by Beth Powning
His jaw crept out and he looked out the window at snow unspooling from a high drift. His eyes hardened.
“I guess it would, yes. As you said. But I’m not working right now. At carpentry. I got no work. So I got to sell these, see.”
He seemed irritated, whether at her or something else she could not tell. She worked at the windows in silence, waiting for his mood to pass. She could be skating. She pictured the rink, the music, the laughter.
Flora dipped the brush into the paste, drew a bead along the wood. Another bead, and two more. She held her breath, set down the brush, gently picked up a square of glass and eased it down onto the glue. Tapped it with a fingertip, felt it settle into the paste. Done, perfect. She set another pane, and then another, until the grid of sticks, the pieces of glass became a window. A thing to enclose a house, to repel wind and rain, to keep its inhabitants safe. She sat back, astonished. She picked up the brush to begin another.
“You should make little people,” she ventured.
He had resumed his careful tapping. “You’re a funny one, you are. Little people.”
“Why not? Like a doll’s house?”
“This ain’t a doll’s house though, is it. This is a replica.”
“Sorry.”
“Aye, you should be. Sorry.”
Was this teasing, she thought, not liking his tone, or testing? Or something else, dangerous? She had never spent time with a man. Perhaps this is what they were like. The windows and dusty walls of the workshop shut away the brisk air she had been enjoying when she had started off down the lane. She wished she had not answered his beckon.
“What was it like, up north?”
“Up north where?”
“Here. In New Brunswick. You told Mrs. Galloway. Where you came from.”
He ran his finger over the tacks to make sure they were flush with the wood.
“Cold,” he said, after a pause. “It was brutal cold up there. Nothing much to do. So I came south to find work.”
A log settled in the stove.
“You’re a one with the questions today. What was it like over there? In England?”
“Cold,” she said, impulsively, trying to match his teasing tone, never having played such a game. “In the winter. Cold and damp. I was in a workhouse, you know.”
“Were you, now.” He stroked his cheeks, pulling down his eyelids so his eyes showed their meaty red, like Sailor in a melancholy mood.
She felt his gaze settle on her. Coals shifted in the wood stove. She determined to leave as soon as she had finished this one window.
“Got no people, then,” he said. The sentence hung, as Josephine’s words had, earlier. Do something nice…
She wiped the paste from the brush, abrupt. “I have to go.”
She gathered up her skates and let herself out of the barn. Ada had told her that men could sense when you had begun your bleeding. That they always knew when you had become a woman.
* * *
—
Two days before Christmas, Josephine brought a letter into the kitchen. She paused in the doorway.
Maud stirred a saucepan whose contents slapped and bubbled. Ellen stood at the table with her hands on her waist, observing Flora as she came from the stove carrying a small cast-iron skillet. The room was vaporous, cloud-like: steam rose from the boiling cranberries, rice cooled in a bowl. Flora poked a strand of hair into her bun, carefully poured melted butter over a beaten egg. Rice croquettes, Josephine thought. Cranberry sauce.
“Like this?” Flora asked. Josephine noticed how she glanced at Ellen, nervous. Ellen was a painstaking baker. She had her methods.
“Yes, and then you sprinkle in the sugar and the nutmeg.”
The room was at once kitchen, dining room, living room and study. Ellen’s chair by the window held a basket with indigo-blue and grey wool. Josephine’s armchair, in a corner, was flanked by a pie-crust table loaded with newspapers, books, a wooden writing box. She sank into her chair, working spectacles onto her nose.
“It’s from Lucy. Shall I read it aloud?”
“Mother, is she coming home for Christmas?”
“I hope so, Maudie. We shall see, I guess. Here’s what she says.”
December 21, 1888
Dear Mother,
Cousin Carrie invited me for Christmas dinner so I will go there. I get only one day off.
Josephine set down the letter. She was silent for a long time before sighing, resuming.
I’m sorry to miss all of you but at least I will be with family. Aunt A. and Uncle N. are coming.
Work is hard. I objected when our lunchtime was cut short. It is not a place for someone who talks back. My overseer for work discipline and production is nasty. He has already given me two fines which are taken from my wages. One was for inferior work which I could not see was fair at all. The other was for giving one of the doffers a snack from my apron pocket. There is a man who pinches me every morning when I go through the door. He waits for me. What should I do?
“Pinch him back,” Ellen said, savage. “The brute.”
“Tell the overseer?” Maud suggested.
“No.” Flora overturned a spoonful of sugar. “That don’t…that doesn’t work. They get worse if you snitch.”
We have to eat our dinner in the same room we work. There are chairs in the corner. That is when we can use the convenience which the men use as well so it is very sticky and smelly. When I am not too tired I go to the Free Public Library reading room in the evenings. That is where I am now. It is quiet and my roommate is not here to stare or chatter at me and drive me to want to slap her face. There is a section about law and I am reading a book called “Blackstone’s Commentaries.” It is the history of English common law and it is very interesting. Did you know about “the doctrine of marital unity”? It sets out that at marriage the woman becomes absorbed by the man and is nobody aside from him. It makes me see why we women are treated like brainless non-persons and why it is so important that we have the right to vote. Cousin Carrie’s meetings are SO exciting. Oh how I wish you could come to them one day with Maud and Flora. We are working on many fronts, as we say. One of us writes to the WCTU…
“Women’s Christian Temperance Union,” Maud murmured to Ellen, who had raised her eyebrows.
…who as you know are endorsing our petition calling for full suffrage. We keep each other up to date on our efforts. Also we are going to have a woman come to speak who is an authority on child labour laws and the needs of women factory workers. Ha ha I could do that. There is no fire escape from this building, for one.
How are all your pampered boarders? Is George coming home from school for Christmas? I suppose he will stay with Uncle Charles and Aunt Lavinia, the spoiled thing.
Did you put up a tree in the parlour? I don’t know when I will be home again but likely when Carrie starts going around to give talks about suffrage and labour. I miss you, Mother, and I hope you are well.
Love,
Your daughter,
Lucy
No one spoke. Maud concentrated on her stirring. Josephine opened her writing box, slipped the letter inside and closed the lid. She felt a prick of jealousy, picturing Lucy’s animated face at Carrie’s Christmas table, seeing Carrie take hold of her headstrong daughter, convincing her that to remain unmarried was a political act. She could not bear the thought that Lucy would forego the love she herself had had with Simeon, or that Maud, over whom Lucy had great influence, might do the same.
Flora’s spoon batted the side of the bowl, a rhythmic knock as she mixed the butter and egg.
Josephine rose and left the room with apparent purpose; then stood in the hallway, dreading her cold bedroom, the line of mourning clothes hanging as still from their hooks as if they dressed a row of corpses. She remembered her delight in Harla
nd’s window display. She could visit again, to see if he had added anything new.
She pulled on her wool coat, wrapped a scarf around her neck and let herself out the back door. She headed down the hill, following a pathway in the snow beneath the branches of naked elms.
They had skated together as children, before Simeon came to town. Hand in hand, the band playing. Recently, in a schoolbook she had gotten out for Flora, she’d found the note he’d written to her when they were children. Dear Josephine, will you mary me?
I am drowning, Josephine thought. Drowning people reach up for something to grasp. Why will I tell him I have come?
She remembered that he had started a petition for an almshouse. She would ask if she could help. She would go into the store and offer to circulate Harland’s petition.
Lucy’s letter had made her feel old and relegated to another era, but now her steps quickened. The smell of wood smoke was on the air, and her heart lifted at the thought of Christmas cookies. She would ask Ellen to make some, after all.
* * *
—
“He’s to be hanged,” Ellen said, after Josephine left the house. “Oh, I wish Mr. Dougan was here.”
Flora mixed egg, sugar and cinnamon with the rice. She plucked handfuls of the sticky mixture from the bowl with floury hands, making croquettes to store in the ice box for Christmas day.
Maud was stirring the cranberry sauce, watching it thicken. “Who?” she said. “Who is to be hanged?”
“That axe murderer, Mr. Crowley. He’s to be hanged tomorrow.”
Alongside her Irish poems, Ellen posted with hatpins the most salacious of the newspaper articles about the trial. She unpinned one and waved it at them, then read it aloud; triumphantly, Flora thought.
“Unless the hand of Providence intervenes between John Crowley and the gallows, he will undergo sentence of death tomorrow, for one of the most heinous crimes on record in New Brunswick. By the judge’s request, the hanging will not be made public. Well, now, we can all sleep safe in our beds.”
Maud stared at her. “That’s horrible.”
“Don’t you be feeling sorry for the man,” Ellen snapped. “Remember what he did. This is the coroner’s testimony: I lifted the woman’s skirts up to examine her. I saw that there were bruises on the inside of both thighs and scratches on the right groin. The bruises appeared to be from a man’s hand and the scratches from a man’s fingernails. Then he goes on about the blows of the axe. The whole forehead was broken in.”
She pressed the paper back on the wall, pushing the hatpin deeper than necessary, as if she wished a permanent testimony.
“Good riddance to him,” Ellen whispered.
TEN
A Wooden Wheelbarrow
MAUD AND JOSEPHINE WRAPPED themselves in ankle-length wool-blanket coats with scarlet stripes on sleeves and hems. They pulled caps onto their heads, tied woven sashes around their waists. Maud’s skates hung over her shoulder and she held out a pair for her mother.
“I want you to skate too, Mother. Please. There’s a boy that’s been ogling me.”
Josephine took the skates.
Flora, rummaging in the front hall closet, dug out an old toque, a worn canvas coat that had once been George’s, and a pair of fleece-lined rubber boots. She sat on the bench, pulling heavy socks over her black stockings.
“It will be lovely in the rink,” Flora said. She heard her own accent, how words were changing in her mouth, less fluid, more like solid, sharp-edged blocks. She exchanged looks with Maud. They had talked of how they must contrive to get Josephine out into the cold air, to talk and laugh with other people.
Maud and Josephine stepped into the snow-refracted light. Jasper Tuck, at the door, returned their greeting and came into the house. He stared at Flora. Boldly, she thought, looking away. She was tugging rubber handles at the top of the boots.
“Wondering what you was doing this morning.”
“You need help with the miniature house?”
“I was going to ask you to play a game of checkers with me. In the parlour.”
She dropped elbows onto knees, boy-like. “It is Saturday afternoon, Mr. Tuck. I took my half day this morning. I am going out to clean the chicken pen.”
“Well, then. I guess I’m goin’ to have to help you.”
“I don’t need no…any help. Thank you, though.”
Going to the barn, her breath came in clouds, the skin of her face papery.
Checkers!
He could not be sweet on her. He was too old. He must be lonely.
This morning she had awakened from her recurrent dream, tears on her cheeks—Don’t go, Flora, don’t go!—Enid’s hands torn from hers, a carriage grown to vast proportions rumbling over cobblestones. She sat up violently, arms around knees, head buried, striving to balance the dream’s essence—betrayal, rage—with determination.
She is somewhere in Nova Scotia, Flora thought, pushing a wooden wheelbarrow into the empty stall where the chickens lived in the winter.
My sister, at this very moment, working like me, in the same freezing air.
The hens burst out in a flurry of scaly legs, feathers and dust. She set the tines of a pitchfork into the bedding, releasing hot, ammonia steam. She pried and lifted, cleaning away the manure and dumping it into the wheelbarrow until the floorboards were visible.
Jasper Tuck came into the barn from his workroom. She pulled the toque from her sweating scalp, panting; her hair slid from its pins, unfurled onto her shoulders.
He took the handles of the wheelbarrow, pushed it out the door and down the shovelled path to the manure pile. He tipped the handles as if it were no weight and returned it to the barn.
He reached for the pitchfork but she snatched it close.
“No. I can do it.”
He looked down at her. A veil tore between them.
“You come get me for the next load, then. That’s too heavy for a girl.”
Her heart speeded. She was not accustomed to kindness, could not sort it out from cruelty or expedience. She thought of how the wheelbarrow’s iron wheel sank into the snow when she cleaned the cow’s stall, loaded with less.
* * *
—
Harland went down on one knee, balanced on skate point, tightening Josephine’s laces. She saw silvery hairs poking from beneath his astrakhan hat and remembered how, at this same rink, sixteen years old, she had skated arm in arm with a friend, having spurned his advances.
“I never could get them tight enough,” she said.
She stood, took his arm and made a few trotting steps; then bent her right knee as he bent his. The cornet band, seated on a raised platform, played waltzes and polkas: “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” “Funiculì Funiculà.” Beneath the music, scraping blades made a sound like hundreds of miniature saws, while light shafts slanted down from windows set around the high pyramid roof. Smell of wool, of cold. Her heart began a healthy pounding—one of his arms snugged hers close, the other beat time at his side, his legs were transformed, supple and smooth, sweeping them around the rink. Permelia, circling in the crush, skated arm in arm with one of her daughters; her fingers fluttered from the girl’s arm as Harland and Josephine swept by. With her privileges, Josephine thought, she could afford to be generous. Her husband merely took pity on a widow.
“I have good news for you,” Harland said, on shortened breath. “Concerning Flora.”
She felt his commiserating glance, but fixed her eyes on the striated ice, seeing things she would not tell. Simeon’s letters in a hatbox beneath her bed. How she now understood Flora’s stunned silence after the auction. How she now knew that life was a structure whose frame could collapse, all at once and without warning.
“You know that I received a letter from Miss Rye saying that Enid Salford was delivered to Halifax.�
�
“Yes.”
“I wrote to a close acquaintance of mine there. She knows a woman who is one of Miss Rye’s ‘trusted friends.’ These people keep in touch with the girls and convey details of their well-being—or ill use—to Maria Rye. My friend gave me an address, so I have written to this woman, asking if she placed Enid Salford. Or if she knows the person who did.”
Josephine looked up at him. Their eyes met and saw more than each intended. She tightened her mitten on his arm—looked away, examining the musicians. They wore black caps with gold badges; matching jackets with stiff, raised collars. Fingerless gloves.
“That’s good,” she said. “Shall I tell Flora?”
They went halfway around the rink before he answered. “I was going to say no, let us not get her hopes up, but then it came to me that this girl has been kept like a…like a tiger in a cage. She has been effectively imprisoned most of her young life. This must end, don’t you agree? She has proven herself intelligent, capable and strong.”
“Yes, oh yes. She is a wonderful help to me. She should know you are sending the letter, even if it ends in disappointment.”
Harland’s chest lifted and his stride shortened while maintaining the music’s rhythm. She saw that he bore a pleased expression.
“Tell her that I’ll be sending a letter by tonight’s mail,” he said.
Men passing on skates, wives on their arms, nodded to Harland; their eyes dropped to Josephine and sobered, remembering Captain Galloway. Women’s sympathy came a beat too late, after a flash of pity, self-satisfaction and a shameful pride, knowing that unlike Josephine they were still married women, fully employed as such, loved and augmented, one-half of a sum greater than its parts. Permelia’s husband is so kind to poor Mrs. Galloway, women would murmur to one another over the rims of teacups, speaking of the cornet band and the rink and the lovely morning.
“Have you begun circulating your petition?” she asked.
