“I’d as soon you didn’t,” Telford puffed, pulling his short legs out over the casement. “It wouldn’t help a speck. She’d never listen to you, Lottie.”
When we were out on the lawn, and the basement window closed and everyone safe and innocent once more, we played shadow tag around the big spruce trees that shaded and darkened that whole yard. All of us except Lottie, that is. She went home.
I was clever in school, and Father was pleased. Sometimes when I got a star for my work, he’d give me a paper of button candies or a handful of those pastel lozenges that bore sugary messages—Be Mine, You Beauty, Love Me, Be True. We sat around the dining-room table every evening, Dan and Matt and I, doing our homework. An hour was required, and if we had no more schoolwork to do, Father would set us sums and dispense advice.
“You’ll never get anywhere in this world unless you work harder than others, I’m here to tell you that. Nobody’s going to hand you anything on a silver platter. It’s up to you, nobody else. You’ve got to have stick-to-itiveness if you want to get ahead. You’ve got to use a little elbow grease.”
I tried to shut my ears to it, and thought I had, yet years later, when I was rearing my two boys, I found myself saying the same words to them.
I used to dawdle over my homework so I wouldn’t have to do the sums he set. We had the Sweet Pea Reader, and I would trace the words with my finger and stare at the little pictures as though I hoped they’d swell and blossom into something different, something rare.
This is a seed. The seed is brown.
But the stiff black seed on the page stayed the same, and finally Auntie Doll would poke her head in from the kitchen.
“Mr. Currie—it’s Hagar’s bedtime.”
“All right. Up you go, daughter.”
He called me “miss” when he was displeased, and “daughter” when he felt kindly disposed toward me. Never Hagar. I’d been named, hopefully, for a well-to-do spinster great-aunt in Scotland, who, to my father’s chagrin, had left her money to the Humane Society.
Once, my hand on the polished newel post at the foot of the stairs, I heard him speaking to Auntie Doll about me.
“Smart as a whip, she is, that one. If only she’d been—”
And then he stopped, I suppose because he realized that in the dining-room fris sons, such as they were, were listening.
We understood quite clearly, all of us, even then, that when Father spoke of pulling himself up by his bootstraps he meant that he had begun without money. But he’d come of a good family—he had that much of a head start. His father’s portrait hung in our dining-room, the oils olive-green and black in the background around the peaked face of the old gentleman who sported incongruously a paisley waistcoat, mustard yellow with worm-like swirls of blue.
“He died before your birth,” Father would say, “before he even knew I’d made good over here. I left when I was seventeen, and never saw him again. You were named after him, Dan. Sir Daniel Currie—the title died with him, for it wasn’t a baronetcy. He was a silk importer, but he’d served with distinction in India in his younger days. He was no great shakes as a merchant. He lost nearly everything, through no fault of his, except he was too trusting. His partner cheated him—oh, it was a bad affair all around, I can tell you, and there was I, without a hope or a ha’penny. But I can’t complain. I’ve done as well as he ever did. Better, for I’ve trusted no partners, nor will I ever. The Curries are Highlanders. Matt—sept of what clan?”
“Sept of the Clanranald MacDonalds.”
“Correct. Pipe music, Dan?”
“Clanranald’s March, sir.”
“Right.” And then with a look at me, and a smile: “The war cry, girl?”
And I, who loved that cry although I hadn’t an inkling what it meant, would shout it out with such ferocity that the boys snickered until our father impaled them with a frown.
“Gainsay Who Dare!”
It seemed to me, from his tales, the Highlanders must be the most fortunate of all men on earth, spending their days in flailing about them with claymores, and their nights in eightsome reels. They lived in castles, too, every man jack of them, and all were gentlemen. How bitterly I regretted that he’d left and had sired us here, the bald-headed prairie stretching out west of us with nothing to speak of except couchgrass or clans of chittering gophers or the gray-green poplar bluffs, and the town where no more than half a dozen decent brick houses stood, the rest being shacks and shanties, shaky frame and tarpaper, short-lived in the sweltering summers and the winters that froze the wells and the blood.
I’d be about eight when the new Presbyterian Church went up. Its opening service was the first time Father let me go to church with him instead of to Sunday School. It was plain and bare and smelled of paint and new wood, and they hadn’t got the stained glass windows yet, but there were silver candlesticks at the front, each bearing a tiny plaque with Father’s name, and he and several others had purchased family pews and furnished them with long cushions of brown and beige velour, so our few favored bottoms would not be bothered by hard oak and a lengthy sermon.
“On this great day,” the Reverend Dougall MacCulloch said feelingly,” we have to give special thanks to those of our congregation whose generosity and Christian contributions have made our new church possible.”
He called them off, the names, like an honor role. Luke McVitie, lawyer. Jason Currie, businessman. Freeman McKendrick, bank manager. Burns Macintosh, farmer. Rab Fraser, farmer.
Father sat with modestly bowed head, but turned to me and whispered very low:
“I and Luke McVitie must’ve given the most, as he called our names the first.”
The people looked as though they wondered whether they should clap or not, ovations being called for, and yet perhaps uncalled for in a church. I waited, hoping they would, for I had new white lace gloves and could have shown them off so well, clapping. But then the minister announced the psalm, so we all sang mightily.
“Unto the hills around do I lift up
My longing eyes.
O whence for me shall my salvation come,
From whence arise?
From GOD the LORD doth come my certain aid,
From GOD the LORD, who heaven and earth hath made.”
Auntie Doll was always telling us that Father was a God-fearing man. I never for a moment believed it, of course. I couldn’t imagine Father fearing anyone, God included, especially when he didn’t even owe his existence to the Almighty. God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.
He never missed a Sunday service, though, nor a grace at meals. He said it always himself, slowly, while we fidgeted and peeked.
“Some hae meat and canna eat,
Some would eat hae lack it.
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord he thanked.”
He did not marry again after our mother died, although he sometimes spoke of finding a wife. I think Aunt Dolly Stonehouse fancied he might eventually marry her. The poor soul. I was fond of her, although she made no secret of the fact that Dan was her favorite, and it seemed a pity that she believed Father held back because she was such a homely woman with her sallow skin that was never greatly improved by the witch hazel and lemon juice she dabbed on, and her top incisors that protruded like a jack rabbit’s. She was so conscious of those teeth of hers, she used to put one hand in front of her mouth when speaking, so that half the time even her words were hidden by a screen of fingers. But her appearance wasn’t what would have decided Father. Matt and Dan and I always knew he could never have brought himself to marry his housekeeper.
I only ever saw him speaking alone with a woman once, and that was by accident. 1 used to walk out to the cemetery by myself sometimes, to read and get away from the boys. I had a place behind a chokecherry bush, at the hill’s edge, just outside the fence that marked the cemetery limits. I’d have been twelve, o
r thereabouts, that afternoon.
They walked so quietly on the path farther down the hill, near the river banks, where the Wachakwa ran brown and noisy over the stones. At first I didn’t realize anyone was there, and when I did, it was too late to get away. He sounded peevish and irritable.
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the difference?”
“I was fond of him,” she said. “I loved him.”
“I’ll bet you did.”
“I did so,” she cried. “I did so!”
“Why did you say you’d come here, then?”
“I thought—” the thin high girl’s voice. “I thought, like you, what difference would it make now? But it’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“He was young,” she said.
I thought he was going to hit her, perhaps say “hold out your hands, miss,” as he’d done to me. I didn’t know why. But through the leaves I could see destruction printed on his face. He didn’t touch her, though, nor say a word. He turned and walked away, his boots crunching on the fallen twigs, until he reached the clearing where he’d left the buggy. Then I heard his whip singing, and the horse’s surprised snort.
The woman looked after him, her face soft and blank, as though she expected nothing out of life. Then she began to trudge up the hill.
I felt no pity for her nor for him. I scorned them both—him, for walking here with her and speaking to her; her, because—well, simply because she was No-Name Lottie Drieser’s mother. Yet now, remembering their faces, I’d be hard put to say which of them had been the crueler.
She died not so long after, of consumption. I thought it served her right, but I had no real reason for thinking so, except the fury children feel toward mysteries they have perceived but been unable to penetrate. I made sure I was the one to let him know, running all the way home from school to impart the news. But he never let on at all that he’d so much as exchanged a word with her. He made three comments.
“Poor lass,” he said. “She couldn’t have had much of a life.”
Then, as though recalling himself, and to whom he spoke, “Her sort isn’t much loss to the town, I’m bound to say.”
Then an inexplicably startled look came over his face. “Consumption? That’s contagious, isn’t it? Well, the Lord works in wondrous ways His will to perform.”
None of the three made much sense to me then, but they stuck in my mind. I’ve since pondered—which was my father?
The boys worked in the store after school. They didn’t get paid for it, of course. It didn’t do them any harm, either. Youngsters were expected to help out in those days—they didn’t laze around as they do now. Matt, skinny and bespectacled, worked doggedly, with neither a smile nor a complaint. But his fingers were all thumbs—he’d knock over a sack of lamp glasses or jolt a bottle of vanilla essence from a shelf, and then he’d catch it from Father, who couldn’t bear clumsiness. When Matt was sixteen, he asked Father for a rifle and leave to go with Jules Tonnerre to set winter traplines up at Galloping Mountain. Father refused, naturally, saying Matt would likely blow a foot off, and a pretty penny it would set him back to have an artificial one made, and anyway he wasn’t having any son of his gallivanting around the country with a half-breed. I wonder how Matt felt, that time? I never knew. I never knew much of Matt at all.
We used to fish under the board sidewalks for coppers that had been dropped by careless Saturday night drinkers homeswinging from the Queen Victoria Hotel, and Matt would lower so seriously his string with its blob of well-chewed spruce gum. When he made a catch, he’d never spend it, or share it, not even if you’d given him the gum right out of your mouth. He’d put it away in his black tin cash box, along with the shinplaster, twenty-five cents in paper money, which the Toronto aunts had sent, and the half dollar Father bestowed at Christmas. He carried the key of that box around his neck like a St. Christopher medal or a crucifix. Dan and I used to tease him, dancing out of his reach.
“Nyah, nyah, Miser Matt,
You can’t catch me
For a bumblebee…”
I never saw him take any money out of that box. He wasn’t saving for a jackknife or anything like that. How mean I used to think him. I never knew the truth of it until years later, years too late, after I’d grown up and wed and gone to live at the Shipley place. It was Aunt Dolly who told me.
“Didn’t you know what he meant to do with his money, Hagar? I used to laugh at him, but he never paid any mind—that was Matt’s way. He meant to set up on his own, if you please, or study law down East, or buy a ship and go into the tea trade, such wild notions youngsters get. He’d have been going on seventeen, I guess, when it finally dawned on him that the handful of nickels and quarters he had wouldn’t take him far. Do you know what he did? It wasn’t a bit like Matt to go and do a thing like that. He bought a fighting cock from old man Doherty—spent the whole lot at once, like a fool, and overpaid, I don’t doubt. He matched it with one of Jules Tonnerre’s, and Mart’s lost, of course—what did he know of birds? He brought it home—you and Dan must’ve been out, for I mind I was in the kitchen by myself—and he sat and looked at it for the longest time. It was enough to turn your stomach, its feathers covered with blood and the thing breathing very queerly. Then he wrung its neck and buried it. I wasn’t sorry to see it go, I can tell you. It wouldn’t even have made a boiling fowl. Too tough to be eaten, but not tough enough to fight.”
Daniel was a different sort entirely. He wouldn’t lift a finger to work, unless he was pushed to it. He was always delicate, and he knew very well the advantages of poor health. He’d shove away his porridge plate at breakfast, with the merest whiff of a sigh, and Auntie Doll would feel his forehead and ship him off to bed—“No school for you today, young man.” She’d run herself ragged, toting bowls of broth and mustard plasters up and down the stairs, and when he’d had his fill of coddling, he’d find himself feeling a trifle better and would progress to raspberry jelly and convalescence on the living-room sofa. Father had small patience with these antics, and used to say all Dan needed was fresh air and exercise. Sometimes he’d make Dan get up and get dressed, and would send him down to the store to clean out the warehouse. But sure as guns, if he did, the next day Dan would sprout chicken pox or something indisputable. It must have been mind over matter, for he cultivated illness as some people cultivate rare plants. Or so I thought then.
When we were in our teens, Father used to let us have parties sometimes. He went over the list of intended guests and crossed off those he thought unsuitable. Among those of my age, Charlotte Tappen was always asked—that went without saying. Telford Simmons was allowed, but only just. Henry Pearl was an awkward one—his people were decent, but being farmers they wouldn’t have the proper clothes, Father decided, so it would only embarrass them for us to send an invitation. Lottie Drieser was never invited to our parties, but when she’d grown a doll-like prettiness and a bosom, Dan sneaked her in once and Father raised cain about it. Dan was fond of clothes, and when we had a party he would appear in something new, the money having been finagled from Auntie Doll. When he was not ill, he was the gayest one imaginable, like a water beetle busily boating on the surface of life.
White wooden lace festooned the verandas in those days, sedate trimming on the beige brick houses such as my father had built. Once there was a craze for Japanese lanterns, hung from the painted lace, crimson and fragile paper, bulbous and thin, ribbed with bamboo, flamboyant with gilt dragons and chrysanthemums. In each lantern there was a candle which never stayed alight for long, it seemed, for some eager lanky boy was always shinnying up the porch pillars, match in hand, to set the glow again for the reel and schottische we twirled. Lord, how I enjoyed those dances, and can hear yet the stamping of our feet, and the fiddler scraping like a cricket. My hair, pinned on top of my head, would come undone and fall around my shoulders in a black glossiness that the boys would try to touch. It doesn’t seem so very long ago.
In wint
er the Wachakwa river was solid as marble, and we skated there, twining around the bends, stumbling over the rough spots where the water had frozen in waves, avoiding the occasional patch where the ice was thin—“rubber ice,” we called it. Doherty from the Livery Stable owned the Manawaka Icehouse as well, and used to send out his sons with the dray and horses to cut blocks. Sometimes, skidding around a curve in the river, you’d see a dark place ahead, like a deep wound on the white skin of ice, and you’d know Doherty’s dray and ice-saw had been there that afternoon. It was at dusk, all shapes and colors having turned gray and indefinite, that my brother Daniel, skating backward to show off for the girls, fell in.
The ice was always very thick where the blocks were cut, so it didn’t break around the edges of the hole. Matt, summoned by our shrieks, skated close and drew Dan up and away. It must have been thirty below, that day, and our house was at the far end of town. Odd that it never occurred to Matt or me to take Dan into the first house we came to, but no—we were only concerned to get him home before Father got back that evening from the store, so no one except Auntie Doll would need to know. His clothes had frozen before we reached the house, even though Matt had taken off his own coat and wrapped it around him. Father was home when we got there—just Dan’s bad luck, for he got railed at good and plenty for not watching where he was going. Auntie Doll gave him whisky and lemon, and put him to bed, and the next day he seemed all right. I don’t doubt he would have been, too, if he’d been husky to start with. But he wasn’t. When he came down with pneumonia, all I could think for days on end was the number of times I’d believed him to be malingering.
The night Dan’s fever went up, Auntie Doll was over seeing Floss Drieser, Lottie’s aunt, who was a dressmaker. Auntie Doll was getting a new costume made, and she spent hours at the fitting sessions, for Floss heard everything that went on in Manawaka and was never shy about passing it on. Father was working late that evening, so only Matt and I were in the house.