They shared their dinner, she and her mother. They sat together at break, with Tilly and her mother’s friend Harriet and a few other ladies from ironing or church. Some girls would not have liked to mix home and work like this, but Bea had always wanted to follow her mother to work, to get a little more of her, and now she could. My shadow, her mother used to tell the neighbors. Never had to worry about this one running off, and Bea looked like her—the same mild gray eyes and broad shoulders, the same capable hands. As long as she had her mother, everything was fine, for her mother got up clear-eyed each morning and made the tea and chatted steadily though rarely complained, and while Bea was not a spectacular student nor a beauty nor anyone of significance, her mother loved her and told her so often. You’re my best girl, her mum would say (no matter that Bea was her only living one), and sometimes it felt as if it was just the two of them, something sisterly about it. Underneath it all was the assumption that eventually Bea would end up with a husband, but they were in no hurry; their arrangement suited them. Her mother did not primp or preen her, did not send her out, except to dancing classes, which were, anyway, all girls.
Her mother’s sickness began in her privates and spread to the rest of her, taking over two years to do her in. At first she talked right through her pain (though rarely of it) but as she grew sicker, her words grew scarce. Sometimes Bea would come home from work and stand on the stairs for a good five minutes, wanting to hear a sentence pass between her parents or come from her mother, who had always carried on a wandering patter, even when she was alone. Finally, Bea stepped inside with the food she had brought for her mother: strained cheese, pears for compote, chicken livers for blood strength.
For her father and brother, nothing. For herself, nothing. She didn’t notice; her appetite was gone, and theirs meant nothing to her at the time. The stairs were dirty; it was her family’s week to clean them, and her mother would never have let them get that way. For the first time in her life, Bea had grown irresponsible, so focused on the task at hand—to force life back. Three times that month she scorched goods at Pearl and had her pay docked, and she couldn’t be bothered to cook for her father or Callum, whose two lives she would have traded for her mother’s one in a flash.
Like farm hands, the men ate porridge for every meal, letting it harden on the counter and cutting a clammy slice to fill them up. Her father did not complain. He seemed in his own daze, doing nothing for her mother for weeks at a time, then coming home having spent a day’s wages on flowers, or on sweets that Bea ate when he wasn’t looking—so that he would think her mother had eaten them, she told herself. Never did he offer one to her. Callum had met Kate, his wife-to-be, by then and often ate with her family on the other side of town. Without Bea quite noticing, he had become a man, large and meaty, nearly as silent as their father. Where had he gone to? How? Tired though she was from so much tending, Bea would have preferred he’d stayed a little boy for her to tend.
Every day for a time, she found a moment to stop at St. Margaret’s and pray, if only for five minutes, though by near the end, when it grew clear that prayer would not work, she gave up even that (Pray for peace for her soul, her mother’s friend had told her, but Bea prayed singularly for one thing—and more to her own mother than to God:
Stay
). In the final months, her mother lost words entirely and developed a noxious swelling in her belly, though they had already removed parts of it. She died wordless in hospital while Bea held her hand and Bea’s father paced. After she died, her mouth relaxed, her belly too. The nurse detached Bea gently but firmly, one finger at a time, but as soon as she was cut loose, Bea knelt again and took her mother’s hand. This time the nurse let her sit for a moment, and then she said her name—
Beatrice
—commandingly and with the greatest tenderness, as a mother might. Fueled by a strange and momentary hope, Bea dropped her mother’s hand and stood. By the time she turned around, a sheet was covering her mother’s face.
“Over,” said her father as he led her from the building—just that, “Over,” as if he were announcing the name of a town along the railway line:
Over! Take your parcels! Mind the gap!
Then he stopped and put a hand on her arm, but it seemed like someone else’s hand, just as her body seemed like someone else’s body. What was over? She’d let go of her mother because the nurse had made her. She’d left the hospital because her father led her out. What was over? She stepped away from her father. She was twenty-three years old. She knew how to iron; she knew how to love her mother. That was all. Poor lass, said her father when, finally, they were in their kitchen, among the cups and plates, sink and drying rack, a foreign country now. Poor lass, her father said again; whether he spoke about her mother or herself or both, she did not know. That was the last he spoke of it all, except to bring up practicalities around her mother’s burial.
Only once did she cry, a few weeks after the funeral, walking and walking on the roads through town and then out of town, nearly to Padanaram, feet pounding, tears starting up only when the houses gave way to fields, her jaw set, fists balled against the sand-soft crumbling wall of grief. It was December and cold and she wore a hat but no scarf and the air scoured her lungs, and at some point she turned herself around, set one foot in front of the other, started back. When she got home, she cleaned out her mother’s clothes and sundries and brought them to the poorhouse, saving only a necklace, a shawl and her mother’s crochet needle (made from an eagle bone, her mother said) for herself. She cleaned the kitchen, stepping around her aunt, who was living there by then. That night, she cooked for her father, her aunt, Callum and Callum’s fiancée: smashed parsnips, beef in dark gravy, stewed apples. Then, without pleasure but with a plodding, almost endless appetite, she sat at her mother’s place at the table (her aunt occupied her own) and ate.
At the laundry the next day, she tried to increase her hours, which she’d cut back during her mother’s illness, but business was slow and her mother was not there to stand up for her, and they said maybe by spring if things pick up. She offered to watch the three-doors-down neighbor’s infant two afternoons a week, and this was her comfort in the months to come: the firm weight of the boy as she rocked him by the stove, the way he woke reaching for her face. The neighbor paid her in sewing notions, which Bea accepted, and hemp bags from the mills, which she had no use for and refused. You need to get out, Tilly would chide her, making her walk to High Street to look in the window of the hat shop, or go to a dance now and then, though everyone knew there was only one man for every five girls and Bea’s mouth had no words inside it, and she had gotten, after having grown so thin, quite fat.
Where was her father through all this? Her brother? Only years later, when she watched the Porters try to move through grief, would it occur to her to wonder. At the time, it seemed to her that sorrow was entirely her own territory. Her brother was getting married, after all. That he broke the news a few months before her mother’s death, and that it brought her mother some measure of peace, did not escape Bea’s notice, but more potent was her sense that both she and her mother were being quickly and practically replaced. Her father did not seem particularly changed after her mother’s death, though he must have been. Anyway, they were men, cut from a different cloth. She washed her brother’s and her father’s clothes and made their food and beds and said hello to them, good-bye, how was your day, have you got a cough, and that was that.
It had not always been like this. When he was little, Callum had been her doughy, funny, white-faced, freckled boy, set apart from the other children by his limp and made Bea’s own by the fact that she cared for him after school when her mother was at work, fetching him from the neighbor’s until he was old enough to attend school himself. It had been Bea, for a time, that Callum wanted when he called out at night. It had been Bea who defended him from teasing, Bea who bathed him, until they grew older and he bathed himself. As Callum grew, a sullenness set in with him. His hands got rough from the ropeworks; he wore his apron when there was no need to, scissors poking from the pocket, jute clinging to his clothes like body hair. He began, at random moments, to say cruel, coarse things to Bea: about her weight, about what people said about girls who worked the laundry. He began (was it he who started their father in this direction?) to drink. And then he met Kate, the girl he would marry, and a certain pleasantness came back, but not toward Bea, especially, though he did stop being cruel. “This is my . . . sister,” he said once as he introduced her to a friend, and anyone might have noticed how he paused before the word, as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was.
With her father too, Bea had once had glimpses of a person she could talk to, but that was years ago. One time, when she was six or seven, for some reason she could no longer remember, her father had taken her and Callum to work for the day. “This is where the china is,” he’d said, leading them to a side room where a sign read “Fragile Goods.” “You need to be banking that with straw, or it’ll break.” He told them that if someone wanted to send a plover’s egg or honeycomb as freight, it was written right into the books that the company was not responsible if the egg broke or the honeycomb got crushed, but it wouldn’t break, not if
he
had packed it. He was a proud and quiet man, her father (this was before the Great War, and she was younger than Janie; he had set her on a packing crate, said Do not swing your legs, and she had not).
It was more words than she’d heard him say in years. She would always remember that—how he’d looked at her more than Callum as he talked, and she’d stared at him and listened as hard as she could, though she was, more than anything, confused. Why, anyway, send a plover’s egg alone on a train, or honeycomb? Over time, in her mind, the plovers’ eggs and honeycomb came to have something to do with her father and the Great War, with her father and the way that, after he came home from France, he scrubbed each night, scrubbed and scrubbed but always stank, for it wasn’t mostly glassware and china he was loading at the railroad; it was coal and ballast and manure, it was filthy sheep marked with chalk, bulls with crimson parts, and first her father was a Good Templar, not a drop of liquor in the house, and then, after her mother took sick, he brought in whisky for her pain, then his; he and Callum drank after work; he stopped washing; he “let himself go” (it was a phrase Mrs. P. used about people, along with “He’s lost his marbles” or “She’s got a screw loose”). And then her mother died, Callum married, her father’s sister Mary moved in, and when Bea brought up the idea of Canada with her father, he barely looked up from his newspaper.
“Tilly’s going,” Bea said, mostly to fill the space. “Also her brother.”
Her first response, when Tilly had brought up the idea, had been panic: first her mother gone, now Tilly. Then, as she was trying to absorb it, only half listening to Tilly talk on, her friend had suggested that she come too. Me? To Canada? It had never occurred to her, not once in her livelong days. Tilly laid out the arguments: how there was no work at home, even the laundry laying off, their own hours just cut by a third. And there are strong, handsome men in Canada, said Tilly. Loads of them, with beards.
Beards?
Bea laughed but felt repulsed. And money, said Tilly, and their own log houses—Scotsmen, loads of them, and the whole lot needing wives. Not long before Bea’s mother had lost the ability to speak, she had told Bea to look after herself now. She had not said find a husband. She had not said take care of your father and brother. Just “Look after yourself”—a release of sorts, though all Bea had wanted was to look after her mother, poultice to forehead, spoonfuls of Benger’s Pap, Soothing Nourishment for the Very Young & Very Old.
“Mr. Stewart on High Street arranges it,” she told her father now. “I’m sure you’ve seen the adverts”—she pointed—“in the paper.”
He turned the page, took a sip of ale.
“You could come too,” she said.
“Me?” He snorted, and some ale slopped into his lap. “What would I do in Canada?”
She shrugged. “They’ve got railroads.”
“Ha! To cart my coffin to my grave.”
“Don’t.” Her hatred burned white and sudden.
He shook his head at her. “You’ll see when you’re old. You’ll want to end up where you started. So you’re off on an adventure, are you, Beatrice? I didn’t think”—he drummed his feet on the floor, a sudden, surly little jig—“you were the type.”
She was not the type. She did not want to be. Still, something nudged her on: the sense that she had little left to lose, but also a bit of hope, even excitement. “Would you manage all right, you and Mary, with me gone? Callum would be here.”
Her father grunted; what this meant, she could not say. Aunt Mary was childless, timid, not unkind. She had come from Dundee, supposedly to help her brother keep house, but also, Bea knew, because she was recently widowed and could not make the rent. Her father played cards with his sister. They talked at night, in low voices, more than he’d talked to Bea or his wife for years. She did not listen in, though the sound of voices, any voices, was a comfort to her, and seeing her father rise a little from his stupor a relief. Her aunt had not gotten on with her mother for reasons Bea didn’t understand or care to investigate, so whatever they talked about was not her mother, and nothing else interested Bea just then. Eventually, her aunt would come climb into the recessed bed, while Bea pretended to be sleeping in the trundle bed below.
“I may just look into it a bit,” she said.
She knew almost nothing about Canada, though she remembered her mother teaching her the letters of the alphabet from the white bags:
GOLDEN WHEAT CANADA
. One time, when a bag was empty, her mother had cut out the letters and made new words from them. Or no—it had been her father. Had it? Had he sat with her at the kitchen table, spreading out the letters, rearranging them:
DEN, TEN, WET, GET?
Her mother was no reader, but her father used to be. She had been happy sitting there, watching her Da move around the dusty, flour-soft squares. She remembered it; she thought she did:
OLD, GOLD, HOLD, TOLD
.
Ask me to stay,
she thought to him now.
Or at least say you’ll miss me. I asked you to come, now ask me to stay, if only to be polite.