by Jamie Zeppa
Frank grabbed her shoulder and yelled, “STOP!” When he turned his back, she opened the closet and threw a can of floor wax at him. It smashed through the glass door of the china cabinet, and when the shattering was finished, Grace sat in the armchair. “I must sit,” she said. The engine inside her was dead.
Frank swept up the glass and brought the dustpan over to her. “Look,” he said. “Look what you’ve done. Ma’s best dishes.”
Grace closed her eyes. “I am tired,” she said. But something about the shards bothered her, and the next day, when Frank was out in the garden, she took the old white and blue creamer down to the creek and broke it into pieces against the big flat rock under the chokecherry tree. With a sharp stone, she pressed the pieces into fragments, the fragments into granules, the granules into dust. She rubbed her fingers together, and the dust disappeared. So that is what it was made of, she thought, amazed. Tiny little pieces of nothing.
Against the flat rock, she opened a saucer, a candle, a pea, a beetle, an ant, a seed. Inside, everything was the same. Everything broke into smaller and smaller pieces, until it disappeared entirely.
Some things didn’t break. She asked Frank, “Frank, what is inside this?” It was a screw she had kept from a clock she’d taken apart. She was able to snap the outside plates back into the rim, but had to throw out the metal innards.
He told her how the screw was made. “They take iron ore, you see, and they—”
“But what is inside iron ore?”
“It’s a rock. Like a lump of coal.”
Grace was disappointed. She knew what was inside coal. She asked, “What happens to people after they die?”
Frank sighed. “I told you, they go to Heaven.”
“I mean, what happens to the body?”
Frank told her how God made the first man and woman out of a handful of dirt in the Garden of Eden. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Grace went back out to the flat rock by the creek. Dust to dust. Everything, even people. The mystery was not why everything died, but why anything lived in the first place. What made the tiniest particles cling together to form dust and rocks and seeds? Frank said all the pieces of the world had been drawn together in the beginning by the hand of God. But what kept all the pieces of nothing together now, Grace wanted to know. Frank said she had it all wrong. “You can’t get something out of nothing.” But Frank hadn’t opened things, so he didn’t know. Grace thought about this until her head hurt and she had to lie down on the grass beside the rock, and that was the first time the bliss came. She came unravelled: her head did not hurt, her chest did not ache, and she forgot about her mother dropping things and her father crying in the garden. An empty white chill held her. Inside the bliss, time did not pass. Frank found her and shook her. “Wake up, Grace,” he said, but she hadn’t been asleep. She had been in a different place altogether. She hadn’t wanted to come back.
In the fall, Grace started school. The first day, she was afraid, so Frank let her carry the pink pearl bride and her navy groom in her pocket. In the beginning, she liked going. Words were made of letters and letters were lines and lines were pencil marks that could be rubbed into pieces of grit and blown away. She liked numbers, too, because they were just one and one added, and if you took one and one away, you went back to nothing. But she had no interest in the equations of triangles or the wars of kings, and the teachers had to speak to her again and again. If they spoke too sharply, they would bring on one of her headaches, and she would weep until she vomited and they would have to send her home. Sometimes, she could not breathe and had to be sent home anyway. Finally, they let her sit at the back of the class and read. The bliss did not come at school; there were too many sounds—chanting and tapping and sniffling—and too many smells—wet wool and mould and chalk. But she was happy enough to read, because she could stay very still and no one bothered her with talk or questions, and sometimes she caught the bliss in between the words.
Their father came home from work one evening and did not go back. There was no work to go back to. He went quiet, speaking only to say yes or no or “Frank, fix some dinner for your sister.” Frank said it wasn’t just their father. Across the whole country, factories had been laying off and people were going hungry, and their father had been luckier than most, hanging on at the steel plant for almost four years. Frank was going to work at the tar plant. He would have to quit school, but at least he would be bringing something home. And Grace did not have to go to school anymore either, Frank said. It was pointless if she wasn’t going to apply herself. She was twelve now, old enough to keep house for them. He left her a list of things to do, and sometimes, she finished the list, but other days, she went down to the creek, where it was very quiet, and lay in the long grass and let herself fade away.
Four years later, their father died. A sore in his gums went septic, Frank said, and the rust spread and poisoned the pathways to his heart. It poured the day of his funeral, and the neighbours stood under umbrellas and sheets of newspaper black with ink declaring war on Germany. “Poor Frank,” people said. And “poor Grace,” too, but mostly “poor Frank.” Poor Grace was part of the reason they said “poor Frank.” “Your brother will look after you, Grace,” they told her. “And you should look after him, too.” They knitted their eyebrows together and wagged their heads at her. They meant she must change her ways. She was sixteen years old; she shouldn’t be running about all day in her mother’s old clothes, her russet hair cut like a boy’s because she never combed it. And Frank shouldn’t be doing all the work in the house, especially after working all day in the tar plant. “At least you have each other,” they said to Frank. “That is your comfort.”
Someday, Grace thought, all of us standing on the cold, wet ground will be under it. Ashes to ashes. That was her comfort.
A few months after the funeral, Frank got a job at the steel plant. Things were picking up, he said, because of the war in Europe. He promised to explain the whole thing to Grace, but luckily, he started fixing the house and forgot. He painted the kitchen and the front room, and scrubbed and waxed all the floors. In the spring, he went upstairs and paced the four tiny bedrooms with a measuring tape. “These rooms are too small,” he told Grace. “I’m going to join these two here, eventually turn the attic into another room. You’ll help me, won’t you, Grace?” Grace nodded and yawned. She let go of the measuring tape and went out to sleep under the cherry tree. The next day, Frank brought John Cherniak from the farm down the road to help him knock down the walls. Grace was supposed to help carry baskets of rubbish out to the backyard, but the banging and the dust made her head hurt. She sat on the wooden bench under the apple tree and watched John trudge across the yard and toss a bucket of plaster dust over the back fence. John was Frank’s age, but he was bigger and broader than Frank. His blond hair was dark with sweat. “Are you just gonna sit out here while your brother does all the work?” he asked her. She nodded. He shook his head and said, “Jeez, Louise,” but he did not sound angry. When he left, he lifted his cap to her and called, “Don’t work too hard back there, Gracie,” and she called back, “I won’t.”
One morning after the rooms upstairs were done, she found Frank washing the sheets from their parents’ bed; the mattress was outside in the sun. “I’m getting married,” he told Grace. “Her name is Vera. She’s been working in town, keeping house for Dr. McCabe’s family. She’s coming tomorrow to meet you. You’ll really like her, Gracie.”
But Grace wasn’t sure about this. Vera was all briskness and bustle; her brown striped dress was tightly belted, her fair hair was pinned back firmly, and she hadn’t been in the kitchen five minutes before she started moving things around. “Why, this belongs with the sewing things!” she exclaimed when she found the tin button box beside the sugar bowl. She was unpacking some of her own things in advance of the wedding: a teapot, towels, a white leather Bible in a pearly cardboard case. Over the sink she hung her clock with a pale blue face and spiky
black hands. “We have a clock,” Grace said. No one had wound it in years. “This one’s electric,” Vera said. She squeezed Grace’s hand. “Soon we’ll be sisters. Now, would you like to help me with dinner?”
“No,” Grace said, then remembered her manners. “Thank you.”
Vera laughed. “You are funny! You can peel the potatoes over there while I see to the chicken.” She didn’t laugh, though, when she saw how Grace had peeled off ragged white lumps. “Grace, let me show you a better way,” she said. “See, if you do it like this, you only take off the skin.” She was perplexed that Grace wasn’t looking. “Don’t you want to learn, Grace?”
“No,” Grace said, and she went to sit in the front room and looked for a quiet pond in her mind while Vera had a whispered consultation with Frank in the kitchen and the earth drank away the day’s light. When Frank finally took Vera home, Grace retrieved the button box from the sewing basket and took it up to her room.
Lying in bed on those mornings when the sickness came, Grace waited until the nausea peaked. Then she padded softly down the stairs, lifted the latch on the kitchen door and ran to the outhouse at the back of the garden, her stomach tightening, her mouth full of saliva. In the cool dark, she threw up, then sat on the wooden seat, waiting for her legs to solidify again. Any minute now Vera would wake up. Grace had to be back in bed before Vera called her: “Grace! Get up! Honestly, Grace, I’ve called you twice already. You’d sleep all day if I let you.”
It vexed Vera, this desire to sleep in the day. Vera could not abide things out of order. Besides, it was a sin to sleep during the day. “How?” Grace asked, and Vera promptly recited a list: “Pride, envy, gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath and sloth.” Sleeping in the day was sloth.
“Rise and shine,” Vera said, sticking her head around the door just as Grace was lowering herself back into the bed. “I want the garden weeded before the sun gets too hot.”
“But we just did it,” Grace said.
“And we’ll do it again,” Vera said. “You want to eat, don’t you? Get dressed. Don’t dawdle.”
Grace pulled on yesterday’s clothes, a long grey skirt that had belonged to her mother and a blue blouse that was too tight across the chest, the buttons straining out of their holes. Over the blouse she put on her mother’s grey sweater, buttoning it all the way to the top, and then checked herself in the oval mirror above the oak dresser. She used to think she looked like a fox, with her cropped, reddish-brown hair and her pointed chin. Once, trying hard to think fox thoughts without human words, she’d brought the bliss on. Today, her small face looked puffy, and Vera would complain that she hadn’t brushed her hair. “You could have lovely hair,” Vera said, “if you would only work at it.” Even hair was work.
Downstairs, Vera was filling the teapot. She had already laid out the buttered bread and sliced meat for Frank’s lunch. This was Vera’s method: before she closed any task, she opened another, creating an ever-continuing chain of never-finished work.
“Frank, your tea is here. I’m going down to the root cellar to get some eggs for a cake. We’ll have barley soup for dinner. Frank, remind me to mend those trousers when you get home tonight. Grace, can you clear the table when your brother is finished, please?”
Grace said, “I’ll do the garden now, Vera.”
“After you clear the table,” Vera said briskly.
Vera was still hopping mad when Frank came home in the evening. “Please talk to your sister, Frank. She went out to weed the garden after you left, and at noon I find her down by the creek, staring into space, and the garden not even touched. She’s nearly nineteen years old. What’s to become of her? What husband will put up with that?”
Grace was already in bed. Vera said if she couldn’t help out, she shouldn’t expect to eat. She could hear Vera downstairs, telling Frank she was at her wit’s end. Frank murmured something in return. Grace crossed her hands across her chest and stared at the ceiling until the roof beams began to soften at the edges. Beyond the walls of the house, Grace heard roots swelling and curling through wet earth, and the faint sigh of fruit trees as they lost their soft white petals. Beyond the garden, crickets conversed with frogs and the creek gurgled and drained endlessly away. Down the road, in the graveyard, spiders dropped on silver threads from trees and the grass grew long around the tombstones. In her room, Grace grew lighter and lighter as the walls dissolved. Out of the silence and darkness, the gleam began, cold and bright and still. If she looked directly at it, it would extinguish itself, leaving her stranded in the night with nowhere to go except into sleep, as thin and worn as an old sheet. But if she was quiet, listening to nothing except the breath passing in and out of her, it would arrive, eventually, in full, and take her into itself.
This was where she went at night, when she was supposed to be asleep, and why she slept during the day, curled up under a tree. She could have the bliss during the day, as well, if Vera weren’t always interrupting her. “What are you doing, Grace? For heaven’s sake, you just woke up two hours ago. You cannot possibly be tired.” She had to go all the way down to the creek, where Vera rarely came because she always ended up with mussed hair and mud on her shoes. But even at the creek, Vera’s voice found her, calling her to come and bring in the laundry.
In spring and summer, every Wednesday morning Vera put on her good brown dress and hat and walked up the road and caught the bus to town. When she returned, she changed back into her housedress and sat in the garden with her knitting and told Grace the news from Mrs. McCabe. Mostly this concerned who was expecting, who had delivered, whose baby had colic or a weak constitution. Grace sat nearby, under the apple tree, where the grass was a deep green and the air was thick with the smell of the roses Vera had planted all around the house. “Shall I do your hair, Vera?” Grace asked. Vera often said no, but one day she nodded, and Grace went to fetch the brush.
“Well, Millie Henderson is going to have another baby,” Vera said as Grace unwound Vera’s golden brown hair and smoothed it with her fingers. “Mrs. McCabe is just beside herself.” Mrs. McCabe was an investigator for the Children’s Aid Society and the Mother’s Allowance Commission, and oh! if people only knew what she had to deal with! The filthy children, red-eyed and coughing, the thin-as-a-rail mother who didn’t know if she was coming or going, all crammed into one room, mattresses on the floor without sheets or pillowcases, a single threadbare towel to serve as face cloth and tea towel and baby blanket. Worse were the loose women, brazen types who spent their allowance on cigarettes, who had men over and then lied to Mrs. McCabe’s face, even when she swooped in and found them together in the kitchen. “Her cousin, my foot!” Vera said. “Does she think Mrs. McCabe was born yesterday? It was probably whiskey in the tea cups!”
Millie Henderson wasn’t brazen, just feeble-minded. Her husband was a no-good drunk who had run off three years ago, and Millie had only just qualified for Mother’s Allowance when he showed back up. Now he was gone again, and the cupboards were stripped of anything edible or sellable, and Millie was pregnant, and she would have to wait another three years to qualify. “It’s just a shame. Heaven knows, the last thing Millie Henderson needs is another baby. Ouch! Grace! Don’t pull.”
Grace hadn’t been pulling. She knew why Vera was cross, though: she and Frank had been married for almost three years and there was no baby yet, only monthly troubles. Vera had gone to see Dr. McCabe last year and had come home with her eyes full of tears. “He said he couldn’t say for certain,” she told Frank. “He said only time would tell.”
Grace separated Vera’s hair into strips and began to plait it.
Vera sighed. “Mrs. McCabe is going to recommend that the baby be taken away. The Children’s Aid can find a good home for it down south.”
While Vera went on about Millie Henderson and bad blood, Grace was thinking that Vera had honey hair. Honey hair and hazelnut eyes and cinnamon freckles. Her brother, Frank, had dark russet hair, like tea, and tanned skin the colour of toast
. “You and Frank will have beautiful children,” Grace said. “Delicious cake-and-tea children.”
“Don’t talk foolishness, Grace,” Vera said and fell silent.
“But why do you want children, Vera?”
“What a question!” Vera exclaimed, but she gave no answer. “Well, really!” she said when Grace persisted. “As if you don’t know why people have children.”
But Grace did not know.
“It’s in the Bible,” Vera said. “Go forth and multiply.”
Grace wound Vera’s hair back into a knot. Whenever you asked someone something they couldn’t answer, they said it was in the Bible.
A few days later, she lifted Vera’s Bible out of its pearly white box, and sure enough, there it was, right at the beginning. What else is in this book? Grace wondered. At first, it was all lists and warnings, but then she found a man who looked on the works his hands had made and saw that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. She slipped the Bible under her arm and took it down to the creek. This man came forth naked from his mother’s womb and returned as he came, and could take nothing of his labour with him. He had laboured for the wind. All rivers ran down to the sea and yet the sea was never full. There was no profit under the sun.
Grace was electrified. She didn’t get a chance to find out what happened to the man, though, because Frank was calling her.
Grace followed her brother upstairs to the attic, a long, empty space with a slanting roof and silvery light from the small, round windows at either end. Grace held the boards while her brother hammered. “Now listen, Grace, don’t take Vera’s Bible outside anymore.”
Grace said, “I won’t.”
