“Dear Brother and Sisters⦔
She begins by telling them how much she misses them, though the three sentences she writes cannot possibly explain how much she longs for Cassie's company. Oh, to be back in Wales or have her here with them on Vancouver Island. She misses Margaret and Gilbert too, but they both have families, and she knows Catherine is the one who will snatch her letter from the postman and read it to the others. Margaret will continue what she is doing even while Cassie reads â pickling, sewing, scouring floors, or scolding her two young children Gwynyth and Evan. She is like Tommy, always busy, not the kind to sit down and talk the way Catherine does. Jane could tell Cassie what she cannot tell Mama because she is too occupied with her sickness; or Tommy because he is always too tired from the mine or from fixing the house and saves his few words for friends at the Whistle Stop; or ten-year-old Gomer, who is too young to talk to about anything except to mind his manners.
Families belong together,
Jane is about to write, as she listens to the crackling swoosh of kindling burning down. She waits for the fire to settle into a gentle whisper before rising to touch the kettle to make sure she filled it the night before. Back at the letter, Mama's voice enters her head and she hesitates. Mama gets impatient whenever she complains of being so far from the others. “You stir up discontent with that kind of talk. There are so many worse off than we are.” She uses the Monmouths back in Wales as an example. Mr. Monmouth lost both legs in a mine accident, and Mrs. Monmouth has to look after him as well as two children without normal brains who can't walk or talk and have to be fed. Some sickness in the family that gets passed on. And all without money. That is true bad luck, Mama says.
Jane tries to remember the Monmouths whenever she thinks about her own father and Margaret's husband being killed in the same mine explosion, forcing her two older brothers, each in a different country, to look after the rest of the family.
It happened so fast. Mama, Jane, and Gomer were suddenly on a ship to Canada last year to set up housekeeping for Tommy on Vancouver Island so he could provide for them. And back in Wales, Gilbert and his family shared his meagre wages with Catherine and Margaret and her two children. At least Margaret was able to keep her own little mine cottage where there was room for Catherine. Margaret's fine sewing brings in a little more now, and Cassie started teaching children in first standard, so that will help. Who would have counted on Mama taking ill with a lung ailment on the boat and hardly having a day of strength since? They have to be thankful both voyages to British Columbia, their own and Tommy's five years earlier, had taken place after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the country. Before 1885, Tommy told them, men would spend six months on a ship going around the tip of South America to get from Britain to the west coast. How would Mama have managed more than the two and a half weeks their journey took? Hard as the wooden benches in the train cars were, she felt less sick from the motion on rails than on waves.
“'Tis the shock of all that's happened causing Mama's illness,” Cassie wrote, but Jane is still trying to figure it out.
She tries so hard not to complain that tears squeeze out of her eyes from the effort. What can she write? She tells Cassie that today she will go to Cruikshanks to do laundry. But will she say that Stella will probably ask her to make two or three pies; that she will leave Jane to mind her new baby when she goes to the fire boss' house for tea; and that she will snatch the baby from her when she comes back, because she thinks Jane is getting too close to him? And she cannot tell that Stella has become so high and mighty she even puts her own underwear in for Jane to wash. For which of them is that a greater disgrace? She will write that Stella is only two years older than she is and that they were in school together last fall in Chase River. Can she add that they were both in the same grade, because Stella was repeating and Jane had been put forward after the first week when the teacher saw her skills and ability? Those things make her sisters and brother proud of her schooling in Wales. No, she cannot worry them in every letter about how much she misses school.
She can still feel the way her stomach twisted the day Mama said, “Things are getting left undone at home.” She knew what it meant. If only she did not have the long walk to and from school every day, she would have more time for her chores. For a while she got up in the dead of night to bake pies and make soup, and have Tommy's meal ready to warm up when he came home from the mine. She even managed to wash clothes quietly at the same time, boiling white laundry in kerosene cans on the stove, while using a washboard in a galvanized tub for the pit suits outside in the dark. But the extra coal needed to heat the stove so early went beyond Tommy's quota, so that was that.
Jane never did tell her sisters or anyone else about her last day. How Stella left at the same time, gleeful because she was with child, knowing Lance Cruikshank would marry her and that would mean the end of school forever. Through Stella's giggles, Jane had to fight back tears because school was her favourite place in Canada so far. She was top student in all subjects and dreamed of becoming a teacher herself some day. In the classroom she lived in a different world, away from scrubbing coal dust from stiff work clothes until her fingers bled. When she carried out her books on the final day with her stomach bilious, she felt fifty years old instead of fifteen. The teacher, Miss Maasanen, almost cried herself when she gave Jane a copy of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
because she knew how much she liked to read. Looking back, she is thankful she did not also know on that unhappy day that she would soon be washing clothes for the girl cackling in front of her.
Her sisters and brother have enough to worry about without her whining, so she will tell them instead about Mr. Louis Strong. Yesterday he brought them another piece of lamb along with his laundry. The lamb comes from Henry “Butch” Hargraves, whose cabin and meat sheds Jane passes on the way to Louis' place. Jane does not like the way he looks at her, but Louis seems friendly with him, so she always says “Good day” before hurrying on. When Louis pays for her services, he always compliments her on the fine way she presses his clothes with the flatiron and folds them neatly. This makes her smile because it does not take much to smooth out overalls and iron sheets and a few flannel shirts. What a difference between a farmer's and a miner's clothes, especially a farmer as careful and orderly as Louis Strong, who spends his days among fruit trees.
She could tell them how she has never heard an accent like Mr. Strong's â soft and easy, from the southern United States. Maybe when both families save enough to bring Cassie over to live with them, she will have enough time to tell her all about Louis Strong's life. How he was a slave, even though his father was the white plantation owner. How he bought his freedom twice and still was not allowed to leave. How he finally fled to California only to learn Negroes were not welcome there, any more than they had been in Mississippi or Tennessee. (An excellent speller, Jane likes writing those words with their clusters of double letters, so she might have to include this information before she sees Cassie in person.) Mr. Strong told her that Governor James Douglas, a mulatto himself born in a South American country called British Guiana, invited Negroes to come and settle in his new colony of British Columbia, so that's how he and his family ended up here. He had bought some land on Vancouver Island a few years ago to experiment with apple trees, to continue grafting various strains. But he did not want to give up the other farm and cattle he owned on Salt Spring Island, so his sons Maynard and Adam stayed behind with their mother to run it. His daughter Ruby is a schoolteacher in the Cedar district, not far from Chase River.
Jane pulls all of this out of him with questions, when she delivers his clothes to him. By nature, he is a quiet man who does not like to talk about himself. His cabin has become the schoolroom she misses so much, where she can dwell in visions from realms other than her own. She grieves to think of him as a young lad wearing only one garment for night and day, sleeping on a straw mattress on a dirt floor in a shack with rags for covers. One pot of stew set in the middle of the floor fed all the children, eating from their knees. In fact, whenever Mama mentions the Monmouths now, Jane thinks of the young Louis Strong instead. And she no longer takes her family's covers for granted; they are quilts that Mama and Margaret sewed back in Wales, threadbare now in places, but more than adequate to keep everybody warm. Probably Margaret and Catherine are stitching new counterpanes at this very moment to replace the ones sent to Canada. Jane lifts her pen from the paper and can almost hear her older sister scolding Cassie to stay at her task and stop daydreaming so much or playing with Gwynyth and Evan.
A snort from Gomer reminds Jane it is time to move him from Tommy's bedroom to the couch. Bundled in blankets, he wheezes as she guides him, still asleep, the few steps to the front room. When Tommy finishes the two small bedrooms he plans to add, Gomer and Jane will each have a sleeping space. She would gladly share hers with Cassie, as she did in Wales. On her way back to the letter, Jane checks to make sure Mama is still sleeping. And as if someone else might be looking over her shoulder, she swivels her head before writing:
Last week I met
his younger son and his daughter at his cabin. They are golden in colour with
smiles all over their faces.
She could never record that she spent half an hour alone in the company of Louis' son Adam after Ruby rode her horse back to her schoolhouse. Even putting his name on paper feels bold, and she omits it.
Jane cannot reveal that she considers Adam Strong to be the most beautiful boy she has ever laid eyes on. Standing next to him in Louis' yard caused all kinds of sensations she has never felt before: pounding heart, light head, and gibberish coming out of her mouth. At eighteen, he is almost three years older than Jane, who will be sixteen in December. She once met Mrs. Strong when she came over to help her husband make apple cider; Adam is not as dark as his mother but darker than his father who carries the imprint of his own white father. Louis, in fact, could almost pass for someone of Spanish or Greek descent, though he would never have tried such a thing in the United States. She thinks of Adam's shade in terms of the old dressers and tables Tommy picks up from other miners, then sands and revarnishes to a gleaming finish. Light oak is the colour of Adam's face in the sun; his neck, polished maple, and his arms, a rich mahogany. He seems as strong and still as an oak himself, just like his father, whom he shows respect and affection at all times. He works hard tending his parents' cattle and farm, because his older brother comes to Salt Spring Island only on his time off from prospecting for gold on the Skeena River in the north. With Maynard away so much, Adam has become the one his mother depends on. Jane smiles to think of Gomer taking on such a load when he cannot yet build a proper fire in the stove. All this she will tell Catherine when they are finally together again. For now she closes with kisses, inserts from a can on the shelf the $10 bill Tommy has instructed her to send, and seals the letter in an envelope.
The sun has begun to break through the morning's haze, and Jane fills an enamelled basin with water now heated in the kettle. In the scullery off the kitchen, she slips quickly out of her robe and nightgown and washes her strong young body, gooseflesh rising from the cold air not insulated by the blanket curtain. Two freshly cured hams and a slab of bacon hang from the ceiling; Tommy gets their pork from a fellow miner â not from Henry Hargraves, to Jane's relief. Back home, their father did the curing, and Mama kept chickens whose necks she wrung herself. That is all past.
She pulls a shimmy over her head, then a white blouse, and steps into a petticoat and a grey woollen skirt, all warming in a bundle next to the stove. As she fastens her lisle stockings to her garter belt, she notes the grease tins are full. Time to make more soap. On the way home she will stop at the store for lye. She leaves the curtain open to insure warmth for Tommy's bath, stuffs her feet into Gomer's boots, and flings a cloak over her shoulders. She exits quietly, two empty pails in one hand, a chamber pot in the other. After a brief stop at the privy, she steps quickly down a lane to a pump shared by a cluster of dwellings.
Tommy did well claiming this parcel of land. Lush with alder, poplar, maple, pine, and hawthorn trees, their large lot slopes gently down to the Chase River flowing through the bottom corner. Sometimes she thinks of the fugitive native murderer in his canoe, whose chase years ago by Hudson's Bay Company scouts gave this sparkling stream its name.
Tommy had rented a small shack on his own until just before his family arrived, when he purchased a larger one for $50 to move here from the declining Wellington mine. Mama contributed her small compensation from Wales for furniture and housekeeping. Many miners rent company cottages, partly due to the greed of the owners, but also because homes can become worthless if the mine dries up, unless they are moved to a new site. Tommy believes they are well located in Chase River. If his work at the No. 1 Nanaimo mine ceases, he can sell or move their home again. He learned the value of owning and maintaining property, no matter how modest, from their father. Even their outside cedar shingles are weathering evenly, in contrast to the unsightly bleeding wood on some of the smaller, shabbier cottages built or rented by others around them â mainly Finnish farmers and miners.
Jane sees Gertie Salo turn into one of those cottages now with full pails. She is relieved to be spared stories of school at the pump from her former slow-moving classmate. Complaints about the studies she craves. The mine whistle jolts her into a quicker pace, still careful to keep the water from overflowing. Back in the warm house, she fills oil cans with water to boil for Tommy's bath and scoops lard from a tin into a cast iron frying pan. Mama sneezes from the bedroom.