Bitter, Sweet

by Laura Best

  “What have you got there?” Mama asked as she walked up the steps toward Daddy.

  “Got? I haven’t got a thing,” said Daddy, his words coming out slurred and jumbled.

  “That’s church wine.” Mama grabbed the bottle from Daddy and held it up in the moonlight to see.

  Davey and Flora giggled and Mama told Jesse and me to take them on home.

  “Where did you get that?” I heard Mama ask with annoyance as we walked away, her voice echoing through the clear night air.

  “The curtains,” he said. “Behind the wine-coloured curtains.” Then he started in again, singing a song he’d just made up about drinking on the church steps and making up for all the holy communions he hadn’t drank over the years.

  Even when we were far down the road, we could still hear Mama chewing Daddy out for getting drunk on the church’s wine. Right when I was to the point where I figured we’d all be going to hell someday because of what Daddy did, Jesse began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, annoyed to think he could find anything remotely amusing about Daddy’s disgraceful behavior.

  “Just listen.”

  We stopped in the middle of the road, and there, amidst the peeping of the frogs and the chirping of the crickets, was the long, drawn-out sound of someone’s hound dog, baying along to Daddy’s rendition of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” And then we were all forced to laugh.

  Mama went to the church the next morning to talk to the reverend before the service and explain to him as best she could why the parishioners would not be able to have communion. I went with her because it didn’t seem right for her to have to go all on her own and confess to something that was all Daddy’s doing.

  Mama hurried out to the fence as soon as the reverend got out of his car that morning. “I’m afraid Nate drank the communion wine last night,” she said.

  “I see,” said the reverend, giving no indication as to what he was thinking. His hands were pressed together as through he might be praying and he stood there for a few moments without saying a word. I wondered if he was asking God for patience. I expected that he would be quite angry, but instead he told Mama she should come in for the service. She did as he requested, although I’m sure it was only because of Daddy’s deed that she felt obliged to do so.

  We sat through the service at the back of the church. When the collection plate came our way, Mama looked at the plate and shook her head apologetically and the man carrying the plate said, “Bless you.” Then when the organ started to play and the singing commenced, Mama broke out into song—melodic and sweet, she put the rest of them to shame. I didn’t even know Mama knew any hymns, let alone that she could sing them so sweetly.

  As we were leaving, the reverend grabbed Mama’s hand and held it in his. “You are welcome anytime,” he said.

  “I trust you’ll no longer keep the wine in the church,” Mama replied.

  Chapter Seven

  Reese was a big help right from the very beginning. After we moved into the farmhouse, he mowed the grass with a hand scythe so that Davey and Flora would have a spot to play. We stood back watching as his arms moved in a steady rhythm with each swath he made. Daddy grinned in admiration and told us that Reese was lucky to be alive, let alone out doing work, since he had been stricken with polio at an early age.

  “Even that limp of his doesn’t slow him down a whole lot,” said Daddy. It was easy to see that Daddy was glad to have his old-time friend back in his life.

  Reese even built a swing for each of us in the apple trees, though Jesse balked and said he was too old for one.

  “You don’t need to build me a swing,” said Jesse when Reese started to cut out a fourth seat.

  “You’re never too old to have fun,” said Reese.

  I knew Jesse was just being stubborn. It wasn’t so long ago that he’d play blind man’s bluff and hide-and-seek with the rest of us. Ever since we’d moved to Dalhousie he’d been acting moody. One day a few weeks earlier, I’d told Jesse that we didn’t like moving all the time any more than he did but he’d just yanked my braid and sent me howling for Mama.

  The morning after Reese put up the swings, I saw Jesse cutting through the rope on one of the swings with Mama’s paring knife. Daddy threw a fit when he saw what Jesse had done.

  “I told Reese I didn’t need a swing and I meant it,” said Jesse, that stubborn streak of his showing.

  I’m not sure who was more stubborn, Daddy or Jesse, because Daddy made Jesse fix the swing even though he complained the whole time.

  “Reese put that swing up and that’s where it’s going to stay,” said Daddy matter-of-factly. Mama watched them from the kitchen window, arms folded.

  “I sometimes think they’re too much alike for their own good,” she said, shaking her head with a smile.

  Reese helped Daddy cut some firewood, and they hauled it out of the woods with Ned. Reese and Daddy split the wood and Jesse and I stacked it up in a pile to dry for the coming winter. All the while they worked at the wood, Daddy grumbled to Reese about Uncle Tom stealing Nanny Gordon’s house.

  “We’d be living down in Annapolis right now if he’d have gone off to war like the rest of the single men around. But no, he has to get his trigger finger cut off,” Daddy said in a mocking tone. “There’s you with that bum leg and me with a family, wanting to stand up for the country if we were able, and then there’s people like Tom, making their own excuses.”

  “Coward!” Jesse’s eyes widened. There was contempt in his voice. I knew Jesse fantasized about the war and often played war games with Flora and Davey, but I refused to join in. I thought war was senseless, countries fighting and people killing one another. Wasn’t there a better way to settle things? I couldn’t imagine there being a good enough reason to be killing people. I didn’t even know why someone would want to pretend.

  Daddy stood looking at Jesse and me. “Now don’t be mentioning to your mother what I told you. She’s been making excuses for Tom all her life.”

  Reese and Daddy had to fix things up inside the house too. No one had lived there since Reese’s grandfather died and that had been fifteen years or more ago, so there were plenty of things that needed sprucing up. Mama scrubbed the walls and scoured the dirty windows. She sewed curtains to hang and arranged things in the pantry while we ran wild outdoors, playing for hours on end.

  “This here’s going to be our home from here on out,” Daddy said once everything was fixed up. This sounded quite impossible to me, as we were constantly on the move from one house to another, hardly able to make friends at all. Mama just looked at Daddy without saying a word. I think maybe she was thinking the same thing too.

  Everything went downhill fast after Nanny Gordon died. The funeral was long and tiring. We had to sit at the front of the church and walk past a church full of people on our way up the aisle. We knew Nanny Gordon was lying in that coffin when we walked past even though the lid was down and we could not see her. Outside the church Mama had told us to walk with our heads high and to look straight ahead, not to whisper, and for goodness sake to behave ourselves.

  Mama said that funerals bring out the worst in people. I guess she was right, because after Nanny Gordon’s funeral we ended up living on the Dalhousie Road in the middle of nowhere and Daddy said it was all Uncle Tom’s fault. We were all standing around Nanny Gordon’s old house in Annapolis that day. Daddy was smiling and shaking people’s hands and I can’t remember a time when he seemed happier even though we’d just been to a funeral. Even the minister who had said all those sweet things about Nanny Gordon’s good character was there, standing with a small plate and a napkin. People were eating food and sipping tea and saying how nice Nanny Gordon looked wearing her yellow dress and commenting on how the straw bonnet on her head was a nice touch because she was seldom seen outside without that hat. Although their chatter was continual their mood was undoubtedly glum.

  The house was crowded with neighbours and cousins when
Uncle Tom told Daddy the news he hadn’t been expecting to hear: that he would be staying in Nanny’s big old house and that it had all been set down on paper. Daddy was furious with both Uncle Tom and Nanny Gordon. Although I’m not sure if it’s proper to hold a grudge against someone who just died, I do know it’s not at all proper to air your dirty laundry in public.

  “You don’t even have a family,” said Daddy. “It’s just you. You to live in this big house all by yourself. I can’t believe you tricked the old lady into this.” A hush fell over the entire household. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “Tom did help look after Nanny these last months,” Mama said in a half-hearted attempt at diplomacy. She could see that Daddy was about to burst out in anger. We all could.

  “Did you want to move down here and live with your mother? You with four young ones to contend with?” Daddy asked her with a vile stare. I could feel a whole room full of eyes set upon us, throwing out daggers of surprise, shock, and utter loathing. Everyone in Annapolis loved Nanny Gordon.

  “Well, no,” Mama stumbled. “But it’s not like you think. I had my hands full,” she added looking around at the crowd of people who stood waiting for some explanation, as if it had just dawned on them and they were all thinking, That’s right! Why weren’t you looking after your mother?

  “And you shouldn’t have had to,” continued Daddy. “This was promised to you years ago, Issy. Years ago. No strings attached.”

  “It wasn’t really promised, Nate.” Daddy’s face turned bright red as if he was embarrassed that Mama did not agree with him.

  “The insinuation was there…. Look at him!” said Daddy, pointing toward Uncle Tom. “Who has he got? No one. Just himself. He doesn’t need a house.”

  Uncle Tom cleared his throat and gave Mama an apologetic look. “Dad signed the place over years ago. Mum had no say. Her name was never on the deed,” he said to Mama. “I thought you knew.”

  “It’s not your fault,” whispered Mama, touching Uncle Tom’s arm right before Daddy grabbed hold of her other arm and hauled her out the front door.

  “Come on,” Daddy said to all of us as we stood there dazed at the scene that had just taken place in Nanny Gordon’s beautiful old house. Daddy had always said that the house would be ours one day even though we had never quite understood that Nanny Gordon would no longer be alive when at last we came there to live.

  I’m not sure who was more upset about us not getting Nanny Gordon’s house, Daddy or Jesse. As soon as we were outside, Jesse turned back toward the house, shouting horrible things and calling Uncle Tom all sorts of ugly names. When he picked up a rock and got ready to throw it, Mama ran toward Jesse and grabbed hold of his arm.

  “Come on, Jesse,” she cried as she pulled on him. Jesse wrenched away quickly, angry that Mama had stopped him, and marched past all of us.

  I sometimes wondered if Daddy would have gone to Ontario to pick tobacco that summer if Mama had been sick. He said he was tired of working in the woods. That’s all there was to do in Dalhousie, and he wasn’t all that sure his back would hold up. But there was another rea–son why Daddy didn’t want to work in the woods and it had nothing to do with how lame his back was. In May of that year, while Daddy was clear-cutting on company land, a tree landed on Elmer Galloway, flattening him into the ground. Daddy was there when Elmer took his last breath, gasping like a fish out of water. Deaf old Elmer didn’t hear Daddy when he called out “Timber!” So even though Daddy didn’t say it, I knew that was the reason he didn’t want to work in the woods anymore and even the reason he stole the communion wine and sang on the church steps a few weeks after Elmer was buried in the churchyard. I knew and I’m sure Mama knew.

  Daddy said we’d be fine while he was gone because he was leaving Jesse behind to look after us all, and Jesse looked real proud to be left in charge. Daddy said he would send us money as soon as he was paid, and that there was nothing for any of us to worry about.

  “I’ll be home once the harvest is over,” he promised.

  Chapter Eight

  The June wind tugged at the clothes in Pru’s hands as she struggled to pin them fast to the clothesline. Flora stood by to hand her each piece, jabbering away about a cluster of monarch butterflies that were sipping nectar from the lilac bush growing next to the house. Flora said she liked the way their wings opened and closed and asked Pru if she thought that Mama was one of those butterflies, come back to see them.

  “Mama’s not a butterfly,” Pru told her.

  “How do you know she isn’t?” Flora asked, reaching into the wash basket for another article of clothing.

  “Because if Mama was anything she’d be an eagle, not a fragile thing like a butterfly that lives for one day and then dies dead in the dirt,” said Pru. Flora did not say anything more about the butterflies.

  Pru thought afterward that it was mean of her to say what she did just to keep her sister quiet. Sometimes Flora’s jabbering exasperated Pru to the point where she was ready to throw her hands up in the air, especially when she had other things on her mind, such as now.

  One of the things Mama had told Pru before she died was that folks sometimes see little things that aren’t right— they notice the smoke coming from your chimney and whether the curtains have been moved. She’d told Pru that they needed to be careful so as not to cause suspicion.

  Not long after Mama died, Pru started hanging her mother’s clothes out on the line for the neighbours to see. Mama had adored seeing the clothes dangling on the clothesline—reds and blues and greens, a whole mish–mash of colours parading about in the wind. Most of all she’d adored seeing the white sheets billowing out like parachutes in a puff of air, flapping and fluttering with ease. There was only one set of white sheets that had not been patched in at least three or four places. Uncle Tom had sent them to Mama brand new along with a whole parcel of things that had belonged to Nanny Gordon.

  “I thought it was only fair that you have some of Mum’s things,” Uncle Tom had written in his note.

  “Crumbs!” Daddy had said as he rummaged through the items Uncle Tom had sent. Reaching into the box, he picked up one of the items and said, “Look at that, an old yellowed doily. It’s not even new,” and threw it carelessly back into the box.

  “Mum made that with her own hands. It’s a keepsake, for sentimental reasons,” Mama had said, removing it from the box and stretching it out in her fingers.

  “Look at you. He sends you crumbs and thinks every–thing’s going to be all right,” Daddy had said, standing in front of Mama all red-faced with anger.

  “He didn’t have to send anything, Nate. He didn’t have to send a thing.”

  “You do it back up and return it,” Daddy had said.

  “I can’t do that. What will he think?” Mama had pro–tested. They’d argued back and forth for a time until finally, through a veil of tears, Mama had given in.

  “Either you do it or I will,” Daddy had said finally. “And when you’re done, you just write a note and tell him what he can do with his crumbs,” he’d added, which Mama had out and out refused to do. So Daddy had written the note him–self. He’d carried the parcel off to the Dale post office that day while Mama had watched from the doorway crying.

  The day Daddy left to pick tobacco in Ontario, Mama had removed the sheets from the package and put them on her bed. If Daddy had known she’d kept those sheets, he would have hit the roof. Mama had smiled as she tucked them under the mattress. “I’ve never slept on brand-spanking-new sheets before,” she’d said.

  But after Mama had gotten sick she’d told Pru to take them up for fear that she would suffer a nosebleed through the night and the stains would set before morning. She’d said she couldn’t bear to see them hanging dingy on the clothesline.

  With Flora still chattering, Pru did not hear Mrs. McFarland come up behind her as she dragged the clothes basket along, pinning the clothes fast to the line.

  “Pru…Pru Burbidge!”

&nb
sp; Pru let out a loud gasp and turned. Flora dropped Mama’s pretty flowered dress in the grass.

  “A beautiful day to be hanging out a wash,” said Mrs. McFarland. “Isadora is lucky to have such help.”

  Pru couldn’t think of an earthly word to say. She had not seen Mrs. McFarland since the day she had stormed from the house. Mrs. McFarland meant trouble in one form or another—that was why Mama had sent her away—and Pru knew she had to keep Mrs. McFarland from nosing around.

  “I haven’t seen Isadora in ages. Used to be I’d see her at Hurley’s store from time to time,” said Mrs. McFarland, eyeing Pru with a look of displeasure.

  Pru looked at Flora and Flora looked at Pru. “Mama says Hurley’s is a poor excuse for a store. She’s been doing her shopping in town.”

  “Oh she does, does she?” said Mrs. McFarland with a great deal of indignation, which indicated that she was not at all pleased with what Pru had just told her. And it was no wonder, as Pru remembered just then that Emily McFarland and Mrs. Hurley were related to each other in some way. “The Hurleys have served this community very well over the years, but I suppose newcomers might not appreciate it.”

  “They’re handy enough for some things,” said Pru in an attempt to smooth things over. “Mama says at least it’s not far to go in a pinch.”

  “And I’d suspect your mother has had reason to accept their generosity from time to time.” Mrs. McFarland was being smug about the fact that Mama, like other people in the community, had received markdowns at the store from time to time. The Hurleys were not as discreet as they should be about divulging such information.

  It was then that Mrs. McFarland looked at the clothing that Pru and Flora were hanging on the line. Mama’s dresses mixed in with the wet laundry, dry as snuff.

  “Why, these don’t even look like they’ve been washed!” she exclaimed.

  Pru thought playing dumb might be to her advantage, so she did not offer up any explanation. Mrs. McFarland grabbed hold of one of Mama’s dresses from the line and turned back toward Pru, looking like Ned did when he flapped his lips while trying to pick a blade of grass up from an open palm.