by Mary Swan
Edie has been fretting about the school work she’s missing, and these past weeks her teacher stops by on Thursdays to catch her up. I know that she really does care about the missed lessons, but I also know that it’s his expected visit that has her asking for the basin, for a brush and a ribbon to tidy her hair. He’s a good-looking boy, is Robbie, and a credit to his mother, no matter what people whisper. Angus has always rated him, and gave him work at the station and taught him the wire, paid him one summer to knock down an old shed and tidy up our yard. I felt such a pang when I saw the two of them out back, looking over what was to be done. Young Robbie standing close beside Angus, copying his stance and crossing his arms in just the same way.
He’s not really a teacher, of course, though when he takes off his overcoat there’s chalk dust on his cuffs, a sprinkling in his curly hair that I first took for snow. When Miss Tunstall had her trouble at Christmastime he agreed to step in, and he seems to know what he’s about, though he’s not long out of school himself. I’ve explained that Edie mustn’t overtax herself and he keeps his visits short, and never leaves her too much work to do. A few problems to work on or a poem to memorize; I thought at first she was raving again, when I heard her whispering: beside the ravelled seas, beside the ravelled seas.
Today, Robbie says that the trustees have asked him to stay on until the end of the school year. “You’ll be back by then,” he tells Edie, as if he’s quite certain. When she asks if Miss Tunstall is still unwell he says he believes that’s so, though I’m sure he knows, as even I do, that no one has heard a thing since her brother came and took her away on the night train. After she’d started singing in her room, and staggered down the main street with a frozen clod of horse dung in each hand. It happens like that, sometimes; the winters are terrible here, and people break. When the first breeze comes and melting snow trickles down the sides of all the roads, we step carefully out of our houses, blinking and looking around to see who is missing. There are always a few, besides the old and sickly. A few who have chosen a rope, a knife, a gun. Sometimes they just walk out onto the frozen lake, until the ice gives way.
While Edie and Robbie go over her work at the kitchen table I change her bedding, bundling the old sheets into a basket for later. Remembering, as I do, her wide eyes when Charlie used to tell her how much deeper the snow was when he was a boy, and how much colder the winters. So cold, he said, that sheets on the line froze solid, and the wind snapped them to pieces that blew through the air like a blizzard. I swear, Charlie said, as he always did, and he told her he could hardly make out the shape of his own mother in the yard, standing in a swirl of white, with a clothes peg in her hand.
How funny he used to be, my uncle Charlie. Everything was lively when he was around, with his easy charm and way of carrying you along. These last years he’s grown terribly fat, his face stretched and shiny, and the winks, the jokes and the flirting are grotesque now, when even a short flight of steps makes him puff and wipe his damp forehead. He didn’t come with my aunts when they visited this past summer; they said he was unwell and perhaps he was, but I also knew that something had happened at the hotel the last time he’d come, and Robbie’s mother had a quiet word with Angus. That day we rode out in the buggy, Nan whispered about the drink and all the trouble it caused. And she said that for all that, he was still her wee brother, and there were times when, just for a moment, she saw his little-boy eyes looking out from his round, red face. Not the mischievous ones, but the look he used to have when he was frightened the powries would come and gobble him up. I could barely hear her, over the sound of the turning wheels, when she said that sometimes she wondered if that’s what had happened.
Edie tries to get up for a little while each day, as the doctor has said she should, though even a walk to the front door tires her out, and she sinks back into her bed with a sigh. She won’t let me pull the shade until the sun has completely vanished behind Mrs. Leary’s cottage across the way, and she writes down the time it happens, proof that the days are getting longer, but the only way you would know. She asks me questions, while the room grows darker, and I answer as best I can, thinking how much easier it was when she was small and wanted the same stories every night, every day. The same stories with the same words; she knew every detail and I suppose it was as soothing to tell them that way as it was to hear them. The one about Angus and his friend Liam climbing the church tower, back in their village, and ringing the bells in the middle of the night. Or the one about Aunt Kez trying to ride poor Jack’s bicycle in the laneway, how she shot out into the street and startled a horse, ended in a tangle on the ground, with her skirts up over her head.
She wants to hear different things now. Did Aunt Nan really marry a scoundrel, like she said that time? Did Kez ever have a beau, and would Charlie stay a bachelor, and did I think Aunt Clare really loved the Professor? Did I know from the moment I saw him that I would marry her father, and what was it like when he asked me? Sometimes when I say I don’t know, I really don’t, but Edie says, crossly, “I’m not a child anymore.”
How quickly it seemed to happen; one day she woke up too old to play with her dolls, and then hugs and kisses were for babies. Another day she fussed with her hair, and walked with her friends past the city boys, lounging on the veranda of the Lakeview Hotel. Be careful what you wish for, people say, and long ago I learned the truth of that. But when she was first born we seemed as close as thought, and somehow I always knew when her covers were too heavy, when her toes needed warming; when she began to speak I knew every thought in her head. There are things I don’t tell her now, that have nothing to do with her age. But sometimes I feel the tug of it, the need to have her know me through and through, because no one else can ever be so close.
Angus and I were married in the parlour on Pembroke Street, just family there, which made quite a crowd, and two friends from work who were going to the West and teased Angus about changing his mind. Edie likes to hear the details, what I wore and the cake Nan made, how baby Fanny spit up, sour gouts sliding down the minister’s shiny sleeve. She thinks her father looks so handsome in the photograph where I stand with my hand on his arm, and today she wants to know exactly how I felt. “Happy,” I tell her, and I must have been, though that day is just a string of small moments in my mind. But I do remember how solid his arm was, how steady in the flash of that camera. I remember that as clearly as I remember all the whispering in the office, and the girls who didn’t care if I heard, when they told each other it was the oldest trick in the world.
But it wasn’t a trick, unless it was one my body played on us both. It was perhaps too early to be certain I was with child, I know that now, but I told Angus I was, and for all he knew about persuasion and loving, he must have been just as ignorant about the rest. Ben got him the post here as station master and we were married in the parlour; they all came to see us off, waving and calling as the train moved out of the station. Snow appeared on the fields as we left the city behind, more and more of it; we both fell asleep and opened our eyes to see white banks piled high on either side, like a passageway leading to some separate, enchanted world.
We stepped down from that train in a swirl of white, and my bleeding started not long after; perhaps there never was a child, but it didn’t seem to matter. We were so happy and full of each other, with the blankets heaped and the old stove roaring, snow piled up to the windowsills of our little rented house. Everything suddenly allowed and we laughed at what Angus called our outdoor romance. The twigs that dug in and the times we lay in our thicket, still as statues, while people passed by so close, arguing about the stranger who had tipped his hat, or whether that fish had been off.
There were days so cold that it hurt to breathe, days the reflected sun dazzled. And there were storms as fierce as any I’d ever seen, the wires down and no trains running; we only left our bed to fetch more wood, to grab bits of food that we ate under the covers, like mischievous children. By the time spring came my stomach was
round with Edie; that summer we walked in the evenings to watch the sun slip into the lake and nothing else mattered. Not the girls in their white dresses, not the sound of the train whistle calling people away from the too-short streets of the town.
The notebook where Edie records the setting sun is actually her old diary, that she hasn’t bothered with for years. When she came across it in the keepsake box she turned the pages and said, “All I did was write about the weather—what a silly.” After I lit the lamps today she read bits out to me: So much snow … A little warmer … No rain today. On the first of May it seems I made an apple cake, but Angus was too late home to eat it. On June 12 she got a star for penmanship, and on July 15 Ida T was horrid; “I wonder why?” Edie said. And then she said, “It’s all so dull, it might as well have burned up like yours did,” a thing I must have told her once, though it’s not exactly true. Maybe I looked sad, thinking about that; Edie said she was sorry she’d mentioned the diary, sorry to remind me. I told her it was fine, and it was, but now that she and Angus are asleep and the house is dark and quiet, I lie awake on the sofa in my wrap of blankets and remember that last long summer in our clearing, filled with biting flies, and filled with my rage. When everything seemed to bother me more, the sun and the bites and the old hoe that drove splinters into my palms, and I longed to be living in town, in a house where the floors were level and there were things to see through the windows; when I thought I knew what it was to be unhappy.
We met along the way, was all my parents ever said about how they came together, and when I was younger I’d imagined them as star-crossed lovers, forced to hide deep in the forest from their wealthy, feuding families. But mostly, that summer, they seemed to me two fools who’d stumbled across each other. My mother’s feet heavy on the stairs, those days when she moved like a person underwater, and the way she fussed and wound her hair three different ways before we headed off to church. And my father, who would spend hours working out the theory of a thing, but always end up with a door that hung crookedly from its frame, a cow that would never calve. He fussed around the trees he’d planted, watering and snipping and sometimes dragging out a kitchen chair and just sitting, as if he could watch them growing. Quite forgetting, no matter how many times I reminded him, to fix a lock to my bedroom door, and making silly jokes and teasing as if I were still a little girl.
My brothers were worst of all, allowed to roam the bush to snare birds and rabbits, and praised for each scrawny thing they brought home. Smug looks when they walked out the door, leaving me piling dishes in the basin, or dragging out the heavy washtub. They pretended to break their teeth on the biscuits I made, complained about my lumpy darning, waving their stinking stockings under my nose. “Oh Iz, they’re just boys,” my mother said. “They’re just trying to get a rise out of you, and maybe they’d stop if it didn’t always work so well.” As if it was somehow my own fault. I knew that she didn’t understand a thing, and I sneered at the dress that she said she’d make over for me, nothing at all like Amy Wroth’s that I’d pointed out in church.
I filled page after page in the diary that had been my present for Christmas. Things I’d always helped my mother with had become unbearable chores and even her voice scratched at me as she explained about what to use instead, when the flour was low, or how to keep a seam running straight. When she talked about Isabella, about the quarantine station on the rocky island, I closed my ears and sent my mind away, and whenever I could I slipped off to my place by the creek, though even it was not the same, not much more than a trickle that dry summer.
My brothers were her spies, sent to fetch me back to do more work, and they were spies on their own, always prowling through my tiny room. Sniggering as they recited sentences from my diary, and they were never punished enough to keep them from searching and finding it again. So I tucked it back under my straw mattress, after I had written: My brothers are terrible snoops. I’m going to hide this in the cowshed, where they’ll never think to look. Way back in the darkest corner, under a mound of hay.
I was so proud of my trick, my cleverness. Proud of the real hiding place I’d made, in a hole I’d scooped out at the base of a tree near the path to the stream. I wrapped it in a piece I cut from the new oilcloth my mother had set aside, and for all I know it’s still there. I was proud of my cleverness, and I may even have smiled to think of my brothers sneaking into the dark shed when everyone was asleep. Burrowing deep into the hay, with a lantern to give them light.
April
“Why is it always poor Jack?” Edie says, looking up from Aunt Clare’s letter. It’s a clear, cold morning and her colour is better, I think, even in the bright sunlight that reaches every corner of the room. Since she’s been ill Clare writes her every week with all the news from Washington, and tells her not to be discouraged, tells her that it will seem like forever but she’ll recover, just like Clare herself did. Everyone will fuss about your heart, she wrote once. But don’t worry, you can still do anything you want to in your life.
This time Clare writes about the new telescope at the Observatory, what a marvel it is, and how it would have fascinated poor Jack. “Well,” I say, and when I say that he was a friend of Aunt Clare’s, from the University, that he boarded with us on Pembroke Street, Edie rolls her eyes, the way only a young girl can; “I know that,” she says. “And I know he could do magic with numbers, and that he fell off the roof one time. But why do they always say poor Jack? Did Aunt Clare break his heart?”
I tell her that they weren’t friends like that, and while I’m thinking of what else I can say, I suddenly see Jack’s long face. His brown eyes and the curving lashes that made him look, when he was still, like some gentle and noble horse, one that would dip its head and take food from your flat hand, if you were patient enough. Though he was only really still when he was reading, and even then his right foot tapped and his thin fingers combed through his hair. Most of the time, now I’m thinking about horses, I would say Jack was more like a rough-coated colt, not yet used to its long, spindly legs. The way he could trip over the edge of the carpet, or over nothing at all, forever banging his knees and his head, and knocking things with a wildly gesturing arm.
Remembering that, I realize that there are all kinds of things I can tell Edie about Jack, that have nothing to do with how it was at the end. The numbers and symbols scrawled over his walls, the ragged fingernails that gouged skin from his own pale cheeks. It strikes me now as a terrible betrayal, the way I rarely think of him. The way I remember that part as if it’s the most important thing about him, as if it cancels out all the rest. Jack deserves to be remembered as he once was, the clever boy Aunt Clare sometimes called BG, for Boy Genius. So many strange and wonderful ideas in his head, and so well-meaning that even Aunt Kez forgave the disasters, like the time he thought to surprise them by mending the kitchen pump with a rubber band and a lump of glue. “So nice to have a man around the house,” she said in her sharp way, but she was almost smiling as she swished the mop through the water that had pooled all over the floor.
My aunts used to say it was a good thing Jack and Clare were just pals, both of them so scattered they’d forget to eat, and so intent on their books that the house could fall down around them. He slept in what they called the peach room, though it was papered blue, but his things spilled out all over the kitchen and parlour, folders and papers and the special inks he liked, the cameras he was obsessed with one summer, and often parts of the bicycle he’d bought himself, that he was always taking apart, to see if he could make the wheels turn faster. One spring he and Clare borrowed a telescope from Professor Whitrow, and climbed through her window onto the low back roof. Jack slipped and rolled off, of course, landing flat on his back on the hawthorn bush below. Unbroken and grinning up at Clare, who was still standing above, surrounded by stars. “He gave his life for Science,” he said, when he caught his breath, and how they laughed.
These are the things I can tell Edie, and I tell her again about th
e magic shows, when Aunt Nan found pennies in the children’s hair, and slipped messages in and out of people’s pockets. Jack predicting the numbers we had whispered to each other by making us add and subtract, divide. I can tell her how much delight he took in everything, from one of his long, worked-out equations to the slow, steady opening of the lilac clusters. The smooth heft of the old darning egg, when he took it from Aunt Clare’s hand. There are so many things I should have been remembering, instead of the way he began to sleep crammed underneath his bed, to keep his brain safe in the night. So much that was Jack, before the black eyes of birds began to glitter. Before the notes of their songs became threats, and the wind whispered warnings in his ears.
“What happened then?” Edie asks, and I tell her enough of the rest to make him poor Jack forever, even without the details I keep to myself. I tell her that he was taken away, but I don’t mention the spittle that flew from his mouth, the streak of blood left on the door frame, when the strong men dragged him through. I tell her that after some years he was well enough to go back to his father’s dark house; I tell her that he stayed there until he died, but I don’t say anything about the heavy chain, about the river.
The doctor says there’s a point where rest does more harm than good, and he tells Edie that she must do more, and stay up a little longer each day. He shakes his finger at her, in a way that tells her that he’s serious but not cross, and he calls her young lady, as he always has, but I’m struck by how it fits her now. Angus bought her an album to mount the loose photographs from her keepsake box, and she sits at the kitchen table with a shawl around her shoulders, a blanket over her knees, and shows me the things that had settled to the bottom. The twist of wire she’d practised with after Nan showed her how to pick a locked drawer. Two buttons and a small, pearly shell, a piece cut from an outgrown dress, and three brittle leaves, their significance lost, that she crumbles to dust between her hands.