ELEVEN
A Man’s Kindness
FLORA STOOD BEFORE THE house gazing up at the lindens. The sky was the chill blue of a winter evening, the branches so still they did not seem part of growing trees.
She went to the back of the barn, let herself in. There was not a sound from the workshop, yet Jasper Tuck must be there, since she’d seen him crossing the lawn, breath scarfing the air.
She listened.
The opening of a drawer.
A click.
She tiptoed to the wall that separated the workshop from the rest of the barn. She put her face to a crack, making a frame with mittened hands.
She could see him only from the shoulders down. He knelt at a tool chest with many shallow drawers. The lowest drawer was half-opened. It was filled with handkerchiefs, perfectly folded, laid side by side. His hand passed over the contents, back and forth, as if deciding which one to pluck out.
She could not understand why he would keep clothing in the barn.
Not handkerchiefs. Banknotes! Twenty-five-cent notes. One-dollar, two-dollar, four-dollar notes. Orange, grey, green.
His hand paused, as if he had heard her thought. The fingers, outstretched.
She held her breath until his hand resumed its soft to and fro.
Ellen frowned, a streak of flour on her forehead and her mouth in a knot as she kneaded dough with stiff arms. Flora, chopping carrots, listened as Josephine and Ellen continued an argument, about herself both in its particulars as well as its unspoken underpinnings. Flora felt her position in the house shifting. Much of the food Ellen prepared would not be there unless Flora had grown it, or bargained and bartered, or sold mittens. Ellen was oddly in her due but would neither acknowledge this nor show gratitude, clinging to her authority over Flora, her only remaining “girl.” Josephine often came to Flora with questions about the house’s running; and Flora responded with caution, thinking that to rise above her station put her in a precarious place whose dangers she could not foresee.
“Why not, Ellen?” Josephine persisted. “Lucy will be at work, but Flora could visit Cousin Carrie. Couldn’t you, Flora? You could see the ships, the market. We’ll make up a package of food for you to leave at Lucy’s boarding house.”
She broke off as if struck by an idea.
“You’ve never had a holiday, have you?”
“Only to pick blackberries,” Flora said. “At the workhouse.”
Once a year, the children of the workhouse were loaded into two green omnibuses, one for boys and one for girls, and taken to the country to harvest blackberries. With seats inside and on top, the carriages swayed like bloated beetles. Jolted, wide-eyed, the children watched the profligate, dizzying, deafening world. Shop windows with gilt- lettered signs, delivery men, women wearing skirts with street-sweeping hems, shiny horseflesh, whip-wielding coachmen, butter-coloured stone buildings side by side like sheaves of barley…
Flora slid a lock of hair behind her ear and resumed cutting carrots on the scarred wooden block, a whole winter’s worth of carrots having been acquired in exchange for six pairs of men’s mittens. She wanted Josephine to think she had enjoyed her trip to the English countryside, with its hedge-lined fields and air smelling of wildflowers—daisies, lady’s pincushion, foxglove, poppies—names that made her think that her mother, who had taught them to her, could not possibly be dead.
Holiday…
…Matron. Handing out men’s shirts to all the children. Roll up the sleeves. Be careful of thorns. Arranging the children all along a row of blackberry bushes. Pick, pick. She walked up and down behind them, poking with her cane, and Flora saw a place where she and Enid could push through the hedge, dash into an oat field, hide in a stand of willows. Her thought. Like a flung pebble striking the matron’s head, who whirled and caught the very instant of Flora’s reaching for Enid’s hand…
Tears sprang to Flora’s eyes.
“Oh, dear,” Josephine said, watching her. “It wasn’t a holiday, was it.”
“Nor will be a visit to St. John with the likes of him,” Ellen muttered, scooping up the dough and slapping it into a greased bowl.
Mr. Tuck needed to go to St. John to purchase fittings for the little houses—tiny weathervanes and grommets, a miniature boot scraper. He needed a new knife, special varnish, bits of carpeting to cut into playing-card-sized rugs. He was leaving on the morning train and would be back at ten o’clock in the evening. He had asked Flora if she would care to accompany him.
“I think it will be fine, Ellen,” Josephine insisted. “Flora, I will phone Cousin Carrie and see if she can meet you at the train. I don’t expect you to spend the day with Mr. Tuck. Certainly not, Flora. You let him take you to the train and you see that he watches out for you on the trip down and back.”
How he had asked her, Josephine did not know and Flora did not tell.
She remembered the silence before he’d asked. The way he’d considered, his lips tight together like the mouth of a bag. He had been whittling wood, the knife held between finger and thumb, more gentle scrape than carve. She could not reconcile these tender gestures with his lean, intent body, his secretive eyes. He did not love the houses. They were matters of profit. The money-filled drawer made her uneasy and she dropped her eyes a fraction more quickly, now, and he noticed that she did so. I’m going to St. John on Friday, he had said. Wouldn’t you like to come with me. It was almost a taunt. You want to come with me, don’t you, was what he really said, like another voice whispering in her ear, telling her her own desires. He peeled her back, revealed her to herself. He looked up sideways and she thought that once again her thoughts were like a flung pebble, as when Matron had read her intention to flee.
Yet. To go somewhere!
“I would like to see St. John,” she said. She scooped the pennied carrots in both hands and dropped them into a saucepan. “I’d work Sunday to make up.”
“That’s all right, Flora. For goodness’ sakes.”
Flora looked up to see that Josephine was suddenly on the point of tears. Her voice faltered, became breathless. “You work harder than all of us combined.”
Flora sat with her nose to the window, the parcel of food on her lap.
“You ever been on a train?” he asked.
His hair, combed, bore the grooves and smell of pomade.
“I was on this train five years ago. The orphanage gave me a paper bag with a piece of bread and some cheese and a hardboiled egg. I had to wear a placard around my neck and people stared at me. Like as if I might steal from them. Like I were an urchin.”
“Well, you were, weren’t you. An urchin.”
“I was not. I was an orphan. Like you.”
Abruptly, he leaned across her to look out the window at the sight of a burning barn: flames bursting from a roof, running men, a rearing horse. The scene was snatched away, the snow-covered landscape resumed. He did not move back entirely. The side of his leg pressed against her. She inched sideways on the wooden seat, her shoulder cold against the glass, a draught chilling her neck.
You want to watch out for him.
He moved back to his side of the bench. He flipped his checking receipt over and over in his palm, staring straight ahead, mouth closed and tongue exploring his teeth. Flora was lulled by the regular, ratcheting movement, the floral carpet under her feet warmed by water pipes in the floorboards. Amid the close-set walls, the varnished wooden ceiling, the murmuring voices, she felt as if she were in a kind of church, a place where people were subdued by a power they could neither understand nor control. She gazed at a hat perched close before her, so close she could touch it, decorated with lacquered berries, feathers. The woman’s neck; a shadow in its groove.
Her eyelids thickened and she felt herself on the point of sleep.
She felt his hand on the back of her head, pulling it down onto his shoulder. She sat up, not acknowledging that this had happened. Perhaps it had not. She pressed her forehead against the cold window to keep herself awake.
“Wouldn’t you like to go to college, Flora?”
The narrow room smelled of beeswax, its ceiling decorated with scrolled friezes and medallions. Side windows faced the harbour, where blanketed horses lined the wharf, icy rigging drooped against a white sky.
“I’m learning to better my reading,” Flora murmured. “So I can help.”
Carrie sat straight-backed, alert, hands folded in her lap. On the desk beside her was a stack of books in Italian, German and French. Neat piles of paper, clipped together. She smiled at Flora’s answer.
“That’s wonderful to hear. You know, you can be anything you want.”
Flora wondered whether Carrie remembered that she was speaking to a girl who had foraged in the frozen remnants of gardens and stolen milk from cows’ udders.
“Look how many mills and factories there are here in St. John that employ women. Like Lucy. Soon, women are going to realize that they’re working as hard as men, if not harder, and being paid far less.”
Words came from her mouth in a sleek tumble, like polished stones. Flora held one hand against her cheek, feeling the need to brace herself against the outflow. She strove to understand their meaning—socialism, political economy, pecuniary.
“We have such stimulating meetings, Flora. I wish you could come. We talk about all the places women should be serving, and you know, when we imagine such a world, a world of equality between men and women, it is as if it has already happened, and were we to walk out into the city we would find women supervisors in women’s prisons, serving as school trustees or on public health boards. In government.”
She paused, her face rapt with the vision, and Flora, trying to think of a suitable response, found it hard to imagine Carrie the way Ellen had described her; her that went around the world as a child and was almost killed by pirates.
“Last night we agreed that popular government is founded on the principles of representation by population and taxation. Well, you know the women of New Brunswick form at least half of the population. Many of us already have the required property qualification. And the rest contribute to the public revenue in one way or another.”
She took a long breath and sat back in her chair.
“We read a satire in the paper, written by a man. Imagine a stout lady, Honorable Mrs. Jemima this or that, holding the office of the Provincial Secretary…Imagine the speaker addressed as ‘Mrs. Speakeress’…Some of us said that we should fight back with our own ridicule of men. Others said we should maintain our dignity.”
Flora could hear the quiet, absorbed chirpings of caged budgerigars and a clatter coming from the back of the house; a cook, she thought, in the kitchen—where I should be. She thought how childless women bore a slight wariness, as if they were in the midst of something which they had abandoned and expected to be asked about.
Carrie’s eyes cleared of the things of which she had been speaking.
“Oh, Flora,” she said. “I do apologize. I start on this topic and I am a runaway horse.”
She rose, brisk. “Let’s walk to the market. I told my cook I would buy some fresh halibut. And we can deliver that parcel to Lucy’s boarding house. You can tell me about Josephine and Ellen and your boarders.”
They lifted coats from the hall rack, worked buttons into holes.
Carrie opened the door and they stepped down onto the street. Flora heard the searing shriek of gulls, smelled salt on the winter air.
“And who is this man who makes miniature houses?”
On the train coming home, Flora struggled to stay awake. She had not slept the night before; the day spent in Carrie’s energetic company, meeting women in the market and in the shops and on the streets, hearing their bold words, seeing their intelligent, forthright eyes shining beneath fur hats, had left her exhausted.
Flora is from England. She works with my cousin Josephine, they run a boarding house together. She’s studying at home.
Carrie had prompted her to recite the names of her textbooks and to tell about “her” tenants; in response, the women had asked her if she had brothers or sisters, and so she had talked of her search for Enid. Encouragement, advice, kindness. One of us. Come to the next march. All day long, she felt as if she were a suffragist, a member of the sisterhood, not a servant but Carrie’s friend. Now, in the train, she returned to herself in her brown wool coat and red scarf, a brand-new basket in her lap filled with gifts of cheese, butter, maple-cured bacon, pamphlets.
Mr. Tuck was watching her.
“Slept on the way down, now you’re sleeping on the way back.”
“Sorry. Did you have a nice day?”
“Nice enough. Got my stuff. Got some bits of carpets for you to cut up.”
“Me to cut up?”
“You’re my helper, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes.” She yawned. “When I have time. Which isn’t much because I am busy taking care of the likes of you. Your sheets. Your dinners.”
“You’re a sassy one.”
A chill in his tone, a warning. She wondered if he knew that she had crouched on the other side of the barn wall, watching him fondle his money. She wondered why he was no longer working at anything other than making the houses.
“That’s why I like you,” he added. His eyes slipped away from her, rested on a strand of blonde hair lying against the wool coat. His finger touched the hair, stroked it, moved it gently from side to side.
“Take your hand off me,” she whispered.
He picked the lock of hair up between finger and thumb, rolled it thoughtfully, set it behind her shoulder.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he murmured. A question. Would I?
She snatched up the basket, held it like a shield. “Why would you even say such a thing?”
“It’s what you were thinking. He’s dangerous.”
Her heart began to hammer.
“And you like that about me,” he added.
The white flash of teeth.
Behind them, a man snored. Oil lamps flared and guttered, their reflections bent up against the black windows. She stared straight ahead, clutching the basket, thinking of the long walk through the winter’s night from the train station to the house, and how Jasper Tuck was meant to protect her from anything untoward—a rabid dog, a drunken man.
Josephine was visiting the Fairweathers for the evening, since Permelia’s brother and family were visiting from Boston. The son, an accomplished pianist, had brought a book of songs. The parlour was filled with women—Josephine, Permelia and her four daughters, the sister-in-law with her two daughters—and an excess of ornament, the women’s dresses with shawls and lace-edged ruffles, the room’s fringed tablecloths, peacock feathers, stuffed quail in a glass case. The daughters sang duets and trios; the young man urged his father to join them.
“We need a tenor. Come on, Father.”
Permelia’s brother waved away the suggestion. He leaned forward and engaged Harland, shifting his eyes only to his son as the story progressed. The girls clustered around the piano, held in check.
“One minute I look out the window and see a moose. Belly deep in snow, staring at the train. Then my eyes fall on a headline—Captain of German ship Goes Insane at Sea, Jumps Overboard. He had an obstruction of the bowel, apparently. Made insane by the pain. They gave him laudanum and he seemed to recover but then he decides that various members of the crew desire to shoot him and begins to fire at random. Subsided after assurances to the contrary. Smoke was smelled, it seems he set his cabin afire. Jumped overboard.”
His eyes widened, unfocused. He narrowed them, satisfied, lifting a glass of port.
“No, darling. You couldn’t possibly have read that.” His wife laughed. “Impossible.”
“What would you know? Do I ever see you reading a newspaper? No, you only ever study your Godey’s Lady’s Book.” He turned to Harland. “And they talk of wanting the vote.”
Josephine felt a headache begin, a slender fracture zig-zagging its way from temple to eye. At the far end of the parlour, tables were set for whist, but after each song the young man swept the page over and the girls remained standing, flushed, and sang again.
Harland spoke into Permelia’s ear, then beckoned to Josephine. She followed him down a hallway into his weather station. The long room was cool, smelled of geraniums and leather.
“I told Permelia I had an important message to give you regarding Flora. I mentioned, also, that you seemed to need fresh air.”
“I do have a slight headache. I am not accustomed to wine.” She felt the fatigue of being a widow in the midst of other women and their families. The effort of repelling regret.
“I never touch it, as you know. Permelia’s brother was unaware of her temperance pledge. We said nothing, not to offend. They arrived with lavish gifts.”
He struck a match, held it to the wick of a kerosene lamp. She saw a table laid with notebooks, pencils, graph paper.
“My weather notes.”
She saw how he marked the passage of his life, in solitude, and had become accustomed to it.
“I received a letter from my acquaintance in Halifax. She knew nothing of Enid, but has discovered the person who delivered her to the train station. A Reverend Snelcroft. I’ve written to him.”
Her eyes went to his fingers spread on the letter. She considered what would happen if she should lay her hand over his. She wanted, only, to be held in a man’s arms. To lay her head against a man’s chest. To be easily, thoughtlessly, part. Not apart.
“You and I both seek forgiveness, Josephine. In my case, it is necessary. But you have no cause for guilt. It is I who asked you to purchase Flora. And you know that you did not truly buy her.”
“I take money from the government. But I give it to her.”
“Well, there. You see.”
She had not thought she was seeking forgiveness and saw no way forward in the conversation, since it seemed to be not about Flora but about themselves.
Wet snow adhered to the windows and slid down the glass, dissolving.
Undone, she thought.
I am undone by a man’s kindness.
He set a glass paperweight onto the letter. A posy of glass cane forget-me-knots floated in its interior.
“We are on the hunt, now. We will find this lost child.” He looked at her but she could detect only concern.
“I do hope so,” she said, taking a step back from the table, seeing his anxiety to return to his duties as host.
He extinguished the lamp’s flame.