“I suggested to my wife that in the circumstances she might remain at home and rest after the exertions of this last year,” Francis said, taking the chair that Canon Judd indicated, across the dining table from Thea and Kay. Thea had not wished to telegraph her condition to Mrs. Judd, but Francis seemed to be an old favourite with her, and Canon Judd too.
“But she wished nothing more than to accompany you, I’m sure,” Mrs. Judd said, beaming at the happy pair. “Very proper in a captain’s wife.” She made her face smooth again and closed her hands together for grace to be said, which Canon Judd did at length in careful Latin. Thea pressed Kay’s foot to make her sit more still.
“And was it a great blessing to leave the frozen North?” the Canon asked, to start the conversation again once he had finished reciting and left a suitable pause for reflection after their amens.
Thea felt Kay stiffening beside her, but she smiled for Canon Judd. “Not so far north. You must think we lived in harsh conditions, but the region is subject to melting winds, and snow is only rarely troublesome. We were very comfortable in the principal’s quarters—and of course the students much warmer and better fed than they would have been in their teepees.” But even saying this, she thought of the Stoney camp downhill from the school when the Elders came to talk while Father lay dying, the wood-smoke warmth of the women’s tent, bright-faced babies tucked up together; and those two old women who walked up to the school, plaid blankets wrapped tight under belts, the fur on their beadwork mitts lifting in the wind. She thought of the children shivering in their dormitory cots last winter, even with two blankets. Twice the blankets, because half the beds were empty.
She looked to check: Kay had bent down her head and was stolidly eating, using the fish fork just as she ought.
Thea picked up her own, and said, “We stayed at Blade Lake until Father’s replacement could arrive, in March, then another while to acquaint him with the running of the school, and finally we set off—and were delayed by a snowstorm at Calgary for three days.”
“How I disliked that telegram,” Francis put in.
“Oh, but it was spring from then on, across the country, the train moving through bare fields and into new leaves by Ontario. And then—well, then we were married, as soon as we were able after Kay and I arrived in Yarmouth.”
“O happy day!” Francis was performing the courtly lover for the Judds, but also for her. If she had not felt so low, Thea would have blushed.
“You had served seven long years for your bride?” Canon Judd asked.
“Ten, Sir!” Francis smiled across the table. “I ought to have ridden to fetch her, but I’m only a man of action on the sea.”
Thea said, “My father needed me, when his wife fell ill—his second wife. Kay was an infant, and I felt a strong duty to go. I was born in the West, at Fort à la Corne, you know, my father’s first parish in the diocese of Rupert’s Land, and only came home to the East to finish my schooling. I was glad to be of service in the school.”
“But to wait, to be kept apart for so long—ten years!”
Careful not to let Mrs. Judd’s overblown sympathy make Kay feel like a burden, Thea said, “I missed Francis, of course. But he was away at sea most of that time. I was happy to be back in the landscape I had loved as a child, and to come to know my stepmother and my little sister.”
“It must always be a privilege to bring light to the darkness of the Red Man, but I credit Mr. Brimner’s choice of climate over your father’s,” Canon Judd said, returning stubbornly to the weather. “A sojourn in the tropics will do you good, as it will him. If his ship ever does put in, eh, Mr. Brimner?”
Taken aback, Mr. Brimner’s mobile eyebrows jumped. “Again I am forced to apologize, Sir.” He put down his knife and fork to make praying hands, and the tall woman took his plate away and replaced it with another.
She put another plate of fish in front of Thea and offered the sauceboat. Mrs. Judd had very fine china, Thea thought, trying to distract her unruly stomach. Pretty, two birds on a branch. Meissen? One could not turn it over to look.
Mr. Brimner had turned to her. “My destination is a fledgling mission school in Tonga, Mrs. Grant. I must take instruction from you on how the education of native children may best be managed, and what errors to beware. My heart is willing, but my skills untested.”
Not knowing what to tell him, Thea said, “I had no skills to speak of, Sir—one year of normal school, training to teach obedient boys and girls in Nova Scotia.”
“Quite a change, going to a wild Indian school!” said Mrs. Judd, warmly approving. “Christian service in action, indeed!”
“They were not wild,” Thea felt obliged to say, at Kay’s quick diamond glance. She tried to smile for Kay, but found her face no longer willing to obey. She rose, and said confusedly to Mrs. Judd, “Is there, may I—?”
“Oh, of course, of course, my dear, I ought to have thought…Come with me, right along this passage…”
Shut in the water closet, blessedly aware of Mrs. Judd’s feet tapping away to the dining hall, Thea leaned her forehead on the wall beside the commode. She felt a sudden sweat start up on her forehead as her interior cramped and twisted, unused to and ungrateful for Bahamian victuals.
Thea had been talking a great deal, and was tired perhaps from the long walk. So was Kay tired. These people were stuffy and there was too much to eat and too many different glasses and forks, as if they were out-Empiring the Empire. There was a long course of conch soup and then more fish, and Thea came back from the toilet and Kay thought she might go but could not make up her mind to bother Mrs. Judd.
More fish with lovely smooth slices of orange fruit around it, and after that a powdery potato stew with strange vegetables in it that Kay did not at all like, and then plum duff, brought in with a steaming gravy boat of rum sauce even on this hot day.
But Thea was standing, and then dropping, bowing, hands to her skirt as if to hide something—her face gone white looked up, caught Kay’s eyes, jerked on to Francis and on again, still searching—
Mrs. Judd came around the table at a run and caught Thea from behind, putting an arm around her waist, and almost swung her to the door, saying come come my dear come now and then they were out of the door and gone.
Canon Judd and Francis and Mr. Brimner looked around the table as if they thought to find some answer there in the empty seats, and Mrs. Judd’s voice in the distance calling, “Rhoda! Rhoda, come quick, will you?” rang clearly through the quiet night.
Nobody spoke. The wind had risen and the sound of the waves lapping at the pier was louder now, crash and ripple repeated over and over.
After a minute or maybe ten, Canon Judd sat down at the table again, nodding slowly, his heavy body making his chair squawk along the wooden floor. Mr. Brimner subsided silently into his own chair.
Francis, almost as white as Thea, said, “I should—may I go and find my wife, Sir?”
“I wouldn’t,” said the Canon.
Kay felt she was invisible now and wondered if anyone would hear if she opened her mouth.
The kitchen door behind her opened a crack and the soft, dark head of a little girl poked through. “Come,” she whispered, reaching long fingers to tweak Kay’s skirt. “Come, girl.”
Mrs. Judd, coming in through the other door, nodded to Kay to go along.
Kay stood up and set her napkin on her plate, careful to make it an elegant fold. “Please excuse me, Sir,” she said, but it was as she had thought, nobody moved or answered, or seemed to have heard.
As she went out, Mrs. Judd was saying, “Well, Captain Grant, you will have to brace yourself, my dear.”
The girls took Kay to a long white room in another part of the house, where they were finishing their own supper on a deal table: a bowl of sago pudding. There were three cots at the other end of the room, with mosquito nets over them.
Kay stood in the middle of the floor, not knowing what to do. The littler girl stayed with her, one arm around her now, running the other hand down Kay’s long braid.
“Mamma say you are to go to bed here,” the second girl said, the older girl. “Your mamma not too good and so she does not go on the ship tonight.”
No one else came. Francis did not come, nor Thea. Nobody told her what was happening to Thea. If she was dead, perhaps.
After some time waiting, Kay took off her boots and stockings and her new white dress and lay down where they told her to. The older girl undid the netting and set it over the bed, and after another blank gap of time Kay fell asleep, still not knowing anything at all.
Thea heard her own voice saying, I know, oh no, I knew, I know. Perhaps not out loud, she hoped not. Hard pain like a mass of stone slammed into her from behind. Sharp pain breaking over that, again and again, really dreadful pain. She could hardly tell where the pain came from, it was in every place, her back, her legs, her chest, her arms, folding tight around her as she tightened into a fetal curl around herself and her burden, her treasure.
Nothing made sense. Mrs. Judd stood aside from the bed where she had fallen, pulling away the skirt of her Delft-blue dress, wet and dark with blood, and the other woman put a thin hand to her forehead. Dark eyes, no smile in them. Thea felt sense leaving, again and again, but then pain came again and the darkness surged away so she could not be blessedly unknowing, unknown. This was not good, this was not the way.
If only she could faint. More blood, and the woman taking blood away. She waved her hand and asked for a pot to sit on, and made another great evacuation of the bowels—so much humiliation, with this woman she did not know, and Mrs. Judd coming in and out; but she had lost the ability to care about such nonsense as pride or civility, and only rocked in the bed waiting for it to pass, this thing that was happening. More blood, in great gouts—the bed would never be clean again. “Oh my dear,” Mrs. Judd said from the doorway. “Rhoda, is she—” and the dark woman said, “More to go, but she progresses.”
Nothing was progressing, there was no—hours and hours, nothing but a black blade scraping inside her and the clamping cramp of her body trying to get rid of it. Of the baby, the darling, already gone, she knew it must be. A punishment, she felt most deeply. But it was not, she told herself. Oh God—she told herself again that God’s justice was not man’s, that she was not at fault, or that she was forgiven—and then the cramping took hold again to twist her so she rose up grossly in the bed, panting on all fours and groaning like an animal in pain. Because she was an animal in pain.
At one moment she heard herself say, “Thank God I am not on the ship.” The inner mouth of her mind that still could think said, Yes, indeed, you see, that would have been worse. The outer mouth said no no nothing nothing could be worse.
She opened her eyes but could not see. She put out her arms and there was a basin put in them and she vomited.
When she next noticed, she was sitting on the pot again, Rhoda holding her arms, or was it Mary, is she, am I taking Mary down from the doorway? Poor dead weight, poor girl.
No, no—she would lose her mind. This was insupportable. She forced her brain back and got up to walk, going from side to side of the room three or four times, but could not carry on and so she lay back down and turned, coiling in the effort to be still and quiet.
After some hours or some days, the woman came again to peer between Thea’s legs, then pushed a hand down hard on her stomach so Thea cried out in shock and hurt. Holding her there, the woman slipped long fingers into her, right inside where it was—everything—flaming with blood, and there was a sliding rip and more wet, more blood in a stranger’s house, this bed would never be unstained.
The pain diminished at once—a relief of spirit and body to be only hurting, only dragged to pieces, not cut right in two. And there was a little sac, lying in the woman’s pearly palm, all reddened now, a red, transparent sac, and inside it a mite, a thumb-sized child, a tragedy of waste.
Wake up, Kay heard. Wake, wake, wake up, girl, whispering, then a tweedling humming, wake up wake up again, all very soft and almost sleeping in her ear. The air was cool and sweet. She had been dreaming, running along a path after Annie as the dark was coming, and where was Thea? Lost, as the dream was lost on waking too.
It was the little girl Sally and her sister, Susannah. When Kay opened her eyes, they took her hands and pulled her from the bed, smiling and whispering. “Come come come,” they said, and Kay pulled her white dress back on over her shift, leaving her stockings where they lay, and went with them. They went in bare feet and so did she, as if it was the old days at Blade Lake. Her feet were soft after a long summer in boots, but she did not mind the round stones or occasional prickles on the path. They went ahead of and behind her, laughing in their yellow dresses now they were outside, and Susannah said her mamma (“my sister,” Kay said) was still asleep and would be most like all day so their mamma said to play along the sand instead of getting underfoot.
Susannah must be her own age, Kay calculated from her height and seriousness. Sally was only little, six or so, tagging along with Susannah as Kay and Annie had run along beside Annie’s sister Mary whenever they could.
The morning was still pearly-early, only faint sounds from the town below them as they climbed on a long white path through tangled brush and hunkering flower-bushes, ducking or leaping branches as they went. A bleating, bell-dangling goat ran past them once and Sally turned to smack its rump with a stick as it went by. The path went downhill then, and left, went right, and opened up as if through an archway.
And there was the sea again, the same particular green-white-blue-white glass that begged you to come in.
They did. The girls dropped their sacks and dresses, and ran down the pink slope shrieking. Kay took off her white dress and ran with them just in her shift, her bare feet on the bare sand, glorious.
The girls were in the water. They would drown! But no, of course they would not. They were laughing and jumping, leaping to meet the waves and leaping back, dancing into the shining water and back.
Sally ran up to where they’d left their clothes, and pulled from one sack a big glass jar. She raced back down the sand—oh! do not drop it!—and into the long, calm shallows past the waves where Kay and her sister stood. Susannah took the jar and showed Kay how to use it, waiting until the wave had passed and the surface quieted: she pressed the bottom of the jar gently into the water and bade Kay look.
She bent over and looked through a clear eye dipped down into the sea—look, fish! Transparent small fish, a school of them, flitted through Kay’s and Susannah’s legs and arms, invisible in the waves until the glass revealed them all. They almost made Kay want to jump back, not to be bitten, but they were small fish, after all. But when a long striped fish swam into her glassy view, Susannah said, “Run!” and they went splashing through the spray, away, away from whatever that bad fish was. The curling surf came racing up the sand so strongly, and pulled back so strongly, that you could only stand sideways and wait for it, almost shivering with the thing that was coming, and would you live?—and then pound, pound, the wave pummelling you over into a great unknowing mound, lost in sudden silence and green motion—and then you were set free and could jump up again. And again, again.
They ran along the water’s edge till they were tired, then back along the sand, wet shifts clinging and sticking to their legs. Susannah’s sack held oranges and plums and bread. They ate, and there was water in another jar to take the taste of salt water out of their mouths. Sally fell asleep with her head in her sister’s lap, and the older girls sat drawing pictures in the sand with a stick until they got hot again. Then Susannah woke Sally (bright eyes clear as marbles, the lashes tangled black velvet) and they ran back down into the purling, constant, ravelling-unravelling sea.
The surf was higher now, an
d they went straight through it to walk in the chest-deep water past its edge, Sally leaping up to ride Susannah’s jutting hip. This time the best thing happened. Susannah pointed and pulled Kay’s arm to turn her to the south. Not twenty feet from them she saw two long grey shapes slide shining through the shining turquoise surf—two blunt, brainy heads, silk-grey skin, one fin with a notch out: two dolphins, strayed into the little bay. How long were they? Nine feet, ten—and they swam close, so close!—their bulbous foreheads, the sweet long line of mouth and nose. The notched one’s face looked up, his eye intense in focus, then away again—her existence did not impinge on his.
Susannah went closer, closer, both sisters sidling nearer and nearer to swim beside the dolphins, wanting to be closer, as Kay did herself. Susannah waved come on!
From the ship she had wanted to jump in and swim with them—but now it felt impertinent to think of touching that grey flank without an impossible permission. The dolphins were not like a fish that you might want to eat, but like a big dog coyote looking back at you from a stubble field. His coat the colour of the grass, as the dolphins were deep-sea-coloured.
But this was Sally and Susannah’s place. Maybe by living here always and knowing the place, they had the right to touch, to swim along with the dolphins.
No place was her place, it seemed to her for a bleak moment. Everywhere was places she had been taken to, or barged into. Even the Morning Light.
Thea lay all day in Mrs. Judd’s guest chamber, still bleeding. The world was made of blood. Still more was coming; they said it would go on for another day or so, like the worst of one’s womanly time. Solid clots like portions of fresh liver ready for the pan, sliding smoothly out as if it was an ordinary month, no pain to speak of.
The Difference Page 4
