by Vicki Delany
And we cried.
Together.
Chapter Ten
Tea is the beverage of grief.
I had dimly been aware I was being led into the house. There were three of us: Hila and me, strangers weeping in a way that we hadn’t been able to with those who loved us, and another woman. I felt a soft wool sweater around my shoulders, heard kind words spoken in a Canadian accent. Doors opened. A man called to a dog. A deep leather couch enveloped me.
Tea was placed on the table beside me.
When I finally wiped my eyes, I could see that I was in a sun room. Three walls of sparkling glass looked out over a well-maintained lawn and the fresh spring woods behind. Bird feeders were placed at the edge of the tree line and chickadees, blue jays, and sparrows darted to and fro.
Hila was seated beside me.
“Sugar or lemon?” a woman’s voice said.
She was in late middle age, thick gray hair stuffed into a messy bundle at the top of her head. Her large brown eyes were calm and her long fingers cradled a delicate tea cup. Royal Doulton, I thought.
“Sugar. I…I’m very sorry. Don’t quite know what came over me.”
“I do.” She handed me the cup. “Grief, pain, sorrow beyond endurance. But we do endure, do we not?”
“What else can we do?”
“Precisely.” She poured tea for Hila and added three hefty spoons of sugar.
Hila had to lean awkwardly to take the cup in her good right hand. The woman did not attempt to help her.
“I assume you’re Ms. Manning’s sister. The one wounded in Afghanistan?”
“You know about me?”
“The whole county knows about you. You can thank your sister and her husband for keeping the vultures of the press from your door. Oh, dear. Did I make a faux pas? You’re with the press yourself, if memory serves.”
“Yes. But not of the vulture kind. I’m Hannah.”
“I’m Maude Harrison and this is Hila Popalzai. Hila is our guest.”
“Pleased to meet you, Hannah,” Hila said, very formally.
I laughed. It had been a strange meeting indeed. Hila smiled at me. Only one side of her mouth turned up, but I could read the warmth in her dark eyes.
We sipped our tea. I told them I’d had a head injury that was almost fully healed. They nodded politely and didn’t say they knew I was lying. They did not tell me what had brought Hila to Canada or how she had been scarred. I did not ask. Maude chatted about herself. She and her husband were retired civil servants. She talked about their various postings, Africa and the Middle East mostly. As she talked I looked around the room. The bookcase that filled one wall was full of beautiful African wood and stone carvings. Long women with graceful swooping lines, single heads, jumbles of limbs and heads. The rug under the coffee table was closely woven in shades of red and cream—Afghan probably—and the chest displaying a collection of pots and figurines was intricately carved.
Her husband’s last posting, she said, had been in Kabul. She herself had never been to that country, as spouses and families were not allowed to accompany their partners to Afghanistan. “Everyone tells me it’s very beautiful.”
“It is. The mountains, the sky.” I did not add the dust the dirt the destruction the desolation the poverty the legions of wounded and maimed.
Hila nodded. “There is a color to the sunset I will miss always.”
In my mind’s eye I saw the last Afghan sunset. The deep yellow and orange followed by the brilliant white flash. People screamed and men yelled. Flames licked the vehicle in front of ours and soldiers shouted panicked orders.
I blinked and realized that Maude was crouched on the floor, gathering shards of Royal Dolton off the lovely Afghan carpet.
Hila cradled my hand in her good one.
“I am so sorry,” I said. “I’ve broken your beautiful cup.”
“It’s just a cup.” Maude placed the pieces on the table. “Easily replaceable.”
“She has many such tea cups,” Hila said, releasing my hand. She gave me her soft twisted smile. The edge of her scarf fell back across her face.
Perhaps, but Royal Doulton wasn’t exactly cheap. I felt a flush of shame. Who was I to react so badly to mention of the beauty of Afghanistan? Hila’s tragedy was far greater. It was written all over her. On her face and her hand. That she was here, in the wilds of Prince Edward County, living with a retired couple of civil servants, meant she had no family.
For Afghanis family is everything.
We three women looked up at the sound of a door opening and the excited click of long nails on the wooden floor. Buddy ran into the room, as fast as his arthritic legs and twisted hip would allow. He headed straight for Maude, his long wet tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. She leapt to her feet before he could plant his muddy paws into her lap. “Look at you,” Maude laughed. The dog was filthy, covered in mud from the top of his half-chewed ear to the tips of his toes. “Were you swimming?”
“Something like that.” A man stood in the doorway to the sun room. He was dressed in a raincoat and stocking feet. He had a bushy gray beard, and wet salt and pepper hair curled around his collar. His eyes were large and blue, nestled in deep folds of permanently tanned skin. “There’s a puddle in the woods so wide and deep ducks are landing on it.” He smiled at me and held out his hand. “The famed Hannah Manning, I presume. Grant Harrison.”
I accepted the handshake without getting to my feet. “Not quite so famed.”
“But you are. I followed your reports from Afghanistan with much interest. Another time, I’ll tell you everything you got wrong. I was sorry to hear about the attack on you.”
I appreciated his candor. Most people said nothing about the IED explosion, and if they did they covered it in euphemism.
He glanced at his wife. The look full of a question.
“Will you get that dog rubbed down,” Maude said, “before we have to fumigate the house. I suspect he was rolling in something other than mud.”
Now that she mentioned it, a particularly acrid odor hung over Buddy.
Maude gave the dog a shove with her toe, and Grant slapped his thigh. “Come on, old boy. Let’s clean you up. Might even be able to find a treat in the kitchen.”
The dog ran off and the man followed. After giving his wife another meaningful look.
“More tea?” Maude asked.
“Do you have the time?” My watch had not been returned to me. Whether broken and tossed out or stolen, I did not know.
She checked. “Twelve forty-five. Lunch time. Will you join us, Hannah? I’ll put some sandwiches together.”
“No. Thank you. My sister’ll be back from making her deliveries and wondering where I am.” My parents had given me a cell phone as soon as I was released from hospital. So I could keep in touch, they said.
So they, and Joanne, could keep track of me, I knew.
I didn’t mind. They cared. Today, however, I didn’t have the phone with me.
“You can call the house from here,” Maude said.
I got to my feet. “Thank you, but no. Another time, perhaps.”
Hila also rose. She slipped her good hand into mine. Like most Westerners, I’m highly uncomfortable holding hands with anyone not a romantic interest. Strange how we confide personal intimacies that would shock most other peoples, yet we can’t bear to so much as touch hands. Hila’s small brown hand felt comfortable in mine.
We walked through the house to the front door. I hadn’t noticed anything when I came in, wrapped in my own grief and sorrow. It was a standard modern bungalow, nothing special, but the rooms were full of art collected in the couple’s travels. More Middle-Eastern rugs and cabinets, more African carvings. Some tiny, perfectly carved stone figures, some lumps of rock from which vague human or anima
l shapes were visible. The walls were covered with woven wall-hangings and paintings of baobab trees and the African veldt. Everything was mixed together: a charcoal sketch of a wide-lipped, white-eyed black man next to a pastel of a middle-eastern bazaar; an ebony statue of a cluster of faces on a small table of intricately carved wood. Yet it all fit together. A home full of memories of a well-travelled, much enjoyed life.
I left without seeing Grant or Buddy again.
***
I walked home in the rain, slowly, enjoying the moisture on my face.
Joanne was almost frantic when I came in.
“Where have you been?” she shouted as I sat on the bench and pulled off my muddy boots.
“Out for a walk.”
“It’s raining.”
“So. I can walk in the rain. I stopped in at the Harrisons’ for tea.”
“You didn’t take your phone.”
“I forgot.”
She threw up her hands. “I have a sick husband, and a farm to run, and employees to supervise, and customers to supply. I can’t be running after you as well.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Someone has to.”
“If it’s such a hardship, I can go back to the city, you know.” After the tea and kindness, and tears and sympathy at the Harrison home, I was suddenly angry. Even as I was saying the words I knew I was in the wrong. Joanne worried about me because she cared. My mom, my dad, even my doctors. They did care.
But I was tired of being fussed over. “I’ll pack my things and be out of here by dinner time. Call me a cab. No, never mind. That would be too much of an inconvenience. I’ll call the cab myself.”
All the fight left Joanne like air escaping from a popped balloon. “Don’t be silly. I don’t want you to leave.”
I, however, wasn’t ready to back down. It was a switch from our childhood roles, when my little sister would huff and puff and I’d run around in circles trying to make everything all right. “I’m going to Toronto. I’ll check into a hotel and see about getting the tenants out of my condo early. I’m sick and tired of this place anyway. You can only watch so much damned grass growing before going insane.” I marched into the living room, my head high.
Where I tripped over a plastic police car Charlie had abandoned. My head was so darned high, I didn’t see it in time. I fell forward with a cry. Joanne was too far behind me to grab me, and I landed hard. Pain shot through my right wrist, up my arm and into my head. Waking up Omar, who’d been blessedly absent all day. The black cloud began to move behind my eyes. I lay on the floor, face down. The wide-plank cedar floor, over a hundred years old, restored to its original glory, felt cool on my face.
I cried.
My sister dropped to her knees beside me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to leave. Are you hurt?”
Heavy footsteps pounded down the stairs. Jake crossed the room and knelt beside me. I felt his strong hands on my arms, checking for damage.
I rolled over. Jake and Joanne were looking down at me, eyes wide with worry. “Perhaps I should go and rest for a bit.” I said. “I feel a headache coming on.”
Jake lifted me to my feet. My wrist throbbed, but I was able to move it, and nothing seemed to be broken. Now awake, Omar was moving in. I imagined him rubbing his hands together in glee.
Joanne kicked the police car across the floor. “That boy,” she said, “I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”
I leaned against Jake and he led me upstairs. Joanne followed, murmuring sweet words of love and encouragement. When we got to my room, Jake left us. Joanne helped me pull off my T-shirt and jeans and slipped my nightgown over my shoulders. I climbed into bed while she went to the bathroom for a glass of water. She fed me my pills. She fluffed my pillow as I swallowed them. “When’s your doctor’s appointment? I’ll make sure Jake’s free to take you.”
“Sorry. I didn’t call. I will later.”
“I’ll do it. You rest.” She kissed my cheek and left me alone.
I didn’t sleep. Even through the haze of the pills, I know when Omar’s there, banging on my defenses, trying to break his way through. Jake and Joanne were in the kitchen, trying to keep their voices low, talking, arguing. About me, no doubt.
I heard the door slam. She’d gone outside. The house was quiet. Perhaps Jake had gone with her.
It was still raining, the light dim in my room. I liked this room. It suited me, suited my life at the moment. The rest of the house had been modernized, the children’s rooms, the master bedroom, the main floor bathroom. Not this room. Perhaps because it wasn’t used often and the time of a farm family to spend on decorating is brief. The wallpaper had been red once, but no longer. It had faded to a muddy brown, the exact color of dried blood, except behind the bedhead, protected from all light, where the color was as brilliant as might be found on the walls of a Victorian bordello. I knew that from the time my slipper got kicked under the bed and I was forced to crawl beneath in search.
The window frames were deep, two feet perhaps. They could have been used as window seats, but no one had laid down pretty, soft cushions. Against the wall opposite the bed was the remnant of a fireplace. Now exposed shelves containing a few unmemorable ornaments and generic, purchased photographs in cheap frames. The ceiling slanted sharply, no higher than three feet at the edges, and the modern overhead fan was so low the furniture had been arranged so no one need pass underneath it and risk cracking their skull.
The carpet was thin and beige, stained muddy brown in several places with what I did not bother to think about. The baseboards, cream paint badly chipped, were at least six inches high. The door to the room was old, the wooden planks cracked with age, not at all disguised by a fresh coat of white paint. So old that a keyhole, the kind for a heavy key that might jangle on a chain attached to its fellows, was set into the door. As in the door to the attic room, the keyhole had been painted over. I wondered at the sort of people who locked their bedroom doors. Fear of the servants, as Jake had said?
Before the first war, anyone who had a farmhouse with a second story, a parlor, more than one bedroom, and several fireplaces was likely to be prosperous enough to employ servants. Always someone lower on the social scale. And, until industry came to this area bringing good jobs and good wages, they would have needed work.
Any work.
Hadn’t Joanne said that even the first family here, the ones living in a one-room settler’s shack, had a maid?
I slipped out of bed and padded across the floor to the window. I’d never opened the blinds. Had never looked out. I pulled the blinds up now. My room was at the front of the house, in the eastern corner, looking across the driveway to the shop. I could see the roof of the old building, the beginning of the earthen path that led to the root cellar beneath. From this angle, I couldn’t see the wooden ramp into the cellar, or the door.
But I knew it was there.
Fog filled the yard. As I watched, the mist grew and the trappings of the farm began to recede. The chickens pecking about in the grass and weeds blurred into vague white and orange shapes. The big maple and oak trees faded. A car came down the road. It made no sound and its wheels did not seem to turn: it glided on the mist. I could not see anyone driving.
Wisps of fog curled around the base of the shop. Fog crossed the driveway and the lawn and reached the sides of the house. It drifted in front of my window. I reached out my hand. I placed my palm against hard cold glass.
I turned and walked out of my room. Down the stairs and out the front door. The wet grass was cold on my bare feet; the fog chilled me through my cotton nightgown. Chickens scattered at my approach. They weren’t white, but rusty red and black. A wagon came down the road, pulled by a horse. Mud splashed its flanks, and then it, and the road, was gone. The neat fields disappeared; nothing but tree stumps lay betw
een the house and the cloud-wrapped lake. The forest was thick and dark and old.
I slid between the bushes at the top of the ramp. No foul stench assaulted me. I walked down the ramp. I opened the door. I did not bother trying to turn on the light.
Fabric rustled, and I smelled tobacco and woodsmoke and unwashed clothes.
“Your duty here is to the children,” the man’s voice said.
“I do not need you to lecture me on duty,” the woman replied. “I have lost everything because of duty.” She moved, and light that came from I know not where lit up her face. She was pale with a mass of black hair tied high on her head. Her neck was long and her eyes flashed green fire.
***
April 19, 1786
The last of the potatoes. A month, at least, until the first of the vegetables would be ready for harvesting. She sighed and shifted sand, fingers digging for the tubers, disappointed at how few potatoes remained. She put them into the folds of her apron, cradled them to her chest and walked in a half-crouch to the door. The candle stub on the shelf flickered in the stale, confined air. She let out a gentle breath, and the flame was extinguished. She stepped into the welcome spring air.
Maggie had come to pride herself on her streak of practical common sense. But something about the root cellar…Something that caused the hairs on the back of her neck and on her arms to tingle and rise. She tried to imagine Hamish and how he’d laugh at her fears and tease them away. She closed her eyes at the memory, and knew she was being foolish to fear the dark damp earth.
When she opened her eyes, he was watching her.
“Don’t stand around daydreaming. There’s work to be done, you know.”
“I am well aware of that, Nathanial. Thank you.”
He bit back a retort. “Maria isn’t well. She’s gone to lie down. Make her a cup of tea, will you?”
