by Mary Swan
I tell her that I had a collection like that, though I’d forgotten until I said the words. Not the notes or the photographs, but an old biscuit tin filled with feathers that had drifted from the sky and green river pebbles, a curved tooth my father said came from a bear. Long gone now, all of it, and nothing I’d have had any reason to keep, except for the notion that those things had once meant something to me. Like the plug of earth I walked on for so long, the cloth that wrapped it turned grubby and rank. It’s still tucked inside my mother’s battered boots, that I haven’t worn for years, but keep at the back of the wardrobe. Every time I see them I think of the story my father said his old aunt liked to tell, about Katie Crackernuts and the danced-out shoes. It terrified him, he said, the thought that his own feet could be made to do something he didn’t want at all.
Edie wants to try, so for the first time in months we eat together at the kitchen table. Potatoes that she has peeled, a bit of liver, though she hates it, to help her blood. She goes to sleep not long after, and I heat up the iron to press Angus a shirt for tomorrow, while he settles with the newspaper, reading out bits he thinks might interest me. Redcurrant bushes are on sale already, and there’s talk of a general strike in Toronto. Frank Ogilvie has had a letter from his brother, Ferd, about the bad wreck at Dryden. He was in one of the train cars that tumbled down the embankment, but not much hurt. Have a roll? I’ll thay we did! Angus says, reading out the last part in Ferd’s lisping voice.
We’re both tired too, and when I set the iron to cool he folds and smooths the paper. Stands and stretches, hooking his thumbs under his braces while he does it, and pulling them smoothly off his shoulders. It’s a thing I’ve seen him do so often, but I’m always struck by the smoothness of that motion, the ease of his body, and I think again of our early time together and how we knew each other, something that only the two of us shared, that will always bind us.
In the quiet kitchen I check that the stove is well damped and fetch the blanket, unfold it to make my nest on the sofa. Angus says surely it’s time I moved back upstairs, but Edie’s still ill, might call out, and I can’t be that far away. He says, “Do you think I don’t worry too? Do you think I’d suggest it, if I wasn’t sure everything will be fine?” And suddenly we’re in an argument, the way that can happen, and I try to explain that I know it’s all I can do. That it’s my fault, only mine, and mine the debt that’s owed. We’re still speaking quietly, but our words come faster. “What fault,” he says, “what debt?” And I say something I didn’t intend to, about all he doesn’t know. About the black heart within me, the ugliness that squats inside.
Angus shakes his head and he sounds so tired when he asks if that’s how little I think of him. If I really think he’s a man so easily fooled. “Don’t you think I know you, know all of you?” he says, and though quietly spoken, his words are a smack that leaves me dizzy. It’s too much for me and I remember Pembroke Street, and the red wool unrolling. Another time when I had to question everything I thought I knew, everything I was. I come into his arms and in the dim light of our cooling kitchen he holds me up, and I feel his beating heart. Angus comforts me, like a mother would do, as if I’m someone who deserves it.
The days really are growing longer; forty-two minutes, Edie tells me today, from when she began to keep track. I wouldn’t have known the number, but there’s a different quality to the afternoon light, and when Angus comes up our front walk he’s no longer surrounded by darkness. But it’s still very cold, the snow piled high, and that leaves me a little off balance, in a way I try to explain to Edie. Something to do with the seasons and how they struggle, the way the old one holds on against the new, not yet ready to let go. The uneasy way they exist together, for a time.
“Hmm, I’ll have to think about that,” Edie says, sounding just like Aunt Clare. Her forehead puckers, and with the way the shadows fall, she suddenly looks like an old woman and I’m swept by such a wave of sadness, not because she’ll one day be that old, but because I’ll never see it, will be gone long before. I blink hard and she’s my girl again. “Maybe it’s because the weather’s harder here,” she says. “If we lived in California, say, you wouldn’t have to be sad like that.”
“Maybe not,” I say, “though I imagine there are other things to be sad about, in California.”
When the letter came about Ben it was a shock, but my aunts said that in a strange way it was as if he’d died already. Robina wrote that there was no warning, that he was found at his desk, his forehead resting on an unfinished drawing. Neat, numbered wires and circuits, a solution to a problem that would remain incomplete. She wrote that of course the children would stay with her, that she loved them like her own, and that’s what they wanted; she said we were all welcome to visit any time, but somehow that never happened. Every year, around Christmastime, she sends a photograph, and we have watched the cousins grow, like strangers.
I don’t think of Ben very often, but sometimes, in the autumn, I remember the train, and all the things he taught me. And I remember a time, when Kez was bashing on about my father, that Ben told her to shush. Then he asked had she never thought that maybe Ross was walking toward something that just happened to be away from all of them.
Edie is tired today, but she says it’s nothing like the way she felt, even a week ago. That’s a good thing, I know it is, but I’m afraid to let myself think too much about it. “Do you remember that day?” I say, looking at one of the pictures in her album, and she says, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” The first summer of the new century, when the big circus came, along with the wire walker called Jerome The Magnificent. He was going to cross high over the river, where it empties into the harbour, and there were still some in town who remembered when Harry Leslie did the same thing, so long ago. Angus told me that the old men who sat on the bench outside the station were in their glory, chins resting on their folded hands on top of their canes, as they watched the excursion trains roll in and relived their old excitement.
The photograph is one Robbie’s mother took; Angus said she gave it to him, because she thought I might like to have it. She must have been near us that day with her tripod and camera, taking photographs like she did at every town occasion, such a familiar sight I doubt I even noticed her, but I’m glad she thought to give Angus the picture. It’s taken close, just his head and Edie’s, tilted back as they stare up, with the same rapt look on their faces.
“I remember the ice cream too,” Edie says now. “And how much you laughed at the clowns, with their big flappy shoes.” That’s a thing I’ve completely forgotten; we talk about what else she remembers, and what I do, and I’m reminded of that game we often played on Pembroke Street. A tray of unconnected objects—a thimble, a pressed flower, three buttons. Maybe a little mound of sugar, and a brass key. All kinds of things gathered and placed until the tray was almost covered. We could look at it for a minute, ticked out on one of Aunt Clare’s watches, and then a cloth was laid over it and we all wrote down how many items we could recall. It was always such a surprise, when the cloth was whisked away, to realize the obvious things you’d not remembered at all.
Jack would have always won, of course, because of the way his mind took pictures, so he was usually the one who set up the tray. And then, more often than not, it was Aunt Clare, who said that the trick was to make it into a story. Say a man with a crumpled flower in his lapel was distracted, and tried to put sugar in his cup with a key; the sugar spilled and trickled down the front of his three-button vest, and his wife noticed that one of those buttons was loose and said if he would just fetch her thimble she would fix it. “You can make anything into a story,” Aunt Clare used to say. “Everything is connected, or at least you can find a way to make it so.”
It’s getting late when the telephone rings, a thing so rare that for a moment I think I’m back at Pembroke Street, where the sound of the fire wagons always made me shake. When I lift the earpiece Aunt Kez is already bellowing, and my voice echoes back to me,
saying, “Yes, it’s me, it’s Bella, yes it is. Kez, are you there?”
“Of course I am,” she says, “I’m calling you, aren’t I?” Though that’s always been her objection to the telephone, how anyone can say they’re anyone, and you can never be sure who you’re really talking to.
My heart is already thumping as my slow brain begins to ask what has happened, to ask who. “What about Edie?” Kez roars, and for a cold second I stupidly think that’s the bad news. Meanwhile Kez says that she has to talk quickly since she’s calling from the grocer’s and the old biddy wants to close up. I can picture her, bent over with her lips close to the mouthpiece, thinking no one else hears a thing, as she tells me they’re all coming to visit next week. Well, maybe not Charlie, but she is, and Nan, and Clare has free time for Easter, so she’ll come from Washington, and they’ll take the train together. “The Professor will just have to comb his own eyebrows for a while,” she says, her old joke about why he asked Clare to marry him.
Kez says they’ll stay at the hotel, like always, and when I tell her it’s mostly shut up for the winter she says everything’s been arranged, which explains why Angus hasn’t been down to see what all the noise is about. I tell her I’m not sure it’s a good idea, tell her the house is in disarray, that the weather might be bad, that I’m not in any state for company. “Oh, get over yourself, Bella,” Kez says as she hangs up with a click, and it’s so like her.
There’s a story I used to tell myself, on the edge of sleep, where I thought it would do no harm. A story where something wakes me; maybe a sound, maybe the sound of hooves on a loose stable door. In this story I’m a good girl, I’m a brave girl, and I know just what to do, though the cabin still burns, sparks spiralling up to the moon. The glass still cracks and shatters, the horse still bolts, but we are all outside, safe at the edge of the clearing. In this story I’ve saved everyone, and we are all alive and together.
And sometimes I think, why shouldn’t it be true? I think of the strange way time moves, think of how it feels as if Edie went to bed one night, prattling in her little cot, and woke up nearly my height, with her own secret thoughts and dreams. I think of the fiddlers in the fairy mound, I think of Tir na n’Og, and wonder if this life is the enchantment, if it’s the place I came to when I walked in my sleep, a thing I don’t remember having done since. I think of the first months after the fire, the closed and silent world I lived in, though I had no idea, and anything seems possible. I get myself in such a muddle when I start thinking this way, tell myself of course this life is real, but even if that’s so, it could easily have gone a different way. “You’re lucky they were there,” Edie says, when I talk about how I came to Pembroke Street. And it’s true, I was; they could easily have turned their backs, the way they believed my father had done to all of them.
If that had happened, I would have had a very different life. With the Wroths, perhaps, a despised almost-sister to Amy, who would have stopped filling my water glass soon enough. Our evenings spent in prayer, until they could marry me off, maybe to some earnest young preacher, and then a life of more prayer and endless good works. If there was no one to marry I might have stood behind the counter in the dry goods store, boarded in the village and spent the rest of my days with other people’s furniture. Or perhaps I’d have become a teacher, ended up in a tiny school somewhere even more remote, where the winters were even darker. My aunts and uncles and cousins living out their overflowing lives on a busy, bonus wire, while mine was the separate, quiet one, meant for those who didn’t know or want anything more.
I tell myself that I wouldn’t have known what I was missing, that I wouldn’t even have known to think that way, but I’ve brought myself to a terrible place, one where there would be no Angus, no Edie. Or perhaps they’d still exist, but somehow altered, two people with no connection to me at all. People I might see, passing through a lighted room, while I stand outside in the dark, close to the cold glass. Oh, for goodness’ sake, Aunt Kez says then, in my mind, saving me again.
If there wasn’t so much to do I’d be angry about the visit arranged behind my back, but there’s no time to think about that, or wonder how Angus managed it. With Robbie’s help he’s moved Edie’s bed back upstairs, and though I heard her tossing and turning through the night she claims to have slept very well. The larder is filled with things for our Easter dinner, and I’ve mixed up the dough for the crescent biscuits Aunt Nan likes so much. I leave Edie to shape them while I sweep out the empty parlour, and when Angus comes home we’ll put everything back as it should be. The floor is streaked with sunlight that shows up the dust and grit in the corners, and the room is so bare that I keep turning my head to remind myself that she’s not gone, no matter how much it feels that way.
As I sweep and wipe down the walls I find I’m thinking of all the dark afternoons, the stories Edie wanted and how carefully I told them, how lightly. Uncle Charlie, and the “wild side,” all that was Pembroke Street. And our cabin in the clearing, farther back, things I’d forgotten coming to me, more and more of them. The way my father could change his rumbling voice to an old woman’s quaver, a little boy’s squeak, and how he could make my mother laugh so hard. I remembered the foul poultices when we were ill, and the feel of her chapped hand on my forehead. The way my brothers’ hair smelled, when they were small enough to be carried about, and how for so long Little Ross called everything blue. Even the sun, even our horse and the floppy-combed rooster. I remembered times, when we were at peace, that I helped them with their school work, or untangled a knotted shoelace, and I remembered their smiles, how they looked at me like someone so clever, someone who would always be there. In the empty parlour I think of the stories I picked out to tell Edie and wonder why they should be any less true, less real, than the dark threads I kept to myself.
I look again through the open doorway and see Edie’s bent head, hear the quiet tune she hums, as she often does when she concentrates, and it almost overwhelms me, the thought of how I know her. The tune she hums and the way her hair falls, all the things that make her laugh, and her sometimes unreasonable temper. There’s nothing I wouldn’t forgive her, no need even to call it forgiveness, and I wonder, suddenly, if my own mother felt the same. If she knew more than I thought, understood more, if there was never any question.
When I open the back door to shake out the mats there’s something in the air. Maybe a scent, or something softer in the way it feels, and there’s warmth in the sun. The ice along the eaves is melting a little, drops of water tapping on the wooden railing, and I catch myself in my old habit of trying to make that sound a pattern, a message. I’ve lived here long enough to know that there are still weeks of winter left, but also to remember that a thaw like this can come like a gift, making it easier to survive the rest.
Behind me, in the house, Edie is now washing the bowls, and behind me farther than that, my aunts will be pulling down the shades and getting ready to make their way to the station, prodding Clare, who still always believes there’s time for another cup of coffee. In a few hours they’ll board the train in a flurry of coats and scarves and bags, bumping into each other and tussling, in a good-natured way, over the window seats. Talking and dozing as the train makes its slow way from small station to station, and nodding to the strangers who board, bringing cold air that rises from their clothes.
There on the back porch I tip my face to the sun, and the movement reminds me of that photograph of Edie and Angus, how I would have seen them exactly like that, if only I’d looked. But like everyone else in the crowd that day, I was staring up. Squinting into the sun while the rope walker stepped out; he had a red sash tied around his waist, and the ends fluttered in a breeze that didn’t touch us, so far below. He started slowly, one foot in front of the other, with the long pole held across his chest, and I remember how he shifted that pole, just a little, to find his balance. The tiniest movements, they seemed from below, but I remember thinking how enormous they would have been, from the high
, lonely place where he was.
II
1916–1968
BURNING BOY
Someone was saying his name, but not his real name. Someone was saying what his mother called his paper name; he could hear it quite clearly when the other noise stopped. Someone was saying his paper name, and that’s how he knew he was dead.
The other noise was somewhere between a bellow and a roar, and he thought it might be important to work out what it was. It made him think of summer when he was small and of the circus, the animals. Not the sleepy-looking lion with its sores and bald patches but the elephant, that was it. The noise was like the elephant when it unfurled its long trunk from between its stubby tusks and trumpeted. His mother had taken a photograph of that elephant and tacked it to the wall by his bed. He could picture it, he was picturing it, but then the noise rolled through again, taking over. Filling up everything, not even the tiniest space left for a thought.
A different voice was saying his paper name, saying, “Francis, Francis.” Not a voice he knew, although he knew a lot of people who were dead. The elephant began to trumpet again but not quite as loudly, as if it was not right beside him anymore but maybe shambling away. When he thought that, it occurred to him that maybe he wasn’t dead, maybe he was small again and at the circus. Though if he was small again, how would he know it was again, and how would he be thinking these thoughts?