August, 1845
Born half-dead, so I’ve been told. Not a single tearless cry. Pulled me out backwards, strangling on my mother. Then lifted me into the light for a breath.
Took one in. So here I am.
Ghastly and purple: some flower in ruin. Or a big withered beet. Or a corpse flower: yes. Passed down to my mother who held me aloft to the various shades in the room.
Little girls forget, see nothing. This was not the case with me. For here is my mother, a young woman then. Middle of her dress undone. One of her breasts spilling out of the gap to let down milk between my lips. Resting over her sternum, a cameo portrait that held a face not unlike hers. In careful inks. With charcoal depth. The Maier flute below the nose. The hard flattened cheekbones. The widely spaced eyes.
And here is my father in pouting grey clothes. Muttering a benediction. Petting me along my sides. Always reeking of fish, not enough, far too many. The inherited curse of grey fish, caught in nets, resting pickled and smoked on others’ tables.
There was tribulation living in his lungs, even then. Starting, already, to tatter him.
Nights the ocean smote our island. Hurtling against the rocks. Our house stood at Clayhead, a perilous clime. Where before your every step, above the mottle of the rock-beds, you could fairly hear the snapping of your bones as you fell. The year after I came, a lighthouse went up. So many salmoners lost to the waves. Unluckier families than me and my own accepting cold bratwurst and strudel.
Q
Saw others, too. Not the salmoners. Others. Earlier, even, than anyone guessed.
They made a very queer parade through those first couple of years of my life in the vale.
Stupid and stubborn. Confused in their movement. Lummox shadows trundling by. Asked me of things about which I knew nothing. Never seemed to look at me for long, or directly. Stood in dark rooms, turned into the corner. Distractedly perched on the edge of the bed. Walked up to doors where they paused for a moment, unsure of the thing that they sought. Turned around.
But I was not the only one. Mother saw them, too.
Claudette.
Gaunt as a birch. Undappled grey eyes. Tight about the thin, chapped mouth. High-collared dresses all the colours of a rainstorm. Hair long and dark as a river at night. Corded wood the same as father. Levered our trap from the deep April ruts. Hoisted great cauldrons of stew from the fire without a bit of broth the lesser. They said when Claudette pushed me out, she lowered her legs, very still, from the stirrups and rested her feet on the floor. When she sat on a chair in her kitchen dominion and carved her figures out of soap, I felt that nothing could displace the bucket wedged between her knees. These figures she kept in a drawer in her bedroom. Latch was always snug in place. Yet still I sensed the dolls sometimes. Seeing my way through her room with their eye-nubs.
Nights my mother sang to me. A song without rhythm. Yet music it was. Said that it came from the Bible, my mother. Her Bible and hers alone.
“Your hair is like a flock of goats, moving down the slopes of Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of ewes and every one bears each its twin.”
Tapping with her fingers on the surface of my teeth, she would kiss my forehead and would let her lips linger. Would kiss me and brush back the goats in my hair. Spilling them, scrabbling, down onto my shoulders. While just outside the ocean waves dashed and murmured on the rocks. Light from the lighthouse, magnesium, molten, cutting back and forth above us. Flickering into the room’s darkest corners. Darting again out to sea.
Q
Who came first.
The governess. Out wandering among the dunes.
Me there with my mother, the two of us watching, as the girl in the Grecian-bend bustle came on. My mother stood facing away from the sea. A tepid winter sun behind her. Yet the light was enough to determine her shadow, which stretched, twice her height, inland from the cliff. The figure approached us not head-on, but rather instead from an easterly tack. Coming up over the waist-high dunes between Clayhead and the ocean. Hair half piled upon her head, half straggling about her shoulders. Nostrils raw. Skin pale to translucence. Bright, blue veins reaching under her scalp. But as she approached, drawing closer and closer, I found I could only see her less. Perspective of her shifting clockwise unless I stood completely still.
Mother was without this problem. She followed the girl steadily with her eyes. And pivoted where she stood, my mother, to match the figure’s every motion. Matched them, and ticked like a sundial behind them, as though to keep the figure within range.
“Where are my children? Lavinia? Miss Pearl?” said the girl into her cold, cupped hands.
“And where is my stick for biting on?
“Where is the Doctor and where are his salts?
“Why am I dizzy so close to the sea when precisely sea-air was prescribed me?”
And my mother replied, “Go home to God. You are long overdue at His side, darling girl.”
“Is that where they have gone—to God?”
“So will we all one day,” said mother.
A pause from the her. A thoughtful pause. A human pause, it seemed, at first, and I remember thinking: I can really know them, can’t I? Know them like my flesh and blood.
“Did falling sickness land me here?”
“Like as not, it was,” said mother.
“Then where’s my stick for biting, miss? Don’t you know I’ll be needing it soon?” said the girl.
Standing there pinching the tulle of her dress. Waiting for the fit to come. And then when it didn’t she muttered away. And that was the last time I saw her.
Mother knelt down, drew a sharp arm around me. “You’re looking at them wrong,” said she.
I was then four. Said I, “How’s that?”
“You’re trying to trick yourself into seeing them.”
“They squirm a lot.”
“It’s these that squirm.” Mother pointed at her eyes. “Let them do the work they’ll do. Learn to trust in what you’ve got.”
“What’s that?” said I.
“The ken.”
“The ken?”
“The ken,” said my mother, but said nothing more.