Bertie came into the room, thumb in his mouth, and crawled under the quilt beside me.
Winnie bounced from Mary’s bed to mine and settled at the end. “Tell a story, Rose. You tell the best stories. I almost feel like they’re real.”
I knew she was buttering me up, but so seldom did anyone say I did anything the best that I felt a small glow.
“But stories are for bedtime,” I teased them. It was my job to tell Bertie a story each night before bed. It was the only way Mam could get him to go quietly.
“We are in bed,” Bertie said.
I hugged him. “You’re right. We are in bed. Though I don’t know how pleased Mam would be to find you here next to me with my cold.” But I didn’t push him away. The company felt nice.
“How about the story of Great-grandmother Rose’s baby?” I asked. I did like my stories running in order, and Mam wouldn’t have time to tell it.
“Oh, Rose. Why do you always want to tell those stories from the quilt?” Winnie complained. “I’ve heard them a hundred times from Mam and you. Tell me the one about the princess on Citadel Hill.”
I had made up a story for Winnie and Bertie about a princess held captive in the Citadel above Halifax waiting for a prince, who somewhat resembled Duncan, to rescue her. Today I wanted the story from the quilt.
“About the baby or nothing. I am sick,” I reminded her.
Winnie sighed, then settled down. She would hear about the baby.
“Rose and Albert were married and lived in a small stone cottage with a thatched roof.”
“What’s a thatched roof?” Winnie asked.
“It’s a roof made of grass,” I told her.
“Green growing grass? Did their goats graze up there?” Winnie was intrigued.
“No, it’s a thick, dried grass, bundled and tied together to make a roof,” I said. “You’ve asked me all this before, so stop interrupting.” I took a deep breath and continued.
“The cottage was cosy with red roses growing up the outside walls, and Rose made it a lovely home. A year later their first baby was born. They called him Albert after his father. He was a perfect baby with soft, pink skin and a sunny smile. Rose and Albert loved him dearly. They carried him to church in a beautiful christening gown that Rose had made”—I stroked the faded pink square—“and had him baptized. Baby Albert was so good he didn’t make one single peep when the priest held him. But one morning Rose went in to get Baby Albert and he was lying still and cold in his cradle.” I lowered my voice. “With a moan, Rose gathered the tiny babe in her arms. She tried to wake him, but his eyes would not open. Rose’s tears fell upon his face. ‘We loved him too much,’ she cried to her husband. ‘No,’ Albert replied. ‘God loved him even more than we did, and wanted our baby to be with Him. You can’t love a child too much.’ And right before their eyes Baby Albert sprouted white wings and flew up to Heaven.”
“That’s a fib,” Winnie announced. “Babies don’t grow wings.”
“It’s not a fib. It’s a story,” I told her. “And he became an angel so he would have wings.”
“Well, Rose and Albert had six more children,” Winnie said practically. “Including our granny, and it’s a good thing she didn’t die as a baby or we wouldn’t be born.” She threw off the quilt. “I smell supper.”
She raced out of the room and downstairs.
“Did I have wings when I was a baby?” asked Bertie.
“No, you’re an alive boy, not an angel,” I said. I heard the back door open, then the voices of Da and Fred fill the kitchen. I gently pushed Bertie from the bed. “Da’s home. Go down to supper.”
I listened contentedly to the family sounds in the kitchen, and gently fingered the pale pink patch. Six more children or not, Great-grandmother Rose would never forget that first child and neither had my grandma. She’d put his christening gown in the quilt.
I studied the other patches, silently repeating to myself whom they belonged to and the stories tied to each. Winnie’s question came back to me. Why did I always want to tell the stories of the quilt? I’d not really thought about that before, but now that I did, I realized it was because of a belief I had. I believed there was a key somewhere inside the Irish Chain quilt—a key to how to be brave and strong like Great-grandmother Rose. And if I kept telling the stories, maybe someday I might find it.
Chapter 4
After two days in bed, on Saturday morning Mam declared me well enough to get up. The house was quiet. Winnie had gone to a friend’s to play, and Ernest had taken Bertie to see the cadets on parade at Wellington Barracks. Da and Fred were putting in extra time at the docks, while Mary enjoyed her Saturday morning lie-in. I felt a deep contentment being alone with Mam as we sat and darned socks.
“It’s never-ending, Rose,” Mam said. She sighed and waggled her fingers through a hole in the heel of Fred’s sock. “I’m now darning my darning.”
I liked when Mam spoke to me as if I were a grown-up. Suddenly, I desperately wanted it to be this way always. “Mam. Why can’t I stay home with you instead of going back to school? I hate it there. I could do all the darning. I’d be a big help,” I pleaded.
“Rose, dear . . .” Mam began.
“Please, Mam? I could keep everything mended. You know I do a good job.”
“You are very good with a needle, Rose. Better than me, but—”
A knock at the kitchen door silenced Mam. A shrill voice called, “Hello? Anyone home?”
Aunt Helen.
Mam rolled her eyes heavenward. I could have stamped my feet I was so mad at Aunt Helen for interrupting. Now I’d have to start to talk to Mam all over again. It wasn’t easy to get her to myself.
“Rose, would you put this sewing in my room, please. And then I think it’s time Mary got up, if you’d go wake her.” Mam held out the socks and wool, then picked up a pair of Ernest’s pants and handed them to me, too. “These can go in my patch bag. That’s all they’re good for now.”
Aunt Helen sailed into the room. “I was just at the store and thought I’d drop in on my way back and see if there is anything you need for this evening.”
“I think we have—” Mam began.
“You know, you have to be awful careful in the shops these days. I tell you, I saw the clerk put a finger on the scale when he weighed the sugar. Have you noticed that lately?”
“No, I—” Mam said.
“Well, I told him to just take those fingers off. He gave me quite a look, but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes. You’d think with the war and prices so high—why would they need to lean on the scale to cheat a person?” Aunt Helen raised her eyebrows.
“I really wouldn’t—”
“Greed. That’s why. Would there be a spot of tea left in the pot?”
There wasn’t anything in the pot, but Mam couldn’t get a word in edgewise to tell Aunt Helen so. I caught sight of Mary on the stairs, grinning widely, and had to lower my head to hide my smile.
Aunt Helen took a deep breath, preparing for her next gush of words. I watched, fascinated, as her large bosom heaved up and down. That woman could proudly adorn the prow of a ship, I’d overheard Da tell Mam once. Mam had laughed and quickly shushed him.
It must be hard, though, I thought, for Aunt Helen to catch her breath with her stout figure laced tightly into a corset. Too bad her tongue wasn’t tied in, too.
“And how are you, Rose?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“Patrick said you were under the weather with the influenza. Concerned about you, he was. He’s such a thoughtful, caring boy.”
Caring? Patrick with his cutting words and hurtful pranks?
“But missing time from school, Rose. What a shame. You can’t afford that, can you? You don’t want to be held back yet again.”
“Helen.” Mam’s voice was sharp. She’d caught my stricken look. “Come into the kitchen for tea.”
“Now, Rose will be thirteen come this next April . . .”
; “Fourteen,” I yelled in my frustration.
Aunt Helen gasped and placed a gloved hand on her chest. “There is no need to shout.” With a backward look at me, she followed Mam into the kitchen. “Really! Young people and their manners these days. What was I saying? Oh yes. She could leave school at the end of this year. Even with her simple ways, I’m sure you could get her into service. Perhaps as a laundry maid.”
I went slowly into Mam’s room and set the darning on a chair, then lowered myself to the bed. Simple ways. Get her into service! I’d never thought that if I left school I’d have to go to work. I thought I’d stay here, safe with Mam and Da. I didn’t want to be in a stranger’s house trying to follow their orders. I’d get things mixed up and they’d be mad at me. School or a stranger’s house. Some choice.
I unfolded Ernest’s old pants and shook them out, then searched in Mam’s sewing box for her scissors. I cut a small square of material and put it in my pocket. On my hands and knees, I fumbled under Mam’s bed and pulled out the patch bag. It held all the clothes we’d outgrown or worn to pieces. Mam used the leftover material to mend holes on knees and elbows. I dumped the bag out to see if anything new had been added since I’d last seen it, and pulled out a flowered skirt. It had been Mary’s, then mine, and Winnie had worn it this past summer but had outgrown it come autumn. I cut a couple of squares from it and tucked them in my pocket with the other.
I went back out and heard Aunt Helen, and escaped up the stairs to the bedroom. Mary stood in front of the mirror running a comb through her hair. She held my eyes with her mirrored ones.
“She is without a doubt the most terrible woman,” she said.
I shrugged. Aunt Helen had been around forever, so I was pretty used to her ways.
“I’ll have to keep Horace away from her tonight. What he’ll think, I don’t know. And Grandpa. If he does that thing where he takes out his teeth and chases the young ones with them, I’ll just die.” Mary sighed and laid down her brush.
“Doesn’t Horace have a grandpa, too?” I asked.
“I imagine so,” Mary answered impatiently. “But not all grandfathers go pulling out their teeth at parties. At least, not those from the south side of town!”
The south side of town. That is where the rich people live. That is where the girls from here went to go into service. I felt like a fist had plowed into my stomach. That is where I would have to go to be a laundry maid.
I went over to the chest and raised the lid. From beneath the woollens, I pulled out my bits ’n’ pieces bag, opened it and dropped in the patches. The bag was quite heavy now, I realized as I tucked it away again. But then, it contained two years’ worth of collected bits of material. I had scraps of Da’s and Frederick’s work shirts, a patch from an apron of Granny Dunlea’s that she’d set afire one day when she bent too close to the stove. She said she often felt as if her stomach was burning inside, but that was the first time she’d ever seen actual flames. I also had a sleeve from a blouse of my other grandma, Mam’s mother, and a patch cut from a corner of Bertie’s old nightgown. I closed the lid of the chest.
Mary pulled out two dresses, looked them over, sighed and hung them back on the hook near her bed. “Horace has seen me in both of these. I need something different.” She unfolded a skirt and a waist and held them to her chest while she studied herself in the mirror.
“That looks nice,” I offered.
Mary frowned and tossed them on the bed. “The skirt will never do. It’s flannel. I look dowdy. Horace’s sister came into the bank the other day and you should have seen the beautiful blue wool skirt she had on, and a smart jacket to match. And their house, Rose—Horace took me there one day when the family was out. It was so grand. A porch right across the entire front of the house and two bay windows. Inside, the floors gleam and there’s a morning room . . .”
A room where you only sat in the morning seemed a terrible waste of space to me, but I listened politely.
“. . . and a parlour with a marble fireplace. Over the dining-room table, a chandelier that shines like diamonds. It made me dizzy just to see, and a library full of books.” Mary’s face shone with her enthusiasm.
I had closed my eyes to better picture the house as she described it, but they flew open at the word books. I never had asked Mary for that favour. I concentrated hard to keep the thought in my mind so it wouldn’t slip out again.
“I peeked into his sister’s bedroom,” Mary went on. “Her wardrobe door was open and the wardrobe jammed with clothes. Imagine having so many clothes no one would see me in the same outfit twice in one month. Oh, Rose. I’d love to live in a house like that—have a life like that.”
“Do they have maids?” I asked suddenly.
“I imagine so,” Mary said. “His mother wouldn’t do the work herself. Not polishing all those floors.”
“Mam does.”
“Their house is much bigger than ours, and besides, his mother is a lady.”
Surely, Mam was a lady, too.
Mary caught my look. “I mean, Mam’s respectable, but his mother’s a society lady,” she explained. “Oh, never mind. Yes, they have maids and a cook.”
“Aunt Helen says I should go into service,” I said. “I don’t want to live in a big house.”
“Well, maybe someday if I live in a grand house like that, you could come and work for me. We wouldn’t tell anyone you were my sister, of course.”
“Why not?”
“Because I couldn’t very well be a society lady with a maid for a sister, could I?”
I didn’t quite know why, but I nodded my head to keep her happy. In the meantime, a horrible thought occurred to me.
“Does that mean you are going to marry Horace?”
Mary flushed and began to brush down her flannel skirt. “Well, he’s not asked me. But he does seem to like me. He is coming tonight, after all. Oh, Rose, you have to help me keep him away from Aunt Helen and Grandpa. They could ruin my chances.”
Her chances for the big house, the maids, the clothes, the books in the library.
“Mary. Could you read me my homework?”
“Not now, Rose. Just read it yourself. I can’t always be here to help you with your lessons.”
“Please, Mary.”
She must have heard the plea in my voice. “Tomorrow, Rose. I promise. Now leave me alone so I can find an outfit to wear tonight.”
I watched her for a few minutes. Something she had said pricked at my mind. I concentrated hard like I’d trained myself to, and it came to me. “Mary. Why did Horace take you to see his house when his family was away?”
Mary shrugged, uninterested, and held up a sweater to her chin. “Maybe they just happened to all be out.”
I wandered down the stairs. I didn’t understand Mary. I loved our house on Albert Street. It was small, but we fit cosily. Our street was cinders and the outhouses smelled something awful in summer, but I liked the way the buildings crowded together, some leaning wearily against a neighbour, as if they were helping each other out just like the people here did. I never wanted to leave it, or Mam or Da, yet Mary, she was raring to go. I sat on the stairs. I’ve asked God before why He made us all so different, but He hasn’t answered yet. It unsettled me to think Mary might leave and become a society lady, but no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t make her stay. If only she liked Duncan instead of Horace. Duncan would make Mary stay.
Aunt Helen’s voice floated up the stairs from the kitchen. “. . . she has the kidney complaint, you know.”
I tiptoed into the parlour to avoid the kidney complaint or the liver complaint or any other complaint. Now it was me feeling restless and cooped up. I looked out the window and felt the tug of wind and cloud-tossed skies. Mam wouldn’t be happy if I went out with my cold still lingering, but I grabbed my coat anyway and quietly let myself out the front door.
There is something about wind reddening the cheeks and ears that makes a person feel extra alive. I put my arms out and
let a violent gust blow my coat out behind me. Like a kite, I thought. I dipped and whirled, remembering the wildly dancing kite Frederick had made for Ernest, Winnie and me. Or rather, made for us, but flown himself. You’d break it, he told us, but I think he liked making it soar near the clouds. Soar. I repeated the word to myself. It held a magic, one that could carry a person on and on. Soar. Could I reach Heaven? Could people visit God and then come back?
“What are you doing?”
I fell back to earth with a resounding clunk to find Patrick in front of me. I’d not seen him come up.
“The wind blew my coat and I was trying to close it,” I hastily fibbed. More for the confessional. The first Thursday of every month I arrived at church with my long list of sins and left with my equally long penance of Hail Marys and Our Fathers.
Patrick fished around in a small brown bag, drew his hand out and popped a red candy into his mouth. He held out the bag to me. Surprised, I reached forward, only to have the bag pulled away when I touched the paper top. He laughed hugely, his tongue, red from the sweet, bright against his pale, doughy face. I imagined myself kneading that dough, reforming his features with my fists. I must have stared for a while because he shifted the bag to his other hand then back again.
“What are you looking at?” he asked finally.
I didn’t say anything. My silence made him uneasy. Had I found an unexpected way to get back at Patrick?
He took a couple of steps backward. “You’re crazy. You know that? You’re not just simple, but crazy. They’ll lock you up at the lunatic asylum if you go around staring at people like that.”
Thoughts scrambled rapidly through my mind—answer him? Punch him? Cry? Run? Lunatic. I stood mute.
He threw the empty bag at me, but the wind caught it and sent it sailing back at him. He swatted it away angrily. “Crazy Rose.” He started down the hill.
“He’s not very nice, is he.”
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