We explored the various branches of the cellar-me coal cellar for the coal; the root cellar for the cabbages and squashes laid out on a board, and the beets and carrots growing whiskery in their box of sand, and the potatoes with their blind albino tentacles, like the legs of crabs; the cold cellar for the apples in their barrels, and for the shelves of preserves-dusty jams and jellies glinting like uncut gems, chutneys and pickles and strawberries and peeled tomatoes and applesauce, all in Crown sealing jars. There was a wine cellar too, but it was kept locked; only Father had the key.
We found the damp dirt-floored grotto beneath the verandah, reached by crawling between the hollyhocks, where only spidery dandelions tried to grow, and creeping Charlie, its crushed-mint smell mingling with cat spray and (once) the hot, sick stink of an alarmed garter snake. We found the attic, with boxes of old books and stored quilts and three empty trunks, and a broken harmonium, and Grandmother Adelia's headless dress form, a pallid, musty torso.
Holding our breaths, we would make our way stealthily through our labyrinths of shadow. We took solace in this-in our secrecy, our knowledge of hidden pathways, our belief that we could not be seen.
Listen to the dock ticking, I said. It was a pendulum clock-an antique, white and gold china; it had been Grandfather's; it stood on the mantelpiece in the library. Laura thought I'd saidlicking. And it was true, the brass pendulum swinging back and forth did look like a tongue, licking the lips of an invisible mouth. Eating up the time.
It became autumn. Laura and I picked milkweed pods and opened them, to feel the scale-shaped seeds overlapping like the skin of a dragon. We pulled the seeds out and scattered them on their flossy parachutes, leaving the leathery brownish-yellow tongue, soft as the inside of an elbow. Then we went to the Jubilee Bridge and threw the pods into the river to see how long they'd sail, before they capsized or were swept away. Did we think about them as holding people, or a person? I'm not sure. But there was a certain satisfaction in watching them go under.
It became winter. The sky was a hazy grey, the sun low in the sky, a wan pinkish colour, like fish blood. Icicles, heavy and opaque and thick as a wrist, hung dripping from the roof and windowsills as if suspended in the act of falling. We broke them off and sucked the ends. Reenie told us that if we did that our tongues would turn black and drop off, but I knew this was false, having done it before.
Avilion had a boathouse then, and an icehouse, down by the jetty. In the boathouse was Grandfather's elderly sailboat, now Father's-the Water Nixie, high and dry and put to bed for the winter. In the icehouse was the ice, cut from the Jogues River and hauled up in blocks by horses, and stored there covered in sawdust, waiting for the summer when it would be rare.
Laura and I went out onto the slippery jetty, which we were forbidden to do. Reenie said that if we fell off and went through, we wouldn't last an instant, because the water was cold as death. Our boots would fill, we'd sink like stones. We threw some real stones out to see what would happen to them; they skittered across the ice, rested there, remained in view. Our breath made a white smoke; we blew it out in puffs, like trains, and shifted from one cold foot to the other. Under our boot-soles the snow creaked. We held hands and our mittens froze stuck together, so that when we took them off there were two woollen hands holding on to each other, empty and blue.
At the bottom of the Louveteau's rapids, jagged chunks of ice had piled up against one another. The ice was white at noon, light green in the twilight; the smaller pieces made a tinkling sound, like bells. In the centre of the river the water ran open and black. Children called from the hill on the other side, hidden by trees, their voices high and thin and happy in the cold air. They were tobogganing, which we were not allowed to do. I thought of walking out onto the jagged shore ice, to see how solid it was.
It became spring. The willow branches turned yellow, the dogwoods red. The Louveteau River was in spate; bushes and trees torn up by their roots eddied and snagged. A woman jumped off the Jubilee Bridge above the rapids and the body wasn't found for two days. It was fished out downstream, and was far from a pretty sight because going down those rapids was like being run through a meat grinder. Not the best way to depart this earth, said Reenie-not if you were interested in your looks, though most likely you wouldn't be at such a time.
Mrs. Hillcoate knew of half a dozen such jumpers, over the years. You'd read about them in the paper. One was a girl she'd gone to school with who'd married a railroad worker. He was away a lot, she said, so what did he expect? "Up the spout," she said. "And no excuse." Reenie nodded, as if this explained everything.
"No matter how stupid the man may be, most of them can count," she said, "at least on their fingers. I expect there was knuckle sandwiches. But no sense in shutting the barn door with the horse gone."
"What horse?" said Laura.
"She must have been in some other kind of trouble too," said Mrs. Hillcoate. "If you've got trouble, you've most likely got more than the one kind."
"What is the spout?" Laura whispered to me. "What spout?" But I didn't know.
As well as jumping, said Reenie, women like that might walk into the river upstream and then be sucked under the surface by the weight of their wet clothing, so they couldn't swim to safety even if they'd wanted to. A man would be more deliberate. They would hang themselves from the crossbeams of their barns, or blow their heads off with their shotguns; or if intending to drown, they would attach rocks, or other heavy objects-axe-heads, bags of nails. They didn't like to take any chances on a serious thing like that. But it was a woman's way just to walk in and resign herself, and let the water take her. It was hard to tell from Reenie's tone whether she approved of these differences or not.
I turned ten in June. Reenie made a cake, though she said maybe we shouldn't be having one, it was too soon after Mother's death, but then, life had to go on, so maybe the cake wouldn't hurt. Hurt what? said Laura. Mother's feelings, I said. Was Mother watching us, then, from Heaven? But I became obstinate and smug, and wouldn't tell. Laura wouldn't eat any of the cake, not after she'd heard that about Mother's feelings, so I ate both our pieces.
It was an effort for me now to recall the details of my grief-the exact forms it had taken-although at will I could summon up an echo of it, like a small whining dog locked in the cellar. What had I done on the day Mother died? I could hardly remember that, or what she'd really looked like: now she looked only like her photographs.
I did remember the wrongness of her bed when she was suddenly no longer in it: how empty it had seemed. The way the afternoon light came slantwise in through the window and fell so silently across the hardwood floor, the dust motes floating in it like mist. The smell of beeswax furniture polish, and of wilted chrysanthemums, and the lingering aroma of bedpan and disinfectant. I could remember her absence, now, much better than her presence.
Reenie said to Mrs. Hillcoate that although nobody could ever take the place of Mrs. Chase, who'd been a saint on earth if there could be such a thing, she herself had done what she could, and she'd kept up a cheerful front for our sakes because least said, soonest mended, and luckily we did seem to be getting over it, though still waters ran deep and I was too quiet for my own good. I was the brooding type, she said; it was bound to come out somehow. As for Laura, who could tell, because she'd always been an odd child anyway.
Reenie said we were together too much. She said Laura was learning ways that were too old for her, and I was being kept back. We should each of us be with children our own age, but the few children in town who might have been suitable for us had already been sent away to school-to private schools like the ones we should be sent off to by rights, but Captain Chase could never seem to get around to arranging it, and anyway it would be too many changes all at once, and although I was cool as a cucumber and would certainly be able to manage it, Laura was young for her age, and, come to that, too young altogether. Also she was too nervous. She was the type to panic and thrash around and drown in six inches of water, through not keeping her head.
Laura and I sat on the back stairs with the door open a crack, hands over our mouths to keep from laughing. We enjoyed the delights of espionage. But it did neither of us much good to overhear such things about ourselves.
The Weary Soldier
Today I walked to the bank-early, to avoid the worst heat, but also to be there when it opened. That way I could be sure of getting someone's attention, a thing I needed since they'd made yet another mistake on my statement. I can still add and subtract, I tell them, unlike those machines of yours, and they smile at me like waiters, the kind who spit in your soup in the kitchen. I always ask to see the manager, the manager is always "in a meeting," I always get shifted off to some smirking, patronising elf just out of short pants who sees himself as a future plutocrat.
I feel despised there, for having so little money; also for once having had so much. I never actually had it, of course. Father had it, and then Richard. But money was imputed to me, the same way crimes are imputed to those who've simply been present at them.
The bank has Roman pillars, to remind us to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, such as those ridiculous service charges. For two cents I'd keep my money in a sock under the mattress just to spite them. But word would get around, I suppose-word that I'd become a loony old eccentric of the kind found dead in a hovel crammed with hundreds of empty cat food tins and a couple of million bucks stashed in five-dollar bills between the pages of yellowing newspapers. I have no desire to become an object of attention to the local hopheads and amateur second-storey men, with their bloodshot eyes and twitchy fingers.
On the way back from the bank I walked around by the Town Hall, with its Italianate bell tower and its Florentine two-tone brickwork, its flagpole that needs painting, its field gun present at the Somme. Also its two bronze statues, both commissioned by the Chase family. The right-hand one, commissioned by my Grandmother Adelia, is of Colonel Parkman, a veteran of the last decisive battle fought in the American Revolution, that of Fort Ticonderoga, now in New York State. Once in a while we'll get some confused Germans or Englishmen or even Americans wandering through town, looking for the Fort Ticonderoga battlefield. Wrong town, they're told. Come to think of it, wrong country. You want the next one over.
It was Colonel Parkman who upped stakes, crossed the border, and named our town, thus perversely commemorating a battle in which he'd lost. (Though perhaps that's not so unusual: many people take a curatorial interest in their own scars.) He's shown astride his horse, waving a sword and about to gallop into the nearby petunia bed: a craggy man with seasoned eyes and a pointed beard, every sculptor's idea of every cavalry leader. No one knows what Colonel Parkman really looked like, since he left no pictorial evidence of himself and the statue wasn't erected until 1885, but he looks like this now. Such is the tyranny of Art.
On the left-hand side of the lawn, also with a petunia bed, is an equally mythic figure: the Weary Soldier, his three top shirt buttons undone, his neck bowed as if for the headman's axe, his uniform rumpled, his helmet askew, leaning on his malfunctioning Ross rifle. Forever young, forever exhausted, he tops the War Memorial, his skin burning green in the sun, pigeon droppings running down his face like tears.
The Weary Soldier was a project of my father's. The sculptress was Callista Fitzsimmons, who'd come highly recommended by Frances Loring, convenor of the War Memorial Committee of the Ontario Society of Artists. There was some local objection to Miss Fitzsimmons-a woman wasn't considered appropriate for the subject-but Father steamrollered the meeting of potential sponsors: wasn't Miss Loring herself a woman, he asked? Thus inspiring several irreverent comments, How can you tell being the cleanest of them. In private, he said that he who pays the piper calls the tune, and since the rest of them were such cheapskates they'd better either dig deep or knuckle under.
Miss Callista Fitzsimmons was not only a woman, she was also twenty-eight years old and a redhead. She began coming to Avilion frequently, to confer with Father on the proposed design. These sessions would take place in the library, with the door open at first and then not. She was put up in one of the guest rooms, the second-best one at first and then the best. Soon she was there almost every weekend, and her room became known as "her" room.
Father seemed happier; certainly he was drinking less. He had the grounds tidied up, at least enough to be presentable; he had the drive regravelled; he had the Water Nixie scraped and painted and refitted. Sometimes there were informal weekend house parties, the guests being artistic friends of Callista's from Toronto.