“Why did this happen?” Elizabeth had asked her father.
“Nature has a generous heart but a brutal hand,” he said. “You’ll understand later.”
She understood now. Her arms had often grown heavy and unbearably tired as she carried a sleeping child up the lane to the house but never as heavy as the load her heart carried with the loss of her husband and children, a load she could never put down.
She stood silently now, tears as salty as the sea that took her brother streaming down her face.
After nights of waking to the darkness of early morning and unable to get back to sleep one morning she murmured, “I’m tired, so tired.” The words God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam echoed through her mind.
“Do the same for me, God,” she prayed, “but don’t take a rib.”
Sleep drifted over her like a fog. She woke, amazed that night had passed and brilliant sunlight filled her room. She remembered her words, funny in the light of day, and a giggle bubbled through her throat. Her laughter rang out like a warm stream caught under ice, now breaking free.
She looked up. “I’m not alone, after all.”
It was then that a tiny seed of faith stirred. It pushed its leaves up through her stony heart and flowered.
71
Yesteryears became a dream for Maggie. She sat in her rocking chair watching her daughter-in-law knead a pan of dough. She punched, stretched, and folded it before covering it and placing the pan on the table, the same as Maggie used to do.
“I live here. Sure, you know it’s my house,” she told the young bride.
“I suppose,” the woman said in a mocking voice. She shrugged as if there was no more to be said about it.
Maggie had raised sons and other women got the use of them. Her youngest son had brought his woman to take over her house and have children just when she had come to peace and quiet. She got pushed into a rocking chair with a bawling baby she could hardly hold for tiredness, her bones seizing up. The daughter-in-law didn’t even suppose she had dreams of how she’d like to spend a day. Women shouldn’t give up their place easily. Why should they? Turning into a crotchety old woman was the least Maggie could do. The loss of her place in her own home was not an easy loss. A daughter-in-law thought this was her house and wanted things done her way. Well, let her sweat and toil and build her own place and leave me to mine. She thinks all I’m doin’ is waitin’ to die. Well, I like waitin’.
A stranger came to visit her. The slender woman, with green eyes like her own, leaned down and in a calm voice said, “I’m wondering why you sent your children to an orphanage.”
Maggie gave the woman a puzzled look. Then her throat felt caught like a fish in the square of a net dragged through icy waters. She found enough breath to answer: “To save their lives.” She grabbed hold of the stranger’s hand and pulled her closer. She smiled hopefully. “You’re my girl.”
The woman spoke slowly, as if she were stepping carefully to avoid puddles that might splash and soil a white dress. “It’s been a long time since I thought that,” the daughter answered, letting her hand lie limp in her mother’s. “I’m Gladys.”
A tear slipped down Maggie’s cheek. “The loss of my children is a thorn I still carry.”
There was a pause and then her daughter said quietly, “I never thought of you suffering through your children’s absence. Children think only of how it feels to be given up. I was too angry with you for sending me to a place where I was treated in a bad way.”
“Tell me,” Maggie said, her voice shaky.
Gladys shook her head. “It’s not something to be talked about. You have a granddaughter out of my trouble.”
“I didn’t know what was expected of a mother. I grew up without one,” Maggie said. “I wanted you and the other children to be properly fed and cared for.”
Her look drifted. “The day I left you at the orphanage I wanted to lift each of your hands and press a kiss into your palms and tell you to hold on to it until I saw you ag’in. I hesitated and then when I lifted my hand to blow you a kiss your backs were turned. I stopped, knowin’ it would be like scattering flower seed into a wind blowin’ the other away.” Her words clotted in her throat, then broke free in a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t deserve to give you my love, not when I was givin’ you away.”
“You didn’t give all of us away.”
“Choices were not made easily,” she answered.
Gladys gave Maggie a defiant look and straightened up. “I grew up thinking that someone who loved me would not have given me away. Goodbye, Mother,” she said.
She left without a backward glance, the door slamming shut behind her.
Maggie could still feel her daughter’s warm hand in hers. She brought her hands together as if to hold the touch and warmth of a hand she hadn’t held for a long time. At least she called me Mother. She’ll be back.
Elizabeth had been in Foxtrap with Elsie, Fred, and their two children a few years when Maggie came to see her. They hugged and Maggie gave Elizabeth a steady look. “You’ve changed a little. We both have.”
They talked for a while, Elizabeth saying, “You had a generous heart. It made room for two men. Both of us have faced losses.”
“We have been strong and stubborn,” Maggie said. “When I was a young girl I wouldn’t have believed I could live through so much heartache.”
Elizabeth smiled. “For a time I didn’t think I would. After a while grief stepped to one side. I had a lift in spirit when I held the grandchildren on me knees. Nelson, Elsie’s boy, is Jamie on the spot! Still, now and ag’in, grief comes like a bully to yank on my heart and pull me back until I almost lose me balance. I try to enjoy little things: a cup of tea and cranberry loaf, a visit from a grandchild, a ride in Fred’s truck to the St. John’s rummage sales. God allowed me to keep seven children. I was blessed to have had so much to lose.”
Maggie said, “You’ve done a lot of surviving. We’ve done a lot of surviving.”
Elizabeth smiled. “And it’s not over yet.”
Maggie put her hand to her head and Elizabeth touched her friend’s hand and asked, “Is yer ill, Maggie?”
Maggie managed a weak smile. “Sometimes me mind’s not very handy to me. I told the doctor there’s something wrong with me head. It feels logy and one of my legs loses its strength. He waved away my concerns. ‘Old age, my dear ma’am. Old age.’
“‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘The other leg is the same age and there’s nothing wrong with it.’ Then he suggested I go into an old-age home. I told him that I know people who’s half dead. When they go into an old people’s home the other half dies.”
Maggie’s throaty laugh mingled with Elizabeth’s girlish laugh—an echo from a long time ago.
72
Elizabeth went back to the cove. Larger fishing boats were being built and women were still doing their own work and helping their husbands do theirs on the stagehead, in the stage and on the flakes. Women had always risked their lives giving birth, growing a family, and men had always risked their lives to net fish, sustaining the family. It was the way of the world.
She remembered when Jacob had been the first man in the cove to wire their house for electricity. At first, a bare light hung from their kitchen ceiling, lighting the whole room with the pull of a chain. It looked like the sun had been brought inside in a glass. Like magic! Now every house had electric lights. An electric light shone from a pole above Cliff Path. At night it cast a ghostly glow on the water, shadowing cliffs and beaches and collared boats. It shadowed Elizabeth’s house.
Alvina and George’s imminent deaths shadowed their house on the hill. Elizabeth listened to the sounds of the sea breathing through the darkness as she walked up the hill. Her in-laws lay dying, one curled against the other in the deep trench of their featherbed.
Day after day Elizabeth watched them sink low, eaten out by cancer until they were tiny, like children hiding under quilts from a malevolent presence. There would be no more leaning over Elizabeth’s fence for sister-in-law chats, no more hearty interchanges between George and other cove fishermen. They were done of that. When a chicken crowed instead of a rooster one morning everyone knew it was time.
That night George murmured to Alvina, “You’ll be gone in the mornin’.”
By daybreak she had passed away. She was laid out and dressed and when mourners viewed her in the coffin they exclaimed, “How fresh and young she looks! The best we’ve ever seen her.” Alvina would have been pleased.
By the time mourners returned from her funeral George was gone.
“They might have made the one job of it,” someone said.
“I never expected to die,” Alvina had murmured when she was pining away. “I always thought The Rapture would take me. That was a wonderful thing to hope for. I believed it with me whole heart. Sister Garrigus believed it, too. Yet she died.”
“It’s not meant for us to understand,” Elizabeth had said. “Hold to the hope of eternal life.”
After George’s funeral Elizabeth sat on the wood locker under the kitchen window facing the house on the hill. She smiled. It hadn’t been all bad. There was play in work women do for those they love. She climbed the stairs and sat looking through the window. She watched little boats move toward the cove under the glass eyes of windows sheened in evening light. The night drifted in and still she stayed.
She gathered her memory quilt from a chair beside her and slipped it over her knees. The pieces in a quilt were like crumbs strewn in the winding path of memory lane warding off fairies of forgetfulness. In the heart of the quilt was a square of Victor’s white flannel gown and on the other side, heart to heart, was a square of white bunting for his twin unnamed. For the unborn daughter, she had placed a piece of cloth imprinted with pink forget-me-nots. She had placed several squares from Beulah’s dress: a field of pink gilly flowers in one square, a solid white square beside it, and then a patch of daisies. Other inside squares were pieces from her living children’s petticoats, dresses, aprons, shirts, and ties. She saved the corner squares for a piece of clothing from Jacob, Jamie, and her mother and father. Her other quilts would lie in the closets and on the beds of her children and grandchildren as they grew in the continuity of change and loss.
Elizabeth was tall and full-fashioned and dignified in her old age, as if she had sailed through life on the most agreeable seas. “A full skiff of a woman,” Jacob would say. She walked erect moving as stately as a ship coming into a calm harbour. Long, lean fingers, cut from the same pottery as her mother’s, lifted to pin strands of loose hair tight against her head with clips that sometimes lost their hold and pinged to the floor. Strands of white hair strayed from her hairnet. Her feet seemed large, now that her body was smaller, turning away from each other as if one was going one way and the other another to avoid that straight path toward death.
When she sat at the table she never leaned toward her food. She always lifted it to her. John, her grandson, said, “If Gran didn’t have an elbow she’d starve.”
Sometimes she sat in her rocking chair and looked at her hands and arms. The veins under her paper-thin skin looked like dusty-blue wool strands, her knuckles as hard as doorknobs after a lifetime scrubbing clothes on glass-roped washboards. Her skin had stretched and wrinkled making papery patterns like a calm pond over which a soft wind had stolen, crinkling its waters. She brought out the snapshot of Jacob and her in their prime. How lovely their skin was! How firm, their eyes bright and unclouded, full of love and expectation under defined brows, lips plump, unlined. Jacob had a full head of hair and hers was silky and heavy. Her mind was not what it used to be either. Sometimes when she went to say someone’s name it drifted away like smoke and came back hours later. “I’ve got it!” she’d say, amazed that a name she wasn’t even thinking of had pushed its way past other thoughts and asserted itself.
Death had sent Elizabeth many warnings that she wasn’t here forever. It was going to get even more personal. Not yet, please God. There are grandchildren I’m waiting to see and every day there’s a bit of gossip to chew on with a visit from the church ladies.
The bright young faces of her grandchildren came close and she got the scent of new life, felt the energy coursing through their bodies, quickening her own life for a moment. Their limbs were supple and lively, unlike Elizabeth’s. Hers were dry as sticks and unbending but she’d had her day, a long day. She remembered the energy that gave her tired body a spark while she worked to keep her children nourished. Now she was like a day with its evening shadows falling. The world looked dimmer, details smeared. Only a few grains were left in the hourglass. She’d not want to tip it back up and start again.
Her minister’s words from a Sunday’s sermon echoed: “There’s an end to human life for all of us; how it comes and when it comes remains a mystery. The ending to this physical story is the beginning of a spiritual one.”
73
Back in Foxtrap Elizabeth answered her grandchildren’s letters . . . you can have one of my patchwork quilts. Indeed you can. People today don’t take time to make quilts. They buys a blanket for five dollars to give as a wedding gift. No thought is put into it. A homemade quilt is like homemade bread. Everyone wants to have it without having to make it. That’s the way of today’s world. love gran
She thought of her grandchildren wrapping themselves in her quilts without visualizing the steps taken in piecing the clothing into it, a shirt worn by her late husband, his warmth and scent remembered, the dresses she had worn over a pregnant belly, the baby clothes. . . . They would not realize the labour it took.
She licked the envelopes, closed them, and laid them on the chair under her bum to make sure they sealed. She got up leaving the letters.
Elsie scolded her: “My, look what you’ve done, forgotten your letters.”
Your turn is coming, she wanted to say but she didn’t. No need to remind her of something she’d find out soon enough.
Nelson took Elizabeth to visit Maggie now at an old-age home. Maggie, her thinning hair in a bun, nodded as she pushed her swollen feet through the hall to the sound of voices. She mumbled from the effects of a slight stroke. “I’m waitin’ for the birds to come and give their song to old ears.”
Elizabeth asked in an unsteady voice, “Do you still think of Jamie?”
Memories came like layers of water over the deep mountains under the ocean. As soon as one memory came and before Maggie could hold on to it another washed over it, waves of memory layering each other, dark and deep as dreams darting against the edges of her consciousness through a dark night. She lifted eyes, bright and watery, her voice trembly. “He’s a dream I once had.”
“Someone is here to see you,” Elizabeth said.
Nelson, Elsie’s son, came into the room and Maggie turned. She straightened her housecoat around her thin shoulders and put out her hand. She caught hold of the young fellow’s hand and her voice came strong. “It’s Jamie off the water. We’ll be married now.”
“That’s not him a’tall. That’s Elsie’s boy. That’s who owns him,” the caregiver told her.
Elizabeth nodded. “For sure, he’s got the smoky grey eyes of his uncle. Anyone knows that Jamie won’t be dead as long as Nelson’s alive.”
Maggie’s face clouded and she stared, uncertain. Nelson took her hand and goosebumps ran down her spine. A great sense of relief filled her. It’s him, for sure. She smiled.
The caregiver took her arm. “Come and lie down now.”
“Indeed,” she said. Her eyes lit up like a young girl’s. She went toward her room glancing back as she went. He did come back.
“She’s been wandering off in her mind lately,” the caregiver told Elizabeth. “Snatc
hes of memories from a long time ago take hold of her. Emily Penny came to see her last week. You likely remember her. She’s from your time.”
Elizabeth smiled. “She was one of the children on the beach when I was a child.”
The caregiver nodded. “That one did well for herself, married the merchant she worked for after his wife destroyed herself. She raised a foundling as her own, a child stolen by peddler Swartz. You remember him, most likely. He was always on the go selling sundries. He confessed on his deathbed, lightened his soul before he passed on to favour or condemnation, whatever the Master saw fit to show him.”
“I knew him faintly,” Elizabeth said. “I was half-grown the first time he descended on the place selling lotions and soaps and whatnot.”
“’Tis everything done and not all good,” said the caregiver.
“And everything that seems all bad is not always bad,” Elizabeth answered. “The mother perished outside her grandmother’s house with the child surviving beside her. If the peddler hadn’t found her she would have died.”
The caregiver shrugged. “God would have sent someone to save her.”
Elizabeth smiled. “He did. He sent the peddler.”
“And something else.” The caregiver folded her arms as if relishing her news. “Emily brought a grandchild with her, Laura, born to Lily late in life. Emily said she loves to play on the beach.”
The hint of a smile crossed Elizabeth’s lips. “So she would.”
Elizabeth went on down the hall to see Olivia, who had come to the same home a few weeks before. She stopped still in the doorway and stared at the man standing by Olivia’s bed. His eyes were solemn, his voice sad and flat. “I expect you don’t know me.”
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