Nova Scotia Love Stories

by Lesley Choyce

  Alice’s mother Rosa would not believe it – could not believe it. When she could finally move and think, she knew she had to speak to her daughter. Everything else was postponed. The next morning, hours before sunrise, Rosa and George, Alice’s father, left their farm, drove over Economy Mountain, made their way to Five Islands, and over the hills of Lynn. They were waiting in the schoolyard when Alice and I arrived.

  I could feel Alice’s hand suddenly shake as she approached them. Rosa got down from the carriage. There was no hello or embrace, just a direct question from a mother whose face was as white as chalk to a guilty daughter already in tears.

  “Is it true?” Rosa demanded. “Have you broken up a Christian home because you lusted with a husband? A husband the likes of David Lewis, a known lecher. Tell me, Alice, it isn’t true. Tell me you’re not breaking my heart.”

  “David is not a lecher. He’s a decent man. We fell in love. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

  “Love!” Rosa snapped. “Your name is being talked about all over the shore. You know the name they will call you. You know the disgrace you have brought on your father and me. Pack your clothes and come with us. Never see that man again. Do you understand?”

  “I cannot do that, Momma. I will not leave him. He and his daughters need me now. The wife is gone; she’s left.”

  “With good reason!” Rosa screamed the words.

  Alice’s father got down from the carriage and walked up to us, looking big and fierce. I was very frightened of him and tried to make myself as small as possible.

  “Either leave with us now and never see that degenerate again or have no more to do with us.”

  Alice broke down sobbing and tried to embrace her father, but he pushed her away.

  “Now, Alice. Leave with us now or be done with us forever.” His eyes burned like flames.

  “You have ruined your life and disgraced your family,” her mother whispered.

  They had come for truth and received it. Without another word, her parents got back in their carriage and left us standing there. I hoped they hadn’t noticed me. I’m not certain they did.

  Alice stumbled as if she was going to faint. She almost crumpled to the ground. She knew at that moment what I didn’t realize until much later: that her parents would never relent. The lifelong bond between parents and daughter was forever broken. As she struggled to maintain her equilibrium and I did my best to hold her upright, we uneasily made our way into the school. I was glad we always came early before the other pupils arrived.

  I don’t recall a great deal about the next few months except we were the objects of awful gossip and scandal. There was much condemnation and finger-pointing, and many questions. The world had turned against us. The outside world, anyway. Inside our house was a very different atmosphere. Alice was now my mother as well as my teacher. She hugged us more than Gracie ever did and every night she would read to us. Those times when we missed our real mother, she would hold us close and say loving things. It helped. It helped a lot.

  I’m not certain how my father handled things. When he was on the road, we had Alice all to ourselves and when he came home, she didn’t push us aside to give him her undivided attention. We were all together, all a family, a happy group of children and adults. I actually felt sorry for some of my school friends who didn’t seem to have the same circumstances in their homes.

  In June of 1911, my father and Alice were married. They went all the way to Moncton, New Brunswick, and were married there. I don’t know why really, since they were already the talk of every community through the mountains and along the shore. It wasn’t very nice talk either, not what you would call complimentary. I heard a few snippets of many conversations when I accidentally happened upon people. Such phrases as “He’s old enough to be her father,” or “It’s a disgrace and he claims to be a Christian,” or “She’s broken up his marriage and they’re living in sin. God will punish …”

  Some of the parents tried to get Alice dismissed from her teaching position, but in the middle of winter, where would they find another teacher? So they demanded the school trustees cancel the school year altogether rather than let that harlot near decent children from decent homes. The trustees hemmed and hawed, and they met more than once, but they never made a decision.

  That was the prattle of the outside world, but in our very own house there was something else, something as close to complete happiness as I have ever experienced. My father and Alice loved each other and it was a love that flowed through all of us like a great blissful river and it tempered – no, not tempered, it destroyed the accusations and criticisms of the outside world.

  Gracie too caused people to talk. She didn’t fade away as a jilted wife. The first months without her family, she worked as a cook in a lumber camp, but then she found something more to her liking. You might say she went into show business. She became Madame Gracie, a fortune teller, and she and her crystal ball went from place to place, from one county fair to the next in all the Maritime provinces in the Dominion of Canada. I often wondered what she told people while looking into that crystal ball, whether she had lighthearted comments or predictions of dire gloom. She never struck me as a woman with an overabundant imagination or one who saw the sunny side of things.

  “Your mother is a fortune teller,” school friends would say, waiting for some reaction.

  “Yes, one of my mothers is a fortune teller and the other one, as you know, is our schoolteacher,” I replied with as much of a natural tone as I could muster.

  “How come you have two mothers?”

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  Of course I did know: most of it anyway. My father fell in love with Alice and she fell in love with him. As I grew up around them, I learned how people deeply in love behave with each other. There was peace in the household, a tranquillity I didn’t see in the homes of my friends and certainly something my father and Gracie never really had. More than anything, there was bountiful kindness and love from Alice to my father and to us. That love expanded when my brothers were born. So people may have pointed their fingers at us in a superior manner, but I grew up in a household of peacefulness and happiness.

  Over the years I got a few letters from Gracie, a Christmas card or a note of where she’d been or where she was going. Odd bits about her current life, but not too many enquiries about how we were getting along.

  We eventually left Lynn Mountain, not because of the scandal but because Lynn, like many rural Nova Scotia communities, was dying. Farms were closing and people were going to localities with better land and less isolation. We moved to Leamington, near the coal-mining town of Springhill. As the years went by, people forgot or forgave the sins of my father and Alice. What they had done was a sin against God, people said, but if God can forgive them, so can we. The forgiveness was probably because of Alice’s loving nature. She wasn’t ostracized as a wicked hussy. She went back to teaching school and even began to teach Sunday school, eventually becoming superintendent. My father became a lay preacher. Forgiveness is in the Good Book and forgiveness is what they finally received.

  But not from everyone. There was one black spot that marred the complete happiness of my parents and it was directly and hurtfully aimed at Alice. Her family, good to their word, never forgave her. They were hard-core Presbyterians and, to them, taking a man from another woman whose union God had blessed was such a sin, forgiveness was nigh on impossible. In their eyes, she was responsible for the breakup of a Christian marriage and to further that sin, she married a divorced man. Both were grave evils and forgiveness was not among the attributes of that family.

  Alice wrote her parents, but the letters were never answered. She was to be shunned forever. I remember once when Alice and my father arrived in Highland Village near the community of Great Village. Alice’s sister lived there. Her name was Sadie and she was known as a loving, caring woman, much like Alice, and Alice hoped that at least here she would be welcomed. She was no
t. When our wagon came up the driveway, Sadie was on her knees working on her flower bed. When she realized it was Alice, she got up without a word, went into the house, locked the door and pulled the curtains tight. There was to be no welcome and we drove on in silence. Alice, try as she might, could not keep the tears from welling up in her eyes. I hugged her arm and both Ethel and I felt so dreadfully sorry for her. Did her family not know what a wonderful woman she was?

  I was seventeen when the sickness swept our community. The flu and grippe hit just about everyone. We all got it except for my sister who was going to school in Five Islands that winter. Alice was laid low, being heavy with child and most vulnerable. I was old enough by this time to pitch in and help look after her. She was seven months into her pregnancy with her third child when she contracted the grippe and pneumonia. We watched in horror as her lungs filled up and she got weaker day by day. My father knelt in prayer by her bed and anxiously hovered around as we applied cold cloths to her forehead. The doctors came, first one then another. They shook their heads and my father wept like a child.

  We all knew she was dying and she was aware of it too. One evening when I was alone in the room with her, she had me write down the hymns she wanted them to play for her funeral, but the page got so wet from my own tears I had to start over. She chose the hymns she loved the most: “I Am So Glad That Our Father In Heaven,” “Sometime We’ll Understand” and “The Sweet By-and-By.” These were long and sad days in our household. Really, the first sadness that had entered our home since the week my mother had left us so very many years before.

  The ladies of Leamington came every day to bring food and help with the household chores. Mrs. A.H. Gilroy wrote Alice’s parents, telling them of the situation and that Alice was near the end. Her mother wrote back with sympathy, but said she did not intend to visit her daughter one last time as it was winter and the roads were impassible.

  Alice’s child was born on a Saturday. It arrived stillborn and she received the news with the dignity she always carried. She died the next night. Her ordeal was finally over.

  Alice was buried in our church cemetery in Leamington. She was thirty-five years old when she died and I cried for a week. She had given me unconditional love. I wasn’t the child of another woman to her, not a stepdaughter but her child and she loved me, wholeheartedly and totally. It was a love I still feel to this day, and it brought into my life an overwhelming influence as to how I still see things and how I ultimately raised my own children.

  Sometimes, when I visit her grave and it’s a warm sunny day, I’ll press the palm of my hand on her tombstone and feel the heat there, like I was still a child feeling that special warmth of her hand.

  I am an old woman now and I look around and see so many divorces and so many remarriages that now are so common. People couldn’t imagine what life was like for those in love during the early nineteen hundreds. Times have changed and so have people and it’s always said that the change has not been for the best. But this I know to be true. If my father and Alice hadn’t fallen in love, I would never have known the warmth and love she brought into our household and into my life. She taught me to love unconditionally and I have tried to pass on that same love to others. For that I am truly grateful. I am indeed a child of two mothers. One brought me into the world and the other gave me a world of love.

  Mr. Manuel Jenkins

  Budge Wilson

  Budge Wilson takes us back to a time of relative innocence in rural, coastal Nova Scotia in this sensitive fictional portrait of a girl coming of age, as she says, “a time of limbo … and a period of trigger-happy nerves.”

  I remember well the day he came. It was autumn, which starts early in Nova Scotia and is always for me a time of joy and bitterness. The onset of winter is hard to accept after a summer that is so short and a fall that is so brilliantly beautiful. And in some parts of the province, winter can seem as forever as dying. As early as the second week in August, my mother would say, “I feel fall in the air,” and my heart would lurch a little.

  It was late September, and some of the low-lying bushes were already scarlet against the black of the evergreen forest. Dried flowers waved stiffly against the blue of the bay, but the gulls were acting as though nothing had changed, as though sailing above on the wind currents was enough for them, now and for always.

  It had been a bad day for me, and the splendour of the afternoon rebuked me. Beauty can be an aching thing when you are unhappy, and I have always welcomed fog and rain – or better still, a storm – when I am sad. Otherwise, I can feel a pull back to balance, and misery, for me, has always been half in love with itself.

  The reasons for my depression were not dramatic. No one had died; the house had not burned down; I hadn’t failed a test in school or lost a boyfriend. But I was fifteen, a time of limbo for me and a period of trigger-happy nerves. Neither child nor woman, I wanted to be both and sometimes neither. For one thing, I longed to adore my mother again, but she irritated me almost beyond endurance, with her obsession with food and cleanliness and good behaviour – and with her refusal to listen to what I was or was not saying. I wanted her to see right into my head and heart and to congratulate me on their contents. Instead, she ignored or misconstrued or misdirected even the things I said aloud. For instance, that morning I had said to her, “Mom, it’s such a divine day. I’m going to take the boat over to Crab Island and just sit on a rock and be me all day long.”

  To which she replied, “You can be you right here in the kitchen this very minute and help me defrost the fridge.” Which I did. After that she said, “What’s the use of going out to Crab Island all by yourself? You could at least take Sarah with you. She’s been galumphing around the house and driving me crazy. If you go alone, she won’t even have the boat to play in.” And where did that leave me? Either I stayed home and nursed the hot ball of resentment that inhabited my stomach almost constantly of late or I went to the island with Sarah, age twelve, whose main characteristic was never shutting up for one second, and who always wanted to be doing something – like exploring, or skipping stones, or writing Xs and Os on the granite cliff with rocks – scrape, scrape, scrape – when I’d be wanting to soak up the stillness. I opted for home and the hot ball of resentment.

  My mom was the big boss in our home. Do this, do that, and we all did it. Jump! And we jumped. Even my dad jumped. He had a slow and kindly heart, unending patience, and a warm smile. That had been enough for me for years and years. But suddenly this year it wasn’t. I wanted him to look my mother in the eye and say, “I live here, too. I caught that fish you’re frying in the pan. If I want to go hunting this afternoon, I’ll go. And you can just stop ordering me around like I was in kindergarten.” But that morning he’d spoken to her as she was thunking down the rolling pin on the cookie dough at the kitchen table.

  “Gert,” he said slowly, tentatively, as though he already anticipated her answer, “I thought maybe I’d go over to Barrington this afternoon and see old Sam Hiltz. Haven’t had a visit with him for near two years. I’m kind of tuckered out. Feel like I could sort of use a day off.”

  “We could all use a day off,” she said tartly, no softness in her anywhere. “If women ever took a day off, their families would starve to death in twenty-four hours. And by the time they got back, they’d have to spend longer than their day off cleaning up the bathroom and the kitchen.” She delivered to him a piercing look. “Why, I can go shopping in Shelburne for two hours and come back to find the kitchen sink looking like the washbasin at the drivein.” She stopped attacking the dough and started forming shapes with the cookie-cutter. No diamonds or hearts on that pan, ever. Or chickens or gingerbread men. All her cookies were round. “And do you think these cookies drop out of the sky?” she went on. “Chocolate chips all firmly in place? Or that an angel flies down and deposits your clean laundry on the bed each Monday evening? No siree. I need that car this afternoon to pick up a parcel at Sears. Old Sam can wait till the next time
you feel a holiday coming over you. And if you’ve got that little to do, how about bringing in some water. Or wood. Or lettuce from the garden. Or something.”

  I wanted to take the pans of round cookies, all the same size, all placed exactly one-half inch from each other, and throw them through the window. I imagined the crash as they hit the window, visualized the little slivers of glass protruding from the dough. And I wanted to yell at my sweet and silent father, Do something! Answer her! Say, It’s my car. I paid for it. Go to Sears tomorrow. Old Sam is ninety-two years old and sick and he might die this afternoon.

  Or he could have said, To hell with all that food! Curses on your stupid cookies! We’re all overweight in this family, all six of us. And we don’t need to be that clean. Even without any plumbing, some people live to be a hundred and ten years old. Sit down. Fold your hands. Take the time to talk to us a spell. Or better still, to listen.

  But no. Off he went, down to the government wharf to discuss the day’s catch with his friends.

  And outside the kitchen, the soft gold September sun shed radiance upon the face of the sea. The sky was cloudless and almost as blue as the bay. Such beauty was beckoning, and not one of us could see it.

  And then he came. Straight up to the front door, where no one ever came. Knocking three times, he waited, hat in hand, and I opened the door. The loveliness of the day had left me, but there was no way to escape the beauty of the stranger who stood before me. He was tanned and shining, face strong and gentle, body tall, hard, powerful.