SIFTING THROUGH A STACK of photographs two inches thick on her lap, Flossy O’Reilly let a dozen or more fall against her stomach. She was awake early this morning and enough wound up to finally just get a start on the day. It was high time she sorted through some of these things.
“Ah, there you are,” she whispered, removing one and tapping the rest on the table to straighten them. She replaced the tidy stack in the tartan shortbread tin. There were pictures from almost every year that she’d been in the classroom. It was a record of sorts of her life’s work, forty-nine years of mostly black and whites with a few colour photos in the later years, but Flossy wasn’t the least bit interested in them anymore.
One of these days, somebody would throw them all out. She should save them the trouble. She picked up one or two of the oldest black and whites and scanned the rows of faces. Day in and day out she had watched those children. She followed their learning, their spurts, acne and heartaches, the ebb and flow of their confidence, yet a few of those faces were as unfamiliar to her now as the population of Prince Rupert.
Men and women from Mealie’s age on down were still coming up to her, as she picked up her prescription at MacQuarrie’s or over the leeks at Sobeys, speaking solicitously about their years in her classroom. As soon as she heard that sing-song volley, “Hel-lo Miss O’Rei-lly,” she knew she was in trouble. For years she’d taken great pride in remembering all their names. By eighty-two, she just couldn’t be bothered.
Tattered on three corners, a crack in the gloss along one side, but otherwise intact, the photograph she had selected was Thomas’s primer class. There he was. His face leapt out at her from among the twenty children sitting and standing in rows beside their teacher. She smiled to see him. Miss Chisholm had been Flossy’s first teacher too, though she’d only taught those two years before getting married. Once a woman married in those days, her teaching career was over. Wouldn’t Ruth think that quaint?
She looked back at the photograph. Thomas standing in the back row, an unremarkable boy, smiling shyly with his shoulders pulled up to his ears, arms at his sides. Among the others in the photo she searched for Elizabeth Bishop, who’d been in Thomas’s class. She was seated in the front row, short and plump, as small and square as Thomas was long. Elizabeth held some of her baby looks into adulthood too, the round face and pouty chin. Her thick, curly hair had been bobbed with some gathered up in a fashionable big black bow. She’d always said you could pack dishes in that hair.
Flossy tucked the photo into an envelope. Today was a great day, a day for the history books, and she was gathering together all the Bishop memorabilia she had for the first meeting of the Elizabeth Bishop Society beginning that morning in the Legion, across from the United Church, at the heart of Great Village. It was her own small archive of a story long-neglected: each mention of the poet from local and regional papers, the Pulitzer, the Honorary Doctorate from Dalhousie — there hadn’t been all that much — Flossy had carefully clipped, dated and folded. The yellowing stack had been set out the night before on her kitchen table. Ruth and Phil had combed through it all, asking questions, curious about Bishop’s life. There were a couple of letters Flossy had saved, kind condolences from Elizabeth on the death of Thomas and her mother, and two photos of the adult poet back home with her Aunt Grace in Great Village in the forties sporting their new Reilly hats.
All of these things Flossy would entrust to Richard Archibald. He would know what to do with them and this might be her last chance to hand them to him herself. She must do more of this divesting. There was a whole house full of things she needed to pass on before she passed herself on.
Should she take the books too? Maybe the poems, at least those. Retrieving The Complete Poems from the parlour to add to the other few items she intended to take along, the anthology slipped out of Flossy’s hands, as things often did now. Bending to pick it up, she noticed it had fallen open at “One Art,” what she’d always considered a Bishop masterpiece. She wondered if Ruth had been looking it over. Flossy almost had this sad beauty by heart but couldn’t resist sitting down on the arm of the chesterfield and reading its melancholy lines one more time. The poem always seemed uncharacteristically biographical for a woman as private as Elizabeth. There is an art to losing, it cheerfully suggests, that can be mastered with some little practice, beginning with the small things we’re all familiar with losing in a day, the wasted hour, keys, things that don’t bring disaster, to irreplaceable things, like homes, continents, even the one to whom the poem was addressed. It was Elizabeth’s catalogue of loss, Flossy thought, and that was, in large part, her life. But losing was every life’s lesson, she’d have said. By the time you got to Flossy’s age, there wasn’t much else. “The sad realities,” Mealie called them. They couldn’t turn around these days without hearing that another old friend was gone or well on the way. If you lived long enough, you lost them all, the odds were against you — for you and against you, in that lucky-unlucky way. And just what would constitute reality, she pondered? Outside the front window she could see that a fierce storm had blown through last night, entirely missed by the weather reports. Tree limbs were down, another edge of cliff would be torn from the shore; maybe the little apple tree gone. They still had two pieces of pie sitting on the counter. Ruth and Phil would probably finish those off for breakfast. It was astonishing what they could eat. Was that reality or was it the much-needed rain for fields after weeks of drought? Jimmy would have wakened to thunder and rain on his roof in the middle of the night and rolled over a happier man. Was reality the maples and lindens storing their sugars in a few weeks and giving up a leafy flourish of gold, saffron and crimson to burn themselves up, drop copper and decay? Or was it the buds, already emerging behind each leaf scar, the promise of beyond, of return next spring?
Was there anything much more than losing in this life? By one method of calculation she’d have to declare a definite no. She was an old woman and the longer she lived the less she came away with at the end of each year: teeth, hair, hearing, stature, patience. Yet that wasn’t entirely the sum of it either. There had been more, much, much more. You couldn’t say that each loss had been balanced by something that drifted back in with the next tide, but there had been comforts, unexpected ones, when she most needed them that Flossy might never have anticipated.
Closing the book of poems, she stretched towards the front window and pulled the curtain back to get a good look up and down the road. This morning the house was creaking with the blowing wind. The street was quiet except for an empty ginger ale can that rolled twenty feet up the hill with a gust of wind, that caught it again, spun it around and rolled it off in the other direction, pattering beyond where Flossy could see. She imagined it taking itself back to McLellan’s for a refund. The front lawn was strewn with branches from the silver maple next door, twelve-foot limbs blown thirty yards her way, still writhing with the morning’s rain and restless winds. “Fear not, till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane,” she echoed Macbeth’s bravado. A chill went through her as she looked down the road. Maybe she should put a fire on for the young people.
ELIZABETH BISHOP HAD MASTERED the art of losing because, in the end, she too had precious little left. There were few lives that could make Flossy as sad as Elizabeth’s. (It was no small mercy they knew so little about Shakespeare.)
At the time the class photo was taken, young Elizabeth was quite happily settled in and, no doubt, doted upon by her Bulmer grandparents, a couple of aunts and an uncle. She and her mother had returned to Nova Scotia from Massachusetts following her father’s death when Elizabeth was only eight months old. Her mother, who was both a nurse and a teacher, had begun to suffer mental breakdowns that would see her committed to Dartmouth when Elizabeth was only five. Though she would be in her twenties when her mother died, Elizabeth would never see Gertrude Bishop again. Mrs. Bishop died after eighteen unbroken-broken years at Mount Hope.
Within a year of that class photo, Elizabeth’s wealthy Bishop grandparents, perfect strangers to her, would arrive in Great Village to take their granddaughter back with them to Worcester Massachusetts. There, little Elizabeth would be given everything money could buy and nothing that it could not.
Flossy stared out the window. She imagined the Bishops arriving from Boston in nice clothing, staying at the Ellmonte Hotel for a week and thinking nothing of taking the child away from everything she’d known. Of that time in New England with her grandparents, Elizabeth once said she’d got more affection from the servant and the dog than anyone in her father’s family. Within a year, the child was gravely ill with asthma and eczema, and unable to go to school. She was also deathly unhappy.
Fearing for her life, Elizabeth’s maternal Aunt Maude risked uprooting her once more to bring her to her own home in Revere, Massachusetts, where the youngster would grow up in a working-class Irish and Italian neighbourhood outside Boston. It meant she could return to Great Village for the summers, before going off to college.
If only the displacement and loss had ended there, Elizabeth might have found the footing necessary to limp along in her life but there was to be no such fate. There was no shortage of influential mentors and peers, like Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, and concerned aunts in the wings, but the clouds of loss and mental illness that had hovered about her tender years would drift into the life she was making for herself. Friends lost their sanity, intimates took their lives, she fought her own losing battle with alcoholism, relationships disintegrated, homes were lost. She wasn’t even — Flossy considered for a moment — granted a few hours to ready herself for her end.
She stopped. There had been a weight on her chest all morning, since she awakened before four. It seemed harder to breathe, she would have thought the air clearer after all that rain. She must stop thinking of Elizabeth Bishop; the sadness of that life could nearly drag Flossy down. She went through all the reasons why she might feel worried about this day. Was it Richard? Maybe Richard.
Was she herself ready for her end? A shiver went through her. “Nobody’s ready,” she muttered aloud, brushing the thought away as if it were a small cloud of gnats dancing in the dwindling August garden. No one was ready who wasn’t already suffering a terrible illness and wanting to go. She’d lost her mother, Thomas, Patricia, David, her father, a couple of good students, other friends, her hearing, strength in her arms, balance. Though she had to admit there were other good things she’d lost too: patience for insufferable stupidity, any time for bigotry, willingness to waste precious time, need for approval. Age brought its own blessings. In all her years of teaching, she’d never met a stupid child but my-oh-my she’d met her share of stupid adults.
Bishop’s death came back to her — though she tried to put it from her mind — the perfect non-negotiable, an aneurysm. Turning to leave the room, Flossy noticed the grandfather clock had stopped at two. She opened the glass door, retrieved the key and quickly rewound it. As the pendulum began to swing she reset the time and hastily swept superstition aside.
Had Elizabeth worried that she’d end up the same as her mother, maybe even expected it? Perhaps she was forever self-medicating depression with alcohol. Flossy often wondered if she’d feared the worm of suicide, what with Plath, Sexton, Berryman before her, all fine poets. Alcohol might even have been her way of covering the suicidal tracks, the slow noose, applied over decades, but without a doubt effective.
Flossy wondered if death might be quick and colourful, was there even pleasure in the final letting go, all those poets seemed to think so, the final pushing of the last door open, perhaps there would be nothing more than wide-shouldered terror. What would she feel in her last moment? Incredulity, she thought, no matter what age. She’d no doubt waste a good few final breaths in gasping denial, like finding yourself suddenly on the ground, having miscalculated a patch of ice or heaved sidewalk.
She thought of what was said about seeing one’s life flashing before the eyes, the long tunnel, white light and the people who’d gone before. Dear Lord, she hoped not. There were a few she’d been happy to see cast off from these good shores for the next and had no desire to begin the conversation again. Would she be able to hear? They always said hearing was the last sense to go.
She’d asked Mealie about that once.
“Mighty Sakes, Flo, I think you’d have to be able to hear reasonably well in the first place.” She could always count on a certain flat-footed practicality from Mealie.
The clouds were low and round-bottomed. Rain lashed grey against the windows, not thinking of ending anytime soon. Back in the kitchen, she bundled up the books and clippings and placed them all in extra plastic bags to keep them dry. The house was dark.
The lights were already on in Mealie’s studio. Flossy had brought her paper in at four-thirty along with a drenched Oscar Wilde.
Why had she never talked to Elizabeth, adult to adult, about the mental illness in their families? Theirs were the two in the area most afflicted by it. Everyone knew this. And like a fresh death, it pains as much that no one speaks about it. In Elizabeth’s case, it hadn’t appeared in any other generation so perhaps the Bulmers and Bishops could allow themselves the comfort that Gertrude’s illness was an anomaly. Nobody understood those things back then and each family carried the shame of it in private. Could she not have reached a hand across to Elizabeth? At least between them they could have spoken with more than curiosity, especially after Lota, her lover’s suicide. Elizabeth had been a stranger to them, that was why. Taken away so young and only returning for visits, never long enough for either of them to get beyond their painful reticence.
Flossy stood watching out the kitchen window. It was a moody Maritime day. There was nothing so welcome after drought. Weren’t people always waiting for something? For the rain to come, the rain to stop, the sun to shine, always waiting for something to pass and something to take its place.
As she stood there watching the rain dance on Mr. McNutt’s roof, Flossy could not help recalling another time of waiting and watching and its terrible end.
“Get the goddamned into the goddamned boat.” She felt the old weariness heavy on her chest. Could she never remember anything else, any tender words her father had said to her? After those three dreadful days, she could never do it again, could never stand at a kitchen window waiting and watching for anyone or anything, would sooner scrub the kitchen floor, clean out the refrigerator or move the entire woodpile from one side of the cookhouse to the other. Sweep out all the summer spiders. That memory of waiting was like another being taking hold of her sanity and pulling her inside-out. She’d been so young. And because of her innocence she’d found herself bound to her father’s death far longer than she ever should have been, until she’d looked through that glass darkly and understood it for what it was.
Like everyone else during the hours and days that her father was missing, she had stood at windows not knowing what else to do, two days that bled to night that bled to day again; on some lonely sliver of a threshold between hope and despair, they’d all waited. There were people in the house who weren’t normally there. Her mother’s sisters had come and Uncle James was there. Flossy’d never seen her mother undone, never seen the strong, combative Lillian frayed and useless like a piece of discarded ribbon among the sweepings of the kitchen floor.
Only thirteen at the time, Flossy hadn’t been able to keep her thoughts steady on anything but the fear inside her head chipping away at what would become a perfect statue of grief. She’d prayed and prayed over those three days her father was missing. Thomas had gone down to the water, spent the days walking up and down the shore as far as the tide would allow him to go in each direction. She and wide-eyed Jimmy watched each other across the room, neither spilling a word. After two days, she knew he could be counted on to keep their secret.
Had she done that to Jimmy? Dear Lord, Flossy sat down, her hand went to her mouth. She’d never thought of it like that before. Had she been the one to exact the unspoken promise to keep silent about the boat? Had she done that to him?
As the sun was setting on the third day, she remembered Mr. Fulton knocking and walking in through the door, saying to her mother as the room fell silent, feet shuffled and all eyes turned. “They found him, Mrs. O’Reilly.”
Flossy was only a child; she hadn’t raised the winds, the rain, the lightning or sent anyone out onto the bay. Nonetheless for years she felt it her fault, her own failing, that her father was dead. And the other horror, the other “accident” only a year later, so suddenly split the scar of the wound that preceded it. The sequence played over and over again in her head like a musical round: her father, the Mumford boys, her father, those boys, her father. They’d felt cursed. Who’d be next? Was it three tragedies or three lives? People said they came in threes. She’d wondered that for years, was it over, or just waiting?
It had taken so many years, a decade at least, to forgive that Iago bay for what it had taken from everyone who’d meant anything to her, how it gouged their trust, their hearts, psyches, sheared them off clean like the entire length and breadth of the Chisholm farm. How many years had it taken to understand the bay’s innocence, as innocent as Flossy herself, a small girl for her age, thirteen, refusing to get into a boat with her father? How many years had she thought it her fault, that he’d not come back because she’d refused to go with him? How many years had she, in her childish fantasy, imagined that she could have caught his arm, saved him, if only she’d gone with him in that boat? And what had Jimmy thought all those years?
Oh, she’d forgiven it. The bay was only water after all. When you turned those tragedies upside down and drained all the emotion from them, you could see that old tide was nothing more than indifferent Nature plodding like a tethered mule at the end of the moon’s long lead. Nature hadn’t lopped off the Chisholm farm, the baseball park and the old Spencer place because they deserved worse than anyone else along the shore. Nature wasn’t punishing the Mumfords nor the O’Reillys for anything they may or may not have done. There wasn’t the least thing personal about it.
The starlings were agitated today, making it hard to catch her breath as if she’d just finished climbing Hustler’s Hill in one mighty rush. Her mind flashed back to that earlier time.
“Get in the boat,” he’d said.
She closed her eyes, hoping the memory would pass.
A storm had blown up unexpectedly then too. The wind all morning had been slamming a barn door someone had forgotten to latch; she could hear the sound, creak-bang, creak-bang, creak-bang. From the house you could see the wind kicking up waves down by the shore. Sixty-nine years ago, you could fit a respectable lifetime into that.
It had been a Saturday too and the three children had gone out to the barn with their father that morning. After the chores were all finished, he told Thomas to go down to the feed mill and grind some bags of corn. It was a peculiar order as they still had some bags ahead but her brother was obedient and didn’t question their father any more than would she or Jimmy. Wouldn’t have done any good: once William’s mind was made up, neither heaven nor high water could change it.
No sooner had Thomas harnessed the mare and pulled out of the lane than William told the rest of them — herself and Jimmy — they’d be going down to the bay. They, too, were obedient. When they got to the water’s edge, the wind was fierce, whipping up the waves and thrashing the rain against them. Flossy and Jimmy had dressed to be out in the barn, not out in the wind with stinging, spraying water. Her legs were freezing and her feet wet from leaky boots. The tide was high and the choppy waves were crazed, crashing into the land. She was afraid.
Their father was a brooding unfamiliar sky that morning, had been all week. He was red in the face, reckless and in a rush. At the shore they were surprised to see he had a small boat, a skiff he must have borrowed from someone because the O’Reillys didn’t have one of their own. He said he wanted them to get in with him to go fishing. Jimmy was used to their father’s favours, the only one of them who was, and William lifted him right into the boat. Not so Flossy. Even at thirteen, she smelled danger.
“Come on, get in lass,” he’d said warmly, as if she were only playing coy. The wind was tossing his hair all around that morning, knocking it down into his eyes, giving him a frayed, sinister look.
“I can’t. Mah says I hafta sweep the kitchen after chores,” she said.
“Don’t be silly. You can do that later. Tell her I said so. Now come on, get in.” His voice was gentle but urgent. He leaned into the wind blowing against him tugging his jacket and pants. They flapped against him like a flag. If it had been a warm summer day, that wind would have been festive and Flossy wouldn’t have hesitated, but it was April, cold and ominous.
She didn’t move and she wouldn’t look at him either. The wind was catching her from every direction and she had to dig in and resist. She was soaked and shifted on her feet in a futile effort to keep warm.
“I’m your father, Flossy, get in the boat.” This voice had lost the soothing undulation. It was a single repetitive note now and carried a warning as if he were a dog growling just low enough to make you wonder what it was you were hearing. It was the threshold at which fear always found compliance, the voice a child disobeys but once. Still, she did not budge.
Everything about this morning was wrong. The children, as a rule, didn’t do special things with their father, like fishing in the middle of the day, especially this kind of a day. She wished Thomas were with them. Thomas would know what to do; he’d so long been the shield between the younger ones and their father. Standing by the water’s edge facing him, the bay tossing and churning, Flossy was scared. She wasn’t sure she could have moved if he’d come near enough to pick her up. Her mother’d always warned her “never but never go down to that bay when the weather’s stormy.” They were freezing. Jimmy’s hair was wet, he was red from the cold and his teeth chattering as much as hers. Besides, there weren’t even any fishing poles in the boat. She didn’t want to go out onto the rough water without her mother knowing.
“You don’t have poles,” she pointed into the boat.
William ignored the comment. “It’s just the three of us,” he said. “It’ll be our little adventure, out for a wee sail, just us three. I know it’s not very nice out but come on now, I only have the loan of the boat for the day.” Flossy was equally fearful of angering her father. She’d seldom done so before without a strapping. Still, she didn’t move.
Jimmy sat in the boat bobbing on the water as William held it by a rope. He couldn’t let go to grab her because Jimmy would almost certainly have drifted off and Flossy stood just far enough away that William had to talk her into getting in.
“Come on, Flossy, we don’t have all day. Get into the boat. Jimmy’s all set. Aren’t you Jimmy? You don’t want to disappoint Jimmy, now. You know how he loves fishing.” She didn’t move and when he made a quick grab for her she jumped back well out of his reach. He almost lost the line and had to dash to the water’s edge to step on it and haul it back. As he grabbed the rope, the boat gave a sudden kick and Jimmy was tossed backward off the thwart. While he didn’t cry, the boy was losing the appetite for adventure.
“Flossy, get the goddamned into the boat.” But the youngster was skittish now and her refusal caused Jimmy to have second thoughts. He scrambled back out, getting his feet wet doing so.
Sensing mutiny, their father calmed himself and changed tack, knowing he had to get Flossy first to get Jimmy again.
He raised his voice. “Don’t you be going nowhere, Jimmy, do you hear?” He turned back to Flossy and spoke softly again. “You know that smart blue dress you’ve been eyeing at the store? We’ll go into town and get that for you, just as soon as Thomas is back. What do you say to that, now?”
Flossy was mute. When he took a step towards her, she stepped back.
“Didn’t you tell Mama you liked that dress?”
“Yeah,” she said cautiously, her head low.
“Well, we’re going to get it for you, but first I want you to get into my little boat here.” Flossy didn’t move, but oh my how she’d wanted that dress, a store-bought dress. She could wear it to church tomorrow.
“I’m cold,” she protested.
“You get in, you can sit by me. I’ll warm you up,” he said it tenderly and Flossy was close to giving in. He took off his jacket and held it out to her. “Here, put this on, you’ll feel better.” She hesitated. “Take it,” he said with a smile, holding the jacket out lovingly like a delicious piece of candy in his outstretched arm. As Flossy cautiously approached to take the jacket, he let it drop to the ground and lunged at her but misjudged his footing in the sand. So nervous was she that she pulled back and drew farther away.
“You get the goddamned into the goddamned boat,” he said through clenched teeth.
Seeing the old rage erupt into spitting demented wrath, the familiar beast rise up that gorged on its own, Flossy looked both ways and bolted back up the bank, and when she ran Jimmy ran too. The wind was behind them and so they flew.
Those were the last words she heard from her father, the only words that circled around and around again in her head. After they left him there at the shore, their father did not come home. When he wasn’t back for supper, Thomas went to look for him. When he didn’t come home that night or show up for chores next morning, Thomas went to tell Uncle James. When he wasn’t back by nightfall, more people arrived.
The tide brought William back three days later and tangled him in Fred Corbett’s weir. The children weren’t allowed to go down. “He’s gone, Mrs. O’Reilly, I’m sorry,” Mr. Fulton had said.
The skiff made its way back too, though it pulled aground closer to Bass River and it was another full week before anyone found it with William’s polished shoes wrapped in a gunnysack and tied securely beneath the thwart. Doctor Rushton had already declared it an accidental drowning before those unkind shoes turned up to cast their several doubts.
how very long it had been — years, Flossy thought — before she’d seen her father’s adventure for what it really was: the punitive fist behind the accidental death, not an accident at all. He’d never meant to hurt them, she and Jimmy, no. In his delusional state he’d no doubt intended to take them with him, save them. It was the others, the ones left behind that William O’Reilly was desperate to hurt.
Flossy shuddered. She must get hold of herself. Memory was a dubious blessing. She was always amazed that details of what wouldn’t amount to mental rubble from seventy years back could be burnished into the brain as tidy and fresh as this morning’s preoccupation with milk gone off. It was as if the mind’s attic had any number of dusty suitcases up there — stuffed with snapshots, trinkets, smells, hair combs, grief and hat pins — ready to spring open at any moment and release their restless tide of recollection. Yet the details of a week ago Tuesday could be maddeningly elusive.
The young people had an hour before she’d call them to go off with Jimmy to the weir. Then, when they got back they’d all get ready for the Bishop’s meeting at ten. Ruth would be up soon. She wasn’t wasting any time sleeping late these days. Phil had stayed over to avoid getting a ride into town this morning but any little excuse served to keep him hanging around these days. She’d passed him in the hall in the middle of the night in his boxer shorts. He’d mumbled something but she had to tell him to hold it till morning; she couldn’t hear a thing without her glasses. Even thirty years after she’d first heard of women’s liberation, parents were considerably easier about their sons’ night wanderings than their daughters’. She mustn’t forget the raspberry tarts and rum balls. Ruth and Phil had both helped to make them. She gathered the tins of sweets and placed them in another plastic Sobeys bag. Was she forgetting anything?
From the kitchen window, she glanced down the Great Village terraces over Hustler’s Hill to the church and watched a car coming along the highway from the direction of Parrsboro. It turned towards Truro. How satisfied she was with the summer. Uncanny the way things had turned out. Here she’d regretted saying yes to Marjory, had dreaded Ruth’s coming right up until the hour of her arrival, even a bit longer, truth-be-told, and yet what a wonderful child she’d turned out to be, a wonderful young woman. The Campbells were overjoyed to meet their lost sister’s charming granddaughter, another ancient wound all healed-up and haired-over. These things seemed long overdue. And in spite of the fits and starts, she’d be meeting her father and Richard Archibald his daughter today. Ruth Trotter-Schaeffer-Archibald, two dreadful hyphens, though they weren’t bothering Flossy nearly as much these days.
It surprised her that Richard hadn’t appeared before now but she thought Mealie might be right. He needed a bit of time. After seeing him in front of the house on Thursday, Flossy had called and left a message on his answering machine, which she knew he checked regularly. She’d offered the briefest apology, hoped they could talk soon and added Phil and Ruth’s names to the registration list for the Elizabeth Bishop Society gathering. She felt sure he’d find a way to squeeze them in. She also suggested he might come by this morning to meet Ruth in private before their meeting began.
Flossy removed the plants and magazines from the top of the old black and white enamel Enterprise. She opened the stove’s damper then lifted the lid and placed several pieces of crumpled newspaper inside with kindling laid carefully on top. She hadn’t heard back from Richard, but she knew he was out there and maybe he’d come for dinner in the next few days, after the Bishop’s conference was out of the way, when everything had settled down, have some quiet time to get acquainted with his daughter. Scraping a match across the box, she let its flame catch on several corners of the paper before dropping it onto the pile. For the next few minutes, she watched the fire build, placing bigger and bigger pieces of kindling on top. Finally, she chose a good-sized log from the wood box setting it on top of the small fire before closing the lid. There was nothing so comforting as wood-stove warmth.
Her mind drifted ahead to the coming meeting as the smell of burning wood drifted throughout the room. It was something immensely gratifying, finally there would be a Society for Elizabeth Bishop. After years of a few isolated admirers from here and there writing articles, raising banners, howling to the moon, it seemed there was at last going to be some recognition of her genius in this, one of her earliest homes, Great Village. If there were no other memory of its former shipping glory, the village would always be the place of Elizabeth Bishop’s formative years, and for that, Flossy was convinced, it would always be great.
There was no doubt that the poet had tutored her ear and mined her memories from the early years in Great Village for some of her finest verse and prose — fishing, sandpipers, the shoreline, moose, milk-route bus rides to and from Boston. Perhaps the early Brazil years, when Elizabeth lived there with her lover, Lota de Macedo Soares, were as happy as any, but they were not to last either and even decades after she’d left Great Village, Elizabeth often found her Muse roaming the landscape of her early memories of Nova Scotia. A Maritimer to the core, she always migrated back to the East Coast: Nova Scotia, Boston, New York, Florida, Brazil.
Where did she come from? Her grandfather was a tanner, the aunts mostly nurses and teachers, as women were in those days, her uncle a tinsmith. There was nothing exceptional in her heritage but the Bishop had genius and could take her place among the best poets of the century. If only she’d had her old age to live out, if she’d had more years to write her poetry. Finish up all those unfinished poems. It didn’t matter, though, what survived was of the finest cut and Flossy was grateful to have lived this long to see Elizabeth’s creative genius celebrated right here in Great Village. It was another of those life circles closed and satisfied, Flossy’s own finished couplet on the Bishop’s life.
She looked once more down the road. There were a few cars gathering in the church parking lot across from the Legion. Some of the organizers were arriving. The meeting wouldn’t start until ten. She looked across to Mealie’s. She must have gone straight to work this morning. Flossy felt happy for her, too much afire to want her morning coffee and paper, a good sign. She could hardly wait to see these pictures.
Walking back to the stove, she inched the damper over.
Ironic what can grow up and flourish in the midst of a quiet village, any village and be entirely lost on all who come and go, have come and gone, brought in their hay and grain, chopped wood, paid bills, fed and clothed their children. Flossy was under no illusion that the vast majority of those in Great Village even today would have heard of the Bishop, read any of her poems, or been interested in the work they were doing to preserve her memory.
“Ya which?” Jimmy would ask each time Flossy’d mention the Society, though she’d talked about it a hundred times before. The poetry still wouldn’t be studied in the senior grades of the local school. How many lost Donnes, Dickinsons and Shakespeares had there been down the ages growing up in obscure little villages just like this one, whose papers were used to start the morning fire of some resentful brother who’d have liked the poet a sight better if he’d spent more time at the barn? It was prodigal. How easy it always was for Flossy to sympathize with that older brother, with the Marthas of the world. The Lord knew she’d been long enough on the short end of that straw.
The Bishop, of course, was a flawed genius, were they not all? Were only the flawed able to look steadily enough into their own raw interior to then offer insight to the rest, expose their bloody hands, their sides for our curious fingers? She wondered. Flossy knew the lives of some of the best of them. She was sure she couldn’t have tolerated the poets whose work she most admired. She’d have put them out in the woodshed. No doubt the few left in the village who had a personal interest in the Bulmer family had heard their share of stories over the years. The older families knew the fate of Elizabeth’s mother, who languished in Dartmouth until her end. Then the Bishop herself, driven by alcohol. They wouldn’t know what to make of the friends she brought home with her for visits over the years either. Such friendships between women might be fine in New York City but they were best unacknowledged in Great Village, as if a woman loving another woman, or a man a man, were anything new under any sun.
The time was creeping on. Everyone was sleeping in this morning. It must be the dark weather and so like these young people, not a wristwatch or an alarm clock between them. “What time is it?”
“It’s summertime.”
She’d give them an extra half hour, pour herself a nice cup of coffee and finish the last ten pages of Virginia Woolf’s final diary in peace and quiet.