by Anne Degrace
My mother turned and waved the knife in the air. “With what money, then?” she demanded. “With what money are you going to play cards and lose, or play cards and drink your winnins? Same to us either ways.”
“Never you mind, missus,” my father said, with a mean smile because she’d spoken directly to him for the first time in two days.
“Tell your father —” she began, but Dad was in his boots and out the door again before she could finish.
THAT NIGHT I tossed on my cot by the stove, the stranger’s banknote under the mattress, burning there. I kept thinking about Mr. Marconi, who had called me his friend. In the morning, the spot by the door where my dad’s boots usually stood was empty.
I was crumpling up the newspaper Mr. Walsh had wrapped the bones in, stuffing it in the stove with the kindling, trying to get a good blaze going to take the chill off the kitchen. One piece of newspaper in the box had been smoothed out, and I recognized the letters, same as the sign at Miller and Sons, and I remembered my mother’s conversation with Mrs. Kelly. The drawing showed three ladies posing in dresses that had a bit of lace at the top, the ladies wearing fancy hats, and if I didn’t pay much attention to the things my mum wore, I knew she didn’t wear such as this. My mum herself came into the kitchen, then, and I shoved the paper in my pants pocket, though why I didn’t stuff it in the fire with the rest of the paper I couldn’t say.
Mum looked at the space where my father’s boots usually sat. “Hmmph,” she said. “You’ll be leavin soon, won’t you? I’ll get Mr. Marconi’s dinner together for you, then.”
Before I left with the dinnerpail, Mum asked me for the money I’d made working for Mr. Marconi, as well as the dinner money he’d sent home with me the day before. I gave it to her, feeling just a little guilty for the penny I held back. I minded what Mrs. Kelly had said about pin money, and I had a mind for something for myself, for all my work, sweet and warm from the bakery on Water Street. I was almost to the end of our own street when I heard her cry out.
I ran back through the clouds of my own breath, the dinnerpail banging against my knees. When I opened the back door into the kitchen there was my mother, standing at the doorway to the pantry, the empty English marmalade jar in her hands.
I WAS LATE getting to the room on the hill that morning. Mr. Kemp gave me a look, but they were too busy wrestling the kite against what looked to be the start of a good winter blow. The men shouted at one another against the blast of it.
“This is insane,” Mr. Kemp was saying. “We need to postpone —”
“No, the order has been sent,” Mr. Marconi caught sight of me. “William, stoke up the fire. We’ll need to get warm.”
I went around back for more wood, and as I bent down I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the man who had given me the note, still tucked in my pocket, a secret.
“What do you have for me?” His face was right up against mine, with the muffler around, but I could see in the light of day it was the fellow from before, the one from the newspaper in New York. “Did you read his notes? Did you write them down?”
“I —”
“William?” It was Mr. Paget’s voice, calling for me.
“I’ll be waiting,” the man said. “Write down everything you can. There’s another note for you if you do.” He ducked around the side of the building just as Mr. Paget rounded the other corner.
“The fire can wait,” Mr. Paget said. He looked angry, and shook his head. “We’ll need all hands if we’re going to get this thing aloft.”
We didn’t. After several tries, we came in and I got the fire stoked and we warmed ourselves, the men talking, me keeping quiet, listening. The memory of the man who had given me the banknote was weighing on me so, I felt as if he were looking over my shoulder.
“How is this any different than the balloon?” Mr. Kemp asked. “We can’t afford to keep losing equipment into the sea. It’s ridiculous, trying to do this on this Godforsaken hill.”
“Never mind that Anglo-American would shut us down. If only they knew,” Mr. Paget mumbled.
My ears perked up. I had heard of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company, listening to the conversations at Mr. Walsh’s shop. “A stranglehold on Newfoundland, thanks to the wisdom of a foolish few,” I had heard him say to Mr. Kelly. “A fifty-year monopoly! For a cable, so some rich bugger can talk to some other rich bugger in Boston, by Jayzus. They’ve sold us short, sure enough. Who’s getting rich, now?”
All at once, I knew who the man was who gave me the banknote, and who’d promised me more. The note felt heavy in my pocket.
“Well, they won’t know,” Mr. Marconi said now, his voice quiet. “And in a few hours, it won’t matter.”
IT WAS A morning of shouts and curses, of freezing in the icy salt wind, of thawing fingers by the fire in order to mend a broken strut, of shouts and stony silences. Just before dinnertime the kite was aloft, and stayed that way for several minutes. Mr. Marconi put a cup, attached to his contraption by a wire, to his ear and listened. None of us breathed. “It’s the atmospherics,” he said. “It’s hard —”
It seemed like we waited a long time with nothing but the wind and our own breathing. When it came, I didn’t hear it at first, and then it came again: three sharp clicks as the tapper struck the coherer, and then Mr. Marconi smiled the first real smile I’d seen on him. He handed the cup to Mr. Kemp, then. “Yes!” he said. “There it is.”
That first moment was exciting, sure enough, but I began to feel fidgety in the time that followed. Nothing happened at all. Nobody breathed. But just when I was sure nothing more would happen, there were clicks, and everyone would sit upright again and lean forward, listening. I must have looked towards the dinnerpail more than once, because at one point Mr. Marconi waved at it and said: “Eat, William.” The others seemed to have forgotten about food altogether. Finally, Mr. Marconi put down the earphone.
“Write this down, Mr. Paget,” he instructed. “Signals at 12:30, 1:10, and 2:20.”
When he sent me home, late in the afternoon, he tucked some paper into my hand, closing my fingers around it and holding them there. “It’s been a great day, William,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”
THE WINTER DARK had already settled when I stepped outside, although it was still early; I’d have to wait until I reached the lamplight at the foot of the hill to see what Mr. Marconi had put in my hand, but the papers I clutched had the feel of the banknote the stranger had given me, so I knew it to be money. I was just passing the pond, and thinking about the ghosts that lie there as I always did, when a figure stepped into my path near scaring the very soul from my body.
“What do you have for me, Boy?” he said.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. In my mind I heard Mr. Marconi’s words, telling Mr. Paget what to write down. Signals at 12:30, 1:10, and 2:20.
“What have you found out?” the man demanded again.
“I —” There was the money, and scarce enough it was in our house most times.
“Did you write it down?”
There was Mr. Marconi, who said he was my friend. There was my father, who’d as soon drink it as put food on the table.
The words came out of their own accord. “I can’t read or write, sir.”
There was a noise, angry or disgusted or both. I didn’t wait to see what the stranger might say or do. I dropped the dinnerpail with a clatter and ran.
I ran down into the streets of St. John’s, past our house and kept running, until my sides wheezed with the pain, and then I walked. I found myself coming up Duckworth Street, clear where I was from the presence of the stumbling, drunken men whose tabs had been cut off at the bar, or who’d lost at cards. And there I found my father, sitting on the wall below the churchyard, the stones of the dead looking down. He had managed to keep his cane, which he waved at me.
“Son. It’s you,” he said. “Don’t s’pose you have a penny or two for your old man?”
I shook my head, the paper money still crushed in my palm. I held my hand close by my side.
“S’pose that’s not a bad thing,” he said, his voice terrible sad. “I am a sorry bugger.” He looked at me and shook his head. “Lost it all.”
I nodded, still standing there, not knowing what to say.
“Not speaking to me neither, are you? S’pose I deserve it, too.”
“Dad, I —”
“You got a right to be ashamed, Willie.”
“You maybe better go home,” I said. “You maybe better.”
I left him there, and thought I’d go down to Water Street, my stomach rumbling with the thought of a warm bun or tart from the bakery, which would surely be closing soon enough. The excitement of the day, the fear when I met the stranger, and then my father had all left me sad and tired, and sure home was not where I wanted to be just then. Truth be told, I didn’t know what I wanted.
I stopped under a streetlight on the corner and looked at the notes in my hand. I turned them over, one by one. I was not so good with letters, but not so bad with the counting, and I knew this to be more money than the stranger had given me, more than I had ever had. When I looked up I saw I was right under the sign for Miller and Sons.
I FOUND DAD where I had left him, a half-block back sitting on the wall. I took the piece of newspaper I’d been carrying folded in my pocket and I smoothed it against my leg and held it out.
“What’s this?”
“Mum wants it,” I said.
Dad took it and looked at it, then dropped his hand, the paper resting on his knee. He sounded weary. “So what if she does, b’y?”
I set the notes on top of the drawing of the smart dress. “She’s been dreamin of it. She likes the one what’s lavender.”
Dad’s eyes grew wide as he took in the money in front of him.
“If you go back in —” I nodded towards the pub. Two men came out, laughing and stumbling, then moved off into the darkness. I shook my head. I didn’t know how to say what would happen if he took the money and went back inside there. “Miller’s is open a half-hour still,” I said, and walked away, leaving him there.
I WAITED BY the back fence in the dark. I waited so long I thought I’d perish, my feet like blocks of ice, they were, and ’til I’d near given up altogether.
I heard him before I saw him, the click of the cane and the thump of the bad leg, but it was a steady sound, one foot in front of the other; cane, foot, foot, cane. I waited ’til he was caught in the lamplight. I could see the bundle under his arm.
I took myself back up the hill towards the tower. The night sky clear for the first time in days, the moon full, lighting the path before me and shining on the black water of Deadman’s Pond, and I knew the ghosts were asleep for now. I thought I’d bide awhile there, in the room on the hill. Maybe Mr. Marconi would let me sit by the stove while he wrote in his book about the signals we’d heard coming from all that way. And when he finished I thought he might show me the marks and letters again, and maybe let me tap out a message of my own, just to say I was here.
William. W-i-l-l-i-a-m. .-- .. .-..__
THREE
HOME GIRL
·1913·
Olive
FROM WHERE I sit in my wheeled chair I can see, through my bedroom window, the barn, and the manure pile out back. I can also see the creeping clematis vines below my window, which by midsummer will be festooned with purple flowers like open hearts. And I can see the steaming brown flanks of Bella, the cow, when my son-in-law Albert brings her out after milking. When Ruth goes out to hang the washing, I can see from where I sit the sight of my bloomers going up, peg by peg, but not quite hear the exasperated sigh of my daughter as she hangs them.
I didn’t want to come here. I had my house in town, which, after my second husband died, I kept and let rooms to young women of good background who came to study at my old friend Adelaide’s school. Addie and I agreed on many things: that young women should be taught the art of running a household, and given skills that will see them through life, and that these skills were too often not taught in the home as they used to be. But we didn’t agree on suffrage — Addie believed women are better able to influence the course of things through their husbands and sons — and I suppose that’s where our falling-out occurred. To this day it seems to me that the pain in my bones began the morning after our final argument, in which I told her I thought women were better served by having our own voice, and the power to determine our own destiny.
Now that doesn’t matter, because Addie is dead these three years past, and my own destiny has become quite clear, with any power I might have had over its course long removed. For I am a bent old thing, folded up upon myself and completely under the power of my daughter Ruth and son-in-law Albert. They see me the way they might see a stall that needs to be mucked out — again — but they don’t hear me, as if my brain and my voice were as diminished as my body. Ruth shouts when she speaks to me, although I am not deaf. Albert doesn’t speak to me at all. Instead, he looks at me from time to time as if thinking: “What? She’s still here?”
Over time I’ve watched as my daughter has become slowly eroded, diminished such that she now sees each day unfold in a series of chores and hardships. It was Ruth who wanted a Home Child, someone to help with me, as she told Albert. It was the first time in years I’d heard her state a firm desire about anything, although I have sometimes seen her gazing out the kitchen window across the roll of the landscape with a longing that fills the room.
Winnie
THE PASSAGE WAS dreadful, with the heaving back and forth of the boat and the smell of sickness. We were told we were coming to the fresh air of Canada, which sounded a sight better than the awful smell of the boat, and more hopeful than the close quarters of the Home. We were to be helpful to the kind families who had agreed to take us in, whose generosity was saving us from a life in the slums.
I’d been at the Home in London almost three years when they told me I was going to Canada. Canada! I told them I didn’t know what I’d do in a place like that. I told them I wanted to see my mum first, and Miss Bexley told me she had died, and so there was no one for me anymore. She told me as if it were nothing to get excited about. It wasn’t until I was in bed that night I cried, and then Emmie, in the cot next to mine, came over and spooned herself around me, although you could scarcely fit one in those beds let alone two. You’ll remember me in Canada, won’t you? Emmie whispered, and I promised.
One nurse was dreadfully sick on the passage, and so I ended up looking after a four-year-old boy called Martin who reminded me of my brother George. And the thought of George made me weep, and Martin cried, and so there we both were, the waif and the wee one, a puddle of tears in a tangle of blankets in steerage. I grew close to Martin in those days on board the ship; it was hard to say goodbye when we’d finally docked. He clung to me, and I had to push him away. He was going to a nice farm on the prairie, the nurse said, but he looked so frightened. It turned me right inside out, it did.
From there, several of us boarded a train, and by then I was so tired I scarcely remembered a thing. The station where we got off was grand, though, with its turrets and arches, and it reminded me of London, and that made me homesick. The sign said Hamilton, and the man who met me told me he was Mr. Brust, and that I’d be coming with him. I felt all turned around and lost, but “My name is Winnifred Blair,” I said as confidently as I could, the way I’d been taught.
“Come on, then.” He was already walking towards a farm wagon with a big white workhorse hitched on. I picked up my case and followed, and the metal corners banged against my legs. I was afraid I’d tear my stockings along with everything else. I studied the back of his head as I scrambled t
o keep up: he had thinning hair on a large head, making him look like a toadstool, especially with his short bowed legs.
The horse swung his big head around as we came up. I wanted to go up and pat its nose, but Mr. Brust nodded his head towards my case and then the back of the wagon, and so I pushed it up and over the side. It was autumn, and in the back of the wagon was a basket of apples.
“You can have one, I guess,” he said. “The market wouldn’t take them. Ruth’ll have to make more apple sauce.”
The taste was sweet and the flesh was juicy, and I felt better at once. I thought: this must be the taste of Canada.
Olive
I WAS AT my window when Albert’s wagon rounded the bend in the drive. At first I squinted to get a clearer view of the girl he had brought home, and saw it was a girl of thirteen or fourteen on the seat beside him. As he drew up I could see she was a skinny thing with lank brown hair, but pretty in the face, with large eyes. As she stepped down — no help from Albert — she looked straight at me through the window. Ruth came out to meet them, her hands wringing a towel.
“You’re older than I thought you’d be,” I heard Ruth say. “I hope you’ll be a good girl, and be a help with Mother,” and then all three faces turned to my window.
Winnie
THE OLD WOMAN is a crippled wee thing. When I first saw her I thought she was weak in the mind, but she’s no such thing. In the morning when I get her up she opens her eyes and gives me a funny, crooked smile and calls me dear. I must dress her, help her eat, and help her to the commode.
That is after I’ve fed the chickens. When Mr. Brust explains things it’s as if he thinks I’m daft not to know already, but we never had such things in London, or at the Home. I’m to milk the cow, when Mr. Brust teaches me how, and then I will rise even earlier. No one has said a word about school, although that’s what I was told to expect. From the chicken house I can see the road, and in the morning children walk to school along that road. It’s getting colder; I can see my breath when I stand there, watching, with the chickens all around.