The Sister's Tale

by Beth Powning

  Dressing, she considered the rehabilitation of Enid. The girl was accepting Maud’s grammar lessons. Repeat what she tells you, Flora urged.

  She pinned up her hair. Josephine herself had taught the girl to play checkers and Old Maid. She gave her a basket containing knitting needles, a skein of cotton yarn and a simple pattern for making a washing-up cloth. She took Enid’s hands in her own and guided them over a purl stitch. She sat beside her and listened to her read. Enid’s favourite primer was about a girl named Flora. “Flora has been to pick flowers in the woods. See, she has some in her apron. Flora sat on a bank and made a wreath of flowers, and now she puts it on.” She pronounced the words carefully, her accent still much more pronounced than her sister’s. Her th’s like f’s.

  Josephine went down the back stairs, smelling the first smoke of the morning fire.

  Enid’s healing would need planning, care. She could not have explained it to herself, the steps she would take: it was a compendium of details, known and absorbed since Simeon’s death. Oddly, it leavened the weight of everything else she had undertaken: bookkeeping, the needs of pantry and laundry, the complaints of the boarders—these tasks felt less onerous, as if they were now part of something precious and rare.

  * * *

  —

  After the day’s chores were done, the women sat on the veranda. Josephine and Ellen took the rocking chairs, Sailor settled at Josephine’s feet, while Flora, Enid and Maud perched on the steps. The floorboards retained the day’s heat; the birds were quiet, purposeful, flying from bush to tree. August leaves made a dry shirring. The breeze smelled of wood smoke and roasting meat. In the garden beds, lilies had shut, sepals tucking away stigma and anther for the night, like locked houses.

  They watched as two boys dashed into the road to retrieve wobbling hoops. A high-stepping bay horse trotted downhill, pulling a hooded chaise, passing a wagon creaking slowly upwards, loaded with barrels and boxes, returning to the countryside after a day in town. Harland’s father, The Commodore, paused to bow as he made his twice-daily constitutional, his little terrier panting at his heels; and the MacVey sisters swept past in white dresses, carrying ivory-tipped walking sticks, waving with lace-gloved hands.

  Ellen adjusted her spectacles and swept open the newspaper.

  “Do ya’s want to hear about what the women are doing, now?” The paper was running a brand-new column: For and About Women.

  Enid hugged a yellow gingham dress around her knees. She brightened, expectant; she liked Ellen, and Ellen, sensing it, had had a change of heart.

  Maud and Flora exchanged a smile. Yesterday, they had complained to Ellen of her fascination with murder.

  “Yes.”

  “Seven Maine schoolmarms, tired of boarding house life, are planning to erect a cottage for their own use. They have saved a few hundred dollars each and their building enterprise will be undertaken on the co-operative plan.”

  Ellen lowered the paper and removed her spectacles.

  “There’s a thing, now. No men in the house. Just ladies, like us.”

  “They’re likely suffragists,” Maud said. “What do you think, Mother?”

  Recently, George had announced to Maud that he would wait until she was twenty-one before discussing selling the house. He had reminded her, however, that the property on Queen Street, so perfect for Mother, might not still be available at that time, and that if she should change her mind they might take Mother on a drive to see it. Even in memory, she felt a wave of irritation. He had adopted his uncle’s tone of voice, choice of words, mannerisms. She longed to report the conversation to Lucy, to lay plans for how they might thwart George.

  “Are you tired of boarding house life?”

  Josephine was startled by the question. “What? Am I…why, no, Maud. No, I have grown quite accustomed to it. It is a way to stay in this house where everything holds a memory of your father. It makes…it simply, you know…it changes our dream into a new dream that somehow includes the old one. No, I wouldn’t want to.”

  She raised a hand, suddenly, as if she were attending a meeting.

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you all. I had a note today from Aunt Azuba. She wrote to say that a date has been set for presenting the suffrage petition to the legislature. She says this is the most important suffrage petition ever to come before the government. She says that if this petition fails there is fear that the momentum will die and it will take years to get back to where…” She paused, considered, resolved something. “…to where we are now. So she asks if we would start a special committee just for our town. For the sole purpose of gathering signatures.”

  Ellen lowered the newspaper to her lap.

  “Now, then,” she sighed. “As if we had nothing else to do.”

  “Oh, but we should start a suffrage committee. Mother, we should.” Maud fidgeted at the top of the steps, fanning her face with a hosta leaf, surreptitiously unbuttoning her collar and the top two buttons of her dress.

  “I agree, Maudie,” Josephine said. The dog sat up on his haunches. She worked her fingers into his white ruff. “I took the liberty of saying we would do it. That I would do it, at the very least.”

  Maud half turned to her mother. Her voice took on Carrie’s pedantic tone. “I feel as if there would be no point to my life, Mother, if it fails. Why should I try for an education, if men still won’t let me vote? As Carrie says—why should we marry if…” She waved her hand vaguely at her mother, the house. “As you have experienced, Mother.” She turned to Flora. “You’ll help, won’t you, Flora? You and Enid? You spoke so well that one time. Remember the march, when they threw water on us? Wasn’t that fun?”

  “It’s about the vote,” Flora murmured to Enid. She laid her hand on Enid’s to stop her from pleating and smoothing her skirt.

  Mr. Sprague and Miss Harvey came around the corner of the house. They were “stepping out” together. Miss Harvey held a parasol against her shoulder. She twirled it, making its white ruffles float out like the petals of a daisy. They strode down the hill on the sidewalk.

  “For example,” Maud explained to Enid, darkly, lowering her voice. “Say they get married. Everything she has earned in the factory office, everything she owns, becomes his. Or might as well, even if the new law says otherwise. Cousin Carrie says they find loopholes to keep us in our place.”

  Flora straightened her back, watching the couple going down past the big houses and feeling indignation at Maud’s words. She realized that she had herself imbibed these ideas at the women’s meetings. Enid was new to such understanding; only wistfulness crossed the girl’s face as she, too, watched the couple.

  Ellen, finger pressed against the article where she had left off reading, narrowed her eyes behind her spectacles. She watched as Mr. Sprague, wearing a brown linen jacket, and Miss Harvey, in a white dress with green stripes, turned the corner past the house with hydrangea bushes. Mr. Sprague was evidently expounding on something, for he slowed his pace, describing something in the air with his hands.

  “Them two. Skinny and bony. Pity the cook they hire.”

  No one knew Ellen’s story. Flora and Maud whispered about her. Maybe her husband murdered someone. Do we know if she was married? No, not for sure. She simmered, never quite coming to a boil; behind her compressed lips, they sensed secrets, resentments.

  “I agree we should start a committee,” Flora said. “We’ll help, Enid, won’t we?”

  Enid nodded—of course—chin in hands, gazing out over the grass with its purple and white flowers too low for the lawnmower’s whirring knives. Her hair, soft and heavy, coiled at her neck. Pink, at last, Flora saw, in her cheeks. Her compliance in Flora’s offer to volunteer was all of a piece with washing dishes or learning to read or improving her grammar. Enid was increasingly agreeable, quieting within, watching Flora, picking up cues and copying them. Released, and relieved.

 
Ellen sighed, again, and picked up the paper. “That’s that, then. Just when pickling is starting.”

  * * *

  —

  It rained, all the next day. Enid hunched over her sewing, silent, as she often was when she had had bad dreams. Flora tried to make her smile.

  “Give her time,” Josephine murmured, passing in the hallway, a stack of folded sheets in her arms. “You can’t make someone’s happiness.”

  That evening, Flora left Enid in the kitchen, darning the heel of a sock. Ellen was bottling pickles amidst steam smelling of vinegar and mustard seeds.

  Outside, on the street, pinwheels of spray rimmed the wheels of passing carriages; raindrops rolled down the Solomon’s seal leaves, plinking a puddle beneath the workshop window. Flora entered the barn.

  Mr. Tuck was expecting her. An array of wood squares, matchsticks, glue and clamps covered her workspace. She was making miniature tables. First she put together the table aprons, then glued matchstick legs to them. She sanded the squares of wood and positioned them atop the apron and legs. Her fingers shook. Tired, she breathed out to steady herself, wondering why a man like Jasper Tuck would have chosen this work, requiring sparseness of movement as he transformed the immutable and massive materials of a mansion—timbers, spikes, bricks—into components as frail as tissue.

  “Your sister working?”

  “I told you. She’s sewing. She’s always sewing.”

  “Got a lot of sewing needs in that house.”

  “As a matter of fact, we do. Clothing for nine people. That’s a lot of mending. A lot of darning.”

  He held a chisel in one hand, tapped it with a hammer, incising a line.

  “I want you to go out on the next fine day. Go out in the dress and talk to a lady. Take the house for her to see. Before it gets too big and heavy.”

  “What lady?”

  “The sisters told me about a friend of theirs.” Tap tap tap. “Lives over on Summer Street.” Tap tap. “Big white house.”

  When Flora had first seen the dress, touched its white wool, heard the rustle of its petticoat, she had been a different person, a girl without someone to care for. Enid’s presence changed things in a way Flora did not know how to explain to Mr. Tuck. It was not the making of the houses that she minded. It was being Mr. Tuck’s salesgirl, his representative. Now that she spoke, in effect, for both herself and Enid, and worked towards their eventual establishment as respected citizens of the town, she could not bear the thought of walking through the streets like a dressed-up doll, pulling the miniature house. Even if Mr. Tuck were to drive her, she could not see herself climbing down from the wagon and going up to a house wearing a dress that a man had bought for her, one that fit with frightening precision. She could not see herself speaking in a warm, false voice about the virtues of owning a house that looked just like your own, attempting, for her own pecuniary gain as well as Mr. Tuck’s, to convince a woman—whom she might have encountered at a suffrage meeting—to buy something unnecessary, made by an indigent man with no family or friends, who had come out of nowhere after Josephine was no longer the beloved wife of a sea captain but the grieving manager of a lodging house.

  She trembled to the extent that she could not hold the little table, so picked up a piece of paper faced with pulverized glass, for smoothing. She recognized fear by a blood taste in her mouth and a darkening around the edges of her eyes. She could not say yes. She could not say no.

  “Sometime next week, I was thinking.” A curl of wood shaving clung to his collar. His eyes were as alert and unfathomable as a racoon’s. “The next fine day.”

  “I will be picking beans on the next fine day. You know you can’t pick them when their leaves are wet.”

  “Can’t you. Missy smart-one, you are. Don’t know what the missus would do without you.”

  That, too, was a worry. She was both beholden and indispensable.

  He set down the hammer and chisel, running a finger along the incised line, drawn lips exposing his teeth. The scritch-scratch of Flora’s glass paper was loud, as if expressing her feelings, and she laid it down. Their eyes touched.

  “How much money have I given you?”

  I earned it, she thought, indignant, but suddenly could not speak, could not stand up for herself, as when she bargained for firewood and hay or argued robustly for her pricing on eggs and butter or snapped at Mr. Sprague if he complained You tuck them sheets so tight a man can’t get into them. Enid’s presence had made her aware of her strength and determination; yet, also, more careful.

  “How much?” he repeated.

  “Five dollars and seventy-three cents.”

  He glanced down at the money drawer. “You and I have a secret. Don’t we.”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t get much money from Josephine, do you? No. No, you don’t. You going to pick them beans or sell a house?”

  “Sell a house.”

  There was no need, she thought. He could have treated her like a partner. He could have asked her pleasantly.

  “You and me going to make a business, aren’t we? One day I plan to live in a house like this.” He reached over and drew a finger along the roof of the little house, like stroking the ridge of a dog’s skull. He grinned, his eyes hard. He made a vague gesture towards the lower streets lined with large, shingled buildings: the boot factory, a tannery, a woodworking plant, greenhouses, foundries. “Tuck’s Miniature House Factory…one day you’ll be my main girl.”

  She resumed sanding. The future that he sketched was so real that she pictured herself passing Mr. Tuck’s mansion, set on the hillside with a view over the eastern hills, as she walked home to her own imaginary house, where Enid would be tending a flock of hens.

  “How you doing with that glass paper?”

  He hooked his chair back with one foot and came across the floor. She folded her hands in her lap and hunched her shoulders. It occurred to her that whenever she caught Enid in such a posture she always whispered Enid! straighten your back, look up, stop fanning your skirt—a kind of pleading, since Enid’s pain was a thing she did not want to witness.

  He stood behind her. She felt as if a draught blew over her head, stirring her hair, a vague brushing. Or as if a daddy-long-legs had wandered over her scalp. She did not dare move, although in the effort to remain still, her neck quivered.

  * * *

  —

  Harland arrived at tea time. It was a hot, still afternoon. The sky was lurid; thunder crumpled, a sense of danger prowling the outskirts. The wisteria-shrouded veranda seemed a place of safety, threatened.

  “Sometimes, yes, I do wonder,” Josephine said. Her throat thickened at the question—Did she wonder, worry or fret over how he had died. She was snapping the stem ends from green beans. She had not worn a corset for months, now. She felt the soft swell of her freed belly, hidden beneath an apron; saw the bright green of the beans in her lap. An ash basket held the snapped-off stems; woven, honey-coloured strips held lines of shadow and light. “There’s no one who can tell me how he died, only that the ship went aground and they saved the women.”

  “No doubt he was in the process of saving them,” Harland said. He leaned forward, picked a stem end from the floor and dropped it into the basket in her lap.

  Even if Permelia should die, she thought, flushing, and Harland were to ask for her hand in marriage, she could not imagine removing her clothes in front of him. She could not imagine his moustache pressed against her face or his fingers touching her breasts. She did not know how other women did this, marrying for a second time. She had given herself to Simeon; together, they had graduated from embarrassed fumblings into discovery of the body’s magnificent gifts. Now she was on the cusp of allowing the past its due and proportion, a reduction, while gathering to herself this day’s weather and the needs of the present; and as the past drifted away, day by day, t
he more frequently, it seemed, Harland visited. She became aware that it was she who had found direction and he who was lost.

  She longed to ask him about Permelia—how did he feel about her—so instead spoke of her love for Simeon. Like plunging one’s hands into the carcass of a hen, she thought. Grasping the heart.

  “I loved Simeon so dearly. He was my best friend. The only person I felt truly knew me.”

  “You had a good marriage,” he said, as if conceding something long unspoken. “I’m glad, Josephine, although I am grieved that it has come to an end.”

  She snapped the ends from several beans, listening to the muttering thunder. She would ask, then. Since the question lay, waiting.

  “And you?”

  “There are difficulties, as you have no doubt realized. Yes. Difficulties. I will admit to my part in her frustration. I am too engrossed in my…my interests. My other interests.”

  “Weather records,” she said. She snapped the beans more quickly.

  “Yes, weather, of course. And the store. And, now, Flora and Enid. Which Permelia simply cannot understand.” He flushed, fingering the rim of the straw boater he held on his knees. His lips tightened over the words Josephine knew he would not speak, the words Permelia used to describe such girls as Flora and Enid, who had been brought over to Canada by the boatload. The worst elements. From the poorest class. Infesting our country.

  “Flora worries, terribly,” she said. “She wants to repair the damages done to Enid. She feels responsible.”

  Flash of lightning, a crackling boom. Josephine started and the beans spilled from her lap. She rose and tugged chair and basket deeper into the veranda. Harland continued speaking as he, too, moved his chair farther back. The first drops of rain drummed the porch roof.

  “Which she is not, certainly,” he said. “The Mallory case is going to court. I received a letter. Both man and woman are in prison. No doubt the poor woman is glad enough to be under a sound roof. They have written to say there is no need for Enid to testify. I came, today, in fact, to tell you this.” He lowered his voice. “They found the boy’s body. The wife has said that he was…” He avoided her eyes. “Abused.”