HE DIDN’T SAY A WORD to anyone, not one word. Thomas O’Reilly slipped into the house unseen. No one would have known he was there except to find his barn boots in their usual place, set side by side to the left of the woodshed door. Crumbs of chaff, dropped from his socks, were scattered here and there like little wayward stars across the floor Flossy’d swept not half an hour earlier.
Just at midday as they were gathering in the kitchen, her mother Lillian said she wondered what was taking him so long. Whipping potatoes over the stove, her words were little more than spilled thoughts meant for no one to wipe up.
“He’s upstairs,” said Flossy, who was busy placing chairs around the table. Her mother frowned as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “His boots’r there,” she added, lifting her chin towards the woodshed.
Lillian O’Reilly stopped. “Mind the potatoes,” she said, pushing the pot off the hottest part of the stove. She crossed the kitchen and called upstairs.
“Thomas?”
She called again: “Are you coming to eat?” Her eyes traced a cool line back to Flossy.
A third time, she raised her voice. “Thomas!” With one hand on the banister and a pinched brow, she strained to catch his reply. There was none.
Finally, throwing her head back, she barked, “Thom-as!”
It got him. It got all of them. She didn’t ordinarily yell.
What seemed like a stranger’s voice from half-way across the bay returned a ragged, “Y y y … yes?”
“Are you come for dinner?” tumbled out of her crossly.
Flossy counted to herself, one-matchstick, two-matchsticks, three-matchsticks, right up to fifteen, her exact age, before they heard, “N … no.”
That was it.
Lillian turned a hard gaze in her children’s direction. Flossy and her younger brother Jimmy shifted like nervous colts, unsure of what would happen next. Her mother was waiting for the shuffled foot, an averted eye, anything that would tell her someone knew something about this and could explain what was going on with the one upstairs, what had prompted this unexpected turn — her eldest son gone to bed before dinner.
“Flossy! Potatoes!” She dashed to the stove as her mother hiked, skirt-in-hand, up the stairs, her shoes clomping out the burdened beat of lost patience. Thomas would have heard the step, the swish of the dress — she never took those stairs in better than a weary tread. The smell of burnt potatoes crept throughout the kitchen. In a few minutes their mother was back down and, without a word, dished out the potatoes with a crack of the spoon to each of their plates.
By the time they came in from the barn that night, having finished Thomas’s chores, her brother still hadn’t got up from his bed, then another day and another passed. It had been just two years since their father drowned in Cobequid Bay and now, without Thomas, there were only three to take a lonely place around the O’Reilly kitchen table. Nobody talked about him anymore than they talked about her father. The house felt chill, though the middle of summer was already upon them.
FLOSSY O’REILLY, WELL INSIDE the door of her eighties, sat alone in her kitchen staring at the calendar on the wall without really seeing days or dates. If anyone had asked her, lost in thought as she was, she’d have said she was remembering the penny details of Monday, July 11, 1927, though she knew it would have been far more accurate to say she relived them. There she was again with her mother around the back of the old house pegging clothes to the line, legs of pants, apron strings and bed sheets thrashing at her, snapping and drying quickly in the winds picking up at the head of a rising tide on that perfect summer day when Thomas slipped into the house.
A shiver riffled across her old shoulders. She hadn’t thought of that day in years, yet today it was as vivid as the back of the hand that sat upon her lap. She examined the estuary of veins and tendons, stroking her own wrist as if she might be assuring someone she loved. Who would have thought so much of their world could crumble with so little flourish? She marvelled at the mind’s capacity to take such a day and turn it over and over again, searching all the edges of calamity with the futility of a blind man fingering each piece of a jigsaw puzzle he hasn’t a hope of ever putting together.
Her brother Thomas, then the man of the house at sixteen, started out that day in July cutting a crop of marsh hay down along the south dike by the bay. It was an ordinary day set out between two wars and he was doing the same work he’d done each summer for two years. Sometime before noon he drove the team back to the stable, unhitched the horses and hung the harness in the usual place on a peg inside the barn door. He gave the animals water and turned them outside, then came to the house, slipped quietly from those boots and went upstairs to bed where he’d stay for twenty-four years.
FLOSSY GLANCED OUT THE back window to the field behind her house. It was going to be another hot day; a warm wind was already rustling the trees but cooling nothing. Why were they returning to her after so many years, these fragments of the past, a match struck in the memory’s darkest room? It wasn’t as if she’d set out to think about her brother, her mother or that innocent summer day that would so undo every last one of their expectations.
She sat up and took a deep breath. She’d been having these visitations from the dead for a couple of months now and couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps it might be her turn. Maybe everyone had at least one such warning, a week, month or year before the end. She knew she could scarcely quibble. Not many of her friends had got eighty-two good years with so little wear and tear — one weather hip and a nest of starlings fluttering in her chest when she walked uphill on her way home from McLellan’s store. It was all they seemed to talk about anymore: their ailments and bit-replacements, or somebody else’s. She’d never heard of people having premonitions of the end or hearing banshees wail beneath the parlour window, but then again she’d never heard even the dying talk about their dying.
Flossy O’Reilly’s practical head would tell her all this was morbid imagination. “Now, stop that,” she muttered. There were no banshees, only Mealie Marsh’s old moggie caterwauling on a warm summer night, but Flossy couldn’t quite let it be.
Mealie had noticed something wasn’t right. She had swept in as usual this morning, coffee cup in hand, and parked herself at the kitchen table in a sleeveless shift that Flossy hadn’t seen before — a green cotton print that was bleached lighter in some sections than others with various red and purple paint splotches where body parts folded towards wet canvas. Mealie was an artist, herself bold, large and colourful, who lived a life of domestic chaos two doors away. As was her custom each morning, she stopped by to read the Chronicle Herald.
“I’ve a mouse, Flo,” she announced. “Got in beneath the fridge before I could find the broom.” Flossy could just imagine Mealie all in a tizzy hunting for the broom. It made her smile. As far as she was concerned, a mouse was the lesser of possible evils. Mealie’s drafty old house was built by the Hills before the war and she was inclined to let everything go when she was in a painting frenzy, as she was these days in the little studio out behind her house. Leftover food sat in containers. Cans, bottles and spoiling fruit collected on Mealie’s kitchen counter, virtual mouse magnets. On a couple of occasions, Flossy had been walking down to the general store towards the end of the day and noticed Mealie’s door wide open to the breeze.
“You know they don’t have the old wooden traps anymore — the kind you catch a finger in once you get the peanut butter on the trigger? You remember those, with the snappy wire?” She paused, glancing up. “Flo?”
“Um?”
“Remember the old wooden mousetraps with the spring?”
“Oh yes.”
“You can’t get them. You can only get these things that capture the mouse, alive. Then you’re supposed to take it somewhere and release it.” Her eyes widened, “Release it!” she said again. “Un-bloody like-ly,” she cackled, her big-boned frame listing towards the wall and jiggling the table. “Bobby McLellan says they’re supposed to be humane traps. If it were up to Bobby McLellan, he’d have all the mice in palliative care.” She looked down at her own cat curled asleep on a chair in Flossy’s kitchen. “And what are you doing here, Mister Wilde?” she stroked the cat affectionately, “You’re supposed to be home working for a living.” Oscar Wilde lifted his head, blinked lazily at her before going back to sleep.
“You’re feeding him too well, Flo,” she said, rubbing the cat’s ear tenderly. “He much prefers your little tins of kitty pâté to low-cal goat kibble.”
When Mealie sailed into the kitchen each morning, Flossy never knew what would be on her mind. She all but dragged the universe in with her, bits of comet dust and muck swirling behind. Mealie was at home here. In two small circles, she could pour herself a cup of coffee and fetch an ice cube from the tray in the freezer to cool it without so much as spilling a drop. Though neither of them went to the dances anymore, Mealie had always been light on her feet like that, even as she’d spread a few inches with the years. Realizing that she hadn’t acknowledged her, Flossy smiled. Oscar did have a way of following the food trail. She was all but certain that cat was getting a third breakfast on the other side of the street.
“What time’s the circus get in?” Mealie asked, opening up the newspaper and tapping it in the centre.
“Oh, they should be here by six, I expect,” Flossy said, looking down at her coffee mug.
“Hmm,” came from behind the paper.
Only Mealie would know how little she wanted these visitors. After all, Flossy’d been living on her own for well-on forty years. You could get too used to your own company to not mind the bother of someone else, getting meals on the table, being polite longer than it took to finish a good pot of tea or closing the bathroom door. When she looked back up, Mealie was watching her.
“So, what’r you stewing about, Flo?” she asked as gently as her raspy morning voice would allow. Not much was ever likely to escape Mealie’s eye. She took a sip of her coffee, peering at Flossy over the brim. “Is it the Guest?”
Was it so? Could the mere anticipation of Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer’s arrival today have rattled Flossy’s nerves? She certainly didn’t welcome someone underfoot for three weeks but there was more, much more. Flossy could hardly tell Mealie, her dearest friend in the world, she might be getting herself ready to die.
Oh, she was anxious about Ruth’s visit all right, a sixteen-year-old from Ontario and her mother’s idea to drop her here while she went on to some church conference in Sackville. What was a city girl going to do in Great Village for three weeks? Besides, Flossy disliked hyphenated names, thought them pretentious. And here the hyphenated youngster hadn’t even arrived.
“She’s not going to ask a thing about the past,” Mealie said, turning down a corner of the paper so she could be sure Flossy, who had only as much hearing as suited her, could see she was talking. “When you’re her age, there is no past.”
Mealie knew Flossy altogether too well, knew how much she disliked idle curiosity, could see her fretting before she herself could. Since the sky had begun to soften through her bedroom window this morning, long before the sun peeked above its own dark covers, Flossy O’Reilly was awake and mentally bracing herself against this day — securing the shutters, gathering loose objects from the yard, locking the back cellar — as if she’d read in the paper of a hurricane chewing its way up the East Coast from Boston: Hurricane Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer making landfall at 6:00 p.m.
“Oh Mealie, you know my life, nothing happens for fifty-one weeks of the year, then it’s all crammed into seven measly days. I’ve just a bit too much on my mind.”
“You and Yahweh, Pet,” she said kindly.
Of course, Mealie Marsh didn’t know the half of it. She’d been away from Great Village, living in Montreal, when Marjory Trotter and Richard Archibald married seventeen years ago. Nor was she around six months later when the marriage failed, or seven months after that when Ruth was born. And that’s where it got horribly muddled. Just two months pregnant when Richard left, Marjory hadn’t bothered to tell him he was going to be a father. She’d promptly set up house with Jack Schaeffer, had her baby and settled into Deep Denial, Ontario, as if all this might never catch up with her. Richard returned to Nova Scotia none the wiser. As far as Flossy could tell, Marjory hadn’t even told Ruth. She dabbed at a crumb on the table and deposited it on the plate in front of her.
It would never have occurred to a woman like Marjory Trotter that Flossy might continue to be friends with her former husband. Good friends. From the time Marjory first brought him around, a soft-spoken graduate student of literature, Richard and Flossy discovered a common interest in the Great Village poet, Elizabeth Bishop. It would prove the more enduring bond. Every few months or so he’d be back at Flossy’s door, “the Bishop,” as they called her, having got right under his skin, asking to see the old house where Elizabeth once lived, to walk the back roads and shores of the poet’s childhood.
For years, Richard, Flossy and a handful of friends had been waving banners to bring some recognition of Bishop’s importance to Nova Scotia where her work had been largely ignored. In a week’s time they’d be hosting the charter meeting of The Elizabeth Bishop Society, right there in the Legion Hall, across from the church, in the heart of the village. Dozens of scholars from Canada, the United States and Brazil would be gathering to hear academic papers on Bishop’s life and work. She and Richard shared the joy of fostering something they were sure would have a life well beyond them: the Elizabeth Bishop Society.
With such a cause to bind them, Flossy would have to admit that Richard had come to mean a great deal to her, whereas Marjory, whom she’d known for forty years, was a woman in perpetual disarray and much less her cup of tea. But surely it was never Flossy’s place to tell him about the child. Of course she hadn’t leaned on Marjory to tell him either. And if it wasn’t any of her business, why was she distressed by it now? Because Richard would see her as having influence over Marjory, if anyone did. It was a muddle, a horrid muddle that Flossy’d been dragged into and there was no muddle she hated worse than somebody else’s. It could twist her all up in a knot, just one more of those things you never talk about that grow the more you don’t talk about them until you almost can’t turn around in the room for what they’ve become.
Flossy had agreed to Ruth’s visit last winter. That long ago it seemed unavoidable, like being invited to Christmas dinner on the first of July. Back then, it was to have been early in the summer for a week but that was before Marjory changed her plans four times and stretched it out by two more weeks. Honestly, it was easier to pin down a fruit fly. Flossy pulled a tissue from beneath her belt and blew her nose, and just her luck to end up now, of all times. She’d warned Marjory that Richard Archibald was going to be around, that she needed to set her house in order.
“Who?” she’d asked over the telephone, as if she’d never heard of him before.
“Richard, Richard Archibald, Ruth’s father,” Flossy said flatly.
“Oh,” was all Marjory could squeak.
“You’ve got to talk to him, Marjory,” Flossy warned. “Both of them.”
“Yes, yes. Okay.”
Before they’d ended the conversation, she repeated it: “Now, you’ll talk to them?”
“I will, I promise, Flossy.” But nobody knew her capacity to put-off better than Flossy O’Reilly. Marjory was a busy United Church minister and if a problem wasn’t hitting her squarely between the eyes, it was somebody else’s problem and she the happier for it. And now what was Flossy supposed to do with Ruth when Richard showed up? Hide her under the bed?
By this time, Flossy didn’t even want Ruth around but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell Marjory. It was actually Patricia Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer, every inch a young woman with a name a yard and a half long, after her grandmother and Flossy’s long-dead friend, Patricia Trotter. They’d called the little one Patty from birth but when she turned fourteen she announced to anyone who’d listen that she preferred her second name, Ruth. Flossy would have to get used to that. She’d asked Mealie about it.
“But why suddenly change your name?”
“I hardly don’t know,” Mealie confessed. “Shows she’s got pluck, I guess.”
Pluck? Flossy turned around and sat down. At eighty-two, she thought she could do without pluck. She hadn’t had a teenager underfoot in many years, too many in fact, and while she’d preferred them as a rule throughout the nearly five decades she’d taught at the Great Village Public School, she’d always been able to lock that chicken coop and head home at the end of each day. That was a lot of years ago. You could lose your fearlessness before teenagers, just as she’d lost her fearlessness for driving in Colchester winter storms.
Mealie Marsh was slim comfort. “You’ve always been good with kids. It’ll be like riding a bicycle,” she’d said, trying to assure her, but Flossy knew all too well that Mealie hadn’t had a teenager around lately either, just one unruly goat that, when Gauguin had a mind to, effortlessly scaled Mr. McNutt’s chain-link fence to dine on Flossy’s peonies. Mealie sank her head back into the newspaper. She, no doubt, figured Flossy was just getting her worrying out of the way before the youngster got there, which she had to admit she often did. Now Flossy didn’t know which was worse, putting up with Marjory, facing Richard or a teenager in the house. These young things could talk, when the mood struck, and question so much better than Flossy at their age, but they could be brash too, entirely lacking the calluses necessary to understand the answers.
“Mealie, are we to the age when all young people are going to hell in a handbasket?”
“A Gucci handbag, Pet. You bet we are,” she said, turning a page.
“Is there anything they won’t ask?”
“Are you kidding? Everything’s out on the talk shows now.”
“And do you suppose we understand anything any better?”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
Flossy’s generation had been taught to mind their manners. They’d been cautioned to respect adults — even, lamentably, the undeserving ones. She wouldn’t have asked a personal question if her life depended upon it. Yet she thought about how useless manners could be too, for those rare moments when a well-placed question might have lent a little understanding to some of the darkest days of her long life.
She looked across at Mealie’s Oscar Wilde curled up in a patch of sunlight on the chair beside hers. She thought of Richard and sighed. Never would she have set out to hurt him, least of all Richard. How many young men and women had she sent off from her classroom over the years — some to wars, some to factories, some to the mines, some to unremarkable lives on farms along the bay, one or two to politics, an occasional fiddler? None was a patch on Richard Archibald. She was a fair teacher, had considerable fondness for her students, though always guarding the needful distance, even now. Richard was different. Not her student, technically, but his dogged dedication seemed to draw her more deeply into the study of Bishop’s poetry. She’d always liked the poetry but he kept drawing her back to its richness. Even Mealie loved those evenings when Richard would come for dinner and the three of them would wax into the night about poetry and the artistic life over a bottle of red Jost. And somewhere along the line, she was sure the teaching door had revolved so that she was learning from him.
She looked through the window to the butternut tree at the back of her yard. A flock of starlings had swooped into it, setting the tree a chatter like a schoolyard full of children. Soon the weather would break. In another month the tree would turn golden and, all in the course of a single day, drop every leaf to the ground. It was the only tree that did so between a sunrise and set. She felt sad and weary. “Courage, Old Thing,” she thought. Maybe at this end of her life her store of courage was all used up. She glanced at the sunflower clock on her kitchen wall. Marjory and Ruth would be well into New Brunswick. There was no escaping now and yet she still could not shake the feeling that her own final hour was fast approaching. All she wanted was a cardboard box down by the furnace to curl up in and to be left alone by everyone.
Oh, she had everything in order, had led a simple life really, with few chattels beyond her collection of books. Mealie Marsh, who was younger by five years and as reliable as a new galvanized pail, had agreed to tidy things up for her. Flossy had long ago instructed her on how to dispose of the house and goods — when dying never much entered her mind.
There were other things that disturbed her — things too frivolous to confide. Like the sardines she loved so well that had vanished from the shelves of the grocery store. Silly how she admired the self-sufficiency of that can with its key, reliable shape and size, the fish stacked end-to-end tight in it, their nutty taste, silver sheen and slivered bones spreading out on buttered toast. Other kinds couldn’t compare.
“Ther’ not making ’em ’nymore,” Bobby McLellan had said from behind the counter of the general store, not looking at her, sitting on a stool, his eyes fixed on a television suspended somewhere above Flossy’s head. He was seventeen and picking at a pimple beneath his left ear. Uneven teeth rested on his bottom lip.
“Who isn’t making them? God not making the fish?” Flossy still had a teacherly voice that could put a knee into either end of a question.
“No,” he said, “It was that Al Nino they had?” Bobby’s inflection picked up the end of each phrase, as if he could drag you along like a tin can on the end of a string with undeniable questions before delivering the indisputable conclusion. “The warm water, like, in the ocean? Over there in Peru? It did in all the sardines; they barely got enough to feed themselves.”
Bobby McLellan, Flossy realized, had just enough information in his head to make you stop asking questions but not quite enough to deliver any sense. She thought about those Peruvians. She didn’t know all that much about them or El Niño, except what she’d read in National Geographic. She couldn’t help imagining them all sitting around Machu Picchu in their colourful capes and bowler hats feasting on her sardines.
It was the same with maple walnut ice cream. It, too, had gone the way of the sardines. At the general store she could get a tightly wrapped sugar cone with a scoop of green mint chip on it or chocolate Oreo or pink black-cherry or tiger-striped orange and black licorice, but no plain, old-fashioned, maple walnut. Bobby had the same reply.
“Ther’ not making it ’nymore.”
“The Peruvians get that too?” It was a loop from which she could not extract herself. Four generations of Great Village McLellans had come to this: Good Walter McLellan’s heir and only grandson sitting on a stool behind the cash register chewing gum and watching Star Trek. He couldn’t be bothered with any more questions.
These things had vanished without warning. Not one, but both, in the same week. Of course they were small things, insignificant things to Bobby McLellan, but to her they were in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas’s soul comforts, sweet pleasures to be indulged at times of extraordinary sadness, and now she felt even these enduring supports, however absurdly personal, had been knocked from beneath her. After all, there weren’t so many pleasures left that she could count on.
Who could blame her for thinking that other things would soon be stripped away too, like life itself, and pimple-faced Bobby McLellan would say of her, should anyone inquire, “She was just in? Lookin’ for stuff? Ther’ not making ’em like her ’nymore.”
You knew it was coming as surely as night follows day. Only a handful of her friends had made it beyond eighty-five and, for some of them, there wasn’t a whole lot left to speak of. Hearing, sight, smell, past, present, they were all on the way out by then, often well before the candle itself. Take Mrs. John-Willy Fletcher in the nursing home over at Little Bass, where she was living out her last years. What a beauty she’d been in her day. Even into the better part of her later years, there was no one to cut a swath through a room quite like Clara Fletcher. Over in that home, they had to lead her around like a puppy, her elegant wavy hair combed up by a ruminant seventeen-year old. There were whiskers curling on her chin and a front tooth had vanished from Clara’s once-radiant smile that nobody seemed in any hurry to replace. She didn’t even know enough to find her way to the breakfast table. All she could do was stiver behind a walker and declare to anyone who’d listen, “Those Creelmans stole my chickens.” Surely, there were worse things in life than death.
Flossy could see the top of Mealie’s curly grey head above the jagged newspaper edge. She was gone for now, in her own world, having finally let go of the rope that was teasing Flossy out of her private swamp this morning. For the next ten minutes or so, Mealie’s coffee would get cold as she finished reading the paper. Most days of the year, the two of them sat across from each other at the kitchen table like this, sometimes later in the morning, sometimes earlier, depending on the slant of the light, Mealie being essentially photoperiodic. They knew each other better than a lot of old married couples, their comings and goings, what could raise chuckles as well as hackles, but there was so much they didn’t know too. So much never got spoken even in the safe orbit of a generous heart like Mealie’s. She’d never told her about Richard and Ruth, couldn’t bring herself to now.
Flossy thought of her brother Thomas again. She glanced up to the ceiling, almost as if he were still upstairs in that bed he lay in for twenty-four dismal years. If he’d died that day, cutting marsh hay along the south field, you could have let him go, given him a Christian burial, mourned, then somehow found your way onward. He didn’t, and so from season to season and year to year she’d coddled the hope that he might one day find the will to drag himself out of that bed and resume his life as it was before.
Thomas was so much like those things locked away inside that never get talked about. You couldn’t ever give them a proper burial; they weren’t really living, but neither were they really dead.