Tress gathered up her own dark hair, allowing Hanora to slip long hairpins into the thickness of rolls or the figure eight, the pins disappearing like magic. Once in a while, at bedtime, Tress put Hanora’s red hair up in rags. The next morning, she untied the rags and pulled them free and shaped ringlets with the tail of the comb. She told one story after another while Hanora tugged and twisted and tried to wiggle out from between her knees. The hair was too fine, too straight, didn’t take to ringlets; any curl would be gone by lunchtime. Tress declared she would not make ringlets again; they never lasted. And forgot, and a month or two later plunked down in the curly-birch chair and said, “Let’s put your hair up in rags tonight. I’ll tell a story if you’ll stand still.” Her mother could pull stories from a current of air, from a wisp of suggestion.
There once was a child, a girl with red hair, who loved to be outside. One morning, she was in so much of a hurry to get out to play, she paid no attention to her clothes and wore her dress inside out. This girl sat on a branch in the maple tree behind her house and whistled to the birds. She put her right hand to her mouth and imitated their calls until they sang back to her. She waggled her fingers as if playing an invisible wind instrument; she cupped a hand to her ear to listen. She created exact tones, exact pitch. She fooled the birds into believing she knew their language, and perhaps she did, because they answered her every call. She was patient; she was a listener. She could sit still for a long, long time in the tree. Perhaps she was collecting stories the birds told about their flights over the deep waters and the great forests.
And Hanora would say, “Now it’s my turn.”
This is the story of the adventures of the baby hawk. She was born in a stick nest and was timid until she first learned how to fly. After that, her eyes could see so clearly, she could look inside the thoughts of others.
In 1932, Hanora’s parents purchased the house they had rented since 1918, the year Kenan came home from the war. He’d returned wounded, two and a half years before Hanora was born. Her parents paid $119 for the house because the postmaster who owned it, Jack Conlin, had died and his widow wanted to sell. The price was low—1932 was a Depression year. Kenan had work and he had a pension from the war and a few dollars saved; he kept the books for two businesses in town. Tress worked three days a week in the dining room of her family’s hotel, which her parents had owned for decades. She and Kenan counted their purchase money and laid it on the lawyer’s desk, and from that day had a house of their own. They had taxes to pay, but no more rent.
From the age of six, Hanora was permitted to walk along the boardwalk by herself to visit her grandparents at the hotel at the other end of Main Street. She passed Tobe’s house along the way, before crossing the street at the corner. Tobe’s mother displayed objects on an inner windowsill that fronted Main Street, two feet back from the boardwalk. The displays changed frequently: a collection of stones, smooth and rounded, gathered from the shore of the bay; a miniature toy train made of wood, engine to caboose; a collection of thimbles; a row of teacups in varying shapes and patterns; a lineup of fancy soaps Mrs. Staunton had made; a trail of glass elephants, the trunk of each raised as if to grasp the tail of the animal in front; a selection of whistles Tobe carved with his staghorn-handled pocket knife, a knife that Hanora was permitted to use. There were surprises on the sill. The contents kept changing. Townspeople sometimes walked out of their way to see what Mrs. Staunford had on display.
The family hotel was directly across the street from the train station and the steamboat wharf, and sometimes passengers climbed down off one and boarded the other. Hanora’s grandmother, Mamo Agnes, was in charge of the territory called kitchen, because she was a cook like no other. She had an assistant who could take over in a minute, but Mamo Agnes still put on her apron, rolled up her sleeves and created a thick stew, three dozen tea biscuits and six layer cakes in a morning. Between meals, in good weather, Mamo Agnes and Grampa Dermot sat on the veranda of their house next to the hotel. They dragged out two Morris chairs—one of the chairs a rocker—and kept an eye on their end of town, and on the coming and going of boats at the wharf and trains at the station. Before Hanora was born, the day-to-day management of the hotel had been given over to Tress’s older brother, Bernard, and his wife, Kay. Uncle Bernard kept the books through the years of layoffs and low salaries and rum-running and even more years of gambling on steamers that criss-crossed the lake, the boats discharging passengers on the wharf late at night. Bedraggled gamblers stumbled across the street to dollar-a-night hotel beds, keeping the place alive during the lean years of the thirties. Al Capone was a guest more than once after crossing the Great Lake in his own small craft. The family protected his identity, knowing that he registered under another name.
When Hanora visited, she ate in the hotel dining room with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and any other visiting relatives who were there at mealtime. A special table in the corner was reserved for family use. The dining room was noisy with the clatter of cutlery and the conversation of travellers touring their samples, factory owners who dropped in for a quick meal, an eccentric doctor who’d put together his own medicine show, and once, a stunt pilot accompanied by his female assistant, who was also his wife and whose job it was to stand on the wing of the plane while it was aloft. The woman’s name was Johanna; Hanora never forgot. Johanna had beautiful soft blonde curls that seemed to be pinned to her head; she wore a pilot’s cap over her curls when she performed.
Every meal Hanora ate at the corner table presented a new adventure. She listened to conversations and strained to understand. She watched and imagined the lives of diners who were seated about the room.
Best of all, she liked to hover in the background when her aunts gathered in her grandparents’ house beside the hotel, or at her own home, or at Zel’s boarding house. Six or seven women: her mother, Aunt Grania, Aunt Kay, honorary aunt Zel, other aunts who arrived in town from their farms north of town to shop, or for no other reason than to drop in and visit over an endless pot of tea.
Laughing and storytelling went on for hours, until the women remembered they had other duties: meals to cook, chores to complete. Still, they wanted to hear each other. They gossiped, passed on family news, farm and town news. One afternoon, the normally quiet Aunt Kay spoke up. She began to tell the tale of an ancestor whose sad epitaph had been printed on a mourning card after her funeral in England. In soft and melancholy tones, Kay recited the verse for the others:
Twas in the blooming time of youth
When death to me was sent
For all my husband’s done to me
Dear Lord make him repent.
The women were shocked to silence. Shook their heads and looked to each other’s faces. Kay repeated the verse and told them that the story had passed through generations with no details of what the husband had actually done. Those had to be imagined. After that, everyone who’d been in the parlour that day (including cousins who’d crept back in after tiring of playing outside) could repeat the lines of the verse about the unfortunate woman whose bones and sad story were sealed forever in her English grave.
The best stories were told and retold. Old Fielding, his face and bald head brown from the sun (Hanora remained silent about his white bum, though she was certain the women would laugh if she told), cycled from town to town, attending funerals, visiting homes and churches and graveyards, any and all within his bicycle’s reach. Because of his bad eyesight, he fell into ditches on the way to funerals, and more often on the way back, if he’d found plenty to drink. He attended whether or not he’d been familiar with the deceased. He stayed for liquor and eats and conversation, and he was never lonely. Asked on the street one afternoon why he had turned back so soon after starting out on his bicycle, he replied sadly and politely that he hadn’t had a movement yet that day; he’d have to miss the funeral. Tress and the women hooted over that. Mamo Agnes laughed with her face scrunched until her eyes appeared to be closed, but they w
ere not. Mamo Agnes, the others said, didn’t miss a thing. The same was said of Aunt Grania, who was Deaf but could lip-read any one of them. If she did miss something, especially when the topic of conversation changed without warning, she looked to Tress for explanation. Since childhood, the two sisters had owned a private language of hands they’d invented. Tress always kept her younger sister inside the conversation.
Hanora hovered in the background, grinning to herself, listening hard, stowing stories to share later with Tobe and Breeda. One afternoon, Aunt Zel took her aside and said, “You’re the one with the memory, Hanora. Someone in the room is always the silent recorder, and I’m pretty certain it’s you. It’s good that stories are remembered and passed on. Stories give us a sense of belonging.”
Days and months and years run together. Did Hanora start school before or after her father’s friend Hugh visited for the first time from Prince Edward Island? She was surprised to learn that her father had a friend who’d journeyed to the same place called War. She watched from her bedroom window while the two former soldiers walked out along the shore of the bay in the evenings. When they sat in the veranda, their conversation could not be heard because they kept their voices low.
Her mother cooked special meals and made the place fancy with flowers and set out good linens when Hugh visited. One summer, he brought a radio of a size he could carry in his arms. They sat in a semicircle in the parlour after supper and listened to big band music while the tubes glowed from the back of the radio. When the program finished, Hanora felt that she was floating on remembered melody. After a late snack of bacon and cheese and tea biscuits and a pot of tea, a cot was made up in the parlour and the parlour doors closed to provide privacy for Hugh. In the morning, the bedding was folded and put away until nighttime again.
Kenan was the one who made breakfast. He cooked eggs several times a week because he’d been allowed only one egg per year when he was a child being raised by Uncle Oak.
There was a boy who grew up in this town. He had long legs like yours, and curly hair. He lived with his uncle and a bulldog named Jowls. On Easter Sunday, the boy was permitted to eat a single egg—the only egg he was permitted all year—and this was served in a special dish rimmed with gold. If you look on cupboard shelves around the room, you might find this special dish, which has its own gold-rimmed lid. The uncle who served the egg was not mean or stingy. He raised hens and sold the eggs to support the child. Every egg was precious and brought in money to purchase milk, or bread, or a new pair of britches, or a copybook or slate to be used at school.
On another visit, Hugh brought piano rolls and they walked along Main Street to Hanora’s grandparents’ hotel, where there was a player piano in the lounge. She invited Tobe to come along and they listened to “Dizzy Fingers” while a crowd gathered round. Hanora thought surely it was not possible for piano keys to move so quickly. That night, the melody rippled through her sleep while long, wavering keyboards with black-and-white keys rose and fell through the air on their own, no player in sight.
Hugh told Hanora stories about Prince Edward Island. About wind that blew for days on end, about gulls that made brave attempts to lift, land, settle on the sea. He told her about two points of land that jutted into the sea a mile apart. At night, seaweed was gathered, as if the points of land reached through the dark waves while everyone was sleeping and tugged and twisted the weed into a long, thick cord. By early morning, there it was, arranged along the beach in a continuous loop, stretched out the entire mile between points.
One regular visitor to Deseronto was cousin Billie, who arrived from Rochester in the late summer, every visit memorable. More than three years older than Hanora, she could have been her twin; everyone said so. They had the red hair and green eyes, and Mamo Agnes declared them to be “two peas in a pod.” Billie’s mother never stayed long; she accompanied Billie on the steamship across Lake Ontario, returned home, and came back after a few weeks to collect her in time for school. Billie hated to return home and told Hanora that she and her brother, Ned, lived in an unhappy household; her parents fought and her father shouted. Sometimes he stormed out, then came back to the house late after a bout of drinking. She preferred Hanora’s family to her own. Hanora had parents who knew enough to stay calm. They behaved like adults. They could be counted on.
Hanora thought her cousin exotic, arriving from another country, brazen enough to complain loudly about her family life, ready to dive into adventure. The bond between them held throughout childhood. They exchanged secretive letters during winter months and invented a coded alphabet. Billie usually signed her letters Love you everly, your cousin Billie.
One August morning while Billie was visiting, the two went for a walk beyond the town limits and ventured into dense woods. It wasn’t long before they were lost, thirsty and hungry. Billie swung gamely from thin branches that drooped down from larger branches above. She dropped to her feet and declared that they would search for food. She promised that a path would turn up, kicked at some rocks and fantasized about what they would eat when they found food. Ten minutes later, chuffed with bravado, she climbed to the top of a wild apple tree to shake down its unripe fruit. “Apples will cure starvation,” she declared. She leaned heavily into a branch. Hanora peered up as the branch cracked. Billie ripped open the back of her thigh on the way down, a long horizontal tear below the buttock. She lay on the ground with a wound that refused to bleed.
To Hanora’s eyes, the upper part of Billie’s thigh was a slab of marbled meat that had turned itself inside out. Tearless, stoic Billie was unable to move, so Hanora had no choice but to abandon her cousin while she sought help. Where? Not only was she lost in the woods, but she was also trespassing.
She ran in any direction, no direction, and arrived at a split-rail fence, which she followed, at a steady, breathless run, to a farmhouse. The owners of the apple tree were inside. She broke into tears when a robust woman opened the door, wiped her hands on a towel and said, “What are you doing so far from town? Aren’t you Hanora Oak? I’d recognize that hair anywhere. Do your parents know where you are?”
After hearing the blurted-out story, the woman’s husband followed (or rather, led) Hanora to the apple tree, knowing exactly where it was. He plucked Billie up into his arms and carried her back to the farmhouse. The woman dressed the wound, and the girls were returned to Deseronto in an open wagon drawn by two horses. Billie referred to the wagon ride as “our triumphant re-entry into town.” The local doctor stitched Billie together, and from that day forward she had a thick horizontal scar running along the back of her thigh.
HANORA pauses in her walk and stands before a memorial plaque on a stone bench at the top of the hill. She looks about in all directions. The three women who preceded her up the trail are leaning into the back of a second bench, nearby. Their faces are turned to the sun; their walking poles rest against a tree trunk. They speak quietly, eyes closed, familiarity with one another apparent—and enviable. Enviable because they seem to have no cares in the world except to absorb the quiet and feel the heat of the sun on their skin.
Here we are, like world explorers, Hanora thinks. One would think we’d journeyed to the tip of Everest. And isn’t there always a journey? Long or short, on horseback or camel, by train or ferry or ocean liner, or in sturdy boots up snow-covered trails. She looks down and stomps her own boots to clear ice pellets and traces of wet leaves that have stuck to the soles. She thinks of Tobe climbing the tree with no sighting of Fielding’s bum. How the two of them giggled themselves into a state of hilarity when they were children. She smiles to herself.
Remembering Tobe makes her think again of the words of Zel, dead many years now. Zel was a widow in her fifties when she moved to Deseronto to start up her rooming house. She exuded spirit, strength, humour, tipping her head back and laughing with abandon. She’d sent a letter of advice when Hanora was living in wartime England. Some advice has been followed, some not.
If you find someone,
hang on tightly. You might not realize the importance of the occasion. You might not recognize the significance of a particular hour or day or week in your life, but you can try. Pause when you watch light rippling over moving water, or when you inhale the exquisite scent of a bloom or hear a child’s laughter. Pause when you are singing, or listening to beautiful music, or dancing in the arms of a loved one, or holding someone close. Every time you offer love and are loved in return, store those moments. There will be a time in your life when you will remember and you will want to remember, and you will be glad and you will be grateful, because your hoard of memories will be raided over and over again.
It was as if Zel believed that Hanora could make conscious decisions about what to remember and what to forget. As if Hanora was somehow in charge of what her brain would store and recall.
What Hanora remembers—she waves farewell to the other hikers and begins to descend the trail—is that during her earliest years, she had no awareness of belonging because belonging was implicit. She was surrounded by family. Only later, after learning that she was not a true part of the family, only then did she begin to feel uncertain, even unworthy. That is probably the word, she thinks: unworthy. The beginning of the feeling. As if, from that day, she no longer had the right to belong. The feeling had come from inside, not from anyone around her. She had lost confidence. Tress and Kenan would have been devastated if they’d known how she felt.
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