Lives of Girls and Women Page 4

  Owen was swinging on the screen door, singing in a cautious derogatory way, as he would when there were long conversations.

  Land of Hope and Glory

  Mother of the Free

  How shall we ex-tore thee

  Who are bo-orn of thee?

  I had taught him that song—that year we were singing such songs every day at school, to help save England from Hitler. My mother said it was extol but I would not believe that, for how would it rhyme?

  My mother sat in her canvas chair and my father in a wooden one, they did not look at each other. But they were connected, and this connection was plain as a fence, it was between us and Uncle Benny, us and the Flats Road, it would stay between us and anything. It was the same as in the winter, sometimes, when they would deal out two hands of cards and sit down at the kitchen table, and play, waiting for the ten o’clock news, having sent us to bed upstairs. And upstairs seemed miles above them, dark and full of the noise of the wind. Up there you discovered what you never remembered down in the kitchen—that we were in a house as small and shut-up as any boat is on the sea, in the middle of a tide of howling weather. They seemed to be talking, playing cards, a long way away in a tiny spot of light, irrelevantly; yet this thought of them, prosaic as a hiccough, familiar as breath, was what held me, what winked at me from the bottom of the well as I fell into sleep.

  Uncle Benny did not hear from Madeleine again or, if he did, he never mentioned it. When asked, or teased, about her, he would seem to call her to mind unregretfully, with a little contempt for being something, or somebody, so long discarded, like the turtles.

  After a while we would all just laugh, remembering Madeleine going down the road in her red jacket, with her legs like scissors, flinging abuse over her shoulder at Uncle Benny trailing after, with her child. We laughed to think of how she carried on, and what she did to Irene Pollox and Charlie Buckle. Uncle Benny could have made up the beatings, my mother said at last, and took that for comfort; how was he to be trusted? Madeleine herself was like something he might have made up. We remembered her like a story, and having nothing else to give we gave her our strange, belated, heartless applause.

  “Madeleine! That madwoman!”

  Heirs of the Living Body

  The house at Jenkin’s Bend had that name painted on a sign—Uncle Craig’s doing—and hanging from the front verandah, between a Red Ensign and a Union Jack. It looked like a recruiting station or like a crossing point on the border. It had once been a Post Office, and still seemed an official, semi-public sort of place, because Uncle Craig was the clerk of Fairmile Township, and people came to him to get marriage licences and other kinds of permits; the Township Council met in his den, or office, which was furnished with filing cabinets, a black leather sofa, a huge rolltop desk, other flags, a picture of the Fathers of Confederation and another of the King and Queen and the little Princesses, all in their coronation finery. Also a framed photograph of a log house which had stood on the site of this large and handsome, ordinary brick one. That picture seemed to have been in another country, where everything was much lower, muddier, darker, than here. Smudgy bush, with a great many black pointed evergreens, came up close around the buildings, and the road in the foreground was made of logs.

  “What they called a corduroy road,” Uncle Craig instructed me.

  Several men in shirtsleeves, with droopy moustaches, and fierce but somehow helpless expressions, stood around a horse and wagon. I made the mistake of asking Uncle Craig if he was in the picture.

  “I thought you knew how to read,” he said, and pointed out the date scrawled under the wagon wheels: June 10, 1860. “My father wasn’t even a grown man at that time. There he is behind the horse’s head. He wasn’t married till 1875. I was born in 1882. Does that answer your question?”

  He was displeased with me not on account of any vanity about his age, but because of my inaccurate notions of time and history. “By the time I was born,” he continued severely, “all that bush you see in the picture would be gone. That road would be gone. There would be a gravel road.”

  One of his eyes was blind, had been operated on but remained dark and clouded; that eyelid had a menacing droop. His face was square and sagging, his body stout. There was another photograph, not in this room but in the front room across the hall, which showed him stretched out on a rug in front of his seated, elderly-looking parents—a blond, plump, self-satisfied adolescent, head resting on one elbow. Auntie Grace and Aunt Elspeth, the younger sisters, in frizzed bangs and sailor dresses, sat on hassocks at his head and feet. My own grandfather, my father’s father, who had died of the flu in 1918, stood up behind the parents’ chairs, with Aunt Moira (slender then!) who lived in Porterfield on one side and Aunt Helen who had married a widower and gone round the world and lived now, rich, in British Columbia, on the other. “Look at your Uncle Craig!” Aunt Elspeth or Auntie Grace would say, dusting this picture. “Doesn’t he look full of himself, eh, like the cat that licked up all the cream!” They spoke as if he were still that boy, stretched out there in beguiling insolence, for them to pamper and laugh at.

  Uncle Craig gave out information; some that I was interested in, some that I wasn’t. I wanted to hear about how Jenkin’s Bend was named, after a young man killed by a falling tree just a little way up the road; he had been in this country less than a month. Uncle Craig’s grandfather, my great-great-grandfather, building his house here, opening his Post Office, starting what he hoped and believed would someday be an important town, had given this young man’s name to it, for what else would such a young man, a bachelor, have to be remembered by?

  “Where was he killed?”

  “Up the road, not a quarter of a mile.”

  “Can I go and see where?”

  “There’s nothing marked. That’s not the sort of thing they put up a marker for.”

  Uncle Craig looked at me with disapproval; he was not moved to curiosity. He often thought me flighty and stupid and I did not care much; there was something large and impersonal about his judgement that left me free. He himself was not hurt or diminished in any way by my unsatisfactoriness, though he would point it out. This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centredness made him restful to be with.

  The other kind of information he gave me had to do with the political history of Wawanash County, allegiances of families, how people were related, what had happened in elections. He was the first person I knew who really believed in the world of public events, of politics, who did not question he was part of these things. Though my parents always listened to the news and were discouraged or relieved by what they heard, (mostly discouraged, for this was early in the war) I had the feeling that, to them as to me, everything that happened in the world was out of our control, unreal yet calamitous. Uncle Craig was not so daunted. He saw a simple connection between himself, handling the affairs of the township, troublesome as they often were, and the Prime Minister in Ottawa handling the affairs of the country. And he took an optimistic view of the war, a huge eruption in ordinary political life which would have to burn itself out; he was really more interested in how it affected elections, in what the conscription issue would do to the Liberal Party, than in how it progressed by itself. Though he was patriotic; he hung out the flag, he sold Victory Bonds.

  When not working on the township’s business he was engaged on two projects—a history of Wawanash County, and a family tree, going back to 1670, in Ireland. Nobody in our family had done anything remarkable. They had married other Irish Protestants, and had large families. Some did not marry. Some of the children died young. Four in one family were burned in a fire. One man lost two wives in childbirth. One married a Roman Catholic. They came to Canada and went on in the same way, often marrying Scotch Presbyterians. And to Uncle Craig it seemed necessary that the names of all these people, their connections with each other, the three large dates of birth and marri
age and death, or the two of birth and death if that was all that happened to them, be discovered, often with great effort and a stupendous amount of world-wide correspondence (he did not forget the branch of the family which had gone to Australia) and written down here, in order, in his own large careful handwriting. He did not ask for anybody in the family to have done anything more interesting, or scandalous, than to marry a Roman Catholic (the woman’s religion noted in red ink below her name); indeed, it would have thrown his whole record off balance if anybody had. It was not the individual names that were important, but the whole solid, intricate structure of lives supporting us from the past.

  It was the same with the history of the county, which had been opened up, settled, and had grown, and entered its present slow decline, with only modest disasters—the fire at Tupperton, regular flooding of the Wawanash river, some terrible winters, a few unmysterious murders; and had produced only three notable people—a Supreme Court judge, an archaeologist who had excavated Indian villages around Georgian Bay and written a book about them, and a woman whose poems used to be published in newspapers throughout Canada and the United States. These were not what mattered; it was daily life that mattered. Uncle Craig’s files and drawers were full of newspaper clippings, letters, containing descriptions of the weather, an account of a runaway horse, lists of those present at funerals, a great accumulation of the most ordinary facts, which it was his business to get in order. Everything had to go into his history, to make it the whole history of Wawanash County. He could not leave anything out. That was why, when he died, he had only got as far as the year 1909.

  When I read, years afterwards, about Natasha in War and Peace, and how she ascribed immense importance, although she had no understanding of them, to her husband’s abstract, intellectual pursuits, I had to think of Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace. It would have made no difference if Uncle Craig had actually had “abstract, intellectual pursuits,” or if he had spent the day sorting henfeathers; they were prepared to believe in what he did. He had an old black typewriter, with metal rims around the keys and all the long black arms exposed; when he began his slow, loud, halting but authoritative typing they dropped their voices, they made absurd scolding faces at each other for the clatter of a pan. Craig’s working! They would not let me go out on the verandah for fear I would walk in front of his window and disturb him. They respected men’s work beyond anything; they also laughed at it. This was strange; they could believe absolutely in its importance and at the same time convey their judgement that it was, from one point of view, frivolous, nonessential. And they would never, never meddle with it; between men’s work and women’s work was the dearest line drawn, and any stepping over this line, any suggestion of stepping over it, they would meet with such light, amazed, regretfully superior, laughter.

  The verandah was where they sat in the afternoons, having completed morning marathons of floor scrubbing, cucumber hoeing, potato digging, bean and tomato picking, canning, pickling, washing, starching, sprinkling, ironing, waxing, baking. They were not idle sitting there; their laps were full of work—cherries to be stoned, peas to be shelled, apples to be cored. Their hands, their old dark wooden handled paring knives, moved with marvellous, almost vindictive speed. Two or three cars an hour went by, and usually slowed and waved, being full of township people. Aunt Elspeth or Auntie Grace would call out the hospitable country formula, “Stop in a while off of that dusty road!” and the people in the car would call back, “Would if we had the time! When you going to come and see us?”

  Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace told stories. It did not seem as if they were telling them to me, to entertain me, but as if they would have told them anyway, for their own pleasure, even if they had been alone.

  “Oh, the hired man Father had, remember, the foreigner, he had the very devil of a temper, excuse my language. What was he, Grace, now wasn’t he a German?”

  “He was an Austrian. He came in off the road looking for work and Father hired him. Mother never got over being afraid of him, she didn’t trust foreigners.”

  “Well no wonder.”

  “She made him sleep in the granary.”

  “He was always yelling and cursing in Austrian, remember when we jumped across his cabbages? The flood of foreign cursing, it would freeze your blood.”

  “Till I made up my mind I’d show him.”

  “What was he burning that time, he was down the orchard burning a lot of branches—”

  “Tent caterpillars.”

  “That’s it, he was burning up the tent caterpillars and you got yourself into a pair of Craig’s overalls and a shirt and stuffed yourself with pillows and put your hair up under a felt hat of Father’s, and you blacked your hands and your face to look like a darky—”

  “And I took the butcher-knife, that same long wicked knife we’ve got still—”

  “And crept down through the orchard, hid behind the trees, Craig and me watching all the time from the upstairs window—”

  “Mother and Father couldn’t have been here.”

  “No, no, they’d gone to Town! They’d gone to Jubilee in the horse and buggy!”

  “I got to about five yards of him and I slipped out from behind a treetrunk and—O my saints, didn’t he let out a yell! He yelled and lit for the barn. He was a coward through and through!”

  “Then you were into the house and out of those clothes and scrubbed yourself clean before Father and Mother got back from Town. There we were, all sitting round the supper-table, waiting on him. We were hoping secretly he’d run off.”

  “Not me. I wasn’t. I wanted to see the effect.”

  “He came in pale as a sheet and gloomy as Satan and sat down and never said a word. We expected him at least to mention there was some crazy darky loose in the county. He never did.”

  “Didn’t want to let on what a coward he’d been, no!”

  They laughed till fruit spilled out of their laps.

  “It wasn’t always me, I wasn’t the only one could think up tricks! You were the one thought of tying the tin cans over the front door the time I’d been out to a dance! Don’t let’s forget about that.”

  “You were out with Maitland Kerr. (Poor Maitland, he’s dead.) You were out at a dance at Jericho—”

  “Jericho! It was a dance in the Stone School!”

  “All right, whatever it was you were bringing him into the front hall to say good-night, oh, you were sneaking him in, quiet as a pair of lambs—”

  “And down they came—”

  “It sounded just like an avalanche had hit. Father jumped out of bed and grabbed his shotgun. Remember the shotgun in their room, it was always behind the door? What a confusion! And me under the bedclothes with the pillow stuffed in my mouth so’s nobody could hear me laughing!”

  They had not given up playing jokes yet. Auntie Grace and I entered the bedroom where Aunt Elspeth was having her nap, flat on her back, snoring regally, and we lifted the quilt with great care and tied her ankles together with a red ribbon. On a Sunday afternoon when Uncle Craig was asleep in his office, on the leather sofa, I was sent in to wake him up and tell there was a young couple outside who had come to apply for a marriage licence. He got up grumpily, went out to the back kitchen and washed in the sink, wetted and combed his hair, put on his tie and waistcoat and jacket—he could never have given out a marriage licence without his proper clothes on—and went to the front door. There was an old lady in a long checked skirt, a shawl over her head, bent away over, leaning on a stick, and an old man bent likewise, wearing a shiny suit and an ancient fedora. Uncle Craig was still dazed from sleep; he said dubiously, “Well, how do you do—” before he burst out in a jovial fury, “Elspeth! Grace! You pair of she-devils!”

  At milking time they tied kerchiefs over their hair, with the ends flopping out like little wings, and put on all sorts of ragged patchwork garments and went wandering along the cowpaths, taking up a stick somewhere along the way. Their cows had heavy, clinking bells hun
g on their necks. Once Aunt Elspeth and I followed the sporadic, lazy sound of these bells to the edge of the bush and there we saw a deer, standing still, among the stumps and heavy ferns. Aunt Elspeth did not say a word, but held her stick out like a monarch ordering me to be still, and we got to look at it for a moment before it saw us, and leapt up so that its body seemed to turn a half-circle in the air, as a dancer would, and bounded away, its rump heaving, into the deep bush. It was a hot and perfectly still evening, light lying in bands on the tree-trunks, gold as the skin of apricots. “It used to be you’d see them regularly,” Aunt Elspeth said. “When we were young, oh, you used to see them on the way to school. But not now. That’s the first I’ve seen in I don’t know how many years.”

  In the stable they showed me how to milk, which is not so easy as it looks. They took turns squirting milk into the mouth of a barn cat which rose on its hind legs a few feet away. It was a dirty looking striped tom, called Robber. Uncle Craig came down, still wearing his starched shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, his shiny-backed vest with pen and pencil clipped in the pocket. He presided at the cream separator. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace liked to sing while they milked. They sang, “Meet me in St. Louis (Louis), meet me at the Fair!” and, “I’ve got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence,” and “She’ll be comin’ around the mountain when she comes—” They would sing different songs at the same time, each trying to drown the other out, and complaining, “I don’t know where that woman gets the idea she can sing!” Milking time made them bold and jubilant. Auntie Grace who was afraid to go into the storage-room of the house because there might be a bat, ran through the barnyard hitting the big longhorned cows on their rumps, chasing them out the gate and back to pasture. Aunt Elspeth lifted the cream cans with a strong and easy, almost contemptuous, movement like a young man’s.