Children of the Day

by Sandra Birdsell

  Sara had been caught by the poem’s illustration as she went by the café window, that of a woman stretched out on a lounge, a book opened on her lap, and a man sitting beside her on a chair, holding her hand. Curious and then mesmerized, while at the same time taken aback. She’d attended the weddings of couples who hadn’t sat near to one another in church, not even after their announced engagement. Once they were married, they might as well have not sat together, for the space between them.

  And why would he rather be the gayest mortal, if at the same time he wanted to be a lucky dog? The poem didn’t make any sense. Or else it was the language and its double meanings that eluded her.

  I would be the gayest mortal, Mrs. Ashburn corrected gently, suggesting that Sara had made an error when she’d copied down the poem.

  Sara suspected the errands were a test of whether or not she would prove to be both intrepid and prudent, whether or not she would return with the correct amount of change. Kornelius says to tell you that the lady of the house is finding out if you can go fetch, Katy had written in a letter.

  Katy had also written that Kornelius would come at Easter to take her to the farm. The news of his pending arrival made Sara feel as though she’d been bedridden for months and now her illness was over. She was hungry to talk her way out of her loneliness, to stand beside him and know who she was. But the idea of Kornelius was unlike the real man who appeared in the foyer to wait for her, the hem of his dark coat streaked with mud. He hadn’t removed his overshoes, and the carpet around him was smeared with clay footprints. Kornelius had been known in the old country as The Wild One, for daring to go against the grain of common Mennonite practices and beliefs. Canada had turned him shrewd, and less willing to tip the boat of convention.

  He nodded a curt greeting, as if preoccupied. He seemed as oblivious as always to the size and opulence of the Ashburn house, and once again had used the front entrance despite Mrs. Ashburn having suggested that in the future he might want to come round the back. He jammed his hat on his head, impatient to leave, and was already turning to the door when Mrs. Ashburn came into the foyer.

  She said, Now you take good care of our Sara. And bring her back, you hear? Her voice trailed off as she noticed the mud on the carpet. She gave Kornelius an envelope containing Sara’s wages, minus the small weekly allowance she paid Sara directly, which was the agreement. As he took the envelope, Sara thought he was rougher-hewn than she remembered, his wrists chapped and his knuckles reddened and enlarged.

  She went to the back door, where she’d put her satchel, and met up with Kornelius around the front, going on ahead of him over the crusted and frozen slush, the satchel cumbersome with the gifts she’d purchased for Katy’s children. Although Kornelius was swift to assist Katy with a heavy burden, he didn’t offer to carry Sara’s bag and she didn’t expect him to. Tree branches along the crescent were glazed in ice, and clacked in the wind as she looked up and down the street for Kornelius’s car, a dark blue Plymouth, and saw instead a new Packard, its chrome fenders and sides splattered with the mud of country roads. Kornelius came up beside her and clapped her on the shoulder. Well, what do you think? he said. I thought a visit to Buckingham Palace deserved only the best. His grin was sarcastic.

  On the way to the farm, several times they nearly slid into a water-filled ditch, Kornelius becoming the old-country Kornelius, whooping loudly and relishing the danger. Man oh man, he exclaimed with pleasure, while Sara feared they would never reach the farm. Not so fast, not so fast, she pleaded, but no, he told her, speed was necessary. It was the only way to drive when the roads were soft. He’d no sooner spoken when the car fishtailed out of the deep ruts and they found themselves stuck up to the fenders in Red River gumbo.

  She watched him plod down a lane towards a barn in search of someone to come to their assistance. Her heart raced and she clenched her fists as she prayed to be spared.

  Spared from what? She didn’t know. She was old enough to realize that it was unlikely that she would spend Easter in the car, mired in the mud. But her bowels churned as she waited to be rescued, and when at last Kornelius returned with two men, the sudden release of tension made her want to sleep.

  They soon pushed the car out of the muck and back into the deep ruts, which eventually led them to the farm and to Katy, who came running to meet them, a kerchief tied over her head and the muddy lane sucking at her rubber boots. To meet Kornelius, Sara assumed, and was surprised when it was her door Katy wrenched open, and herself Katy engulfed in a fierce embrace.

  You’re home at last, Katy said. And for a brief moment, Sara was home. She leaned into her sister’s body, inhaled the odour of nutmeg in the skin of her neck and remembered that, for a time, home had been Katy’s body, the curve of her back, their spooning together wherever they slept. Then Katy held her at arm’s length to take all of her in, joy streaming in tears down her face. Kornelius called from the car, Say, you two, there’s enough water around here without you adding to it. Sara stiffened and clarified, It’s not me, I’m not crying.

  Moments later she wandered through the rooms of the farmhouse, looking for changes and finding none. Her feeling that she was home vanished. What little furniture Katy possessed, arranged around the walls of the rooms, made the house feel grudging and cold, the only adornments being the cuckoo clock that had once hung on a wall in Kornelius’s house in Russia, and a hand-painted porcelain pitcher belonging to her dead grandmother, its pale roses gleaming in the dimness of a corner shelf.

  Later in the day, Sara went walking on the land with Annie, and Susan and Jake, a niece and nephew who ran on ahead towards a dilapidated log cabin that Kornelius had inherited when he had purchased the land, and for a time had used as a pigpen. Its stone hearth had been smashed apart by the previous owners, the stones piled in a heap that Katy’s children raced to meet, the first to climb to the top becoming the King of the Castle. The log cabin was built to last, Kornelius had said, in admiration. The previous owners had likely tried to bring it down and failed. It brought to Sara’s mind the houses they’d left behind in the old country. She sometimes wondered who might now be living in her grandparents’ large and solidly built house.

  Finally, during the Easter church service, Sara felt surrounded and comforted again, the familiar people around her being like a feather tick she wanted to sink into, as soft and giving as her grandmother’s feather bedding, which was now packed in a trunk in the farmhouse attic. When her grandfather had died, Katy had sent Sara to sleep with her grandmother to ease her loss. Sara had forgotten that she’d once feared the feather tick—feared that her grandmother’s movement during the night might cause her to sink too deeply into it and suffocate.

  Later that evening, Annie gathered Katy’s children to be bathed and put to bed. During their four months of separation, Annie had grown suddenly from a shy twelve-year-old girl to a thirteen-year-old woman quietly pleased about her achievements at school. Katy was her usual bustling self. Although she was prematurely grey-haired, she hadn’t turned sour, unlike many of the women they knew who had come from the same town as they had, who had passed through similar circumstances and fled Russia in the same manner. Rather, Katy remained young-looking, much more so than Kornelius.

  Come, let’s you and I have a good visit at last, Katy said, leading the way into the dining room.

  Sara joined her at the table. A bowl of rye wheat, grown tall, was placed at its centre, next to a paska bread on a plate with coloured eggs arranged around its base—Easter traditions Katy adhered to. What was life like in Russia? The cook’s question was on Sara’s lips and she remembered her own unsatisfying reply.

  She remembered their last Easter in the old country, when, for the last time, they visited what was known as the Taras Bulbas cave, after the famous story by Gogol. Sara, Katy and Annie, Kornelius, her spent and broken-hearted grandparents; a red-haired aunt, an uncle and their three children, whom Sara would never again see in this world; they were like a string of
obsidian beads being drawn across a trestle bridge. The sky was a grey-blue, and as distant as the Dnieper River appeared to be, one hundred and fifty feet below them. Her grandmother stopped on the bridge to peer down at the undulating currents and whispered, This is where those two poor young men were made to jump. She hadn’t known the young martyrs, but their names were silver spoons she constantly polished.

  When they had crossed the river and climbed an outcrop of rock to the cave, they crawled inside it and arranged themselves in a circle. Faith is the victory, they sang, their voices as patched, threadbare and mismatched as their clothing. Their hymn resounded within the confines of the ochre-coloured cave, their teetering song growing harmonious and strong with conviction, while Sara covered her ears and shut her eyes against the sight of tears coursing down her elders’ faces.

  She clearly remembered that last Easter in the old country, and she was beginning to recall their life on the estate.

  Your letters haven’t told me much about what it’s like working for the Ashburn’s, Katy said.

  Katy’s question immediately brought to Sara’s mind the dressing table; the memory she had of being a child and sitting at a similar table; the chiming of the mantel clock in the Ashburn house, similar to her family’s clock striking the hour while moonlight fell across floorboards the colour of butter.

  It’s like being in our house. The Ashburn house is like our old house. The one we lived in when we lived on the Sudermann estate, Sara said, the words coming out in such a gush that she realized how much she’d been wanting to say them.

  Phfft! Katy said, after a moment of startled silence, as though she needed to clear the air of what Sara had said. You were five years old when we left the estate. Obviously you don’t remember much, or you’d know that our father was a poor man. He was a worker for the Sudermanns. He didn’t have even an acre of land to call his own. The house we lived in wasn’t as good as this one.

  Katy got up and went over to a window that looked across the yard to the barn. Kornelius walked towards the barn, a lantern swinging at his side. Sara Vogt, get your nose out of the air for once, Katy said to the window.

  Yes, accuse me, Sara thought, her sister’s unfairness making her throat tighten. Make me feel in the wrong for wanting to know.

  There was a sound, and both Sara and Katy turned to see Annie in the doorway looking at them, her cheeks flushed with anxiety. She gestured to Sara to come with her. You never said what you thought of our room, she said. Meaning the bowl of crocuses she’d set on the apple box beside their bed, the new cover she’d made for their quilt during Sara’s absence.

  Our room, Sara thought, as she got up from the table, hooked her arm through Annie’s and went upstairs to at last dig out the gifts she had brought, having waited until the end of Easter Sunday, as Katy wished, so as not to distract the children from the reason why they celebrated Easter. Our room. Our room in Kornelius’s house. As much as the barn and outbuildings belonged to Kornelius, so did the house. She’d come upon the envelope containing her wages tucked alongside a stack of plates in the cupboard when cleaning up, her contribution to Kornelius for what he’d provided.

  The following morning, when Sara was to return to Winnipeg, Katy surprised Kornelius and her sister by insisting on accompanying them. It was a two-hour trip back along the same deeply rutted road, and then a gravel road that followed the course of the Red River. Kornelius stopped after a time, the car’s engine idling as he looked out across the land. You see that? He indicated a path cut through a stand of trees. That land belongs to me now, he said. He had recently purchased a strip farm from a Frenchy, a father of six girls and no sons. The man had been crippled by a falling tree, and was no longer able to farm. Someday I’ll build you a castle there, eh, Mother? he said to Katy. Kornelius would harvest those trees and build Katy the kind of house he had once owned in Russia, a large A-frame that looked out for miles across the prairie in all directions.

  Sara watched them from the back seat, thinking that Katy was broad-shouldered to the point of looking clumsy unless she held one of her children in her arms or on her lap. Then she softened, her eyes rising to meet Sara’s, saying, See this? This is what tenderness looks like from the outside. The outdated dark hat she wore aged her. How like Kornelius, Katy had become much like Kornelius, calculating, choosing her words carefully for fear that she might reveal something her husband had cautioned her not to speak about. Plans for their future, a new purchase that might incite envy in fellow Mennonites, or raise questions as to how he could afford to buy more land, a new car, when the same rain and hail fell on his crops as on the others’, the same pestilence of grasshoppers.

  When the broad city streets began opening up before them, Sara recognized several buildings along the route to Crescent Road. But although much of what she saw had become familiar, she didn’t feel as though she was being taken home. Neither here nor there, Sara thought, a favourite saying of Irene’s. Not here, not there, but somewhere in between. Somewhere in between the city of Winnipeg and Kornelius’s farm was a place that Sara might someday begin to call home.

  Katy grew increasingly silent as they drove along the wide crescent, passing by horse-drawn delivery wagons, her eyes taking in the houses and drawing private conclusions. Well, yes, she said, as though the spectacle confirmed a long-held suspicion. Later, her disapproving eyes swept around Sara’s small room on the third floor, noting the clutter of clothing her sister had failed to put away, several books lying face down on her bed, the wardrobe door open, revealing clothes hanging askew.

  I didn’t teach you this. You know better, Katy scolded, as she began picking up the clothing, folding it, putting it into drawers, while Sara sat on the bed watching, amazed as always at how swiftly her sister could make order out of disorder.

  How do you spend your free days? Katy asked, opening and closing doors with more energy than necessary, hangers clacking in the wardrobe as she rearranged garments. Then she sat down beside Sara on the bed, opened her purse and took out a slip of paper with a woman’s name, address and telephone number.

  Sara recognized the name. It was the person who had recommended the job and been present during the interview with Emily Ashburn. Frieda Wiens, a middle-aged childless woman who, along with her husband, had started a mission in a boarding house on William Avenue, the Home Away from Home Club, a meeting place for Mennonite girls who’d come in from the country to work for the wealthy. She’d invited Sara to attend the weekly meetings, and when Sara made the excuse that she didn’t know her way around the city, had offered to send someone to fetch her. Not yet, Sara had said. Not now. She hadn’t persuaded Katy that she was ready to take up working in the city in order to be put back where she had come from.

  You need the company of other Christian girls, Katy said now. When it appeared Sara would object, she insisted. Either you go, Sara, or we’ll have no choice but to bring you home.

  Which meant that Sara would be sent down the road to work on the neighbouring farm. She’d been allowed two years in the one-room schoolhouse and then, at twelve years old, had been sent to work for Low-German-speaking Mennonites, Canadieres, as they referred to themselves, who had immigrated near the turn of the century and were stubbornly entrenched in their backward ways. Katy had understood that Sara would be employed as kitchen help, or caring for children, not hoeing sugar beets or stooking hay in the fields during harvest. The sight of Sara’s blistered hands had struck Katy with remorse, which she stifled as she smeared them with Vaseline, bound them and sent her back to the fields wearing a pair of Kornelius’s work gloves.

  All of the following summer, Sara reluctantly attended the weekly meeting of the Home Away from Home Club, slipping away as soon as possible without risking offending the host or raising questions among the twenty or so young women. She preferred the solitude of her cozy third-floor room, where she watched the constant flotilla of boats and canoes going up and down the Assiniboine River, the women wearing broad-brimme
d hats and muted Sunday finery while the men worked the oars. The river, in late afternoon, looked like milky amber.

  She lay awake in the sweltering third-floor room, wondering about the writers of the notes that were wedged between the wall and the baseboard. What drove the girls to leave the messages, what did they hope to gain? She knew that Katy had written down her thoughts in a notebook—Kornelius is going to ask me to marry him, I’m certain. My dear Kornelius—she’d written, and later she had spoken those words aloud in her and Kornelius’s curtained-off room. Sara had tried to shut out her whispering, their muffled laughter, the sound of movement in bed.

  My heart belongs to Robert. Had the writer brought Robert up the back stairs to this room? Had they lain together perhaps, he on top of the girl, just as Kornelius had been lying on Katy when Sara had entered their room and demanded to know, What are you doing? What was Kornelius doing to Katy that made her cry out?

  Sara wondered the same now, as she touched herself, felt her slipperiness and heat. She wanted to experience, for once, what she sometimes experienced in dreams, an agony of pleasure that roused her from sleep. She put a finger into herself, felt her own pebbly insides, which was what Kornelius must feel when he put his sex into Katy. Her fingers smelled yeasty and the scent was comforting, and she fell asleep with them curled beneath her nose.

  She awoke hours later to the heat of the room, the dim light of early morning beginning to creep along the river. She swept her nightgown over her head and lay in the sudden coolness, her skin prickling with the sensation of air. She let her knees fall outwards, felt the air cool against her wetness and wanted something to be there, to touch her. Kornelius, she said, her fingers pressing and working, the other hand muffling the sound of an ensuing moan.

  On Saturday afternoons she was free to go walking along the crescent as far as the gates to City Park, where she stood for moments, looking at the people strolling along the pathways, at the picnics taking place beneath a canopy of canvas, before returning to her room. Then she began to venture through the gates, to walk among the trees, each time going farther, drawn by the sunlight moving on the surface of the river, but always heeding Mrs. Ashburn’s advice not to stray from the paths.