The Boys in the Trees

by Mary Swan

  He stepped out onto the front porch, closed the door, and I couldn’t hear a thing they were saying. Only Rachel’s happy voice from the kitchen, where she was helping my mother. I couldn’t hear the words they were saying but it was so strange, this knock in the dark, my father stepping out in his shirtsleeves, that I didn’t continue up. I sank down onto the third stair and waited, smoothing my skirts over my knees.

  They were there as long as I can remember, there in the room where mist trailed by the window, in the darker, noisier room. The jumping boy and the laughing girl. Not every moment, not every day, but enough to be without surprise. Sometimes I talked to them but they never answered, and I don’t know that they even saw me. The way I saw them hard to explain, something like a thought that ravels away when you try to catch hold of it. Sometimes words came into my head and I spoke them out loud; once my mother said, Who are you talking to, Lily? Are you talking to someone? When I said, The jumping boy, she dropped the plate she was holding; it smashed with a terrible sound and bits lay jagged on the floor. Her voice when she spoke so slow and careful, but with something humming beneath. She asked, and I told her how the boy jumped straight in the air, so high, his light hair flopping. How the girl sometimes had smudges where she’d touched her cheek with her fingers. I was still in the bed and though my mother’s voice was slow and soft, it frightened me a little, something did. Just the two of us there; maybe I was very young, Rachel not yet born. I wanted to tell her about the children and yet I didn’t, and I worked my finger in the hole in the brown blanket, making it bigger, but my mother didn’t tell me to stop. I had never questioned, never thought before that maybe they were only mine. The jumping boy, the laughing smudgy-cheeked girl, and sometimes the other who was just a streak of color at the edge of my looking.

  My mother asked me questions, in the soft voice that soothed, with the hum beneath that frightened. What did they look like, what were they doing, were they happy or sad. When I asked, she said they were children she knew once. And when I asked where they were now, she just said, Gone. And then she did a strange thing. She walked toward the bed, the broken shards crunched beneath her feet, and with all her clothes on, even her shoes, she crawled under the bedclothes and put her arms about me, and we both fell asleep again, even though it was already day.

  There was someone else, but only Constable Street came in with my father when the door opened, the tip of his nose red. Miss, he said with a nod, but my father walked by as if he didn’t even see me, fetched his coat. His face wiped clean of everything, smooth as stone.

  The graves in the churchyard are marked by straight standing stones, and although the church is not old, there are so many. Mothers and fathers and children, whole families, sometimes, buried together. Rachel and her friends play a game, hold their breath when they walk by on the way to the gaping doors of the church. When I fainted there on the steps it was just like the other times, the buzzing getting louder, muffling the voices around me. The yellow mesh becoming denser and denser before my eyes until it closed in completely, blotted everything out. My mother felt the tug on her arm as I started to slide down but she wasn’t strong enough, and when I opened my eyes I screamed at all the faces, bending over me. Dr. Robinson put his fingers on my wrist and asked if this had happened before, and I heard Rachel say that it happened almost every day, but I forgave her. That is how I came to sit on a chair in his office the first time, the scratch of his pen and everyone seizing on the word that he gave me, as if it said everything, as if it could hold every part of me, each dark part. Now I sit in that chair every Wednesday and things are checked, and then we talk. I’ve told him about the pebbles I carry in my mouth, but not about the other things.

  My mother came from the kitchen, wiping her hands, and the constable nodded to her too, looked down at his shuffling feet. He said there was just a little matter to clear up, and my father said nothing at all, as the front door closed behind them.

  I was born in Halifax, where the ship first docked; my mother says there was no money to go any farther. She says there was one tiny room, that we lived there for years, maybe three, maybe four, but I don’t remember. Only swirls of mist and the sound of gulls, and maybe a game that we played, my mother sitting with her face in her hands. My father worked in an office on the docks, but he had to leave. We sailed up the river to Montreal, and those same gulls wheeled around our boat.

  When Rachel asked, my mother said it was nothing. Some confusion, some little problem at the business, perhaps, and Rachel went lightly up to bed. I wondered why two constables would walk across town in the dark, for nothing.

  In the evenings Rachel does her lessons at the kitchen table, and when she’s finished she sometimes draws pictures of houses, of trees, on pieces of paper my mother saves for her. My father brought home a blotter, tucked under his coat, for the surface of the table is uneven, scarred and gouged by people we’ve never known. Rachel has made up stories about them, the families who walked through the rooms that are now ours, who ate their meals here, sat in these chairs. One family she calls the Whippets; they have two wild boys named Joshua and David. The deepest gouge on the table was made by David Whippet, with a pocketknife he was given for his birthday, and he was sent to his room for twenty-one days. Now when something is broken or spilled, my father says, Which Whippet did that?

  I wonder about the families, the real families, and where they’ve gone. Marks of their anger, their errors, the only things we have to know them by. Walking toward the mouth of the church we have to pass the standing stones and I think how they may die before me, my father and my mother. Rachel must have her own life, tend our memories but nothing else. Mrs. Toller went to bed with a bottle of laudanum; I heard my father tell my mother. And a man named Meyer was found hanging in a barn. When I open my eyes in the morning there’s always a moment when I wonder if it’s a good thing.

  My mother and I sat in the little front room that was filled, like the whole house, with things other people had left behind. The worn spot on the arm of the settee where she sat sewing, the spot rubbed bare by a stranger’s hand. The needle flashed as she raised it, pulling the thread tight. She jabbed her finger and crumpled the white shirt to the floor. Then bent to pick it up again, smoothed it on her lap.

  Dr. Robinson counted my pulse, checked my heart, looked in my eyes, my mouth. He asked questions, so many questions. When I slept, what I ate, about my monthlies. All these my mother answered. Then he said that I had a condition, that there was a name for it. The name was chlorosis, and he wrote it down on a thick piece of creamy paper. The scratch of the pen drowned out by a raised voice from beyond the door, a woman’s voice, chiding a servant. Sound of something that might have been a slap. He looked up at that but said nothing. Passed the paper to my mother and leaned back in his chair, hands on the edge of the desk. Loose threads, a button missing on his vest.

  He told my mother that he’d been reading about this green sickness lately, that it was not uncommon in girls my age, that there were things that could be done. I meant to listen, but found I hadn’t. Realized, when he stood up, that I’d been staring, just staring at the dangling stray threads, the place where a button belonged.

  And is it better or worse, to know that there’s a name? Things I felt long before I knew the words for them. Things change when you put a name to them, but they don’t disappear. Just change.

  My father seemed pleased with the word, asked each day if I’d walked, if I’d rested, if I’d taken the Blaud’s pills. He said if it was to be meat every day then I should have it, and my family sat around me with their pale plates, potatoes and cabbage, a slice of bread. My mother knew how hard it was; meat, if I must eat it, I like burned black, hard like a stone in my mouth, bitter like the taste of Rachel’s charcoal stick. A bit of chicken I could bear, not easily, but I could bear it, but the bloody taste of beef was an agony, though I cut the pieces as small as I could, made motions with my jaw and tried to swallow them straight down. The
y sat at the table day after day, my plate half full while theirs were wiped clean. Telling their bits of news over my bowed head as if there was nothing else they needed to do, nowhere else to be. The three people who love me in this world.

  We sat and listened to the ticking of someone else’s clock, to the wind picking up outside. My mother said she didn’t know what was wrong. She told me instead about the look of my father’s boots when they first met, a story I thought I’d heard before. I stood and pushed aside the curtain a little; there was a high, cold moon and I could see the fallen leaves skittering away in the dark.

  My mother’s hands are always red and sore and with all the cleaning and washing when we came to the new house they got worse, her fingers covered in raw spots where the swollen skin had cracked and split. Some days I had to do her buttons. Before she went to sleep she smeared her hands with a thick grease, and then she had to lie on her back with her arms straight, palms up outside the covers. Once my father came home with a little pot of cream he’d bought at Mr. Marl’s pharmacy and he sat across from her in the kitchen, working it in, kneading from her wrist to the tip of her fingers, stroking her palm, pressing her knuckles.

  Her sore hands made my father angry. He said we should hire a servant; he said she shouldn’t have to do so much, with only me to help, but she just said, Oh, William. Money was still owed to someone for something; I’d heard them talking about that behind their closed door. And even I knew that if Rachel’s only dresses were mine made over, if we had to use the tea leaves twice, and sometimes twice again, then there was no money to hire a servant. But my father said soon there would be, said this was a town where he could climb higher and higher. Already in charge of the Sunday school, and there’d been talk of him joining a club. He said that we should go out more, make calls; he said that was how things worked here, how connections were made. And my mother said she would, but just now there was so much to do.

  It was strange to hear my father talk that way. In the cities we had lived in people on the same stair knew us a little but mostly, as he used to say, we could keep ourselves to ourselves. In Toronto each time the fat woman came with her basket he brushed by her in the doorway, even when she asked him to stay. Leaving my mother to thank her for the things she brought, to answer the questions, all the questions. The fat woman wanted to know all our business, writing in her little book. She spoke kind words but her lips had a way of folding, her eyes looking everywhere. She told my mother about other families she visited, where the husband was ill or paralyzed, or just gone. She said that my mother was lucky, that her man was perfectly healthy, that there must be something he could do. Buildings to be built, streetcar tracks to be laid. As if it were all his fault. Still, she was the one who read Mr. Marl’s advertisement, who learned that his bookkeeper had recently died. My father polished his boots and walked to the station; he was gone two days and when he came back he brought a posy of white flowers for my mother, a piece of beef, wrapped in greased paper. He said all our troubles were over.

  Behind me, my mother said, Your father loves us. Said, It will be fine, go up to bed. I thought then of safe places, how they had come to be this little white house, the yard with its high board fence. Dr. Robinson’s office when the door is closed and maybe, just maybe, the streets I know in this town. How suddenly they were all shriveling back down to a dot, to the room where my mother sat, to the space on the cushion beside her. How she was sending me away.

  Something happened in Halifax, something happened in Montreal, and maybe in England before. My father knows; my mother may. In Toronto he lost his job, though at first he didn’t say. One morning he forgot to take his bread and my mother fretted, saying she knew he wouldn’t spend money for something from a stall, and she took it to the factory for him. We went early to bed that night while they spoke in the other room, and Rachel whispered that she’d already known, that she’d seen him one day when she took a different way home from school, sitting on a bench, staring down at his hands. Terrible days came after.

  The children were everywhere in my room; they were chanting a rhyme and although I could hear every word I couldn’t catch hold of any of them, just the echo they left in the air. The darting child left trails of color, made me dizzy, and for the first time in months I reached under my mattress for the bone-handled knife, rolled down my stocking.

  Rachel recites the kings and wars of England, she knows amo amas amat, and all the capitals of Europe. Perhaps if I’d gone to school. My mother saying no to my father, in a hard voice. Saying, You know why. She taught me to read from the Bible, her own mother’s name written inside in faint, spiked letters, and from the newspaper when we had one. That was easier, the letters larger, the words more familiar. But not as beautiful as the Bible, as the words in the Bible. When my mother read from the Bible I felt as if I were in a green field, with sun on my face, or sitting by a stream, hearing water over smooth stones. Though I hadn’t done either of those things. It wasn’t like in church, not like hearing Reverend Toller; he read different parts. Darkness and screaming, the plagues of Egypt, the sufferings of Job. Reverend Toller’s Bible was filled with terrible tests. Abraham on the mountain with his knife raised, and Isaac bound tight, looking into his eyes.

  My father said it wasn’t enough to be able to read, to write my name. In Toronto, before the men took our furniture, Mr. Envers used to come, already unwinding his long, greasy scarf when my mother opened the door. He was no taller than she was, his hair stuck flat to his head and his beard stained yellow, tumbling down his front. The little bundle of books, tied with a bit of rope. One of the books had maps and he opened it to the middle and touched the page, his fingers yellowed like his beard, the nails almost as long as my father’s. This is England, he said, where you are from, the Atlantic Ocean your parents crossed. This is Halifax, where you were born, and Montreal. Toronto, where we sit now.

  And all the words brought pictures, a forest and a vast stretch of ruffled water, gulls wheeling and dancing, a cobbled street slick with rain. I couldn’t see how that happened, as if the pictures were somehow folded into a dot on a page, like a bud that’s waiting, that looks like nothing until it opens. There was something I almost understood then, understood in the same way I see the leaping boy, from the corner of my eye. There was something I almost had, but Mr. Envers didn’t notice. Instead he picked up Rachel’s ball from the floor and said, This is the Earth, the North Pole and the South. This is England, here, and Canada, America. And this round Earth spins and spins, so quickly we cannot feel it. Then my mind slid away, for that I couldn’t grasp at all.

  Mr. Envers came through the winter and the spring and his voice was hoarse, not much above a whisper, and sometimes he coughed until tears ran down his cheeks. Then my mother would make him a cup of tea if she had any leaves, and he would tell her about boys he had taught, now doctors and lawyers and one in the government. How they’d never forgotten him. The lessons got shorter and shorter, the time with the cup longer. Once he asked my mother if I was good with a needle.

  Then Rachel called out and I went to her, across the dark hall. She was sitting up in bed, and in the bit of moonlight that slipped through the top of her window her hair was a sooty tangle, her eyes deep in her face. What was the noise? she said. A bang, a loud bang, it woke me. Hush, I said, there was no noise, no noise; it must have been a dream. She sank back down onto her thin pillow and I sat on the edge of the bed beside her, held her hand until it slipped away from mine.

  This is the first real house we’ve lived in, all the rooms just ours. The kitchen and the three bedrooms. The front room with its heavy brown furniture, the privy in the back. When my father brought us to it, helped my mother down from the wagon that had carried us from the station, she clasped her hands together, rested her chin on them like someone praying, and smiled and smiled. Not her sad smile, but a different one. Inside my father wound the clock on the wall, and when it started to tick he put a hand on her shoulder and said that th
is was our real beginning. She took his hand and lifted it to her lips, and Rachel ran upstairs and down, through the front door and out the back, and came in again, saying, There’s a yard, is it ours? And a little tree right in the middle.

  The yard is ours, with a fence along one side, and along the back where the laneway runs. On the other side a mass of bushes, covered with red berries at the end of summer. A tree that’s not much taller than Rachel, and a little shed that my father said was for chickens. He came home one day with three in a wicker basket, and a small rooster with a drooping comb that Rachel named Simon Peter.

  The chickens were for me, my father said, for me to take care of. I never said, but I didn’t like anything about them. The greedy way they went after the food I scattered, and they pecked at me, at each other, and squawked and chased Simon Peter away when he came too close. Some days there were no eggs at all and my father went back to the market, thinking he’d been cheated. He came home with another rooster, a big, strutting fellow he called Lord Bray, and the hens didn’t peck at him, didn’t flap him away, they all lay down for him. Simon Peter was for the pot but Rachel cried and pleaded and we kept him too, until one morning I found him in a little ruffled heap by the canes, Lord Bray with blood on his beak. Simon Peter’s feathers swirled all around the back step where my mother and I plucked him, and we tried to gather them all up again. When asked, my mother said that he had flown away over the high fence, and I could tell that it pained her, watching Rachel lift the fork to her mouth.