Flower

by Irene N. Watts

  The door of my room is open. There’s a window seat, which follows the curve of the wall. I can see the apple trees in the garden. One of them has a swing hanging from a thick branch. An old shed behind it is covered with climbing ivy.

  A narrow wardrobe stands against one wall. A small chest of drawers, with a china basin and jug on it, stands against another, and, in a low alcove, there’s a shabby old-fashioned trunk. I can just make out a couple of faded letters on the lid–an I and an L.

  The single bed has a brass headboard. I pull my copy of The Secret Garden from my backpack and put it on the table beside my bed. That’s what this room reminds me of. Almost everything does. This might be Martha the maid’s room. That’s the cane chair, where she’d fold her clothes at night, and in winter she’d shiver with cold, her bare feet glad of the cotton mat on the floor in front of the bed. The blue-and-white patchwork quilt might have been sewn by her mother, though I don’t know how she’d have time with all those children to take care of–I think it was twelve.

  Gran comes in with the towels over her arm. She picks up my book. “I loved that novel when I was your age. Still do.”

  “Me, too. We’re doing it for the school play next term. This is a great room, Gran. Is that trunk one of Grandfather’s bargains?” He loves going to auctions and flea markets.

  “It belonged to your great-aunt Millicent. I use it for storing extra quilts and blankets. Are you ready to eat, Katie? Lunch will be spoiled if we don’t go down and have it soon.”

  Grandfather sits at one end of the long kitchen table, tossing salad in a wooden bowl. Gran slices a baguette, and brings a brown earthenware casserole to the table.

  “Cheese soufflé made with six eggs, especially in your honor, Katie. Help yourself.”

  I put some salad on my plate. “I think I’ll stick to bread and salad.” There’s no way I’m going to eat that eggy stuff. I try not to look at it.

  “Have just a little. Pass me your plate, dear.”

  “Gran, I guess I should have told you … I’ve sort of developed an aversion to eggs lately I’ll eat bread and salad, if that’s alright.”

  “I’ve got some cold ham, or how about a piece of cheese? You’re not dieting are you, Katie?”

  I can’t stand this interrogation. When did Gran turn into someone so–I don’t know–grandmotherly? “I’m not dieting. Cheese is fine, thanks.” I keep my eyes on my own plate while they eat their eggs. You can call it anything you like–soufflé, whatever–it’s only dressed-up scrambled eggs.

  Lunch is finally over. “I’m away to my workshop,” Grandfather says. “I’ve got a sign to finish by tonight. I thought we’d have a house naming ceremony. I’ll expect you to do the honors, Katie.” He used to teach woodworking at the high school. He’s really great at making things and refinishing stuff. “It was a delicious soufflé, Norah, my dear. My favorite.”

  I wish I’d gone to camp with Angie.

  “It’s warm enough to sit outside. Take this please, Katie.” Gran hands me a plate of chocolate brownies and puts two glasses and a pitcher of lemonade on a tray. I hold the door open for her.

  “Try that old rocking chair, dear–wonderfully relaxing. It used to belong to Mr. Macready His daughter told us she remembers her father sitting out here after dinner and smoking his cigars.”

  It seems ages since I left Toronto. Dad and Stephanie must be more than halfway to England by now. I sip my lemonade, and eat a brownie. “Good brownies, Gran.”

  “You always did like them. Now tell me what you’ve been up to. Is school going well? Are you and the lovely Stephanie getting along? It is exciting about the baby, isn’t it? I’m sure you’ll enjoy being a big sister.”

  A truthful answer is liable to give Gran a bit of a shock. “School’s okay. I haven’t thought much about the baby yet. It’s not due till Christmas. Is it fun being retired?” Brilliant Katie, change the subject.

  “Retired? We’ve never worked so hard in our lives. But I always wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast. We’ve already been getting inquiries.”

  “That’s great. It’s a terrific house. I’ll go up and leave you in peace, Gran, and put my stuff away.” I escape. I’ve got a bit of a headache.

  Before supper Grandfather hammers the new driftwood sign into the front lawn. I take a deep breath and, feeling a bit like the queen naming a ship, say, “I name this house Carpenter’s Rest. Bless all who live here.”

  “Well done, Katie. This calls for a toast.” We go inside and he and Gran have champagne.

  Dinner is by candlelight in the paneled dining room. There’s a seafood pie, with chunks of Nova Scotia lobster and scallops in a cream sauce topped with mashed potatoes. I have two helpings.

  A door bangs upstairs, making the candles flicker. I say, only half seriously, “Captain’s making his rounds.”

  My grandparents tell me ghost stories. Gran says there’s supposed to be a resident ghost in the Spring Garden Library. “It’s rumored that the ghost is a former librarian who prowls the corridors, angry because she’s been fired. I always hoped I’d see her, but I’ve never caught a glimpse.”

  “I think we might be in for a bit of a windstorm,” Grandfather says. “I’ll check the windows in a minute.” He finishes his rice pudding.

  I put down my spoon, and try to stifle a huge yawn. Gran suggests I go to bed. I offer to help with the dishes, but Grandfather says, “Go along, Katie. It’s my turn tonight.”

  I run a bath in the deep claw-footed tub and soak for ages. When I finally get out, my bedroom is filled with moonlight. I sit on the window seat and look out at the garden.

  When I was little, I’d kneel down beside my mother in our backyard and dig holes in the dirt, like Mary Lennox wanting her little “bit of earth.” The swing moves back and forth in the wind. The moon dips down behind the shed. I climb into bed, too tired to read or write.

  Wind billows the curtains into my room. A shadow appears on the wall of the alcove…. It looks like a girl holding a flower.

  My mouth is too dry for me to cry out; my heart’s pounding. I fumble for the switch and finally manage to turn the light on. The wall is blank. Everything is exactly the way it was this afternoon.

  I jump out of bed, almost too afraid to let my feet touch the floor. I close the window and huddle under the quilt. Grow up, Katie. Just because the house is old doesn’t mean there’s a ghost here. It was a shadow–that’s all. But I pull the quilt over my head and lie awake for hours.

  William

  Someone’s calling my name, but the voice is a long way off: “Breakfast, Katie.” A radio’s on. There’s a clatter of dishes. At this hour? It feels like the middle of the night. I roll over and go back to sleep and don’t wake up again for hours.

  My headache’s gone and I’m starving. I jump out of bed and open the window wide and lean out. There are long tendrils of ivy creeping up the wall. That’s what I saw last night in the moonlight–ivy looking like arms, holding a flower. It reminds me of the shadow puppets we used to make when I was small.

  I check the alcove, run my fingers over the creamy wallpaper, and lift up the lid of the trunk, which is packed with neatly folded quilts. Not a ghost in sight.

  There’s a note for me downstairs, propped up against a jug of flowers on the kitchen table:

  Good morning, Katie. Glad you had a good sleep. Orange juice in the fridge and cranberry muffins on the counter–eat as many as you like. I’ve gone for a walk in the Public Gardens. Grandfather’s in the shed. He’d love a cup of coffee midmorning, if you can manage it. Fill the percolator half full of water and add two and a half scoops of coffee from the brown pottery container. Love, Gran.

  Honestly, as if I can’t make coffee … I’ve been making it for Dad since I was eight. I start the percolator and wolf down two muffins, which are delicious. The orange juice is freshly squeezed. After I’m done, I carry a mug of coffee down to the shed. The door’s propped open. Grandfather’s perched on a stool, gluing a
tail on a beautiful old rocking horse with flashing eyes, black forelock and mane. I put the coffee beside him on the workbench, and sit down on an upturned barrel.

  “Coffee smells good. Thanks, Katie. Handsome old fellow, isn’t he?”

  “Amazing. Where does he come from?”

  “That’s the astonishing thing. He was standing in that corner, covered with a piece of old sacking. I touched up his coat, gave him a new mane and tail, and he’s good as new. How about giving me a hand?” Grandfather holds out a soft rag and a tin of saddle soap, and I start to polish the harness and saddle. He takes down the glue pot from the shelf. The whole shed looks like a miniature hardware store, with its assortment of paints, varnishes, tins of nails and polishes and dyes. He puts another dab of glue on the tail.

  “Where’s the horse going when he’s finished?” I ask.

  “I thought in the nursery, which is probably where he started out. One of these days that new grandchild of ours will ride him, and maybe our great-grandchildren. A wooden horse like this will last for another hundred years.”

  “I like that–stuff being passed down through the family. Like Great-aunt Millicent’s trunk. I wish I knew more about her. I’ve only ever seen one faded photo. Why don’t I know any stories about our family? It’s like there’s some deep dark secret that no one talks about. Is there?”

  Grandfather looks up from his work. “Not really. You know that Millie passed away before you were born, and that she had to bring me up when Mother died.”

  “Yes. It’s very sad. I’m sorry.”

  “I never knew Mother at all–I was just three days old when she died in 1935, so Millie was the closest thing to a mother I had. She was the eldest–only twelve years old–so she took over the running of the household: my father, my ten-year-old brother, Hamish, and me. It was the middle of the Great Depression, and there was no money for hired help. Millie was forced to drop out of school. She didn’t complain, as far as I know, but it can’t have been much of a life.”

  “I wish I’d met her.”

  “I wish you had, too.”

  Grandfather hands me a brush and puts the tin of varnish between us. “Let’s start on the hooves and then do the runners.”

  “Okay, but what about your father?”

  Grandfather wipes the edge of his brush on the tin and says, “My father, your great-grandfather William, was an orphan, a Home boy who was sent to Canada on the Sardinia in April 1907. I found his name on the passenger list of Dr. Barnardo’s boys in the National Archives of Canada. The names for that year weren’t released until 2001.”

  “But why did you never tell us? Does my dad know?”

  “No. My father never spoke much about his early life. All we knew was that he had been born in England. I guess he told us as much as he wanted us to know. He worked long hours in the smithy. It can’t have been easy then to feed and clothe three children. Most families were poor, struggling to make ends meet. I don’t suppose he was always paid on time for his labor. And we were never the sort of family who sat around the table and exchanged confidences.”

  “So how did you find out?”

  “Just before Dad passed away in 1970, Gran and I drove up to Truro to spend Sunday with him and Millie. It was one of those late warm days at the end of summer. Dad and I sat on the porch after lunch and Millie and Gran went for a walk, leaving Dad and me to drink our tea. He had a box of old horseshoes on the table beside him, and was sorting them. He could never bear to sit and do nothing.”

  “You’re like that too, Grandfather.”

  “Like father like son, I suppose. I wondered what had made him choose to become a blacksmith. He was telling me about one of the horses, the worst kicker he’d ever shod. I think he remembered all of them.

  “When your great-uncle Hamish died in World War II, it almost broke Dad’s heart. My brother was only nineteen years old when he died in 1944. He’d joined the navy as soon as he’d finished his apprenticeship with Dad. They’d planned to expand the business after the war, making ornamental goods like wrought iron gates and light brackets as well as wagon wheels and shoeing.

  “I asked him if he remembered the moment when he knew what he wanted to do with his life. I realized there might not be another chance for a real talk, for him to speak freely to me before it was too late. I must have asked the right question because my dad began to tell me his story, at least as much as he was willing to share with me. It was as if he’d been waiting all these years to speak:

  “‘My father, Albert Carr, worked with horses all his life. He was a stableman for a London horse bus company. One day he let me go with him to the stables. I watched him groom and feed the horses. “They’ll never let you down if you treat them right,” he said. Then he lifted me up onto the back of a big glossy brown mare. She twitched her ears and flicked her tail when I patted her neck. After I got down, Father took an apple out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Give it to the horse,” he said. Not too many apples came my way, but it never entered my head to eat it myself. I’ve never forgotten that day–that was when I knew.

  “‘Will we tell Frankie?” I asked him on the way home. Frankie was my brother, a year and a half younger than me. Father said Frankie would get his turn when he was a bit older. Frankie never did get his turn.

  “‘I was five years old in 1900, the year my father went off to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. “Don’t you fret. I’m off to take care of the colonel’s horses,” he said. He gave Frankie and me a whole penny each and told us to look after our mother. He turned at the door, saluted, and then he was gone. He didn’t come back.

  “‘We had to move from our neat little house to a smaller one. Mother took in washing to eke out the small pension she received as a soldier’s widow. Frankie and I helped as best we could. We carried bucket after bucket of water from the pump we shared with the other families in the lane, and Mother heated the water on the kitchen stove. She spent her days bent over a basin of hot soapy water, scrubbing other people’s soiled clothes on the washboard. The kitchen walls ran with steam. When the clothes were dry, Mother ironed them with heavy flatirons.

  “‘Frankie and I delivered the laundry. Now and then we made the odd copper shoveling manure from the streets and selling it. We never kept the money–it was for Mother. We tried to look after her like Father had said we should.

  “‘Sometimes Mother sent us to the street market on a Saturday to buy a head of cabbage. While I bargained with the stall owner, Frankie stuffed his pockets with carrots and onions. We did what we had to do. We never thought of it as stealing.

  “‘There were many days when we all went to bed without supper. Mother often didn’t finish her meal. “You have mine, boys,” she’d say, “I’m not feeling hungry.”

  “‘One day Frankie and I got home and emptied our pockets of bits of coal we’d manage to scrounge from the back of the coal delivery carts. Mother made us wash our hands before she let us sit down to the soup she’d made. I saw that there was a bit of bacon in our bowls, as well as potato and onion. “For a treat,” Mother said.

  “‘After we’d scraped our bowls clean, she told us we had to be brave. “I’ve sold everything I can and there still isn’t enough to pay this month’s rent.” That was when I noticed that Father’s chair had gone. “You both need boots, and Frankie’s too thin. I’ll have to go into service. Barnardo’s Home will take you in. It won’t be for long, just till I get on my feet.” I was nine years old, and I wanted to believe her.

  “‘At the orphanage, Frankie clung to her skirts and cried like a baby. They told us Mother was allowed to visit in three months’ time and we could write to her once a month. Then she signed a paper, kissed us good-bye, and was gone. The big door closed behind us and I couldn’t stop thinking that Frankie and me were on the wrong side of it. Father had said to look after her.

  “‘After Mother left, a doctor checked us over – eyes, ears, chests. He wore a white coat, and wrote things down. Ou
r hair was clipped short. We were told to scrub in the bath and to dress in new clothes and boots made in the Home’s own workshop. That evening we sat at long tables in the dining hall, eating bread and dripping, drinking cocoa, and looking exactly like all the other orphans.

  “‘Later, in the big dormitory where over a hundred boys of all ages slept in tidy rows, I whispered to Frankie, “You and me, we aren’t like them, Frankie. We’re not orphans.”

  “‘We soon got used to the discipline and routine of the orphanage. Every morning we scrubbed, polished, mopped, and swept. If it wasn’t done right, we did it all over again. And it had to be finished before we were allowed to eat our breakfast of bread and tea. Then there were lessons and, in the afternoon, we learned a trade–carpentry or shoe making, upholstering, printing, or tailoring.

  “‘Every minute was planned. We were never alone. On Sunday there was church, but there was also a pudding if we’d behaved ourselves all week. If we broke the rules, we got beaten and every boy was made to watch. It wasn’t all bad–we ate three meals a day. Christmas was the best time; we got an orange, and there was a tree.

  “‘For the first two years, Mother came to see us every visiting day. One morning, when I was eleven, I was called into the superintendent’s office. Frankie was in the country by this time as a foster family had been found for him. The doctor’d said he had a weak chest and wanted him to have fresh air. Frankie wrote that they let him keep rabbits.

  “‘I was glad Frankie wasn’t there when they told me Mother had passed away. I was allowed to stay in the dormitory all that day. “Be brave. It’s for the best,” they told me. How could it be for the best? I thought. I wrote and told Frankie. I said that one day we’d be together, and he was to get well.

  “‘Every year the orphanage sent boys overseas. They had to make room for the new boys coming in. That’s what all our training was for: to get us ready to take our places in the world, especially the New World.