Girl Runner

by Carrie Snyder

  Underground, the wheel strikes an unseen root, violently.

  This is how I fall: flatly, in a state that recalls relaxation, into the dank spring earth, alive with thin green promises and the sweet rot of last year’s roots and weeds.

  I register nothing of their commotion.

  I have fallen among the stones, but have struck none. One is quite near my head, the perfect distance for my eyes to focus on it with clarity. The stone looks soft, cushioned by moss, its edges crumbling and shot with rust-coloured veins, and it is sinking into the dirt, or being swallowed, pulled under.

  A person might step on it and not see it for what it is; it is Fannie’s stone, I’m certain.

  THE WAR ENDS, November 11, 1918, like that. I am ten years old. George is a boy soldier marching around the ruins of the Halifax Harbour, dreaming of going to sea. He is not quite seventeen.

  I wait for him to come home.

  Olive and Cora and I walk through the woods to town, carrying our lunches in pails. The low, brick one-room schoolhouse stands on the edge of town, and we enter through the door marked GIRLS. Olive will finish this spring. Olive and I are satisfactory students and haven’t a hope (or desire) of attending the nearest high school, more than ten miles away; but Cora is clever. She won’t leave her desk at recess, poring over her lessons in the poorly lit classroom.

  I burn past Olive, who ignores me, one in a clump of big girls near the door, all wrapped in coats and bright-coloured mitts, whispering together. They emit a shriek of laughter, their collective breath a frosty cloud. I scatter with the boys, heading for the playing field. I like boys. Boys say little, except what’s necessary and brashly mocking. Boys talk about what they’re doing, provide running commentary, try to make each other laugh. A boy would never shriek with inexplicable laughter when you pass by him. Instead, he would slide feet first into you at home plate in hopes of knocking the ball out of your frozen fingers. This makes sense to me.

  When we return to the schoolhouse I separate and enter through GIRLS. I sit with Cora at lunchtime. I am not lonely that I notice, nor do I long for a best friend. I eat the bread and cheese and dried apple turnover, and listen to Cora and her best friend, Edwina, talk seriously about school and chores and what they’d like to do someday.

  “There’s nursing,” says Cora, “which is better than teaching.”

  “But sick people.” Edwina shudders.

  “You can work anywhere,” says Cora. “Teachers have to go where they’re assigned.”

  “I like children,” offers Edwina.

  “I don’t, not really.” Cora looks at me with mild contempt, as if I were so much younger.

  “Children get sick too,” I point out.

  “I’ll specialize,” says Cora. “Not with children.”

  When lessons are finished for the day, Olive and Cora and I walk home again, empty pails, town to farm.

  ONE AFTERNOON we arrive home to cracks of darkness opened, gashes in the ceiling, floorboards missing, an ugly pile of debris pushed into the empty space where the wall between the kitchen and the dining room has been. Father has knocked it down. He’s accomplished the task by himself, drifting a layer of white dust everywhere in the house, even in the rooms upstairs. Our feet leave behind prints, our fingers too.

  Father shovels the pile of debris out the front door and into a wheelbarrow, which he trundles down the wooden steps. He dumps it out behind the barn. It is up to us girls to clean up the rest of the mess; we do not put forth our best effort.

  Father’s new invention will be a floor-to-ceiling cabinet, with shelves going right through from the kitchen to the dining-room. At the heart of the cabinet, a large double-decker lazy Susan will spin behind glass doors. Food will be sent from kitchen to dining room, and dirty dishes returned. We admire the drawings.

  The weather turns cold, snow blows in and stays, and it seems that the dust from the broken plaster and sawn boards is snow too, blown through the cracks. I watch it float and descend upon our house, inside and out, and I wait.

  George does not come home for Christmas.

  I decide, privately, that this is for the best; Father’s lazy Susan cabinet is nowhere near completion. I accept the circumstances in which our family is living, but I do not think that George would like it. The table and chairs crowd against the far wall. The food we eat is gritty with sawdust—or do I just imagine it? We trip over the ragged ends of boards, catch our skirts on exposed nail heads, find screws stabbed into the bottoms of our shoes. In the kitchen, the hammer and the corkscrew drill lie side by side with the knife strop and the soup ladle.

  Olive screams at the scampering mice, boldly scurrying out of the opened wall or gaping floorboards. Their droppings infest any food stores left unguarded. Sometimes Olive’s scream is occasioned by a bat, winging wildly across the room.

  What frightens me is the sight of the ceiling and walls and floor opened up, like a body cut apart, bones and guts exposed.

  It is through the cracks, one lamplit evening, that I see my dead sister Fannie slowly appearing. She comes right into the room. I hold my breath, staring, the hairs standing up under my sleeves and at the back of my neck, but no one else seems to see her—neither my sisters, nor my mother, who are also in the room, entirely alive. I freeze, paused in the small actions I’ve been undertaking, the scratching of a pencil across a scrap of paper, the humming of a tuneless song.

  I know it’s Fannie even though I can’t see her face. She doesn’t look at me. She slips quietly past and up the back stairs to the servants’ quarters.

  I stand, knocking over my chair, pencil dropping from my fingers.

  “Aggie? Are you all right?”

  Without saying a word, I chase after Fannie. I’m running, stumbling the steep steps, trying to catch up, but she’s already gone around the corner and when I reach the cold hall, she has vanished.

  “Aggie!”

  My mother stands at the bottom of the narrow twisting staircase and calls me back, but I won’t come. It’s dark in this bleak hallway and I think that if I wait long enough, my eyes opened wide enough, I might see Fannie, she might emerge from wherever she’s hiding. I hold my breath, squeezing my hands closed and open, over and over again.

  My mother climbs the stairs slowly, her footsteps heavy, her breath slow and heavy. When she touches me, I shudder and spin away.

  “What is it, Aggie?”

  “It’s Fannie,” I gasp out. “I seen Fannie.”

  “You saw Fannie.”

  “But I couldn’t catch her!”

  “Aganetha.” My mother grabs my chin in her hand and directs my gaze to hers, though we can scarcely make each other out in the chilly blackness of the hall. Her voice is hard, and unlike her. “You’ll be more careful. You’ll not be wanting to catch up with the dead.”

  In this way, even as she cautions me, my mother tells me that she believes me.

  Mother’s solution is to brew me a tea prepared with dried rose petals, and to dose me with cod liver oil, but her medicines do not work. Now that Fannie knows she can squeeze through the broken plaster, she comes when she pleases, not every evening, but often enough that I look for her expectantly, a shiver of excitement greeting her arrival. I see her shoulders, her neck, an ear, and sometimes the edge of her cheek, as if she were thinking of turning to me and saying something, but she doesn’t. She never turns her face.

  I, alone, watch her pass us by, my heart beating out of my chest.

  Mother looks up from her book. “You’re restless. Go help your father in the barn.”

  Olive and Cora study by lamplight at the dining room table. The dishes are washed and put away, the animals fed and watered. Father has returned to the barn to cut more boards on his lathe. Mother has cautioned him to use the oil lamp with care. His hands will be clumsy, thick-fingered in fat wool gloves.

  I shake my head, no. I’m watching Fannie pass from the dining room into the unlit summer kitchen, cold and unused in this season.


  Mother returns her attention to the leather-bound volume open on the table before her. Filled with handwritten notes and sketches, the book once belonged to her own mother, and is now hers. Its pages are unlined and their texture is rough to the touch, the paper tinged brown and flecked with red and green and blue threads and specks. I’ve inspected it closely. The pages in the back half of the book have yet to be filled. It is here that Mother records information she gleans from the Farmer’s Almanac, and from her own experimentation and experience. She writes down the name and sex and birth date of every baby whose birth she attends, and every visit from every girl who comes to our door, identified by first name only. She writes down dates, and medicines tried, and dosages, and results. She keeps track of the moon cycles, and the harvesting of herbs. But she uses a kind of code, a shorthand that I can’t interpret, though I’ve tried, poring over the handmade pictures and words.

  “This will be a long winter, girls, and a short spring,” she tells us. How does the Almanac know these things? By the thickness of the bark on the trees, by the squirrels’ stores, the shells of insects, the migration habits of the birds? The world around us is mysterious, but not unknowable—the physical world of living and dying.

  We hear Father come into the summer kitchen, the door slamming with the wind behind him, his feet stamping on the boards. “Help him, Aggie,” says Mother.

  Father shoulders his way into the shadowed room bearing several small thin boards, veneers meant for the cabinet fronts. He brings the cold with him. As I’m shutting the door behind him, I glimpse Fannie in the summer kitchen and throw the door wide to be sure, but she’s gone.

  “Aggie! You’re letting in the cold.”

  Father arranges his little stack of wood pieces upon a larger stack with care, blows into his cupped hands, claps them together. “Look at this grain,” he says. “Look at the whorls. Look at the colour.” Beads of moisture glisten in his moustache and beard, the trimmed black hairs flecked with insistent grey. I go to look, but I’m the only one. I lift the veneer, pretending to be surprised at its lightness in my hands. But that is not what surprises me. What surprises me is that the grain has been painted onto the veneer by hand, the whorls too, and the hue is unnatural, a cherry-coloured stain.

  It catches my breath, the care he’s taken. I don’t understand it—the artifice of beauty, the insularity of vision—and it frightens me.

  Maybe I recognize it and do not want to. We’re akin.

  Dear Aggie—I might stop in Montreal for good if I can learn to parlay fransay. Not everyone has to work so hard as they do on the farm and thats a fact. They ride bicycles! They go out dancing! Sincerely yrs George

  Dear Aggie—Toronto is the place for me I found work at the rail yards with the animals that come through horses especially. City folks dont know much about animals luckie for me. You would like it here. Yrs George

  Dear Aggie—There is work for all that want it you could cut off your hair and be a jocky at the track. Tell them Im not coming home and thanks for the loan it comes in handy will pay back soon. Yrs truly George

  AS PROMISED, spring comes late.

  We start seedlings indoors in broken crockery and glassware and twists of brown waxed paper, balanced on makeshift brick-and-board shelves before the windows, wherever we can find sunlight. Spilled dirt clumps in the corners, mingled with sawdust. I find an abandoned nest of kittens and bring them inside, with Mother’s permission.

  Father gets to work. He frames in the cabinet. Instead of cracks and holes, there are only smooth boards, the smell of planed wood and dried sap.

  Fannie stops coming. I think I know why: she can’t get through.

  We eat wrinkled potatoes and salt pork and the bright young dandelion greens that Cora and I gather from the front pasture. School’s out now.

  Spring comes late, but that does not prevent the day from arriving on which Fannie died, one year ago. The day seems so unlike that other day and the house too—so unlike the house that Fannie left behind. It’s been emptied out, broken. I wonder whether the others are thinking the same thoughts as we bow our heads and eat warm biscuits with honey and butter. I eat and I swallow until the food is gone, but the feeling won’t go, even as I clear the table, dry the dishes, escape the house—restlessness.

  It’s my job to muck out the horses’ stalls and lead them to the front pasture. Even the old mare is feeling her grain and kicks her heels and rolls in the mud.

  It’s my job too to clean the chicken pen, and feed the squabbling, scrambling, brainless hens. I fight my way through the stinking pen with a pail of water, which spills down my dress and soaks right through to my thighs. The chickens peck and claw. I drop the bucket and back out of the pen, slamming the door.

  Fannie isn’t in the house. Fannie isn’t here in the barn. But I believe her to be somewhere, nearby, just out of sight. I feel my heart slow with resolve. I will look for Fannie. I will find her.

  Before I can think, I’m off and running, inexplicable excitement firing my limbs. I feel shaky at first, and my breath comes sharp. I run out behind the barn, along the field, to the woods. I run all the way to the edge of town. I look for Fannie in the early feathery green of leaves. I call her name, but quietly, under my breath. I figure she can hear me. When I don’t find her in the woods, I run farther, across the fields, in the ruts at the edges, heavy with mud and churned-up stones. When I don’t find her in the fields, I force myself to turn toward Edith’s. But I veer off before I’ve arrived, and run, instead, along the stony road.

  The graveyard.

  I climb the split rails, catching and tearing my skirt, and swing over the fence.

  “Fannie, are you here?”

  I kneel on her grave, as if I expect her to rise out of it, my fingers scrabbling to dig a hole in the mud. I’m damp with sweat, and soon shivering. I speak down into the earth, my voice rising even as I repeat her stories, each of them, beginning at the beginning with the twins, and then the boy who was only six months old, and drowned James—“It wasn’t your doing, Fannie!”—and the first mother, and Big Robbie killed at war, and ending with Fannie herself.

  “You went so quick, Fannie.”

  I dig down deeper, but there is no reply. My fingers hurt.

  “Aganetha.”

  I jump halfway out of my skin.

  She’s come so quietly, I haven’t heard; or perhaps I’ve fallen so deeply inside my own head that I’ve lost sense of the outside world going on around me. This happens sometimes. Sometimes I startle to the sound of someone calling my name—a teacher, a sister, my mother—as if I’ve been deep inside a dream, away, though I can never think where. Somewhere beyond thoughts.

  “Aganetha, child.” My mother stands just outside the fence, open arms, calling me to her.

  I feel my mouth crumple, my eyes sting. I run to bury my cold face against her neck. Her arms fold like wings around me and we are wrapped together inside her warm shawl. We rock like this. I want to hide my grief against her body, so she can’t see, yet it isn’t long before I’m too restless to hold, even inside her care, her heavy arms, her steady breath. I break free, wiping my eyes clean with the sleeve of my dress.

  “Fannie liked to come here,” my mother says, but more like she’s asking a question.

  I nod.

  “You liked to come with her. You came together.” More questions.

  Yes.

  “I would watch you go. I would think, how lucky little Aganetha is to have Fannie. And how lucky Fannie is to have little Aganetha.”

  My mother stops. She doesn’t go on and say more. She picks up my dirty hands and squeezes them. There is dirt from my hands on her cheek.

  Pictures of Fannie stream behind my eyes, moving pictures, fast-motion, but silent. She is bending over the gravestones. She is walking away from me, waving me off, and I am following.

  Mother watches me closely, as if she might be reading my thoughts—I believe she can. She lets go of my hands and kneels
on Fannie’s grave and gently covers over the hole I have dug.

  Slowly she speaks, down to the ground. “People we love do disappoint us, you know, Aganetha. We don’t have to love them less for it. Maybe we have to love them more.”

  I resist what my mother is saying.

  I think that she is asking too much, that her demands are too steep, that she cannot possibly understand or mean what she says. But her words strike deep into me. I will think of them again, the years of my life unwinding in a whirl of hard-cast moments. I will think of what she is asking me to do. Can I do it?

  “Come, let’s eat.”

  We walk up the lane, mother and daughter. I let her hold my hand.

  9

  Rosebud Ladies’ Athletics Club

  HERE LIES FANNIE in her smooth wooden box. I can feel her beneath the earth, resting and waiting for this: for me to come home. I feel strangely peaceful. My breath comes deeply and slowly. I am aware of effort all around me, strain, excitement, but I let it go. The tiny muscles in my face and throat and neck and chest relax almost imperceptibly and my heartbeat slows.

  I rest like I’m preparing for a race, one I didn’t know I’d been entered in. I’ll do my best. I’d never say no to a race. I take several unnaturally long breaths in order to steady my heart, to enter a place of stillness, a trick I learned as a young runner: how to conserve my strength, blot out disruption.

  Don’t disturb me. Don’t try to move me.

  She is a strong girl, but she can’t lift me. I smell her fear, peppery and sharp. Her touch flutters, wary. She turns me, and I lie on my back among the stones like a beetle, exposed.

  “Are you okay, Mrs. Smart? Is she okay? This is awful—we should just tell her the truth, just tell her everything.”

  Oh, don’t do that, dear. I won’t if you won’t. A rash confession is quickly a regret, believe me.