by Beth Powning
“You choose.”
“Well. I’m not so sure about Canada. Strikes me as a hard place,” she said. “But I like Mrs. Galloway’s house.”
“You like being with your sister.”
“Oh, yes! Flora can do anything. Can’t she?”
Except wear the dress with pleasure, in order to sell his houses…
A tight smile. “Yes, indeed she can.”
She could surprise Flora. She could do it, and then tell her it had been done. Flora, I sold a house, you can make money again. And maybe, too, she could help with the cutting and sewing, and it would be as if they were back in the felting room but without the terror of Matron’s inspection.
“Mr. Tuck, I would like…”
He pushed himself away from the wall with one foot. He stood across from her and put his hands on the sides of the wheelbarrow. He leaned forward and his eyes went to her hair.
“What would you like, Miss Enid Salford?”
“To see that there dress. The one you got…you know.”
“Yes,” he said. She thought he spoke to himself. Yes. She was not certain what he meant by it. He turned and walked back towards his workshop. Uncertain, she bent to lift the wheelbarrow. He heard the creak of the axle and stopped. “Hey? You coming with me?”
She followed him into the workshop. She smelled the bright, clean aroma of paint, turpentine, wood shavings. Immaculate windows sharpened the house across the lane, like a focused lens. Sun lay on the surface of the work table, so scoured that droplets of dried paint were as if intentional and the wood grain, ridged, held no dirt, only streaks of blue or white, the dent of a hammer. On the wall was a row of miniature tools, oiled, sharpened: chisels, hammers, knives. The brass handles of a chest of drawers were a grid of shining, golden shells, upside-down.
“You keep it so neat, Mr. Tuck.”
“Waiting for the next job. Which…” He stared at her, and she thought he wanted her to speak but could not imagine what she should say. He turned, abruptly, and went to a chest shoved up against the wall. He squatted, lifted the lid. A rustling, like paper. He stood, the dress laid over his arms. He held it out to her.
“You want to put it on?”
She lifted a finger to stroke the blue velvet.
“I’ll go out there in the yard and stand under that tree. See? Right there where everyone can see me. I’ll set my back to the barn. I’ll be looking out at the street. You crack open the door and give me a whistle when you’re done.”
He went out. Enid withdrew to the back of the workshop and removed her clothes, glancing over her shoulder. He remained by the tree, sturdily fixed, arms crossed. The dress smelled reassuringly of Flora; slightly too big, it was easy to slide into. Her arms, sleeking along the lining of the velvet sleeves. Her feet, stepping into the circled overskirt. Shoulders, shrugging into the jacket. Her fingers flew, tipping the buttons into their holes. She patted herself down and looked up to see a reflection, in a mirror. The mirror was as clean as the windows. She saw that the dress was loose over the breasts, yet the lacy frill at the neck’s edge cupped her chin and she looked into her own wide eyes and felt a stirring of love for her beauty.
“Mr. Tuck.” She cracked the door. “Mr. Tuck.”
She glanced over at the house. What if one of them were to come out. She retreated to the back of the workshop.
He came back into the workshop and did not look at her until he had made certain that the door latch had settled properly. He turned. The expression she had thought would come over his face—delight, wonder—did not arrive and she realized it was Flora’s reaction she’d expected.
“Bit too big,” he said. He crossed the floor. He was shorter than Mr. Fairweather and lean as Mr. Mallory; his thin lips reminded her of the workhouse children who never had enough of anything. Fred, she thought, lifting her arms, since he was reaching for her waist…would have looked like Jasper Tuck, had he grown up.
He set his hands on her, lightly, and revolved her until she stood with her back to him. He gathered up the loose material; pulled it tight against her breasts.
“About an inch,” he muttered. “Seams.”
He turned her again.
“Still,” he said. “You’ll grow. You’ll be growing fast with the likes of that Ellen’s food.”
“Do you want me to try to sell some houses? I will, if you want me to.”
“You going to tell Flora?”
“I thought…maybe if I sell one. Then I could tell her.”
“And why is that? Why wouldn’t you tell her that you are selling houses for me?”
“She wouldn’t…”
“Want you to have anything to do with the likes of me.”
He looked sideways, out the window. His hand was still on her waist, as if she were made of china and he kept her steadied so she would not tip and fall. The likes of me.
“It’s not you, Mr. Tuck. It’s me. She’s afeared for me. She won’t let me go down into the town alone.”
Still he stared through the immaculate glass. She sensed his unknown story, most likely similar to her own, and felt the sprouting of pity. She wondered if her own father might have wanted her for an assistant; might have inspected her, soberly, as Mr. Tuck had. She saw that Mr. Tuck might change his mind and then she would never again wear the dress. She felt a passionate attachment to the dress, as if her own loveliness were shaped by it. She wanted, for the first time in her life, to care for Flora.
“Mr. Tuck, your houses are like a dream come true. That’s what I would tell people. His houses are like a dream come true.”
The sentence tilted her, the edge of a slide.
His smile flickered, vanished. He lifted his hand from her waist and circled his finger. She rotated, again, unconsciously lifting her arms into the air.
“Flora is the beautiful one,” she said. She felt the need to explain this so he would not expect too much.
He stepped closer, held her shoulders.
“She might be the beautiful one. But you and me. You and me, Enid. We’re a secret, the two of us. Aren’t we?”
He raised a finger to stroke back a strand of hair that lay across her forehead but changed it into a warning shake.
Teasing, she thought. He left the workshop and again stood under the tree. Her own gingham dress was like a wilted leaf, softened by washing and the sunshine and snap of the clothesline. She tied the strings of her cap. There were more beans to pick, rows and rows, lying dead and dry in the soil.
* * *
—
Enid told Flora that she had met a girl who was working in one of the other big houses on Creek Road. Sometimes she and this girl, Colleen, would walk in the pastures up behind the houses.
Flora felt a pang of jealousy and chastised herself for it. Enid had never had a friend.
* * *
—
September drew to a close. After supper, darkness sifted down and the few feeble crickets fell silent. With dishes done and the house readied for morning, Flora and Enid went up to their bedroom to study.
“What are you reading, Flora?” Enid asked. She was practising her addition. 11 + 17. 23 + 10.
“Then all around was heard the crash of trees / Trembling awhile and rushing to the ground. It’s a book about how men and oxen cut down all the trees and turned the forests into farms.”
Rustle of turning page. The scratching of Enid’s pencil.
Flora dropped her forehead onto the heels of her hands and stared at the poem’s illustration, an etching of mighty trees and men swinging axes; the largest of the trees was in the process of falling, and Flora felt sad for it, and for the young birch trees that bent beneath it. Mr. Tuck had not asked her to go out prospecting for new customers, and so there were no little houses to make. Josephine relied on her to keep the boarding house running; this was Flora�
��s work, yet it yielded only room and board. She had only erratic slices of available time, which were all right for a job with Mr. Tuck; but she did not see how she could work in the tannery or the boot and shoe factory or the steam laundry. Mr. Tuck had not asked her to go around in the dress. His face was closed, forbidding. She figured he was hatching a new plan.
Flora wondered if she and Enid would ever leave this house, no matter how far they furthered their education.
She pictured the drawer filled with banknotes. Orange, grey and green.
* * *
—
Occasionally, Enid waited for Mr. Tuck on a side street. She wore the dress, concealed by a cloak. He picked her up with a horse and buggy from the livery stable.
Enid knocked on doors. If admitted, she unrolled large pencil drawings that Jasper Tuck had made of his creations. She explained about the similitude of the reproduction. Who is the maker? she was asked. Mr. Tuck had told her not to point him out as he waited in the buggy. She was to say that Mr. Jasper Tuck had recently moved to town and that he constructed these houses in his own workshop. Should you be interested, Enid said, we kin ask if those as owns one of his little houses can let you see it. She stood straight and fearless, proud of herself in the beautiful dress. Women sent her away with cookies or a loaf of bread. They smiled, giving her pats on the shoulder and glancing at the man on the buggy as they followed Enid to their doorways. One asked if Mr. Jasper Tuck was her father.
After the third such visit, Mr. Tuck no longer spoke when she climbed back into the buggy. His eyes skipped to the closing door, the face in the window. His expression masked any emotion. He lifted the reins and clucked to the horse.
* * *
—
Josephine took down the Simpkin’s Tooth Powder monthly calendar from its nail and turned it to October. There was more sky visible between the branches; the rooms of the house seemed larger in the unimpeded light.
“Do you remember the pirates?” she asked Carrie, who had stopped to visit. Carrie was on her way to the train station, heading back to St. John after visiting her parents in Whelan’s Cove.
“I remember it more as a sensation,” Carrie said. The turret room was chill, and both women wore merino shawls. “With pictures strewn around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” She spoke briskly. “My dear dead dog, Gig. I remember that. And how I helped my mother make my father’s hair into little braids to bind the wound.”
Josephine realized she should not have forced this from her husband’s cousin, who had never asked her how she had felt upon visiting the scene of Simeon’s death.
“I’m sorry, I should not have asked.”
Flora came in with a plate of oatmeal cookies, fresh from the oven. Carrie’s eyes followed her as she left the room.
“She seems sad,” she said. “Is she still pursuing her studies?”
Josephine felt a pang of guilt, realizing her own preoccupation ever since the precarious moment with Mr. Fairweather. “Yes, I believe she studies in the evening with Enid.”
“What will become of them? The sisters?” Carrie leaned forward to take a cookie from the plate. “They must have a life of their own, someday.”
Her eyes were calm, as if the question were simple, but Josephine saw it encumbered with Carrie’s understanding of what constituted a life—women as players in a political drama, their choices weighted with historical significance. Josephine wanted to protest that she had saved the girls from poverty and degradation. She wanted Carrie to acknowledge the gracious house with its linens and carpets, and how even if the girls were to some degree servants within it, it was their home. She wanted to proclaim the advantages of her own deep affection for them. Yet she was struck by a pang of shame.
She found she could not tell Carrie the degree to which she loved, as well as depended upon, Flora. Or how she and Maud and Flora and Ellen murmured to one another about Enid—delighted to see that she had stopped pleating her skirt on her knee, thrilled when they noticed she had begun to look people in the eye, improve her grammar, smile. She could not tell Carrie that on some mornings she woke to her loneliness and felt as lost, as vulnerable, as Flora and Enid.
“I don’t know what will become of any of us. Them, me, Ellen. My own daughters. I can only go on, day by day. Keeping food on our table and a roof over our heads.”
“Men’s laws left you in a pickle, of course, and now you avoid working out your own situation by being pleased with the improvements you see in the girls.”
“There is only one way that I can see of to work out my situation, Carrie. Simeon’s will could not be found, and because of that, I have nothing. He would not have wished this upon me, but those are the facts and cannot be changed. I will live in this house the rest of my life, unless all three of my children decide to sell it. Which I heartily hope they will not. But if they did, and should I relinquish my dower right, the portion I would receive from the sale would pauperize me. I am doing the only thing possible, running a boarding establishment. It is an invaluable help having Flora and Enid here. I hope it is a help for them as much as it is for me.”
Her face grew hot. Mr. Fairweather. Divorce. His desire to spend the rest of his life with her. The fearful sweetness of the moment, which she could not resist nurturing.
Carrie, misinterpreting the blush, leaned forward and touched Josephine’s arm. “Oh, Josephine. You know, I believe I spent too many years of my childhood with only my mother. No playmates. My father was of necessity a stern man. I did not learn the niceties of conversation. I am too direct. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not…” Embarrassed, Josephine leaned to peer out the window. She had seen a movement on the lane, a flash of green, and thought it could not be Mr. Tuck’s coat, as it was too bright.
* * *
—
Enid listened but heard no sound. She opened the door and slipped into the workshop.
In the corner where she had changed into the dress, just where she’d expected it to be, she found her white satin ribbon. Ellen had given it to her and she wore it like a necklace, treasured it. It lay between a wicker wastebasket and the wall. Farther back, in a corner, she saw an object—box, book, wallet, spectacle case—clearly lost, in want of rescue. She scrabbled into the darkness, lifted something cold, smooth, heavy. A paperweight? A toy?
A brass duck.
She squatted, cleaning it on her skirt.
It was so unlike Mr. Tuck that she knew immediately that it must have belonged to one of the children, Maud, perhaps, or George. Perhaps they’d forgotten it while visiting Mr. Dougan. Oh, he kept the place spotless, Ellen had recollected. Loved to oil the harness, the bridles. Mr. Galloway had a nice riding horse. Mr. Dougan, he kept those stirrup irons shining like the best silver.
Enid had once possessed a cloth doll with wooden head, arms and legs. She could not remember it, but Flora told her that Ma and Papa made it for her. It went missing in the workhouse, Flora said. Some other little girl stole it. You cried for days.
She held the duck in the palm of her hand until it was warm. She rubbed the round circle of its eye until she fancied it looked happy and recognized her.
Back in the house, as Enid climbed the stairs, she heard Flora laugh, probably at something Ellen had said. Farther off, the murmur of voices in the parlour. She went to her bedroom, dropped the ribbon on her bed. No one wanted the duck, she reasoned—she’d only brought it into the house where it belonged, although it was hers now. She tucked it under her pillow with only a bit of the beak showing. So you can breathe. Later, she would find a better hiding place for it.
She went back out to pull the last of the turnips.
* * *
—
At four-thirty, Ellen put a hand to the small of her back.
“Must go lie down,” she said.
Flora stooped to slide a sheet of biscuits into the oven. “
I can make the pie.”
“You got to crumble the savoury fine and pick out the stems. Remember Mr. Sprague. Needle in my throat, he said.”
Ellen went upstairs. Passing the door to Flora and Enid’s room, she paused, noticing the ribbon on the bed. She saw something else, curious. She stepped into the room and lifted the pillow.
* * *
—
As Flora put the finishing touches on the supper table—cut-crystal saucer of pickles, silver-plated butter dish, knife inserted in its prong—the boarders were coming down the stairs. Returning to the kitchen, she noticed that light had drained from the sky, the barn roof a silhouette against the cooling blue.
“Where’s Enid?”
Maud was sitting in the rocker, patting the cat. “Haven’t seen her. I thought she was upstairs washing her hands. I’ll call her.”
She jumped up, went out.
The cat, offended, rubbed against Ellen’s ankles. Ellen, revived from her brief rest, was spooning mashed potatoes into a bowl; she stamped a foot. “Go on with you.”
Maud returned, shortly. “She’s not upstairs.”
“I think she’s in the garden,” Josephine said. She was stirring a custard.
“I’ll go check. It’s not like her to be late.” Maud was in the hall, shoving her arms into a woollen sweater.
“But it’s getting dark,” Flora said. She felt her breath, shortening. “It’s almost night.”
She carried the chicken pie into the dining room. Ellen followed with the bowl of mashed potatoes. Miss Harvey, Mrs. Beaman and Mr. Sprague were pulling back their chairs, discussing a bicycle race that had taken place in St. John.
“Is Mr. Tuck coming down?” Ellen said. She stood with the bowl of steaming potatoes balanced on the flat of her hand. A pat of butter loosened, pooled.
“Didn’t see him.”
They listened.
Mrs. Beaman, sitting, loosened her waistband with complacent tugs. She unfolded her napkin, surveying the table as the women set down pie and potatoes and hurried back to the kitchen.
