XI

“FLOSSY O’REILLY LOOKED FROM Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer to the calendar on the wall above the long kitchen table, as if a symbol of time alone might transport her to the distant past.

If she’d wanted to, from where she sat Flossy could stretch a hand out and touch the square for today, Monday the eighth of August. The date stroked a recollection of some kind for her, of sadness she thought, as if she’d placed a hand where an arm had recently lain and felt its warmth but with no memory of who had been there. All throughout the morning and into the afternoon, the winking significance of the day had tugged the edges of her consciousness like a dream she was trying to remember that lay tucked away in opaque sleep.

Was it somebody’s birthday? She ran through the ones she tried to acknowledge: not Mealie’s, nor Jimmy or Noreen, their girls. She tried to fix her mind on the usual suspects, things that could chase out her unholy ghosts at this time of year: the shorter days, a reminder of grey November looming; the beginning of school and with it the unsettling memory of standing in front of a new crop of students. Though she’d not had a class in twenty years, September still had its way of bubbling up in her cauldron — once a teacher, always a teacher. Some of the best of them, Flossy knew, didn’t sleep at all the last two weeks of August.

She looked around: a Brown Betty teapot with a chip out of the top sat on a metal trivet in the shape of Newfoundland that Jimmy’s grandson had brought her after a trip there a few summers back. An unmatched salt and pepper, their contents looking tired and dusty, sat quietly beside Noreen’s ladybug serviette holder with three different sizes of napkin squeezed between the wings. The white paint on the windowsill was beginning to crack and chip. She should try to get it painted before it turned cold. Did it matter? Would she even be here when it turned cold?

She looked back around the kitchen. The sun streaming through the window showed every splatter and speck on the wall. This was where she fit now. It was the season of make-do, with chips and nicks and dust settling quietly over everything. Others thought she didn’t see the dust anymore, no doubt wondered if maybe her eyes were going the way of her hearing, when in fact Flossy’d just stopped caring about it. If you only have a finite amount of time left, she figured who in her right mind would be worrying about a little dust.

“There’ll be dust enough where we’re headed,” Mealie liked to say, as if anyone needed to be reminded.

Flossy didn’t miss teaching any more than she missed dusting. She didn’t miss bored and unhappy teenagers, like the Sylph across the table. She liked how age simplified things. Now she had everything she needed within the compass of her outstretched arm: the old Funk & Wagnall, a notebook, pencil, half a pink eraser, ruler, her books and the calendar. It was a pretty thing, Maritime views with houses, churches and seascapes put out by Stanfield’s, though at that moment Flossy wasn’t actually looking at the photo for August, the days or even the few scattered appointments pencilled in here and there throughout the month. She was merely perched on her yellow chair, thinking of the Sylph’s question, posed only a moment before: “Didn’t you take him to a doctor?”

Flossy took a small sip of strong tea. It was the question of a scientific age, perhaps even a psychological one, she thought, a generation sure that every action had a reaction, every question an answer, each dilemma a solution. Was there an answer to every question? Were questions, like matter and energy, never lost, only transformed? Was it possible to find, now, for example, answers to questions posed years ago, questions bent around the universe or buried under half a century of tides and shifting sands? Were they even the same questions that had drifted there in the first place? She lay one hand on top of the other on her lap.

“Oh, yes.” The doctor, in fact, was the first one their mother had brought to see her brother Thomas when he took to his bed. She trusted Doctor Rushton. He, a son and grandson had been doctors this side of Truro for as long as Flossy could remember, though Rushton Senior may have cured more horses than people in his day. In their family, Doc Rushton was next to God, from the time their mother had been so sick after Jimmy was born.

The doctor had come around to see Thomas a week or so after he’d taken to his bed. Flossy could remember the commotion of his arrival. Dr. Rushton had a motor car — not so many did in those parts in the summer of ’27 — and you could hear the gears grind as he whined and chugged up the grade from Great Village in a cloud of dust, thumping along the washboard road. Their mother hadn’t told them he was coming, if she knew, so it was no small shock for Flossy and Jimmy, racing each other up from the bay and tumbling into the house to tell her Doc Rushton had gone by, to find him squat, square and spilling over a wooden chair in their own summer kitchen.

Dr. Rushton was chatting and laughing with their mother. He’d been telling her a funny story about a sister of his who’d kept a pet pig in the house, as Flossy recalled, before hoisting himself to his feet and asking her to take him to the patient. Their mother carried a chair up behind the big man as there wasn’t normally one in Thomas’s room.

The doctor had a jolly, booming voice that made you think he was always speaking over your shoulder to a crowd behind you. You’d hear his wheezy laughter outside after church service on Sunday, shaking hands with the other men as if he himself had delivered the sermon or was just uncommonly pleased with himself for being there. He was a man used to putting a lot of people at their ease. Their mother always said of Dr. Rushton, “he could talk to anyone.” She valued it. Being a huge old man, though, the talker was winded by the time he’d got upstairs that day and it was a few good minutes before he could huff any more than two words at a time.

“Thomas, m’boy,” he exclaimed, as though finding their brother in the bed had taken him entirely unawares. “How’s th’boy?” he wrapped a foot around the chair leg, scraped it towards him and dropped heavily into the seat. He sat there beside Thomas like a fat old Rhode Island Red, his neck short in his shirt, and took a handkerchief out of his pocket, so as to mop the sweat beads that formed on his shining bald scalp. “Hot day.” His bulk was imposing, half an inch of flesh spilled out over the tight collar he was wearing. Their mother smiled more than usual when he was around. “It is,” he panted.

Dr. Rushton had never been upstairs before, hadn’t even been in the house as far as Flossy could remember. It wasn’t a smallthing to have him there. His breadth, substantially larger than their father, who’d been no small man, his puffy hands resting on his knees, his thick-glasses gaze, the soft, wide face and massive, wiry eyebrows, all gave the impression of a man of importance who filled that room, the whole house in fact. He knew their mother and maybe they’d talked about Thomas, but he seemed to like to give you the idea that he knew something about you, inside you, the way you thought.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking” was one of his favourite ways of tidying up a story. He would hook a thumb in one suspender and point a finger of the same hand at you, but he never really knew, only fancied he did.

Doc Rushton was used to people paying attention, nodding and asking no questions. If he told them to run up the nearest pin cherry, most people would hurry out the front door and shinny away. He expected it. You’d feel wrong for not obliging someone like him. If it had been Lillian up there in bed instead of Thomas, and he’d told her to get up, without hesitation she’d have got up and, quick, made him a pan of biscuits.

He listened to Thomas’s chest, tapped his back and looked inside his mouth. He made him roll his eyes around and cough. Their mother motioned the two younger ones out of the room, but Flossy loitered on the top step.

Dr. Rushton asked Thomas if anything had happened to him the day it all started, if he’d had any sharp pains in the chest or head, if his eyes had blurred, if he’d passed out or had a sore throat or rash, any blood in anything he’d passed? Thomas said no. Was there any swelling in the feet? Sores on the fundament? No. Did he feel sick? No. “Any discomfort whatsoever, son?” he asked. No.

“What about defecation?”

“Wh-wh-what?”

“Can you use the thunderbox, the outhouse, do your business?”

“I’ve w-w-went most days.”

“Any bloating?”

“N-n-no.”

When Dr. Rushton didn’t get the answer he was looking for, some straw he could sit and chew on, he let out a huge sigh and leaned back in his chair that creaked under the great man’s weight. Flossy could see him through the open door: he removed his round wire-rimmed glasses, slowly unhooked one side then the other from behind each thick ear, scratched both bushy eyebrows with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, then he fixed those tiny chicken eyes straight on Thomas and set in on him in a low voice about letting their mother down when she was a widow woman and had suffered enough over the shock of their father.

Flossy had to hand it to him, the doc was good with words. He talked so earnestly and for such a long while that she was convinced by the end of it that Thomas was letting Dr. Rushton down too, his wife, all of Great Village and the entire Presbyterian Union. He was the eldest, he said, the man of the house now, and there wasn’t anyone to fill his shoes. Thomas should act like a man. He said it wasn’t right to just turn in like that, lie in bed while the womenfolk did the work that was properly his.

“God alone knows everyone feels like giving up some time or other,” he said, “everyone, but it isn’t the kind of thing a man does.” Thomas must have felt those tiny eyes burning into him. “Every man must remain, always and in the presence of everyone,” he said, pointing one stubby fat finger at him, “master of himself.”

for a long while after that, Flossy thought about what Doc Rushton had said to her brother. She wondered if every man did have this some time in his life. Was it some initiation ritual that every other adult in Great Village had passed except Thomas? Was he not a man then because he’d taken to his bed? She didn’t believe Doctor Rushton; couldn’t believe that everyone had this the way Thomas did. It took him over like a ghost sickness with none of the usual signs of something being wrong. He couldn’t act like a man, either, that was the problem. He couldn’t act. Was Thomas the only one who couldn’t? Had Doctor Rushton, along with her father and all the other men of the village, been just a troupe of better actors?

The doctor descended the stairs, weaving from side to side to see each step out over his belly, and told them he seemed healthy as a spring foal, couldn’t figure what was keeping Tom up there: strong heart, perfectly sound in the chest, good reflexes. (They never called him Tom.) Said he was baffled, hadn’t seen anything like it in the forty years he’d been practising medicine, a young buck taking to his bed for no apparent reason.

Doctor Rushton plodded through a dozen diseases they’d all heard of. He gave them the symptoms, complications and cures, then slowly argued his way back out of each one. He was stumped, couldn’t come up with any illness known to modern medicine that could match what had got into Thomas. He wasn’t sure he was sick.

Dr. Rushton said some people might come down with an illness that doesn’t show up in the normal way for a time. The fatigue couldn’t be explained all at once but eventually it would be clear what had got him, although he confessed he saw this more with old people. He told them to watch for rashes and a fever, especially the fever. It would tell him more. There could be seizures too. If he ever wet the bed they should let him know.

His face crumpled in the centre as he hooked a thumb through his suspender and lost himself in his own thoughts while cleaning his thumbnail. “Then there’re the melancholics …,” he said, letting his voice drift while glancing in Flossy’s direction.

Her mother shook her head, “Flossy’s been doing the work of a grown man around here, she deserves to know.” Doc Rushton cleared his throat and proceeded in a low voice while those little eyes burned through his glasses into Lillian O’Reilly.

“The melancholics,” he said, “go like this maybe once every few years or so, take straight to their beds and there’s nothing can be done.” It runs in families, mostly with women, he said, a species of nervousness. It was an inclination by nature, a hereditary taint, he cautioned, not to be confused with outright malingering. He had seen it often and no amount of talking seemed to do them any good. These ladies often had difficulty seeing the winter come on, filling up with dread and hopelessness as the fall advanced. It was possible Thomas had something like it.

Sometimes it was brought on by a shock or disappointment but often it grew from something entirely insignificant that’s built out of proportion “up here,” he said, tapping his temple just above the arm of his wire glasses that dug permanent grooves into each side of his wide head.

“On the other hand,” he argued, “could be a spurt of growth, stumbling on depleted soil. Feed him up,” he counselled, dropping his fist emphatically on the table. “Six eggs a day, meat with every meal, two cups of meat blood between meals and a regimen of strychnine, in prescribed doses until his energy returns.” If they did this and avoided constipation at all cost, Dr. Rushton said it would only be a matter of time before he came around to himself again. He’d be a new man before the snow was flying. Flossy peeked at her mother who shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She knew as well as Lillian O’Reilly there was no money to feed him up like that. All they had was one cow and a calf. If they killed the cow, Flossy calculated, they wouldn’t have milk or butter for another two years until the heifer freshened. If they killed the calf, would it be enough meat and blood to cure him or would they then have to kill the cow too? Her mother was, no doubt, figuring the same cruel calculation.

Then there was Queen Esther to consider: if there was but a single vital thing left to the survival of this remnant of the O’Reillys, it surely had to be that cow. Yet Queenie was so much more than a cow; she was their friend, their rock, their brindle comfort, had provided richly for the house for years. She would have let the Grim Reaper milk her, would even stand patiently for Jimmy who tugged away at her and could no more milk a fly. They couldn’t possibly repay such fidelity with a blow above the eyes. Who between them could have done so? Not their mother and not Flossy. Besides, they’d all perish without that cow. Just the thought of it quickened her pulse.

Their mother asked him if people recovered from the melancholy. While most did, he told her there was a certain small number of incurables. Usually, they ended up in Dartmouth, he said, the ones that were a danger to themselves.

There wasn’t anybody who hadn’t heard about Dartmouth or knew that only the most desperate of souls ended their days there behind barred windows and locked doors. Mount Hope they called it, though there’d be precious little hope to be found anywhere among those walls. Doctor Rushton warned their mother she mustn’t worry about that happening to Thomas. Those cases were extreme and wouldn’t apply here, like the Bulmers’ daughter, Mrs. Bishop, who’d lost her mind after she’d been widowed so young with a brand new baby. The Bulmers had had to keep vigil on her day and night. He’d seen many of those committed and Tom was nothing like them.

Their brother wasn’t mad and he was never dangerous to them or himself, as far as they knew. There would never be a question of sending him off to a place like that. He’d not last a month. He was like those eggs that get laid by the chickens when they haven’t enough grit; the shell is soft and transparent and if you were to put your finger on them you’d leave a dent in their oval perfection. You couldn’t send someone like Thomas to a place like that.

Doctor Rushton said he figured maybe Mah was being too soft on him, that she let him think too much about himself. He said this while buttering the second half of his biscuit as a piece of chewed food escaped from his mouth and lobbed out onto the table. He dabbed it up with his finger and licked it off.

“If his father were here,” he said, his mouth full and waving the knife with a flag of butter on the end back and forth while he swallowed, “he’d have a birch rod behind that woodshed door and not be a particle afraid to give the lad something to brood about. He wouldn’t be lying in bed for long.” He scooped the last half of a biscuit into his mouth and blazed Lillian O’Reilly with those tiny beads of eyes to make sure she was listening. “The lad’s a man in years,” he explained to her, “but there’s still some boy in him that’s gotta be toughened up. Spare the rod,” he warned, taking a bite off the end of another biscuit he was preparing to slice and dress, and shaking one of his immensely fat fingers. Fowler’s tonic combined with arsenic was another consideration, but Dr. Rushton concluded the strychnine the superior cure.

These last notions were just dried leaves blowing in gusts of wind, thoughts tossed out before them as the doctor wound down his impressively unhelpful clock. They’d had their disappointment laid out by then. Neither Flossy nor her mother had a question left between them. They’d been desperate to hear something concrete from Dr. Rushton, so sure he’d offer something definite to pursue for their brother’s cure that would, at a minimum, burn away the layer of fog that obscured the entire matter. They could barely get Thomas to eat the smallest helping of porridge or potatoes in a day. He was about as capable of eating meat, eggs and drinking cow’s blood as a newborn.

“He saw a doctor, yes, Thomas did,” Flossy replied to the curious, open young face seated across from her over afternoon tea. “They weren’t then what they are today, at least some of them,” she added.

And like all those everywhere up and down the shore awaiting word from the doctor, Flossy and her mother expected bad news, didn’t even much hope for good. They just wanted it to be one or the other, not something in-between, neither tide-in nor tide-out. He didn’t know. What was in between was indefinable. He couldn’t really say.

So, after all the words and opinions of the great man, his arguing back and forth with himself, they were none the wiser. Dr. Rushton sniffed a great deal about this whole affair. He really didn’t know anything more than all the rest of them but nonetheless he spoke with great authority. You sensed, though, among all the sniffling, that he didn’t like being baffled by medical science. Perhaps his disappointment lay in this even more so than his inability to make Thomas better. The doctor took pleasure in knowing what was best for everyone and being taken to heart.

Bolstered by two cups of tea and four of their mother’s warm biscuits with butter and crabapple jelly, Dr. Rushton said he felt certain he could reason Tom out of his gloom and would consider his approach in the coming days. He warned them never to give in to the bleakness: at every opportunity they should tell him how much stronger he looked and how much better he seemed. Dr. Rushton would do likewise and by virtue of his natural authority and the confidence Tom had in his skill, the symptoms would gradually disappear.

And so he proceeded to do just that. In another week, Dr. Rushton was back upstairs to spend an hour talking like a Presbyterian preacher about patience, hope and joy. The week after that, he argued the case of science, disputing with their brother, curled up and mute on the bed, his silly misconceptions of illness and turning his mind towards the light of the doctor’s own healthy vision. On the next visit, he pursued his efforts to persuade Thomas to renew the attitude of good health, while emphasizing the value of exercise. This after three weeks of increasing doses of strychnine that would send Thomas into violent spasms of vomiting so that he seemed weaker each day. All the while he lay pale and fetal on his bed and the rest of them came to think they’d lose him if it went on much longer.

The next time they expected him, Dr. Rushton didn’t appear; mercifully, Mrs. McLellan had delivered her fourth in the middle of the night and he’d been called out. Thomas’s treatment, far from restoring him to robust health, was bringing the rest of them to despair. The dinner table had gone silent with the unspoken knowledge that someone was dying upstairs. It was little Jimmy who finally took that whole bottle of strychnine and dumped it down the outhouse. Neither Flossy nor her mother could scold him for it.

What became apparent was that Doctor Rushton could not bear mystery, could not accept that the mind alone might cripple a healthy young man as permanently as the infantile paralysis. He could not abide that which was not quantifiable. Perhaps that’s why his attitude towards Thomas ultimately hardened to the opinion that their brother suffered nothing but wilful malingering.

The visits troubled their mother for weeks afterward. Flossy knew this because Lillian admired Doctor Rushton and her faith in him was such that she would have made herself do whatever he’d said, all but this, bringing her son to the edge of death. As for the whipping, she would have much preferred to whip herself. She had to find her way of thanking him for his time and concern, while suggesting they’d care for Thomas the best they could themselves.

She was low for the longest while afterward and Flossy couldn’t make her smile over anything, even when she brought her daisies that she’d picked near the creek, and there were times when she swore she saw her mother’s eyes welling up over her sewing. To think that she should take a rod to Thomas, that it would be for his own good to beat her son, that she might even be failing him by not doing so, was hard for Lillian O’Reilly. She could be severe with them, the disciplinarian, but there was no cruelty in her; she could yell when she really had to — on a windless day you could hear her to the other side of the barn — but she wasn’t one for striking anybody.

Now their father, he was another matter. Dr. Rushton was right; their father would have fleeced the hide off Thomas but Flossy thought it wouldn’t have served a whit. Maybe that’s just how their mother reasoned herself out of it; she knew exactly what William O’Reilly would have done and that nothing good ever came of it. He was never the one to call forth someone’s better part. The rod was no way to call forth Thomas’s, that was certain, but they were still left at such a loss to know precisely how to do that. It wasn’t will they had to beat out of him, they knew that. It was something that needed restoring.

Their mother didn’t say much after Dr. Rushton’s treatments but she did talk to Flossy one night at the barn. Pushing her palm against Queen Esther’s flank to move the cow over a step so she could get in to milk her and patting the warm wide side, she spoke to the plink-plink rhythm of her milking, “It’d be like … taking a birch rod …,” plink, plink, “to this one …,” plink, plink, “after she’d given …,” plink, plink, “all the milk she had to give.” Said she didn’t see how poison and a whipping could cure what ailed him.

Flossy was relieved that her mother fell back on her own good sense. She couldn’t have encouraged her in the other, didn’t think it would have turned out any differently.

Some might have thought it couldn’t have turned out worse, when you consider twenty-four years of it — the best part of a young man’s life lying in a bed — but with all those years behind her now and all the tragedies she’d heard of in the village over the time, the desperate souls who’d run shrieking off into the bay in the middle of the night, the young and old swinging their disappointments from a sturdy barn beam, the hunting rifles too near at hand when hope dissolved — she’d have to say it really could have been worse, much worse.

The youngster sitting just then at Flossy’s kitchen table licked raspberry jam from the palm of her hand that had dripped over the side of a banana muffin. She rubbed the hand on a napkin then leaned forward in the chair she was sitting on and confided in Flossy that her mother, too, “loved to stay in bed.”

In fact Marjory Trotter, Flossy was to learn that afternoon from her daughter Ruth, kept three alarm clocks in her bedroom and the last, loudest and longest to ring was placed so far under the bed that she had to pull herself out, get down on her hands and knees to reach it and shut it off.

“Pretty good for a minister, eh?” As Ruth said it, she giggled like a girl half her age and pulled her shoulders up in anticipation of Flossy’s amusement.

The tiny older woman looked from the youngster’s mouth up to the twinkling eyes. With a small tilt of her chin towards her chest and a conspiratorial smile, Flossy O’Reilly had to agree.