“Big?” Why should I take it so keenly? “I wouldn’t call it big, as houses go.”
“Well, you couldn’t compare it to the big new split-levels and those,” Doris says. “But it’s a four-bedroom house and that’s big enough for these days.”
“Four bedrooms big? The Currie house had six. Even the old Shipley place had five.”
Doris lifts brown rayon shoulders, looks expectantly at Marvin. Say something, her eyes spell, your turn now.
“We thought,” Marvin speaks as he thinks, slowly, “we got to thinking, Doris and me, it might be a good idea to sell this house, Mother. Get an apartment. Smaller, easier to keep, no stairs.”
I cannot speak, for the pain under my ribs returns now, all of a stab. Lungs, is it? Heart? This pain is hot, hot as August rain or the tears of children. Now I see the reason for the spread table. Am I a calf, to be fattened? Oh, had I known I would not have eaten a bite of her damnable walnuts and icing.
“You’ll never sell this house, Marvin. It’s my house. It’s my house, Doris. Mine.”
“No,” Marvin says in a low voice. “You made it out to me when I took over your business matters.”
“Oh yes,” I say quickly, although in fact I had forgotten, “but that was only for convenience. Wasn’t it? It’s still my house. Marvin—are you listening to me? It’s mine. Isn’t that so?”
“Yeh, all right, it’s yours.”
“Now wait a minute,” Doris says, a high hurt squawking, like an unwilling hen the rooster treads, “you just hold on a minute—”
“The way she talks,” Marvin says, “you’d think I was trying to do her out of her blamed house. Well, I’m not. Understand? If you don’t know that by now, Mother, what’s the use of talking?”
I do know it, and do not. I can think of only one thing—the house is mine. I bought it with the money I worked for, in this city which has served as a kind of home ever since I left the prairies. Perhaps it is not home, as only the first of all can be truly that, but it is mine and familiar. My shreds and remnants of years are scattered through it visibly in lamps and vases, the needle-point fire bench, the heavy oak chair from the Shipley place, the china cabinet and walnut sideboard from my father’s house. There’d not be room for all of these in some cramped apartment. We’d have to put them into storage, or sell them. I don’t want that. I couldn’t leave them. If I am not somehow contained in them and in this house, something of all change caught and fixed here, eternal enough for my purposes, then I do not know where I am to be found at all.
“Maybe you’re forgetting,” Doris says, “I’m the one who has to look after this place. It’s me that trots up and down these stairs a hundred times a day, and lugs the vacuum cleaner up twice a week. I ought to have some say.”
“I know,” Marvin says heavily. “I know that.”
How he hates all this, the bicker-bicker of women, the recrimination. He ought to have been a hennit or a monk and lived somewhere beyond the reach of human voices.
Probably she is right. I no longer make even a pretense of helping in the house. For so long I did, and finally saw I was only getting in her way, with my slow feet, and my hands that have to be coaxed to perform tasks. I have lived with Marvin and Doris—or they have lived in my house, whichever way one cares to phrase it—for seventeen years. Seventeen—it weighs like centuries. How have I borne it? How have they?
“I always swore I’d never be a burden—”
Now I perceive, too late, how laden with self-pity my voice sounds, and how filled with reproach. But they rise like fish to the bait.
“No—don’t think that. We never said that, did we?”
“Marv only meant—I only meant—”
How ashamed I am, to play that worn old tune. And yet—I am not like Marvin. I do not have his urge to keep the peace. I am unreconciled to this question of the house, my house, mine.
“I wouldn’t want the house sold, Marvin. I wouldn’t want that.”
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s forget it.”
“Forget it!” Doris’s voice is like a darning needle, heavy and sharp.
“Please,” Marvin says, and Doris and I both sense his desperation. “I can’t stand all this racket. Well see. We’ll leave it now. Right now I’m going to see what’s on.”
And he goes to the den—an appropriate name, for it is really his dark foxy den, where he looks at his flicker pictures and forgets whatever it is that bothers him. Doris and I accept the truce.
“I’m going to evening service, Mother. Care to come along? You’ve not been for some time now.”
Doris is very religious. She says it is a comfort. Her minister is plump and pink, and if he met John the Baptist in tatters in the desert, stuffing dead locusts into that parched mouth for food, and blazing the New Kingdom out of those terrible eyesockets, he would faint. But so would I, likely.
“Not tonight, thanks. Next week, perhaps.”
“I was going to ask him to call on you. The minister, I mean, Mr. Troy.”
“In a week or so, perhaps. I haven’t felt much like talking lately.”
“You wouldn’t need to talk so much. He’s awfully nice. It helps me, just to talk a few minutes with him.”
“Thank you, Doris. But not this week, if you don’t mind.”
Tact comes the hardest of all to me now. How to say that pearly Mr. Troy would be wasting his time in offering me his murmured words? Doris believes that age increases natural piety, like a kind of insurance policy falling due. I couldn’t explain. Who would understand, even if I strained to speak? I am past ninety, and this figure seems somehow arbitrary and impossible, for when I look in my mirror and beyond the changing shell that houses me, I see the eyes of Hagar Currie, the same dark eyes as when I first began to remember and to notice myself. I have never worn glasses. My eyes are still quite strong. The eyes change least of all. John’s eyes were gray, and even near the last they looked the same to me as the boy’s, still that hidden eagerness as though he half believed, against all reason and knowledge, that something splendid would suddenly occur.
“Ask your Mr. Troy to call, if you wish. I may feel up to it next week.”
Gratified, she goes to church, to pray for me, perhaps, or for herself, or Marvin staring at his epileptic pictures, or just to pray.
Two
HERE WE SIT, the little minister straight from the book, bashful and youngly anxious, and I the Egyptian, not dancing now with rowanberries in her hair, but sadly altered. The day is warm and spring, and we are in the back-garden yellow with forsythia. I am struck as always with the shrubs’ early blossoming here, the coast plants still a marvel to me, recalling the late prairie spring and the tenacious snow.
Mr. Troy has chosen a bad day to call. The rib pain is not so intrusive this afternoon, but my belly growls and snarls like a separate beast. My bowels are locked today. I am Job in reverse, and neither cascara nor syrup of figs nor milk of magnesia will prevail against my unspeakable affliction. I sit uncomfortably. I am bloated, full, weighted down, and I fear I may pass wind.
Nevertheless, for the minister’s call I have at least put on my gray flowered dress. Silk jersey, Doris calls it. Muted and suitable it is, the flowers miniature and peach-colored, nothing to jar God’s little man. All the same, I quite like the frock myself. It flows in folds around me, and the flowers, sprinkled liberally, almost overcome the gray. Gray isn’t only the hair of the old. Even more, it’s unpainted houses that strain and crack against the weather, leached by rain and bleached by the bone-whitening sun. The Shipley place was never painted, not once. You would think in all that time someone would have had the odd dollar to spare for a few gallons of paint. But no. Bram was always going to do it—in spring, it would be done at harvest, and in fall, it would be done for sure in spring.
Mr. Troy is trying his level best.
“A long and full life like yours—it can be counted a blessing—”
I make no reply. What does he know of it, one
way or another? I will not ease his way. Let him flounder.
“I guess life must have been quite difficult in those days, eh?” he stumbles on.
“Yes. Yes, it was.” But only because it cannot be otherwise, at whatever time. I do not say this to Mr. Troy, who likes to think that half a century makes all the difference in the world.
“I guess you grew up on the farm, eh, Mrs. Shipley?”
Why does he ask? He does not care if I was born on the farm or in the poor house, in Zion or in hell.
“No. No, I did not, Mr. Troy. I grew up in the town of Manawaka. My father was one of the first people there. The first merchant, he was. His name was Jason Currie. He never farmed, although he owned four farms and had them tenanted.”
“He must have been a wealthy man.”
“He was,” I say. “In the goods of this world.”
“Yes, yes,” says Mr. Troy, voice leaping like a spawning salmon, to show his spirituality. “Wealth can’t be truly measured in dollars and cents.”
“Two hundred thousand he was worth, at least, and never a red cent of it came to me.”
“Dear, dear,” says Mr. Troy, not certain what the response should be to that. I will not tell him more. What business is it of his? Yet now I feel that if I were to walk carefully up to my room, approach the mirror softly, take it by surprise, I would see there again that Hagar with the shining hair, the dark-maned colt off to the training ring, the young ladies’ academy in Toronto.
I wanted to tell Matt I knew he should have been the one to go east, but I could not speak of it to him. I felt I ought to say it to Father, too, but I was terrified he might change his mind about sending me. I said nothing until my trunk was packed and all the arrangements made. Then I spoke.
“Don’t you think Matt should go to college, Father?”
“What would he learn that would help him in the store?” Father replied. “Anyway, he’s past twenty—it’s too late for him. Besides, I need him here. I never had the chance to go to college, yet I’ve got on all right. Matt can learn all he needs right here, if he’s minded to do so. It’s not the same for you—there’s no woman here to teach you how to dress and behave like a lady.”
Such a barrage of arguments managed to convince me with no difficulty. When it came to saying good-by to Matt, at first I avoided his eyes, but then I thought—why on earth should I? So I looked at him squarely and said good-by so evenly and calmly you’d have thought I was going over to South Wachakwa or Freehold and would be back that evening. Later, in the train, I cried, thinking of him, but, of course, he never knew that, and I’d have been the last to tell him.
When I returned after two years, I knew embroidery, and French, and menu-planning for a five-course meal, and poetry, and how to take a firm hand with servants, and the most becoming way of dressing my hair. Hardly ideal accomplishments for the kind of life I’d ultimately find myself leading, but I had no notion of that then. I was Pharaoh’s daughter reluctantly returning to his roof, the square brick palace so oddly antimacassared in the wilderness, back to the hill where his monument stood, more dear to him, I believe, than the brood mare who lay beneath because she’d proved no match for his stud.
Father looked me over, my bottle-green costume and feathered hat. I wished he’d find some fault, tell me I’d been extravagant, not nod and nod as though I were a thing and his.
“It was worth every penny for the two years,” he said. “You’re a credit to me. Everyone will be saying that by tomorrow. You’ll not work in the store. It wouldn’t do. You can look after the accounts and the ordering—that can be done at home. You’d not believe how the store’s grown since you’ve been away. I entertain now—just a few friends for dinner, nothing too elaborate. I find it’s well worth while. It’s good to have you back, and looking smart. Dolly’s quite passable as cook, but as for hostess—it’s beyond her.”
“I want to teach,” I said. “I can get the South Wachakwa school.”
Both of us were blunt as bludgeons. We hadn’t a scrap of subtlety between us. Some girls would have spent a week preparing him. Not I. It never occurred to me.
“Do you think I sent you down East for two solid years just so you could take a one-room school?” he cried. “Anyway, no daughter of mine is going out there alone. You’ll not teach, miss.”
“Morag MacCulloch teaches,” I said. “If the minister’s daughter can, why can’t I?”
“I always suspected Dougall MacCulloch was a fool,” Father said, “and now I know it.”
“Why?” I blazed. “Why?”
We were standing at the foot of the stairs. My father put his hands around the newel post and gripped it as though it were a throat. How I feared his hands, and him, but I’d as lief have died as let him know.
“You think I’d allow you to go to South Wachakwa and board with God knows who? You think I’d let you go to the kind of dances they have there, and let all the farm boys paw you?”
Standing there rigidly on the bottom step, buttoned and armored in my long dark green, I glared at him.
“You think I’d allow that? What do you think of me?”
He held tightly to the newel post, his hands working at the smooth golden wood.
“You know nothing,” he said in an almost inaudible voice. “Men have terrible thoughts.”
It never seemed peculiar to me then that he said thoughts, not deeds. Only now, when I recall it. If he had kept to his pattern then, laid down the law in no uncertain terms, I’d have been angry and that’s all. But he did not. He reached out and took my hand and held it. His own hand tightened painfully, and for the merest instant the bones in my fingers hurt.
“Stay,” he said.
Perhaps it was only the momentary pain made me do it. I jerked my hand away as though I had accidentally set it on a hot stove. He didn’t say a word. He turned and went outside, where Matt was telling the drayman what to do with the black trunk inscribed Miss H. Currie.
I felt I must pursue him, say it was a passing thing and not meant. But I didn’t. I only stood at the stairs’ ending, looking at the big brown-framed picture, a steel engraving of cattle, bearing the legend The towing herd winds slowly o’er the lea.
I did not go out teaching. I stayed and kept my father’s accounts, played hostess for him, chatted diplomatically to guests, did all he expected of me, for I felt (sometimes with rancor, sometimes with despair) that I would reimburse him for what he’d spent, whatever it cost me. But when he brought home young men, to introduce to me, I snubbed the lot of them.
I’d been back in Manawaka three years when I met Brampton Shipley, quite by chance, for normally I would not have found myself in his company. Chaperoned by Auntie Doll, I was allowed to go to a dance at the school one evening, because the proceeds were to go to the fund for building a hospital in town. Auntie Doll was gabbling away with Floss Drieser, so when Bram asked me to dance, I went with him. The Shipleys all danced well, I’ll give them that. Heavy as Bram was, he was light on his feet.
We spun around the chalky floor, and I reveled in his fingernails with crescents of ingrown earth that never met a file. I fancied I heard in his laughter the bravery of battalions. I thought he looked a bearded Indian, so brown and beaked a face. The black hair thrusting from his chin was rough as thistles. The next instant, though, I imagined him rigged out in a suit of gray soft as a dove’s breast-feathers.
Oh, I was the one, all right, tossing my black mane contemptuously, yet never certain the young men had really noticed. I knew my mind, no doubt, but the mind changed every minute, one instant feeling pleased with what I knew and who I was and where I lived, the next instant consigning the brick house to perdition and seeing the plain board town and the shack dwellings beyond our pale as though they’d been the beckoning illustrations in the book of Slavic fairy tales given me by an aunt, the enchanted houses with eyes, walking on their own splayed hen’s feet, the czar’s sons playing at peasants in coarse embroidered tunics, bloused and bel
ted, the ashen girls drowning attractively in meres, crowned always with lilies, never with pigweed or slime.
Brampton Shipley was fourteen years older than I. He’d come out from the East with his wife Clara some years before, and taken a homestead in the valley just outside town. It was river land, and should have been good, but it hadn’t flourished for him.
“Lazy as a pet pig,” my father said of him. “No get-up-and-go.”
I’d seen him sometimes in the store. He was always laughing. God knows why he had cause to laugh, left to bring up two girls alone. His wife had died of a burst spleen, nothing to do with children. I’d spoken no more than hello to her occasionally in the store. A vat of a woman she had been, something moistly fat about her, and around her there always clung a sour yeasty smell as though she spent her life in cleaning churns. She was inarticulate as a stabled beast, and when she mustered voice it had been gruff as a man’s, pebbled with impermissibles, I seen and ain’t, even worse coming from the woman than from the man, the Lord knows why.
“Hagar,” Bram Shipley said. “You’re a good dancer, Hagar.”
As we went spinning like tumbleweed in a Viennese waltz, disguised and hidden by the whirling crowd, quite suddenly he pulled me to him and pressed his outheld groin against my thigh. Not by accident. There was no mistaking it. No one had ever dared in this way before. Outraged, I pushed at his shoulders, and he grinned. I, mortified beyond words, couldn’t look at him except dartingly. But when he asked me for another dance, I danced with him.
“I’d like to show you my place sometime,” he said. “I’ve had some bad luck, but we’re coming on now. I’m getting another team in the fall. Percherons. Reuben Pearl’s selling them to me. It’ll be worth looking at, someday, that place of mine.”
As Auntie Doll and I were getting our wraps that night, I chanced to see Lottie Drieser, still light and tiny, her yellow hair puffed up and arranged so carefully.
“I saw you dancing with Bram Shipley,” she said, and snickered.
Lottie herself was keeping company with Telford Simmons, who’d gone to work in the bank.