Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  She was stalwart within the church although privately held to the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy and began each day with tea, toast and a silent reading from that small blue book; was easy and cordial with the women of the village as well as the farm wives who came her way and during the past two years spent Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in the basement of the town hall rolling bandages, bundling wool scraps, writing letters to unknown boys from the lists provided from the USO and once a month helping to weigh and pack barrels with horded bacon grease, lard and tallow. In the fall she paid out pennies to the pound to the poor and often illiterate girls from Kings Valley, the backways of Brocklebank, who hauled to town in wagons or hand-sledges the large old burlap wool-sacks stuffed with milkweed down pulled from the cracked pods, girls, always, each with their wretched clothes and downcast eyes, reddened and split fingers who came down skittish as wild creatures from the swaybacked ruined farms without electricity or telephone, children who’d left school well before the eighth grade to stump along best they could with their families until one way or another they became pregnant and one way or another among their own kind but not kin a husband, a man-child like themselves was found, or maybe an older man who’d buried two or three wives but needed someone to keep house, cook as could be done, warm his old bones in a cold bed. In that wretched season Jo kept a finger lightly upon the scale and a pocketful of peppermint candies to hand out with the payments. She reimbursed those overpayments from her own money.

  Some few women of the town thought she believed herself to be a grand lady, in some way better than themselves. She was not unaware of this but understood the error in judgment was their difficulty, not hers. Even if, mildly and without satisfaction, she knew it to be true. She owed no apology for her intellect or birthright.

  In October of 1942, Evelyn Chapman, the eighth-grade Home Economics teacher, abruptly left her job to travel one hundred fifty miles east and take a job at the Portsmouth Shipyard, this action still a novelty although other young single and married women would follow in the coming years, to the Yard, and a multitude of other war effort jobs around New England, many never to return, having had a taste of another life. At the time though it was simply an immediate crisis with the school year under way and no obvious candidate for the job. Jo and her husband sat in the library, the radio turned low to Walter Winchell. Ruth was in the kitchen doing geometry homework while surreptitiously reading a recent issue of Screenland. Nate Hale was muttering about the Chapman girl as he called the thirty-two-year-old and shivering his jowls with a vivid disappointment over one who could so easily throw over the terms of her admittedly paltry contract. Jo twirled the last of the diluted nightcap in the heavy glass, swallowed and set the glass down a bit harder than intended.

  “It’s basic cooking and sewing,” she announced. “I’ll do the job. Pay me half whatever you paid the Chapman girl and that will satisfy any who would question and you may, of course, continue to search for a more qualified candidate.”

  He looked at her, wondering if she thought he’d been sleeping with the girl—he tended to eschew girls quite so close to home. Still, he reddened a bit and coughed into his stronger drink before saying, “That would be extraordinary. For only the shortest possible time, to fill in, of course. She left us in a lurch. But the sewing part—they do use machines, you know.”

  Jo stood. “I can learn,” she said. “What I don’t know, the girls will show me, I expect. There’s always at least one clever girl that simply seems to know how to use something new, even if she’s never seen it before. Well! I feel as if I’m contributing something real, now. Good night, Mr. Hale.” She crossed over and leaned to plant warm lips upon his forehead and he responded, “Good night, pet. I’ll be up soon. I’ll check Ruth’s homework first.”

  “Oh,” she said, as she glided from the room with the faint skim of a smile upon her, as a cat that’s figured out the new mouse hole. “Please do.”

  Being within the school she’d have a cautious but much closer look at Ruth, caught in passing but also the undertow of talk spilled over from classmates, perhaps even her new colleagues—though she recognized those adults would most likely keep her at a distance, uncertain of why she’d been placed among them. Jo was fine with all that but her daughter had grown to be a mystery to her: She knew Ruth was spending time with the Snow boy and this didn’t disturb her very much, at least not as much as the times. Everything was accelerated from her own youth, the war did that—too quickly by her lights. Also, dresses and skirts were shorter, just below the knee and lacking pleats so little of the woman’s form was left to imagination. The newest rayons were almost sheer, clinging to upper bodies, hair was worn long, parted on one side or another like a man and then falling free to shoulders where it might be curled under. Stockings no longer could be had except on the black market and they were not that sort of people but Jo quivered in guessing her daughter might enjoy the fresh press of air up under those short skirts.

  The summer Jo Putnam was seventeen, two years before she met Nathaniel Hale, there occurred a tragedy connected closely to her Shelburne home. Their cook was an Irish woman, Irene Cuddy, with a daughter, Maeve. Jo was aware of the girl in a vague way; Maeve attended the local schools and Jo attended the Academy for Girls at Follett’s Bay. If there was a Mr. Cuddy she had no idea, never even wondered but in the callow way of a young person simply assumed there was. She’d seen Maeve time to time over the years and thought her pretty with her black hair and blue eyes but the girl always looked boldly upon Jo before ducking her head down and away, as if she didn’t like her. Beyond that she knew little of the girl and held less interest—later she’d examine this part of herself and her life began to change at that point. After the terrible weekend, all of which Jo learned about later, most gained the middle of the following week one evening when she’d left her bedroom and tiptoed down the hall to sit in her nightdress at the top of the stairs and listened to her parents talking out of sight, below.

  Irene asked for the weekend off, unheard of but her urgency was clear. Late on Sunday morning came a long distance telephone call—the first such the household had received. They’d only just returned from church. Her father then made a series of hushed calls and left the house. Her mother refused to answer questions or offer any explanation and the two of them sat through a wretched parody of noon-dinner, served cold by the woman who otherwise was the weekday housekeeper. Her mother time to time set down the fork she idled in swift tickings against the china and turned her face, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. Then left Jo on her own for the afternoon.

  It was late on Monday when her father returned. Mrs. Cuddy had taken her daughter to Montreal to see a doctor, a surgeon, someone recommended to her by a woman of the town who’d claimed to know of such matters. What Jo overheard that weeknight hidden on the stairs was that, once he’d arrived in Montreal, her father had paid sums in fees and bribes to have Maeve’s body released and sent home, to have Irene Cuddy released from the Royal constables and allowed to accompany her daughter, further sums also to facilitate whatever paperwork was necessary, which, she gathered, was a considerable amount. The doctor, whatever he was, had vanished. The constabulary did not seem interested in him. Maeve was buried that Monday night after dark in a far corner of the cemetery behind Our Lady of the Snows and her father then had paid Mrs. Cuddy the remainder of her month’s wages. She understood, without a word passing between them, that she was to leave town. That he was not part of this unfortunate business. And Jo, upon the stairs, thought But you were. And understood more. Suddenly, midsummer and she was wracked with chills as if it were January and the coal fire in the grate had died. She’d gone then to her room, pulled woolens and feather-stuffed quilts from the chest, spread them upon the bed and lay under them, back up against the pillows, legs twined together to try and draw heat where there was none. Shivering as her understanding of all she’d heard cascaded upon her. The window open and summer moonlight upon the wide lawns
and gardens. She thought she’d never be warm again in her life. Then hours later woke from a deathly slumber to a sunlit morning, most of the covers pushed off in some forgotten fever of the night, a single sodden sheet pulled tight around her.

  She would keep an eye on Ruth. In a world changed, she would do her best to protect her youngest, a girl dear and almost unknown to her. A girl, she thought, unknown to herself.

  The morning after the muted community celebration to welcome in the new year of 1943 she realized, with the welling dread that she was already too late, that her daughter was set on a course of passion lacking all coolheadedness, the least semblance of forethought, of any practical sense. Jo and Nate had left shortly after the bell was rung to welcome the hope and promise of the flip of a calendar page but she was still awake hours later when she heard the door softly shut downstairs, the car coasting away on the packed snow downhill before the engine was fired, the creep of the girl gaining the stairs, the unsteadiness of her cautious tread.

  She stayed abed. This talk, she knew, was almost certain to fail but the best hope was mere hours ahead, in the cold light of day.

  “No, Mother. We won’t wait.”

  “I don’t understand. Why not? Other girls do.”

  “Other girls? Other girls! Do you know why they wait? Do you?”

  Jo was quiet a fatal moment. “They’re practical.”

  “And so am I. Next fall, I’ll attend the Lyndon Teacher’s Institute. I’ve made my application already and attached a letter explaining my circumstances, my intentions. You might be surprised to learn they welcomed me. The dean himself wrote a letter applauding me for my sense of duty to my future as well as the man I love. ‘These are extraordinary times,’ he wrote, ‘and they call for extraordinary measures.’ That, I say, is practical.”

  “Hotheaded is what I say. You risk being a widow before you even undertake life.”

  “That’s just it! I want Oliver to go off to war without a doubt of me, knowing I have the ultimate confidence he’ll make it through. I have to give him that, I’d not be true if I didn’t. I love him, Mother, and he loves me and nothing else in life is promised us, is it? Nothing at all.”

  Jo said, “Have you spoken with your father about all this?”

  Ruth said, “No, I have not.” She looked away and back and her mother knew what was coming: “I was wondering if you might? I’m happy to afterward, but I thought you could better explain it to him. You know how he flusters me.”

  Jo Hale stole that moment to consider all she could not say: Oliver Snow was a fine, bright young man, with a streak of melancholy came down from his father and grandfather. And the strange disappearance of the Canadian grandmother—Oliver Snow was, to her mind, a man unlikely to survive this war, a dreamer and one at best half aware of all that went on about him, with an ethereality he didn’t yet recognize but would catch him one fine day. And she could say none of this. She had spent her life wrestling with her own deeply held understandings of who around her fit in which way, and the times she’d been proven wrong. Her gut ached and her arms were goose-fleshed just before noon on the first full day of the year and she wanted a cup of coffee, the one before her gone cold, and more, wanted to pour a bit of port or rye into it. She looked back up at her daughter and said, “I’ll talk to your father. But after, you will as well.”

  Ruth stood and leaned and threaded her arms around her mother’s neck and brushed her lips against her ear and said, “Thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, I love you.”

  Jo rose into her daughter’s embrace. Held her shoulders and looked deep and strong into her eyes and said, “I love you too, baby girl.”

  Ed Snow had packed away his fiddle after his mother disappeared, pushing the scuffed and worn alligator-hide case deep on the top shelf of the closet, behind his polished black funeral shoes fitted with trees. In the years since he’d been called upon many times to play at kitchen parties, tunks and wakes and refused all but two. Saying it was old-time Canuck music and no one wanted to hear it, they wanted the new music and his fiddle wouldn’t swing. The way it was. The two exceptions he’d said nothing to his wife beyond promising he’d be back and then drove off and didn’t return until late afternoon of the following day. Once he was simply back in the store when Oliver came by after school—the other time he drove in as they were seated to supper and had a sack of dried sausages that he hung in the cellar while whistling an unfamiliar jig before coming back up to eat stewed chicken and baked Hubbard squash with his wife and son. He never offered to share the sausages and in the way of these things Oliver knew not to ask even as time to time over the coming months he’d sit across from his father at breakfast and eat his oatmeal and bacon while his father held the tight leathern sausage in his hand and chewed with concentration directed somewhere far away, groaning now and again. A sound close to one Oliver recently discovered he also owned.

  But when, following the wedding and the dinner, and the guests were spread between the library, dining room, and parlor of the Hale place up on West Hill, Ed Snow walked into the room with the old case and lifted the fiddle and tuned it, tucking his chin down low to bring the strings close to his ear, Oliver wasn’t surprised. His father, happy with the tuning, lifted his chin and surveyed the room. Seemed half the town and half the county was packed into the house but all fell silent in a moment, a telegraph person-to-person seemingly at work. Ruth stood feet away by the fireplace, the butternut wallboards behind her in a soft late winter afternoon glow, Ruth in a grand white gown, her grandmother’s wedding dress dug out from a chest up attic and altered to fit by her mother and a seamstress all the way from Woodsville, Ruth flushed peaches and cream, beautiful as Oliver had ever seen her.

  His father spoke in a clear voice, respectful and assured. “If I might,” he said with no hint of seeking approval, “I’d play a pair of the older songs. My father played them at my wedding. There were a whole pile of em played that day, but these two, why, they’re a pair of tunes for the bride and groom. Songs for luck and long life, and for the strength you need, separate and together.” He bowed out a short couple of measures and spoke again, “The groom’s song comes first, the bride’s after. The way it is.”

  He tucked the fiddle under his chin, bent at the waist a bit and extended his arms slightly as if not to gather the instrument to himself but himself to the fiddle. He bounced the bow once upon the strings and then played. The groom’s song was a jaunty reel with clear fast runs and clever fingers flying to a blur up and down the neck, the bow rising and falling and that arm’s elbow as if pulled by wires unseen. Music fleet and nimble as a man must be and flowing with color and joy and glissandos neat and contained. There came a bridge that slowed and stretched, a short low passage dropped in that suggested the long years of work, of shouldering the burdens of life and then the bow danced and quivered again upon the strings: an old man with a pipe in a chair beside the stove, grandchildren rolling on the floor like puppies, old friends around a table playing cards or lifting a glass and telling old thrice-told tales. A short sweet taper then up the neck and trilling off to sudden silence.

  Ed Snow tapped his foot four times in that silence and played again. This time without fancy work, finger or bow but a lovely and haunting steady rise and fill, falling off and rising again. Most in the room felt the song register within, as if they should know it and perhaps some few once upon a time at some house party or kitchen tunk had heard the song in a slightly more rousing version, perhaps with the words sung in a quavering voice over the music but played as it was this afternoon none could put a name to it. To many it seemed only a slow lovely piece played for a young woman on her wedding day, a pretty tune, a moment, an indulgence for the groom’s father welcoming this young woman. A lovely thing.

  Oliver Snow stood listening. He alone, standing next to his bride, knew not only the name of the song but also the words, the name of the ballad. “Lady Franklin’s Lament.” A sad tale spun over sad music. He felt a blush of ange
r toward his father and then a wrench of love in his heart for the man, for everyone present in the house on this day. Most of all for his wife.

  When the song ended, the polite applause had fallen away, he stepped forward as his father was bending to replace the fiddle in the case.

  In a strong clear tone Oliver Snow said, “Dad? Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  Ed straightened, the fiddle gripped by the neck. “Am I? What would that be, eh?”

  “Could you give us a waltz? Just for Ruth and me?”

  His father appraised him, nodded and for the shortest of moments studied the big ceiling beams overhead even as he brought the fiddle back against his tucked chin. People understood also and pressed back, making a small opening upon the floorboards before the father of the groom. Oliver turned to Ruth and silently extended a hand. She stepped forward as the first notes sang out. To most all listening the song in tempo and tone was not so different from the lament just played but for the sharps, and dips of color, the full notes one into another rich as polished hardwood lit by flames of some remote fire. Echoing the suddenly clear bright fire in the room, a music crisp and dulcet at once.