Secrets

by Marthe Jocelyn

  The train slowed, whistle hallooing, bell clanging, steam billowing past her window. She had her coat on before the conductor told her this was her stop.

  On her second afternoon at the farm, the doorbell rang.

  “Now who in the world …?” Aunt Lydia got to the door before Corny and Ros. She had her sewing circle ladies in the parlor. No one else was expected. The village doctor stood in the open porch, bending away from the wind, clamping his hat to his head. His car idled in the laneway.

  “Your aunt Nell’s in bad shape, Lydia,” he said, stepping inside and removing his hat. “Took a weak turn in the night. They got a neighbor to call me and I was out to see her early this morning.” He shook his head. “She’s not good.”

  He and Aunt Lydia exchanged a knowing glance. “I thought, when you go out, you could take her something for pain.” He handed Lydia a brown bottle with a prescription label on it.

  “Oh, dear, I’ve got the ladies here and John’s away.”

  The doctor looked at Corny. “The lad could take it, if he bundles up. I’d go again myself, but I’ve an office fall of patients.”

  Corny stepped forward, his chest rising. The doctor looked him squarely in the eye. “And don’t do anything to rile poor Lucy. She knows something’s up.”

  “He won’t,” Lydia called after him. “He’s good with her.” She closed the door.

  “May I go, too?” Ros asked. She felt redness creep up the sides of her neck, remembering her promise. She could hear the ladies in the parlor, someone talking, a little burst of laughter.

  Aunt Lydia was preoccupied. “I’ll make up a basket,” she said. “Christmas cake and some beef tea.”

  “May I?”

  “I think not.” She frowned as if she, too, remembered something.

  “But there’s nothing else to do.” Rosalind followed her into the kitchen, where her aunt hurriedly lined a four-quart basket with a tea towel. Corny was putting his coat on. More laughter from the parlor.

  “Please?” She had a way of pleading with her dark eyes that was irresistible.

  Her aunt looked at her and sighed. “Oh, I guess so. You can wait outside while Cornelius takes the basket in. You’re to come straight back, both of you. You’re not to stay, son, with your great-aunt Nell so sick.” She handed him the basket.

  Excited, Rosalind quickly thrust her arms into her coat and pulled her tam on over her fair hair, down over her ears. Something was going to happen. She didn’t know why, she didn’t know what, but it gave her a rushing feeling in her chest.

  “Wait up!” she called to Corny, as the door slammed behind her. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. Her mother had forbidden her to go into the house, and so she wouldn’t.

  “Let’s take a shortcut,” she said, when she’d caught up to Corny.

  “How do you know the shortcut?” The earflaps on his hat were tied under his chin, giving him a half-strangled look.

  Ros shrugged. “Just a guess.” She led him up a snowy lane, into a grove of trees.

  “You’ve never even visited them before,” he said.

  “I know. Here, I’ll carry the basket for a while.”

  Soon there were tree trunks on all sides, their bare branches groaning in the wind. “I’d better lead the way,” Corny said. “You’ll get us lost.”

  She followed for a while, lugging the basket, impatient. She thought that if they veered to the left, they’d get there faster. She got ahead of him, but he skirted her, wanting to be the leader. They jockeyed for position. She pushed him aside and, without meaning to, knocked him face first into a low-hanging bough.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Now look what you did!” Blood ran from his nose over his upper lip, and he spat it out.

  “Hold snow up to it.” She felt badly.

  Their progress was slowed by Corny scooping up snow every few minutes, only to throw it down when it got too cold on his nose. Behind them gleamed a red-spotted trail of frozen clots.

  They were protected from the wind by the dense bush, but the cold bit through Ros’s mitts. At last they reached a clearing and saw, ahead of them, the shore of a frozen lake. On the far side huddled a log house, smoke painted in the air above its chimney.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Maybe.” Corny looked sideways at her. “How come you know so much?”

  She shrugged, surprised herself. “Just guessing.”

  The ice beckoned, blue-black where the wind had swept it bare of snow. They bounded to the edge to test its strength.

  “You go first,” Corny said.

  “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.” At the very edge, the ice was lacy with cracks. Ros stepped out and the ice held. She dug with her heel, and it held. She jumped on it. A resounding crack boomed across the entire lake, sending little shock waves of sound, causing a rumble in the lake’s watery underbelly. They both screamed, but the ice held.

  “Go out a little farther,” Corny said.

  Oh, sure. “If I go through, you have to save me.”

  “I will.”

  She wouldn’t go through. Still, she imagined the scene, her arms flailing in icy water, Corny running back and forth onshore, barking ideas: Grab hold of something. Keep your head up. She smiled, testing herself against the ice’s hidden power.

  By the time she was halfway across, Corny joined her. They ran over hillocks of snow and slid on the windswept patches of ice, pausing to exclaim at a leaf frozen in midswirl, and a frog, embedded, limbs outstretched in immortal breaststroke. The lake groaned in vain. They skipped ashore on the other side and heard its empty gulp.

  “I hope we don’t run into Lucy,” Corny said.

  “Who’s Lucy?”

  “She lives with the old aunts, but we’re not supposed to talk about her in public. She’s batty.”

  “I’m not public,” she said. “What does she look like?”

  “The hind end of a pig.”

  “What’s so batty about her?”

  “She rocks back and forth like a rocking horse, and she keeps patting her mouth as if she can’t remember what she was going to say.”

  “Is she old?”

  “Don’t know. Looks old, but I think she’s young. Mother says she’s smart and dumb at the same time. Born that way. The aunts take care of her because they never want her put in an asylum, or any place like that.”

  They legged it over the snowbank bordering the road and up the lane to the side of the house, keeping an eye out for Lucy. In spite of the cold, Rosalind felt sweat on her upper lip. “I’ll wait out here for you,” she said.

  Corny took the basket and vanished into a dark shed-like entry. She waited, stamping her freezing feet. A sound drew her to a wall of firewood stacked to the left of the entry. Nothing. She put her hands in her pockets. Again, the whispery sound. A mouse, she decided.

  “Ssss,” it said.

  She wanted to believe it was a mouse, even a snake, cold as it was. But her heart, thumping, told her it was human.

  “Ssss.”

  Her skin tingled as if she were about to touch a hot burner. She whirled suddenly. Behind her stood a slack-lipped woman in a ragged fur coat. She clutched a stick of wood as though it were a baseball bat aimed at Rosalind’s head. Ros stopped breathing, her legs soupy.

  “Now, that’ll do, Lucy!” A stump of an old woman appeared from the darkness of the doorway. “She won’t hurt you, young lady. She likes to tease. Lucy, you get in here right this minute. You, come in too, out of the cold. Sure it’s not a day to be out.”

  Lucy scuttled sideways into the house, shielding her backside from the old woman whose hand was raised in a threat. Helpless with fear, Rosalind allowed herself to be yanked in after her.

  The large kitchen was warm and pungent with wood-smoke and spices. Ros took her eyes off the old woman long enough to notice a narrow staircase running up one wall of the room. Lucy was nowhere in sight. Corny sat at a table, a plate in front of him, his
mouth crammed full of gingery-smelling cake. The woman sat Rosalind down across from Corny. He shrugged helplessly.

  Ros watched the old hag bustle about the stove, creaking its door open, bending to look in. Ros wrapped her arms around herself, aware of how skinny she was beneath her coat. Had the old woman been sizing her up? Had she stumbled into some kind of fairy tale?

  “Need some meat on those bones, missy,” the woman said. She shoved more wood in the stove. A big pot of water steamed on top. She busied herself over the basket they’d brought, taking out each item, squinting at it with one eye.

  “What’s this? Medicine, is it?”

  “The doctor sent it,” Corny said.

  She sat down on the chair next to Rosalind and offered the plate of gingerbread. “No, thanks,” Ros murmured, leaning as far away from her as possible. She shouldn’t have come. She should get up and leave.

  The old woman grinned, exposing a perfect row of teeth, lowers only. “Want some coffee?”

  “Mmp!” Ros’s lips were pressed tight. She pushed her fair hair out of her eyes and back under her tam. Except for the pounding of her heart, they sat in silence while Corny wedged more cake into his face. She felt trapped in some other world.

  The woman reached for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on a shelf beside the stove and put them on. She inspected Rosalind.

  “So. The young lad tells me you belong to my niece Adele, her youngest. I’m your great-aunt Eileen. Your sisters are well?” The words sounded chewed. Rosalind nodded. “All still at home?”

  “Yes,” Rosalind managed, forgetting about Marietta at university.

  “Your mother had six sisters, too, did you know that? And her the youngest.”

  “I only have five,” said Ros.

  Eileen wheezed out a laugh. “We were there at your christening, Nell and me. Up and about then, Nell was. You were done late, a toddler. How old are you, now?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Time you were told,” she said. “May never come a better chance with Nell in the state she’s in, and Lord only knows how long she’ll last.” She pocketed the bottle of medicine. “Come along then, girl.”

  With both hands on Rosalind’s shoulders, she pitched her out of the chair, forcing her to her feet.

  White with fear, Rosalind tried to clutch at Corny, but he shrank away. “Just go,” he said. “They won’t hurt you if you act polite.”

  Still grasping her shoulders Eileen tried to escort Ros from the kitchen, but she balked, wriggling to get free.

  “Ssss!” she heard then. Upstairs, leaning over the banister, Lucy’s pug-nosed face threatened from under her heavy brow. She made a move to come down the stairs.

  Ros needed no further encouragement. She went with Eileen through the dimly lit passage and into a parlor reeking of coal oil and mothballs. Great-Aunt Nell’s bedroom was behind the parlor.

  A square bed was anchored at the corners by spooled posts. On the bedside table, propped against a Bible, an orange jaw of false uppers grinned malignantly – the other half of Eileen’s teeth. In the bed lay a tissue-paper skeleton.

  “She doesn’t look it, but she’s awake,” Eileen said. “Nell!” she shouted, “Adele’s girl is here. The youngest.”

  The old woman opened one rheumy eye and then the other. Rosalind tried to back away.

  “She won’t bite you.” Eileen’s nudging fingers urged her closer.

  “Are you the one, then?” Nell whispered. “Eileen, fetch me the spectacles.” Eileen took them off her own face and wrapped them around her sister’s wispy skull, curving them securely around her ears. Nell’s eyes, immense now, focused on Rosalind.

  “Lydia’s sent you some potion the doctor wants you to have.” Eileen poured a dose into a small glass on the bedside table, raised her sister’s head, and held the glass to her lips. Nell made a sour face, but swallowed it.

  “You’ll be wanting the teeth,” Eileen shouted, setting the medicine glass down.

  Ros watched in horror as the bedridden old woman reached out, clawed the bedside table, contacted the teeth, and, with an immense effort, stretched her lips out of the way to allow her pale upper gums to receive the choppers. Ros tried to back out of range, but Eileen gripped her firmly.

  Nell wheezed, “They told me … better not to mention it. Your mother said, I don’t want her told … oh, it was a while ago now.” The old woman closed her eyes.

  Ros allowed herself to breathe, hoping she’d drifted off to sleep. Or died.

  But Nell’s eyes opened again. “Has it started, then?”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Do you see … patterns in things? Do you get a feeling for the future?”

  “No!” Ros said sullenly. Her mother had been right; this was no fit place to be. The smell of the old woman’s breath made her queasy. Under the bed she had noticed a chamber pot. Even with its lid on, she could smell that, too.

  Eileen prodded her. “Speak nicely, girl, and speak up. Nell’s hard-of-hearing.”

  “No, I don’t!” Ros hollered.

  Nell’s eyes bore into hers. “Little liar! I can see by your face it’s been given to you. You’ve the gift, just as my mother had. You are your great-grandmother all over again.”

  Ros stood rooted, repulsed, enthralled. Too hot, she undid her coat.

  Eileen hissed in her ear, “She’s been wanting to tell you about our mother, your great-grandmother, so you listen. Practicing it for years, just for you.”

  Why me? she wanted to say. Her shoulders sagged. She listened as the old woman’s voice wheezed over sentences repeated so often they had the cadence of a chant.

  “She was a comfort to all who knew her,” Nell rasped. “Come from far and wide … Sir John A. himself, even … and kept herself and all us youngsters by telling people’s fortunes … twenty-five cents a fortune, I believe it was. More for lost objects. And solved a murder, so she did … and went to watch the man hang.”

  The hook was baited; Ros listened.

  Sucking her teeth tightly into her gum, Nell said, “Irish she was, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. And a proud man was her father, an officer in the British Army.” Perhaps it was the effect of the medicine, but Nell’s voice flowed now, like a spill of satin ribbon.

  “As the child grew, she was deemed prettier than all her sisters, with eyes that would catch you and hold you and probe you. In all of Ireland, there was no match for the girl in beauty and wisdom. And her wisdom was uncanny and her mother feared for her, for she had the gift of foresight, which could bring her much pain.

  “And fair of hair she was with coal black eyes and she danced every dance at all the balls. And it happened, at last, that she danced her way into the heart of a lowly young sergeant in her father’s company.” Nell moistened her lips with her tongue. “But her father forbade the marriage, and so it came about that the two eloped to Canada, and my poor mother was cut off from the family who had loved and nurtured her.” The old woman’s voice fell silent.

  “Is that the end?” Ros felt cheated. Surely there was more. Nell’s breath came in long snores, as if she had fallen asleep. Timidly, Ros reached out and touched her shoulder. With a shuddering sigh, Nell again took up the tale.

  “At length my mother arrived on the shores of this very lake and made her home in a humble log house. And time passed, and soon it became known that my mother possessed powers beyond all understanding. And oh, they came from far and wide. When to plant the crops, they asked her, where to find lost items, and what would be the sex of their unborn child.

  “And my father soon tired of the visitors and of his wife’s gallivanting about the neighborhood and, although he forbade her to continue, he could not control her ways. He was not a man to be guided by a woman, and so he left her, and all of us children. He was a good-hearted man, but sorely tried.

  “And ’twas no time at all before word got round that our mother could read teacups with the skill of the Delphic Oracle, as she came to be cal
led. And I’d see how she’d swirl the teapot and give the leaves a good shake-up. And then must her fortune-seeker pour out a cup and carefully return the tea to the pot, making sure the leaves remained behind in the cup. ‘Now turn it over,’ she’d say, ’and twirl it.’ And at last she’d pick up the cup and read it.

  “And once, I recall, she turned the cup back over. A young girl sat before her. I saw my mother’s face cloud. Her eyes, always bright as jet, grew dull; she didn’t speak. At length, she handed the girl back her coin and said, ‘I do not see a future in your cup.’ And the girl looked down all sorrowful and embarrassed, as if she’d done a wrong thing, and my mother accompanied the girl to her waiting buggy and told the driver, ’Take the long road home, lad.’ But he laughed and my mother stood in the road and watched them drive off.

  “And on their way back home, less than an hour later, the young girl was thrown from the buggy and killed in an instant, for the horses took fright from a passing train.”

  Great-Aunt Nell’s lips smacked closed and then open as she tried to moisten them with her tongue.

  Ros waited, unable to take her eyes off the old woman’s face.

  Nell took a long breath. “And so it came about that my mother repeated to all those awaiting their turns, ‘I can see no future.’ And sadly she went back into the house and admitted no one else for many days to come.”

  Rosalind felt a chill and shivered. “And then what?”

  Nell turned toward her; surprised. “Eh?”

  “Wh-what happened next?”

  Nell fixed her eyes on Rosalind’s. “There was some called her witch. They used to burn witches.” Her labored breathing filled the room.

  Ros’s voice was shrill with fear. “And was she?”

  Nell wheezed, “And they’d call her in for the birthing of babies. And for the laying out of the dead.”

  “Was she?” Rosalind said, louder.