Jane is firm with Janet, knowing she will listen. “Not tonight, sweetheart. It's too crowded and no one will sleep well.”
Her daughters settled, she drifts in and out of the pain in her head. It crests like a hundred hammers until fitful sleep stills the swell briefly. The prospect of Aspirin consoles, but not in the state it will be delivered by Roland. When he is away at night, she leaves the coal oil lamp barely lit on the kitchen table to prevent him crashing into furniture on his return. Tonight it is just enough to see the bright eyes of Sara on her whenever she becomes restless. More than once, she hears her rise quietly to add more coal to the stove.
What will be the added cost for heat if they go over their limit of fuel from the company? Instead of the anxiety she expects from such extravagance, the thought opens a memory of Chase River. Her mother is telling her she must quit school because the extra coal needed to bake and cook in the pre-dawn sleeping household is setting Thomas back too much. It unfolds like a scene in a play without the crushing disappointment she felt at the time.
Either the unaccustomed heat or the fever is turning Jane's limbs from blocks of ice to shafts of fire. She kicks her covers to the floor, startling Sara.
“Mama?”
“I'm warm now, darling. Go back to sleep.”
Jane tries to lie as still as possible, directing the heat in her body to consume the throbbing in her head. As she does, patches of memories pull loose from a wall that has confined and protected her for twenty-four years. Chase River grows clearer through the widening cracks.
She sees a curing shack, primitive, dark, filled with dead meat and weapons. A proper stench, if she could smell, but she cannot. She observes only. In hiding, her thumb catches on a rusty hasp and bleeds while her friend, her dead friend, lies in the dark. She cannot feel the horror of that night in the forest but sees it in a bundle of clothes in the snow, her blood spilling onto his. Back home, she collapses from her wound. Her mother catches her, administering the touch and scent of love and of Wales in a bottle of iodine.
Sara's adenoidal breathing grazes her reverie but does not puncture it. It blends into the grey and leaden weeks she lay lifeless, to be miraculously awakened by her first kiss. A kiss from a golden prince. The scene is clear: the cabin of her friend Louis, her dead friend. She has stolen away from her mother's care for a walk in the fresh March air. Adam is there packing his father's few belongings. Alone. Adam is alone and Jane is alone. Until they are not alone, but two becoming one. She cannot tell him of his father's murder because her high fever has trapped and sealed all traces of it. Was a second high fever its only entry?
Jane does not feel the rapture, but she sees it in Adam's wondrous face and soft gaze. She cannot hear the tender words on the old porch later, but sees their blush in the lilac bush next to it, bestowing tenderness upon all lilac blossoms and anything lilac-coloured. She knew back then that magic is fleeting and most often an illusion. And they both knew this magic would vanish. Jane Owens and Adam Strong were not meant to be a couple beyond the rough edges of a log cabin soon to be demolished for the Extension mine.
But the bloom did not vanish, and Jane did the only thing she could think of: walk into the open arms of Roland Hughes. She cannot feel the betrayal or revulsion of that moment, but can see it in the nervous eager tic in Roland's cheek. Nothing was said when the plumpest, bonniest baby she has ever held arrived six weeks earlier than expected â the question she feared about complexion becoming nothing against the fear of his irregular breathing. And how did she bear the horror of watching that breath stop altogether, blaming the midwife for not slapping him hard enough at birth? She cannot feel the bottomless anguish in her seventeen-year-old heart, but sees her favourite cat Velvet in the cradle and wants to strangle her for not being her baby.
Except for sight, all sensation and emotion have been leached from the pictures. Even then Jane views them behind her eyes and not through them. The image of her lost baby causes her to cry out. Sara leaps to her mother's side.
“Just a bad dream,” Jane whispers. Sara lays a cold cloth on her forehead. She holds her hand until a punch on the warped door just before dawn announces her father.
Sara springs to her feet, but Jane does not have the strength to mediate in his drunken entrance tonight. She wishes only for Aspirin. Her headache has dulled and given way to a heaviness in her chest: as if the sofa were on top of her and not the other way around.
Roland shouts, “What the hell happened to the fire? Do I have to supervise every minute in this house or it falls apart? Your mother is sick, or haven't you noticed?”
Jane says quietly in short breaths: “I told her to let it burn down because I was warm with fever. She's kept it going all night.”
“Some job she did.” He stumbles to the coal box, scoops a few pieces into the scuttle, dropping as many as he grabs. Sara nestles up against her mother on the couch for safety.
“Did you get the Aspirin, Roland? And carbolic?”
“Just my luck, the chemist was closed. Guy I ran into later says there's no quinine to be had in Nanaimo. Where are the onions? Doesn't anybody do anything when I'm away?”
He lurches to the kitchen where he has not chopped an onion in twenty-three years, brandishing a knife he has found after slamming all the cupboards. Jane tells him the girls will look after it. Janet has been wakened by the commotion and comes out hurriedly in her nightgown and housecoat to begin chopping. Sara huddles closer to her mother until Jane sits up abruptly with her head back, blood streaming from her nose.
“Get some rags from the sewing room.”
Janet begins to cry because she has not taken the clean handkerchiefs from the laundry line in the kitchen, inadequate as they are now for the flow. She starts toward them, then turns back fretfully to the onions, not knowing which to do first.
With a handful of clean rags, Sara whispers to her mother: “Papa's a beast.”
“He's scared,” says Jane. “He acts worse when he's scared.”
“I'm scared too, but I'm not mean.”
“No, you're not, and I want you always to stay this way. Papa didn't have a mother to tell him not to be mean.”
“But we have you, Mama, and we always will, won't we?” Sara begins to cry and lays her head on Jane's lap.
Masks forgotten, she strokes her daughter's hair and removes the rag from her nose long enough for a quick breath-held kiss on her head. “And I'll be with you even if I'm not with you.”
She knows the signs, as sure as those of birth, each a mysterious, unalterable step to the transition itself. The cough, the aches â head, back, joints, chest â the bleeding, the short breath, and the final suffocation from mucus in the lungs. Some say bleeding noses help with recovery, but not in Marjorie's case. And if she is with child, as Marjorie was, it's well known she is more susceptible to the pernicious virus. How poignant that another man's son should start her life with Roland and his own seed should hasten its end. She must trust the strong fibre that has served her so well for forty years to accomplish her final mission.
“Sara,” she speaks through the rag to her daughter still sobbing on her lap. “Please move the cot to the kitchen. Soak a sheet in whatever carbolic is left, wring it out, and hang it on the laundry line. Janet will help you.”
Roland has passed out in the bedroom to everyone's relief. As her daughters set up her corner in the kitchen, Jane rises from the couch and moves slowly toward her sleeping husband. Raucous snores insure that he will not see his wife step out of her brown hopsacking skirt and petticoat, pull her bloodstained white blouse and shimmy over her head, slip into a clean cotton nightgown, and change her underwear. No man has ever seen her naked. And only three midwives. Even alone she does not prolong the changing or bathing process, at times ruing her innate modesty because her body is firm and trustworthy. She stuffs her clothes into an old pillowcase and carries them out to the porch to be burned.
The exertion causes Jane to collapse on the cot. Having piled the clean handkerchiefs neatly on the counter, Janet steps outside for fresh water to wash the sheet. Jane calls Sara away from the onions.
“Please bring me my writing tablet and pen from the desk.” While Sara fetches them, she props herself up against pillows in readiness for her task.
At that moment a coarse cough precedes Roland's sluggish footsteps into the kitchen. He spies Sara with the paper and pen and snatches them away. “Is this what you do for a sick woman? Tax her strength with foolery? To draw pictures, I s'pose.” He stuffs the writing paper into the cookstove. “Make yourself useful for a change. Make your dear mother some violet tea, get some soup into her, and finish that poultice.”
Sara chokes back tears, having learned from her mother that explanations only inflame her father's rants. Jane says quietly: “Roland, the stores will be open soon. Would you try again for carbolic? We're fresh out.” She is too weak to ask if he has any money left and no solution if he doesn't. Hangovers from bootlegged liquor are as vile as its other stages. The open air is best for him.
“I s'pose that's a reminder I didn't get the Aspirin too.” He stops short, seeing his wife's heaving chest, takes the jacket he has flung over a chair, and escapes.
“Sara,” Jane whispers when he's gone. “Bring me the scribbler you use for your lessons. Papa dropped the pen over there. It's important.”
Sara runs quickly to her bedroom and brings back a lined notebook.
“I want to write a letter to my sister Catherine in Wales. It's my heart's desire that you will meet her and Margaret and your cousins someday.”
“Don't talk, Mama. Save your strength until you get better. We can take you to our school where there are nurses and doctors.”
Jane shakes her head. The makeshift hospitals offer more hope than remedy, and she is beyond both. Janet comes in from the porch with a damp sheet in her hand, disinfectant fumes escorting her.
“It's wrung out, Mama. Sara can help me hang it up.” She sees the scribbler in Jane's trembling fingers. “Sara! Mama can't be helping you with lessons now. She's too sick.” Her tone carries a burst of hostility â finally warranted â toward lessons.
“It's all right, Janet,” Jane says quietly. “I asked her for it. I need to write a letter to your Aunt Catherine. Sometimes words are necessary.”
Unable to withstand two attacks, Sara retaliates against the sober one. “Leave Mama,” she shouts at her sister for the first time ever. “You don't love words the way we do.”
Janet drops the wet sheet on the oilcloth table cover and runs sobbing into the bedroom.
“Sara,” Jane says as emphatically as she can. “You must never fight with your sister. She's your heart and soul.”
Sara nods and Janet returns. Wordlessly, they hang the damp, pungent sheet on the laundry line, sealing their mother off from the rest of the house, and worse, from them. With the unison of twins, they take knives and finish chopping onions for the poultice. For once, Sara's strokes are more precise and focused than her sister's, allowing Janet to shed enough tears for them both.
Behind the curtain, Jane develops a rhythm to ration her diminishing reserves. Write, rest, breathe. Increasingly, she must struggle to raise her head from the pillows between scrawled sentences. No time to feel remorse over bad penmanship. Urgency stokes dying embers, releasing a flare-up of words. All the books she loved so much to read offer their language in a last rite, sometimes in her mother's Welsh rhythms. The letter will set her story down, but not here, not where it could hurt Roland, who gave his name in good faith to the child she was carrying. Nor does she want a new image of herself altering any detail of the perfect love she shares with her children. Sweet Cassie will receive Jane's words of atonement for the silence she has held so long about her friend Louis Strong. His kind face visits her feverish brain.
Please forgive me Louis for not coming forward at the trial. My mind turned
in on itself when I was so close to death.
Of his doomed grandson no one ever knew, not even the baby's father. How we both loved Adam. Stickiness oozes from her ear and she dabs more blood on the rag already red from her nose and sputum. Along with bodily fluids, the infection releases senses frozen from the pictures just hours ago, and for twenty-four years before that. Her longing for Adam momentarily revives her breath, the same way he stopped it back then. By leaving her alone as agreed, he protected her from gossip. Later she heard that after Henry Hargraves was acquitted of the murder of their father, the Strong brothers moved to the mainland. Ruby returned to Salt Spring Island to take a teaching position and to care for their mother. Where were they now? Would any of them have understood her silence?
“Mama!” Janet cries. “Why so many pages? You must rest yourself.”
A loud sigh issues from Jane's throat. The pen drops on the blanket after she makes a faint squiggly version of her name at the bottom of the letter.
“I'm done,” she says, summoning her twins to her side. She includes Janet in this sacred task by asking her to fold the five pages, bring an envelope from the desk, and seal it. This twin will have no curiosity about the contents.