What Is Left the Daughter (19 page)

"Next day after Donald was escorted off to Halifax," Cornelia said. "Tilda out there on the wharf like that? Sometimes I think of it as admirable, but one thing's for sure—it's mysterious far beyond normal wifely obligation, no matter how devoted."

"Has she gone mad, Cornelia? Is it madness?"

"Often in a marriage, there's a husband you just don't know if he's hearing you or not, but the wife keeps trying." Cornelia smiled. "All kidding aside. No, if Tilda's mad at all, she's mad with guilt. If she didn't go to the wharf every morning, it might swallow her up, that guilt."

"Guilty of what?" I said.

"Like Tilda herself told me, she shouldn't have ever let Hans go to the house with you that night. Had she been along, Donald—she thinks — couldn't have committed that murder. I'm not sure I agree with her, but my opinion's hardly the point, is it?"

When I got back home, I went out to the shed. Inside, it was all stale air, and as far as the sleds and toboggans were concerned, there was much disarray. Tilda had peeled the U-boat news, all those headlines and articles, off the walls. I opened the windows and let the breeze in. Spider webs were in every corner. I swept those away with a broom. It had to have been Tilda who'd also organized, in separate stacks held by rubber bands, invoices, letters of request and other correspondence on the workbench. I sat opening and reading these for an hour or so and concluded, Well, you need to have some employment, let's see what you can do.

Skipping lunch, working well into the afternoon, I wrote to each of the twenty-three customers to whom a sled or toboggan was due —some for nearly two years!—beginning each letter with,
My uncle Donald Hillyer is no longer employed in this line of work. I'm Wyatt Hillyer, his nephew, and I was apprenticed to him for a good while. I will be carrying on with the business. I think you will be satisfied with the results.

The thing was, Marlais, I had no idea whether I could manage the paperwork, let alone construct the sleds and toboggans on my own — and how many of these customers would still want their sled or toboggan? Yet what was my choice? Close to age twenty-three now, I had no other skills to peddle. Honestly, the thought of asking for work on a fishing or lobster boat crew was daunting, even laughable. Who would hire me? What was I in this village anymore?

Pariah,
I worried. The rancor I'd felt fairly steaming off Leonard was the first step in confirming the fear that I'd brought shame to my neighbors. And come to think of it, on which side did my own private sympathies fall? Should Reverend Witt be praying for Hans Mohring's passage to heaven, or for my uncle's redemption? Why shouldn't Witt pray for both in the same breath? Minute by minute my thoughts would start out in a straight line toward a hopeful conclusion, then would suddenly detour and get lost. Naturally, I considered leaving Middle Economy for good. Just getting out. I even imagined that Randall Webb might hire me to work in his music shop. My childhood house on Robie Street was rented out, to a childless couple, last name of Pullman. I could give them notice. I could move back there.

Detour, detour, detour into late evening; finally, I was just grateful I'd left enough stew for supper a second night. Especially that French stew, because the flavors settled in more deeply. Have you ever noticed how that works with leftovers?

After supper, fully dark out, it started to rain and I switched on the front porch light. Washing the dishes, I looked out the window and saw rain spill over the iron birdbath Tilda had given Constance in the summer of 1940. Steven Parish had worked on it like a sculptor, adding a special feature, a circumference of dancing angels at the solid, heavy base. There was quite a downpour now. I put on a phonograph record from an album containing a set of Beethoven's sonatas for cello and piano —Sonata in A Major, Sonata in C Major and Sonata in D Major—then settled onto the sofa. I had wanted the Beethoven to transport me out of the world, but in a short time the music turned out to be only an accompaniment, not an antidote, to my restlessness. I lifted the needle, set it on its holder, turned off the gramophone, took a kerosene lantern from a shelf, set a lit match to the wick and carried the lantern out to the shed.

Once inside, I lit a second lantern and placed the two at opposite ends of the worktable, and this made for adequate light. I started in on the toboggan long promised to a Mr. and Mrs. Kormiker, originally from Iceland but now living in Copenhagen. Mr. Kormiker was in banking. On a visit to Halifax they'd seen my uncle's brochure, probably in one of the hotels. It was very professionally done, that brochure, not inexpensively produced, either. Steven Parish had provided drawings of sleds and toboggans, as he had done for his own brochure of iron works—fireplace tongs, candelabra, stovepipes and such—that he forged on commission.

Now, Marlais, you might ask, why start up again with this particular toboggan?

Because while going through all the correspondence, I'd read the letters that Mrs. Kormiker had sent to Donald and Constance. Eleven letters in all, each cordial and filling no more than three-quarters of a single page of personal stationery. Her written English was excellent. In one letter she wrote, "Our granddaughter is now two years of age. Is it possible to have a toboggan made by your hand delivered for her sixth birthday?" This letter was dated April 11, 1941—the war had allowed it to cross the Atlantic. What most struck me was the faith that a simple transaction in life, with patience—because think how far in advance they were planning—could eventually take place between people an ocean apart. A bargain had been struck, and I'd inherited an obligation. I felt desperate to do some small dignified thing. What's more, I figured that if the granddaughter was two in 1941, that meant if I worked hard on the toboggan, I might not be all that late.

Mr. and Mrs. Kormiker wanted a 12-by-3-foot three-board called a dog toboggan, with an upright backboard. I had to hire Steven Parish to forge the triangular hitch with handle. I'd been concerned he wouldn't want to do the work for me. But as it turned out, he was noticeably only a little less friendly than he'd always been, which wasn't too friendly at all. He looked at my rough sketch of the toboggan and said, "Sure, I'll make the hitch. But I'll make it because Donald said you were a proper nephew to him, for the most part. But you have to pay me before I start."

Parish made the hitch with handle in two days. When I went to pick it up, he said, "Bring me any work you need done, Wyatt, and I'll do it. By the way, I've been up to Dorchester five or six times. Bleak place, eh? I made Donald a candle holder for Christmas last year. I never thought to ask if they allow him candles. Anyway, Donald's getting by."

Though the Kormikers' toboggan could be pulled by hand, it was really designed to be tied to a haul rope or reins. And they also wanted an attachable cargo box, so their granddaughter could fit snugly inside. There'd be plenty of room for quilts or blankets or overcoats in there, too, I learned from one of Mrs. Kormiker's letters: she and Mr. Kormiker had made their choice on the basis of sketches of five different types of toboggans my uncle had sent them.

And that's what I spent three full days and nights doing. Little sleep, no radio. My uncle had already fashioned the bow to three feet of curl. What was left for me to do was sand and attach the crosspieces, hinge the backboard behind the next-to-last crosspiece, and build the slush board my uncle had promised as an "extra." In addition, I had to build the cargo box from scratch, including gunwales, eyebolts and hinges. I had to fix the runners. Finally, I had to shellac the entire thing, curl to stern.

On my third morning of work, I completed the toboggan at about six
A.M.
, but I hadn't been able to feel the tips of my fingers as I applied the shellac, because they were raw and numb from hours of sanding. My uncle had jars of salve for immediate relief after such long bouts. The salve was from Norway. I worked some into each of my fingertips but didn't feel that, either.

The toboggan weighed about thirty pounds. I set it across two sawhorses to allow the architecture to settle and plugged in an electric fan to help dry the shellac. It looked just fine. I recalled how when we finished a sled or toboggan, or the occasional horse-drawn sleigh, Donald would pour us each a shot of whiskey and we'd clink glasses and he'd say, "One down, and if we're blessed, ten thousand to go." I cleaned the tools, hung them in place, tidied up the shed and went in to wash up at the kitchen sink. Then I drove into town.

But instead of stopping, I drove past the bakery and on to Parrsboro and, as I thought I might, saw Tilda out on the end of the dock. If anything, it was raining harder than during the night, and it had rained all night. Now rain blew fiercely in from the Minas Basin. Half a dozen trawlers pulled at their tie ropes and knocked against the pylons. It was quite the storm, and yet there was Tilda, dressed in a rain slicker, dungarees, galoshes and a fisherman's hat tied under her chin, right out in it. To me the remarkable thing was that three men—I recognized Todd Branch and his neighbors Ralph and Alvin Drakemore, all from Upper Economy—just went about their business. They weren't going to head out in this weather and were battening things down on the deck of their trawler, shouting words I couldn't make out. They completely ignored Tilda, or so it seemed at first. But then Todd Branch went below, emerging with, of all things, a steaming cup of molasses tea, or coffee or cocoa or whatnot, and brought it to Tilda, and cupped Tilda's hands in his as she lifted the drink to her lips, as if he was helping a person to recover her strength after a deathly illness. The other two men didn't even look up. Tilda took another sip, nodded to Todd Branch and turned away from him. She went back to tasting the rain in her cup and talking to Hans Mohring. Todd stepped onto the deck of his boat. It seemed to me he carried out all of this like it was matter-of-fact, no more than a recently added chore. How many mornings had he brought a hot drink to Tilda?

The moment I stepped into the bakery, Cornelia set a cup of coffee and a cranberry scone in front of me, without my having asked for either. She sat down opposite me at the table closest to the window. "Look at that, will you?" she said. "Wind blew mud all the way in and my perfectly clean window's not perfectly clean anymore." She took a bite of toast.

"I saw Tilda at the Parrsboro Wharf just now," I said.

"You know, I thought that was your car going by."

"There she was. Just like you said."

"I saw her out there three mornings ago, and guess what?" Cornelia said. "Some schoolboys were taking potshots at whichever birds — cormorants mostly. And all at once, Tilda reached over and grabbed that rifle and took a few potshots of her own. Of course she missed everything except the water, but the sight made me laugh so hard. I was on my way back from picking up cranberry preserves from Mrs. Gerard's in Parrsboro when I saw that."

"I think she might've seen me," I said. "I hope she didn't think I was spying on her or something."

"You just gave in to curiosity, Wyatt. That's pretty human of you, and besides, Constance Hillyer confided in me."

"Confided in you what?"

"Confided in me about your feelings for Tilda," Cornelia said. "Look, Tilda's been a widow for merely a couple years. And I suppose life's as bewildering to her as it would be for any war widow, of which there's recent thousands, eh? Do you know, she spends half the night in the library, due to Mrs. Oleander's tolerance and hospitality. That's her narrowed horizons. House, wharf, library. Know what else? I think Tilda forgot how to sleep. I hear her playing the gramophone upstairs."

"Anyway, my
feelings
for Tilda, as you call them?" I said. "They aren't in the least well met by her. How could they be? I put her husband out to sea, may he rest in peace, and I mean that. So my
feelings
are hardly the thing that'll solace her, if that's what you're saying."

"I'm saying what I just said, that's all."

"She must've been even more in love with Hans than I thought."

"No denying, Hans was allowed all her beloved places, village she grew up in to pillow talk, all so soon after they met, too. It fairly took your breath away."

"I thought about that night and day. In prison, I mean. Thought hard about that. And about other things, of course."

I tried lifting the cup of coffee Cornelia had brought to the table, but I dropped it and it smashed on the floor, coffee splattering.

"My goodness," she said, "you're a clumsy oaf this morning."

"Sorry. I worked on a toboggan all night. All that sanding numbed my fingers."

"Want another cup?"

"No thanks."

I picked up the pieces of the cup and put them in the wastebasket. Cornelia handed me a sandwich wrapped in a napkin. "It's halibut, onion, tomato and mustard," she said. "You put that in the larder, eh? I doubt anyone's making you lunch these days."

"Thank you. I'm a bit short of money just now, though."

"Do I look like a debt collector to you, Wyatt?"

"No, you don't, Cornelia. Thank you for the sandwich."

"Tilda should be back any minute."

"She'll come see me if and when she wants. I think that's best."

"I hope you try and make a go of your uncle's business, Wyatt."

"I got that toboggan finished, didn't I?"

Much of the rest of the day, not counting the time it took to eat the sandwich, wash some clothes in the sink, rinse and hang them to dry on a length of twine I'd rigged taut in the pantry, with three buckets side by side underneath to catch any drip, I drew up a rough design for a box in which to send the toboggan to the Kormikers in Denmark. Under a tarpaulin in back of the shed there was more than enough plywood to build it to adequate dimensions. The construction itself took about two hours. When I inspected the results, I thought, If I'm honest about it, this thing looks like a long coffin. A rueful, though not all that original, observation. And then your mind sometimes doesn't stop to charitable purpose: I thought, I'm sending this coffin to Denmark, a toboggan inside, whereas Hans didn't get even this much.