by Mary Swan
My room was empty and silent now but still I couldn’t settle, and when I heard the front door I took my shawl and sat at the top of the stair. I heard my father say, Nothing to fret about, and he said that Mr. Lett had posted bail, that it was so late because they had to wait for the Odd Fellows meeting to finish. He asked my mother for a cup of tea, and as they moved to the kitchen my father said that he had to appear in court at noon, that it was a misunderstanding, that it would all be fine. Then the scrape of the stove being stirred, the rattle of the kettle, covered their voices. Only once, my mother saying, What will become of us? Saying, I can’t bear it, to start again.
My mother thought we should grow our own vegetables, now that we had a yard, and my father turned over a square of earth, held up his own red hands at the end of the day and said he’d been too long in an office. He made a low fence around our garden, to keep the chickens out, and we planted potatoes and carrots, a few sweet peas. When the work was done Rachel made a sign for each row, and we all stood together in our own yard. The light was thick and golden, the sun moving down; we looked back to the house that was all ours, the brown door and the step where my mother and I sometimes sat, and that moment went on and on.
We checked every day, watched the green shoots push through the soil, more and more of them, and when we thought it was time my mother and I went out with a bowl to pull some carrots for our dinner. But the carrots we pulled were tiny, stunted things, some just a tangle of roots; my mother pulled more and more, all the same, and she put her hand to her cheek, leaving a muddy print, saying, What did I do? What did I do wrong?
The green-eyed woman who looked after Mr. Cowan next door was hanging out clothes; she must have heard us for she pushed through the bushes and came to look. Didn’t you thin them at all? she said, and she told my mother that she should have pulled the seedlings, many of them, told her that was the only way the others could grow straight and strong. Have you never grown a carrot before? she said, and my mother said no, that she’d never had a bit of earth before. Her cheeks red, as if she’d said a shameful thing. Never mind, the woman said. You can try again next year; next year you’ll know. And she said that Mr. Allen had a few nice carrots left to sell, that no one would have to know. But my mother said that wouldn’t be honest, and the woman gave a little shrug, a smile. All we’d gathered just made one small serving on my father’s plate, but he said they were the best he’d ever tasted.
I must have fallen asleep, leaning at the top of the stair, for the next thing I knew was my father’s hand on my shoulder, his voice whispering, Go back to bed now Lilian, go to sleep now. I heard him close the door of their room, heard his cufflinks chink in the little china dish, heard the creak of the bed as he sat on it. But I don’t know that anyone really slept in our house that night. Only Rachel, deep in her dreams. There were footsteps and creakings and murmurings, and if they stopped there were other sounds that dragged me back. A dog barking somewhere close, a tree moaning. The clock ticked louder than it ever did in the day, as if it was ticking right inside my head.
Days I stay in bed Rachel often sits with me, not asking me to talk but just keeping me company, telling me things. Jokes and stories, what she learned at school, things she thought about. Like the days we used to share a bed, when she was two and I was seven, how she curled up against me, how she chattered and patted my face until one of us slept. Not long ago, sitting on the edge of my bed, her face hard to make out in the rain-colored room, she told me that Miss Alice had read a poem by Mr. Tennyson, that all the girls had tears in their eyes. And then she said wasn’t it a strange thing to cry? The way it sneaks up, the way you know it’s coming but you can hardly ever stop it. The way your throat goes thick, something happens in your stomach. I didn’t say, but I realized that’s the way I feel. Almost all of the time.
My father’s eyes were red-rimmed and the ends of his trousers dark with damp; he said he’d woken early and been out walking. My mother’s cheek scored as if she’d slept on something harsh instead of her own clean pillow. We blinked at each other around the kitchen table as if we’d just come out of some dark cave, as if we couldn’t bear the morning light. Even Rachel eating quietly, looking a question that she didn’t ask.
One Sunday after church my father said, Let’s walk a little; it’s such a beautiful day. He held out his arm to my mother, and after a moment she took it. We were always near the last to leave, not liking the crush at the door, so the footbridge was empty when my father led us there. And it was a beautiful day, patches of snow still on the ground, especially beneath the trees at the edge of the river, but the sun was high and the air was soft, our coats unbuttoned. Rachel skipped ahead, her long hair lifting and floating, until my mother called her back, her voice a little sharp. Perhaps because she had to speak loudly to be heard over the tumbling water. It had been a sudden thaw, the river running high and fast, and already two boys had been lost. We didn’t know them, we hardly knew anyone, but my mother wept for them all the same.
There came a point, near the middle of the bridge, when my heart began to race. The way the boards moved, just a little, beneath our feet, and I wasn’t sure that I could carry on. But the way back was just as far; my feet slowed and I could no longer hear the rushing river, my heart thumping and thumping in my ears, in every part of my body. My parents walking slowly ahead, and Rachel just ahead of them, and I felt so strange that I wondered if I was dying, wondered if this was what it was like, if this was the moment when it was done. But I wasn’t ready, and I had always believed I would be ready. It was a mistake and I had to move, before they were lost to me.
I looked at the back of the houses on the far side of the river, the secret side of the houses, and some of them had boats, had rowboats upside down near the water’s edge, and I thought, An upside-down boat will not hold anyone. But with that thought came a sound like far-off laughter, and I found I was thinking of a woman in a long white dress, leaning back on faded cushions while someone rowed one of those boats. The blue one, maybe, that was almost the color of the sky. Rowing along the green river on a warm summer’s day, with a parasol, perhaps, to shade her from the sun. Trailing her fingers in the water, and I knew how the water would feel, warm and silky. The trees along the riverbank were bare but I saw how they would be, in summer, in full dark leaf. And all the weeping willows, their branches curving down to make a sheltered place there on the riverbank, a place where a person could sit and be content. My heart slowed down and I could hear the churgling river again, as I looked at the place where I would sit, in summer, and watch a boat glide by with the tiniest splash of oars. I saw my father and Rachel walking hand in hand, almost at the other side, saw my mother had missed me, had turned and started back for me, and my feet moved again; I made my feet move.
On the far side the steps were splintered and worn but they were solid enough, and ahead of us, to the left, was the back of a yellow brick cottage, with a small sign in one window saying Fine Photography. My father said, That’s what we should do; we should have our photograph taken. What do you say, Naomi? And Rachel said, Can we do it now, right now? Tugging at his hand, but he wasn’t looking at her. He said my mother’s name again, said, To mark our new life. What do you say, but all she said was that no one would be there on the Sabbath. He knocked at the little back door anyway, went round to the front, just a step from the narrow street, and finally the front door opened and there was a man with his hair all ruffled, his suspenders hanging looped at his sides. After he had closed the door again, my father said he would come back another day and arrange it all.
He was strange that day, my father, in such high spirits. He led us up a narrow, winding street that climbed the hill, as if he knew exactly where he wanted us to go. Though there were not so many houses as on our side of the river, they grew larger and larger as we reached the top of the climb. Enormous houses of red or yellow brick, of stone, some with turrets, with colored glass in the windows, with long verandas looking down
on the river, looking down on the rest of the town. We came to a place with iron gates standing open, and he led us a little way up the curved drive. Another house with many chimneys, a glassed room built out on one side that had colored streaks, maybe birds, flitting behind the windows. Mr. Marl’s house, my father said. We shall have a house like that one day. My mother said, Oh, William, but Rachel took it up, saying, Really? Will we really? My father said, Of course we will, and he stooped a little to put an arm around her shoulders, pointing out the windows, the rooms, asking her to choose which one would be hers. We must go, my mother said, plucking at his cuff. What if someone comes and finds us? My father said, What if they do? But he turned away all the same.
My father pushed back his chair, said he had no appetite, and he caught my mother’s hand as she reached to take his plate and held it for a moment. Then he left the kitchen and we heard his footsteps going back and forth, back and forth, in the room above our heads. After I had watched Rachel cross the road to school he came down with his hat in his hands, said he had errands to do in town. My mother asked if he would get a few nails to fix the loose board on the chicken coop, but he said he would do it another day.
Dr. Robinson counts my heartbeats, looks in my mouth and my eyes. Once he tried the electric box; he gave me his own white handkerchief and said it was a shame that it had upset me. Said that he knew it would help, that we would try again, but not for a month or two. When I went home I still had the handkerchief crumpled in my hand; I washed it and pressed it and put it under my pillow so I wouldn’t forget to take it back.
After the checking Dr. Robinson sits behind his desk, all his buttons sewn on. I sit in the chair and listen to him talk and it doesn’t take so long now, for me to be able to stop staring at the toes of my shoes. He talks about how the treatment is working, how I am progressing, and it may be true, although there are always things I don’t tell him. He asks how my mother likes the town, says that his own wife came from the city, as he did, that she found it difficult, at first. He talks about his son, Rachel’s friend, how there are things a mother doesn’t understand, things about being a boy. Sometimes when I raise my eyes he’s not even looking at me, and sometimes he calls me someone else’s name, but I never say. I know what it’s like to have someone bring you back, even if it’s done in the gentlest way.
Dr. Robinson reminds me of some nice type of dog, I don’t know why. Maybe his brown eyes, the way his mustache droops over the corners of his mouth. The type of dog that would follow you everywhere, that would sleep on the end of your bed and only ask you to be kind to it. The type of dog that would always try to protect you, even when it couldn’t. My mother had a dog like that once, in England. Its name was Blackie, and one day it ran into the road and was crushed by a brewer’s cart. She never wanted another.
Dr. Robinson talks, and sometimes he stops and I can’t even hear him breathing. I watch until he blinks his eyes, puts his hands on the desk, asks if I have any questions. One day I heard myself ask if it’s true, that every life has a purpose. I didn’t mean to ask it, I felt my face flush, I didn’t know where to look, but he answered as if there was nothing strange in it, nothing strange in my speaking. He said he believes that’s true, though a purpose can be many things. He told me about a promise he had to make once, to do no harm. Then he asked if I’d been thinking about that, asked what I think my purpose is. Like the garden, I said, and he waited for me to say more but I couldn’t go on, my mind a jumble.
There was a bite in the air and the chickens pecked the ground around my feet, even though I’d scattered the grain in a wide circle. I was very tired, but I thought how it was Tuesday, and almost the top of the week. When I went back inside my mother was humming, heating up the stove and saying maybe she’d bake a cake later, if she had enough flour, saying we all needed something to cheer us up a little.
When my father polished his boots and came on the train without us, a man he met told him that Mr. Marl owns half the town. That may not be true, but his name is everywhere in Emden. On the big factory, the office block on the square, on the pharmacy and the jeweler’s shop. In the newspaper. My father says Mr. Marl also started with nothing, says that is proof that anything is possible here, says this is our new beginning. He goes into the world each day, in a shirt we keep white and mended, in the boots he polishes himself. He returns from the world to the house, and the house is different when he does, when he is there. Just different. There are things he doesn’t know, because we don’t tell him, or because he doesn’t see.
In the evenings my father sits in the armchair, the one with the stain no amount of scrubbing can remove, and while my mother sews he reads the paper out loud and the clock of our new life ticks and ticks. He reads the whole paper, even the deaths and marriages, and sometimes he will stop and say, Another one gone, Lil, but plenty left for you. John Dawes, from church, he said once. Now there’s a fine young man. Or Alec Lyon, steady and hardworking, and he’ll inherit the mill. As if all I had to do was decide, as if I would ever have a life like that, a normal life. He says things like that, and yet he was happy with the word, Dr. Robinson’s word, and if he was happy with the word, that must mean he thought something needed to be explained. Maybe he sees more than he thinks, or more than he lets himself say. I know that my father loves me, but I don’t know if he knows anything about me. I don’t think he’s ever held my hand in the street; I don’t remember ever walking with him, just the two of us, alone.
When my father came back he had bought the nails after all and the sound of the hammer blows echoed, the chickens running in mad circles to the farthest corner of the yard. When he came in he rolled his shirtsleeves down and walked around the downstairs rooms, touching things but not picking them up, not even really looking at them. My mother asked would I wash some windows and I pumped the bucket as full as I could carry, gathered the rags. But my father stopped me at the foot of the stair, said he needed a piece of music for the Sunday school, a piece by Bach that Miss Alice had, and would I go and fetch it now. I didn’t say, but I wondered why he needed it then, with my hair wrapped up, my sleeves already rolled. I wondered why Rachel couldn’t bring it, why he couldn’t ask Rachel when she came home at noontime. He held the door open and watched me on my way, the first time he’d been still all morning. On the porch chair there was a package, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. A small package, strangely shaped, like a lumpy letter L, and I wondered why he hadn’t brought it inside.
Rachel was born late, not like me, and my mother said that was why she had such a mass of dark hair. She sometimes meets my father after his work, and they walk through the town together. She can recite the kings and wars of England, all their dates, and she draws the trees arching over the river, draws our white house, draws Mr. Allen’s store on the corner, with its square sign, with its baskets of pears in front. She holds out her hand under the table and takes my meat, sits on the end of my bed when I’m too weary to rise. I watch her from the upstairs window when she goes to school; there’s a point where she disappears, the angle of Mr. Allen’s store, and I feel my heart thump until I see her again, stepping up to Miss Alice’s front door. Every day the same.
Rachel is twelve now and women’s things will happen to her, but it won’t be like me. One night in my bed the leaping boy put his mouth to my ear and whispered, Beware. And I sat straight up and realized that he had been gone, they had all been gone, and I had no idea how long. I thought of my mother, the waiting in her shoulders, and that’s why I minded. The only thing I have to give her.
Rachel’s friends told her that Will Toller has a crooked arm because his mother was frightened by a snake when she was carrying him, and she asked my mother if that was true. My mother looked even sadder, and she told Rachel that a mother and the child she carries are one flesh, that things can’t help but be passed on.
Once outside the house I forgot my tiredness, forgot the strange, long night. The trees were standing still, red and orang
e against a clear blue sky, and though the air was cool on my cheeks, the sun was bright. Outside his store Mr. Allen was polishing apples on a little table and I thought of a pie my mother could make, thought of how one of those red apples would taste if I picked it up and bit into it. I thought that later I might take my walk by the river, instead of around and around the yard, and that thought carried me across the road to raise the knocker on the faded blue door, and I didn’t even worry that it might be Mrs. Barnes who opened it, that I might have to look at her baffled gray eyes, repeat my sentence again and again.
Reverend Toller said there was evil about, in the shape of people who said they could talk to the dead. People who said that the dead appeared and rapped and spoke through them. Reverend Toller said that a woman in this very congregation had held such a gathering, invited such a person into her home. I wondered if my mother would have gone, if she’d known.
My mother’s hands are cracked and sore and her hip aches, especially in rainy weather. She tells my father that she will make calls, join committees, but not just yet. I wonder that he doesn’t know, what she can and cannot do. She goes to the shops in town, and if she will have a lot to carry, I go with her. People know her name, talk to her about the weather or the latest news. She smiles her sad smile and answers them, agrees about the sun or the clouds, tsks at the sad fate of Mrs. Toller. She is different in the shops, not completely, but a little. In her black dress, in her bonnet.
Our real life is in the house; it is only in the house that she hums sometimes, or sings a bit of one of my father’s songs, or a hymn from church. In a house with five rooms there is always something to do, but sometimes she cuts a slice from a loaf that’s just baked and we sit on the back step and tilt our faces to the sun. We are as close as thought, and even if she doesn’t know the details of all my secrets, she knows their shape. Days I stay in bed I hear her footsteps moving through the house, climbing the stairs, and she strokes my forehead and whispers that she will take care of me always. We were one flesh, when she carried me.
