VI

TURNING OVER IN HER bed, finding no ease in quiet, Flossy O’Reilly resigned herself to a hot and sleepless night.

She was spent by the time her guests had gone off to their rooms. Weary of chatting about nothing and too distracted to pick up her reading again, her mind now refused to fold its corners down into blessed sleep.

It was always a fat roll of the dice at her age anyway. The only thing she could reasonably count on was having at least a night or two of unquiet slumbers each week. She could close her eyes but a thousand candles were blazing in her head. After watching the unhappy mother and daughter sitting around her kitchen table, thoughts of her own mother crept back to her unbidden, that most complicated of relationships. How hard it can be to get beyond the tangle of women, to know which thread to tease out and when, which to pluck, tug or shun altogether.

It had been the dead, finally, that loosened Lillian O’Reilly’s tongue. Flossy’s mother held her silence well into her sixties and the wonder was she unburdened herself at all. The kind of life she had endured could as easily harden a woman as make her yielding in the face of a daughter’s dismay. How often had Flossy heard brittle ladies in church basements whispering, “She’s made her bed, let her darn well sleep in it”?

Had Flossy not gone with her mother that chill November day they might never again have found themselves alone in the sacred arc of candour where Lillian wanted to talk and she wanted just as much to listen. And because she’d only made the decision to go to the cemetery with her as her mother was walking out the door, it seemed all the more a bestowal of grace to find themselves there together.

The two women and Jimmy had driven over to the Mahon Cemetery when the chores were finished that morning. Her mother had wanted to go for weeks, though never asking outright, and so it was left to Flossy to arrange a ride with Jimmy, who was by then married and living in the village.

Though Lillian always visited the cemetery alone, Flossy went along this time because almost overnight her capable mother had turned around an old woman. When they’d pulled into the cemetery and Jimmy shut the motor off, her mother could only paw at the door of his Ford pickup, the knuckles of her hands red and swollen from the arthritis that had descended upon her earlier that year with the ferocity of a feral cat and left her stiff, sore and incapable of clutching a needle or fastening a button. She had to be helped into and out of every piece of clothing. Seated in the middle, Flossy reached across and released the lever that swung the door open. Perched there at the edge of the seat, hunched in her brown winter coat, Lillian hesitated. The ground, Flossy could see, was a long way down.

“Jimmy, move,” she said, jabbing her left elbow into her brother. By the time he’d slouched aside and she dashed around the truck to help her mother, Lillian had squirmed to the ground.

“I’m going with her,” she said to him through the open door.

“Suit y’rself,” he said, shrugging his shoulders then nestling them back into the truck seat and pulling his hat forward over his eyes. One thing you could count on with Jimmy, he could always sleep.

Flossy followed Lillian, who’d set out unsteadily across the field of graves like a toddler just finding her legs. She was headed towards the far end of the cemetery. As she got closer to where her mother had stopped, Flossy could see her bent over the grave and brushing particles of red sand from the crevices of letters carved into the granite, despite the soreness of her fingers. She slowed. That long after William O’Reilly’s death, the gesture seemed an absent-minded tenderness, as if he were still close enough to sweep straw from his jacket as he stomped into the house ruddy and grateful from a frosty winter’s evening at the barn. Had it been twenty-five years since they’d laid him there?

With one hand on the granite, her elbow taut, Lillian leaned against her husband’s grave. Flossy could see she was gathering herself, waiting for her breath to return, as she so often did now at the kitchen table after the smallest chore, draining the water from the potatoes on her better days or hoisting the kettle from the pump to the stove. That walk across the cemetery ground was not so easy anymore on thick legs with one ankle swollen overtop of the shoes Flossy had laced up for her an hour earlier.

In her spry years, Lillian would contrive to come here alone. From the highway in, it was a half-mile walk along the old cemetery road, dusted in Colchester red sand, the grass then as now heaving between wagon-wheel ruts, to the graveyard sleeping in a grove of maple, white pine and spruce. When they were little, her mother would dole out chores to Flossy and Jimmy to be done while she was away — sweeping the kitchen, emptying the ash can, filling the kindling box. Their Uncle James would drive her to the end of the cemetery road on his way to the village and she’d walk the distance in for her solitary visit. Uncle James avoided cemeteries whenever possible and, when the children got a little older, they did too.

Though the leaves had fallen for another year, Lillian and Flossy were still considerably sheltered from wind off the bay in this refuge. It wasn’t good enough for her mother to see the stone among the many others in the graveyard, from a distance; she wouldn’t have had to make all that effort to get out of Jimmy’s truck for that. No, Lillian had to bend and touch the chill stone for it to count. Even before looking down at the names, Flossy thought her mother could tell by the distance she stood from the maples growing along the south edge and the graceful white pines along the east, which was his, give or take a few feet. She’d take her bearings like an aging crow, scanning the tree line for a curved white pine with a broken leader that struggled behind the rest.

There had always been an angular comfort in returning to this lonely spot for Lillian O’Reilly. She seemed not at all offended by the signs of decay, old man’s beard spreading over ailing spruce and dying lilac like hoarfrost, the creeping charlie growing up around the stone of her husband’s grave, nor the sand and wind that would take such pains to wear away his name,like her memory of him.

Reflecting on her mother’s life, Flossy thought those visits were Lillian’s way of holding on to something of William, feeling the slab of granite, keeping the plot weeded, as if she might be doing a small kindness for him still, something he’d not be expecting, like sewing a hole in his pocket before he’d thought to mention it was there.

“Hard as it was to lose him, I wouldn’t have him back.”

Though she never expected to hear the words, they did not surprise Flossy.

“Oh no,” Lillian sucked the thought in with a little gasp of air. Her mother just needed to see where he was now and again, needed to see the permanence of the place, his few feet of space, sinking on two corners, in relation to all the other souls laid there.

The maple trees had grown into a massive wall of intertwined gray branches in the decades since he’d died, though you couldn’t have seen it so clearly from year to year. And death had been greedy in their midst. Newer graves were stretched out four times beyond where they’d laid him.

Flossy looked at the stones of the others near her father’s grave, unable to ignore names and dates. Great Village’s Mahon Cemetery was a good size, established by the Presbyterian Scots who settled along the bay. Some of those lichen-crusted stones went back a hundred and fifty years. To William’s left was a Bungay headstone. The Bungays had settled out Montrose way on one of the more remote farms this side of Portaupique Mountain. A son, who had been a year or two ahead of Flossy in school, was still there living on the same unyielding wood lot, last she’d heard.

“How was it Mrs. Bungay died?” Flossy asked.

Lillian was still staring at her husband’s grave. “Old age.”

Flossy thought about that a few minutes. “Couldn’t have been that old, Mah,” she said. “Sam Bungay was with Thomas in school.”

“Whatever Doctor Rushton didn’t know, he pretty much called it old age,” she nodded. “You’d be surprised, Flossy, people were a lot older back then.” Flossy turned in the direction of the doctor’s own monument, not far from where they were standing, a granite angel with a chip off the top of one wing. He had once been as revered as King George in their household but that was a long time ago and a lot of water had passed beneath the Great Village bridge since then.

Mrs. Bungay’s death hadn’t rung in the ear quite the way word of a death would just after they’d lost William. You could easily develop a sensitivity to dying, an irritating itch like hives that turns up every now and again in a different spot when you least expect it.

To the south lay Hiram Hyde McKay. Now, Hiram her parents had known well.

“Sold us our first calf and a brood sow just when we were married,” Lillian said of Hiram, “and could have asked quite a bit more for them. He was as good as they come. Would tell you where to dock a lamb’s tail or break a piglet’s wolf teeth and the sex of every one of your chicks.” Hiram farmed more successfully than most in those parts, with two sturdy sons to help him. They said he split his foot with an axe just about the time William died, though Flossy and Lillian remembered him coming by the house to pay his respects, but never had it looked at until it was too late. He was just the kind of man to put more faith in his uninterrupted good health than doctors.

Among the fellow-departeds in her father’s row was a small mound whose headstone held two names, “Charles and John-Calvin, cherished angels.” Flossy would have reached out and stroked this one but didn’t want to risk the memory disturbing her mother. She thought, instead, about the two people whose graves flanked her father’s as she pulled wisps of brown and brittle grass from behind his stone. He’d known them both. When you’re going about your business hale and hearty, you never think much about who it is who’ll be keeping you company in the local graveyard. Great Village was a small place when you looked around, so the chances were good that you were meeting up with your left or your right regularly at Sunday service or in McLellan’s store as you bought molasses, tea and sugar. You’d never entertain the thought, when someone was selling you a bushel of oats, that this might be the man you’d eventually be mingling your dust with. It wouldn’t be healthy. People were made to live, not dwell on their dying.

“Never easy to live with.” Lillian seemed to be talking to herself. A damp breeze was building from the north. It was a day running to icy when the sun ducked behind the clouds. Flossy wondered if they shouldn’t be going. She didn’t want her mother to catch cold.

Lillian pulled her coat tightly around herself and felt for a button at the neck that wasn’t there. “If I’d known the kind of man he was, I’d never have married him,” she said, this time directly to her daughter, her lips screwed tight into a little beak. She worked her bottom lip as if in silent prayer or rehearsing what next she wanted to say.

“You surely wouldn’t have been the first to think that way, mother.”

“I never told anyone that before, Flossy,” she said in a near-whisper, then added, “and I wouldn’t want Jimmy or Thomas to know.” She folded the weeds in her left hand down into a smaller bundle. They were always careful about what they said in the house with Thomas upstairs in his bed, as if he were a small child that needed to be shielded from the truth. “It’s as well we don’t know, I guess, or weddings would be scarce as hens’ teeth.” Flossy caught a softening in her mother’s eye. Lillian, she thought, had got into the habit of talking to herself, to William, out here with only the wind and a few gulls to chide her back. In this Valley of Death she was free to say all the things she should have said in the fifteen years of their marriage. Now, for the first time, it seemed, she was allowing her daughter to listen in.

“Some of the women around here got the drinkers, or the ones too quick with a backhand. Some the loafers — though they didn’t usually last long; some couldn’t stay in their stalls …” She stood looking down at William’s grave. “If you had a bad spot like that in your man you’d think the other bad spots would be easier to contend with,” she raised her head to her daughter, “but they’re all about the same in the end, Flossy, even him.” She tapped his headstone with her toe then looked up and around as if she were just now noticing the dozens of other graves surrounding them. She pulled herself up to her full height, chest out, and stood like Moses at the foot of the mountain. “They’re all out there on their own sandbar. Unreachable.”

“Was he different … at first?” Flossy inquired hesitantly, not wanting to ask too much for fear her mother, like all the other times, would quickly shy from this kind of talk.

“Oh, I can’t say as I recall.” Ah, there it was, gone, brief as a match. Flossy chastised herself for rushing in with her questions. She longed to know more about her father, who died when she was thirteen, but so often Lillian got this far into the story of him, wooed to this very threshold of recollection, when suddenly the loaves had to be turned in the oven or the clothing brought in from the line. Lillian stood a long while looking down at the grave, her eyes flickering back and forth.

“I thought it set in shortly after Thomas came,” Lillian began, her voice low and calm, “but it could well have been there all along.”

Flossy reached to take the weeds her mother held.

“I was the one with stars in my eyes. Thomas was a crier and William detested the sound of that crying and yet he wouldn’t let me go to him either. I’d just get him fed and settled and I’d have to adjust to William’s sulking for ignoring his order. I was spoiling the creature. Got so I had to hold the child away when his father was near, so William wouldn’t be in a temper. He even took offence to the nursing. For pity’s sake, Flossy, he’d never have said such a thing of the mare and her colt.”

An old church pew set at the edge of the cemetery served as a resting place and Lillian made her way over to it. “They can be a different man all out in front, when they’re making their way into your affections,” she said, squatting and dropping heavily onto the bench, “than the broody one that sets up house.” Flossy watched her mother closely. “You see him courting, you see him with a different coat on, all colourful, bright and gay.” She shook her head, still looking out at the field of headstones in front of her. “You don’t know what he has inside, Flossy, what he’s thinking, what he’s thought all along about your family and friends that’ll come pounding out some day when a little rage pushes him past caring. You don’t know how he’ll be when you’re turning the last of the flour sack out, when he’s crushed an ankle under a wagon wheel or tossed the final spade of earth over his mother.” Her red hands were on her lap. She turned the left over and twirled the wedding band back and forth.

“I’ve never wished him back, not one minute.” Lillian must have realized how hard it sounded because she cast an eye at Flossy as if expecting to find judgment there. She sat down beside her mother and tucked her hand inside Lillian’s elbow. She leaned close to keep them both warm.

“Why him?” Flossy asked. “Was he good to you, at first?”

“The pick of the Truro lads, he was,” she said, nodding her head. They had met in Truro and, from the look of their wedding portrait, Flossy gathered there may have been some choice, for Lillian Davison had once been a beauty, though the picture bore but slight resemblance to the corrugated features of the woman beside her now.

“He had no end of work in him, going off in the winter to cut wood. We needed the money. There were a lot of things I could count on but an awful lot I couldn’t.”

Flossy nodded. Her mother was a chickadee eating grain from her hand. She didn’t want to ask too much, scare her off, so rare were these moments when Jimmy and Thomas weren’t near and her mother talked.

“A solitary man,” she continued, “solid as oak, Flossy,” slapping the bench with the flat of her hand. “It was as lonely out there as if he’d died in our marriage bed.”

No wonder Thomas took up such a soft place in her, the first-born, her favourite, so soon the companion his father was not. Flossy could see it would have made things worse between them. A baby needed his mother, whereas William could give the impression he needed little more than someone to keep his tea and porridge hot, his potatoes on the boil and boots clean.

She could remember her father going off to sleep every night just after his tea. He’d be snoring in the bedroom off the kitchen by the time she and her mother got all the dishes done up and Jimmy to bed. In the morning he’d be up before everyone else and begin his day as if he were a man living alone. There was no keeping pace with him. As a boy, Thomas had been the only one to try, and fail miserably.

“Never talked about his family when I was getting to know him, only a couple of funny stories about his parents. He’d more likely tell you about the antics of his brothers and his mates. All he’d say was his mother was a saint and his father a fair and decent man, but that no one had ever helped him from the time he was seven. The ones who think they raised themselves? They’ve conveniently forgotten they had a mother, and I can tell you for sure that father of his was neither fair nor decent.”

Flossy could remember William’s brothers and sister sitting like granite lumps around the kitchen after the funeral, virtual strangers to the children. They had her father’s critical glare, looking with cold disdain on all who’d gathered.

“They’re the kind to watch out for,” she continued. “The ones with no past to speak of. Anyone could tell by the lines on his mother’s face that it had been a hard life and there’s nothing much worse, Flossy my girl,” she said, raising a cold finger, “than a hard Irish life.”

Might not poor old Grandmother O’Reilly with the wary eyes have warned Lillian about this son of hers? Might she not have taken the younger woman aside and said “he’s a deep dark well you’ll never see the bottom of”? You could count on the Davisons to warn her mother against marrying an Irishman, Flossy knew that from one of her aunts, but Lillian had only resented it and defended him the more.

If only Lillian had had her own mother near or any of her sisters perhaps she’d have been able to ask them, knowing they would know or, at the very least, the listening would have been born of concern, not curiosity. Was it this way for all of them? Was he peculiar or did they all withdraw after a time? Two years, six years, a decade? Did they all eventually shove you away from them or had she done something to betray him? Maybe Lillian had broken some filament of trust unwittingly, as one steps through a spider’s web that breaks across the face before you can see it, something fragile, carelessly torn, that was hardly even perceived until you were looking over your shoulder at it, something completely beyond her understanding to repair. If so, how did William come to be so unforgiving that he could not let her back in, not spoken his disappointment, not given her half a breath of a second chance? Flossy longed to shout it out in this valley of granite: “Could a woman never make her man love her again?”

You couldn’t put those things into a letter to your mother. Each one sent home was undoubtedly read by everyone who could read for six houses in each direction. There was no way that Lillian could get her mother’s ear alone; people around would all be wondering why they couldn’t read the letter, Tommy Jenks the postman having told everyone along the line that Fenton and May Davison’s Lillian had a letter come through that day. When any of the Davisons came out to the farm, on the rare occasions they did, Flossy and Jimmy stuck to the table like spilled jam.

“And Thomas, the way he was with him …?” She shook her head. “He was only a boy, for Mighty Sakes,” she said. “You remember what he was like, Flossy. William expected him to learn something once and never forget it.”

“Oh, I do.” Her father hadn’t taken the same disliking to the younger two. It was too bad for Thomas, doubly so because, unlike the others, he adored his father and wanted nothing more than to be close to him. Thomas was awkward and accident-prone. He spilled pails of water, broke handles, bashed knees and fingers trying to take shortcuts, doing things in a hurry to please. And never did. Yet it was, above all, the clutter of his words that infuriated her father far more than all the rest: sound so often foundering on the shoal of his thought, stuttering or tumbling from the boy incomprehensibly.

The sheer unpredictability of it, the mystery of its absence some morning followed by hours of jerking, knotted stammers, fell on William’s ears as patent wilfulness. And Thomas cried. It wasn’t punishment that went so hard on him; he could take a strapping. It was humiliation. There he was, poor boy, doing his best to muddle along, caught between two warring continents yet understanding nothing of it, no one explaining a thing, knowing instinctively that abandoning his mother was the only way to his father’s shore and not entirely willing to turn from the sole beacon of kindness in his life. It was a terrible and impossible sea upon which to set adrift so sensitive a boy.

“You knew he’d never talk to James.”

“I knew he didn’t,” said Flossy, “I never knew why.” Lillian’s older brother, James Davison, lived two farms up the road from them. After Thomas took to his bed, James did what he could to help them get by, finishing the hay that year, the oats and wheat and planting them until their own Jimmy was able. The woodpile, too, was always magically replenished by kind Uncle James. They wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

“The year Thomas was a baby,” her mother began, “we had a bad April storm. Thomas wouldn’t have had more than three months to him, took a cold and then a fever. I wanted William to take us to Dr. Rushton. He wouldn’t, said it would put some fight into the boy. Thomas grew hotter and hotter and I was scared. I begged William but he turned hard. I was at my wit’s end when James dropped by, like an angel of mercy. Straight away he took the two of us to the village. Dr. Rushton said Thomas wouldn’t have lasted the night. William never spoke to James again. Wouldn’t have him in the house.”

“I never knew, Mah.”

“And you shouldn’t ’ve,” she said. “It wouldn’t have made you feel any better about your father.” Staring towards her husband’s grave, Lillian blinked a couple more times, then said, so softly Flossy almost missed it, “Sure didn’t make me feel any better about him.” She clasped her elbows with those raw, inflamed hands pulling her arms in as if she could fold a bitter memory back inside herself.

So that’s where the divide had been struck. Flossy had to look away to hold her own thought. That was where her mother lost faith in her father; anyone would. From then on Thomas had become their sacrificial lamb, the unsuspecting booty in a war waged half a dozen times a week between them. They all bore witness to it.

“He was a good worker and that’s all he was,” she said, as if she needed to find something redeemable. It was true. William would have made an enviable hired hand. He had no end of energy for work. After her father died, Flossy remembered they’d all been afraid. With someone else in the house, a capable man, her mother could share the burden of the fear of not surviving. Not that they’d speak about it, but at least there’d be someone else there to brace the back against. Thomas, even before he’d taken to his bed, never had his father’s appetite for work. Slight and nervous, he wasn’t made for it. He couldn’t have gone off to the woods to cut trees without one falling on him. They’d had to wait for Jimmy to grow up for that. In the meantime, their survival had been in Lillian’s hands, as it turned out, quite literally so.

But the end, when it came, none of them could have foreseen. Lillian may have thought she knew her husband, knew what to expect after fifteen years but it was dismally clear she’d underestimated William O’Reilly. Hadn’t they all? Flossy knew this was where her mother would make the motions to be going home.

William’s death was still intolerable to think about. And so, Lillian O’Reilly came to this place to clear and tend the grave site but made every effort to put his dying from her mind. They never spoke of it. None of them. Never had. Her mother wiggled herself forward from her seat and planted both feet on the ground, and she slowly heaved herself up. Flossy grasped her elbow until the old woman was steady.

William’s death was another thing for Lillian Davison O’Reilly, Great Village’s finest milliner, to stitch tightly into the seam of her hard life, the seam of forgetting. She would much sooner have pushed a needle into the palm of her own hand and drawn it through to the other side than think of how they’d lost him.

“We’d best be going. Jimmy’ll want to be getting on.”

The dead, the living, Flossy thought, were ever connected: gone but never gone. Grief collided with their living day in and day out; they moved over each other like tide on land, and the survivors, if they could be called that, were utterly incapable of pushing the one back from the other.

She watched her mother pull a frayed handkerchief from her pocket and wipe her nose and eyes; she wrapped her loss tightly inside her winter coat and held it close with one hand at her neck, limping back among the graves to where Jimmy sat asleep in his old pickup truck.