FOR HER PART, FLOSSY O’Reilly deliberated over her writers and their lives that sweltering August as carefully as she might string a prized scarlet ibis for fishing along the bends and bows of the Great Village River.
The art with any student, she felt certain, was in the casting — wrist straight, pitch a fly out just beyond the reach, ravenous as they all were about life’s flashy questions, and she could almost count on them to leap and snatch before it could scratch the water’s skin. Flossy had spent the better part of a lifetime casting her morsels about, illuminating sweetmeats about the works and lives of the writers she so admired.
As Ruth, Mealie and Flossy sat quietly around the table early Wednesday morning, the rough rhythmic crunch of feet on gravel filtered into their consciousness. Ruth’s head went up, the others followed, like birds detecting motion.
“Anybody ho-ome?” a low voice sang out. Flossy slipped from her chair and pulled the screen door for a young man clad in shorts with a cardboard carton of eggs in his hand.
“Hi, Flossy. Mom asked me to drop these off. The chickens are laying their brains out. How’s things?” A shaggy head of sun-bleached brown curls, wet along the hairline framed ale-coloured eyes. He was flushed; sweat dripped off his face and soaked through his T-shirt. A pair of wire glasses sat upon a sturdy nose.
“Manganiferous,” she replied, “what about your chickens?”
“Laying,” he said carefully, “can’t stop ’em.” He held the carton out to her.
“Come in, come in, don’t let the flies out,” she said, waving him in. “I’ll get you some juice.”
“Thanks. It’s way too hot out there …” Phil stepped to the threshold then abruptly stopped, noticing the others quietly watching from their places around the kitchen table. Balanced there, he filled nearly the entire screen door.
“Oh! Y’ra …,” he stammered, “a girl!” Then, somehow, one huge foot caught on the other and he stumbled into the room, mercifully catching the counter just short of Flossy’s arms. The three women passed an amused glance that spared him outright laughter. Phil mumbled on. “I saw you leave the store yesterday,” he said to Ruth. “Sorry, I thought you were a … I only saw you from the … We needed a … shortstop,” he finally blurted out.
Stepping entirely inside now, he nodded towards Mealie, “Hello, Mrs. Marsh.” Turning back to Flossy he said, “I wanted to bring your books back too.” He took the glass of orange juice, switching it between hands as he pulled a knapsack down each arm and retrieved three books from inside. “Thanks, Flossy. If you have any more of this guy’s stuff,” he said, tapping the book on top, “I’d be happy to see it.” He spoke carefully and watched to be sure she caught his words. He pressed the cold glass against his forehead for a minute before drinking the juice.
She leaned over and glanced at the book. “By stuff, my Sesqui-pedalian, I gather you mean Mr. Rilke’s writings, not shaving soap or cigarette papers he might have left behind?”
“I do,” he grinned, glancing over at the other women. Ruth smiled back.
“Well then, I think there may just be some stuff around. How about the letters, the Rodin letters, have I ever given you those?” He shook his head. “Two volumes; I’ll bring them by the store. Thank your mother for the kindness, Pumpernickel.” As Flossy spoke she loaded a crust of fresh bread with butter and raspberry jam for Phil Spencer.
“This is Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer, Phil; she’s here from Ontario and we’re hoping she’ll stay awhile. Ruth, Phillip Spencer.”
“Good to meet you,” he said, putting the glass on the counter and wiping his hand on his shorts before reaching it out to her. Phil had, by now, entirely collected himself and smiled confidently in her direction. In fact, the others noticed he’d barely taken his eyes off Ruth from the moment he saw her sitting there. Mealie winked at Flossy.
“Nice to meet you too,” she said, sitting up and stretching a long hand out to him.
“Ruth plays ball,” Flossy offered in a quiet voice.
“Oh, yeah?” shaking his mane and pushing the sweat-soaked curls back from his face. “This’s hardball,” he replied.
“That’s all I play,” Ruth said, flashing her brown eyes at him.
“Oh, yeah?” he smiled and shrugged. “This’s only guys.”
Other, different women might have jumped into the silence that followed to cluck and assure Ruth she’d not want to play with the Great Village Ironclads — too rough, too competitive. Flossy, arms now folded, stared at Phil too as if waiting for him to rise to some unyielding challenge.
“What?” he asked, looking at her. Nor was Ruth letting him off. Mealie Marsh was getting interested. She closed the paper and set it aside.
“What do you play?” he asked, turning back to Ruth.
“First base. It’s a mixed league.”
“Oh.” Phil Spencer’s eyebrows jumped. He bobbed his head thoughtfully. (Even Flossy, who didn’t follow baseball, knew first base had to be a good player.) It was a wedge and Mealie was the one to follow through.
“Just call her Dash,” she said casually, her voice scratching out from the end of the table.
Phil shifted on sandal-clad feet that Flossy noted were fit for a young draft horse. She could see him thinking. He looked from Mealie to Flossy, who lifted her chin in an unspoken question, then to Ruth. He bit his lower lip and Flossy could see he was sizing up the fact that long, lean, Ruth Trotter-Shaeffer might well pass for a fine-boned boy, albeit a pretty one. He quickly shook his head.
“She’s way too …,” he started, paused, looking at Flossy, “we’d never get away with it.” He shook his head.
“I’m really good,” she said.
“You ought to see her spit,” Mealie interjected.
“Now then, my Boonfellow,” Flossy began, taking him by the arm and drawing him a little closer to Ruth, “do you not suppose that if Will Shakespeare could put all those lads on stage at Stratford on Avon and convince everyone in the audience that they were women, that the four of us couldn’t pass off one little woman as a shortstop on the significantly more short-sighted stage of a Great Village baseball field?”
Phil looked at Ruth again. “You have your glove with you, Dash?”
“No,” she said with a wince. “I wasn’t expecting to play.”
“She’ll have one,” Flossy chirped.
“Needs a uniform,” he said.
“Who’s out?” Mealie asked.
“Jeff,” Phil replied. “Broke his digit,” he said, holding up a middle finger with a grin.
“Who, Jeff Moore?” Flossy asked. Phil nodded. “He’s not much bigger than Dash.” Not wanting to give him a chance to change his mind, she added, “You get the uniform; Dash’ll be ready.”
Phil grew serious, “Not a word to anyone; we’d get bounced from the league.”
Ruth raised a two-finger Brownie salute. “I promise to do my best …”
Mealie followed, two fingers in the air.
“Agreed,” Flossy raised hers as well.
“I’ll get you at quarter to six.” He turned back to Flossy. “Thanks Flossy,” taking the bread in his left hand and a bite from it. “Don’t be late … Dash,” he said to Ruth with a huge grin, as if the idea had been his all along. She gave a little finger-wiggle of a wave in reply.
“Bye, Mrs. Marsh.” She, too, gave a finger-wiggle wave, as Flossy shot a teacherly look in her direction. Turning back he reminded Flossy, “Don’t forget the stuff.”
“On your way, Stringbean,” she said, “you’ll be late for work,” closing the door gently behind him and watching as he ambled away. Turning back towards the two others in her kitchen, the pleasure she saw on their faces as Mealie and Ruth hunched closer together, Flossy noted how delicious conspiracy could be. Mealie was already making a list of things they’d need for Ruth’s disguise.
Flossy leaned for a moment against the door, her hands behind her back, watching them. So, it hadn’t taken long after all. Remarkable. She’d wondered if there might be a courageous local lad somewhere in Great Village to place himself in the sights of the fair maiden. She was pretty, the kind of woman who would attract admiring glances even with her hair shaved to the wood, perhaps because of it. Flossy thought the absence of hair made her eyes even more fetching. They hadn’t come so far from the courtly days of Arthur’s Round Table after all, when gallant knights all a-gleaming in mail, shield and helmet would enter tournaments to do fearless battle to win a lady’s glance and possible affection.
This one looked considerably more vulnerable, Sir Phil the Awkward, in sweat-drenched T-shirt, summer shorts, big knees and long-boned, hairy legs. He may have stumbled into the arena but he’d made an endearing recovery and she was sure she’d detected something, a spark arc across her kitchen.
“You’ll need a wad of gum,” Mealie was making notes, “and I’ll get you a cup at Kilmers when I’m in Truro this afternoon.”
“A cup?” Ruth giggled, “I don’t need a cup!”
“If you don’t have something down there to adjust when you’re up to bat, Honey,” Mealie was saying, twiddling her pencil back and forth before pointing it at her, “they’re never gonna think you’re a guy.” When Ruth grinned, she added, “In fact, I’m gonna get you a large. Might just as well create a stir for the village. What do you weigh?”
“Hundred and ten,” Ruth said.
“I weighed that once,” Mealie said, catching Flossy’s eye, “for twenty-seven minutes when I was ten, I think.” Ruth giggled.
Phil Spencer knew Flossy’s routine better than she did herself. There wasn’t much that missed his gaze at the general store. He could have run that shop with both hands tied behind his back and a wiggle of the ears if he’d wanted, but all Phil Spencer needed was a summer job to make a bit of money, play some baseball and catch up on his reading.
With his visit, Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer had come to as well. She’d swung ’round from the table, stroked what little hair she had and leaned towards the newcomer in their midst, poised on the edge of her chair like the charming Sylph she was, inhabitant of ancient forests, testing the winds. She’d noticed. And bright-eyed Mealie Marsh never missed a thing.
“Who was that?” Ruth asked with the usual cool indifference when the three women were again seated quietly at the table.
“Just now?” Flossy asked, “Phil Spencer? He’s from here, home for the summer.”
“What’s he do?”
“Works at the general store,” Mealie offered.
“With the other guy?” Ruth asked.
“Who’s that?” Flossy looked up.
“The sardine guy?”
“No, no, Phil works for the competition, the other general store across from the church.” It was the short answer. Ruth looked back and forth between the older women, who had each returned to her reading. Friends who went back as far as they did knew each other’s mind with little more than a twitch or glance and right here in Flossy’s kitchen they had wordlessly colluded to hold out, to keep young Phil Spencer in the shadows. Mystery, above all. Flossy stroked her hand along the seam of the page she wasn’t actually reading. One had to cultivate mystery to awaken the heart’s curiosity.
In another minute, she felt the gentle pressure of Ruth’s hand on her arm. Ah well, she supposed mystery didn’t have half a chance where hormones prevailed. She hadn’t been a teacher all those years to forget there was no stopping an on-rushing train.
“I mean, the rest of the year,” the young woman persisted.
“Oh, he’s still a student.” Again Flossy let her attention fall back to Virginia Woolf. Phil was a good boy. He’d be fine company for Ruth, a godsend. But they mustn’t for a minute let her think this was anything but her own idea. In fact, better to outright discourage her interest wherever possible. “There’s an old glove in the garage, hanging on the wall,” Flossy said to Ruth. “If that one’s had the biscuit, we’ll drive down to Jimmy’s later and borrow his grandson’s.”
When she had stepped outside to retrieve the glove, Mealie leaned towards Flossy with a twinkle in her eye. “Now, why didn’t you think of that, Miss O’Reilly?”
“Because I’m not sixty anymore,” Flossy replied, a knuckle concealing her smile. It was beginning to look as if she wasn’t going to have to influence either side of this equation; she’d never been much of a matchmaker anyway. Mealie’d always said, “You couldn’t see a match till it was blown out and the smoke drifting towards Glenholme.” It wasn’t entirely so; Flossy saw a lot more than she let on; heard a lot more too. She was just an exceptionally wise editor.
“Is her knapsack still packed?” Mealie inquired.
Flossy nodded, “I give it twenty-four hours.”
Perhaps she might beg off the afternoon errands tomorrow after all, plead weariness, send the shopping list and Rilke books to the store with Ruth. She disappeared to her bookshelves in the parlour and returned a few minutes later with the two volumes of Rodin letters she’d promised Phil. She’d left the three books he’d just returned on the table near Ruth.
No sooner had she returned with the glove than Flossy saw her pick up the copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. Ah, a perfect place to start.
“He studies books, literature, at Acadia in the Valley,” Flossy said to her, “you can’t hold that one back. Phil Spencer’s been gobbling up my books since he was no higher than this table. Now he’s reading them all over again. You watch, he’ll have those two big volumes of Rilke letters back by next weekend.”
“Day after tomorrow, now that he knows you’re here,” Mealie interjected without looking up.
“His family lives up the road from Jimmy, near the old farm, a couple of miles from here.”
The three were quiet again. Ruth opened the Rilke book and Mealie’s attention had returned to the Chronicle Herald. Just as Flossy was about to resume her reading and feeling a certain satisfied relief with this turn of events, she glanced at the youngster to her left.
A trick of sunlight, glossing the back of Ruth’s head, instantly flooded her memory with Patricia Trotter Campbell. She nearly spoke the name. The fine details of the young woman’s face were in shadow but it was a particular gesture of turning the head away then looking back as if from the corner of her eyes, that brought Patricia right back again.
Flossy closed her eyes. How capricious genetics could be, pinching the nose of long-tamed grief. Patricia, Patricia; Flossy had missed her. And here in her granddaughter an insignificant gesture had somersaulted a generation and landed four-square in her kitchen on a sweet summer’s morning bringing her dear, dear friend back to her. Patricia Campbell, Ruth’s grandmother, youth all restored, sitting right there beside her — they’d been closer than sisters — before Frank, before the babies, before leukemia, before the years of wasted wasting. How Flossy had missed her, missed how they’d talk and laugh till their ribs ached, missed growing old with her. How she’d longed for more time, a last word, glimpse, this very thing.
It was nothing short of remarkable how puckish genes could slumber like that — sleeping beauties — ready to turn inside-out in a generation thirty-years distant, the spirit breathed back in them, with all the power to pry up rusted memory and rend hearts anew. And those still living who’d once known that nose, the chin, and adored that hairline, those lashes, could only limp behind in wonder on stiff knees and gouty feet. My oh my, what is taken and what is given in a lifetime, in a lifetime. If Flossy lived to be a hundred she’d never cease to be humbled by all the things tidal life took away and when she least expected it, just as mysteriously, so graciously restored.
“You’re so like your grandmother,” said Flossy, “she would have loved you.” Ruth smiled but said nothing. Mealie looked out over the paper.
It seemed to be just one more of the severed circles of Flossy’s eighty-two years that had turned up unceremoniously healed and haired-over of these last few weeks. Inside her head these long-forgotten memories were returning and with them the many years of loss and longing stirred again, her mother, Thomas and, now, Patricia, the past mysteriously coexistent with the present. Was she, with this, reconciling the two, weaving the fine threads of her own end to her beginning? She felt well enough but Flossy knew lots of people over the years who’d gone to bed at night and never got up in the morning. She looked across at Ruth. She wouldn’t want this youngster to find her, but then who would it be? Mealie or Jimmy? You had to admire old cats that just took themselves off to the woods one day and never returned.
Flossy was reminded of all the ties Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer had to Great Village yet how foreign it all must seem to her. She imagined the youngster’s utter frustration: dumped there, cast off from her family and friends for three weeks — a teenage eternity — reluctantly backed into another century with an old woman she didn’t even know. No wonder she hadn’t unpacked, was asking sly questions about getting to Truro and where the bus station was located. And how unexpected this glimmer that she might emerge from the hostile mood she’d dragged behind her all week like a grubby old blanket.
Little did Ruth know that right there in the elbow of Great Village was a whole other universe that belonged to her. So many people she passed on the street, at the gas station and general store were distantly related. She’d commented on Great Village being so friendly, that everyone smiled or said hello. Mealie had raised an eyebrow to that one, “Oh yeah?” she’d said in her gravelly, noncommittal tone.
The two older women could have told this youngster a tale or two of feuds over diverted streams that went back a good two centuries and were still flammable among the descendants, long after the mill wheels for which those same waters had been shifted in the first place were set out as garden ornaments. It would have taken the bloom off the friendly rose but Flossy had lived a lot of years and was wise enough to know it was the story of every village everywhere, entirely out of place in this kitchen on a soft August morning. Every bride, after all, deserved her honeymoon.
Fortunately for all of them, word had not spread that Patricia Campbell’s granddaughter was in town. Flossy had purposely withheld Ruth’s connections from her brother because what Jimmy knew his wife Noreen knew, and she, a woman who cut the hair of a good half of the village in a little shop they’d fashioned in the front room, was a high-efficiency talking machine. Flossy knew better than to tell Jimmy anything she didn’t want the rest of the village to find out. As yet, there hadn’t been an opportunity to talk to Ruth about her extended family.
“You wouldn’t know this but I’m pretty sure he’d be a cousin of yours,” she offered quietly, anticipating the surprise that quickly peeled across Ruth’s bright face.
“He is?”
“Mmm.”
“But how … how can I have a cousin I don’t even know?” She was finishing a glass of milk.
“Oh we all have scads of those, you go back far enough,” offered Mealie. “Problem out here is everyone goes back too far, they never leave and get to be old as herpes.”
“Now, let’s see, he’d be the …,” Flossy glanced up to the right for a moment as she pursed her lips and mentally counted off the generations, “grandson … no, that should be great grandson of your grandmother’s eldest sister. Now, of course this is on your mother’s side.”
“Let’s see.” Ruth smoothed her hands along the tabletop beside the orange and red poppy placemat as if she were looking at a huge invisible map. “I’ve never really thought about that grandmother. She had a sister?”
“Heavens, child, no one ever told you?” Mealie put the paper down. “There was a whole slew of them; half a dozen Campbell girls and they all married around these parts, hatched about three, four kids apiece, and except for Millie and your grandmother they’re all living and smoking in metropolitan Great Village.”
“There are any number of Phil Spencers out there,” said Flossy. “Everywhere you look in these parts, you pretty much belong.”
“I do?”
“Half that baseball team’s gonna be related to the Campbells,” Flossy said, “in some way or another.”
“They’re all first-rate players,” said Mealie. “Must be in the bones.”
Flossy watched Ruth’s puzzled face gaze at the table as she traced a finger along the wood’s grain. Placing a marker in the Woolf diary, Flossy closed the book. Mealie dug into her canvas bag and pulled out a drawing tablet. They cleared everything else from the table while Mealie began drawing a chart, writing in a fine, clean script: The Descendants of Samuel and Martha Campbell.
“Time you met your kin,” she said, passing it across to Flossy. Picking up her own pencil and ruler, Flossy drew a long line beneath the Campbells, under which she wrote in the names of each of their six daughters, including Patricia, the youngest.
“Milly was the eldest — that’s Phil’s great grandmother — and she married Thomas Spencer. They had a son, Crawford, who married Lily Grue.” Flossy wrote the names in as they went.
“And one of their four sons, Frank,” offered Mealie, as Flossy wrote, “is Phil’s dad.”
“Terribly bossy; we were all a bit afraid of Milly,” said Flossy. “But I’ll tell you this, Ruth,” she ran a finger over Milly Spencer’s name printed on the page, “she sure did miss your grandmother. We all did.” She shook her head. “Then there was Frances. Did you know her, Mealie?”
“To say hello.”
“Frances Campbell,” Flossy began, “spent six months in New York City in her twenties and never got over it. They couldn’t get her to the barn. Franny, you see, was born a lady,” she said, raising her brows. “Sally was the third of the sisters.” Flossy wrote the name carefully.
“There’s someone you’ve gotta meet,” said Mealie. “Sally’s jitterbug was the best along these shores. Get Phil to take you to meet her; she’d adore a visit from you and you won’t get away from her without learning the hop-polka. She’s a character.”
“And the last two before your grandmother,” said Flossy as she pencilled the names in, “were Nell and Pritchard.”
“Why ever a fine pair of Presbyhooligans like Samuel and Martha Campbell would name a daughter Pritchard was beyond all of us,” Mealie laughed. “She hated that name, so everyone’s always called her Billie.”
“Oh yes,” interjected Flossy. “Now, Patricia, your grandmother, and our friend, was at the very end. She was someone absolutely without guile, Ruth.”
“And hilarious,” said Mealie.
The three huddled over Ruth’s genealogy the better part of the morning, Flossy writing in each name, then she and Mealie clucking and telling all the variegated stories they could remember about the Campbell descendants: husbands and children of the six sisters, including Marjory and her brothers.
Beside Ruth’s mother, Flossy printed the names of two husbands. Ruth looked up at her. She pointed beside Richard Archibald’s name. “I go here,” she said.
Mealie noticed right away. “Richard Archibald?” she croaked. “You’ve gotta be kidding.” She looked across at Flossy, who nodded.
“I only found out myself, just before I got here,” said Ruth, a little sadly. “My mom and dad didn’t tell me before.” She turned to Flossy, “I thought you knew.”
Looking from Ruth to Mealie again, Flossy answered with a sigh, “I did.”
“Mom always said she never made an important decision without talking to you.”
“Pregnancy ain’t always a decision,” Mealie interjected in a much-softened voice.
“Do you know him?”
“Richard?” Flossy nodded. “Oh yes, yes, he’s a good man.”
“They don’t come much better,” Mealie joined in. “And you’ll find an Archibald under every rock in Nova Scotia,” she said, taking a sip from her coffee cup, sitting back in her chair and looking out the window.
“The Archibalds were some of the earliest settlers out here. They used to say they were the first men to have a squeak in their boots,” said Flossy, “it meant they were wealthy, but Richard’s people were the humbler cousins. Your mother and he would drop in regularly when they were travelling to Halifax.” Flossy took a white handkerchief from the belt of her dress and wiped her nose. “He’s a wonderful man,” she swiped the handkerchief across the nose twice more then tucked it back up under her sleeve. “Gentle and kind and as honest as the day is long. He was good for your mother. I was so sorry when it didn’t work out, for them both.”
Stroking the top of her head thoughtfully, Ruth said, “I don’t know where he is, but I thought I might be able to meet him.”
“Did she tell you he’d be here?” Flossy asked.
“Yeah.”
“So that’s why you’ve hung around,” Mealie chuckled.
“Kind of.”
“Don’t worry,” Flossy said, “he’ll be here, by the weekend for sure. We’ll be hosting the very first meeting of the Elizabeth Bishop Society over at the Legion. Your mother has promised to call him this week and, let me tell you something, you’re going to be an even bigger surprise to Richard Archibald than he is to you.”