My Ghosts (13 page)

She told them stories in the rainy light, about fiddlers and enchanted rivers and trees, about magic shoes, and instead of ending the usual way, the clever children in Kez’s stories always outsmarted everyone who had wished them harm. One of their favourites was the one about the boy who had been
stolen by the Water Horse, how his father smacked his own face, while his mother sank to her knees and keened on the shore of the loch. Kez had the children keen with their loud little voices, and when they fell silent she said,
Then …
Then a ripple, spreading wider and wider, and they emerged, the gentled horse with the boy on his back, high-stepping out of the water. And the water sparkled as it flowed from their bodies, and the sun cast colours through the droplets flung wide when they shook their sleek, wet heads.

Maybe it’s because I have too much time to think, these past months, or maybe the stories I’ve been telling have stirred things up. The things I leave out, with Edie, that have poked through from wherever they’ve been lurking, the things that torment me. From the time I began to speak again on Pembroke Street there were things I could have said, things I could have told them about my father, about our life, which I knew they wondered about. One of those nights around the kitchen table, when they were remembering the tree house he had once tried to build, I could have told them how he’d described it to my brothers, a grand structure all the neighbourhood children admired, and they would have laughed, but it would have brought him closer. And they would have thought better of him if I’d told about the saplings he planted and tended so carefully, one for their father and one for their mother.

The good and kind girl I had vowed to be would have shared those things, and she wouldn’t have said that she didn’t remember when Charlie asked about the fiddle. That girl would have told him that from the day my father opened the package it sat on a shelf with our Bible and the picture of Isabella. No one else was allowed to touch it, but every so often
he would take it down and press in different places, pluck each string. Once my mother said why on earth didn’t he ride over to Talbots’ and ask Linc to show him; how hard could it be, if a fool like that could play. “I just might,” my father said, but he never did.

I didn’t tell them any of that, and I lied to them, too, when I’d been with Angus, made up stories to explain the grass stain on my blouse, the trail of sand when I took off my shoe in the kitchen. The worst thing, I see now, was not that I fooled them, or thought I did, but that my mind somehow turned them into people who deserved to be fooled. How ridiculous they became then, with their penny-pinching and their silly jokes. Aunt Clare lost in her reading while the supper burned on the stove, and the annoying way her glasses slid down her nose. Aunt Kez poking her nose into everyone’s business, but not caring enough to notice mine, and how she tried to make an adventure out of her dull life, telling every little detail of her walk to the butcher. I even felt scorn for poor Jack, his clumsiness, and when Aunt Nan said, “Be careful, Bella,” as I left the house, I saw nothing but a silly old woman, one with no idea what it was to burn like I did. How little time it really took, in my new life, for me to become again the selfish and deceitful girl I had been before.

March

“I can do it myself,” Edie says, so I leave the basin and cloth, and wait in the kitchen in case she gets dizzy and falls. The house is quiet except for the soft trickle as she dips and squeezes, and
the falling water reminds me quite suddenly of the little creek not far from our clearing. The sound of clear water moving over mossy stones, and how often I stole away from my chores to sit there, dreaming about a grown-up life, far away.

Edie has been fretting about the school work she’s missing, and these past weeks her teacher stops by on Thursdays to catch her up. I know that she really does care about the missed lessons, but I also know that it’s his expected visit that has her asking for the basin, for a brush and a ribbon to tidy her hair. He’s a good-looking boy, is Robbie, and a credit to his mother, no matter what people whisper. Angus has always rated him, and gave him work at the station and taught him the wire, paid him one summer to knock down an old shed and tidy up our yard. I felt such a pang when I saw the two of them out back, looking over what was to be done. Young Robbie standing close beside Angus, copying his stance and crossing his arms in just the same way.

He’s not really a teacher, of course, though when he takes off his overcoat there’s chalk dust on his cuffs, a sprinkling in his curly hair that I first took for snow. When Miss Tunstall had her trouble at Christmastime he agreed to step in, and he seems to know what he’s about, though he’s not long out of school himself. I’ve explained that Edie mustn’t overtax herself and he keeps his visits short, and never leaves her too much work to do. A few problems to work on or a poem to memorize; I thought at first she was raving again, when I heard her whispering:
beside the ravelled seas, beside the ravelled seas
.

Today, Robbie says that the trustees have asked him to stay on until the end of the school year. “You’ll be back by then,” he tells Edie, as if he’s quite certain. When she asks if Miss Tunstall is still unwell he says he believes that’s so,
though I’m sure he knows, as even I do, that no one has heard a thing since her brother came and took her away on the night train. After she’d started singing in her room, and staggered down the main street with a frozen clod of horse dung in each hand. It happens like that, sometimes; the winters are terrible here, and people break. When the first breeze comes and melting snow trickles down the sides of all the roads, we step carefully out of our houses, blinking and looking around to see who is missing. There are always a few, besides the old and sickly. A few who have chosen a rope, a knife, a gun. Sometimes they just walk out onto the frozen lake, until the ice gives way.

While Edie and Robbie go over her work at the kitchen table I change her bedding, bundling the old sheets into a basket for later. Remembering, as I do, her wide eyes when Charlie used to tell her how much deeper the snow was when he was a boy, and how much colder the winters. So cold, he said, that sheets on the line froze solid, and the wind snapped them to pieces that blew through the air like a blizzard.
I swear
, Charlie said, as he always did, and he told her he could hardly make out the shape of his own mother in the yard, standing in a swirl of white, with a clothes peg in her hand.

How funny he used to be, my uncle Charlie. Everything was lively when he was around, with his easy charm and way of carrying you along. These last years he’s grown terribly fat, his face stretched and shiny, and the winks, the jokes and the flirting are grotesque now, when even a short flight of steps makes him puff and wipe his damp forehead. He didn’t come with my aunts when they visited this past summer; they said he was unwell and perhaps he was, but I also knew that something
had happened at the hotel the last time he’d come, and Robbie’s mother had a quiet word with Angus. That day we rode out in the buggy, Nan whispered about the drink and all the trouble it caused. And she said that for all that, he was still her wee brother, and there were times when, just for a moment, she saw his little-boy eyes looking out from his round, red face. Not the mischievous ones, but the look he used to have when he was frightened the
powries
would come and gobble him up. I could barely hear her, over the sound of the turning wheels, when she said that sometimes she wondered if that’s what had happened.

Edie tries to get up for a little while each day, as the doctor has said she should, though even a walk to the front door tires her out, and she sinks back into her bed with a sigh. She won’t let me pull the shade until the sun has completely vanished behind Mrs. Leary’s cottage across the way, and she writes down the time it happens, proof that the days are getting longer, but the only way you would know. She asks me questions, while the room grows darker, and I answer as best I can, thinking how much easier it was when she was small and wanted the same stories every night, every day. The same stories with the same words; she knew every detail and I suppose it was as soothing to tell them that way as it was to hear them. The one about Angus and his friend Liam climbing the church tower, back in their village, and ringing the bells in the middle of the night. Or the one about Aunt Kez trying to ride poor Jack’s bicycle in the laneway, how she shot out into the street and startled a horse, ended in a tangle on the ground, with her skirts up over her head.

She wants to hear different things now. Did Aunt Nan really marry a scoundrel, like she said that time? Did Kez ever
have a beau, and would Charlie stay a bachelor, and did I think Aunt Clare really
loved
the Professor? Did I know from the moment I saw him that I would marry her father, and what was it like when he asked me? Sometimes when I say I don’t know, I really don’t, but Edie says, crossly, “I’m not a child anymore.”

How quickly it seemed to happen; one day she woke up too old to play with her dolls, and then hugs and kisses were for babies. Another day she fussed with her hair, and walked with her friends past the city boys, lounging on the veranda of the Lakeview Hotel.
Be careful what you wish for
, people say, and long ago I learned the truth of that. But when she was first born we seemed as close as thought, and somehow I always knew when her covers were too heavy, when her toes needed warming; when she began to speak I knew every thought in her head. There are things I don’t tell her now, that have nothing to do with her age. But sometimes I feel the tug of it, the need to have her know me through and through, because no one else can ever be so close.

Angus and I were married in the parlour on Pembroke Street, just family there, which made quite a crowd, and two friends from work who were going to the West and teased Angus about changing his mind. Edie likes to hear the details, what I wore and the cake Nan made, how baby Fanny spit up, sour gouts sliding down the minister’s shiny sleeve. She thinks her father looks so handsome in the photograph where I stand with my hand on his arm, and today she wants to know exactly how I
felt
. “Happy,” I tell her, and I must have been, though that day is just a string of small moments in my mind. But I do remember how solid his arm was, how steady in the flash of that camera. I remember that as clearly as I remember all the
whispering in the office, and the girls who didn’t care if I heard, when they told each other it was the oldest trick in the world.

But it wasn’t a trick, unless it was one my body played on us both. It was perhaps too early to be certain I was with child, I know that now, but I told Angus I was, and for all he knew about persuasion and loving, he must have been just as ignorant about the rest. Ben got him the post here as station master and we were married in the parlour; they all came to see us off, waving and calling as the train moved out of the station. Snow appeared on the fields as we left the city behind, more and more of it; we both fell asleep and opened our eyes to see white banks piled high on either side, like a passageway leading to some separate, enchanted world.

We stepped down from that train in a swirl of white, and my bleeding started not long after; perhaps there never was a child, but it didn’t seem to matter. We were so happy and full of each other, with the blankets heaped and the old stove roaring, snow piled up to the windowsills of our little rented house. Everything suddenly allowed and we laughed at what Angus called our outdoor romance. The twigs that dug in and the times we lay in our thicket, still as statues, while people passed by so close, arguing about the stranger who had tipped his hat, or whether that fish had been off.

There were days so cold that it hurt to breathe, days the reflected sun dazzled. And there were storms as fierce as any I’d ever seen, the wires down and no trains running; we only left our bed to fetch more wood, to grab bits of food that we ate under the covers, like mischievous children. By the time spring came my stomach was round with Edie; that summer we walked in the evenings to watch the sun slip into the lake and nothing else mattered. Not the girls in their white dresses,
not the sound of the train whistle calling people away from the too-short streets of the town.

The notebook where Edie records the setting sun is actually her old diary, that she hasn’t bothered with for years. When she came across it in the keepsake box she turned the pages and said, “All I did was write about the weather—what a silly.” After I lit the lamps today she read bits out to me:
So much snow … A little warmer … No rain today
. On the first of May it seems I made an apple cake, but Angus was too late home to eat it. On June 12 she got a star for penmanship, and on July 15
Ida T was horrid
; “I wonder why?” Edie said. And then she said, “It’s all so dull, it might as well have burned up like yours did,” a thing I must have told her once, though it’s not exactly true. Maybe I looked sad, thinking about that; Edie said she was sorry she’d mentioned the diary, sorry to remind me. I told her it was fine, and it was, but now that she and Angus are asleep and the house is dark and quiet, I lie awake on the sofa in my wrap of blankets and remember that last long summer in our clearing, filled with biting flies, and filled with my rage. When everything seemed to bother me more, the sun and the bites and the old hoe that drove splinters into my palms, and I longed to be living in town, in a house where the floors were level and there were things to see through the windows; when I thought I knew what it was to be unhappy.

We met along the way
, was all my parents ever said about how they came together, and when I was younger I’d imagined them as star-crossed lovers, forced to hide deep in the forest from their wealthy, feuding families. But mostly, that summer, they seemed to me two fools who’d stumbled across each other. My mother’s feet heavy on the stairs, those days when
she moved like a person underwater, and the way she fussed and wound her hair three different ways before we headed off to church. And my father, who would spend hours working out the theory of a thing, but always end up with a door that hung crookedly from its frame, a cow that would never calve. He fussed around the trees he’d planted, watering and snipping and sometimes dragging out a kitchen chair and just sitting, as if he could watch them growing. Quite forgetting, no matter how many times I reminded him, to fix a lock to my bedroom door, and making silly jokes and teasing as if I were still a little girl.