The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  “Olive will have to play with her, then. She will be terrible at it, I think.” He was busy sliding down the tree. One skinny calf came into view, smeared green as an apple from new bark, apple-sapgreen. Lena Hubbard would be angry with him, but it was Thea who had knit the stocking, after all.

  On the ground, he dusted bark off his rump and carefully folded his knife before stowing it away in a pocket.

  “You’d better watch that, you’ll cut yourself,” she said.

  “Sharp enough to cut a hair on water, sharp as sharp,” he boasted. “I sharpened it on Jerry Melanson’s whetstone, he showed me how.”

  “It would be a good mariner’s knife, to match your marlinspike.”

  He took her arm—at nine, already as tall as she was—and they walked down the aisle of trees, their feet scuffing the gentle petal dust.

  Thea saw them coming over the meadow. The grass had been mown down by sheep over the last month, but now the lambs had been moved to pasture, it was growing up again. She must tell Jerry Melanson to send his nephew Hubert out there again with the scythe.

  There came Kay and Roddy, good, because Aunty Bob was driving out from town for dinner, bringing the Krito-sophian ladies to discuss the next lecture series. The ladies were attempting to secure Aimee Semple McPherson, so very interesting, with her mission life and wide experience. Thea found the idea irritating, but she was tired, after a long week alone with Aunt Lydia. Now Olive was married and never coming back, and this care would be her duty for some time to come, years perhaps. And the weather was oppressive, too warm for May.

  Francis had gone down to the stables. Back again, more or less in one piece. She could taste the silky mother-of-pearl skin inside his mouth, the tender inwardness that she loved—even at this advanced age, forty next week. She could let go his hand in the morning knowing she would lie with him again at night. Why are we all so sad? We are lucky, she told herself again.

  Kay waved to Thea, who was back from visiting, leaning on the veranda railing in her best silk chiffon. Thea shaded her eyes to see them, and Kay waved again. Roddy put on a turn of speed to go to his mother, but Kay, hearing Francis calling from the stable, went to see what he wanted.

  He beckoned.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He turned back to the shadowy interior and she followed, from long habit pausing to tap the horseshoe nailed to the doorway. But it did not help.

  “Pilot,” Francis said. He was crouched on the planks beside her old dog, without regard for the knees of his good grey suit. “He’s not doing well.”

  Kay went into the twilight. Her good dog Pilot thrust his nose up into her hand, from where he lay on an old horse blanket Francis must have set out for him. His long tail trembled and then gently thumped the floor in greeting. Under his fur she felt the lumpy growths she’d come to expect. Two, three of them—perhaps they were larger. He had been ailing for some time, this was no surprise. But Francis took her hand and held it, and with his other hand drew back the long fur under Pilot’s jaw. A greater lump there, and it had opened, oozing pinkish fluid. He had been sore and stiff before she left, but this was very bad.

  “It’s not the lumps, so much,” Francis said. “But this abscess, the open tumour—he’s in pain now, Kay. It’s time to give him release.”

  She saw that it must be so. Pilot’s eyes looked into hers until the effort of holding his neck was too much and he let his head slump, flump, on the blanket. That was how it was with dogs, they were frailer than humans and aged much more quickly, and the good thing was that one could put them out of their misery. It was all quite rational.

  “All right,” she said. Would Francis wish her to do it herself? He had taught her to shoot the little rifle. She put her hand under her eye to stop it trembling there. It was very hard for him to fire a rifle now, after the war, so she should do it.

  “He’s very old for such a big dog,” Francis said, looking at her a little anxiously. It made him look like Roddy. “We’ll give him a good dinner, and keep him warm, and it will be the best thing.”

  She nodded, and got up. “I’ll find something in the kitchen, then.” Best get on with it.

  He pulled a scrap of sacking over from the hay bin and sat beside Pilot, one hand buried in the soft mane. His trousers would be ruined.

  At the door, she turned back. “Should I tell Roddy?”

  “He asked me to have a look at the poor old boy. Ask Thea, as you go by. She’ll know.”

  Whether it would be better for him to know beforehand or afterwards. With people one did not have that choice, to know or not to know. But then parents were always discussing whether or not to tell their children this or that, whether it was good for them to know the truth or whether they should be spared.

  At the porch table, Thea had rested her head on one hand bent across her eyes—reading, or asleep? Roddy must have been sent to change his mucky breeches. Thea lifted her head as Kay climbed the stairs and, seeing her, said, “Oh, Kay, will you help Lena bring in lunch? I must go turn Aunt Lydia.”

  “Let me do that.” The cold misery of rolling Aunt Lydia’s oblivious sausage-body in the sheets was less disheartening than Lena’s conscious dislike.

  Lena Hubbard had left the sea as well, and worked for Thea now, her hind end still a mute reproach to Kay. Nothing was known of Hubbard’s whereabouts; Lena had come back to Yarmouth, destitute, a week before Olive left for her long-promised six month’s tour of Europe, just as Thea and Francis were about to take on Aunt Lydia’s invalid care in Olive’s absence. Kay had begged them not to hire Lena, but of course that was no use.

  Now Thea caught Kay’s sleeve gently. “What would you like me to do? Leave her to rely on the parish?” She meant Lena, not Aunt Lydia. Abandoning Aunt Lydia was not even imaginable.

  “No,” Kay had to say, and again, “No!”

  Thea looked up, her eyes still in her hand’s shadow, considering her as Father used to. “You still must work to correct your temper, and a reminder in the house can do no harm.”

  The cruel justice of this left Kay with nothing to say—indeed, let the breath out of her chest so that she had to walk to the end of the porch to find more air to fill it. But she could not be angry with Thea.

  She was not allowed to be angry anywhere, with anyone, was the truth of it, and that alone made her want to screech like a harbour gull. She made her fingers into talons and flexed them, and went in through the glass doors at the end of the veranda to turn Aunt Lydia.

  The shade, and the heat, the smell, the quietness, all magnified the clunk of the clock on the mantel in the dark-panelled room that had once been the dining room. The great body lying there, not quite a husk. Olive had been right to worry, long ago, that Kay might send her mother apoplectic. But it was not Kay that felled Aunt Lydia, it was the war, and Forrest lost in France. Nobody blamed poor Olive for leaving; she had managed all that time alone, six years of ministering to an unresponding lump. When she came back, Thea had said, they would make sure she had daily help; with any luck, Lena could be persuaded to stay with her. But now Olive was not coming back.

  With practised moves, Kay stripped the top sheet off and pulled a clean sheet over Aunt Lydia’s bulk, tucking half of it in on the wall side; rolled the body forward onto the clean half and slid the soiled half out with a jerk. Not as efficiently as Thea did it, but her clumsiness caused no stirring from Aunt Lydia. Tuck, tuck, and then she allowed the bulk to roll back, and roll a quarter turn again to give a fresh side to the bed. Old sores that Thea had found when they first came were healed now. But indeed, it must have been very hard for Olive all alone.

  Kay pulled the nightgown into place down the thin old bluish legs, set the bolsters to brace the body and tucked the sheets in carefully to keep it suspended on its side—on her side.

  It was not necessary to think of this body as a woman; Kay felt sure that whatever had made Aunt Lydia herself had left this mortal shell long before. She had no wish to remember
her aunt in true vivid life, grown more cranky and difficult with age. Even Francis had disliked her, and she was his aunt too, by marriage. But he had agreed that they must relieve Olive, and had not protested at moving out to Lake Milo for six months or however long the European tour would take. He did have some relief: from time to time he stayed at the house in Yarmouth, attending to business that could not be delayed. His affairs were mysterious to Kay—holdings in various ships, interests in others; not always successful, she supposed, from the Elm Street house, which was smaller and less opulently furnished than Marion Hilton’s father’s place. Shipping was chancy business.

  To relieve the gloom and silence, Kay opened the curtains to the afternoon light, although Lena would certainly close them again, left the French door to the veranda ajar and lifted the heavy sash of the west window halfway. Light brought a pale pearl-glow to Aunt Lydia’s arm, extending limply from the linen sleeve. Outside in the sunlight Thea looked pale too. Was she ill?

  Kay curbed her sudden fear—it was Pilot who was ill. She went to forage in the kitchen, where she found cold beef and warmed a dish. Out in the stable, the dog was sleeping. She knelt on the straw beside him and stroked his great head without waking him.

  Francis, still sitting vigil, said he would stay with him. “We’ll wait till morning, in case there’s any change,” he said. He’d made himself a cot of horse blankets, and she could tell Thea he would not come in for dinner. “Pilot is saving me from those damned Cryptosporidians,” he said. “Faithful to the last.”

  There being nothing she could do, Kay went up and sat on the windowsill to watch Thea dress for dinner, going into costume as a matron of Yarmouth. She had been so pure, so much better, so far removed from ordinary women—now here she was, Secretary of the Krito-sophians, in a tambour lace dress over dove-grey satin, putting cold cream on her face that Kay had watched her buy in Paris for twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars, for half a teacupful! Where was her noble charity now?

  The burden of scorn was heavy to bear, and Kay knew it was unfair. It had been a relief to run off to Bar Harbor with Francis, and watch Olive with her captive Mr. Dawlish. Olive had offered her a room at the hotel for an extended visit. “If you’re getting ready to take life seriously,” she said, which made Kay laugh a little, interiorly.

  What was she to take seriously? She had no skill worth flogging, beyond hitting a golf ball; there was no one to marry. For a while it had looked as if she might be assumed into an engagement with another Wetmore cousin, Terence, but that had come to nothing. Because there was nothing in it. It was all right for Terence—back from France with new determination, he had married (to the dismay of his mother) Doris Sweeney, who was a telephone operator, and gone to live in Hebron with Doris’s family. It was a great relief to Kay not to have people throwing them together anymore, and Doris was quite nice and kind.

  Marion Hilton drove out to dinner with the Krito-sophian ladies, two of whom were her aunts, another her future mother-in-law. Safely engaged to Murray Judge (after a short, exciting romance with an unsuitable American), she was in line for membership. Worthy, round-faced, worried, nice—though she could not stop herself from occasional piercing honesty. She’d have to curb that, to fit into the Krito-sophian circle.

  Drinking sweet sherry in the drawing room before dinner, they sat a little removed from the older women. Marion stared at Kay with the ordinary rudeness of a childhood friend. “I like your Boston frock!”

  Kay smoothed her dress. Francis had taken her to Filene’s, for their usual annual visit. Fawn linen, very nice.

  “But what happened to your eye? What have you done to it?”

  Her hand went up to the bruise. “Hit myself, just before the wedding. I was adjusting—some strap, you know, and my hand slipped, and I gave myself a knuckle punch. My eye swelled up horribly.”

  “No, it’s black—above your eye—”

  “Oh, that—it’s just a mole.”

  “Oh my, are you worried about it?” Marion’s own eyes, sky blue, could barely focus close up; that only added to her dreamy look. She was such a pretty girl.

  “It’s nothing. It does keep growing, though.” Kay stood. “Let me refill your glass.”

  Soon she would be so ugly she’d be unable to go out in public at all. At the drinks cart, Kay pulled her dress, which had rucked up behind, over her lumpy waist and straight-down hips again. There was something stark and comforting about being ugly in this world, about not conforming to the way people want you to look.

  Or she could shake herself out of this ill temper and spare a thought for Thea, who did not point out one’s blemishes and was kindness itself. Kay would take her a glass of sherry.

  But it was time to troop into the new dining room, which had been the sitting room before Aunt Lydia could not go upstairs. Thea gestured around the table and seated the Krito-sophians in an order that would make them agree with their neighbours, more or less, and only talk each other’s ears off. Very skilfully done; Kay saluted her with her eyebrows in South Pacific fashion.

  Lena Hubbard went in and out with the soup tureen and the biscuits, Jerry Melanson carried the roast, and the customary heavy meal lifted on the evening tide and got under way.

  Sharp-tongued Miss Yarrow congratulated Kay on her cultural achievements. “I understand that you could give us all some pointers in the use of the Latin tongue!” Since Miss Yarrow was the new Latin teacher at the Yarmouth high school, that was very condescending.

  “I am better at Greek,” Kay heard her own mouth say, and then she felt heat rising in her cheeks and added, “It is not boasting, but only that I was lucky enough to have had a good teacher.”

  Miss Yarrow hmmphed, perhaps taking that as an insult. Conscious that she herself was scowling, Kay turned to Mrs. Judge and asked how her daughter was finding normal school in Truro. The conversation veered onto various offspring and supposed friends of Kay; all the Krito-sophians had much to say about Higher Education and Life Paths.

  Safe for a while, Kay cut her portion of meat into neat pieces and stared down at her plate. Roddy was too far away to talk to, and she disliked everyone else around the table. Her stomach was sullen, aware of Pilot out in the stable, and what must be done, but she put a forkful into her mouth anyway.

  At last they retired to the front parlour and sat in little groups, and Thea asked Kay to play. She went obediently to the piano. Roddy came to turn the pages for her, so they were at least removed from the general talk. He leaned against her on the piano bench, knowing about Pilot and needing comfort. She played a selection of moderately difficult pieces, not nearly so well as Thea would have done, and endured the ignorant praise of her technique.

  The conversation became general, and Miss Yarrow, sitting on Kay’s right, had a question about the rites of the South Sea Islanders.

  “I am no authority. I do not know anything at all about the South Sea Islanders,” Kay said. “I have seen the sea, that is all a person like me can say.” She went to the mantel, tidying the china figures there to give herself something to do.

  “Well! I had hoped your journeying would be more salutary. They say that travel ought to broaden the mind, you know.” Miss Yarrow’s little eyes drilled test holes into Kay’s blank face, seeking some ore or other.

  Kay hated her. And everyone.

  Thea said, “Don’t listen to Kay, Miss Yarrow. She learned a great deal on all our travels and never stopped studying for a moment. Her piano, and literature, and Latin, and an enormous amount of Greek—enough for a boy!”

  To shield Kay, though any defence would be wasted on Miss Yarrow, Thea added seriously, “Here is what I know of the Islanders, Miss Yarrow: that they are not unlike the Indian people my father worked with in the West. They, like us, are a portion of that fallen race for whom Christ died, they have souls to be saved or lost.”

  Miss Yarrow drew back her head on her thin neck.

  But Thea continued, gravely. “They are accessible to the Gr
ace of God. They have intellects of a superior kind, which receive instruction readily. The people in all those islands are remarkably skilful in all kinds of handiwork, and they are as capable of improvement in their social condition as any other race—or more so, due to the benefits of their geography.”

  All that sounded to Kay very much like Father holding forth to Dr. Bryce when the doctor had come to inspect the school. Boasting of the cleverness of his charges as if they were pets, except of course that he judged them to have souls, which he believed dogs did not.

  As the word dogs appeared in Kay’s mind, a bitter flame ignited in her stomach. But she could do nothing about that.

  She could do nothing about anything! She was a mediocre pianist, she knew very little Latin—and anyway, the world had no purpose for that except to turn one into a wizened-up Miss Yarrow—and she had entirely failed to learn Greek, even with the best of teachers.

  Miss Yarrow pressed on, getting Thea to her real question. “And what of that young fellow you brought home? Where has he gone off to?”

  Before the question was finished, Thea had already picked up the big silver tray and was taking quick steps to the door. “Lena! Oh, there you are—Take this, will you, and where—will you send Roddy to me?”

  He had slipped out the window at the end of Kay’s playing. She thought he had gone down to find his father, in the barn with Pilot.

  Relieved of the tray, Thea turned back and crossed the drawing room to the open French doors. “Rod? Roddy?”

  She stepped out onto the veranda, looking in her lace dress like a picture from a magazine, a lovely mother searching for her child. She worked too hard and never rested, but she was still a delight to look at, long and graceful in her body. Life was very unfair, that sisters could be so unalike.

  “Aren left us,” Kay told Miss Yarrow. Since Thea was not going to answer. “Not finding the people of Yarmouth to his liking, he went to Halifax and found work there.”