by Mary Swan
Things could always be worse; she tries to imagine that. Worse if she’d told any of them where she was going, worse if she’d said she’d come back with a big surprise. Worse if the new house was somehow next door to the Institute, instead of so many blocks away. Worse, maybe, if there wasn’t a new house, if she had to go on living between these walls that had witnessed it all. And definitely worse if she hadn’t realized her idiocy until after the treatment, when she’d already handed over her sack of coins. She’ll have to sneak them back into the jar, the same way she took them out; maybe working backwards will be something like an undoing. Maybe it would have been worse if she’d landed on her head, not her bottom, when she fell in the icy street. If she’d forgotten who she was and had to live out the rest of her life with people who were strangers to her. Or maybe that would have been better.
Her mother used to say that everything would look better in the morning. Kez opens her eyes to grey light so she must have slept, and slept deeply; Nan is gone, and she hears voices and clattering from the kitchen below. She folds up their sheet and quilt, ready to go, and heads down, wondering how she feels. Not calm exactly, more limp as a wrung-out rag. And relieved, somehow, to find she’s still here, not vanished in a puff of black smoke.
Charlie has been up early, made tea and toasted bread, all of it on the table with a little pot of the currant jam she loves; Nan says she’s been saving it for today. Charlie says, “Miss MacFarlane,” as he pulls out a chair for her, and she understands that he’s apologizing for his slam out the door.
“Thank you, kind sir,” she says as she sits down.
“I thought I’d feel sadder,” Clare says, and Nan says she thought the same. They talk about that and Kez watches them all, her brother and her sisters, their familiar faces and the familiar things they say. She thinks that she’ll find a way to make it up to them, although they’ll never know that’s what it is.
They’ve barely finished packing up their dishes when they hear the cart, the man Charlie knows, with two strong boys to help him. Everything begins to move quickly; their boots thunder up and down the stairs, in and out, and they shout to each other and joke, and one sings a loud song about a maid on the shore. Two trips it will take, they decide; somehow there’s always more than you think. Clare and Charlie go along on the first one, to open the door and to be there if Ben and Edith come in on an earlier train. Kez and Nan sit on two chairs in the kitchen, the table already gone, sharing the last of the tea in the old cracked mug that they’ll pitch out the back door when they’re done. “Here we go, then,” Nan says, and Kez says, “Here we go,” and they sit there, not touching, but it feels like they are, until the men return.
When everything else is loaded Kez persuades Nan to ride with the cart, while she does the final look around. It’s a milder day, and she says she may even walk down. If Nan feels like it, when she’s seen everything unloaded into its proper place, maybe she can walk up, and they’ll meet halfway. “Why not?” Nan says, and as the cart rolls away she calls, “Take care of yourself,” as if they’ll be apart for years.
It’s so quiet then; it can’t be possible, but Kez thinks this might be the first time, in all her years, that she’s been alone in the house. Empty, it seems a small and shabby place. The bare floors, though swept and washed, are stained and gouged, the walls all crooked and cracked. The ill-fitting doors to the bedrooms creak when she pushes them open, and she thinks of the fairies and their jewelled gowns, that fade to nothing in the light of day.
In their parents’ room, with the big dresser gone, she sees the bare wall where the paper ran out that day they worked together to finish it, as a surprise for their mother. Their father had them sign their names with a thick pencil and there they all are, even Ross, even Clare, though Kez thought they’d done this before she came to them. The new people will no doubt cover their signatures with paint and paper, but that doesn’t matter; she’ll always know they’re there.
When she climbs to the attic, she sees that they’ve left mounds of grit in the corners. The broom is gone, and she thinks briefly of scooping it up in her bare hands, but that would be silly. She feels suddenly like a soldier, come back from a hundred-years war. Like the fiddler who walked out of the fairy mound, and found that everyone he knew was long gone, long dust. The traces they’ve left here are all dirt and damage, and the new family will add its own. As will the one after them, and after that, damage on damage, as long as the house keeps standing. “Oh fiddle,” she says aloud, and feels better for it.
She comes out through the door for the last time, and the boy is sitting on the front steps, a few houses down. Looking sideways at her, with his cheek resting on his drawn-up knees. It’s probably been longer than she thinks, and she’ll have to walk quickly to meet Nan. But she stands still for a moment and there’s a sound of things melting, the icicle children all dripping in the afternoon sun. “You’ll come with me?” she says to the boy, and he seems to say that he will.
BELLA
You look sad entering your dream
Whose long currents yield return to none.
—EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN
January
In the long afternoons my daughter wants stories, but she’s too old, she says, for the one about the foolish brothers. For the one about the changeling child, or the maiden in the tower, letting down her long, long hair. The winter sun sets early, staining the cold sky, and her face fades against the pillow as the room grows darker.
It should be a simple thing, telling the real stories she wants to hear. I start to talk and the words come, and carry me along until I find myself on the edge of something I must back away from, skip around. I can tell her about the clearing in the forest, about the cabin and the sound of birds in the clear air. I can tell her about the wood shavings curled in my father’s beard, but not that I saw him blaze like a lightning-struck tree. Flames from his fingertips, from the top of his head. I can tell her my brothers’ names and their mischief but not the way they were found, burned into each other’s arms.
We have moved Edie’s bed downstairs by the parlour window, although it’s a quiet street and there’s not much to see. Children dawdling on their way to school and later the bustling women, baskets hooked over their arms. Sometimes a scruffy black dog, skittering along with his nose close to the ground. It’s a well-built house and the sounds that reach us are faint, the whisper of a buggy’s wheels or runners, the jingle of harness. When the flames leapt, our old horse kicked down the loose-hinged door my father kept meaning to fix; he ran into the night, sparks flicking from his long, wild tail.
Angus is certain that Edie’s getting better and I’m not saying he’s wrong. Only that I can’t think in those long stages of convalescence or decline. I see him through the window, coming home at the end of the day, know the pause before he turns the handle of the door. The first words we say to each other—was it a bad day, or a better one? How much sleep, fever or not, and what was I able to tempt her to eat. So much like the way we used to greet each other when she was newly born and every detail a marvel.
Before he goes in to her, Angus pumps water to wash his hands, splashes his face and runs his wet hands through his hair. “Well, well,” he says, in a voice full of cheer, and he usually has something in his pocket, a bit of hard candy or a smooth black stone, a page from a book he found lying beneath a bench at the station. Things like the small gifts he brought home years ago, and though she’s just turned fourteen Edie receives them with that much delight, rubs the smooth stone between her fingers, or reads the mysterious page out loud. When she’s strong enough he props her pillows higher, and she dips her own spoon into the broth. We eat our meal with her, Angus and I at the little table he moves from its place by the wall. Sometimes our knees touch beneath it, the closest we are these days.
Edie still loves to hear about the big telegraph office in the city, about the way her father and I first met. Angus raises his eyebrows when I tell her what a da
ndy he was, and how full of himself, like the other bonus men, their fingers a blur as they tapped the key. “Oh now,” he says, when I tell her how the girls used to jostle to be the one who carried the message slips to his desk. Again and again she wants to hear about our secret language, about the time he carried Aunt Nan’s shopping basket as the three of us strolled between the butcher and the grocer. His long fingers tapping on the handle: Meet me tonight. Meet me tonight.
“And you did,” Edie says, and I say, “Yes, I did.” Telling it like it was a childish prank, tiptoeing down the back stairs when the moon was high, easing open the door. I tell her we went walking through the empty streets, and once all the way down to the lake, the moonlight spreading a silver path, as if that was the point of it all. Not the secret places he led me to, the messages tapped out on my skin. How foolish I was, thinking that I was nothing like the girls who sobbed in the cloakroom. That the things he groaned in my ear were words he’d never said before.
The doctor comes every week, looking so rumpled and tired. All the sickness, in winter, and so much weeping, the muffled black processions moving past our window when I’m not quick enough to pull down the shade. I know it’s not fair, the way I’ve taken against him. It’s not his fault that there’s nothing to do but wait. “She’s better each time I see her,” he says, but I can’t let myself believe him. Angus does, and if he’s home when the doctor comes they take a glass together, talking and sometimes laughing, that way men do when women are just out of earshot.
If Angus is not there I give the doctor tea at the kitchen table, and stare at his scalp between the strands of white hair, at the purplish lump of his nose. The thick fingers around the cup, that slid the stethoscope down the neck of Edie’s nightgown, that pulled at her eyelid and squeezed all her painful joints. The day she slid to the floor at school, and was carried home limp with fever, I knew that all the fear, all the sorrow I’d ever felt, was only practice.
“Thank you, my dear,” the doctor says as he sets down his cup, and I remember that he has his own sorrows, and a silent house he lets crumble around him. Peeling shutters and cracks in the dark, blank windows. I lift up the teapot, but he has more calls to make; he wraps his long scarf around and opens the door to a slash of cold, blinding light.
Angus is an orphan like I am; he crossed the ocean with one small trunk, and a canvas bag slung over his shoulder, and he used to say that he understood how it was for me. But he was able to pack that trunk, that bag, he was able to choose what to take and what to leave behind; it’s nothing the same. All I had left was my nightdress, pitted with star-shaped holes, and the boots on my feet. My mother’s boots, as it happened, that I must have mistaken in the dark. I also had the mystery of what I was doing outside in the middle of the night, trying to walk in my mother’s boots, which had formed themselves around her feet, her pathways, her thoughts.
It had happened before, the hem of my nightgown damp when I woke in my bed, twigs in my hair. Sometimes I was missed and searched for, and my brothers found me once by the creek in the dawn. They said that they spoke to me and I answered, that I took their smaller hands and let them lead me back to the cabin, where I asked my mother to sing me a song. I don’t remember any of it, but I believed them. They were terrible liars, my brothers, but only to keep themselves out of trouble, and besides, I liked to think that I was like one of the mortal girls in my mother’s stories, marked out and given an extra, secret life.
So I must have been sleepwalking and that must be why I was standing still in the trees. A ghostly shape found by someone rushing to the creek for more water, although it was clearly too late. The roof crashing in and the walls, and glass cracking and exploding, the windows and all the jars of preserves my mother had just finished laying down against another cold winter. I don’t remember that either, not really, but I must have overheard it in the days that followed. Even now I sometimes dream the sound of that glass, the shape of a man in flames.
“Tell me about coming to the city,” Edie says, and I have to think where to begin. She knows, of course she does, that I lost my family in a fire when I was about her age, and she knows that’s why I still run to stamp out sparks from the hearth, why I check that the stove is damped and check again, before I turn down the lamps. It could have started one of those ways; no one knows for certain. Aunt Kez told me once that they thought maybe a lantern was knocked over, or a smudge pot left going in the shed. When she said it I remembered a man with a bushy moustache asking me about blackflies. Asking was it my brothers’ job to settle the animals, would that be why they were found there. While I was thinking he patted my head and stood, and his voice far above me said, “Never mind, I don’t suppose it really matters.”
Things came back to me like that, in patches, and time moved as it does in a dream; I found myself in one moment or another with no link between them, no steps to trace. Opening my eyes in a strange room I wondered where and who I was. And wondered, since I knew that the room was strange to me, who I had been before. Then the door opened slowly and I saw the smooth face of Mrs. Wroth, and knew that I was in the pastor’s square frame house in the centre of the village. The bed dipped when she sat on the edge and it was hard to breathe when she wrapped me in her plump arms, tried to rock me like a little child. My hands were lost in the sleeves of the large, scratchy nightgown she said was hers, my own ruined, she told me, beyond any saving. So all I had then were my mother’s boots, and after she’d left me to dress in the clothes she’d brought, I took the little scissors from the dressing table and scraped at the ridges in the soles until I had a small mound of earth. The last my mother had trod on, the last I had, mixed together.
I had nothing to put the earth in so I cut a piece from the runner on that same table, tied it tightly with another thin strip so that nothing would leak through. I arranged the silver tray with the brush and comb so it didn’t show, and I thought that when Mrs. Wroth discovered the damage, as she was bound to, she wouldn’t say anything about it, not to me. She would maybe think I was maddened by grief; that phrase came into my head and rolled around there, rolled right over the leap of shame that came when I looked at the clothes she had left. The moment’s delight at the stockings and petticoat, the soft patterned dress, far prettier than anything I had ever owned.
It belonged to Amy Wroth, that dress; I knew because she’d worn it in church some weeks before. The pastor’s daughter, with her pink cheeks, her neat blond hair, her cruel tongue. She had spread a story about me once, or maybe I had spread one about her. Whichever way it had been she was all sweetness those days I stayed in their house, filling my water glass before it was empty and buttering my bread, as if these were things beyond me. I joined them at the table, where the talk was mostly of the weather, and when Mrs. Wroth said, “You must be tired,” I thought that perhaps I was, and went back to the cool spare room, pulled up the soft covers and stared at the lacy shadows moving over the far wall, the ceiling above my head, until she came to bring me down to another meal. It was like being under an enchantment; days and nights passed and I felt nothing, not even surprise when Mrs. Wroth pinned up my hair and led me down to the parlour, where a bearded man stood to greet me, and said my name.
The story I tell Edie starts here, with my uncle Ben appearing as if by magic. Which is how it seemed to me, although later, of course, I understood that telegraph messages would have been delivered, some in the city and some to the pastor’s house while I floated in the shadow-filled room upstairs. Details tapped out, decisions made, a life arranged for me. My uncle said that I was coming to live with him, or rather, beside him; I didn’t understand exactly. There was a train to catch, a buggy and driver waiting to take us to the station. He was sorry, he said, but there was no time for the offered tea, though he took the cakes Mrs. Wroth wrapped up, tucking them into the small bag at his feet. I stepped up into the waiting buggy and the turning wheels rolled me away while I smoothed the flower-sprigged dress with my hand.
; Edie has known the station here all her life, and even before she knew all her letters Angus taught her to tap out her name on the old key he kept on top of his desk. This past summer she and her friends met every holiday train, their wide eyes taking in all the fashionable ladies, their enormous hats and the trim on their slippery gowns, and the handsome sons and brothers who raised a hand to help them down from the carriage. Once, in town, I saw her with her friends strolling slowly past the wide veranda of the Lakeview Hotel, their arms linked and their giggly faces close together, and I thought, Oh my.
I’m sure that what I’ve told her is true, that I hadn’t seen a train myself until the day my uncle came, although I must have sometimes heard them calling. We had to hurry from the buggy and across the platform, and he touched my elbow as we went, making me jump. “Well,” was all my uncle said, when we were settled in our seats, and he put up a hand to fiddle with his spectacles, which sat a little crookedly on his face. He took them off and played with the metal arm, said, “I’m always bending and breaking them,” and he smiled when he said it, looking at me with his bare and softer eyes.
I knew nothing about him beyond his name, and the fact that he was my father’s younger brother, though he looked older than my father would ever be. There were other brothers, and sisters too, and I tried to remember how many, and if I knew what they were called, while my uncle settled his glasses and patted his lumpy pockets, took out a thin pencil and a small notebook with a blue leather cover. I noticed these things, but my mind felt small and muffled, no words I could think of saying.