My brothers were worst of all, allowed to roam the bush to snare birds and rabbits, and praised for each scrawny thing they brought home. Smug looks when they walked out the door, leaving me piling dishes in the basin, or dragging out the heavy washtub. They pretended to break their teeth on the biscuits I made, complained about my lumpy darning, waving their stinking stockings under my nose. “Oh Iz, they’re just boys,” my mother said. “They’re just trying to get a rise out of you, and maybe they’d stop if it didn’t always work so well.” As if it was somehow my own fault. I knew that she didn’t understand a thing, and I sneered at the dress that she said she’d make over for me, nothing at all like Amy Wroth’s that I’d pointed out in church.
I filled page after page in the diary that had been my present for Christmas. Things I’d always helped my mother with had become unbearable chores and even her voice scratched at me as she explained about what to use instead, when the flour was low, or how to keep a seam running straight. When she talked about Isabella, about the quarantine station on the rocky island, I closed my ears and sent my mind away, and whenever I could
I slipped off to my place by the creek, though even it was not the same, not much more than a trickle that dry summer.
My brothers were her spies, sent to fetch me back to do more work, and they were spies on their own, always prowling through my tiny room. Sniggering as they recited sentences from my diary, and they were never punished enough to keep them from searching and finding it again. So I tucked it back under my straw mattress, after I had written:
My brothers are terrible snoops. I’m going to hide this in the cowshed, where they’ll never think to look. Way back in the darkest corner, under a mound of hay
.
I was so proud of my trick, my cleverness. Proud of the real hiding place I’d made, in a hole I’d scooped out at the base of a tree near the path to the stream. I wrapped it in a piece I cut from the new oilcloth my mother had set aside, and for all I know it’s still there. I was proud of my cleverness, and I may even have smiled to think of my brothers sneaking into the dark shed when everyone was asleep. Burrowing deep into the hay, with a lantern to give them light.
April
“Why is it always
poor
Jack?” Edie says, looking up from Aunt Clare’s letter. It’s a clear, cold morning and her colour is better, I think, even in the bright sunlight that reaches every corner of the room. Since she’s been ill Clare writes her every week with all the news from Washington, and tells her not to be discouraged, tells her that it will seem like forever but she’ll recover, just like Clare herself did.
Everyone will fuss about your heart
, she wrote once.
But don’t worry, you can still do anything you want to in your life
.
This time Clare writes about the new telescope at the Observatory, what a marvel it is, and how it would have fascinated poor Jack. “Well,” I say, and when I say that he was a friend of Aunt Clare’s, from the University, that he boarded with us on Pembroke Street, Edie rolls her eyes, the way only a young girl can; “I know that,” she says. “And I know he could do magic with numbers, and that he fell off the roof one time. But why do they always say
poor
Jack? Did Aunt Clare break his heart?”
I tell her that they weren’t friends like that, and while I’m thinking of what else I can say, I suddenly see Jack’s long face. His brown eyes and the curving lashes that made him look, when he was still, like some gentle and noble horse, one that would dip its head and take food from your flat hand, if you were patient enough. Though he was only really still when he was reading, and even then his right foot tapped and his thin fingers combed through his hair. Most of the time, now I’m thinking about horses, I would say Jack was more like a rough-coated colt, not yet used to its long, spindly legs. The way he could trip over the edge of the carpet, or over nothing at all, forever banging his knees and his head, and knocking things with a wildly gesturing arm.
Remembering that, I realize that there are all kinds of things I can tell Edie about Jack, that have nothing to do with how it was at the end. The numbers and symbols scrawled over his walls, the ragged fingernails that gouged skin from his own pale cheeks. It strikes me now as a terrible betrayal, the way I rarely think of him. The way I remember that part as if it’s the most important thing about him, as if it cancels out all the rest. Jack deserves to be remembered as he once was, the clever boy Aunt Clare sometimes called BG, for Boy Genius. So many
strange and wonderful ideas in his head, and so well-meaning that even Aunt Kez forgave the disasters, like the time he thought to surprise them by mending the kitchen pump with a rubber band and a lump of glue. “So nice to have a man around the house,” she said in her sharp way, but she was almost smiling as she swished the mop through the water that had pooled all over the floor.
My aunts used to say it was a good thing Jack and Clare were just pals, both of them so scattered they’d forget to eat, and so intent on their books that the house could fall down around them. He slept in what they called the peach room, though it was papered blue, but his things spilled out all over the kitchen and parlour, folders and papers and the special inks he liked, the cameras he was obsessed with one summer, and often parts of the bicycle he’d bought himself, that he was always taking apart, to see if he could make the wheels turn faster. One spring he and Clare borrowed a telescope from Professor Whitrow, and climbed through her window onto the low back roof. Jack slipped and rolled off, of course, landing flat on his back on the hawthorn bush below. Unbroken and grinning up at Clare, who was still standing above, surrounded by stars. “He gave his life for Science,” he said, when he caught his breath, and how they laughed.
These are the things I can tell Edie, and I tell her again about the magic shows, when Aunt Nan found pennies in the children’s hair, and slipped messages in and out of people’s pockets. Jack predicting the numbers we had whispered to each other by making us add and subtract, divide. I can tell her how much delight he took in everything, from one of his long, worked-out equations to the slow, steady opening of the
lilac clusters. The smooth heft of the old darning egg, when he took it from Aunt Clare’s hand. There are so many things I should have been remembering, instead of the way he began to sleep crammed underneath his bed, to keep his brain safe in the night. So much that was Jack, before the black eyes of birds began to glitter. Before the notes of their songs became threats, and the wind whispered warnings in his ears.
“What happened then?” Edie asks, and I tell her enough of the rest to make him
poor Jack
forever, even without the details I keep to myself. I tell her that he was taken away, but I don’t mention the spittle that flew from his mouth, the streak of blood left on the door frame, when the strong men dragged him through. I tell her that after some years he was well enough to go back to his father’s dark house; I tell her that he stayed there until he died, but I don’t say anything about the heavy chain, about the river.
The doctor says there’s a point where rest does more harm than good, and he tells Edie that she must do more, and stay up a little longer each day. He shakes his finger at her, in a way that tells her that he’s serious but not cross, and he calls her
young lady
, as he always has, but I’m struck by how it fits her now. Angus bought her an album to mount the loose photographs from her keepsake box, and she sits at the kitchen table with a shawl around her shoulders, a blanket over her knees, and shows me the things that had settled to the bottom. The twist of wire she’d practised with after Nan showed her how to pick a locked drawer. Two buttons and a small, pearly shell, a piece cut from an outgrown dress, and three brittle leaves, their significance lost, that she crumbles to dust between her hands.
I tell her that I had a collection like that, though I’d forgotten until I said the words. Not the notes or the photographs, but an old biscuit tin filled with feathers that had drifted from the sky and green river pebbles, a curved tooth my father said came from a bear. Long gone now, all of it, and nothing I’d have had any reason to keep, except for the notion that those things had once meant something to me. Like the plug of earth I walked on for so long, the cloth that wrapped it turned grubby and rank. It’s still tucked inside my mother’s battered boots, that I haven’t worn for years, but keep at the back of the wardrobe. Every time I see them I think of the story my father said his old aunt liked to tell, about Katie Crackernuts and the danced-out shoes. It terrified him, he said, the thought that his own feet could be made to do something he didn’t want at all.
Edie wants to try, so for the first time in months we eat together at the kitchen table. Potatoes that she has peeled, a bit of liver, though she hates it, to help her blood. She goes to sleep not long after, and I heat up the iron to press Angus a shirt for tomorrow, while he settles with the newspaper, reading out bits he thinks might interest me. Redcurrant bushes are on sale already, and there’s talk of a general strike in Toronto. Frank Ogilvie has had a letter from his brother, Ferd, about the bad wreck at Dryden. He was in one of the train cars that tumbled down the embankment, but not much hurt.
Have a roll? I’ll thay we did!
Angus says, reading out the last part in Ferd’s lisping voice.
We’re both tired too, and when I set the iron to cool he folds and smooths the paper. Stands and stretches, hooking his thumbs under his braces while he does it, and pulling them smoothly off his shoulders. It’s a thing I’ve seen him do so
often, but I’m always struck by the smoothness of that motion, the ease of his body, and I think again of our early time together and how we knew each other, something that only the two of us shared, that will always bind us.
In the quiet kitchen I check that the stove is well damped and fetch the blanket, unfold it to make my nest on the sofa. Angus says surely it’s time I moved back upstairs, but Edie’s still ill, might call out, and I can’t be that far away. He says, “Do you think I don’t worry too? Do you think I’d suggest it, if I wasn’t sure everything will be fine?” And suddenly we’re in an argument, the way that can happen, and I try to explain that I know it’s all I can do. That it’s my fault, only mine, and mine the debt that’s owed. We’re still speaking quietly, but our words come faster. “What fault,” he says, “what debt?” And I say something I didn’t intend to, about all he doesn’t know. About the black heart within me, the ugliness that squats inside.
Angus shakes his head and he sounds so tired when he asks if that’s how little I think of him. If I really think he’s a man so easily fooled. “Don’t you think I know you, know all of you?” he says, and though quietly spoken, his words are a smack that leaves me dizzy. It’s too much for me and I remember Pembroke Street, and the red wool unrolling. Another time when I had to question everything I thought I knew, everything I was. I come into his arms and in the dim light of our cooling kitchen he holds me up, and I feel his beating heart. Angus comforts me, like a mother would do, as if I’m someone who deserves it.
The days really are growing longer; forty-two minutes, Edie tells me today, from when she began to keep track. I wouldn’t have known the number, but there’s a different quality to the
afternoon light, and when Angus comes up our front walk he’s no longer surrounded by darkness. But it’s still very cold, the snow piled high, and that leaves me a little off balance, in a way I try to explain to Edie. Something to do with the seasons and how they struggle, the way the old one holds on against the new, not yet ready to let go. The uneasy way they exist together, for a time.
“Hmm, I’ll have to think about that,” Edie says, sounding just like Aunt Clare. Her forehead puckers, and with the way the shadows fall, she suddenly looks like an old woman and I’m swept by such a wave of sadness, not because she’ll one day be that old, but because I’ll never see it, will be gone long before. I blink hard and she’s my girl again. “Maybe it’s because the weather’s harder here,” she says. “If we lived in California, say, you wouldn’t have to be sad like that.”
“Maybe not,” I say, “though I imagine there are other things to be sad about, in California.”
When the letter came about Ben it was a shock, but my aunts said that in a strange way it was as if he’d died already. Robina wrote that there was no warning, that he was found at his desk, his forehead resting on an unfinished drawing. Neat, numbered wires and circuits, a solution to a problem that would remain incomplete. She wrote that of course the children would stay with her, that she loved them like her own, and that’s what they wanted; she said we were all welcome to visit any time, but somehow that never happened. Every year, around Christmastime, she sends a photograph, and we have watched the cousins grow, like strangers.
I don’t think of Ben very often, but sometimes, in the autumn, I remember the train, and all the things he taught me.
And I remember a time, when Kez was bashing on about my father, that Ben told her to shush. Then he asked had she never thought that maybe Ross was walking
toward
something that just happened to be away from all of them.
Edie is tired today, but she says it’s nothing like the way she felt, even a week ago. That’s a good thing, I know it is, but I’m afraid to let myself think too much about it. “Do you remember that day?” I say, looking at one of the pictures in her album, and she says, “Wasn’t it wonderful?” The first summer of the new century, when the big circus came, along with the wire walker called Jerome The Magnificent. He was going to cross high over the river, where it empties into the harbour, and there were still some in town who remembered when Harry Leslie did the same thing, so long ago. Angus told me that the old men who sat on the bench outside the station were in their glory, chins resting on their folded hands on top of their canes, as they watched the excursion trains roll in and relived their old excitement.
The photograph is one Robbie’s mother took; Angus said she gave it to him, because she thought I might like to have it. She must have been near us that day with her tripod and camera, taking photographs like she did at every town occasion, such a familiar sight I doubt I even noticed her, but I’m glad she thought to give Angus the picture. It’s taken close, just his head and Edie’s, tilted back as they stare up, with the same rapt look on their faces.