Caroline is reminded of the Tupper twins, girls she once knew from school, as she watches two of the smallest girls in the choir’s front row cover their mouths with their hands and whisper. Twins, possibly, but surely sisters; they have identical turned-up noses, pointed chins, and straight black hair with bangs that need trimming. They’re wearing the same navy trousers, blue T-shirts, and sashes as the rest of the girls but the uniforms of this pair look as though they’ve been dug out of a heap of dirty laundry at the foot of a bed. One of them points at the row of wheelchairs and they giggle behind their hands. Caroline is tempted to wag her finger at them. “Born in a barn,” her mother used to say whenever Caroline was rude or forgot her manners.
While Cara, the young aide, dressed her this morning, Caroline argued that she should be allowed to stay in her room. Why did she have to take part in these pointless social events, wheeled out into the common room and set out on display for everyone to gawk at like a heifer in an auction ring? Cara told her it would do her good; taking part in group activities stimulated Caroline’s brain. There’s nothing wrong with my brain, Caroline shot back. It was her broken-beyond-repair hip that had sentenced her to spend the rest of her days in this dreaded wheelchair.
A middle-aged woman, wearing the same royal-blue sash as the girls, taps two sticks together and the group starts to sing, slightly off-key, although one of the older girls in the back row has a lovely voice and is carrying the melody almost single-handedly. It’s a song Caroline remembers playing on the radio when she was a girl and, after a few bars, she feels her shoulders relax from where they’ve been hunched up under her ears. She’s thinking about a rainbow stretched across a bright blue sky when there’s a commotion near the kitchen. The man who lives in the room across the hall is paddling his hands at loose air while Scott, the orderly (although Caroline’s been told they don’t call male attendants that anymore), has his arms wrapped around him from behind, holding him an inch or two off the floor. The old man kicks out with one foot and knocks over a small table holding a pitcher of pink juice and it crashes to the floor. The sisters quit singing and stare and, one by one, the voices of the little choir trickle out as a woman hurries across the room and takes the old man by the hand. He shakes his head the way a defiant two-year-old might and, between Scott and the woman, is led away.
After what seems like an hour, the choir resumes its song and Caroline sighs. This is what her life has come to; nothing but all this endless waiting. She is wheeled out to wait for breakfast and lunch and supper. Wheeled out to wait for everyone to be assembled and settled before any activity begins. She’s been here a week and doesn’t know if she can survive the tedium of this place.
After her fall down the basement stairs, she’d spent eight weeks in the hospital, a horrid place, the food tasteless and her room so close to the nurses’ desk it was never quiet or dark enough to get a proper sleep without one of those small orange pills. She thought she would eventually return to her own house with the help of home care once her hip was healed (not that she wanted strangers popping in and out at all times of day) but she was told she would have to be panelled. Panelled? She was thinking of the wood-looking sheets Eldon had once nailed up on the porch walls when Dr. Boutreau told her she couldn’t go home. Her injury was too severe; she would never walk again.
The woman is back, speaking to a nurse by the overturned table while the janitor mops up the juice. “May I go back to my room?” Caroline asks Cara.
“You’re not enjoying the sing-song?”
“Oh, yes. The girls are very good, it’s just that I’m feeling unwell.”
Cara sighs. “You win.” She tosses the towel she’s holding onto a chair and takes Caroline back to her room, settling her into bed and handing her the remote control.
“Is there anything else you need right now?” Cara asks as she tucks an afghan over Caroline’s feet.
“Just some peace and quiet, and would you please close my door?”
When Cara is gone, Caroline switches on the television. There is never anything to watch during the day; talk shows with silly celebrities, or afternoon doctors discussing bowel issues or personal family matters that should be kept within the walls of one’s own home. Why would anyone willingly air such private details and bring such disgrace to their families? She turns off the television and leans back on her pillow, closing her eyes.
Life has changed so much since she was a girl. Young people marrying after the birth of their children or living together without walking down the aisle at all, for instance. No one bats an eye these days when a single girl gets herself in trouble. Adultery and divorce are so commonplace no one thinks anything of it. How different things were back then. Family secrets were kept in the shadows, elaborate stories woven to cover or protect the shame.
Don’t think. Don’t think. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both …’ She begins the Robert Frost poem in her mind.
Long ago, she learned she could replace her troubled thoughts by mentally reciting poetry, a trick she used most often on nights when Eldon still came to her bed, his presence there weighing on her conscience. But after Eldon died, her secret finally lay dormant. Without him around to remind her daily of her transgression, she was rarely disturbed by it. It was this upheaval, the move to this horrendous place with the clatter of trays in the dining room and the constant stream of people milling around that had brought everything spewing back to mind. Never a moment’s peace. A tear springs to her eye. Don’t think. Don’t agonize over such things. ‘And be one traveller, long I stood.’ I can’t bear it. Haven’t I suffered enough?
Her thoughts are a jumble as she tries to relive the summer day Becca went away. If she could just get it clear in her mind. It’s so long ago; she can scarcely remember. Was it Jack or Eldon or both, facing her down with such bitter hatred in their eyes? Bilyk or Webb? Who blamed her more?
Outside of her room, she hears wheelchairs rolling down the hall as Cara and the other aides return her new neighbours to their rooms. All of them, like me, without much use left for this world, she thinks. Sunny Haven: the last home for all of us as we wait to die. She closes her eyes. She must find her peace soon before it’s her time, but how will she do it?
Perhaps if she goes back to the beginning and comes out at the end of that fateful day she might uncover some clue she has missed. If she replays each detail of those long-ago years in her mind, she might remember. She must bring them all back, starting with her parents; her mother, who she loved beyond measure, and her demanding father, to whom she was bound. And Eldon Webb, who she met on a blustery spring day.
She should have been studying for a history exam but she was sitting at the kitchen table, lingering over a page in the Eaton’s catalogue, admiring smart and stylish spring coats — a red, double-breasted one with silver buttons in particular — when her mother turned down the radio and peered out the window into the swirling snow. “Henry,” she said to Caroline’s father. “Someone’s coming down the lane. Who would venture out on a day like this?”
Caroline joined her mother at the window. A man wearing a long, tan-coloured coat with the collar pulled up over his ears leaned into the wind as he ploughed his way toward the house through snow halfway to his knees. The wind had picked up considerably in the last hour — the snow drifted and swirled — and Caroline could just make out the dark shape of the truck he’d driven off the lane by the mailbox next to the road.
Her father had been reading the Manitoba Co-operator, commenting on the market report, which he did every Sunday afternoon. He was a man who believed in hard work, sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and he thought God intended folks to rest on the seventh day like it said in the Bible, although he, himself, didn’t attend services at St. Paul’s Anglican Church with Caroline and her mother. “That’ll be Eldon Webb,” he said, folding the paper and tossing it into a cardboard box he kept next to his chair. He made no effort to move, to look out and see where Eldon had driven off the road or to find his boots and put on his winter parka so he could head out and start up the tractor to pull Eldon’s truck out of the ditch.
“And how would you know that, settin’ there?” Caroline’s mother took the tea towel draped over her arm and swiped at the steamy window again to take another look. “The fool’s not even wearing a hat,” she said, shaking her head.
“I know it because he said he’d stop by one of these days. Said he had something he wanted to talk to me about.”
“Picked a fine time to drop by, in the middle of a bloody snowstorm. What’s he doing coming ’round here?”
“We got business and such to discuss, if you think you need to know.”
“Did you forget about the last time you crossed paths with those Webbs? Old Elvina waving her arms, complaining about that young bull you sold them. You’re just asking for trouble if you plan on selling them any of our stock again.”
“You just don’t worry yourself about what I’m plannin’,” Caroline’s father said, getting up from his chair. He went to the door and threw it wide open before Eldon had a chance to knock. A blast of frigid air and the fresh, crisp smell of newly fallen snow pressed in on the heels of the tall stranger.
“Henry. Mrs. McPhee,” Eldon said. His ears were pink from the cold and the top of his thinning red hair was dusted with feathery snowflakes the size of dimes. He nodded at Caroline and said, “Hello, Caroline,” which surprised her. She’d never met him before, though she’d seen him around town and passing by on the road, barely lifting one finger from the steering wheel to wave. She hadn’t expected him to even know her name. Fine wrinkles fanned out from his pale blue eyes and he had a weak, inconsequential chin, despite the confident way he held his head. He turned back to Caroline’s father. “It’s like driving blind out there. Couldn’t see where the lane was at all and steered my truck straight into the ditch there. Not the first impression I’d hoped to make.”
He laughed and Caroline’s father shook his hand and invited him in. Right away, Caroline’s father started in on a story about an April blizzard just like this one when he was a boy, a tale Caroline had heard before — how he’d found three newborn calves, dead, all twelve legs tangled together, piled up against a fence when the snow melted — so she turned and was on her way up to her room to study when her father called out. “Caroline, don’t run off. Come back here and cut us a piece of that cake you baked yesterday.”
Caroline glanced at her mother, who had actually baked the lemon pound cake. Her mother pursed her lips in that angry way she had whenever Caroline’s father said or did some fool thing that wasn’t worth wasting her breath on. Her mother tipped her head toward the fancy covered cake plate and yanked open a drawer, rifling through the ladles and wooden spoons until she found a serrated knife and set it down on the counter. “First you’d best put the kettle on. We’ll be needing some tea.”
Caroline filled the kettle and put it to boil, aware all the while of Eldon watching her every move. She was conscious of her hair; the careless way she’d bunched it together and tied it into a ponytail with a frayed ribbon that morning without even brushing it when she’d found out they weren’t going to church because of the storm. He was making her feel uneasy, off-kilter, the way she felt when she was called to the blackboard at school by Mr. Nott and given a difficult mathematics question to solve. She pictured herself standing in front of the class, chalk in hand, with no idea where to begin. Picking up the knife, she turned it over and looked at it hopelessly.
“Just cut four pieces,” her mother said, not unkindly, and handed her four china plates. “Where is the blasted teapot?” she muttered under her breath, flinging open the breadbox and every cupboard door before she finally located the teapot next to the drinking-water pail where it always sat.
Caroline cut the cake and placed Eldon’s plate in front of him. He reached for it and his hand, unusually clean for a farmer, with a palm smooth as a tabletop, brushed her arm. “How’s school, Caroline? Only a few months to go, eh?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll be glad when it’s over and summer holidays are here.”
“All right? It’s better than all right. She won’t say, but she walks away with all sorts of awards each year for high marks and such,” her father said, with the same enthusiasm he had when he talked about the brand new Farmall tractor parked out in the shed.
“Dad,” Caroline said, looking down at her plate. “Last year I got an award for history. It’s Susan who gets all the awards.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, missy. Our Caroline’s one smart cookie, isn’t she, Mother?”
Caroline’s mother stood at the sink, eating her cake standing up the way she always ate her dessert. “I will say she’s got a brain in her head, which is more than some people,” she said.
Caroline’s father took a huge gulp of tea then shifted the conversation to the market outlook for wheat until they were finished.
“That was a fine cake, Caroline,” Eldon said as he was putting on his coat. Her father had already gone to start up the tractor and her mother was clattering plates into the enamel dishpan behind them. “Maybe I’ll stop by again, if that’s all right with you.”
Caroline didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t heard her father and Eldon discuss any sort of business at the table but perhaps they hadn’t gotten around to talking about the purchase of bulls or yearling heifers. She wasn’t sure why he needed her approval to come back and speak to her father.
As soon as Eldon was out the door her mother said, “You should have said no, Caroline. ‘No, it’s not all right with me.’” She dumped the tea leaves into the slop pail under the sink and rinsed out the pot. “I don’t want that man coming ’round. Just wait until your father comes back. By God, he’ll hear what I think about Eldon Webb sniffing ’round here.” She pumped a splash of water into the dishpan, added some hot water from the kettle and took a deep breath. She turned, calmer now, and put her hands on Caroline’s shoulders. “I’ll wash up these plates. You go on up to your room and study for that test. I don’t care, one way or another, ’bout any awards, but you will graduate and head off to the city this fall like we talked about.”
Later, after Caroline closed her notebook and was preparing for bed, she heard the rising swell of her mother’s voice coming from the kitchen and the low rumble of her father’s voice as he answered. He had returned to the house after pulling Eldon out of the ditch, stamping snow off his boots and raving about the new truck Eldon had just bought at Hubley Ford. Her mother just sat there at the table with one of his grey work socks stretched over a jar, darning a hole in its heel, and didn’t say a word, not about Eldon or his truck or any other thing. Caroline’s father said, “Well, that’s that, then,” and there was nothing but stony silence between them for the rest of the afternoon and all through the evening — the only sounds the sizzle of frying pork, the rustle of newspaper pages, the scraping of forks against plates during supper. So when Caroline heard her parents begin to speak, she crept out of her room to the top of the dark stairs and crouched there to listen.
“What were you thinking, Henry? What are you up to?”
“Leave it alone, Violet. It’s none of your concern.”
“If Caroline’s not my concern, then what is? Thirty-four years it’s been without a word from me, settin’ back and letting you take the reins, making all the choices for this farm, this life we set out on together. Settin’ there all those years ago, quiet as a fence post, when you waltzed into the bank and borrowed money to buy Beulah’s land, without the thought even entering your skull that maybe you shoulda asked my opinion. And it grieved me when you lost it, and to William Webb, no less, but I never said a thing. I kept my mouth shut, even though I knew better, when you sowed the oats that year ahead of all the neighbours so’s it froze and wasted all that seed. But I’ll be damned if you won’t hear what I have to say when it comes to my own daughter.”
A chair scraped across the floor.
“Don’t you go running off to the barn like you do. I want an answer. What was Eldon Webb doing here? And don’t start up with one of your fancy tales.”
“Bumped into him in town yesterday, is all. And I thought maybe, instead of him sittin’ up there in that big house on a Sunday afternoon, he might want to come by for a cuppa coffee.”
A cupboard door slammed. “He can have coffee with that hoity-toity mother of his, the two of them, settin’ there in that fancy house with their noses stuck up in the air, thinking they’re better than the rest of us. When we all know she grew up poor as a church mouse, like we all did. Married for money, and flauntin’ it over all the rest of us.”
“What’s it gonna hurt? Him meetin’ Caroline? She’s as pretty as any other girl in Ross Prairie, and just as smart.”
“I knew you were trotting her out for a reason, you old fool. Have I been talking to the barn door these last couple years? She’s decided to head off to work in the city this fall whether you like it or not. She wants an education. If you’d set aside money every year like I asked, she’d be able to start class with Susan in September instead of having to wait until she’s saved up enough on her own.”
“A girl her age needs a husband. With land. Lots of it. Not more schoolin’.”
“What’s a girl to do without schooling? Where did that get me? Bound to this farm tighter than twine to a spool, that’s where. Working harder than any hired hand ever did till Caroline came along. Nothing to show for it but raw knuckles and an aching back.” A lid clanked forcefully on a pan.
“I never made you stay. You could’ve set off down that road any time you cared to.”
“And gone where?” Her mother’s voice was trembling now. “With nothing more than the shirt on my own back?”
“That’s the trouble with you. You were never happy. Not with this farm or any other damn thing I ever did.” The screen door hit the wall then the big door slammed.
“You’re wrong about that. I got Caroline, didn’t I? The only damn thing you ever did right!” Caroline’s mother called after him.
Soon the light would come on in the barn like it always did after one of her parents’ late-night arguments. When the weather was fair, her father would often stay there all night, sleeping in the straw under a worn wool blanket. Their battles were fierce but brief, moving in like late-summer thunderstorms, over quickly after a few harsh words. Caroline wondered if everyone’s parents fought that way. She couldn’t imagine her friend Susan’s parents saying the hurtful things her parents shouted to one another. She had spent enough time at the Wawryks’ place, all those noisy brothers and sisters — eight others besides Susan — and her jolly mother with a baby in her arms as long as Caroline had known her. When Susan’s father came in from the dairy barn, long after the children had been fed, he would kiss Susan’s mother on the cheek and say, “How’s my Missus?” And she would blush and hand him a child and set out the dinner plate she’d kept warm for him in the oven.
The next day at school, Caroline found Alice and Susan waiting for her beside the water fountain. Lurking nearby were the Tupper twins, the worst gossips at school. Caroline put her arms around her friends’ shoulders and they huddled, heads together, while she told them about Eldon’s visit.
“You’re so lucky!” Alice said, popping up her head and stepping back.
“Lucky?” Caroline asked. “What’s so lucky about that?”
“He is the most eligible bachelor in Ross Prairie. A real catch.” Alice, with her dowdy dresses and mousy hair, was plain as a paper bag. She was always talking about boys and her main ambition in life seemed to be securing a boyfriend for herself. “Any girl would give her right arm to be married to him.”
“Who’s talking about marriage?” Caroline grabbed Alice’s arm and steered her away from the eavesdropping Tupper twins and down the hallway toward their classroom.
“And how old is he?” Susan asked, following along. “I’ve heard my Aunt Jane mention him. They went to school together. He has to be in his thirties.”
“Geez Louise,” Alice said as they waited outside their classroom for the bell to ring. “He’s obviously trying to court you, Caroline. You two both need to learn a thing or two about men.”
Caroline rolled her eyes. As if Alice was such an expert. She lived under the strict thumb of her mother and wasn’t allowed to stay out past eight o’clock, even on weekends. She’d never even had a boyfriend. Not that Caroline had much experience. She’d only ever dated one boy, Robby Mathers, when she was in grade ten. He was a town boy, cheeky and loud, but he was good-looking with that cleft in his chin like Kirk Douglas, so she’d agreed to go to a dance with him. But once he asked her to go steady, he changed, or else she hadn’t noticed his annoying habits before. She disliked the way he acted, showing off in front of the other boys, tripping poor Gregory Porter and knocking him around, bragging about his father’s new car, as though that might impress her. They’d broken up after two months.
“He talked to my father most of the time and we had cake, for goodness’ sake,” Caroline said. The Tupper twins were skulking behind them again so she dropped her voice. “I’m not marrying the man.”
“But let’s just say you did,” Alice continued. Caroline could tell she was enjoying the fantasy, imagining herself, perhaps, in Caroline’s shoes. “If you did, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. His mother never does. They have a housekeeper and a hired man to do the outside chores. And you could take the train to Winnipeg like Mrs. Webb does and stay at the Fort Garry Hotel and buy all your clothes at Eaton’s or Hudson’s Bay. Can you imagine never wearing another homemade dress and having all those shoes?”
The bell rang and Caroline linked her arm with Susan’s as they proceeded to assembly. “I’m not the least bit interested in dating him,” she said. “I’m going to the city with Susan in September like we planned. I’m going to work in an office or a department store while she’s in class at United College.” She glanced over her shoulder at the Tupper twins. “We’re leaving this boring little town for bigger and better things, aren’t we, Susan? And we’re never coming back.”
It was the middle of May and the sun lingered a few extra minutes each day, warming the earth. Tractors and drills had been rolling for a couple of weeks and Caroline’s father was keeping long hours, trying to finish sowing the wheat by Victoria Day.
Caroline noticed the clothesline as she walked down the lane after the school van dropped her off, the careless way her mother had hung out the laundry — everything dangling willy-nilly, flapping towels mixed here and there among Caroline’s blouses and her mother’s wide skirts, her father’s bibbed overalls brushing the grass next to short red-toed socks and two sets of pillow cases, not a one of them paired. A rake leaned against the clothesline pole, another job unfinished, and the wind whipped the wispy grass and crumbled leaves from a pile close to the house, scattering them back over the yard.
Old Smoky, the grain truck, its front fender tacked on with a twist of baling wire, was parked next to the house. It was her mother’s job to drive the old relic out to the fields, hauling whatever seed was needed to fill up the drill, matching Henry’s long hours, although lately she’d complained about the way her arms ached at the end of the day from wrestling with the steering wheel, holding Old Smoky to the road.
Caroline’s old Lab, Lady, shaggy winter coat not yet completely gone, loped up and bunted her on the shin. “Hiya, girl,” Caroline said, and reached down to scratch her under the chin.
Caroline opened the back door and dropped her books on the floor. The aroma of beef stew wafted through the kitchen from a covered pot simmering on the stove. The morning wash water, with its curdly film, still stood in a pail by the door and the sink was piled with unwashed dishes and pots. Half of a fat turnip, speared with a knife, sat in the middle of the otherwise empty table like a ghoulish centrepiece. There was no sound except the ticking clock and an occasional pop from the dying embers in the stove.
“Mum?” Her mother’s workboots sat on the rug next to the door, her red flowered kerchief draped over a wooden chair. “Are you here?”
From upstairs, the familiar creak of the floorboard outside her parents’ room and then the soft tread of her mother’s feet on the stairs. She came around the corner, buttoning her blouse. Her hair — whiter than it had seemed just last week — was tousled, her eyes puffy from sleep.
“Are you home already?” she said, looking up at the clock. “I was supposed to have a box load of wheat seed at the Maxwell quarter by four thirty.” She took her faded jacket from a hook by the door, put it on, and tied the red kerchief over her hair. “Make dumplings for the stew and leave the rest of this mess. I’ll get to it later.” She stepped into her boots, about to head out the door. “If I’m not back in an hour, come looking for me. Smoky’s been acting up more than usual these last couple days and I don’t need to be settin’ somewhere, stranded on an old dirt road, when there’s so much work to do.”
A minute later, the truck roared out of the yard and Caroline glanced at the clock, then checked the stew. Her mother had hurriedly scratched out her dumpling recipe on an envelope and left it next to the breadbox. Caroline rarely saw her mother read a recipe; her cookbooks sat untouched on a shelf. She made buns and bread, white and chocolate and coconut cakes, oatmeal cookies and buttermilk muffins straight from her head, baking and cooking in the same easy way Mrs. Bell, the music teacher, sat down at the piano and played any tune. Caroline picked up the envelope and was headed to the pantry for the flour bin when she heard Lady bark. She peered out the window over the kitchen sink. A shiny blue truck bounced across the rutted yard and stopped by the house. During hard spring rains, her father — complaining about his arthritic hip and the time it took him to pick his way across the sloppy yard — often drove the tractor right up to the back door when he came in for meals, even though her mother nagged him often enough about the deep ruts it left. She had salvaged half a dozen old two-by-fours from the junk pile and thrown them over the ruts to keep mud from tracking in. Now, Eldon Webb carefully made his way across the planks, balancing with his arms outstretched, one foot in front of the other, even though the ground was perfectly dry and he could have walked right up to the house alongside her mother’s flower bed if he wanted to.
Lady guarded the door, a low growl in her throat, while Caroline watched through the screen as Eldon stood outside and doffed his hat. His face was sunburned from long hours on the tractor but the broad expanse of his forehead under his receding hairline was glaringly white and it occurred to Caroline how smooth and unlined, how free of worry, it was. He wore smartly pressed navy trousers and a cream-coloured shirt with a pale blue hanky tucked in the pocket. Even though it was a regular workday, it looked like he was headed out for a night on the town.
“Afternoon, Caroline.”
“My father’s not home,” she said through the screen, not bothering to open the door. “He’s sowing wheat at the old Maxwell place.”
“I’m not here to see your father,” Eldon said. “Mind if I come in?”
Eldon stayed for an hour and Caroline didn’t get the dumplings made. After he left, she rushed out of the house, still in her school clothes, and raced down the country road in the family Buick, bumping over washboard and ruts, toward Maxwell’s farm. She had just accepted an invitation to attend a concert with Eldon at the United Church. A string quartet from the city was coming to Ross Prairie — Maisie Stuart’s grandson played the viola — on May 24. A busy time with farmers still in the fields, Caroline thought as she swerved to miss a barking dog. She had hesitated in answering him at first, knowing what her mother would have to say, but she’d kept looking at the clock, minutes ticking by, and she couldn’t stop thinking about the unmade dumplings and her mother stuck along some back road in Old Smoky. Eldon wasn’t showing any sign of leaving even though she’d served him two glasses of iced tea, so she finally agreed to go to the concert with him to get him out the door.
She saw her mother in the distance at the side of the road, waving her kerchief above her head, as though Caroline might not see Old Smoky pulled off the road, steam or smoke or both curling up from under the hood.
Her mother’s hands were coated with sticky black grease and the smell of burnt rubber hung in the air. “Tried to get the belt off myself but I can’t do it. I’ll need a wrench or we might just have to come back with a chain and tow Old Smoky home. What took you so long anyway?”
Caroline could only imagine what her mother would say if she knew she’d been sitting in the kitchen, chatting with Eldon Webb about the crops he’d sown and the pleasant spring weather. Her mother looked so tired, Caroline didn’t have the heart to tell her just yet that the dumplings weren’t made, and she decided to wait until the time was right, whenever that might be, to tell her about her upcoming date.
Caroline was a bundle of nerves, getting ready. Why had she ever agreed to go to the concert with Eldon? She could have said she wasn’t interested or had an important test to study for the next day. Why couldn’t she just speak her mind and not worry so much about other people’s feelings or what they thought of her? Susan, with her bright, shiny words, never held back. She came out and said whatever was on the tip of her tongue, just as she had when Caroline told her she was going to the concert with Eldon. “It’s preposterous. Simply ridiculous that you consented to such a thing without giving it more thought,” she’d said.
Her mother’s face had grown stony and cold when Caroline finally told her. “He’s too old for you,” she said. She was standing at the sink, hands immersed to the wrists in a murky bucket of water.
“What’s it going to hurt, just this once?”
“I know you might be impressed with his fancy new truck and the sharp way he dresses,” her mother said, pointing a paring knife at her, “but there’s something about him; those shifty eyes that don’t seem to look right at you when he’s talking, like he’s scheming or thinking about some way to get the best of you even while he’s standing right there in front of you. He might have your father fooled, but those Webbs, they can’t pull anything over on me,” she had said, and carried on peeling potatoes.
Caroline hadn’t mentioned it to her father (she couldn’t tell him about something as personal as a date with a man) but she assumed her mother must have, because he was in high spirits at suppertime, as chipper as he’d been in weeks, eyes shining as he talked a mile a minute about the new truck he was hoping to buy.
Caroline had two different outfits laid out on the bed. She first tried on a navy skirt with a soft pink blouse but it seemed frumpish, like something Alice might wear, so next she chose a sleeveless mint-green dress that showed off her curves, although she worried it might be too early in the season for a sundress.
She heard the creak of the stairs and turned to see her mother leaning against the doorway. She’d lost weight, and Caroline wondered why she hadn’t noticed it until now. Her ample bosom had nearly disappeared and the bodice of her blue housedress was puckered in folds from the apron strings cinched tightly around her waist. “Need some help?”
“I can’t decide what to wear.”
“I’d put you in a burlap bag if it meant Eldon Webb would lose interest in you.”
Caroline slipped into the dress and lifted her hair while her mother fastened the covered buttons. She sat at her vanity table in front of the mirror and her mother picked up a brush and pulled it through Caroline’s thick golden hair.
“You look tired, Mum. Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m no spring chicken, Caroline. I’m slowing down. Can’t do what I used to.”
“You’re not old,” Caroline said, reaching back to touch her mother’s hand.
“It wasn’t fair to you, growing up with parents as worn out as a pair of old shoes. I hope you have your children when you’re young, like I wish I could have done.” Caroline’s parents had been married for sixteen years before she was born, the first and only time her mother had carried a child. She squeezed Caroline’s shoulder. “But not too young, mind you. Don’t you be letting Eldon Webb get too close now,” she warned.
Caroline laughed. “I’ve already told you I don’t think of him in that way. But he seems nice enough.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. He’s a sweet talker and they’re the ones you have to watch out for. They know exactly what to say to sweep a young girl off her feet. He’s two-faced like his mother, sweet and syrupy when they’ve got you face to face but just as likely to knock you flat on your arse once your back’s turned. Before you know it, September will be here and you’ll be off to start a new life. Don’t you be letting Eldon Webb turn your head and change your plans.”
“Oh, Mum.” Caroline grasped her mother’s wrist. “I’m not about to let that happen. Besides, Susan would kill me.” She shook her head and let her hair settle in waves on her shoulders.
“Besides, there’s something I need to tell you about the Webbs,” Caroline’s mother said, resuming her brushing. “Eldon was engaged once, about ten years ago. A city girl, someone he met when he went to agricultural college after high school.”
Caroline caught her mother’s eye in the mirror. “Who was she?”
“I don’t know if I ever knew her name or heard it mentioned. That’s the way the Webbs are. A secretive bunch. They always have been. Elvina’s slick as ice, the way she controls talk ’round town, making up tales herself and dropping little bits off like bread crumbs here and there, changing how folks think. And Eldon’s no better. Making themselves out to be something they’re not.”
Caroline twisted around on the stool to look at her mother. “What happened to the girl?”
“There was a June wedding planned at a ballroom in a fancy city hotel but in early spring it was called off. Folks wondered why, o’ course, and Elvina was acting as though there’d never been an engagement, so that busybody Millie Tupper came right out and asked her ’bout it one day in the post office. The girl wasn’t suited to life on a farm, Elvina said, so Eldon thought it best to let her go.” She lifted one eyebrow skeptically.
“Did people believe that?”
“There was talk, o’ course. Most folks, me included, believed it was the girl who dumped Eldon. I heard it was because she didn’t care for the way Elvina always had her nose in his business, while others said it was something about Eldon himself that scared the girl off.”
Caroline turned back to the mirror and twisted open a tube of lipstick. “You don’t have to worry.” She applied a coat to her lips. “I’m going to this one concert and that will be the end of it.”
“You know tongues will start wagging the moment you walk into that church with him. Millie Tupper will have a story spread by the time the coffee’s perked and, the next thing you know, folks’ll be saying you two are planning a walk down the aisle.”
Caroline stood and pecked her mother on the cheek. “Mum, it would be a frosty Friday before I’d even agree to another date, never mind letting him put a ring on my finger. I’ve got my whole life stretched out ahead of me, waiting for me to make my own way.”
“And a sad day that’ll be when we send you off.” Her voice cracked and she looked down at her shoes.
“Oh, Mum. Let’s not talk about that day yet. Once my final exams are over we’ll have the whole summer to spend together. Just me and you.” Caroline turned and fumbled through a drawer so her mother wouldn’t see her eyes welling up. “Where’s that yellow ribbon? Could you help me tie it in my hair?”
Millie Tupper was seated in the church foyer when Caroline and Eldon arrived. “Why, Eldon Webb and young Caroline McPhee!” she said as she handed Eldon a program and eyed his hand hovering at Caroline’s waist, barely touching her.
He removed two tickets from his shirt pocket and handed them to Millie. “Judging from all the cars out there, it looks like it’s a full house.”
“Don’t you worry about a thing. I’m sure your mother’s saved you the best seats, up at the front where you always sit. Enjoy the show, you two.” Millie gave Eldon a conspiratorial wink and turned to the next person in line.
Caroline spotted Nan and Fran Tupper, their necks craned and heads swivelled. They bent their heads together, whispering to one another as Eldon and Caroline made their way past the crammed pews. Four young musicians dressed in black pants and white shirts sat in chairs on the chancel tuning their instruments, plucking strings and turning keys as the discordant sounds filled the church above the low drone of voices.
Eldon took Caroline’s elbow and steered her toward the pew at the front of the church. “There’s Mother.”
Mrs. Webb, wearing a purple flowered dress with a full skirt, stood in the aisle, fanning herself with a program. Caroline had seen her before, in Pipers’ store selecting a roast from the butcher’s counter or driving her Cadillac slowly down Main Street, but she had never actually met or spoken to her. Why hadn’t Eldon mentioned his mother would be joining them for the concert?
“Here you are, Eldon. Finally. I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind about coming at all. I can’t say I’d blame you, it’s so terribly hot in here. Even with the door open, there’s absolutely no breeze.” She flapped the program in front of her flushed face, looking as wilted as the oversized satin rose that drooped over her ear from her small pink hat.
“Mother, this is Caroline McPhee,” Eldon said.
“I know who she is,” Mrs. Webb said, limply shaking Caroline’s hand before turning and abruptly squeezing into the pew. Eldon slid in after her and Caroline took her place at the end of the pew on the aisle.
Mrs. Webb removed a lace-edged handkerchief from her patent-leather handbag and dabbed her glistening forehead. “Eldon, why don’t you ask Millie or whoever’s in charge here to open a window or two? Have they no concern at all about our comfort?”
Eldon stepped over Caroline and hurried off to the back of the church as the young minister, who didn’t look much older than one of Caroline’s grade-twelve classmates, spoke to the cellist before approaching the lectern, trying to get the audience’s attention.
“Do you like classical music?” Mrs. Webb asked, turning to Caroline as she fiddled with one of the red gems dangling from her ear.
Caroline listened to the latest radio hits on Saturday evenings. Sometimes, when the girls were over, they pushed aside the chairs and table and jived, Susan and Alice pairing up, and Caroline coaxing her mother away from her work to be her dance partner. They would swivel their hips and twirl and laugh, sliding and swirling across her mother’s freshly waxed kitchen floor.
Mrs. Webb looked at her expectantly, waiting for her reply, but luckily Eldon was back, standing in the aisle, and Caroline didn’t have to admit she never listened to classical music. Marvin Tupper tugged at a hook at the top of an arched window with a long-handled stick while the minister tapped at the lectern with a pencil to get their attention. Millie Tupper bellowed, “Quiet!” from somewhere behind them and the chatter died as Eldon sat down beside Caroline and she slid closer to his mother. The quartet began its first piece, a haunting melody by Brahms in C minor.
Caroline closed her eyes, pleased at the way the music painted vivid, moving pictures in her mind and she wondered if this was what Brahms had intended; for a girl like her, sitting in a church hundreds of years later, to be reminded of two birds, soaring in wide, languid circles through a pale blue sky. She’d once seen two hawks in flight above one of her father’s fields. They dipped and rolled beneath the clouds — at play, she thought — until the larger bird pitched steeply then climbed through the sky again, higher and higher, as though pursuing the smaller, more vulnerable bird. He dove upon it from above and, together, talons clasped, they plummeted in a spiralling crescendo toward the earth until, at the last moment, they’d released one another and swooped back up into the sky.
She opened her eyes and glanced at Eldon. He drummed his fingers on his knee, the tapping out of time with the music. He was frowning — there was a deep pucker between his brows — and it made Caroline wonder what he was thinking about. He seemed to have no real interest in the music at all. After a few shorter numbers the audience applauded politely while the musicians took their final bow.
“Just wonderful, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Webb said, standing in the aisle. “We should hurry downstairs so we’re at the front of the coffee line. I noticed Maisie Stuart carrying a plate of her raisin tarts when you dropped me off, Eldon. I know they’re your favourite.”
“I don’t think we’ll be coming down for coffee,” Eldon said. “Caroline needs to be home by nine thirty.”
“Why, it’s just eight o’clock,” she said, frowning at him. “Do you need to go just yet? And how am I to get home if you leave now?”
“I’ve asked the Cornforths to give you a ride.”
“Very well, then. I see you have this all arranged. You might have had the courtesy to tell me about it before the concert.” Mrs. Webb huffed and turned to glare at Caroline.
Caroline felt herself blush. “It is early.” She turned to Eldon. “There’s time to have coffee first if you’d like.”
“What I’d like,” Eldon said, leaning in close so his mother couldn’t hear, “is to take you for a short drive. There’s something I want to show you.”
On their way out of town, Caroline reached up and pulled the ribbon from her hair. The unmistakable smell of the end of a blistering hot day — a lazy scent that reminded her of summer holidays — swept through the open windows. Eldon had something to say about every one of his fields they passed, explaining what type of crop he’d planted or telling her how he or his father had come to own that specific piece of land. Caroline wasn’t particularly interested. What did she care if Eldon’s father had won a hundred and sixty acres of scrub trees from Walter Nychuk in a poker game? They turned down another gravel road then slowed and rolled up to the Webbs’ huge brick house. The front yard was dotted with a number of flower beds, splashed with the crimson red and vibrant yellow of dozens of tulips. A man working in a bed nearest to the road leaned on his spade and waved when they drove by.
They stopped in the yard and Eldon came around to open her door. “I’d like to show you where I live.”
With none of their own land nearby and her school van on a different route, Caroline had only been past the Webb house a few times. She remembered the size of it because her mother had once commented that Elvina Webb might lose a few pounds if she had to hustle around that big house and do the cleaning herself.
Instead of walking in through the kitchen door like Caroline’s family did at home, Eldon led her into a foyer through a massive front door with a stained glass inset as fancy as one of the windows at church. The foyer was bigger than the McPhees’ living room with hardwood floors and a curved staircase off to one side. Through an arched doorway to the left was a sitting room. Every piece of furniture was polished to a gleaming shine.
“Have a seat,” Eldon said. “I’ll get us something to drink.”
Caroline didn’t feel right being alone with him in this big house without his mother or anyone else there but she settled in on a cream-coloured chesterfield with a tufted back. Oil portraits of a younger Eldon and his parents hung on the wall and she wondered why they’d had their pictures painted, why they wouldn’t have just gone to a studio to have their photos taken like everyone else.
When Eldon returned with two glasses of red wine, Caroline wanted to tell him she didn’t drink wine, but she took it anyway and let him clink their glasses together. “To a wonderful evening,” he said, which surprised her. She didn’t think he’d enjoyed the concert at all.
“So, what do you think of it?” Eldon leaned back on the chesterfield next to her and took a long sip.
She thought he was referring to the wine so she said, “It’s not very sweet,” and he tipped his head back and laughed. “I meant the house. What do you think of my house?”
“I thought this was your mother’s house.” Again, she’d said something without thinking, and she blushed when he chuckled.
“This house is meant to be mine someday,” Eldon said, growing serious. “My mother keeps saying all these stairs are getting to be too much for her and she’d like a house in town.”
“So why doesn’t she move?”
“We’re very close, my mother and I. You must know what it’s like to be an only child. She has my best interest in mind and she’s always said she won’t leave until I’m married and settled, with a wife and a family of my own.”
As a clock began to chime somewhere behind the stairs, it occurred to Caroline that Eldon might have had a family by now — a son nearly reaching his shoulder and maybe a little red-haired girl — if his engagement hadn’t been broken off all those years ago.
“Have you thought about it?” Eldon asked.
“Thought about what?” The last of the chimes echoed through the empty house.
“Becoming a wife. Starting a family.”
“Oh, eventually, I suppose. But I want to see a bit of the world first before I do that. There are so many things I’d like to do — dip my feet in an ocean, see Buckingham Palace, tour the ruins of Pompeii. And go to college, work at doing something I love. I want to make my own way before I become a wife and a mother.”
Eldon frowned. “Farm girls didn’t have such notions when I was in high school. Few of them even finished school.”
Caroline felt her face grow hot. What was wrong with wanting a bit of a life before settling down to the same endless routine as most girls? “I’m not the only who thinks that way,” she said. “Take my friend, Susan, for instance. She wants to be a linguist, or a professor, or the editor of a publishing house. I’d be happy enough to be a teacher working in a small town or even a country school, if it came to that.”
Of course, there were many girls, like Alice, who didn’t even consider other possibilities. They were content to finish school and just as quickly slip into a white dress and go straight from their father’s house to a pulpit, coming out the church door as some man’s wife, without knowing who they really were, or what it was that mattered to them. Without taking any time at all to listen to the singing in their own hearts. But that would never be enough for Caroline.
“Married life worked well enough for my mother and yours,” Eldon said.
Isn’t it wonderful that it’s 1954 and, in this day and age, not all girls want to do what their mothers did? She could see there was no sense explaining things to Eldon. He was just like her father; one foot still rooted in the first half of the century with his outdated ideas. She wanted to tell him so, but what was the point? Instead, she put her empty glass on the small side table, smiled politely and asked if it was possible for him to please drive her home; it was getting late and tomorrow was a school day.