by Mary Swan
October
The season is changing, autumn-blue sky hard against the attic window. There’s a perfect red leaf on the tray Kez brings; “It’s glorious outside,” she says. Clare keeps the leaf until it dries and curls, crumbles it to powder and watches how it hangs in the air when she blows. Thinking, That’s time too, what it does.
Later, her brother Ben climbs the stairs, to tell her that Principal Thomas has stopped by. That he drank a cup of tea, ate two pieces of Nan’s seed cake and said he’d had to hire another teacher to take Clare’s place. Perhaps next fall, he’d said, when she had completely recovered, perhaps then he could find her a new position. “He left this for you,” Ben says, tugging a thin green book from his pocket. “He said you’d been discussing it.”
Clare has no memory of that discussion, but when Ben is gone she runs her fingertips over the cover of the little book, a beautiful deep green, like the trees in Moss Park when the light is beginning to fade. It’s called Elementary Astronomy, and she turns the clean pages slowly, looking at the simple illustrations. Circles and ovals and lines with arrows, a tiny man on a hill with a telescope. The patterns of the fixed stars that you can only see when you’re told what they’re meant to be.
She knows it’s not right, but all she feels is relief at losing her place. As if she’s put down some heavy thing she hadn’t even realized she was carrying. She remembers, but distantly, how proud she was of her first class certificate, how happy when Principal Thomas opened the door and showed her the empty classroom that would be hers. She remembers counting off the days last summer, waking earlier and earlier as the time drew closer.
But when the first day of school finally came it was hard to open her eyes, and the bedclothes seemed an impossible weight. She remembers how carefully she began to brush her hair, and then her arm was so tired and she realized that she’d been brushing and brushing for who knew how long, staring at herself in the mirror. “Pull yourself together,” she said then, and the moment she said it she felt as if she was fraying at the edges, sliding away. The dishes Nan set on the table made a hollow sound, and the buildings she walked by on her way were all sharp lines and colours, like the rows of thin-shouldered children, their piercing voices. She understands now that her fever was coming on, but that day all she knew was that things were not quite right, and she thought that she just needed to concentrate. But the next day was the same, only more so. Like a dream, in the moments before you realize that it is a dream, that terrible feeling of everything sliding out of control. Next fall is a long way off, but it feels as if a door has closed quite firmly; she can’t imagine herself trying to do it all again.
Kez has brought her the old brown sewing box, the button jar and the smooth darning egg Clare loves to hold in her hands, along with a pile of things to be mended. “Nothing too tiring,” she says, as she leaves with the tray, “but it will give you something to do.” Clare thinks for the first time of how much extra work she’s causing, how it’s not only her days and nights that have changed. She will do the mending, make herself useful, and she thinks that she might even learn something from the tears and frayed seams, messages from the lives going on in the rest of the house. They’re none of them the mud-slinging, tree-climbing children they once were, but Ben still sheds buttons almost daily, and his jacket pockets often tear from the notebooks and sharpened pencil stubs he stuffs them with. Nan’s blue dress has a pattern of tiny singed holes near the hem, sparks scattered from their father’s old pipe when she knocks it on the sole of her shoe. Sitting on the back steps in the dark, having her quiet smoke, her body in their father’s shape, elbows on her knees and right hand cupped around the bowl. They all know not to say a word, if they happen to open the door to a curl of scent that reminds them of another time.
The clothes in the mending pile have only the usual types of damage, tell her nothing she doesn’t already know. She concentrates on her neat, small stitches, the tiny snap of the thread in her teeth. “Was it Rumpelstiltskin?” Kez says, when she picks them up in the morning. She gives a little jump and tries to click her heels, laughs the witchy cackle their mother used to do when they begged for one of her stories, a thing Clare hadn’t known she remembered. She thinks of something Ben told her once, a trick he used when he studied for examinations. He said that he imagined the tall old dresser in the kitchen, that he lined his facts up, put them in different spots in different shelves and drawers, and he said that he could always call that picture to mind, find anything he needed that way. It never worked for Clare, but she thinks now that maybe her mind is something like that dresser after all, drawers and compartments swollen shut by age and weather; she wonders what else might be hiding there, waiting to slide suddenly free.
Clare’s sister Nan has a very round face, and her sister Kez has ears that stick out. They call each other Moon and Jug, but no one else does. They were born as close together as they could be, without being twins; impossible to think of one without the other, even though they’re nothing alike. Nan’s round, kind face hides a secret sorrow, another thing Clare knows, though she doesn’t know how. She has two friends from church, the Misses Simp, Kez calls them, although one’s a widow and they aren’t related at all. But they both have long, thin noses and pale faces, sit very straight and hold their saucers up in front, set their teacups down with the tiniest of sounds. Long pauses in their conversation, while the clock ticks. Kez says they make her want to break wind loudly, she says one day she’ll pin them down, knees on their bony shoulders, and smear rouge on their sagging, pale cheeks. “Oh stop!” Nan says, through her laughing, and Kez does stop, although she wouldn’t for anyone else.
Kez is a joker, like Charlie, but with a meaner edge, someone who would tickle you into nothing but pain. She can’t let anything go and it’s worse since their mother died, no one to check her tongue. “For Heaven’s sake, I’m only joking,” she’ll say, as if words shouldn’t cut within the walls of your own house. Still, she’s the one you’d want with you if there’s a dull, hard job to be done. Her arms are skinny but strong and she pushes up her sleeves and jumps in, something like their mother in the way she’s rarely still. “Pretend this carpet’s the mean old landlord’s face,” she says, when it’s draped over the line outside. “Take that,” Kez says, giving it a whack with the beater. “Take that and that.” And they do it until their arms are so tired, the dust that’s left only a shiver in the air. She’s good at thinking up games while they wring out the laundry, knead and peel things at the kitchen table. What kind of animal would the fat man next door be, the grocer’s wife, the butcher with his missing fingertips. What would be the best meal you could ever eat, every single ingredient. Or what do you think the princess would do, if the prince never came to the tower?
“A fever,” Kez says, “a collapse—what does it matter? This is where we are, and soon you’ll be better, and that’s that.” She tells Clare not to think so much, tells her the doctor said that too, just like their mother always did. “The doctor came?” Clare says, but Kez bats the question away. “Only a few times,” she says, “only those first days. Just rest, is what he said, and he left a nasty tonic for your heart, but we couldn’t get you to take it.” She puts on her witchy voice and says she poured the bottle out the back door, says it bubbled and seethed and burned the ground black, and Clare knows she’ll hear nothing more about the doctor, how worried they must have been to call him.
“I’ll try,” Clare says. She knows she can’t explain it to Kez, how safe she feels in her dark-walled room. How it’s beginning to feel like a gift, this time with nothing to do but think. Although it must be what wears her out; she does nothing else but sew a few buttons and walk the room end to end, read a paragraph about the changing face of the moon.
Nan’s knee is better and she’s sometimes there when Clare opens her eyes. Other times Kez is sitting in the chair by her bed, or Ben, and sometimes even Charlie, who brings her a book on repairing clocks and watches. That’s not
really the kind of time she’s been wondering about, but when he’s gone she turns the pages, looks at the diagrams, all the tiny parts hidden beneath the plain face. Trains and bridges and pinions, levers and springs and jewels. The escapement, which regulates everything, makes the wheels turn at a steady rate that equals the passing of time, shown by the moving hands. She covers the page and tries to see it in her mind, each part of the mechanism, and what its purpose is. In one of the illustrations the pieces are exploded out, each one separate with its own neat label. But you can see that they are all in order, that at any moment they could fall back into place with a tiny sound and become whole again, and then time will go ticking on.
When Charlie comes next there’s been a first, early snow; he bends his head so she can feel it in his hair. Then he sits in the chair, fidgeting with his cuffs, his open collar. Scratches at his earlobe. His nails are bitten down, there are dark smudges under his eyes, and Clare thinks that he looks like the person he might be if he wasn’t always so lively.
Charlie is next to her in age, and there was a time they were always together. Wandering through alleyways and the wilder parts of the park, climbing over fences and up through the branches of swaying trees. Once they tried to rig a tightrope, but the knots didn’t hold, and after they saw the Wild West show they galloped down all the back laneways for days, on their way to rob the two o’clock train. Clare was the lookout, her job to peek around the corner and then give the special whistle that would bring Charlie thundering past, a torn-off sleeve tied over his nose and mouth. Noisy bullets flying from his cocked thumb and finger. She doesn’t remember exactly when it changed. When she began to spend the sleepy afternoons scrubbing potatoes at the battered table, or whispering behind her hand with the other girls at school. Charlie fixing his part just so with a wet comb and stroking the soft hairs above his lip, walking with a new, lazy slouch and not telling her anything that mattered.
Clare knows, they all do, that he’s not happy where he is. Always complaining about the fine, close work and the bad temper of Mr. Howell, and about his tiny room above the shop. Looking at him now there’s barely a trace of the smooth-skinned boy, but she remembers sitting beside him, throwing stones that gulped into a pond, the smell of wild grass all around. And she remembers sitting on the hot roof of a shed while he told her what they’d do with all their stolen gold. The fine house they’d live in together, soft green lawns through the window where horses chased each other and shook their manes, their long brown heads. Heavy linen napkins snapped out in their hands when they sat at a long table spread with covered silver dishes, each one holding some food they’d heard of but never tasted.
She wonders now where that picture came from, nothing like a life either of them had ever seen. And she wonders if there’s another kind of sidestep, like the one she’s decided Heaven must be. A place where she and Charlie still sit in the hot sun, chewing on blades of fresh spring grass with their shoulders touching, not one sad thought in their heads. She’s just about to ask him what he thinks about that when he gives a huge sigh, and his hands fall open, palms up on his splayed-out thighs. “I don’t want it,” Charlie says. “A little life like this.”
After he’s gone, his footsteps fading on the stairs, Clare smooths the rucked-up chair cover and thinks that in a strange way those few words are the most Charlie’s ever said to her. As if he slipped out of a cloak as he came through her doorway. She thinks that maybe Kez does too, something softer showing, that Clare never thought was there to be seen. Even Ben, who climbs the stairs most evenings and talks about what’s gone on at the Telegraph Office, tells her about an idea he’s working on, switches and currents and relays. It doesn’t matter that it’s nothing she can follow; as he talks he pulls out his notebook and begins to draw, to scribble down figures, and soon the only sound is the scratch of his pencil, and the soft pss pss pss of breath through his teeth. But lately he drifts, with a little smile on his lips, and once he asked her about hair combs, and was that a gift that a woman might like. What kind, did she think, for hair that was lighter than hers, and straighter. Hair that had a sort of gleam.
Arranging the cover she thinks of the chair too, a gift from Kez and Nan when she got her certificate. Something they found on one of their prowls. Walk with them to the shops or down any street and you’ll notice how their heads swivel, how they see the worth in all kinds of things other people think they no longer want or need. A dented fire screen, the old squeezebox that made Charlie’s eyes open wide, a bouquet of flowers, barely wilted.
Somehow they dragged the heavy chair home, found a place to hide it while Ben fixed the broken leg, the wobbly arm. They dyed a sheet deep blue and draped it to cover the leaking stuffing, huffed it up the stairs for Clare to find when she came home, a sign pinned on that said Teacher’s Chair. When she thinks of that, she feels a wash of shame at the way she keeps herself apart. The fever itself is long past, and maybe she’s not as weak as she feels, maybe she needs to make herself get up, make herself set aside whatever it is that keeps her from the stairs. That keeps her from taking her place at the kitchen table, from going on with her life like a normal, happy girl.
November
The hard blue sky has turned a gloomy grey. Day after day a rainy light, although it must be falling softly, no sound on the roof that slants above her. No difference in the hours of the day. Clare thinks what it would be like to be trapped in an eternal, hazy present. Like the man in the problem, walking his endless road. Maybe that’s why someone began to think about measurement. Maybe someone understood that being able to mark time in a different way could keep you from going mad, from thinking that nothing would ever change.
She wonders if that’s what it was like for Aunt Peach, who was buried with the only things she owned. A dark grey dress and shawl, a thin gold ring on her crooked little finger. They used to say that she was content enough, that she didn’t know; a blessing, really, that she had no idea at all. But maybe it was a choice, that wandering of mind and body. Leaving the chair by the stove, one way or another, to look for the place, the time when she lived a real life, when her mind worked as well as anyone’s. Clare wonders what she would choose, if she became an old woman in a house of noisy strangers. Where she would go, while she twisted her ring around and around. Maybe she’d run down those laneways with Charlie, or perch on her father’s shoulders, holding her breath while the time-ball fell. Maybe she’d choose the classroom, Mr. Dunbar’s boots squeaking as he paced the oiled floor, while her pencil flew over the page. Or the very first one, kind Miss Bell with her pitted cheeks, soft hands. Trailing the faintest scent of flowers when she walked between the rows, or looked over Clare’s shoulder and whispered, “Oh, very good. Very good.”
Minutes and hours are the same length, and days have twenty-four hours, even when the light changes according to the seasons. The same length everywhere in the world, although Clare knows that the actual hour varies. Knew that even before Ben’s stories from the Telegraph Office, a man in Toronto receiving word of a death in Edinburgh, that in some way hadn’t happened yet. And then there is time that seems to go on forever, yet on looking back has vanished in a blink. For so long the house could barely hold them all, and then it went quiet; she could walk into a room and find no one there. A dancing of motes in the light, disturbed by no one alive, although at those moments Clare has always felt that if she can only listen hard enough, she will hear her mother’s voice. That she has just left the room, a flicker in the doorway, that she’s always almost there.
It’s not the same with her father. Wherever he is, it’s not here, and she wonders if that means he didn’t love them enough. Or if maybe he’s somewhere deeper, a fold within the fold, another layer where he stays apart with her mother and Wee Alan. Because Wee Alan was the first of them, from a place not even Ross remembers. From a time glimpsed when her father used to play his fiddle, his head bobbing and a lost look on his face. A time when his heart was all open.
; Clare’s friends came calling, she’s been told, when she was far too ill to see them. They still do, though not as often, and she tells Kez that she’s still too tired to see anyone, that she fears a lively visit will wear her out, undo all the slow progress she’s made. Easier than trying to explain how that life they were part of feels impossibly distant. She’s used to her drifting days, doesn’t want to be cheered up, to be distracted from things she needs to think about. Though sometimes now her eyes open in the middle of the night. She turns her head toward the window and looks at a sliver of moon, the rest of its pocked, dark circle. Wonders if that’s really what she sees, or if her mind fills in what she knows must be there. It’s terribly quiet and she suddenly thinks that maybe they’ve all gone away. That they’ve either forgotten her or had enough of her, nothing but empty rooms left below. If she could make her legs move down the stairs, there’d be nothing at all to find.
Or maybe she died from the fever, if it was a fever; maybe she’s as much of a ghost as her mother is, as Wee Alan, as all the wandering souls. She pinches her thigh, but what good is that? Who knows if the dead still feel pain. At those moments she longs to be back in her warm place between her sleeping sisters, even if Kez sometimes flings out a sharp elbow and Nan’s long toenails scrape her shins. She folds her hands together and squeezes, tries to focus on that, and just in time she hears the creak of someone turning in bed, the faraway tick of the old clock in the hall.
December
She knows they’re becoming shorter, but the days feel longer. She tries now to keep herself awake, so the nights will be unbroken, sews or reads in the Teacher’s Chair. The book about watches, the book about the skies, and even a terrible novel the Misses Simp have sent over, all ringlets and sighs and God’s tests and forgiveness. Her thoughts still go around and around, but they all seem familiar, as if she’s reached the end of where her own mind can take her. When she hears Kez and Nan leave for the shops, the door closing loudly behind them, she stands on stronger legs and carries her tray downstairs, washes the dishes and leaves them dripping in the rack.