by Linda Little
MY GROWN DAUGHTER AND I EASED INTO A GENTLE FRIENDSHIP. In the evenings with chores all done and the children in bed, Charity and I would sit together in the kitchen with our sewing or mending or knitting. We forged a new intimacy, one between women—mother and daughter of course, but two adults, two mothers. Charity had always been a blessing to me but now I felt a certain comradeship of equals I had not held for another person since Abby had left for the West thirty years ago. There were evenings I shared with her my fears about the future of the mill. I worried about the business that would be left for the boys. The modern steam-powered roller mills ground more cheaply and efficiently. How much longer would there be a place for small water mills? Charity’s distaste for the mill moderated with her maturity to the point where we could mull over the boys’ best interests together. We shared stories of the children, explored their respective characters, talents and shortcomings, their delights and their fears. We pondered educational possibilities. For the first time in my life I could share the joy of a child’s future with another person. I wondered if this communion was what heaven would feel like.
One Sunday evening Charity and I sat knitting after a pleasant day with the children. She had been to the dance at the hall the evening before and was now luxuriating over all the news and developments.
“Alvin peeked around the corner at Maggie and who could help but laugh at the dear fellow. The wink! But Tom took her hand. Oh my. What a look he gave her! I thought she must have felt it down through her bones. We were all in a swoon, even those with no right to be!” She laughed the most enchanted, buoyant little laugh.
The night hung soft around us, the lamplight delicate. My beautiful daughter and I together in happy comfort with the children nestled safe upstairs. Charity’s father’s face came to me as it had not in years. Perhaps it was the angle of the lamplight, perhaps the tenderness that enveloped me. I almost told her. I almost said I knew how deeply a look could pierce the heart. I almost said I had once fallen under a spell. I remembered his hand on my waist and his mouth on my neck, the blizzard raging beyond the walls. My skin warmed at the memory of his hands. I nearly said, “There was a man once…” I opened my mouth, the whisper soft in my throat, my eyes on my lap.
Charity crooned on. “Tom is as handsome as the devil himself when he gets that look. He’s not so much fun of course, but with his…” Little Rachel woke at that moment and began to howl from her nursery above us, piercing our bubble. Charity sighed, set her yarn and needles aside, and rose to go to her.
Instantly I became angry at how close I had come to betraying my own secret. “Tom MacCarron is a dangerous man and Maggie should show him the road right now! I don’t like the way he stands over her. None of those MacCarrons have any respect for their women.”
“Oh, Mother,” she laughed, “you don’t like anyone who’s not your precious Wesley.” Her voice trailed after her like a satin ribbon as she disappeared up the stairs.
THE WAR IN EUROPE DRAGGED ON. We heard stories of the trenches and the gas. There was no shortage of news from the front, no shortage of reports about our bravery and success and about the devilment of the Huns. Yet despite our reported prowess, there was no victory. The boys followed the development of the British airplanes. Even young Alec could explain to me the relative advantages of the Bristol Fighter over the Strutter. Three or four times a year we would get a short letter from Laughlin. The notes said little and were virtually identical—thanks for the socks, we’re beating back the Hun, there’s not as many luxuries in the trenches as a man might want. The boys folded up the letters and carried them around in their pockets as trophies. I wondered what they remembered of their flesh-and-blood father. The father they carried in their pockets grew to mythic proportions. The boys grew into their chores. They could saddle or harness the horses, make deliveries, stack hay, catch and smoke a salmon or a string of trout. The older two could even manage the bucksaw and the splitting axe and needed less and less help with the wood.
One summer day after the boys had hoed their rows and brought me home a gallon of raspberries from the bushes along the north rill, I sent them off to play. Soon I heard them arguing beneath the big maple at the front of the house. The windows were opened to the breeze and their voices floated in as I tended to my jam. The recriminations were for Yoo-hoo, who had, in an effort to impress his brothers with his strength, tossed their toy plane so high it had landed on the roof of the house. Samuel wanted to solicit my help to get it down but Yoo-hoo was dead set against this plan.
“You were smart enough to get it up there, you should be smart enough to get it down.” He mimicked my supposed response so accurately I had to stifle my laughter to avoid betraying my eavesdropping. Yoo-hoo began firing rocks at it, hoping to dislodge it, I suppose, but his two brothers clamoured to stop him, afraid he would do more damage. Another round of arguments ensued but they moved away from the window, their talk grew indistinct, and I turned my attention back to my own business. By and by I became aware of the silence. I slipped outside and around to the front corner of the house. It was all I could do not to cry out. They were stacked up like circus acrobats, their backs to me, and any distraction at this point would have sent the tower crashing to the ground. Yoo-hoo stood at the far corner of the porch with Samuel on his shoulders. Perched on Samuel’s shoulders was little Alec. I held my breath, my heart in my throat as, holding onto his brother’s up-stretched hands for support, Alec wobbled to his feet, reached up, and leapt onto the porch roof. In a second he had scrabbled up to the dormer where the airplane had landed and sent it soaring to the lawn below. Yoo-hoo called for him to hurry, that Samuel was heavy. For a moment Alec ducked out of my line of vision. The next thing I saw was his feet on his brother’s shoulders. The tower of three lowered itself to the ground in a controlled collapse like a telescope. Once safe, they rolled around on the grass laughing as I flattened myself against the wall and tried to slow my heart. While I dithered over whether or not to show myself, whether or not I should condemn their behaviour, they were up and off to the stream with their fishing rods.
In my final years of life I would often recall that day. It gave me hope when I needed to believe that they would grow to stand on each other’s shoulders, hold each other up, and snatch their futures from the world together.
THE YEAR 1917 BEGAN TO DRAW TO A CLOSE. One morning I felt an odd jarring in the mill floorboards. Flour dust puffed off the panes of the window by my elbow. Charity said the jolt rattled the dishes on the shelves in the kitchen. Wesley felt it too and said it startled the horses in their stalls. It sent little ripples through the ink in the inkwells at the schoolhouse, the boys said. Everyone looked up from what they were doing; we all cocked our heads and waited. When nothing more happened we returned to our business. The news was not long coming—a munitions ship had exploded in Halifax Harbour. The war blew a hole in Halifax so big the entire civilized world turned and gaped. Nearly two thousand souls killed and ten thousand more wounded. No one could talk of anything else. Those who went into the city to help came back shaking their heads. “You can’t imagine it. You have to see it. Everything’s flat. Beyond comprehension.” So close. The war was suddenly more than anyone had bargained for.
The explosion jarred me out of my complacent state in relation to my son-in-law. Over the years I had rubbed him into an indistinct blur which I stored somewhere in the basement of my mind. His absence had allowed me to imagine—no, imagine is not the word—I was aware of the possibility that Laughlin might not return but this possibility I accepted as a set of logistical circumstances. We were managing so well. In the event of his passing, the mill and the farm would belong to Charity, and I often amused myself with the infinite possibilities of life, of education for the children, for instance, if this or that asset were sold or kept or divided. I did not amuse myself with the possibility of Laughlin’s return. Believe me, I did not wish him dead. I simply did not keep him in my mind as a real, whole human being. The expl
osion made him real for me again and reminded me that this war would end, eventually, one way or another.
Several months later we received a letter in unfamiliar handwriting from overseas. It was from a nurse in an army hospital in England. Private Laughlin Wainwright was safe, she claimed. He had lost two and a half fingers and his right eye in a blast. There had been some damage to his face and right shoulder; however none of these injuries would prevent him from leading a full and meaningful life. Although he was no longer fit for service, near full recovery was expected outside these unfortunate losses. Private Wainwright hoped to write on his own very soon, she claimed, as soon as he could manage a pen. Charity frowned then brightened, then frowned again, uncertain of what to make of this news. The boys were more than ready for a father to guide them into manhood. She would have a husband again. But why had Laughlin not attempted a few words with his left hand? Why had he not at least dictated a few lines?
Charity wrote to him, but received no reply. There was nothing to do but wait. Spring came, and then summer. Maggie had thinned her party of suitors down to two. Tom MacCarron lost patience and demanded she marry him. Apparently there had been a visit one night, a confrontation, a scream and a chase, and undisclosed injuries to Mr. MacCarron. Shortly afterwards Maggie and Wesley were married under a brilliant October sky. Charity clucked through the arrangements like a mother hen. One would have thought it were her own wedding. But it was Wesley and Maggie who went off to settle down on Wesley’s little farm by the Crossing.
After the wedding Charity took the nurse’s letter down from the shelf once more and turned it over in her hands.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
THERE HAD BEEN NO SNOW YET BUT WINTER HOVERED OVER us, grinning down at fall’s unfinished chores. Newly married, Wesley had his hands full building a new room onto his house over by the Crossing so I was working alone in the mill. Charity had taken little Rachel across the brook and up to Gratto’s to drop off a sack of oatmeal. When they returned I shut down the mill and we all set off up to the house for dinnertime. A man sat on a rock beside the road, on the rise between the mill and the house. I had seen someone there earlier, noted it unusual to see a traveller all the way up here but decided to mind my own business. Yet there he sat an hour later. He lifted his head to watch us approach. An odd-looking fellow, dishevelled and rough with a closed-over eye; he looked as though he had slept sideways on his features and had not bothered to smooth them back into place. He needed a shave. He looked away in such a brusque manner as we approached that my greeting died on my lips. Only after we were about fifteen paces past him did he speak.
“Charity,” he said, crisp as the air.
She whirled around and he sat looking straight across the road presenting us the left side of his face in perfect profile.
“Laughlin?” The question in her voice arose from incredulity, not doubt. She let go of her daughter’s hand and stepped back along the road towards him, slowly as though fighting some great headwind. She halted just beyond arm’s reach.
“Where is your uniform?”
It was an odd greeting but she had not written a script for a homecoming like this. Where was the brave soldier she had built in her imagination?
“Traded it for this lovely suit of clothes. Let some other poor bastard see if he can wring some luck out of the King’s rags.” He turned his blind side to her, bent over to retrieve his rucksack and struggled to his feet.
“Laughlin, you’re home. You’re safe. Why didn’t you answer my letters? We heard nothing after the letter from that nurse. I didn’t know…” She touched his unblemished cheek and then the ragged one, cupping his face. “You’re back,” she said.
He made no effort to either embrace her or to shake her off. “What’s left of me.”
“Laughlin. We had no idea … This is our daughter, Rachel. Your father is home, my dear. Home from the Great War.”
He nodded and took a couple of steps towards the girl. His limp was noticeable but not pronounced. He pulled a sort of glove, a knitted bandage, off his right hand and waved it in Rachel’s face, showing off the stumps that had been his pinky and its neighbouring finger. “The alligators took these.”
Rachel recoiled in horror, scrabbled into the folds of my clothes, swimming into my body. I lifted her up and held her close for comfort.
Here is war, I thought, and could think no further.
“Come up to the house, Laughlin.”
Ours was a house for women and children—I saw this as we stepped in. There was a scattered airiness about it. The last of the asters and cosmos had gone with the frost but the window sills were festooned with bouquets of beautiful coloured leaves and clutches of bearded barley. There were pieces of a new school shirt for Yoo-hoo, half stitched, piled on the rocker. Alec often fetched home some wonder or other from his travels: a perfect pinecone, a wren’s nest, a fleck of fools’ gold. These trophies were displayed in all their glory. Samuel brought his mother fresh sprigs of evergreens which she loved to hang in the windows to sweeten the air. Yoo-hoo’s latest whittling project, which he claimed was a pistol, had been abandoned on the bench by the door. There were pictures the boys had painted on rainy Sunday afternoons and the few toys they had made for themselves and their sister. The tin soldiers and the bright red truck, store-bought from MacKinnon’s, were inexpertly stowed in the vicinity of our little kitchen toy box. Always an item or two of child’s clothing hung off the back of a chair and, despite our best efforts, an errant mitten or sock or scarf. No peg was set aside for a man’s coat, no place for great galumphing boots, no scatter of tools, no tobacco bowl, no special chair set off with its kingdom of don’t-touch-its.
Laughlin carried his head at an odd angle, his chin tucked in slightly towards his left shoulder setting the scarred side of his face forward and his blind eye out to meet the world. I wondered if his carriage was the result of injury to some muscle or tendon. When he turned I caught a glimpse of the answer. A film of fear simmered beneath the dullness of his good eye. The emptiness frightened me, then chided me for my hesitant and sparse welcome. For the first time in my life I wanted to reach out and soothe him.
“Let me take your coat, Laughlin. Welcome home. Dinner won’t be long. I’m sure you could do with a square meal.”
All that time convalescing, waiting, travelling and he never sent word. He sat at the table, his good side tight to the wall leaving Charity his wounds. Charity sat by him stroking his arm. When he answered no questions, she filled in the space. “The boys are at school. The mill is in fine order. Scotch River has a creamery now. And a cheese factory. But you came in on the train, surely? So you saw them. You’re home,” she kept saying. And, “Wait until you see the boys.”
He ate with slow deliberation as though ranking each mouthful. I couldn’t understand what had kept him away for so long.
“Have you been to see your mother?” The softness in my voice may have caught him off guard because he answered directly.
“I set up a stone for her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” That was that. Ewan and his concubine both gone now. I called to Rachel to come and help me and left the two of them alone. Upstairs held no more trace of him than the rest of the house. I had slept in his bed and pooled his wife’s body heat with my own. My clothes and effects filled his wardrobe and covered his dressing table. I gathered my things, paused at the doorway to Rachel’s room with my arms loaded. I considered nesting in with my granddaughter then changed my mind and carried my things back downstairs to the little room off the kitchen.
When the boys arrived home from school that afternoon, Laughlin blinked in amazement at the size of them. They had been tykes when he left. Now at twelve and eleven the older two stood with their backs to their childhoods. At nearly five feet Samuel was taller than his older brother by an inch but Yoo-hoo was broader across the shoulders and already carried the promise of his future burliness. Even little Alec, at nine and still far too small for
his own liking, was bigger than Yoo-hoo had been when Laughlin left.
Not only at the initial reunion but every time he saw the boys he blinked in surprise. He never asked a question about any of his children. Although, to be fair, he rarely had a moment to get a word in edgewise with all the competition to fill him in on every little detail of life.
News of Laughlin’s return spread rapidly. Our family regained the stature that comes to a complete family with a man at the helm. The boys no longer suffered the shame of dependence on neighbour men. I watched the boys struggle to reconcile this fragile and distant being with the heroic soldier of their construction, watched them balance the advantage of a flesh-and-blood father with the imperfections of reality. Charity was not so far removed from the boys’ experience. She had spent so many of her young married years locked in melancholy; perhaps she had little more real memory of him than the children did. I watched her approach then back off then approach again from a different angle. She spoke about him this way and that, trying to fit this enigmatic presence into our lives like she was trying on a wardrobe full of outfits.
“The boys are overjoyed. My goodness, Mother, if Laughlin thought he’d slip back home unnoticed they certainly put paid to that idea. They’ve been spreading the news like feathers in a windstorm. They’re so proud of him. And he can hardly believe how big they’ve grown. Imagine suddenly being father to all that flesh and bone! No wonder he’s a little stunned by it all. Who wouldn’t be?” And when he came into the house she would be at his side, doting and solicitous.