PICKING UP SOME LETTERS to be mailed, Flossy O’Reilly slipped a heel down the back of each canvas shoe, stepped outside her kitchen door and set off walking in the direction of the postal box down by the general store.
Along the edge of the road, where grass and gravel meet, the evening’s heat lifted the scent of sweet chamomile to her nose. The light was rich at the end of the day, casting copper warmth over the faces of houses on the far side of the street. With the heat’s edge past, it was entirely pleasant outdoors.
Two cardinals dipped past her, lilting off towards Mr. McNutt’s orchard. She turned to follow their path but caught, instead, the glare of the sun full on her face as it peered out like some fierce ancient eye from between the McNutt and Marsh houses. Here it was, halfway through August, and the huge crimson ball shivered on the horizon as if it were the first of July. Even the leaves on trees were beginning to curl and drop. This time last year, she was sure she’d been covering the tomatoes at night. Though her left hip had ached all day, a sure sign of rain, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
She ambled on though her eyes were drawn back to the setting sun. Was it a perspective to love a day folding down tidily on itself, another one finished? Perhaps it was a late-life infatuation, some aging resonance with the dying of the light.
A family of crows passed between her and the sun. Seven silent black spirits beating southward, she felt their shadows pass through her. “The air is delicate,” she whispered, “light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.” How did he know so much? How did Will Shakespeare know about crows and everything else, cram so much learning into one short life-time? It always seemed that whenever Flossy learned something new in her life, all she had to do was circle back around Shakespeare again, and she’d find him already there, that clever sorcerer, perched on a rock up ahead, thumb on his nose wiggling fingers at her. And what was it that drove such big birds to fly a hundred miles every evening to roost together by the thousand in a valley up the Shubenacadie River, then tomorrow strike off again in their family clusters for another day of scavenging and racket?
A little walk in a day, down by the shore, or like this along the road to McLellan’s, could put things in perspective for her, restore a balance of sorts. Like Elizabeth Bishop, nature had always been Flossy’s best comfort even when she most detested living on the farm. Oh, and she’d hated the chores all right, despised getting up on a winter’s morning and pulling on chill trousers to go to the barn, the days so dark and cold her nostrils froze together with every icy breath as she carried steaming pails of water from the house over squeaky snow to thaw the pump and prime it to get more pails of burning cold water to haul to the animals, her fingers aching, knuckles bleeding from merciless winter.
Detested it all until she got down there among the shaggy hides, the animal calm and dungy warmth of the stable. Then the predictability of the animals, their pitiful contentment with a handful of grain, hay and water placed before them, salt licks and molasses, a scratch behind the ears, in turn gave her uncommon comfort. Flossy could still feel her forehead pressed against Queen Esther’s warm flank, the sweet smell of milk rising from twin streams pinging rhythmically against the empty pail. She recalled the last steps of the nightly routine with the chickens roosting and animals settled, their cud-chewing tranquility restored. She’d blow out the kerosene lamp, its puff of acrid smoke curling into the air, pick up the pail of milk and collected eggs, latch the barn door and walk back to the house with the immense milky way twinkling so close up there in the infinite above. No warrior, prince or knight-victorious throughout the ages had a more welcoming return than to step back into the house, the old kitchen stove lashing out heat, her mother taking the milk and eggs, rubbing her stinging hands with a towel, Flossy could look back on those dreadful days with no small measure of affection. Curious how kind the revisionist mind could be, sixty-some years distant.
She surveyed the road in front of her. When the sun’s long rays slipped between the houses like that and caught her figure, the shadow stretched all the way across the street and curled up into Mrs. Bill Curtis’s front window as if Flossy were a giant, thirty feet tall, walking along the shoulder of the Londonderry Road, not her usual four feet ten inches that, with time, had settled like sediment to something more in the order of four foot eight. How does a woman lose two inches? Two teeth, yes — she’d stepped out of the car once at Sobeys and noticed a perfect molar on the ground — but two inches? They vanished about as mysteriously as whole decades in the middle of one’s life. She didn’t honestly mind the years flying by; it was the decades she most resented.
In fact, there had been at least one decade of unending physical drudgery for the O’Reillys’ on that farm — she and her mother at the barn day in and day out while Jimmy was growing up — the horror of the Depression years of scrimping and scraping, living on turnips, potatoes and Jimmy’s fishing, anxious they wouldn’t survive.
Nothing had changed specifically, by the close of that first dismal decade after Thomas went to bed, but you could say it eased considerably. One could always see these things more clearly in other families: the crisis that lost all its sting with five years behind it. In fact, there weren’t many troubles that could hold their shape at five or ten years’ distance, those that thought the sky was falling with a daughter pregnant on the wrong side of the altar. People stretched a lot more than they ever imagined they could.
The single biggest change in that decade, of course, had to be Jimmy. By the end of it, he was nearing twenty and big enough to handle the farm, relieving his mother and sister of the morning and evening chores. Their little Jimmy would stretch into a round and sturdy six foot two and turn out to be as uncomplicated as he was big, the kind that have so little to prove. As a boy he ran, ate, fought, fell asleep and got up the next morning bearing no grudge for the previous day’s disputes. Nor did he change all that much as he grew older. For Jimmy, each day brought its own reasons for grief and gratitude and he sought to borrow none from the morrow. He was content to do what had to be done in a day, do all a person could, whether it be work or play, and just as happy to surrender it all to a cup of tea by a warm kitchen stove and follow it with a good night’s sleep.
That boy was made for farming: loved rising with the sun, setting out to the shore with his dog to check the weir, was patient with growing crops and animals. He took pride in solitary hard work, was not beaten down by poor weather or indiscriminate death visiting his herd. He’d found a woman to marry who could work right angles to him and bear him children whose children they’d watch into their old age.
Flossy glanced at the lime-green envelope in her hand among the bills she was on her way to mail. Little Jimmy would be turning seventy-six in another few weeks on Labour Day. She still hadn’t found a private moment for a word with him. She mustn’t let it drift. Seventy-six, she could hardly believe it. Jimmy could still pack in the day of a much younger man even with some arthritis and the daily undoing of the aging body. In another month he’d be out until dark harvesting corn with his son-in-law. Noreen was always so fond of saying, “Jimmy’ll be the happiest man alive if he drops dead sitting up there in his big old John Deere.” Her sister-in-law was another of the reasons Flossy was more than a bit complacent about losing some hearing.
Once they’d got through the worst of the Dirty Thirties, Lillian O’Reilly’s millinery sales began to pick up and by the middle of the Second World War, Reilly hats were being worn across the province. It hadn’t always been so. When the Great Depression hit there wasn’t money for bare necessities let alone hats and the McLellan brothers initially said they’d have to decline her work, but Walter McLellan, the younger of the two, had a bit of a soft spot for the Widow O’Reilly’s talent. He was also a sufficiently good businessman to know the lean years wouldn’t last forever, especially for quality hats, and so agreed to take Lillian’s merchandise and pay her in kind as he could: sugar, tea, kerosene, salt, seed, sewing supplies, the few things they couldn’t grow or preserve themselves. It was more than the O’Reillys could have expected. He sent the extra hats to a son of his who ran a woman’s clothing store in Halifax. By the late forties, custom orders were coming in as fast as Lillian could turn them out.
Flossy in her own right by then was the longest-serving teacher at the Great Village Public School. For a small woman she had built a reputation for being able to manage boys twice her size in any class and giving them the basics of a solid education. She didn’t think all that much about it back then. If she’d dared take a long, critical look at teaching, saw how little she was accomplishing after the first four years, or could measure how hard some of them worked against what she was trying to do with them, she’d probably have walked away and started growing mushrooms at the other end of the province. For the most part, she figured school was children’s work, keeping them occupied so as not to have packs of ten-year-olds roaming the countryside and shooting each other with rubber bands.
Would Mealie think that too harsh? She looked across and could see the lights on in the studio. It pleased her to see them, Mealie’s lighthouse. It meant she was in a creative fog, burning her wick. It reminded Flossy of times when Mrs. Woolf was writing a dozen finished pages a day, pushing the work forward. Flossy would have to get herself to Halifax for Mealie’s show in October. She hoped she’d be around for that, for Mealie.
THROUGHOUT THAT FIRST HARD decade without their father and Thomas, Flossy had been overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all. Not a little bit or even now and again. Her anger ran deep. She’d find herself awake at night, pacing the floor, obsessing over the day’s transgressions, a pressure building inside of her. Back in those days, an egg not boiled to her liking could ignite her rage, then the fury would fly in every direction as she reminded the rest of them of all their shortcomings since the last eruption.
If anyone had asked her way back then, the source of that irritation, she might have pointed to Thomas. Not only did he not do a lick of work, he lay up there in that bed and wouldn’t even come down for meals. Stuck in her brain and nagging like the chip off a back tooth, was a seemingly insignificant detail about the day he took to his bed. It was the horses’ harness hung in its usual place inside the barn door. Going in and out of there every morning and night, Flossy’s hand brushed against the leather as she reached for the door latch, a daily reminder of the mystery of that day. Whatever happened to Thomas out there in the hayfield, if anything happened at all, he’d had enough will to bring the mower back to the barn, remove the harness from the horses, water them and put them out to pasture. If he’d only left the animals in the field and walked straight to his bed, Flossy might have understood it more, thought there was not an ounce of will in any of it, but he hauled the harness off them — no small task — hung it behind the door and pumped them pails of water. Thomas wasn’t an enormous clock that stopped working, rather he’d mysteriously wound down. If that was so, in her young mind, maybe it was a matter of will to wind him up again.
She often wondered if there was a month or year or maybe ten times in a day when the notion might have floated into his mind that he could get up, some shriek or whoop outside his window tug his curiosity just enough to scrabble those legs to the edge of the bed and slowly drop them out from beneath his blanket, feel the bottoms of his feet on the cool floor once more. But he never did. His body’d become stone. If there’d been a cup beside the bed filled with a magical potion that would restore his life, he could no more have reached out for it than a stone rolled itself into the bay.
His absence drew an awkward hush over the others in the household that separated the wish to ask from the wisdom to abstain as surely as cream rising from milk. It was as when they were expecting a long-awaited visit from someone they’d all been dying to see, like their mother’s sister Margaret, who only made it back from Boston but once in three years. The hour for the arrival would pass, maybe another. They’d each grow quiet with the realization that something had come up, as so often did in the country, and all would be explained in a letter through the mail in a day or so. All the same, they’d ached for that sweet arrival, and the sadness would throb in the throat. They’d change back into their everyday clothes but couldn’t resist the waiting and watching, taking one more futile look up the road.
Thomas had become a study in senseless worry. He was afraid of something, everything, but, like motes dancing in a shaft of sunlight, nothing you could ever put a finger on. He was beset by all the penny worries a healthy mind might pick up in a day, look at, and set right back down again.
For twenty-four years they had to wait on him as if he were a small, wilful prince upstairs to pamper day in and day out. In those many years of getting up at four-thirty in the morning with so much to do, emptying Thomas’s slop pail or dragging his dinner up those stairs at night was just another chore among too many to fit edgewise into a day, and he was never so grateful as Queen Esther to get her meagre handful of grain or the horses their hay. And if Flossy wasn’t provoked by Thomas, it was Jimmy or her students. There seemed always to be someone gnawing away in the attic of her nerves.
It came to a head with David Mumford in the summer of ’36, the year of the Moose River Gold Mine Disaster, when Flossy was in her mid-twenties and Thomas was nearing a full decade in bed. Reverend Mumford had come by that summer day on his usual visit but instead of going straight up to see her brother, he sat down beside her on the porch steps where she was shucking peas. Flossy was in a dark mood having just had a row with her mother in the kitchen over something she couldn’t even recall. The two women were at each other frequently and Lillian, throwing her hands in the air, had muttered, “You’re every bit your father.”
Still steaming outside on the porch, Flossy wasn’t at all happy to see David Mumford ambling up the lane and the peas were flying in just about every direction but the bowl they were meant for. An angry blush ran right up her neck to her cheeks and ears. In the minister’s presence, she struggled for composure. She talked about what was on everyone’s mind, the mine disaster.
They’d all been caught up by that event. Each night Jimmy would go up the road to the Johnsons to sit around their parlour with a few others to listen to the wireless before bringing the news home to Flossy and Lillian waiting up for him. The cbc carried the first nonstop reports of the rescuers’ efforts. People who had them were fixed to their radios, so much so that crops weren’t getting in. Like everyone else, the O’Reillys followed the events as if those three trapped men, a hundred and forty feet underground, were their own brothers. Rescue teams from every part of the province worked around the clock and finally reached them eleven days later. Two had survived. For months, they followed the ups and downs of the survivors, even quite a lot about the rescuers. People in town talked of nothing else.
That day, Reverend Mumford sat beside her with two handfuls of peas from Flossy’s basket and began quietly splitting them into the bowl with her, not saying anything at all. She talked about those poor trapped men, Mr. Scadding, Dr. Robertson and Mr. Madill, and what it must have been like underground, in the darkness all that time. She told Reverend Mumford all the details she knew about the latest news of a machine being flown out from Toronto to save Mr. Scadding’s feet. She related, too, quite a lot that amounted to pure speculation on the part of their neighbour, Spurgeon Johnson, who’d become an authority on such disasters by virtue of being the sole owner of a wireless along their section of Highway 2, with all the time in the world to listen to it, though he’d never actually been within ten miles of a mine shaft.
They were almost finished the peas. Flossy asked David Mumford if he’d heard that one of the rescuers had gone back to Stellarton and died in a mining accident back home. He had.
“Lotta waste,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Peas,” he said.
“Un-huh,” she nodded. Flossy wasn’t used to sitting near the minister. She liked Reverend Mumford. Normally she liked stealing a peak at his long eyelashes as he closed his eyes in prayer or seeing the smile that would shift across his face unexpectedly, loved listening to his eloquent phrases at Sunday service, but that day she was feeling affection for no one at all.
He picked up one of the pods and ran his thumb through the empty waxy chamber again, turning it over. “I find it curious,” he began, “that people talk so much about the bad things that happen to others.”
She felt a bead of sweat roll down the inside of her arm. A climbing rose beside the front door that always began flowering on her mother’s birthday was still covered in clusters of white blossoms and she had an urge to point this out to him. Flossy hurried to finish her task but he dallied with those peas as if this were the only chore he had left to do before delivering his Sunday sermon. He was seated one step above her, his elbows resting on his knees to speak near her ear. “I’ve watched a lot of people with a lot of troubles over the years, Flossy.” He didn’t look at her when he spoke; David Mumford knew she’d be listening. “I’ve walked a long while myself with anger, fear and sadness. I can tell you they’ve been my sole companions in the middle of many nights.” He spoke with a different voice from the one in church. It was the voice he used by Thomas’s bed and it soothed like trickling water. A car came along the road and they watched in silence as it drove past, a trail of dust behind it lasting longer than the sound of the motor in the distance. “Sometimes I think they’ll take me over too, be the end of me. On those days, I believe Thomas is a more truthful me, lying up there in his bed. And Sarah’s a more honest me, rocking all day in a chair, staring at a wall. He’s too sad to live and she’s too wounded.” He tossed the empty pod to the pail but missed. He reached over to pick it up. Flossy did not speak.
“Anger’s a little unique from the others; it’s got eyes and looks for someone else to blame,” he said catching her glance before tossing the pod into the waste bucket, “but it’s never them.”
Reverend Mumford carefully set the bowl of peas in the pail on top of the empty pods, stood up and offered Flossy a hand. As he turned towards the door he said, “Too much has happened that you’re not responsible for,” they both paused, “nor is your mother, Jimmy; nor is Thomas. Terrible things …” He stood close to her, his soft eyes looking down into hers, speaking quickly.
Flossy’s heart pounded; she could feel her cheeks flush. When he saw her embarrassment, he added in a gentle voice, “No one can change what’s happened.” He motioned towards the house. “We can only prevent it from changing us. And anger’s the one thing I’ve seen that ends up changing us,” he tapped his chest, “in here.” His hand rested there a minute. “We all can take a lot of hardship,” he reached for the handle of the door and pulled it towards them, “suffering, disappointment.” He moved behind to let her go ahead. “No one gets through this life without their share sooner or later, Flossy.”
She looked down.
“I know of what I speak,” he reached for her chin and turned it towards him, so that she looked into his eyes, “You’re quite a lot like me, you know.”
“You’re never mad at anyone.”
“No?” He smiled at her.
They stood together quietly, not a sound came from within the house. Flossy thought they should go. She turned towards the kitchen but felt a gentle hand on her arm.
“Something’s broken in Thomas and he’s not capable of putting it back together. You’re different. You’re strong, you’ll never give up and go to bed like him. But that strength that keeps you going can as easily burn you up. If you don’t find your way to struggle against anger, you’ll push everyone away who wants to be close.” He hesitated, looking down. “All of us,” he whispered. David Mumford met her eyes. He ran his hand over her cheek and through her sandy hair. “It would be more than my heart could bear,” he said softly and deliberately, “to see anger have any part of you.” She reached for him, he took her into his arms and pressed his lips against the top of her head then as quickly released her.
David Mumford. Flossy, feeling weary this evening on her walk to the store, looked over at the lights already on at the church. That summer day, David had found his mark, all right. When she looked back on that first brief encounter with him, as she so often did, she couldn’t honestly say that they were specifically healing words he’d spoken that day but David Mumford had done something more, he’d reached through the walls of silence that tragedy upon tragedy had forced around them. There were so many things the O’Reillys dared not speak of, could hardly think of rationally. All he’d had to say was, “I see, I know.” He was the only man who’d ever done that for her and it was a far deeper knowing than anything else offered her by any other man in her long life. There was nothing worse than people knowing of your sorrow and never talking about it.
After that encounter, she felt older, a woman more in possession of herself. Her life didn’t change overnight, those things never do, but it continued with an ounce more courage that summer. She might have prolonged that tenderness with David Mumford, and she thought she saw in his sad brown eyes that he’d have yielded to it, but you didn’t do those things to your married minister.
Over those years, Flossy would have to say that David had been the one to show them all how to live. He was a humble man, a man of tidal suffering who nevertheless found a way to love life and encourage others at just the right place in their own dark woods. However old or young, feeble, vulnerable or discarded a person might be, he always found a unique possibility in them, a small fidelity to honestly acknowledge and appreciate. He was forever encouraging the sad, lonely or bereaved to hold on, till tomorrow, the harvest, a new season, another year, as long as it took for the black wave of grieving to wash itself back out to sea. He’d known it. No one knew it more.
In the breadth of this confidence Flossy promised herself she’d be mindful of her temper and try to be patient with what wouldn’t matter the next day, in ten days, a year. She tried and she failed. She tried harder and failed miserably, a dozen times in a week, but when she did she made her way back to tell the others she was sorry, something she’d never done before. They noticed and eventually even Flossy would have said it got better. For one thing, Jimmy and her mother were spending more time around her now and the work always went faster when they did it together.
It was about that time that she decided, as well, to go up to see Thomas for a few minutes each day, not simply to drop his tea in the morning or grab his tray from supper, but to sit at the end of his bed and talk to him. Flossy might take him the first ripened plum or a dozen baking apples for pies that she’d peel beside him, gooseberries they’d taste together. She might tell him of a classroom romance, mark papers and talk about the students or begin reading a book that had come from their uncle in the States. If you were ever going to get a thought from him, it would come just as the day was closing, as the sun cast those long bars of gold into his room, as he sat there obscured by the nodding, winking day. Flossy noticed her mother also learned to mine that sweet sunset hour, bringing in her latest hat to show him. He couldn’t offer much. Sometimes the best he could do was to choose between the ribbon or piping that she held out to him. “Which?” she’d ask.
“Better,” he’d say, motioning to one with a nod. He was still always right.
Even Jimmy began taking his tea and cigarette up to sit with his brother at the end of the day, reading to him from the newspaper or telling him about this or that around the farm.
“He feels things ten times more deeply than the rest of us, Flossy,” David said to her once. “He’s taught me so much … more than anyone in my entire ministry. Thomas and I are bound together in this life; we have a responsibility to each other. He doesn’t need forgiveness for what he can’t do, for what he never was to you and Jimmy and your mother, he needs to know you won’t be held back.” And in a whisper, he’d added, “It’s the closest I’ve come to an understanding of God.”
She wasn’t sure she always understood what David Mumford meant. Flossy had come to think of her brother as someone virtually without feeling, like a blowfly banging endlessly against the same closed window, so absent was he from anything that went on beyond those walls, so seemingly remote from what distressed the rest of them, but somewhere towards the end of that horrible decade and the beginning of the next, a winnowing of wheat from chaff would take place regarding her elder brother. She no longer thought of him as their burden. She began to feel for him again, tender white-green sprouts of compassion, as when they were young and their father would berate him for stuttering. This paralyzing inertia that had overtaken him, just like that faulty tongue, she could see, was just as much beyond anyone’s control.
THREE LITTLE GIRLS WALKED by in a cluster, huddled together and looking shyly at Flossy. She thought one was Gordie Faulkner’s girl. The others she couldn’t be sure. She smiled at them. New families had been moving into Great Village and communities like it all along the shore, some folks driving to work each day to Truro, others all the way to Halifax. There was a time when Flossy knew every child and her pedigree in Great Village, but she’d been out of the classroom far too long for that now.
So few details remained after fifty years. She shook her head: half a century; it hardly felt like that. She could remember where they’d ended up on some things but not always how they’d got there. Her life seemed not unlike that huge sandbar that had built itself up so gradually over the decades out in the middle of Cobequid Bay and now had marsh greens growing on it in the springtime.
That’s how it had been for her and David Mumford. Never was there a particular day in the year that they could claim as their own, a day when they once declared their love to each other and marked forever after, a day that might still make her stop at eighty-two and miss him all over again. So much less intrusive was their love and so easeful, the waiting and watching for the other, week after week, month after month, the gentle advance, the shy retreat, tidal deposits of reliance and affection. Flossy did not awaken one morning in love with him; she only knew that this was where her heart rested, with an unfathomably holy man, a good and married man whose wife had imprisoned him, too, and would outlive him by three years, eating plaster off the walls of an asylum for the insane down Dartmouth way.
David was seventeen years Flossy’s senior. He was her minister, and could not divorce Sarah under the circumstances — they both knew this — no matter how deeply he would come to rely on Flossy’s love and she his. There was no room for scandal of that nature in Great Village. He would never have held her back, would have dutifully performed her marriage to any man of her choosing from Colchester County or beyond but Flossy’s heart was never in it. There were men who’d come around, good men, farmers mostly, who would have given her children, but none of them was David Mumford. Who of them could have made her weep for Job’s lost children, collected and aged those tears in a flask, filled her head with Hopkins and Donne or taken her to the heart of sad old Lear? What was it that they’d had over all those years? It would sound feeble to anyone out there — Flossy looked around at all the quiet village houses and over to the church — a walk to the water’s edge every other Wednesday night where they might open their hearts to each other and share a tender moment, the exchange of books, thoughts to carry for another week, until the next glance. Not much, yet everything, everything she’d ever wanted and no one she’d wanted more.
Stepping out to cross the main street of the village, her eyes on the church tower, a huge lumber truck roared up from behind loaded with dozens of massive logs. The horn blared at her followed by a blast of dirt and wind that thrust her back from the roadway. She’d been lost in her thoughts, heard nothing — only felt a rumble through her feet. For a few minutes, waiting for the traffic to pass, Flossy felt as much embarrassed as shaken by how close she’d come to having a load of logs roll onto her four-feet-eight inches.
Was that what she’d been waiting for? Her brush with death? She needed rocks in her pockets, that’s what she needed. Rocks in her pockets and to pay considerably more attention to what she was doing. Was that it? She laughed out loud, elated. She’d cheated death. Was that all? The transport was followed by a stream of cars and smaller trucks with impatient drivers unable to pass on the winding village roads. She waved at them. When all was clear, she crossed the street, relieved to be alive.