“We’re starved! When’s supper?”
Tessa’s brothers, Mick and Teddy, bounded in. They were eleven and nine, loud and sweaty, having ridden their bikes from the school field where ball practice was held on spring afternoons. Their mother directed them to change their clothes and wash their hands. Supper was ready. It would just be the four of them tonight as their father had to work late at the Experimental Farm.
“Do you have a game on the weekend?” she asked, spooning macaroni and cheese onto each plate and adding a helping of salad. “Mick, will you pour milk, please? And carefully. I mean it. This is a clean tablecloth.”
“We play View Royal. Their field. Can Dad take us? And maybe Petey and John too?”
“We’ll see.”
After supper, Mick and Teddy asked if they could go out to play with the other kids and were told yes, but to be back by eight.
“Are you going with them, Tessa?” asked their mother, beginning to wash the supper dishes in the old aluminium pan.
“They didn’t ask me. But can I go across the road?”
Her mother nodded, and Tessa ran to put on her old runners. She also put her flashlight in her back pocket as it was dark in the shadows away from the streetlights. She was thinking of water, of the stream running underground through Bushby Park, meeting another arm of it coming down through the cemetery, just beyond the park, then trickling into the sea below the breakwater. Or this is what she had worked out so far. Maybe she could make a map of its route. They were learning about maps at school, and she liked figuring out things she knew in real life from the way they appeared on maps—the roads, the parks, one map even showing the Experimental Farm on Saanich Peninsula, indicated by a little row of trees. You couldn’t see everything, of course, not the houses and the other buildings, not the cars on the Pat Bay Highway, or the fences, or the horses leaning over their rails at the farm across from Elk Lake. But you could imagine yourself here, enroute, matching the names on the map to the real places. You could almost imagine a train on the little tracks on the map that led up the Island to Nanaimo or boats in the expanses of water.
She lowered her body to the grass in the far corner of the park, checking for her flashlight first to make sure it was at the ready. Tall boards separated park from yards, and mint crept from the garden on the other side of the boards to flourish in the damp earth. This must be the stream, thought Tessa, this must be where it is underground because the grass is always wet here. Ruefully she rubbed at the damp patch on her dungarees. Her mother would not be happy; she’d only worn these pants for a day or two and already they were soiled. She thrust her head into the mint to listen.
Yes, she could almost hear the water. Or was it her own blood rushing around in her head? She listened. Water, she thought. And then was certain—it was gurgling and ringing. How far from the mint could she lie and still hear it? She backed up, on her knees, and then pressed her ear to the ground. It was like hearing rain, from a distance, a dripping, an echoing. She kept backing up, still listening, still hearing the water in its course under the park. All those days when the park had been crowded with children playing ball, hiding in the bushes, running races back and forth across the grass, a stream had been running under their feet. When Ricky Anderson pumped his swing higher and higher until it flipped over the bar from which the row of swings were suspended, Ricky falling with a great shout and a flailing of arms to the cement underneath and cracking his head open (you could still see the blood stain, a faint rust mark on the cement), the stream trickled underneath as the children screamed and various parents ran to help. It was something to think about, how water just kept on doing what it had always done, no matter the activity around it. And Tessa dug her fingers into the damp soil, feeling the tough stolons of mint criss-crossing just under the surface, eager to spread. She wondered if they followed the route of the creek, the small nubs of stems emerging from the soil like road signs, leaves unfurling, flagging the course of a hidden waterway.
Riding a bike along the quiet lanes in the cemetery, she thought about the fact that underneath the grass and tree roots were bodies, some of them skeletons by now, and the more recent burials still recognizable as people. Mick and Teddy knew more about this than she did, and they said worms and bugs ate the flesh until only bones were left. It took longer now that people were buried in special coffins, but that was what happened. As though to prove it, they buried two of Mick’s hamsters—both died within three days of each other, of old age—in the backyard, one in a cigar box and one just wrapped in Kleenex. Four months later they dug them up. Most of the hamster wrapped in Kleenex was rotten, its skin and fur gone, with maggots everywhere, and most of the one in the cigar box was still in quite good condition, though the smell made Tessa throw up by the compost heap. They had conducted a little run of burials then—birds that had broken their necks flying into the window, a squirrel run over near the breakwater, jellyfish washed to shore and stranded in the sun. Even Tessa had been buried in the sand under the monumental works, her head sticking out so she could breathe. Her brothers told her she would have to stay there until she died. She remained perfectly still, trying not to worry. She could hear her heart thumping through the sand, her pulse racing in her neck in time to her heart. Was it possible to be buried alive, in sand or in a coffin? How long would it take to die? Panic began in her chest, the flutter of her heart racing. Her feet felt numb. She had to pee. She could hear the men in the building above her and supposed if she screamed, someone would come down and help her. But then children might be forbidden to play in the monumental yard. Or her mother might be told and then she would be in big trouble. Just when she thought she would have to give up and pee into the sand (which had already begun to smell of cat), she heard her brothers laughing as they returned for her, Teddy digging her out with a piece of board and Mick pulling her by the arms until she stood up, her knees shaking. They knew she wouldn’t tell.
Going back to the house with the stream still ringing in her ears, Tessa saw Miss Oakden’s porch light shining through the dusk. Hers was one of the houses backing onto the park, though not close to the route Tessa thought the stream must follow on its way to Ross Bay. She had never been in that backyard, but even in the falling light she could see through the space between the boards that there was a small pool with some potted plants around it and something growing right in the pool itself, large shiny leaves spreading over the surface of the water. They caught the light from the kitchen window, where Tessa could see Miss Oakden washing dishes, looking up occasionally from the sink to gaze out at the gathering dusk. She looked sad. As she leaned against the fence, Tessa discovered there was a loose board. By working it a little on its nail, she found it could be moved aside like a shutter to make an opening wide enough for a skinny girl like herself to enter the yard. She would ask Miss Oakden first, but this special gate would eliminate the need to walk around the block if she were to visit her friend. It could be their secret. And she wanted to see the pool the next time she visited.
PART TWO
Memorial Crescent, Fairfield
ELEVEN
1962
Tessa begged a large sheet of chart paper from her teacher, Mrs. Barrett, and found an area in the basement at home where she could spread it out, held down at each corner by a brick. She was also allowed to bring home one of the blue-covered classroom atlases. She struggled to understand some of the explanations: contours, projections (there was that Mercator guy again); but some of it was really interesting. A map could show crops, populations, zones for climate and agriculture and mining. Some of this was helpful. Tessa laboured over scale until she understood that it was a way to show how the real distances between places or objects could be presented in a relative way by using a ratio. They had learned about ratio at school, so it was a matter of thinking about things above and below a line. If she kept that in mind, it was easier to imagine the distance between her street and the Cross of Sacrifice in inches instead of i
n yards or miles.
Tessa tried to think of the best way to begin her map, to include as much as she could. She wanted to trace the route of the buried streams, position her favourite graves at the cemetery, some of the trees she loved best (the Atlas cedar with its forty-seven trunks, of course, and some pines—one her father said was a red Japanese pine and another, from the Himalayan Mountains). She looked both places up in her borrowed atlas and realized how far the trees were from their native soil and air. She wanted to include her street, and May Street, and Memorial Crescent where Miss Oakden lived. Also the Moss Rocks, and Moss Street too because that was the way she usually walked to school, and Fairfield Road because her classroom in the Annex looked onto it. The old turreted house on the corner of May and Memorial. She knew there would have to be a legend; she would need to work out a scheme for this before she began to draw the map.
Among the books on the shelves in the dining room she found one with old maps. She particularly liked the maps drawn by Samuel de Champlain. He included little drawings of fish and mammals, mountains, trees, sailing ships in the oceans, and even crops. This was so much more interesting than the usual maps that divided Canada into provinces with broken lines, stars for the capital cities, and elevation shown by colour with a legend explaining how each five hundred feet above sea level shaded from green through orange to pink, with three shades of blue below sea level. She decided that de Champlain was a person to learn from when it came to making maps.
Tessa made a pad of old burlap potato sacks and lay on her stomach on the cold basement floor to plan her project. Even though she felt such urgency inside herself to begin, she chewed indecisively on the end of her pencil. Finally she decided to lightly sketch in certain areas on her map, to mark out the territory. There was no point in going beyond the cemetery, past where the Cross of Sacrifice was, that far corner near where Hollywood Crescent began its meandering to Gonzales Bay. Tessa’s mother sometimes walked with the children to the Gonzales beach on hot summer days, but the streets and houses between Eberts and that beach were like a foreign country. Tessa knew no one living there; the children from those streets attended another school. This map was about her own street, her route to school, the monumental works, and the graves. And underneath it all, the buried streams. So she carefully made a line around a patch of white paper, taking up about a third of the entire area. This would be the cemetery. Fairfield Road would be the top boundary. But what about compass details? She would have to borrow her brother’s Cub compass and take her bearings the next time she went over on her bike. It would be a kind of orienteering, wouldn’t it?
TWELVE
December 1914
The train was late. Flora stood on the platform at Pennies with her valise and trunk beside her. She tucked her scarf in a little more snugly; the December wind was cold, coming off the bench above the river and carrying sand in it. Flora’s cheeks stung—from wind, and sand, and tears. She had never felt so uncertain about anything in her life.
She hadn’t heard from Gus for a month. A letter had arrived from England in late October, from Salisbury. She was surprised to learn how close he was to her family home at Watermeadows. She thought about asking her parents to have him come to stay but then realized how many questions that would cause and how few could be answered. Best to wait, perhaps, and take him there herself, a ring upon her left hand.
Letter Three: We are in the shadow of the great Stonehenge, he wrote. But the gods who guard those stones have done nothing about the weather. It was lovely when we first arrived but has rained ever since. And I’ve never seen anything like the rain here. Our tents leak, there is talk of huts but nothing has come of it yet, and the horses, well, I feel for them most of all. Mud fever, dreadful problems with their feet . . . It is hard to train in mud. And Flora, you’ve never seen mud like this. It sucks your boots off! And yet we are told we are not disciplined enough and require serious drilling to make real soldiers of us. Ha.
She wrote back to tell him of the unborn child she carried within her body, and a reassuring letter had come back very quickly to say she should not worry, he would do what he could, and if she needed to leave the community, she should think of his family home as a place of refuge. He would write to tell them to expect a letter from her, or some sort of contact, and he trusted they would write to her. He was now at a camp called Lark Hill and he said it was utterly bereft of larks. Instead, the tents and a few huts the men lived in were surrounded by mud. There was a lot of illness, which he had, until then, avoided, though many men had already died. They had yet to cross the English Channel. The King had inspected their regiment. Training went well. The weather was terrible and the food barely edible.
But then no other word. Each day she’d go to the post office. There were letters from her parents, a catalogue or two, invoices for fertilizers and agricultural equipment, but no letter from Gus. And she had begun to receive looks from women in the townsite, pointed looks at her expanding waistline (it was no longer possible to flatten her stomach with binding under her skirts). Invitations to join the other women for whist or knitting bees—socks were particularly needed among the troops and the women prided themselves on the quality and abundance of their socks—ceased.
And then she had been cut from inclusion in any social event, shunned in the post office as though she were invisible. A comment had been made, in a mocking voice, as she walked away from a fruitless quest for a letter—“Well, if we come to grief, I am certain it will not be the fault of Mary”—and she learned how spite could be carried in a heart like a wasp in a hidden place, ready to sting when least expected. There was no one Flora could turn to with her secret, which was not a secret any longer, but which had a story, a history, and she hoped a future. Jane McIntyre might have listened and comforted, but Jane and Allan were on an extended trip to San Francisco, in part to provide Jane with a chance to recover her health. And Flora could not present such awkward, ill-timed proof of her ability to both conceive and carry a child to her friend, weakened by another miscarriage.
Flight and Agate stood by the fence, waiting for their master, their coats ungroomed and their wise eyes patient. But now, a huge space we have travelled / and time has come to uncollar our steaming horses. The lines had begun to make a queer kind of sense, these horses bare of any tack, their saddles forgotten, standing by the fence listening for their master, the distance between Lark Hill and Walhachin and the far fields of France unfathomable.
Just when Flora had become so desperate that she was sleepless with anxiety, Mary made a suggestion.
“The Sisters might help, Missus. Where my brothers and I went to school, in Kamloops, at Le Roux Point. We write sometimes. They might help.”
Flora was moved that Mary was thinking of her situation. “Thank you, Mary. It’s so close though, Kamloops. I wonder if I might not be better off going farther away from here. I can’t bear being shunned, and so many of the people living here are in Kamloops regularly.”
“The Sisters have another place too. In Victoria. I have a letter with both addresses. Will I give it to you? I believe Gus Alexander’s family is in Victoria.”
Flora grasped at the small hope that the nuns might take her in, give her some tasks to pay for her keep. The money her parents sent, the clothing allowance, would surely cease when they learned of her condition, though a small trust from her grandfather would continue, she thought. A letter was sent to the nuns, and they replied that she should come and they would see what might be done. There was a home in Victoria for women who found themselves in Flora’s position and inquiries would be made on her behalf. Something about this did not sit right with Flora, but she put it out of mind, reasoning that now she had a plan, a destination, and she would work out the details. Mary agreed to forward letters and of course Flora would let Gus know as soon as she had a new mailing address.
• • •
The train finally appeared on the rails to the east of Pennies. Flora checked her po
cketbook again to make sure of her small amount of money and the letter with the directions to the convent. She had as well the address for Gus’s parents’ home written on a card. Dr. and Mrs. Robert Alexander, St. Charles Street, Victoria. She had been expecting a letter from them in response to the letter she had written to tell them she was coming to Victoria, but nothing had arrived. She would contact them, she thought, once she was settled into some kind of home.
She was lucky to have a seat to herself, on the left side of the train, where she sat pressing her face to the glass to watch the progress of the river down below. Everything looked so cold—the rock slopes, the grey hills, singular pines, the turbulent river. Flora nestled farther into her coat, moved her fingers in their gloves to increase circulation. She had a flask of sweet tea and a packet of sandwiches, made for her by Mary.
At Lytton the train stopped to take on more passengers. Flora had never been in the small town before. When the conductor suggested that those on the train might want to stretch their legs—the train would be stopped for an hour—she adjusted her scarf securely around her neck, pulled her cloche low over her hair, and disembarked to see what might be seen.
An Indian woman was sitting on the train platform, surrounded by baskets. Flora stopped to look at them. The woman was bundled in layers of sweaters over a woollen skirt, a kerchief wrapped around her head and tied at the back, gypsy-style. She smiled up at Flora.
The Age of Water Lilies Page 9