if you want her to use some for a cobbler or if you just want to eat them all yourself.
I got another basket of peaches for everyone else, and a couple of bags of Ketchup chips for you all to share.”
He turned toward the other kids, who were looking at him like he was some lanky version of Santa Claus. “Raymond, let’s you and I go see where that chicken got out while the girls put the groceries away. Oh, and I picked up the part I ordered for the David Brown. Maybe tomorrow afternoon you could come over and help me take the old fuel filter off and put the new piece on?”
Raymond followed Zac out the door. Rachel picked up the basket of peach
es Zac had set on the table in front of her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten a fresh peach. She picked one up and felt the fuzzy skin on her fingertips. She set it back in the basket, then picked it up again, not quite able to believe that these were really all for her. She looked down at her peach again, then took a big bite and felt the juice drip down her chin, savouring the sweetness. She turned her head away from the twins, who were walking back and forth from the grocery boxes to the pantry. I’m almost crying, for God’s sake, she reprimanded herself. It’s just a peach. What’s wrong with me?
Sam and Bud followed Rachel down the hill toward the lake. Does it count as an hour alone if the dogs are with me? she wondered. Truthfully, she was really quite pleased that both dogs had followed her and not stayed in the garden where Chelsea and Crystal were picking yellow beans. Raymond and Zac were doing something over at the shed where Rachel guessed the chickens were kept. She could hear the pounding of a hammer. The sound faded as she got closer to the water. Sam dropped a stick at Rachel’s feet and she picked it up, assuming that he wanted her to throw it. She flung it a ways out into the water and Sam bounded into the lake after it.