The only truly bad person Kay knew was Miss Ramsay. Young Mr. Maitland was quiet, but he had dreadful headaches and when he was in the midst of one he could be terribly hard on the boys. Spare the rod, he would say, and then proceed to flail about him. Thinking about it now, Kay saw that he was also a bad person, perhaps worse than Miss Ramsay, for the things she had seen him do.
Bad things were done. Done and done and done. Discipline, dignity, diligence, Father said. Courage, he would add, before he whipped the boys, demanding that they took it well. If any cried out, he was whipped harder, on both hands or on his bare back. Kay saw Benny Twoyoungmen’s back when he ran into the wash house, long lines black-edged, red-edged, frilled skin pale and shrinking between the edges.
She felt her own back shrinking, sitting under the skylight in the saloon, listening to the great howling that had set up above as Mr. Wright brought the quarrelsome sailor up on deck.
Thea got up and used the metal ratchet to close the skylight window more tightly. “Francis has to have the seaman whipped,” she said. “But we do not have to listen.”
“Which one is it?” Kay asked. “What is his name?”
Thea looked at her. “What does it matter? Not one of our boys, someone hired on in Boston. Francis cannot have fighting below decks, you know.”
“But what did he do?”
Thea took the watering pot and attended to the flowers, answering without looking back, as if it was no matter at all. “I told you, he has been fighting with other men. That is not permitted on board ship, it can lead to terrible trouble. It must be—nipped in the bud, you see? Discipline must be maintained.”
From the corner, where he had seemed to be immersed in his book, Mr. Brimner said quite quietly, “The ship is a microcosm, Kay—from which words does that word come?”
“μικρός,” Kay answered automatically, seeing the word in Greek letters. “Tiny. And— κόσμος, cosmos?”
“κόσμος, the world, yes.” He exchanged his long, thin legs, one for the other, the left now resting on top. “κόσμος, everything that is the case. In this world, we develop rules for living with each other, so we can depend on each other. We agree on those rules, generally—although the debate has been going on for centuries as to what civil behaviour may be. In this small world of the ship, if one person tramples over those rules, we all suffer.”
Kay looked at Mr. Brimner, without acquiescing.
As the weather let up, Mr. Brimner took sick, his first bout of seasickness—or perhaps it was a bad pot of Gentleman’s Relish—and was compelled to keep to his cabin. He sent Kay’s Latin book with exercises marked, set two more translations in the First Greek Book and included a note: “Composition has been neglected. You may write me a story—write three or four pages about your best friend. In a fine hand, mind you.”
The exercises were quickly done. Even the Greek set piece; she was not as confident of it as of the Latin, but with liberal use of the vocabularies at the back of the book she felt sure it was close. There remained only the story. Kay filled her pen again, and sharpened her pencils, thinking whether she ought to write about one of the colourless girls who had been invited to tea with her in Yarmouth, whose names had slipped out of her memory along with their faces. And what could she say of Susannah and Sally except They took me to the water…?
In her notebook she wrote,
I had a friend who was kind to me. Her name was Annie
Salter.
For a time it seemed enough of an effort to write that down, to say that she had had a friend, to name Annie with her whole name. But Thea would never read this book; Thea had never yet looked at her school work since they came onto the ship. So she went on.
When my mother got sick at Blade Lake, Annie’s sister Mary looked after me. She was ten, when I was a baby. Then Thea came, but while she was teaching, Mary still came across to the House to be with me. In the nighttime when I was afraid Mary sat by my bed and sang the songs she knew. When I was sad or angry she would click her fingers at me from across the room in a certain order to make me laugh.
Then her sister Annie came to the school too, when she was six and I was five. Annie was in ward B, where the younger girls slept. She was the third bed from the end. I was not allowed to go in the ward but sometimes Mary had to take things to Miss Ramsay, clean towels and flannel, and then I went with her quickly and came back quickly, so Mary did not get in trouble. But then Mary died.
She did not want to write about that, so she crossed it out.
But then Mary died. I was forbidden to go into the School because of sickness. Many students brought consumption with them and Father said I was susseptible, since my mother’s family all died of it. I had to stay in the study with him for many weeks.and he did not speak to me at all.
Later, when so many people were sick, Annie tried to go home. She came from far away, so far she did not know the way to go home and Thea found her but it was too late. She was buried behind the school in the small lot by the horse graves.
That filled up three pages. Kay shut her book. She would tear those pages out later, before Mr. Brimner was better.
* * *
—
That night Kay had a bout of earache, the first since Yarmouth. Hearing her sobbing in her bunk, Thea came from the saloon where she and Francis sat talking to see what was amiss. The drops had leaked in the medicine chest, giving a mentholated smell to the whole kit. Kay did not want them, but could do no more than weep slowly against the prospect. Thea sat on the bunk with Kay’s head on her lap, gentle fingers smoothing the hair away, holding the lobe in a soft grip. The liquid trickled down and wound its way through her ear’s whorls, cool and unpleasant. Kay lay staring at tiny tucks in the waist of Thea’s purple dress. She had not realized that it was Thea’s beautiful blue going-away dress, dyed darker. Rhoda must have dyed it, to better hide the stains.
Kay slept, but dreams pursued her, a dream of boxed ears, a box of broken ears, broken eardrums, ears running with yellowish fluid, of the rhythm of four great slaps, back, forth, back, forth—and a pause, and four great slaps again, and again, and then feet pounding down the echoing wooden halls and Miss Ramsay chasing them, her big red chapped hand reaching and ready. She followed after Annie, down behind the shed with the broken window, behind the shack, behind the trees—following, was she Miss Ramsay or herself, Kay?—the path open past the falling-down byres where calves huddled in the storm, and then an opening in the brush, the slit through which we slipped down to the bottomlands, down the long slant into the coulee, a long path down, wolf willow parting and the path widening, earth tamped by deer or by buffalo in the olden days, where in the earliest spring paths were marked through swampy slough, wet pools and pockets, fire smell and smoke smell from the camp where trappers scraped furs, rot and leaves and earth and the dark-green darkness roofed over, circling to a hut—the ghost of a hut, the hidden place—the man there, what was he really? The bootlegger, the still man. Satyr dog-sailor Satan Saviour Seaton, with his dirty child and a dead porcupine, quills and quiver, he pulls a handful, offers us the hooks, the sticks, the spines. Annie said he was not people. The wagon open, a mound up there, what is in there? What is under the wolf willow branch?
She woke to Thea clutching her arms, saying, “Stop—Kay, stop!”
Oh no—she had been dreaming again. She pulled away from Thea’s hands, which were hurting her arms, and shut her mouth and held her breath, afraid to speak. Her face was wet.
Thea said, “What were you dreaming? What was it?”
“Annie,” Kay said, when she could make her mouth open. The wood above and around them was solid, the dream was a dream. She put her elbow across her eyes to shut out the light from the lantern Thea had brought.
“I want you to stop this,” Thea said.
Kay nodded, eyes still shut.
�
�Look at me,” Thea said. “You are not to think about her anymore,” she said, her face unyielding. “Not to dream about her.”
“But I cannot choose—”
“You can. You are to put that away now. You are not a child any longer, it is time for you to curb your temper and control your outbursts. And to stop this everlasting—”
“You are unkind.”
“No, I have been unkind not to stop you before now.”
A gallon of water was forcing its way up in Kay’s chest, was going to burst out of her now. She did not, did not let it. “It was unfair! She wanted her mama and her little brothers—she wanted Mary, but you could not save her.”
Thea stared into Kay’s eyes, her own eyes like black coals burning in her white face. “I did the best I could to save Mary—you saw me take her down and work on her, you saw me.”
“You should have sent Annie home then. Father should have let her go.”
“Well, he would not. He could not, and she could not. It was the law that she must go to school, Kay. And it was better for her to stay. She was a clever girl and could have made something of her life—if she had been educated.”
“She wanted to go home and talk with her mama the way they talk, and tell her about Mary.”
“It was too far to go, and nobody to take her, and it was winter. She would have starved up there, I’ve told you. You never saw the way they lived in the bush, the terrible hardship—she would have starved, or died of cold, or been beaten, or fallen ill and died.”
Kay’s chest dissolved, because it was that or break. Because of death. “I am just sorry,” she said. She was surprised that tears did not come shooting out of her eyes and drown them all and sink the ship.
Thea did not know how to do better for Kay, how to help her to overcome this obsessive grief. She had tried not to look ill or tired or sad, not to allow her sadness to intrude. But Kay must have known about the baby. Of course she did—she was there at dinner, and staying in the house! But as was only natural for a child, she seemed to have forgotten all about it. So it was a surprise when she mentioned the baby one afternoon, after Francis had stomped back up on deck in a temper to deal again with that sailor who was still making trouble.
“Why did your baby die?” Kay asked, abrupt and cold, as if she had screwed herself up to it. Her sunburnt face was tight-clenched. A nightmare on its way again.
Thea answered, without adornment, “It was not meant to be. God decided.”
“God decided.”
Thea looked up, again surprised. “What do you mean?”
“I do not understand how God decides things, or why, by what measurement. Does God decide when everyone is to die, each person?”
“Yes,” said Thea, shortly. Mr. Brimner was at the other end of the saloon, lost in one of the Windsor captain’s months-old newspapers.
“Each person—but also each animal, each thing?”
She had hoped Kay was finished with this line of questioning. “Come and wash for dinner, and I will think how to answer you.”
The shouts were louder in Kay’s ears, after dinner. She sat at the piano, staring at music she already knew. While Mr. Brimner and Thea finished their stewed prunes and talked and talked, Francis was above, watching as Mr. Wright flogged John Cherry, the Boston seaman. Arthur Wetmore had told Kay his name.
If she had a measuring device like the roll meter for waves, the arrow would point at 7 or 8, although the shouts had started lower, at what might be called a 4. Was there a sextant for measuring sound? She could not let herself think about the man’s skin, brown and bare beneath the lash. Or the shouts of the boys being beaten in the shed. Some of them weeping. One boy laughed—little Silas, the one Annie liked. That made Mr. Maitland hit him harder.
There was nothing to think and no room to not think it. She turned the leaves over and over, searching for a new piece to learn. They would wait for half a minute between each lash, and there were to be ten lashes, because this was John Cherry’s second offence.
Between shouts, Lena Hubbard came plumping in with the big china teapot, making an impatient to-do with her skirt and a table that had been shifted and got in the way.
“Your experiences must have expanded your faith,” Mr. Brimner continued, after Lena had set down the tea and gone away again.
“Sometimes it is very hard to understand God’s purpose.” Thea glanced at Kay. “I trust the will of God, but I do not always—” She turned her mending. “There was an accident just outside the school grounds one day. A family from Scotland, breaking land. The father was hauling logs, and stopped the wagon with a lurch at our gate. He got out in time to see a log roll down onto his son, who had been running along behind.”
Kay remembered that, from when she was very young. The man’s white-rimmed, staring eyes; the boy lolling, head and legs limp and misshapen, a crater in the chest under his grey shirt. Thea’s long white apron touching her black boot-tops.
“He was holding his son in his arms, but the boy was clearly dead.” Thea stopped, and put thin white fingers to her upper lip.
Swinging the piano stool a quarter turn, Kay glanced at her sister.
Thea said, “I took him into the back kitchen and laid him on the table. I prayed over the poor boy. I thought if I had enough Christian faith I would be able to ask God to bring this child back to life, like Lazarus. I felt guilty for years, wondering why I had not had enough faith. I had a hard time getting over that.”
“Yes.” Mr. Brimner nodded, his several-times nod of understanding.
“And again, when the tuberculosis came, and so many of the children succumbed—I prayed and prayed, I did my utmost, and nothing…And then there was influenza.”
Mr. Brimner did not speak at once. No longer pretending to play, Kay heard the pause extend over several bars, linking phrase marks pulling it on and on…Then he said, “There is a comfortable idea that death comes when we are ready, or that prayer can be efficacious against it. I have not found either to be so.”
Thea turned away, practical, tight, controlled. She was always like this, after speaking of Blade Lake. Kay’s throat hurt.
Thea said briskly, “Well! I no longer take so much pride in my prayers.”
Mr. Brimner rose, as if he might go to bed. Instead, he said, after a moment, “My own dear friend, a priest and poet I respected and admired with all my heart, was stricken last winter with the influenza. His work was very fine, very fine. I cannot begin to know what he might have accomplished in this life, but he was taken, without the least—”
Then it was Mr. Brimner’s turn to stop. A hitch, a slight, calm breath. His voice came again, dark and light at once, like rubato in music. “It is my task to bring his work to a wider audience. I have corresponded extensively with his sorrowing mother over the editing of his poems, and on this voyage I hope to complete the manuscript for parcelling off to Cambridge.”
Thea turned a cup upright and checked the teapot’s warmth with her palm.
“I cannot convey how beautiful a soul he was, how extraordinary his poems are,” Mr. Brimner went on. “But if I can see this through, I will not have to tell you—you will be able to read them yourself.”
“I read very little modern poetry,” Thea said, and pressed the bell for Lena Hubbard to bring hot water.
Mr. Brimner turned back to retrieve his book. She had dismissed the story, Kay saw, and hurt Mr. Brimner. Perhaps because it involved poetry, which was not religious, or for some other reason Kay could not see.
Thea was too straight, she had no understanding of other people’s sideways-ness, and did not see how difficult it had been for Mr. Brimner to talk about his friend. On the piano stool Kay cramped into tight dislike for her sister’s composure and self-satisfaction, for her believing that she was so close to sainthood that she ought to be able to call back the dead—she was like Jesus Himse
lf, she was so noble and pure.
Seeing her sister’s eye on her, and as if she were party to Kay’s interior mind, Thea said sharply, “We are put here to do what good we can, and to leave the rest to God.”
Still rebuking Kay for dreaming about Annie—a thing she could not help, no matter how Thea might think a person could control everything inside their own head and body—perhaps she could, because she was a cold holiness, a head without any human misery in it.
Thea snapped the mending taut, pulling it into true, examining her firm, invisible work with satisfaction. “Whatever our feelings might be, we cannot know God’s ends, or explain why it is necessary for someone to…to be called home.”
It rose out of Kay, coming up like a thunderclap from her deepest parts: “Annie was called home—if you had let her go home, she would not be dead.”
Thea turned in her chair to look at Kay with hurt, accusing eyes, all her certainty sunk into a sorrowing, deep-bruised soul. From her tower of rightness, she said, “I will pray for you to be granted greater understanding.”
I will pray for you. Because you are nothing but a child, with no intelligence or heart.
It was in Kay’s mind to say, And what about your baby, was your baby called home? She caught herself at that, it scrambled in her throat, and because she was holding back so hard, it came out instead in a screeling, insufficient hiss, a quiverful of arrows racing toward Thea’s eyes. “You are the cruellest, coldest— You are horrible!”
Lena barged in again with the drinks tray, making a bustle out of setting it on the lipped table. She made a face at Kay, warning her to mind her manners.
“Sic loquendum est cum hominibus, tamquam dii audiant,” Mr. Brimner said absently, not to any point. “We should speak with people as if the gods are listening.”
The Difference Page 8
