Looking into the baby’s eyes, Stella understood why Elise had mentioned their colour. They were like the bottom of an untouched puddle, in the instant before the stomp. So clear, but at the same time, begging for disruption. Summer stared up at Stella, unapologetically, and Stella had to remind herself that this child, with her black doll’s hair, was only three days old.
Summer Fall. Stella shook her head, clicked her tongue softly. How could someone who weighed not more than a good-sized bottle of beet be eternally wedged between two seasons? Surely an unkind place for a newborn baby. A nowhere sort of place. And even though Stella tried to assuage it, a damp sadness had caught in her throat, made her want to cry.
Stella returned home to days of impossible quiet. Visitors were few and far between. Many of the children who had plodded about, harping and throwing rocks and striking her fence with sticks, were now grown and gone away. She had long ago sold two parcels of her land, and the robin’s egg blue saltbox constructed on the lot to the north housed an elderly couple who rarely emerged. To the south, a skeleton of a home stood, frame grey and warping in the salt air. On blustery days, the wind would whip through the boards, squeal and moan. But, since she came home, the wind never uttered a single sigh.
Stella had not received a letter from Robert in six months. After university, he had moved to Toronto, taken some sort of position in a bank that was never fully explained. When he first went away, he wrote every two weeks, then it slowed to once a month. And more recently, his letters had stopped altogether, only to be replaced by letters from his new wife. A woman named Jane, who with perfect script, wrote endless pages about the richness of their everyday: their adored pet cat, Elmer, who owned its own chair; a gnarly old peach tree in her yard that she’d coaxed into producing; imminent plans for a baby, her secret hope for a boy. Stella felt only hollowness when she read each letter. Dear Mom, When are you coming to stay?
During the past summer, Nettie Rose, Stella’s best friend, also left Bended Knee. She had moved to a small apartment in St. John’s, in order to be closer to her daughter Grace. In recent years, Nettie Rose struggled to take care of herself. She’d told Stella she didn’t know what to do first. “Can’t stand owning all this time,” she’d said. “Carefree afternoons? You can have them for me.” Her life had taken a shift towards simplicity. Most of her many children gone. Grandchildren distant. Husband no longer on the earth. Idleness caused rust to bloom from within, and Nettie became forgetful. After she had caused a small fire, a greasy pan, blackened fish, she decided to move. “Be where someone is apt to keep an eye on me. I needs that. There idn’t nothing wrong with owning up to it.”
During her time with Elise and Summer Fall, Stella had visited Nettie. But the meeting was awkward, strangely upsetting. In that stuffy place on a third floor, Stella complimented Nettie’s matching plates, framed pictures of seashells and pink roses, yellow furniture set, polka-dot cushions. She told Nettie she adored her bright red upholstered rocker that looked soft, but really wasn’t. When Nettie had sold her house, contents were included, and now, Stella’s particular kitchen chair was no longer available. The kitchen table that she usually leaned upon was gone, replaced by plastic covered pressboard, cold metal legs. Nettie yammered on about a man named Milton Berle, how happy she was to have discovered him on her small television set. “Never laughed so hard in my life,” she crowed. Stella nodded, though that comment jabbed her. She didn’t finish her tea. It didn’t taste the same when served in a heavy mug.
And now, with everyone gone, Bended Knee felt like a foreign village, bleak and somewhat uninviting. People continued to be helpful and generous, but she didn’t appreciate it when Jo Taylor tucked a complimentary tub of candied fruit in among her purchases. Or when Skipper Johnson layered on an extra piece of dried cod, his wink and wide smile doing nothing to disguise the hint of pity in his eyes. And when Johnnie, one of Nettie’s sons, still a bachelor, stacked a row of spruce logs by her back door, he wouldn’t accept so much as a thimble of rum for payment. Such generosity embarrassed Stella, made her feel older and less competent than she was. The look on their weathered faces told Stella they believed she was a woman who hadn’t had her fair share of luck.
When the few straggly trees separating the homes were stripped bare, the sight of the unfinished shell nearby bothered Stella more and more. But instead of drawing the curtains, she began to watch it, the way long shadows moved through it, the sun making rectangles and triangles dance upon the frosty earth. She sighed when birds rested in tight corners or when stray dogs hunkered beneath a lean-to of abandoned boards during rainstorms, drops like nails. Whenever she noticed a couple strolling up the lane, she would wait to see if they slowed, took interest. Perhaps they would be the owners. Ready to complete what they had started. But no creature, bird, dog, or person, ever lingered near the structure for any length of time. Like a joke, it was left standing there, a man’s dream for home and family. Alone, against the sea, with empty eyes, holes instead of doors. A sad joke. Stella finally had to look away.
As fall gave way to winter, Stella rarely used her kerosene lamps. She took to eating an early meal, usually fish boiled on the stove, potatoes or bread, some sort of pickles. Occasionally she would make a grunt with a scoop of partridgeberries from the keg in the back porch. Afterwards, she would sit there in the dim light, missing the harvest moon. Some evenings she hummed softly to herself, but being alone, the humming echoed. Mostly, she quietly sipped her tea. Until darkness drove her to bed.
When winter’s bitter hand gripped Bended Knee, Stella closed the door to the kitchen, caging the heat, and she took to sleeping on the daybed. She ate sitting near the stove in a hefty chair Leander had made. It was one of his last projects, thick wooden arms and back. On each side near the top, he had fastened what he called “a wooden ear,” a piece of birch shaped and sanded into half a heart. Stella had wanted him to stop, to rest, but he pressed on. Told her, “No matter where I is, my dear, I’ll hear you.” And she had taunted, “I believes your ears is a mite bit smaller than that, now, Leander. Just how far do you reckon on going?”
Now, when she thought of those words, her smirk quickly turned into a frown.
Some nights, as she sat in the chair, she tried to talk to Leander. Tried to tell him about her day, her meal, how she’d burned her little finger on the iron. Sometimes she’d talk about the times they had when they’d just married. She told him about Johnnie, who would dig a trail to her back step after each storm, and fetch a few paper bagfuls of groceries from the shop. Mentioned how he was such a rabble-rouser as a boy, but had grown into a decent man. Leander would remember that, all the trouble that boy had caused. There were plenty of engaging stories.
She would keep her voice nice and light, imagining her words traveled from her mouth into those two cuplike wooden ears, then directly to Leander. But, her pleasantness always deteriorated, and instead, she found herself asking him, “Where have you gone off to? Where have you gone? What kind of cruelty is this? To leave me all alone.” Darkness pushed her own voice back into her face, and her loneliness, out loud like that, only made things worse.
One afternoon, when blinding light bounced off the snow, penetrated her window, and made her small kitchen feel too close to heaven, Stella bundled in a blanket, sneaked into the coolness of the front room. It was quieter there, and Stella felt as though she were taking a break, away from the never-ending crackle of the fire and the relentless gales drilling the outside boards. Seated in a chair, soft cushion against her lower spine, she inhaled the odours of this space. There was history in those smells, damp books, woolen sweaters, four picture frames that hung behind her and perfumed the air with woody sweetness. Comforting, yet she sensed these smells didn’t belong to her.
Glancing about, she identified her mother’s blanket, the stump-like stool where her father would rest his feet, Leander’s pieces of furniture, a forgotten pair of Elise’s buttoned-up shoes side-by-side beneath a chair, Rober
t’s navy sweater with the hole in the elbow that he’d left behind. All items belonging to others. The only thing she owned (other than the walls and the windows and the ceilings) was a tall cabinet made of pine. Leander had built it for her, designed to house her most precious possessions. It was sturdy, and the wood, aging gracefully, had developed a soft tawny colour. Leander had purchased green milky glass knobs, and she touched one now, but didn’t open the drawer. She didn’t want the additional reminder that nothing lay inside.
The following week, snow arrived and never let up. Gusts plucked up what had fallen, shaped it into heaps and drifts, blocking her door, coating her windows in a frozen crystalline mess. Clearing a path from her back stoop, she tied two lengths of rope – one from the railing to the outhouse, the other from the railing to Leander’s shed. While the outhouse was practical, and the rope guided her when her eyes could not, there was no actual need to be connected to the shed. But in jacket and boots, she would journey there during the storms, pick through Leander’s tools and swipe her hands in sawdust that always reappeared even after she’d cleaned. She couldn’t bear the idea of being separated from the shed, and she spent countless hours, in blue winter light, poking through boxes and drawers of Leander’s items, sorting nails, balling twine. Searching. She was certain there was something there. Something she was meant to find. Hiding from her. More than once, in her frustration, she plucked up a hammer or planer, let it drop, just to hear the dull thud when it struck the wooden floor.
After months of hollow days, rollicking blizzards, nights as black as pitch, the sounds of life that arrived with spring made Stella anxious. Icicles dripping, mud sucking at her boots, crows scraping at scattered bits of garbage, cawing. She removed the ropes that had linked her to the outside world, and coiled them, hung them over the railing to dry. For a moment, she sat on her step, clutched the frayed ends that dangled down. Somehow the winter had kept everything together, tight and clean, and now her world was thawing, coming undone. The snow was receding over the grass, stripping the rocks of their insulation, exposing the tree roots, moistening the soil. Blanket lifted, and Stella felt as though she were naked underneath. She lifted her face towards the sky, and when the wind entangled itself, she thought she could feel the sun, teasing her with hints of distant warmth.
Stella began to clean, swiping cobwebs from corners, airing quilts on the line. With damp cloth, she dusted every surface, but the blackish dust only seemed to shift locations. In the front room, the wallpaper had begun to bubble and let loose, and cracks could be seen near the ceiling. Her land was not much better. Flowerbeds, once overflowing with orderly blooms, were now riddled with the brown stems of nettles, heads long burst, seeds already scattered. Her shrubs were overgrown and spindly, and on her house, she saw flaking paint, several soft boards. When she pressed them, water beaded near the tips of her fingers. How had this happened? As though overnight, her house had stopped singing, starting complaining about aches in joints, weakness in the bones.
Inside the shed, she cracked open two windows, but struggled with the third. The thick coats of paint had bonded, and she used a bone-handled knife to cut through the layers. Heels of her hands pressed against the frame, she grunted and shoved until the window gave way, jumped upwards several inches. Lurching forward, she smacked her hip on the counter, and was forced to kneel, eyes watering from the pulsing pain. A deep breath, and she looked up, noticed a tiny cupboard tucked into a corner underneath the counter. She reached out, ran her fingers over the dented metal knobs.
She could not count the number of times she had looked at that cupboard but never opened it. During her winter visits, she had focused on the newer section Leander had built in the shed, ignoring the corner where her father’s things were kept. Stella shimmied closer to the cupboard and tugged at the drawers. Years of neglect in the dampness, and the wood had swollen. Stella had to yank with both hands, then pry her fingers into the crack, and wrench each drawer open
The first two drawers contained nothing of interest, but in the third, she found a cookbook, pages stained with berry juice and mildew. Stella moved out from underneath the counter, sat on a wooden stool, cookbook resting in her lap. Odd to find such an item in a woodworker’s shed, and she realized it must have belonged to her mother so many years ago. Perhaps while her father was working, her mother would sit by the fire, maybe even upon the very stool where Stella now perched, and her mother would read through recipes, discuss dinners.
Stella shook her head. These images were difficult to reconcile. Her mother rarely cooked anything other than a hasty meal, and to the best of Stella’s knowledge, never spent a moment perusing a cookbook. Delia Abbott was a woman who died with her own flesh withering on her fragile bones. There was no apparent interest in gastronomy. But then, how well did Stella really know her mother? Hardly at all. She barely remembered her. She had died when Stella was only a child. Should she be expected to remember her? Children remembered through their skin, by way of warmth and touch. Her mother had not been a woman who embraced easily, who bent her head just to smell her child’s hair.
Opening the book, Stella shuffled the pages gently, and a dusting of flour sifted out onto her skirt. Her breathing slowed when she saw her own name, her maiden name, neatly printed on the inside cover. Miss Stella Abbott. Fingers shook as she turned the pages, read the miniscule notes written beside a multitude of recipes. Secrets. Hints. A record of mother’s wisdom, meant to guide a young woman. “Don’t handle the crust. Toughens it.” “Treat dough like you would a baby. Gently, but firmly.” “If late berries, cut sugar in half. Too sweet as is.” “Dry pan on stove – or apt to rust.” In the margins, she noticed the occasional silly doodling, a mouse, surprised expression, missing its tail, a fat blueberry staring upwards at its stately frilly crown.
With the palms of her hands, Stella pressed the pages together, held the book to her chest. There was discomfort there, inside her heart, and Stella took several deep breaths to ease it. Who was the woman who had written those words, sketched those whimsical images? She was the opposite of what Stella had conceived, what she held as fact. In life, her mother had been more than that distant cloud, a bruise on the sky, gradually drifting away from their home. The following realization came to Stella with startling fullness. That she was not, after all, born into the hands of an unhappy woman.
She sighed, closed her eyes, and let the joy spread through her. After wandering for years in dusky shadows, this cookbook felt like a passage, and there was warm milky comfort on the other side. Waiting there. For her to accept it.
Stella stood up, strode out of the shed. She never bothered to close the door.
One afternoon in mid-June, Stella stopped beside the window at the top of the stairs, stared out at the thin strip of sea on the horizon. Though the cobalt mass was calm, she knew beneath it all, there was a continual rumbling that would never cease. Creatures jostled in the currents, skittering fish, watery landscape altered. All these things changing, but the force behind them remained the same. She took solace in this one element of constancy. No matter the walls that surrounded her, no matter the earth beneath her feet, the ocean, her ocean, would never change.
As she stared at the water, she noticed a man standing in the laneway, black hair slicked backwards, hands on his hips, purpose in the spacing of his glossy shoes. Pretty wife beside him, bulbous belly, another child clinging to her skirt. “Go on,” she said firmly and swatted the boy’s backside. “Go on and look it over.” He darted towards the skeleton house, climbed the splintery wood, bounced and grabbed and hung from the joists, testing the structure as only a child could. Husband and wife held hands, picked their way through the overgrown path. “I loves the smell,” Stella heard the woman say. “Of building a home.”
Stella thought about Nettie then. Content there in her small apartment, her space filled with items she had chosen. Smelly soaps and warm water from a tap. Kitty cookie jar overflowing with gingersnaps. Grandchildren jum
ping, jumping against the counter, knocking the kitten over, gorging on spilled treats. Then every Tuesday, reliably, Milton Berle. A man who made her laugh.
In her closet, Stella found her carpet bag, plucked it down from the shelf, laid it on her bed. She stared at it for just a minute, then unzipped, spread the mouth wide. And with no further hesitation, tucked the cookbook inside.
chapter thirteen
“I had a bad dream, Nanny.”
“Oh, my baby.” Stella rubbed Summer’s warm head, tucked the blanket up around her neck. “Tell Nan about it. Sometimes that helps.”
Summer’s cheeks were flushed, and she rolled onto her side. “In my dream, it was right dark, and I got out of bed, and came to the kitchen and I looked outside. I could see the moon through the door. The door weren’t there, that’s why.”
“Where was the door?”
“A man stealed it. I seen him running down the road. Door on his head.”
“On his head?”
“Yes, Nan. On his head.”
“That’s really something. I’d imagine that’d be real tough. Balance a big door and run.”
“Was only a dream, Nanny. It’s not real.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I weren’t scared. A door is just a good thing to have.”
“That it is.”
“Should I chased him?”
“What? Gone after him?”
“To get the door back.” Summer wound her fingers through Stella’s, palms touching.
“I wouldn’t even think of it.”
“What about the wind? Do you think it’d get in?”
“No, my maid. The wind I knows don’t like the indoors.”
“You’re right, Nanny.”
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