TWO FATHERS, FLOSSY TURNED the thought over in her mind as she stood at the back of her garden in the late afternoon snipping the pincushion heads off spent purple coneflowers.
Mealie had mentioned that some people were leaving such blackened knobs for the finches to eat or what was now being referred to in gardening circles as winter-interest. She could see their charming bronze glow in the heavy light of a late afternoon, but Flossy didn’t much like the idea of leaving them all winter. She thought old used-up things ought to be allowed their peace beneath the earth. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine herself set out in some cornfield for someone else’s winter interest or crow feed.
She’d had her father thirteen years. Unlucky thirteen, she thought. One man can do a lot of damage in thirteen years, and a different one a lot of good. What if she, Flossy O’Reilly, had learned one day that William wasn’t really hers, that there had been another? Any other. What would it have meant if someone outside the family, even maliciously, had planted that seed of doubt?
A sudden stabbing pain in the chest that swiftly migrated to the round of her left shoulder and slowed as an ache up into her jaw forced Flossy to hunch forward and clutch the wire mesh of the fence. Her heart flopped to no recognizable beat. The scissors dropped from her hand. She got her head down. One-matchstick, two-matchsticks, she began to breathe shallowly, three-matchsticks. In a minute or so she could half straighten up again to reclaim some balance. She looked out over Hustler’s Hill towards the church spire for something, a point, for her eyes to hold onto until the fluttering and pain eased. She was fine, fine, her vision returning, able to breathe again. The stars that were blinking throughout her whitened field of vision were disappearing one by one.
She looked over towards Mealie who was staring into a pot of marigolds near the house. Flossy knew that colour-gaze. A rust, orange perhaps, had caught Mealie’s eye and she’d be absorbed in it for half an hour. She hadn’t noticed. No need to alarm.
Feeling steady enough to carry on, Flossy bent over for the scissors and lifted the green watering can. The pain was not much more than a squeeze in her chest when she inhaled now. Moving gingerly around the garden she drenched wilted plants with water. The pain was retreating. That was better. Refilling her can halfway at the back of the house, she turned to the pots on the patio. Much better. Standing over them, she watched the soil darken and the liquid rise in each terracotta pot until a stream dribbled from beneath: staked cherry tomatoes, parsley, dill already gone to seed, sage and rosemary. The herbs could take a beating though the tomatoes wanted their water twice a day in these temperatures.
Twenty years ago, she’d think nothing of packing a lunch on a scorcher of a day like this and striking out for the Portaupique woods or the road to Five Houses to pick blueberries. Nowadays everything took so much more effort and she wilted about as quickly as those tomatoes.
The pain was almost gone. She hadn’t had one of those in awhile and how suddenly it overtook her. Flossy once visited someone in a nursing home in Truro where she noticed two ancient Italian ladies leaning towards each other saying their goodbyes, kissing each other on both cheeks and whispering, “Have a good death.” At the time she couldn’t believe her ears. Back then she thought it funny. So did Mealie but now Flossy was beginning to understand those old gals. Hers would be swift, she felt sure, like that pain. She thought of Jimmy telling everyone up and down the line “She got away from us of the heart,” and Noreen chiming in that she never would go to a doctor. (Noreen wasn’t likely to let you off, oh no, not even in death.) They were all, of course, terrified of having a stroke and lingering, or worse, losing their minds and having those old John Deere tickers their doctors took such good care of pump for another senseless decade. She’d prefer to go quickly but not so quickly she couldn’t say the odd goodbye.
Bumping up against a tall urn of acidanthera gladiolus, the long necks of the delicate white triangular flowers bowed to her like a herd of miniature giraffes. A rough spot on the side of the pot had caught her leg just below the knee. Putting the watering can down, she fished a handkerchief out from beneath her belt to wipe the bubble of blood that was forming.
“Mealie, I think I’ve lost my epidermis.”
“Maybe it’s with my mouse, did y’uh check under the fridge?” she asked without looking up from the pot from which she’d begun snapping pungent dead marigold flowers. Flossy could smell their strong burnt scent from where she stood. Mealie was sitting forward in the lawn chair, a little snug across the beam. She squirmed from one hip to the other.
“Mealie?”
“Unh?” She looked across to Flossy who was holding a bunched handkerchief against her knee.
“I’ve wanted to tell you about Richard and Ruth,” she looked down, “I’ve been stewing about it.”
“I kinda figured that,” Mealie replied.
“He was parked in front of the house this morning but by the time I got around there he was gone.”
“Needs a bit of time, Pet.”
“It was like Bubba all over again. I … I didn’t want to keep it from him, but somehow I felt caught between the two of them.”
“I can see how you would.”
Mealie understood. She always did. Flossy didn’t know why it had been so hard to tell her. “You know, the terrible thing is I can’t even remember if she asked me not to tell him or if I just kept it to myself, which seems so much worse, especially that he means a great deal to me.”
Mealie sat back in the chair again and looked more closely at Flossy. “Awfully hard to know when to insert yourself into someone else’s affair, Flo. It would have been kinder if Marjory had left you out of it,” she said, “but she’s not likely to do that in this lifetime and, with your luck, the next besides.” After a few more minutes, she said, “I don’t see how you could have told him before they’d told Ruth.”
Flossy looked down. “Sometimes silence is golden,” she said, “and sometimes it’s just plain yellow.” Mealie gave up a soft affirmative snort. Had it been so hard after all? Could she not have told Mealie months ago and saved all that fussing?
“He’ll come around. He’s got a big view when it comes down to it.”
UNADULTERATED RELIEF IT WOULD have been if Flossy’d learned that William wasn’t her father, though she knew things never worked out that way. Imagine, though, what they all would have been able to step away from if troubled William had been the late arrival like Jack Schaeffer — a senseless lifetime of guilt.
“Blessed relief,” she muttered, but all that was fantasy, birthday-candle wishes, the future imperfect, and it didn’t have a whole lot to do with the past imperfect or getting on with your living. And Thomas? How frequently her older brother crowded into her mind these days; she didn’t even have to dredge him up. He was there, a benign presence, still lying upstairs in some mental attic, to be stopped-in-on and tended each day. What would it have meant to him if he’d heard that William was not his?
“Blessed relief,” she said it again. Catching the words slipping out of her this time, Flossy looked up at Mealie, who was looking back.
Her eyebrows went up. “That for me or just you?”
Flossy shook her head. Her mind swung like a pendulum from Thomas to their father and back again. Once more it settled on a particular day in the barn that, to her mind, shifted everything that came before and after. Remarkable, how a single incident in one small day of a life could so alter the way she’d look at everything else.
Before that day, her father would have his usual little rages and they were in their petty way something you came to expect if you couldn’t altogether get used to them: tantrums that Flossy thought would have been well served had her mother broken a chair over his head in the early months of their marriage. It was a bad habit he’d got away with. This other, though, had been something else, something sinister that she’d never mentioned to another soul.
“Mealie?”
“Unh.”
“Do you think the younger generation’s better off for telling all its secrets?”
Mealie didn’t answer right away. Dropping several dead flowers into the bucket beside her then pulling her half-glasses forward towards the end of her nose she replied with a shake of the head, “I wouldn’t say so.”
“Was ours the worse off for having kept so many?”
Again she took her time answering. She closed her eyes and rubbed her left earlobe thoughtfully for a minute or two, so long that Flossy wondered if she were going to answer at all. “I think so.” Leaning her cheek against the hand and looking aslant towards Flossy she added, “Any you can think of now that deserved to be kept?”
Flossy smiled.
Mealie nudged the glasses back in place with her knuckle and let her gaze fall to the flowers again.
It would have been a flat-out lie to say William O’Reilly was any kind of man to grow up around. He had a dark Irish rage always on low boil, the visitation of which was a privilege he bestowed upon his family almost exclusively. Their mother called him their Gate Angel. Beyond the gate, he was the charming angel to everyone he met. Inside the gate, his fury would strike as unpredictably as lightning from a cloudless sky.
Flossy could recall him in the barn leaning against one of the pens, relating some Irish yarn one minute when a shadow would fall across him the next, something he’d remember or maybe didn’t like in the way you were standing. His face would twist up red, the eyebrows huddle, his bottom jaw shift to the right and there’d slither out a vicious blast in the same choked breath. He might of a sudden lose patience about a knot he couldn’t untie or a pail of water the cow had kicked, Thomas standing before him sputtering over a hard consonant that struck a burl on his tongue. In an instant their father’s voice would screech an octave higher.
“Outta the goddamned way,” he’d roar at him through clenched teeth in that squealing voice that issued like dragon’s fire straight from the bowels of hell. He had a way of making his mood everyone else’s in the household, broadcasting it before him like grain to the chickens.
Thomas bore the brunt of the fury from sheer proximity. Their father never hit any of the rest of them in such a mood but he thought nothing of skelping Thomas. Poor Thomas, he always thought he deserved it somehow or other, when all along it was just the temper.
“We always tried to keep things from Thomas, secrets or news of any kind.” Flossy had emptied the watering can and was standing motionless in front of Mealie with it pressed against her stomach.
Looking up again over the glasses, Mealie nodded understandingly, “Oh yeah?”
“But that man could hear bad news drop on the other side of Burntcoat Head,” Flossy said. “Always knew when something was up.” This last she uttered turning away.
Dropping another handful of spent flower heads into the bucket at her feet Mealie took a long look at Flossy. “Is he hanging ’round you these days?” she asked.
“Umh?”
“Thomas. Is he hanging around?”
“Oh,” she smiled, “considerably.”
A pout of Mealie’s lower lip told Flossy she understood. She went back to her task, turning the pot around to get at the plants at the back. She was a big woman, Mealie Marsh; capable, dependable, solidly kind, could hold a lot inside her. Flossy admired these things about Mealie. She kept her own counsel. Never one to pass on gossip, yet she was also the most directly honest person Flossy knew, would always say exactly what she thought, even if it might not land so sweetly on the ear. You could put money on it and she, Flossy O’Reilly, was no betting woman.
They’d known each other since grade school. Yet there were things Flossy didn’t know about Mealie too. She didn’t know all that much about the years in Montreal, the two husbands she’d loved and left behind, why she ever decided to move back to Nova Scotia.
“I sold a picture yesterday,” Mealie said, collecting her things and pulling herself out of the chair. “What do you say we go over to the Palazar, get some lobster, tomorrow noon? We’ll take Dash.”
“If Dash can work us in,” Flossy replied softly.
Ruth was at a baseball practice, getting ready for another game tonight, her second in two days. Flossy checked her watch. In an hour or so they would make their way over to the field to watch her play. Mealie had done a credible job of fitting her out with a sparse boyish moustache and tiny red sideburns from a makeup artist in the Drama Department at the Teachers College. Between the two of them, Flossy and Mealie had coached her to swagger some when she walked, jut the jaw out and lower her voice, though they thought she could get away with the occasional grunt. They filled her pockets with gum before sending her off, cautioning her to use the men’s washroom, spit frequently and always pat herself southward before stepping up to the plate. Ruth could only giggle.
“Mighty sakes, Child, never ever giggle,” Mealie shook a finger at her, looking sternly out over her glasses, to which Ruth giggled all the more.
The genius of the disguise, though, couldn’t compete with Ruth’s own ability to play baseball. She flew at that hardball and no matter how she clutched and tumbled to a halt, always delivered a steady, reliable throw. The few who came regularly to the games stopped mid-sentence to watch her. “Did you see …?” echoed across the bleachers. At bat, she wasn’t likely to drive anything out of the park but she frequently got a base hit or two. In fact, no one on the team was driving anything out of the park, so a base hit was entirely respectable. This late in the summer, the Great Village Ironclads wouldn’t be changing their fortunes at the bottom of the league, so no doubt the occasional blind eye was being turned in order to play some baseball. And with a Major League Baseball strike all but a certainty, a few in the village were already suffering withdrawal.
Flossy and Mealie had gone to the game last night, setting their lawn chairs out behind the bench and quietly watching, which surprised and pleased Ruth. Neither of her parents, she told them later, had made it to any of her games in over two years.
The two women had huddled at the window earlier watching Ruth and Phil go off together with baseball gloves tucked snug beneath their arms for the second night. As they walked down the Station Road towards the baseball field, they kicked a rock along in front of them, completely absorbed in each other and beaming enough to fairly eliminate all need of street lamps in Great Village. Such beautiful, young, carefree lives.
“Mealie?” Flossy sighed.
“Unh.”
“Were we ever so young?” she asked, turning to watch Mealie as she spoke.
The big woman shook her head thoughtfully, “Not that young, Pet.”
WHAT IF THEIR GENERATION had grown up as carefree as those two? What if there’d been no drowning, no war, illness or Depression? What a difference two generations could make. There they were, Ruth and Phil going off to a baseball game, money in their pockets, hundred-dollar running shoes on their feet, with nothing more to fret over than a pimple on the chin.
Pointless thinking that way. Why did she even cast about in those murky waters after so many years? It was like some desperate compulsion to pick at a scab. The past was. Period. Flossy’s parents had had a hard life and they’d lifted their burden like gunpowder high above the water, kept it dry and intact, to deftly pass onto the shoulders of the next generation. There was not a thing carefree about their living.
It was Thomas, as the eldest, who bore the brunt of that burden. Except for the hours that he slept each night, he had an uncanny awareness of everything that was going on in the house, like an animal sleeping behind the stove whose ear lifts when a forearm is scratched on the other side of the room. From the moment he heard William’s boots strike the floor or the door slam each day, Thomas tried to divine his father’s mood. If William was broody and silent, Thomas retracted; if he was sunny, Thomas too was cheerful and open.
Their mother saw all of this and either from reaction or compassion or both looked indulgently on Thomas, which only fuelled their father’s contempt. It wasn’t something you could finger directly with concrete examples from around the house or at the dinner table, that she gave Thomas the preferred portion of a Sunday chicken or the hen’s heart tucked beneath his dumplings, which he loved best of all. She was straight-up fair about things given to each of them. It was, rather, a bend to her branches, a gentling lent to Thomas that wasn’t there with the rest.
He was close to her, too, but you could see that as he grew older he longed to be under his father’s wing. Thomas fawned for William’s approval, though he was unlikely to have got it, Flossy was convinced, if they’d both had eight more lives to live.
If her mother cleaned Thomas’s boots Saturday night for Sunday church, he’d be anxious his father would find out. William always said he had nothing but respect for a man at church Sunday morning with polished shoes, though the ones who had them you could be sure were unlikely to have done the shining themselves. Thomas would buff his tattered old boots Saturday night until the last of the kerosene sputtered from the lamp.
Unlike Jimmy, who had the same bull neck and even walked like the O’Reillys, Thomas hadn’t inherited a single feature from their father, not eyes, ears, the set of jaw, the length of bone or shape of feet. He, instead, bore a striking resemblance to their mother, even in temperament. You might have thought he’d sprung from her rib. Perhaps some men don’t need to see themselves in their sons but someone like William O’Reilly surely didn’t want to see a Davison every time he turned around. Though he wouldn’t have Thomas close to him, even less did he want the boy close to his mother. He was determined to toughen up his boys, both of them. Flossy’d overheard him once saying to Jimmy, who couldn’t have been more than four at the time, “I want you to remember this son, you can pick a snake up by the tail but you can’t trust a woman.”
Winter and summer, Thomas was the one who got up at five every morning without complaint to go to the barn with William before school or church and he was the last one in after him at night. From the time he was ten, their father said he was old enough to do the work of a hired man. If Thomas had been a mongrel that strayed to their door, Flossy was certain her father would have boasted to everyone for six miles up and down the shore that he was the best dog he’d ever had. But he was a son and their father never did say such a good thing about him. Besides, no dog ever stuttered.
“Were you around when the crow was here?” Flossy asked as she cut a cluster of late-summer roses for the kitchen table and placed them in a jar with water.
“Crowe? From Portaupique?”
“No, no, Elijah.”
“I went to school with Peter. Didn’t know Elijah.”
“No, no, Mealie, a crow, a bird.”
“Mighty sakes, Flo, between your hearing and my misunderstanding, it’s a wonder we get anything across.”
“Beg-pardon?”
“No, a bird? No,” she raised her voice a bit.
“Thomas found a chick, had fallen from a nest in the woods. He kept it down by the spruce trees so father wouldn’t find out. Called it Elijah and, when it got big enough, it followed him everywhere. If he went down to the far field to get the cows, it would lumber along, hopping from fence post to fence post. William didn’t like it. Then one day it vanished. Thomas thought father had caught the bird or shot it.”
Mealie looked up.
“Elijah was smarter than that,” she continued. “After father died, the bird was back.”
“Just followed nature?”
“I suppose.” She looked down the hill towards the centre of town. The fire truck was pulling out of the station, lights flashing. “The Merson boys killed it,” she said.
“No!”
“Elijah followed Thomas to school a couple of times and they got it. You remember how they tormented Thomas. Then they sang a little ditty for him. ‘You da da da didn’t cry when your old man died, but you cried when the old crow died.’”
“Brutes.”
“Schoolboys,” she corrected, looking off again. “For years, though, there’d be one crow that would perch on the same post at the back of the house where Elijah used to wait, making a ruckus until someone would go outside. They’re terribly clever.”
Mealie made a soft noise in her throat that said she was listening and thinking too.
“This morning, when I was going out to get Richard,” Flossy pointed to the back of the property, “there was a huge old crow, sat on that post right over there for a good ten minutes. Cawed and cawed until I came outside. Mealie, I know it’s crazy, but I always think it’s Thomas when I see something like that. Do you think that’s too silly for words?”
“Nope.”
How good it was to have Mealie near, though one could get used to her, take her for granted like you took for granted a good liver working quietly away inside the body, straining everything you so carelessly threw at it. Mealie was the one person Flossy could always say things to, soft-in-the-head things, just like that about Thomas and the crow, and she’d listen patiently. You’d never say such things to Jimmy and, God-forbid, Noreen.
Of course the crow wasn’t Thomas, they both knew that. It was just that sometimes things could call so convincingly from the past that it was nice to tell someone else without danger of committal.
THE DAY IT ALL changed for young Flossy O’Reilly started out as a seasonal gift, the unexpectedly sweet fall day or two that’s lodged between chill incursions of winter. A flush of Indian Summer had settled in along the bay and brought with it a remnant of fair weather to Colchester County. Flossy’s interior eye could still rove the barnyard of that unusual day, the leaves twirling like giddy little girls on windless warmth; Jimmy feeding the horses fallen apples through the fence. They were all out in short sleeves when their father took Thomas aside and said they’d be going to the barn after dinner to butcher the pig.
All three children gathered to watch: Thomas, a long willow switch of a boy at thirteen; Flossy, tiny, just short of a full year younger; even Jimmy, barely five, stood and waited as their father heaved and dragged that fat old pig to the centre of the upstairs barn floor that had been swept clean for the killing. Thomas had carried that pig, the runt of the litter, up there in his arms five months earlier to fatten him for this very end and now, almost two hundred pounds bigger, they could barely budge the beast.
Killing was the one uncommon chore of the year that required the house and barn to work hand in glove. As the children watched a safe distance from their father scuffling with the pig, their mother would be in the house stoking the fire to boil pots of water, one to scald the coarse white hairs off the butchered animal, another to prepare a brine to preserve the hams and shoulders and the last for the slow rendering of the animal’s head. A barrel, half-filled with coarse salt, would cure fat pork and bacon that was cooked with Saturday baked beans or used for frying throughout the year. The feet would be boiled for soup the next day. Today, though, was a day of happy abundance; there’d be pork chops for supper.
A large hook dangled at the end of a rope over top of William’s head. It had been threaded through a pulley as big as a man’s hand that was screwed into a low beam three-times Flossy’s height off the ground. They’d all seen animals killed each fall; no one could be shielded from the coarse grain of farm life. The mechanism would haul the pig aloft by its back feet to allow the cutting of the throat and blood to drain, then expose the long pink belly to be sliced clear up to the back legs for the entrails to tumble out.
Oblivious to the threat of these new surroundings, the dumb pig blinked its beady eyes and snorted twice in the direction of the children, a faulty hesitation. Front legs spread, its stumpy snout snuffling and rooting the air, the pig swung its head in William’s direction as he lifted the sledgehammer with both hands. The chuck of metal on flesh was traced by a thud as the beast crumpled to the floor, making the little ones jump. The animal lay unmoving, eyes open.
William, thick like the pig, grunting and clearing his throat, grabbed at the rope Thomas held and knotted it tightly around the animal’s hind feet. He clutched at another overhead, whose slack Thomas had freed, and clawed a thick iron hook between the pig’s bound hind ankles. With his left hand outstretched he motioned Thomas to pull.
Still tottering on boyhood, with so little muscle, Thomas heaved until his face reddened and his arms shook without getting the pig’s rump more than half-lifted off the ground. William clamoured over to help as they hoisted it into the air and tied it securely.
Catching at one of the beast’s numbed ears and twirling it like a dance partner a yard off the ground, William passed the butcher knife to Thomas, who guarded it carefully, knowing how clumsiness enraged his father. Standing behind the pig, holding the animal by both ears and stilling its free-floating whirl, William turned its neck towards his son.
“Come on, come on, and from the side,” he said impatiently, “otherwise you’ll be cleanin’ blood off you into next week.” Thomas stepped gingerly to his right and held the newly sharpened knife out for his father again, the shaft turned towards him. “You,” he said bluntly.
From Thomas’s open mouth, words tangled then jammed altogether. Flossy held her breath. In the engorged minute between command and answer that refused to budge, she counted: one-matchstick, two-matchsticks, three-matchsticks … She could see his shoulders shake, his head jerk, the eyes gripped tight. The knife drooped then fell from Thomas’s hands. She stiffened, squeezing her eyes and praying her father would ignore him just this once.
“Damn, you bloody piss-tail,” their father scowled, “he’ll not be staying like this ’til supper.” Still, the boy didn’t move; he stopped gulping words. Fifteen-matchsticks …
“Pick up the knife!” William snarled. He took a threatening step towards his son. Seeing the menace in their father’s eyes, a rage on the rise, Thomas bolted for the door but William leapt after him quicker than Flossy had ever seen her father move.
He yanked Thomas back with both arms around his chest. The two staggered then collapsed on the floor in a delirious jumble of panting, squirming, twisted bodies. Flossy remembered Thomas looking straight at her, terror in his eyes as he fell back into that dreadful embrace. Limbs flailing like a deer in a cougar’s jaws, he scuffled with his father, the knife somewhere beneath them. Someone’s foot caught two stacked pails that skidded along the floor and separated as they rolled in different directions, another struck the blank-eyed pig suspended above them that spun like a tethered top. Though up against an opponent twice his size, Thomas put up a stubborn fight, not even a fight so much as a frenzy to escape.
William by now was a blue-faced, snorting, spitting fiend, slamming a tight fist into Thomas whenever he could. At least five hard blows struck the boy’s head and face. Blood was pulsing from his nose, running down his chin and smearing the floor beneath them. Thomas made little effort to shield himself and, unlike many a lad thrown into similar stew, gave not one punch back.
Flossy at twelve, small for her age, moved a few steps closer, instinctively fearful of William finding that knife. Jimmy had already scampered off like a spooked fox. She was shaking, her heart pounding, and just as she stepped into the scuffle’s circle, her arms stretched out and reaching for the steel she could see beneath them, her brother slipped free, rolled to his feet and skittered off like a wildcat as their grunting father lay curled and winded on the ground. Flossy stepped back into the shadows and vanished before he had time to recover his breath and find his feet.
All three children scattered like a puff of smoke to their most secret places throughout the farm that afternoon. Seeing such fury in her father chastened Flossy, and something she sensed more than understood, did not have words for, hardly did now, would be altogether different from then on.
It wasn’t a scuffle on the barn floor and a cracked nose that broke Thomas’s spirit back in those troubled years with William. This was more of the same treatment her brother had come to expect from his father, only a degree more in severity.
It was she who’d been trampled underfoot that day; Flossy who could never look at her father the same. She knew he’d hurt Thomas and there was not a doubt in her twelve-year-old mind that he’d meant to.
That sweet autumn day, William would take a place among all the other males she’d learned to be wary of around a farm — the ram, the billy goat, the rooster, Chisholm’s bull — animals you crossed a field to avoid, animals you never, never turned your back on.
blood didn’t bother thomas. Killing one animal or another was something they did every fall and each year he was the one to wash the killing floor, carry the pail of organs — the steaming heart, liver and kidneys — back to the house for their mother to clean or cook up for supper. It was the killing of something he’d named that Thomas couldn’t bear. He could gut a fish, kill a rat or take the head off a chicken but not an animal like Runty Pig, who he’d been feeding up on corn meal and turnips, whose dull head he’d scratched each morning and night for a full five months.
Thomas had an extraordinary tenderness for any lame or weakened animal around the farm. The orphaned or sickly young he brought to the house and bottle-fed, as he had that pig for its first two weeks. Even as a child he was always putting birds’ eggs and chicks back into nests, however futile.
Flossy, who had been standing with one hand braced against the white clapboard of her house, suddenly realized water was pooling at her feet, flowing over the top of the watering can and from its spout. She scurried to close the tap below her. Mealie was watching.
“You okay today, Pet?” the big woman asked. Flossy nodded. Had Jimmy any memory of it? Or had he been too young to understand and therefore see? Did any piece of that cruel afternoon float back at him, as it had Flossy unguarded this afternoon, as he crossed the part of the barn again where they’d once slaughtered animals, as he walked the lonely mudflats to his weir each day or drove the familiar roads to and from Great Village? Or had it merely sifted like silt to the ocean floor of his deepest dreams? The episode in the barn that no one ever talked about cured young Jimmy of wanting to spend time with his father. Maybe Jimmy had just seen too much more in that war he’d gone off to fight in Europe, had too much else he was working hard to forget. Mealie’d often said, “You wouldn’t be the first brother and sister who grew up in apparently different families.”
Thomas was string: sinew, long bone and little meat. He had their mother’s dark hair and cowlick. For a week that fall, he looked out through two slits in the middle of swollen, blackened eyes. The broken nose set his breathing apart from then on as something you’d always notice in a room.
“What do you suppose Thomas would have done, Mealie?” For so many years Amelia Marsh had been near, a friend, who knew the family well enough to see to the seam of Flossy’s question.
“Thomas?”
“Mmm. If he were Ruth’s age, now, what do you suppose he’d have ended up doing, his work?”
“Oh.” Thoughts flickered back and forth in Mealie’s intelligent eyes a couple of minutes before she answered. Flossy waited. She liked this about Mealie, that she was capable of picking up any random thought that tumbled out. “Oh, something precise,” she said. “I’d imagine him working in a museum, Boston maybe, New York, cleaning the bones of reptiles or birds no bigger than the palm of your hand. Cataloguing their parts. That, or maybe fixing clocks, old clocks, works-of-art clocks, worth standing back and admiring.”
“I think of him working over something fiddling, too,” said Flossy, “with big thick glasses.”
“You kidding me? Spiked hair, pierced ear and Silhouette designer frames.”
“Silhouette?” she asked.
“Only the best. Born into the wrong century,” said Mealie. “That’s all that happened to Thomas.”
Flossy thought about it for a minute. Maybe she was right; a century might have made a difference. “Mealie?”
“Unh?”
“I can’t tell you how good it is to have an old head to talk to.” Mealie wrinkled her nose, “You tell me that just about every week.”
“Do I?” she asked. “Huh. Must be the memory’s enfeebling some.”
“Convenient.”
A century. Thomas never found the tool or instrument to fit perfectly into the curve of his long hand tight against the lifeline, not a burin for delicate engraving nor the finest set of callipers to measure the distance between himself and the rest of humankind. He’d never had the time or luxury. Of course, no one in the family would have known how to help him find his calling even if there’d been more time, not with their father gone.
In those days the family had a need as big as a Fundy tide pressing in on it every day of their lives: it was survival, and you filled it with whatever means you had at your disposal. You didn’t for a minute forget that. Like so many others around there, they had nothing but the land and strong backs and the only way to make a living — avoid starvation, actually — was by farming. They weren’t unusual that way. Once the Great Depression settled in upon them like a winter that wouldn’t end, most everyone in every direction was frantic to stay three steps ahead of the County Home. By then it would all be so much worse than any of them could have imagined.
You never considered what someone might have done; luxury again. They’d known fishermen from those parts who’d had the first joints frozen off three fingers on each hand. You’d never have asked them if they liked fishing. They wouldn’t have known what you were talking about: it was what they did, bald-faced survival.
If William O’Reilly hadn’t drowned, things might have been different. In the unholy marriage of loss and necessity that follows such tragedies, Thomas became a farmer. It was the one thing they all were sure he wasn’t cut out for.
He had a natural timidity far more deeply rooted than an undermining tongue. Thomas was afraid of the big animals, especially the gelding, and even as he and the horse matured he never overcame it. If anyone was going to be stepped on, kicked or bitten by that horse you could be sure it was Thomas. Their father had always chided him about his carelessness near the animal: “The bay mare you can walk beneath in a thunderstorm; the colt, never, never turn your back on him.” If William said it once, he said it a thousand times. Even Jimmy knew as much. Horses, like people, their father would always say, were to be trusted or not; it was that simple.
After William died, the beast was no better than it had ever been, four years older and gelded, hooves the size of stovepipes, the horse was a brooding soot-black demon that never held still and was no better in the harness than the first time they put him there. How often had that beast tormented Thomas? How often had he seen its massive black hull backing towards him in a stall set to ram him into a corner?
No, Thomas’s work should have been quiet, dry work. He might have been good with fine wood, cherry or bird’s eye maple, something he could carve, sand and polish. It should have preserved the sensitivity of his hands, the ability to see and inquire with those delicate fingertips, never something like smithing that required brute strength and sweat, the taming and pounding of iron with fire and hammer. That’s perhaps why their mother’s work had seemed so natural to him.
He loved textures, the feathers, satins, felts, ruchings and quillings of the hats their mother made. Grandmother Davison had taught all her daughters the art of hat-making. It was in the family’s little shop in Truro that Lillian and William had met. For that first year after William died, when Lillian had to take up her millinery trade again to bring in some needed cash, Thomas would sit beside her at night and read from the almanac or just be quiet. He stayed while she stitched her grief away into bone weariness. It comforted her, no doubt, to have him there and calmed him besides. He’d sift through her basket of scraps: velvets, furs and tweeds.
You’d see him take these remnants out and place them on the table, side by side, moving this one over by that one, in some order that made sense to Thomas alone. Sometimes he’d rub them against his cheek, sitting beside Lillian watching her work, humming softly to himself. He never stuttered then, though such shilly-shallying of fabric bits and bobs was something he’d never have done if his father were alive.
A couple of times early on, when they’d be sitting like that around the kerosene lamp and he’d be sorting Lillian’s scrap box, she’d of a sudden think of something she’d forgotten to do that had to be done urgently, stoke the fire, save the potato water for bread-making next morning or address a letter ready for the post. She’d gather up the hat, needle and thimble and dump them onto Thomas’s lap, saying, “Just finish that stitching right to the end, like I’ve done. Mind you do it neatly, now.” He was an obedient boy and, unlike the work he did on his feet, which always courted mishap, Thomas’s fingers up close were capable of infinite, even artistic, precision. Mother always said he could sew a seam to put his grandmother to shame, and Grandmother Davison was ever the standard of perfection in the household.
Sometimes, instead of sewing a seam to the end exactly as she’d instructed, he’d make a small loop in the fabric, maybe cross one end of a seam over another. Eventually, it was Thomas who was making the odd suggestion here and there about colour or ribbing to their mother, a tuck along the side or flair at the back, a remnant of fur or feather perfectly placed, the more defined sweep, and, oh my, she could see just like that that he had a rather extraordinary knack for improving the design. Over those years, their mother began to feel that his suggestions were giving her a small edge over the Great Village hat market. They were the calling detail, the leap in design, that drove the eye over the rack of so-so hats to the distinctive Reilly Hat.
It caused no little stir in the village as one of the clerks at McLellan’s general store, was brother-in-law to the town’s other hat-maker. A couple of times over the course of the twenty-five years their mother was making hats and selling them to McLellan’s, he tried to have the Reilly line discontinued, supposing that if the villagers had only his sister-in-law’s hats to choose among they’d no doubt still walk away with a hat. He was successful only once and briefly until their mother went to the store herself and spoke to Mr. Walter McLellan, the owner.
“May I remind you, Mr. McLellan, a woman’s hat,” she said with the dignity due her creations, “is an emotion.” Fortunately, all the McLellans from those parts were good businessmen who fully appreciated the virtues of market competition. They were also married men, to discriminating women who adored those hats.
That kind of work, though, would never do for a man. People from there wouldn’t accept that a man could be more suited to the setting of perfect stitches or know the subtle possibilities of dimension and texture, the juxtaposition of fabric and colour; that he might have a flair for symmetry and proportion, an eye for drawing out every woman’s beauty in a simple accessory, or prefer these occupations over what went on outdoors in the lumber woods, the mines, at sea or the barnyard. It was a family secret. It would never be easy to be a man of uncommon delicacy in Great Village.
In another century, he might have become a student of the shoreline creatures, or charted the pathways of the brain, painted landscapes or even like Mendel studied the genetics of the common pea. He was the kind of boy you felt had a unique possibility in him, a gentle and gifted sensitivity with the promise of doing something lasting. Sadly, he was born to a place too small for him, a creature without carapace and the world into which he was thrust was one where strength was all.
The village, now, was its own matter. Of course people talked. Talked in a hybrid way that dusts a pollen of curiosity over feebler concern. People outside a situation have their standard ways of understanding things of this nature that come over someone. Some said Thomas had a case of nerves and if you didn’t subscribe to that, then it was laziness.
Any Thursday in the nice weather you could walk by the Liar’s Bench, set out for the old timers to gather and gossip in front of the general store, and hear them talking about some old codger who’d lost an eye from a pitchfork. Half would say it was his own fault, always left his tools underfoot; the others, a bad-luck accident. If you passed that bench ten years later and remarked on that same glass eye, they’d no doubt drag out those same petrified opinions. People around there never much pulled the thread of a notion back through the eye of a needle for a new understanding.
Back in those days, you didn’t get many people defending anyone who didn’t fit in, like the old Faulkner twins, a pair of spinsters who’d been living back on Portaupique Mountain. They farmed on their own up among the woodlots and some said they picked mushrooms and cured with herbs and roots. People didn’t like that they farmed without a man. Even some of the local women joined that full-throated chorus.
“It’s indecent,” they chided, “women dressing like men, asking old Adam Chisholm to bring his bull over to cover their cow.” Chisholm didn’t mind; the sisters paid him for his trouble and money was money to him.
The rest thought the Faulkners queer and shunned them when they came into town wearing their trousers and smelling of the barn. You might have thought it a crime they hadn’t married or had a brother to live with them and make them the more respectable. You might have thought, too, that the women around there who truly held farms together over the years, while their husbands sat company with a whisky bottle from breakfast to last light, might have nursed a larger view.
You might have thought, after all, in a village like ours, a little sympathy cost anybody money.