ASIN B01LQS9MFS
Print Edition ISBN-10: 1537640003
Print Edition ISBN-13: 978-1537640006
Printed in the United States of America by CreateSpace
Independent Publishing Platform, 2016
Copyright © Regina Sirois, 2016
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without expressed written consent of the author except in cases of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
v0.99
First Published 10/01/2016
www.reginasirois.com
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
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CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3
* * *
CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6
* * *
CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9
* * *
CHAPTER 10 CHAPTER 11 EPILOGUE
* * *
More from Regina Sirois
TO JAIMA,
YOU MAKE HARD THINGS LOOK EASY. YOU MAKE SIMPLE THINGS LOOK SPECIAL. YOU WRITE CIRCLES AROUND ME—AND I LOVE IT.
CHAPTER 1
8TH FEBRUARY 1939
I lost my breath as soon as I tore enough parcel paper away to see the black case. Even the Smith Corona embossed on the side couldn’t make me entirely believe it. “It’s months ‘til my birthday and Christmas is over.” I turned to Dad who fought back an embarrassed grin before I unlatched the lid to reveal her sleeping inside, burgundy body curled in a nest of black satin. I shrieked once, then started cooing in the same voice I use when a lamb is born. William got impatient and made a grab for her.
“Get off or take a braying,” I warned.
“Dad!” he complained. “Eve won’t let me see the new typewriter.”
“My new typewriter, thank you very much. Hands off!”
“Give ‘er a span to see it first,” Dad told him, his face gruff and grinning at all once. “It’s just a second-hand job. Did a bit o’ trade.” He murmured as he scratched at his coarse whiskers.
William made one more grab, but I shrieked and Dad growled and my brother surrendered with an enormous sigh.
“She doesn’t even have a ribbon yet,” I said a bit kinder, hoping to reconcile. “I’ve hardly touched her.”
“What do you mean ‘she?’ It’s a typewriter.” William moped his way into a kitchen chair. William is a funny one to see when he turns all scowling. At fifteen he’s grown taller than most of the boys in the village and his voice is deep like a man, but his face and posture are so much like a child smarting about not getting his toy that I laughed. Which is not unusual. Everyone tells me I do laugh too much.
Laughter was too much for our sheepdog, Skip, who was trying to break through the kitchen door to get to us. He threw his body against the wood with sharp whines calibrated for optimum sympathy. His face appeared every few moments when he jumped high enough to look through the window panes. The chickens added their frantic screeching to the racket. Apparently, Skip felt it necessary to herd them toward the house in order keep his eyes on his birds and his people all at once. Sheepdogs are under the delusion that all things belong to them.
“It’s upsetting the dog. Let me see it.” William waved his hand at Skip to reassure him. It only made the dog more desperate, which increased the tempo of his scratching.
The commotion must have alerted Alan in the yard because he opened the door to see what all the excitement was about. In an instant Skip tore into the room, a frantic ball of shedding hair that rushed around the table legs in streaking circles, barking at the strange bundle in my arms.
“Sorry,” Alan hollered over the noise as he tried to stay on the rubber mat with his filth-encrusted boots. Skip made the mistake of running too close to Alan on one of his circumnavigations and a strong arm shot out and caught the dog by the collar. “I didn’t mean to let him in.” Alan pushed some of his dark blonde hair off his forehead before looking to us. He spotted the box on the table first and then his eyes roamed until he saw the typewriter cradled against my chest. “So it came, then?” he asked with one of his rare, bright grins.
“You knew?” I accused. “Dad didn’t tell me a thing about it.”
“It’s for the farmin’ records, to get us straightened out,” Dad spoke up, his serious face trying not to betray the sentimentality of the gift. He’s known I’ve wanted one for years. Ever since I left school where we learned to type I’ve been beating out words with my fingertips against my leg or on tabletops just so I don’t forget. But I’d never touched a typewriter so sleek and compact. The ones at school were complete monsters with folding carriages that sat so high a girl couldn’t see over the top.
“I’ll straighten us out, certainly. No more crumpled receipts for us. 1939 is bound to be the most orderly year Brannon Farm has ever seen.” I returned Alan’s smile, but not because I meant to. That is just where my smiles seem to drift lately. The joy in my chest mingled with the smell of baking bread from the oven until I was certain happiness smelled like wheat bran. I set the typewriter gently on the table in front of William. “You can see it. Of course you can see it. It’s just for farm records.”
“Well, that’s not all,” Dad said, picking up on my worried smile that suddenly felt much more like a misshapen frown. “You’ll have a bit o’ a lark with it too, when the work is o’er.”
William hit two of the keys and I flinched. I hadn’t meant to give the first touch to someone else, and certainly not his rough, clumsy fingers. I listened to a few more of the typebars hit the empty carriage, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. “It’s not good for it to strike without paper,” I said and snatched it away from my brother’s hands. Clutching it close to me I hurried from the room saying I would take it upstairs and look it over there. I heard footsteps behind me so I hurried and shut my door, figuring it was William coming to torment my new pet. Instead, a soft knock sounded and Alan’s voice fell against the door, just as lightly as his knuckles. “Eve, you didn’t get your case and the manual. You might want these.”
Well, that was brave for Alan. When Dad hired him years ago it took him months before he’d answer us more than a few words, and years more before he’d start a conversation. I opened the door a bit my expression guarded. At least I hope it was guarded. It is so hard to feel one’s face from the inside out. He wore the same sad grin that confuses me whenever I see it. Perhaps I have no emotional complexity, but when I am happy I smile like I am happy and when I am sad I look sad. I’ve never known how or why he insists on mixing the two together.
“Thank you.” I took the case from his hand. As I opened the door wider I realised that in the last five years I’d never seen Alan on the second level of our home. He seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same moment because he looked into my room and his face went red like the February wind had found its way from the yard into the narrow hallway. I always liked the way he looks in the winter, wind-burned and chapped, his light whiskers trying to fight their way out to protect his shaven skin. I suddenly wished it were Sunday. I always wear a dress on Sundays. But Fridays I help clean the troughs and I was already suited up in coveralls. I’m quite sure Alan disapproves of women in trousers.
“I...” he stuttered a moment and looked at the typewriter. “I hope it works well. I’ll be getting on.” He turned and left me to watch him walk down the dark hallway without his shoes. His feet did look well in woolen socks. I clicked the door closed behind him and sighed a
s I set the typewriter down on the bed since I’ve no desk.
Corona. Like the sun. I put my fingers on the keys and held them there, loving the way they filled the empty spaces like water in a bowl. I pushed the J first, watching the typebar spring and return, the little echo of its effort snapping in the silence. Well, near silence. Skip still howled outside. I grabbed a scrap of paper from my bedside table and rolled it around the carriage. Then I opened the manual and bent myself over it, my hungry eyes swallowing every detail. In minutes I had the ribbon in place, poised for its first letters.
EVE
I pounded it out in all capitals. It was straight and black like the ravines between our hills on a moonless night. I’d never seen my name so official before. It looked just the right name for a girl nearly nineteen and eager for life. And for a moment I didn’t feel like Eve Brannon, resident of Kepsdale, Yorkshire, Nowhere, England.
I felt like Eve Brannon, officially grown and a woman of the world. Truly, typed words simply exude sex appeal. My coveralls, however, exuded only the smell of sheep. I sat for a moment, staring at the piece of paper and wondering if the Eve Brannon on the page would ever be the same Eve Brannon typing the words. Well, obviously I can’t say it right. Only that it felt like there were two of me, and both of them were thinking about woolen socks and blue eyes and a man at the threshold of my room.
I have only walked away from my machine for the most necessary things like food or washing or chores, and even those I do like a horse chewing the bit and flattening its ears. I always yelled at our old draft horse, Bully, when he strained against his harness and threatened to start without a driver, but now I understand. I keep turning to the stairs, my feet ready to race for my room and watch the ink appear on the paper. And thinking of Bully makes me sentimental. I was the one who wanted to sell him when we got the tractor and never understood why Dad kept him on in the pasture when he does us no good. For the first time I see how good it is to be a creature with a job you want to do.
I think that’s why some of the farmers still keep their teams. After the lean years (and truly, they are all lean here) they can’t bear to put another creature out of a job—even a draft horse. There’s a glory in labour that no one knows like a hard-scrabble Dalesman. Nevermind the tractors make the teams obsolete. Nevermind horses cost precious money farmers don’t have. Nevermind a team eats almost as much as it plows. There is so much we nevermind here. After hundreds of years of farming land that never wanted to be farmed in the first place, all Dalesmen have earned one characteristic—we don’t mind.
And just as well, because all I want to mind today is my new typewriter. If I could paint her instead of just type with her I would put a little dab of yellow-white where the glow of my lamp mixes with the clear moonbeams and blazes off of her maroon paint. I would paint the way the concave keys puddle the light into tiny, alphabetical pools. And even though they wrote the word “silent” in bold, black letters right above the keytop she is not silent at all. There is a muted tap that reminds me of rain on the distant roof of the shed, but even better. After a while the sound blurs into something like a staccato song that makes me feel productive and catatonic all at once.
As I sit here staring at the keys, I realise it is a shame we cannot type pauses. I don’t know how to dictate any honest sentence without somehow showing the time it takes to stop and think. How would a reader ever know how long it takes me to tap out a line when I keep halting to stroke my space bar? It is beautiful. Black and sleek, and only when you spend enough time caressing it do you notice the subtle curve like a bed for your resting thumb. I like to see how far I can press it before the spring can’t bear it and snaps the page forward. I love that I get to use it between every word. Twice between sentences. Never in all my life have I held a machine in my hands and thought it beautiful.
Everything else grows quiet at the end of the day. The sheep stop plodding and eventually huddle into one sleeping ball, the scratching feet of the chickens slow until their plump bodies lower into the damp hay. Even people yawn and settle into quiet heaps. Dad fell asleep in his chair tonight with a pint at his side and an unread paper in his lap. William studies in his room, dreaming of the day when he becomes a scientist and lives in a city, perhaps even America. Alan always leaves after dinner to do evening chores. I wish I could follow him and see what he does when he is all alone. I wonder if he might talk to himself. A part of me hopes he tells himself jokes and laughs when no one is looking. Usually I am happy to slip off to bed early, but tonight it is painful to stop this strange conversation between my hands and these keys. My Corona keeps her eyes wide open, smiling a metal, half moon smile that tells me, “We could keep going all night. Whatever secret you tell me I will faithfully record.” I must learn to resist my burgundy temptress.
14TH FEBRUARY 1939
I’ve never loved a Tuesday so well. William is at school, Dad and Alan are with the sheep and I have at last emerged from my room to write in the sunlight. My small window faces north and it always feels gloomy up there, but the kitchen is soaked in light and even though I am the cook around here, I must admit it always smells heavenly. Over one hundred years of farm butter and fresh sausages have infused the plaster walls, so I can’t take credit for all of it. I always feel a bit like I work around the ghost of every woman who ever toiled here. Once I imagined a woman from the ministry of Earl Gray peer in wonder at my boiler and electric lights and look at me in jealousy, all in my head.
Strange I never feel my mother wander about. I remember her being pleasant and quick to laugh, just like me. And even though I was eleven when she died, which was plenty old to understand it all, I cannot recall much of the transition. I remember a desperate cry with my arms wrapped around an impatient sheep, and Mrs. Rowley coming every day to make our supper and cook breads and pies. I only found out later Dad had hired her. I suppose I thought she did it out of the goodness of her heart, though her heart really is very good in spite of being paid. She cared for us until the butcher finally determined an eight-year engagement was a mite too long, especially with his woman suddenly spending all day around a widowed farmer. He swept her off to town when I was fifteen and I’ve done it all myself for more than three years now. My beginnings as the woman of the house started rocky—lots of eggs and salty bread—but William has never been trouble and we managed. We’ve done so well for so long I think the men are nearly ready to care for themselves, which means I can follow some wonderful dream, if only it would come to me what it is.
I’ve a growing fear the farm beat the dreams out of me. Not in a cruel way, of course, but just in forcing us all to work so hard and be so sensible. And I certainly toiled away at sensible tasks today and have a great heap of typed papers to prove it. It took all my working hours but I converted every bill and crumpled receipt from the past year into neat, typed ledgers. My neck aches like mad from hunching over, but I did get out of dosing sheep with vitamins, which is a sticky, drooling mess.
As I write this I am looking out the window to give my neck a stretch. The winter clouds cleared this afternoon and I can see all the way to Fern’s Fell and the lights of Briswell in the distance. I have only traveled to London once (I hated it, but I was only nine and wonder if I might like the crowded streets more now) and never beyond, but even knowing how little I know, I believe there could not be a spot on earth where the air feels as clean and free as it does when it whistles over our fields. Our beck slices down from the high hill and spreads green clover and the smell of heather and bracken the sheep find irresistible. My home is a bit of a psalm. He leadeth me beside the still waters.
Only our shepherd is not the eternal one. He is Alan. I certainly didn’t see all the potential when he turned up. He was barely schooled, skittish as a hare, and scrawny for a sixteen year old. At least he thought he was sixteen. His family was a bad lot and no one ever could remember his exact birthday and they weren’t the sort he could trouble to look it up. He never did tell us all the sto
ry, but he showed up one spring half-starved and asking for hard work. My mother wanted to send him off, but Dad liked his Irish accent (reminded him of home) and took him under wing. I was thirteen, too tall, and a class clown, not because I was funny, but because I found everything else funny. That trait sticks out like a two-headed pig in Kepsdale because a long face is nearly a requirement for life here. When Alan first came I only had eyes for the youngest son at Buchanan Estate. Marion Doran was a boy so handsome it made my eyes hurt, and every other girl in the village felt likewise. I was so full of daydreams of glittering galleries and beaded gowns and shows in town I took no notice of the shepherd sweating his way across our pastures.
And then I finished school and took over the house and one day looked down at myself and noticed I was nearly grown. It only took me another day or so to notice Alan was quite fully a man. And not just a man, but a veritable David in my backyard. Right down to the way he carries the lambs and keeps a leather sack for his dinner. Truly, someone could carve him in stone. Only (curse me forever!) I’ve been running around in coveralls smeared with unmentionable muck and dirty fingernails and I’m worried he will forever see me as a laughing, smudged-up schoolgirl.
But then, there is his sad smile. Sometimes I daydream it is not sad, but wistful, and he pines for me, unable to admit it because my family owns such a respected farm and he is only a labourer who doesn’t even have a birthday to his name. If ever he says he loves me but doesn’t deserve me, I will crush my face against his strong chest and say, “Alan, darling, all that I have is yours. Even the sheep.”
That sounded dreadful. Truly, just dreadful. Only how is a girl to know what to say when she has no chance to practice? Which is exactly why Theo never lets me miss a Saturday night village dance. Most villages hold them every week, but I suppose we’re skint on dances as well as money hereabouts, so we have a monthly do, instead.
To Move the World (Power of the Matchmaker) Page 1
