Scare the Light Away (18 page)

I pulled out a tin that I had discovered earlier. It was a fruitcake, and it looked moist, rich, and delicious. I took down side plates and forks and a cake knife and placed the whole lot on the table.

“If Dad needs a housekeeper,” Shirley said, “then I’ll find him one.”

I spluttered in indignation. Did I not try to talk about this with my sister? Was I not very politely shown the door? “We can talk about it,” I said, as I passed Dad a serving of the cake. It was very dark and rich with fruit. I could smell the brandy it had been soaked in. Sampson thumped her tail.

“Nothing to talk about. I’ll handle it.”

“Jimmy and Aileen and I…”

“Jimmy,” Shirley snorted. “I wouldn’t ask Jimmy to find a kennel for that wretched dog.” She tossed her head at Sampson, who was still waiting for cake crumbs to fall. “Never mind someone to come into my father’s house every day. And as for you, Miss Vice President…”

“Is that what all this is about, Shirley?” I asked. “Not about Dad and what’s best for him, but about not wanting me to be in charge? Well let me tell you, I don’t want to be in charge of anything, thank you very much.”

“I’m going to take the dog out for a bit of a walk,” Dad said. “The rain seems to have let up for now, so this would be a good time.”

The emotions raging through the house fascinated Sampson so much that she ignored the beloved word “walk.”

“Come on, there’s a good girl.” Dad took his raincoat down from the hook by the door, and man and dog trudged out into the muddy yard. But first Dad carefully shut the door, not making a sound.

My sister and I faced each other, across the narrow room and the chasm of years. Ten years apart in age, we’d never been playmates. Scarcely even sisters in the sense of girls sharing clothes and toys and dreams. I hadn’t thought of her more than five times in the thirty years since I left. I had escaped, made a good life—a great life—for myself, left it all behind without a backward glance. I wondered what I’d left behind for her.

“Shirley,” I said.

She scraped her chair across the kitchen floor and stood up, her thin chest heaving. “Why don’t you just leave,
Becky?
You’re not needed, or wanted, here.”

Unlike our father, she slammed the door on her way out.

***

The rain started up again in the night, accompanied by a full orchestra of rolling thunder and a spectacular display of jazzy bolts of lighting that filled my bedroom with light and sound. Sampson hates a thunderstorm; it turns her into a quivering mass of furry jelly. Long before the first blast of thunder shook the house, she had crawled under my bed. And there she remained, all through the night.

The next morning the ferocity of the storm had abated, but the rain continued to fall, a steady, quiet torrent.

True to form, Dad had said not a word about the scene in the kitchen when he and the dog returned from their walk. He brought Sampson in, dried her legs and belly off, and announced that he was off to the Legion. I didn’t see him again until suppertime. I spent the remainder of the dismal day down in the basement, lost in the distant echoes of my mother’s thoughts. Spiders were moving in already, spinning their delicate webs in the dark corners of the cellar, no longer kept at bay by Mom’s fiercely wielded straw broom.

I was in a dreadful quandary about what to do with the diaries. Was it right for a daughter to know so much about her mother? To peer into her secret dreams, her hopes, her fears? Mom had been old when she died: not dreadfully old, not incapacitated by old age, but old enough to be aware that she didn’t have a whole lot of years left to her. She must have known that someone would read the diaries if she left them behind. Did she think it would be me? Or was it more likely that she assumed Shirley would be the one to go through her things? Perhaps it was her way of apologizing to her oldest daughter. Apologizing for taking her away from a warm, adoring family and a comfortable middle-class home in a pleasant English village only to replace it with a hardscrabble life of poverty, strife, and abuse.

Perhaps my imagination was getting the better of me and I was reading too much into it. Maybe Mom didn’t even think about the future. She got pleasure, enormous pleasure as well as strength—it was obvious to me that the diaries kept her going when nothing else could—from keeping a record of her days. So she kept on writing with never a thought of someone finding them after she’d gone.

And what should I do with them, once I finished reading and took Sampson and myself back to the West Coast? If I decided to keep them, would I ship them to Vancouver, all three tea chests full? Eventually all would come to a dead end. There would be no one to cherish them once I was gone.

A sobering thought.

***

The weekend passed in a peaceful blur of leaden skies and liquid air. Aileen and Jimmy came for lunch on Sunday, which appeared to be a bit of a family ritual. Fortunately Dad remembered to tell me in time.

While in the cellar with the diaries, I’d also discovered a treasure trove of frozen food in the freezer. All of it homemade, either wrapped in aluminum foil or freezer bags or packed into sturdy plastic containers. A few of the packages were marked in my mother’s neat handwriting, but the rest were in all sorts of different wrappings and markings. Some were unlabeled. People must have been arriving the entire day after Mom’s death bearing casseroles. And Dad put them carefully away in the freezer and forgot about them.

I dashed downstairs to pull out a large package marked
chicken pie
. Even I could manage to do mashed potatoes, and there were still plenty of vegetables to throw together to make a good salad. At the last minute I called to invite Jackie and her family. Jason was in a hockey game and his dad was driving, but my niece sounded delighted at the invitation. I might be fighting with her mother, but I liked Jackie a great deal.

Before the guests arrived, I patted makeup onto my face, which was now reaching its full colorful glory, sort of like the woods in autumn. Jimmy noticed; the question darkened his eyes but he said nothing. Hopefully he would blame the dog and a sharp door. Aileen tossed me a thankful smile, and Jackie fussed over her grandfather.

Conversation over the dinner table was mostly about the store. Aileen had enough of Mom’s quilts to see her into the summer, but she needed to find a new supplier. I was not part of the conversation, so it seemed odd to me that they could talk about Mom’s work with so little emotion.

But then my own business life is as far from my emotions as it can get and still occupy the same body.

Jackie sheepishly confessed that she only had two pieces of jewelry ready to offer for sale. Aileen was disappointed, but she hid it behind a bright, encouraging smile. They decided that Jimmy would bring the truck around after lunch and they would load up Dad’s winter collection of rocking horses to take to the shop in the morning.

I cleared the dishes and brought out dessert. Apple pie, another bereavement offering found in the freezer. I served the pie with huge scoops of vanilla ice cream on the side. It didn’t seem proper to serve pastry for the main course and also for dessert, but the alternative was my cooking. No contest.

It was a lovely lunch. After coffee Aileen, Jackie, and I did up the dishes while Dad and Jimmy switched on the TV to see what sports might be on. Wrapped in the warm companionship of the women of my family, the chore didn’t even seem like work.

Aileen excused herself to go to the bathroom. I handed Jackie, in charge of the washing, a burnt pastry-encrusted cookie tray. I’d managed to cook the chicken pie a bit too long. She coughed lightly and scrubbed vigorously at the baked-in crust. Then she dropped her voice. “They’re saying some nasty things about Uncle Jim. In town. I heard it this morning. I forgot to get bread for Dave and Jason’s sandwiches so had to make a quick trip to the grocery store.”

“What sort of things?”

“I was standing beside the bread, debating between the whole wheat at full price or the white on sale. And on the other side of the shelf two women were gossiping. I couldn’t see them, I could only hear what they were saying.” Her eyes darted about, wary of Aileen’s return. “One of them said that Uncle Jim molested Liz’s daughter Melissa. But that the police wouldn’t prosecute because he paid them off.”

“Do you wonder that I hate this damn town?” I slammed my fist into the countertop, imagining that it was someone’s face.

“I snatched the first loaf of bread that came to hand, and hurried around to the other aisle. They stopped chattering mighty fast, you can imagine, once they saw me. I didn’t know what to do then, Aunt Rebecca. I glared at them and they hurried away. Should I have said something?”

“Probably best not to. Anything you say will only encourage gossip.”

On her way through the living room Aileen asked Dad if he wanted more coffee, and Jackie and I changed the subject. But the quick conversation left me worried. This wasn’t a good time for fabricated rumors to be circulating about Jimmy. Even the gossip in this town was stupid. As if the police weren’t waiting to jump on Jimmy McKenzie if he so much as crossed the street against the light, never mind him paying anyone off to cover up child abuse.

I enjoyed the family Sunday lunch very much, but I spent the rest of the afternoon with a knot in my stomach as if I’d eaten that whole apple pie.

***

Monday morning the cats and dogs continued to fall, but despite the rain my own restless dog needed a walk. I made breakfast for my father and decided to brave the elements early in order to be at my computer by the start of business, Vancouver time.

The police had spent a good part of their weekend poking through the woods behind barriers of yellow tape. But Sunday afternoon the tape came down, and the patrol cars drove away.

We set off through the woods toward the swamp. I soon realized what a huge mistake that was. Sampson was covered, from her belly down, in mud and indeterminate guck.

The spring rains had raised the level of the bog very high indeed. Paths that I’d walked down days ago were now virtually under water. I scooted around widening puddles in search of higher ground. Of which I could find precious little.

Sampson burst out of the bush, lifted a dripping muzzle to me and grinned from ear to ear before dashing back into the quagmire.
A bath for you, my girl, when we get out of this.
I smiled at the memory of the voice in my head. She hates the water, but up at our chalet, after a romp in the rain forest, Ray would throw her in the shower and clamber right in with her. Afterward, the bathroom would look like a tornado had swept through.

Getting into the tub with her was one thing I wouldn’t do for the silly dog. She would hate me for it, but I would make her stand under the shower all by herself, until she was once again shiny and reasonably pristine.

She disappeared into the swamp, and I kept walking, seeking some sort of path. No point in turning back now. She couldn’t get much muddier and neither could my boots. She would find me, soon enough. But instead of bursting out of the undergrowth in hot pursuit as soon as I faded from sight, the dog started barking.

Cornered a ferocious squirrel, I assumed and whistled for her to join me. Not that I can whistle, but I sort of push air through my lips and hum at the same time, and Sampson seems to understand.

But this time she didn’t respond. I called and whistled and called some more. And she alternately whined and barked but didn’t appear. With a curse I stepped off the high ground; my boots sunk immediately into the muck. I ploughed through, cursing every step of the way, the mud dragging down my steps like an affectionate bog-creature asking me to stay and play. For me, all this rain might be a curse, but for the forest it was the source of life. Spring flowers and grasses grew with wild abandon in the rich, muddy soil. A bullfrog croaked a throaty greeting (or was it a warning?) as I stepped over a rotting log covered with soft green moss.

“Sampson,” I bellowed. “Come here.”

She barked some more.

My anger faded to be replaced with a growing sense of worry. She didn’t sound in any sort of pain, thank goodness. But she might be stuck, and she is pretty darned heavy. Particularly when soaking wet and coated in mud.

I passed through the last line of trees clinging to solid ground. The swamp stretched out before me, stunted trees, thick mud, slimy water, long grasses. Thoroughly inhospitable. By this time next month it would be far worse—a paradise for breeding insects.

Sampson stood on a patch of slightly higher ground, surrounded by swamp. She saw me and barked once. She stood over a log, half of it submerged in the water, half resting on land.

I waded into the muddy water, hoping that Sampson had found nothing more than a struggling puppy, caught in the rising waters. I imagined myself drying it off in front of a roaring fire, pouring a small helping of dog food into a saucer and fresh water into a bowl, all the time receiving excited licks of gratitude from a soft, wet tongue. But the back of my mind warned me that this expedition wasn’t fated to have a happy ending.

I got closer and form took shape. A mud-encrusted foot stuck out from under the side of the log nearest to me. A pair of legs rested on the high ground, partially hidden by the log. One foot still wore its boot; the other was bare of boot and sock. The naked toes stuck up out of the mud at the round bottom of the rotten log, like little oyster mushrooms. The head and torso stretched down the slope and disappeared in the thick water, an arrangement for which I was profoundly grateful.

Sampson rubbed her big head against my hip. I sunk to my knees and hugged her tightly.

Chapter 32

The Diary of Janet McKenzie. December 14, 1953

My son dropped a glass of milk onto the bedroom floor today. It was a full glass, too full, and it rained glass and milk all over the floor, the liquid dripping under the big old dresser. I pulled the dresser away from the wall to get at the drops of milk and found the loose floorboard. I had actually forgotten about it. Too many bad memories, no doubt. I waited until the children and Mrs. M. were asleep, and Bob was in the front room listening to the news on the wireless, and then I pulled out my diary. I haven’t written in it for more than five years. It’s been a long five years. Aunt Betty is dead as well as Dad. So I really am alone in the world. I have thought a lot over the past years of what might have been. If Mum had stayed with us, if my brother John had lived. If Mary Jones hadn’t taken sick, so that I went to the dance with Jenny. If I hadn’t met Bob.

But what’s done is done. And no use crying over spilt milk as Aunt Betty always said.

It’s time to start writing in the diary again. I did like keeping it. But I’ll never show it to my daughter now, as had been my intention, so long ago.

As bad as things are, I do have my children. And if things had been different, then I wouldn’t have them. So maybe it is all worthwhile after all. Shirley is so smart, like I knew she was when she was a baby. She does so well in school. Jim is a little terror, but Mrs. M. says that all boys are like that, so I’m glad. That he’s normal, I mean. I learned early that there was no point in calling him Arthur. Can’t have the poor boy growing up confused about his name, Mrs. M. said one day. The only bit of sense I have ever heard come out of her mouth.

Sometimes they call him Little Jim and then they call Mr. M. Big Jim. That I’ll never say.

Bob built a bit of an addition onto the house. So we could finally move Shirley and her brother into their own room. Not that there is likely to be anything going on in our bedroom that the children shouldn’t overhear, let me tell you! That part of our marriage is long over. Bob reached for me one night a few weeks after the baby was born, and I actually jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom to be sick. I won’t allow him to touch me in that way again.

So he continues to drink.

A second room went onto the main house as well. “Shirley will want a room of her own once the next baby arrives.” Mrs. M. smiled at me. Stupid woman. But it’s hard to hate her. She’s like a particularly innocent child herself, so timid and frightened, scurrying about, trying to guess what her husband wants before he bellows for it.

Him, of course, it isn’t hard to hate at all. At least he pretty well stays out of my way.Since the time Bob took his mother shopping and the children were napping and he caught me in the kitchen. I pulled a knife out of the drawer and told him I’d use it if I had to. I would have too, and he believed me. I wish sometimes he hadn’t. Then I could have used it. I don’t think I’d even mind going to prison, if it meant that my children would be free of him. He has no more time for Shirley than he ever did, thank God. But it worries me sometimes, the time he spends with Jim. Trying already to ‘make a man out of the boy’.

There will be no ‘next baby’, so I turned the new room into a sewing room. No one ever goes in there. I will move my diaries and bury them in a drawer under a pile of fabric.

After Jim’s birth and then the news about Dad, I thought I might die of sorrow and loneliness. But shortly after that a new minister arrived in town and his wife turned out to be nothing at all like the old one. She is terribly nice, not at all like the stuck up old prune face who would scarcely give Mrs. M. and me the time of day. As if it was our fault that we live in a shack with a bastard of an old man and his son who drinks himself into oblivion. But the new minister’s wife, she is nice. She invited me to the quilting circle she started at the church. I didn’t really want to go. Sit around in that freezing old church basement with that herd of stuck-up cows sewing a bunch of rags? No thanks. But Mrs. Burwell talked me into it (she doesn’t take no for an answer, that woman). There is no one left now in the quilting circle but Mrs. Burwell and I. And the quilts she taught me to make are certainly not bunches of rags.

So now I have a lovely sewing room of my own. I don’t get much in the way of housekeeping money but I’ve managed to save a bit of what Bob gives me for the children’s and my clothes by making them myself. I am making a quilt for Shirley’s bed.
In my own sewing room.