Girl Runner (8 page)

My throat aches, my mouth gummy and dry.

“I’m going to the house,” I say hoarsely, and he nods his head, once, twice, and offers his focus to the plank he has been honing. I won’t consider how many times my father has undertaken this task, how many times he has done what he can to help his own child rest easy in death as in life. How proud he is of the smoothness of the boards he has worked. How it is all he can offer, now. I won’t let myself think of it, or try to understand.

The sight of those boards fills me with raw terror.

I come quietly through the summer kitchen. I pour a glass of water from the blue glass pitcher Mother keeps on the counter, and I drink the water down in great gulps, refilling the glass and drinking again. The sink is full of this morning’s dirty dishes. I can’t imagine ever caring enough to wash them clean. I stand over the sink and splash water on my face. Rivulets track down my arms, little streams rimmed with mud. I don’t see George anywhere about, and I am relieved, though I can’t think why. Only that I do not want to see him. I do not want to see anyone, except for Fannie.

She will be upstairs.

The house is so very quiet, as if everyone has gone to sleep in the middle of the day. I creep up the back stairs into the servants’ quarters, tiny rooms over the kitchen and dining room that our family doesn’t use, as we have no servants. My grandfather built this house with Father’s help, and I don’t think he kept servants or even a housemaid, so the rooms’ inclusion in the design make no sense, and yet the rooms exist. I walk the narrow, dimly lit hall and open the door that separates these cramped quarters from our own bedrooms, which are vast by comparison, and bright, the windows wide, the bumpy plaster splashed with whitewash.

I hear the low voices of my sisters and my mother, and I follow their gentle pull. They hush as I come to the doorway and stop. At first, I can’t bring myself to look directly at Fannie, resting on her back in her bed. But then I can’t stop looking. Her eyes are closed. I wonder if my mother has closed them, or is this how Fannie died? How does a person die? Is it like a window gone dark, shuttered? Does a person keep looking at this world until the very last second of life, trying to take it in and understand it at last, or simply to hold it, to attend to it, to love it? Or does a person stare in dreadful panic at all she is losing?

I see that my mother is the only one who is touching Fannie. Olive and Cora stand at attention beside the window, shadows in the hot sunlight.

“Don’t come near,” my mother says. “You must not get sick.” She is rinsing a cloth in a basin and she smoothes it over Fannie’s face, and around behind her ears, lifting her head with the hair flowing loose and damp all over the pillow so that she can wash the back of Fannie’s neck.

“I went for the doctor,” I whisper because anything louder seems a disturbance.

“Thank you, Aggie, but he’s been and gone. There was nothing he could do but hammer up the quarantine papers.”

I am remembering something from my spent passage. I am remembering the white of hundreds of spring flowers, the spread of trilliums under the canopy of new leaves. Here it is, nearly June. Here is this terrifying flu that kills at random, stealing the healthiest, the most vigorous, as well as those who might be expected to succumb. Here is Fannie, aged twenty-three years, two months, and three days.

I stand in the doorway, my sisters by the window, I don’t know for how long. For however long it takes to wash a body, and to dress it in clean underclothes and a fresh frock, and to brush and arrange its tangled hair, and to smooth its brow.

And then a body is buried quickly, and deep, laid inside wood planed soft as silk.

GEORGE SAYS
I’m only half his sister, not his full, not like Fannie was.

“Fannie is sister enough for me!” It has been two months since Fannie’s stone was laid in our graveyard, but I can’t bring myself to use the past tense.

“But it’s better this way. This way, I can kiss you.” George nudges me in the ribs. I don’t believe he’d actually try to kiss me, but all the same I wish he wouldn’t joke about it.

There are things I don’t like about George. Have they always been part of him, drawn suddenly to the surface by Fannie’s absence? How can I not have noticed? I observe him quietly, trying to puzzle it out. Why do I care so much what he thinks of me?

“What are you staring at, Aggie?” he says, catching me.

“Nothing.”

We’re sitting on the barn roof looking out over the farm. Father’s magnificent flight of stairs, finished in the winter months, leads directly into the belly of the steeplelike windmill. Father does not know, but inside the windmill, where the stairs end, George has loosened several boards so that he and I can climb directly onto the barn’s slick tin roof.

“We’re cursed,” George is saying. He’s out to stake his bitter claim as one of the last living children of Robert and Tilda Smart—just George and Edith left, and Edith with a dead womb.

“Don’t say that about Edith!” I beg.

“She can’t be fixed,” he says bitterly.

“Mother’s trying to help.”

“That’s the problem right there,” he says, “and Edith thinks so too.”

I fall silent. I don’t believe a word he’s said. Mother goes to Edith regularly. She brings us along too, me or Cora or Olive, to do the tidying and play with Little Robbie, or to scrub and hang a load of washing. Edith doesn’t want to leave the house, but Mother urges her outside, helps her onto the porch and into the rocking chair. “Some have a slow grief,” she tells Carson, who edges around the house like it’s not his own.

Does Edith grieve her lost sister, or is this a longer grief attached to the nearly grown stillborn baby my mother delivered her of last summer? Obediently, Edith swallows the tinctures my mother prepares for her, but even I would have to allow the medicine has had no effect. She remains a scattered housekeeper, a slothful cook, a pretty face with eyes fading onto a distant point. She seems to bear no expectations.

George refuses tinctures and teas. “Potions,” he calls them, with scorn. None of us speak up to defend Mother, not even Mother herself. We stand aside and let his words fall to our feet, as if this could keep them from doing harm.

I don’t know what’s happened to George, but I wonder if it happened while Fannie was dying upstairs and he was downstairs listening to her die. This is not a question I can ask, but I wonder—did some loose pieces inside him slip into position that day, solidify, harden? I don’t know. I wasn’t in the house when it happened. It was George who sent me to fetch the doctor—did he do it not to save Fannie, but to spare me from knowing what it would feel like to listen to my sister die?

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the hot metal roof stings my bare feet, the sun slaps my cheeks, bleaches my hair, draws freckles across my nose. George looks like an entirely different creature: dark eyes and hair, and skin that tans deeply. For all his sickliness, he is tall, like we all are, and his shoulders stand straight, his carriage is graceful. We gaze over a sweeping countryside, the rich cleared soil, the work that continues, even as the two of us absent ourselves from the proceedings, even as we escape. I am content to believe that my family is prosperous, that our land will be ever giving, that all of this careful plotting and growing and harvesting will keep turning, no matter what comes.

The first Robert Smart to settle the land was a blacksmith from the old country: Scotland. The graves of his wives and children are not even marked, although his is. It was the first stone to have been set into the ground that became our family’s graveyard. His son, Robert Smart, was my grandfather, who buried his father and built the original house, a square stone structure that was expanded and improved upon in the years that followed. My own father, also Robert Smart, worked with his father to finish the rambling field-stone structure that I could see now, if I scrambled to the other side of the barn’s roof.

My grandfather Robert Smart died before I was born, and my grandmother kept two rooms at the back of the house. Mother took them over when Granny died, which was after Mother married Father, but before I can remember. The larger room is our parlour, never used, and only rarely dusted. The smaller room—the Granny Room, we call it—contains a bed, and a mirrored bureau, and a washbasin, and sometimes girls stay there, but never for very long. We are not to disturb them, although occasionally Mother asks Olive to carry a girl a tray with tea or soup and bread. She used to ask Fannie. Now it is Olive’s turn to help.

The girls are ill and Mother nurses them back to strength. That is all I know.

But Mother couldn’t nurse Fannie back to strength. I am anxious whenever my mind touches on that thought. I shove it away wildly. Mother didn’t save Fannie. She was there when Fannie died, and she did nothing to save her. No, that is not the same thing, is it? She was there, helpless as the rest of us.

“I’ve signed up, Aggie.” George’s voice cracks. He’s spoken rather loudly, sneaking a sideways glance at me, and away.

“Signed up?”

“I’m going to the war, they need me, you know—boys like me.” He doesn’t wait for my reply. He is angry, I see it in his hands: fingers curled into his palms, so tightly the knuckles have gone white. “We’re cursed anyway. What’s one more dead Smart?”

“It was the flu,” I tell George. “It wasn’t a curse. Nobody could do anything, not even Mother.”

“Your mother is not my mother,” says George, but he’s stopped on a cough.

“They won’t let you.” I seize on the cough. “Your lungs.”

“They will and they have. I’m going, and soon. So long, farewell, good-bye.” He sweeps his arm to emphasize what he’s leaving, as if this isn’t the most beautiful place on earth. I hear disgust in his voice.

What do I know of war? I’ll never be a boy, never be a son. War is never going to be my way out. But George—George is exactly that: a son, and a disappointment. Robbie died fighting for his country, Robbie, the brother George will never match up to, here on the farm.

I sense that the edge, the breaking-off point, needs to be jagged between George and our father, George and the farm.

“Keep it a secret, there’s a girl, Aggie. I had to tell you, but the rest of them, they won’t know till I’m gone.” He leans into me, awkward with eyes fastened onto mine, and I think he might kiss me after all. I hear my heart catch, then tumble to racing in my chest. George sways slightly like a tree in a breeze. And I’m up before he can horrify us both beyond repair, I’m scrambling to climb the roof to its top. A couple of good leaping strides, and I grab the peak and pull myself up. There is no higher point on our land: this is it, these are the heights.

It is easy to rise.

I am standing. My knees become springs, my toes point, my arms spread wide. I can feel the muscles in my back and stomach wrapping my spine like layers and layers of gauze bandages: stronger than they appear. The wind catches my untidy hair, and my skirt.

I can hear George wheezing, terrified down below me. Good. I’m glad. What do I care? I can’t fall.

“Look at me!” I scream.

I take a step and another, chin high. The metal is imperfectly joined at the peak and hurts even my summer-calloused soles, but I dance, step after step, all the way to the end, where I can see the barnyard, many stories below. I calm my breath and bend forward slowly, patiently, to look down on the cleared gravel where the wagons turn around. Our rat-hunting dog lies panting in the sun. He catches sight of my shadow waving to him, and jumps to his feet, turning in frenzied barking.

There is Cora, coming out of the house with a basket for gathering vegetables clapped against her side.

I wave, leaning toward her. “Hiya! Cora!”

At first she can’t find me. Something about this delights me: hiding in plain sight. She stops and stares around the yard while I holler and shout: “Look up, up here!” She finds my shadow waving at her first, then lifts her eyes, shading them with her free hand. Her mouth is a perfect round O. I falter for half a breath, waver, steady myself before her sight. She drops the basket. Screams.

That brings our mother running.

Cora has fallen on her knees, hiding her face in her apron. She can’t bear to see what might happen next. Why does she assume the worst? I could spit with irritation. Why doesn’t she trust me?

I can do anything, anything I want to, Cora, just watch me.

“Lord have mercy.” I see my mother’s lips shape the words a half beat before their sound arrives at my ears.

I make myself stand steady as a post. And then, as if I’ve been planted on the barn roof, attached like a weather cock to a whirling vane, I spin around once, twice, three times.

My mother’s hand drops from her heart and she runs to find a better angle from which to see me—she climbs the pasture fence, as if by getting higher she will be closer to me, and then she climbs right up and into the branches of a maple that overhang the pasture fence.

Is she trying to save me? Or is she urging me on?

I feel birdlike, although I know I can’t fly, nor do I wish that I could. It’s just an act. I wave to my father, to the three hired men, to Olive standing on the porch, all of them summoned by Cora’s cries. Cora herself peeks from under her apron only to resume her hysterics. “Get her down, get her down, get her down! Before she falls!”

I curtsey, lifting my skirts and swinging them. And then I turn and run the peak to the far side of the barn where no one can look up and see me but the pigs in their rooting pen, and the cows pastured beside the mountainous manure pile.

I greet the indifferent animals. I salute the pond and pause for a breath to remember little James, drowned. And then I jog lightly back to my audience. I’ve forgotten almost everything, past, present, and future, but this—the line of hot metal, the sky over me, the waiting faces upturned. They are looking for me, hoping to see me again. They fall quiet at the sight of me, hushed for a moment.

My mother in the tree in her full apron and skirts, her arms scratched by the branches, hugs the rough trunk.