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The Birth House
Ami McKay
Spanning the 20th century Ami McKay takes a primitive and superstitious rural community in Nova Scotia and creates a rich tableau of characters to tell the story of childbirth from its most secretive early practices to modern maternity as we know it.Epic and enchanting, �The Birth House’ is a gripping saga about a midwife's struggles in the wilds of Nova Scotia.As a child in the small village of Scot's Bay, Dora Rare – the first female in five generations of Rares – is befriended by Miss Babineau, an elderly midwife with a kitchen filled with folk remedies and a talent for telling tales. Dora becomes her apprentice at the outset of World War I, and together they help women through difficult births, unwanted pregnancies and even unfulfilling marriages.But their traditions and methods are threatened when a doctor comes to town with promises of painless childbirth, and sets about undermining Dora's credibility. Death and deception, accusations and exile follow, as Dora and her friends fight to protect each other and the women's wisdom of their community. Hauntingly written and alive with historical detail, �The Birth House’ is an unforgettable, page-turning debut.
AMI McKAY
The Birth House
Copyright (#ulink_b22f12aa-c30a-5d52-b3b7-398abd3c710e)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercolins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2006
Copyright В© Ami McKay 2006
PS Section copyright © Rose Gaete 2007, except �The Occasional Knitter’s Society’, �A Brief History of the Vibrator’ and �The Halifax Explosion’ copyright © Ami McKay 2006 and �What Inspired The Birth House?’ copyright © Ami McKay 2007
PSв„ў is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
Ami McKay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007233304
Ebook Edition В© AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780007391486
Version: 2017-01-12
Praise For The Birth House (#ulink_02b0274e-f887-5e82-ac27-8a9eeed9eaac)
From the reviews of The Birth House:
�Modern medicine clashes with folk remedies in … McKay’s stirring saga of midwifery in Nova Scotia … An impressive novel, laced with quirky research and rippling with muscular poetry. As you’d expect, there are plenty of messy scenes starring wild-haired, blood-slicked mums-to-be, yet beyond the gore and folksy detail, a quieter drama plays out: that of women asserting their right to control their bodies’
HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON, Observer
�McKay’s achievement lies in shaping a candidly told story rich in sub-plots about what is an effective, non-sentimental feminist polemic confronting domestic violence, marital rape and incest … A dramatic, convincing novel … unusual, vigorous and disciplined’
Irish Times
�This is a truly captivating read … [McKay] weaves lyrical detail of the natural beauty in which these pioneer families live with the pricklier reality of the First World War era, when centuries-old folk wisdom collides with modern science. The underlying theme of the shared strength that women give each other in hard circumstances lends this tale a solid bedrock’
She
�Ami McKay cleverly points up the good and the bad in both old and new attitudes, while contemporary newspaper reports and advertisements illustrate the pace of change’
Guardian
�Mckay makes ingenious use of diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings real and imagined, invitations, and old wives’ remedies. Despite (or because of) all this stylistic variety, The Birth House builds up a strong narrative momentum. Intelligent, quirky, passionate, and funny, it deserves a wide readership and a long shelf life’
Quill & Quire
�The Birth House has a spirited momentum, and it is difficult not to be swept along by it … [McKay’s] writing is often beautiful, with colourful turns of phrase that mirror the earthiness of her setting … She does know her way around a good story’
Sunday Business Post
�A gripping tale of times and traditions long past’
Belfast Telegraph
�[McKay] … stylishly re-creates the pioneer days of Nova Scotia with a fine eye for descriptive detail and history … Wise, wry, witty and yet deeply serious’
Historical Novels Review
�The Birth House is an astonishing debut, a book that will break your heart and take your breath away … To read The Birth Houseis to enter a world, a richly imagined and keenly observed fictional totality without seams of doubt, without any fissure of disbelief. It is a world from which one will be reluctant to depart. The novel will linger in the reader’s memory as the finest fiction always does. To say this is a powerful debut is to damn Ami McKay’s novel with too faint praise; it is an altogether remarkable work from an impressive new talent’
The Ottawa Citizen
For my husband, Ian
My heart, my love, my home
Contents
Cover (#uefd4bc6b-66f7-5169-94c5-8c14f061bdcf)
Title Page (#ud12cf106-aa88-5e36-9998-10b8d0ad554c)
Copyright (#ulink_b2ca4ed5-ae53-5709-b261-71da63e09b8a)
Praise for The Birth House (#ulink_69094016-ce70-55a8-b853-e0f43871024e)
Dedication (#uafa05624-8701-541e-a65e-6b3921932a54)
Prologue (#ulink_1dc44d6f-0458-52a4-ab93-e047f78d8dd4)
Part One (#ulink_53c32b34-d164-50e2-87c0-e0e8da884123)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_0b4531bb-4722-5b22-9d28-5e523b31926e)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_e1429435-82c1-5248-b8cb-c013fac36fcb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_f6fa4477-bb47-5ba2-8a06-208cc3809451)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_ed3912ca-9846-56d4-a18c-d35a7f1bcaf1)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_4048aa1d-8949-5512-8d40-adbb29832107)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_8e14ad7e-ac0d-5ead-901c-c77b600d792a)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_6107f70a-252c-5057-a4cc-b5b0d2e08c8a)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_b0a230fa-453d-5b0d-a2d6-99c59f0faca5)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_65c3a8c8-4112-581b-9cfc-35b45ba6dd45)
Chapter 10 (#ulink_5b13404d-1fee-50f6-9c33-62a26142d0ca)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes from the Willow Book
The Midwife’s Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas interviews & features … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the book (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_ade1f09d-3435-5e2a-92e3-cb541f29bdc3)
MY HOUSE STANDS at the edge of the earth. Together, the house and I have held strong against the churning tides of Fundy. Two sisters, stubborn in our bones.
My father, Judah Rare, built this farmhouse in 1917. It was my wedding gift. A strong house for a Rare woman, he said. I was eighteen. He and his five brothers, shipbuilders by trade, raised her worthy from timbers born on my grandfather’s land. Oak for stability and certainty, yellow birch for new life and change, spruce for protection from the world outside. Father was an intuitive carpenter, carrying out his work like holy ritual. His callused hands, veined with pride, had a memory for measure and a knowing of what it takes to withstand the sea.
Strength and a sense of knowing, that’s what you have to have to live in the Bay. Each morning you set your sights on the tasks ahead and hope that when the day is done you’re farther along than when you started. Our little village, perched on the crook of God’s finger, has always been ruled by storm and season. The men did whatever they had to do to get by. They joked with one another in fire-warmed kitchens after sunset, smoking their pipes, someone bringing out a fiddle … laughing as they chorused, no matter how rough, we can take it. The seasons were reflected in their faces, and in the movement of their bodies. When it was time for the shad, herring and cod to come in, they were fishermen, dark with tiresome wet from the sea. When the deer began to huddle on the back of the mountain, they became hunters and woodsmen. When spring came, they worked the green-scented earth, planting crops that would keep, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, turnips. Summer saw their weathered hands building ships and haying fields, and sunsets that ribboned over the water, daring the skies to turn night. The long days were filled with pride and ceremony as mighty sailing ships were launched from the shore. The Lauretta, The Reward, The Nordica, The Bluebird, The Huntley. My father said he’d scour two hundred acres of forest just to find the perfect trees to build a three-masted schooner. Tall yellow birch, gently arched by northwesterly winds, was highly prized. He could spot the keel in a tree’s curve and shadow, the return of the tide set in the grain.
Men wagered their lives with the sea for the honour of these vessels. Each morning they watched for the signs. Red skies in morning, sailors take warning. Each night they looked to the heavens, spotting starry creatures, or the point of a dragon’s tail. They told themselves that these were promises from God, that He would keep the wiry cold fingers of the sea from grabbing at them, from taking their lives. Sometimes men were taken. On those dark days the men who were left behind sat down together and made conversation of every detail, hitching truth to wives’ tales while mending their nets.
As the men bargained with the elements, the women tended to matters at home. They bartered with each other to fill their pantries and clothe their children. Grandmothers, aunts and sisters taught one another to stitch and cook and spin. On Sunday mornings mothers bent their knees between the stalwart pews at the Union Church, praying they would have enough. With hymnals clutched against their breasts, they told the Lord they would be ever faithful if their husbands were spared.
When husbands, fathers and sons were kept out in the fog longer than was safe, the women stood at their windows, holding their lamps, a chorus of lady moons beckoning their lovers back to shore. Waiting, they hushed their children to sleep and listened for the voice of the moon in the crashing waves. In the secret of the night, mothers whispered to their daughters that only the moon could force the waters to submit. It was the moon’s voice that called the men home, her voice that turned the tides of womanhood, her voice that pulled their babies into the light of birth.
My house became the birth house. That’s what the women came to call it, knocking on the door, ripe with child, water breaking on the porch. First-time mothers full of questions, young girls in trouble and seasoned women with a brood already at home. (I called those babies “toesies,” because they were more than their mamas could count on their fingers.) They all came to the house, wailing and keening their babies into the world. I wiped their feverish necks with cool, moist cloths, spooned porridge and hot tea into their tired bodies, talked them back from outside of themselves.
Ginny, she had two …
Sadie Loomer, she had a girl here.
Precious, she had twins … twice.
Celia had six boys, but she was married to my brother Albert … Rare men always have boys.
Iris Rose, she had Wrennie …
All I ever wanted was to keep them safe.
(#ulink_c2caa289-88fc-569e-8aee-9f8203cc1a79)
Around the year 1760, a ship of Scotch immigrants came to be wrecked on the shores of this place. Although the vessel was lost, her passengers and crew managed to find shelter here. They struggled through the winter – many taking ill, the women losing their children, the men making the difficult journey down North Mountain to the valley below, carrying sacks of potatoes and other goods back to their temporary home, now called Scots Bay.
In the spring, when all who had been stranded chose to make their way to more established communities, the daughter of the ship’s captain, Annie MacIssac, stayed behind. She had fallen in love with a Mi’kmaq man she called Silent Rare.
On the evening of a full mune in June, Silent went out in his canoe to catch the shad that were spawning around the tip of Cape Split. As the night wore on, Annie began to worry that some ill had befallen her love. She looked across the water for signs of him but found nothing. She walked to the cove where they had first met and began to call out to him, promising her heart, her fidelity and a thousand sons to his name. The moon, seeing Annie’s sadness, began to sing, forcing the waves inland, strong and fast, bringing Silent safely back to his lover.
Since that time, every child born from the Rare name has been male, and even now, when the moon is full, you can hear her voice, the voice of the moon, singing the sailors home.
A RARE FAMILY HISTORY, 1850
1 (#ulink_3706fc3e-4dd2-5009-b959-f23c8c2224a1)
EVER SINCE I CAN REMEMBER, people have had more than enough to say about me. As the only daughter in five generations of Rares, most figure I was changed by faeries or not my father’s child. Mother works and prays too hard to have anyone but those with the cruellest of tongues doubt her devotion to my father. When there’s no good explanation for something, people of the Bay find it easier to believe in mermaids and moss babies, to call it witchery and be done with it. Long after the New England Planters’ seed wore the Mi’kmaq out of my family’s blood, I was born with coal black hair, cinnamon skin and a caul over my face. A foretelling. A sign. A gift that supposedly allows me to talk to animals, see people’s deaths and hear the whisperings of spirits. A charm for protection against drowning.
When one of Laird Jessup’s Highland heifers gave birth to a three-legged albino calf, talk followed and people tried to guess what could have made such a creature. In the end, most people blamed me for it. I had witnessed the cow bawling her calf onto the ground. I had been the one who ran to the Jessups’ to tell the young farmer about the strange thing that had happened. Dora talked to ghosts, Dora ate bat soup, Dora slit the Devil’s throat and flew over the chicken coop. My classmates chanted that verse between the slats of the garden gate, along with all the other words their parents taught them not to say. Of course, there are plenty of schoolyard stories about Miss B. too, most of them ending with, if your cat or your baby goes missing you’ll know where to find the bones. It’s talk like that that’s made us such good friends. Miss B. says she’s glad for gossip. “It keep folks from comin’ to places they don’t belong.”
Most days I wake up and say a prayer. I want, I wish, I wait for something to happen to me. While I thank God for all good things, I don’t say this verse to Him, or to Jesus or even to Mary. They are far too busy to be worrying about the affairs and wishes of my heart. No, I say my prayer more to the air than anything else, hoping it might catch on the wind and find its way to anything, to something that’s mine. Mother says, a young lady should take care with what she wishes for. I’m beginning to think she’s right.
Yesterday was fair for a Saturday in October—warm, with no wind and clear skies—what most people call fool’s blue. It’s the kind of sky that begs you to sit and look at it all day. Once it’s got you, you’ll soon forget whatever chores need to be done, and before you know it, the day’s gone and you’ve forgotten the luck that’s to be lost when you don’t get your laundry and yourself in out of the cold. Mother must not have noticed it … before breakfast was over, she’d already washed and hung two baskets of laundry and gotten a bushel of turnips ready for Charlie and me to take to Aunt Fran’s. On the way home, I spotted a buggy tearing up the road. Before the thing could run us over, the driver pulled the horses to a stop, kicking up rocks and dust all over the place. Tom Ketch was driving, and Miss Babineau sat in the seat next to him. She called out to me, “Goin’ out to Deer Glen to catch a baby and I needs an extra pair of hands. Come on, Dora.”
Even though I’d been visiting her since I was a little girl (stopping by to talk to her while she gardened, or bringing her packages up from the post), I was surprised she’d asked me to come along. When my younger brothers were born and Miss B. came to the house, I begged to stay, but my parents sent me to Aunt Fran’s instead. Outside of watching farmyard animals and a few litters of pups, I didn’t have much experience with birthing. I shook my head and refused. “You should ask someone else. I’ve never attended a birth …”
She scowled at me. “How old are you now, fifteen, sixteen?”
“Seventeen.”
She laughed and reached out her wrinkled hand to me. “Mary-be. I was half your age when I first started helpin’ to catch babies. You’ve been pesterin’ me about everything under the sun since you were old enough to talk. You’ll do just fine.”
Marie Babineau’s voice carries the sound of two places: the dancing, Cajun truth of her Louisiana past and the quiet-steady way of talk that comes from always working at something, from living in the Bay. Some say she’s a witch, others say she’s more of an angel. Either way, most of the girls in the Bay (including me) have the middle initial of M, for Marie. She’s not a blood relative to anyone here, but we’ve always done our part to help take care of her. My brothers chop her firewood and put it up for the winter while Father makes sure her windows and the roof on her cabin are sound. Whenever we have extra preserves, or a loaf of bread, or a basket of apples, Mother sends me to deliver them to Miss B. “She helped bring all you children into this world, and she saved your life, Dora. Brought your fever down when there was nothing else I could do. Anything we have is hers. Anything she asks, we do.”
As I pulled myself up to sit next to her, she turned and shouted to Charlie, “Tell your mama not to worry, I’ll have Dora home for supper tomorrow.” We sat tight, three across the driver’s seat, with a falling-down wagon dragging behind.
Miss B. began to question Tom, her voice calm and steady. “How’s your mama sound?”
“Moanin’ a lot. Then every once in a while she’ll hold her belly and squeal like a stuck pig.”
“How long she been that way?”
“It started first thing this morning. She was moonin’ around, sayin’ she couldn’t squat to milk the goat, that it hurt too much. Father made her do it anyways, said she was being lazy … then he made her muck the stalls too.”
“Is she bleedin’?”
Tom kept his eyes on the road ahead. “Not sure. All I know is, one minute she was standin’ in the kitchen, peelin’ potatoes, and then all of a sudden she was doubled right over. Father got angry with her, said he was hungry and she’d better get on with what she was doin’. When she didn’t, he shoves her down to the floor. After that, hard as she tried, she couldn’t stand on her own, so she just curled up and cried.” He gave a sharp whistle to the horses to keep them in the middle of the rutted road, his jaw set hard, like someone waiting to get punched in the gut. “She didn’t want me to bother you with it, said she’d be alright, but I never seen her hurtin’ so bad before. I came as soon as I could, as soon as he left to go down to my uncle’s place.”
“Will he stay out long?”
“More’n likely all night. Especially if they gets t’drinkin’, which they always do.”
Tom’s the oldest of the twelve Ketch children. He’s fifteen, maybe sixteen, I’d guess. I think about Tom from time to time, when I run out of dreams about the fine gentlemen in Jane Austen’s novels. He’s got a kind face, even when it’s filthy, and Mother always says she hopes he’ll find a way to make something of himself instead of turning out to be like his father, Brady. I can tell she prefers I not mention the Ketches at all. I think it makes her scared that I’ll not make something of myself and turn out to be like Tom’s mother, Experience.
The Ketch family has always lived in Deer Glen. It’s a crooked, narrow hollow, just outside of the Bay, twisting right through the mountain until you can see the red cliffs of Blomidon. No one here would claim it to be anything more than the dip in the road that lets you know you’re almost home. The land is too rocky and steep for farming and too far from the shore for making a life as a fisherman or a shipbuilder. Too far for a pleasant walk. The Ketches suffer along, selling homebrew from a still in the woods and making whatever they can from the hunters who come from away, men who hope to kill the white doe that’s said to live in the Glen. In deer season they block off the road, Brady at one end, his brother Garrett at the other. They stand, shotguns strapped to their backs, waiting to escort the trophy hunters who come from Halifax, the Annapolis Valley, and faraway places like New York and Boston. The Ketch brothers charge a pretty penny for their services, especially since they’re selling lies. It’s true, there’s been a white doe spotted on North Mountain, but it doesn’t live in Deer Glen. It lives in the woods behind Miss B.’s cabin, where she feeds it out of her hand, like a pet. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard her call to it on occasion, walking through the trees singing, Lait-Lait, Lune-Lune. Father said he saw it once, that she’s the colour of sweet Guernsey cream, with one corner of her rump faintly speckled. He came home with nothing that day and told Mother, “It would have been wrong to take it.” Shortly after, at a Sons of Temperance meeting, the men of the Bay all pledged never to kill it. They all agreed that there’s sin in taking the life of something so pure.
It was nearly dark when we got to the Ketch house, its clapboards loose and wanting for paint, the screen door left hanging. The inside wasn’t much better. A picked-over loaf of bread, along with pots, pans and empty canning jars were crowded together on the table, all needing to be cleared. Attempts had been made at keeping a proper house, but somehow the efforts had gone wrong, every time. The curtains were bright at the top, still showing white, with a cheerful flowered print. Halfway to the floor, little hands had worn stains into the fabric, and the ends were frayed from the tug and pull of cats’ claws. No matter how fresh and clean a start they may have had, the towels in the kitchen, the wallpaper and rugs, even the dress on the little girl who greeted us at the door, all showed the same pattern, their middles stained, their edges worn and dirty. The entire house smelled sour and neglected.
Experience Ketch was hunched over in her bed, clutching her belly. Her oldest daughter, Iris Rose, was standing next to her, dipping a rag in a bucket of water then offering it to her mother. Mrs. Ketch took the worn cloth and clenched it between her teeth, sucking and spitting while she rocked back and forth.
Miss B. sat on the edge of the bed and held Mrs. Ketch’s hand. She talked the woman through her pains enough to get her to sit up and drink some tea. The midwife wrapped her wrinkled fingers around Mrs. Ketch’s wrist, closed her eyes and counted in French. She pinched the ends of Mrs. Ketch’s fingertips and then pulled her eyelids away from her pink, teary eyes. “Your blood’s weak.” Miss B. pushed the blankets back and pulled up Mrs. Ketch’s bloodstained skirts. Her hands kneaded their way around the tired woman’s swollen belly, feeling over her stretched skin, making the sign of the cross. After washing her hands several times, she slipped her fingers between Mrs. Ketch’s legs and shook her head. “This baby has to come today.”
Mrs. Ketch moaned. “It’s too soon.”
“Your pains is too far gone and I can’t turn you back. If you don’t birth this child today, all your other babies don’t gonna have a mama.”
“I don’t want it.”
Iris Rose knelt by the bed and pleaded with her mother. “Please, Mama, do what she says.”
The girl’s much younger than me, twelve at the most, but she’s as much mother as she is child. From time to time she’ll show up at the schoolhouse, dragging as many of her brothers and sisters behind her as she can. She barks at the boys to take off their hats, scolds the girls as she tugs on their braids, making her voice as big and rough as an old granny’s. For all her trying, it always turns out the same. By the time the snow flies, the desks of the Ketch children are empty again.
Mrs. Ketch needs them home, I guess. I’ve heard that each of the older ones is assigned a little one to bathe, dress, feed and look after, so they don’t get lost in the clutter of a house filled with dirty dishes and barn cats. With six brothers of my own, I think I can say there’s such a thing as too many.
When Mrs. Ketch’s wailing went on, Tom and the older boys disappeared out to the barn. With Iris Rose’s help, I tucked the rest of the children into an upstairs room. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. “Now don’t you make another sound, or Daddy’ll come running through the hollow and up these stairs with an alder switch!” The room went quiet. Six small greasy heads went to the floor, six bellies breathed shallow and scared.
“Can I watch?” Iris Rose asked.
“If you promise not to say anything.”
“I’ll be silent. I swear.”
I left her on the stairs, peeking through the broken, crooked pickets of the banister.
Miss B. and I turned back the straw mattress and tied sheets to the bedposts. She tugged hard at them. “See now, Mrs. Ketch, you know what’s to do … when the time comes, you gots to hold on for dear life and push that baby out.” Miss B. motioned for me to steady Mrs. Ketch’s shaking knees. “And it’s comin’ fast and hard as high tide on a full moon. Pousser!”
Mrs. Ketch bent her chin to her chest, the veins on her neck throbbing. “Let me die, dear Lord. Please let me die.”
Miss B. laughed. “How many times you been through this, thirteen, fourteen? You should know by now, the Lord ain’t like most men, He ain’t gonna just take you home when you ask for it …”
Just last Sunday Reverend Norton went on and on about the trespasses of Eve, pounding his fist on the pulpit, his face all red and puffed up as he spit to the side between the words original and sin. While he talked at good length about the evils of temptation and the curse Eve had brought upon all women, he never mentioned the stink of it. I never imagined that “the woman’s tithe for the civilized world” would smell so rusted, so bitter.
I kept the fire in the stove going, unpacked clean sheets from Miss B.’s bag, did whatever she told me to do, but no matter how busy I made myself, my stomach ached and my hands felt heavy and useless. I don’t think my nervousness came from it being my first birth, or even from seeing such pain and struggle in a woman, but more from hearing the sadness, the wanting, in Mrs. Ketch’s cries. Nothing we did seemed to help. She sobbed and cursed, her wailing and Miss B.’s coaxing going on for an hour or more, I’d guess, or at least long enough for Mrs. Ketch to give up on a miracle and have a baby boy.
He was a sad, tiny thing. His flesh was like onion skin; the blue of his veins showed right through. If I had looked any harder at his weak little body, I think I might have seen his heart. Miss B. bundled him up in flannel sheets and handed him to Mrs. Ketch. “Hold him, now, put your chest to his so he knows what it’s like to be alive.” But Experience Ketch didn’t want her baby. She didn’t want to hold him or look at him or have him anywhere near. “Get that thing away from me. I got twelve more than I can handle anyways.”
I couldn’t stand it. I took him from Miss B. and pulled him close. I whispered in his ear, “I’ll take you home with me. I’ll take you for my own.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Iris Rose run up the stairs. I turned to Miss B. “He’s looking so blue, his arms, his legs, his chest. His breath is barely there.”
“He’s born too soon.” She made the sign of the cross on his wrinkled brow. “If he’d been born three, four weeks later, I could spoon alder tea with brandy in his mouth, make a bed for him in the warmin’ box of the cookstove and hope he pinked up, but as it is …”
I stopped her from going on. “Tell me what to do. I have to try.”
Miss B. shook her head. “If you can’t see him through to the other side, then you should just go on home. Mary and the angels will soon take care of him. I have to see to his mama.”
I sat in the corner and held tight to the dying child.
Miss B. wrapped a blanket around us. “Some babies ain’t meant for this world. All you can do is keep him safe until his angel comes.”
“There’s nothing else I can do?”
She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Pray for him, and pray for this house too.”
2 (#ulink_313f359b-7f33-53cc-a212-99420aabe7e9)
BETWEEN MY PRAYERS and Miss B.’s spooning porridge into Mrs. Ketch’s mouth, the baby died. It was almost dawn when Brady Ketch came home. He stomped through the house, drunk and demanding to be fed. “Experience Ketch, get outta that bed and get me some food.” The poor woman tried to get up, as if nothing had troubled her at all, but Miss B. held her down. “You need rest. Lobelia tea and rest, then more tea and more rest. At least three days to get your strength, but a week would be best. If you don’t, you gonna bleed �til you’re dead.”
Mr. Ketch staggered, reaching for the bundle of blankets I was holding in my arms. “Let me have a look-see there, girl. What’d we get this time, wife? Another boy, I hope. Girls don’t eat as much, but they take their toll every-ways else. I don’t trust nothin’ that can’t piss standin’ up.” He pinned me against the wall, his dark mouth leaving the skunky smell of his breath in my face. “Ain’t you pretty … you Judah Rare’s girl, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your daddy’s got the right idea. How’d he manage to get all boys and just one pretty little thing like you? Bet you come in handy when your mama gets tired. He’s one lucky son of a bitch, I’d say.”
Mrs. Ketch hissed at her husband. “Leave her be, Brady.”
He pulled back the blankets to look at the child. “I’m just lookin’ at what’s mine.”
I stood still while he pinched at the baby’s thin, blue cheeks. “Hey there, little critter, ain’t you gonna say �hello’ to your—” He stopped and pulled his hand away, his curiosity giving way to confusion and then to anger. He turned and stared at Miss B. “What’d you do to it?” Before she could answer, he grabbed her by her shoulders. “Looks to me like you killed my child and put my wife half-dead on her back.” Brady Ketch slid his hands around Miss B.’s throat, slipping his fingers through her rosary beads. “What’s to keep me from taking you back in the glen and snappin’ your wattled old witch’s neck?”
An iron skillet lay on the floor by the cookstove. A doorstop shaped like a dog sat in the corner, one ear and the snout of its nose chipped away. I could’ve killed Brady Ketch and not felt a minute’s worth of guilt. “God sees what you do, Mr. Ketch.”
He let go of Miss B. and made his way back to me, smiling, leaning into my body and stroking my hair. “Now, don’t you worry, little girl. Miss Babineau knows I’d never mean her any real harm. It’s just sometimes a woman needs a man to set her right. Says so in the Bible.”
Miss B. started packing up her bag. “See that she gets her rest. Three days off her feet, no less.” She moved towards the door. “Come on, Dora.”
“That won’t do.” Mr. Ketch stood in front of the door. “She can’t just take to bed for days whenever she feels like it. There’s things that need to get done around here. You gotta fix her. Now.”
Miss B. stared at him. “I told you, she needs bedrest. Three days and she’ll be good as new.”
He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “That Dr. Thomas, down Canning way, he’d know how to make her right. When Tommy snapped his wrist, the doc fixed it up so he could use it right away. Tied it up nice and clean, give him a few pills, and Tom was chopping wood that afternoon.”
“And you can afford a fancy doctor always runnin’ up the mountain to fix your family?”
Brady pretended to hold a rifle in his arms, pointing his finger past Miss B. and out the window. He clucked his tongue in his mouth and moved his hands as if to cock the gun. “Let’s just say the doc and I … we have a gentleman’s agreement when it comes to that sweet white doe everyone’s always lookin’ to bag.” He grinned as he slowly changed position, now pointing at Miss B.’s heart, squinting one eye to take aim. “And don’t think I don’t know where to find her.”
Miss B. pushed his arm away and started again for the door. “Well, ain’t that fine.”
Brady opened the door and shoved Miss B. onto the stoop. As I started to hand the child’s body to him, Miss B. called out to Mrs. Ketch.
“You send Tom to get me if the bleeding gets any worse.”
Mrs. Ketch rolled over, her voice sounding tired and sad. “I can take care of myself … Just get out now, and take the baby with you. I don’t want that ugly thing in my house.”
Miss B. sang little French prayers to the dead baby boy and wrapped him in one of the lace kerchiefs she’s always tatting on her lap. We laid him in a butter box, tucked October’s last blossoms from the pot marigolds and asters all around him and nailed the tiny coffin shut. She vanished between the alders in back of her cabin. I walked behind, following the sound of her voice, cradling the box in my arms, trying to make up for his mother not loving him. If only my love had been able to raise him from the dead.
Miss B. whispered. “Shhhh. Le jardin des morts, the garden of the dead, the garden of lost souls.” In the centre of a mossy grove of spruce was a tall tree stump. The likeness of a woman had been carved into it … the Virgin Mary, standing on a crescent moon, her face, her breasts, her hands, all delicate and sweet. All around her, strings of hollowed-out whelks and moon shells hung with tattered bits of lace from the branches, like the wings of angels.
Grandmothers and old fishermen have long said that the woods of Scots Bay have cold, secret spots, places of foxfire and spirits. “Never chase a shadow in the trees. You can’t be sure it’s not your own.” Charlie must have chased me a thousand times down the old logging road in back of our land, both of us running into the woods behind Miss B.’s place, shouting, witched away, witched away, today’s the day we’ll be witched away. We’d spent hours weaving crowns from alder twigs, feathers, porcupine quills and curled bits of birch bark. We’d imagined faerie houses and gnome caves in the tangled roots of a spruce that had been brought down by the wind. We’d come home, tired and hungry, declaring we’d found the hidden treasure of Amethyst Cove but had lost it (yet again) to a wicked band of thieves. In all our time spent in the forest we never found or imagined anything like this.
Miss B. took off her shoes. “Can’t let no outside world touch Mary’s ground.”
She began to make her way around the grove, tracing crosses in the air, circling closer and closer to the Mary tree. I slipped off my boots and followed. When Miss B. was finished, she knelt at the base of the tree and began to dig at the moss. Beneath the dirt and stones was a thick handle of braided rope. Together we pulled up a heavy wooden door that was covering a deep hole in the ground. “Our Lady will watch over him now.” She took the tiny coffin, tied a length of rope around it and lowered it into the dark grave. “Holy Mother, Star of the Sea, take this little soul with thee.” She let go of the rope and took my hands. “You gots to give him a name. Just say it once, so he knows he’s been born.”
I closed my eyes and whispered “Darcy,” after Elizabeth Bennett’s sweetheart in Pride and Prejudice. Because he should have lived; he should have been loved.
I’ve seen the runt of a litter die. When there are too many kittens or too many piglets, the mother can’t keep up with them all. The runt gets shoved out by the others and the mother acts as if she doesn’t even know it’s there. Maybe Mrs. Ketch knew Darcy wouldn’t live from the start, maybe she pushed him away so she wouldn’t love him, so she wouldn’t hurt.
It’s a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky-wet of blood and afterbirth, mother wailing, child crying … the helpless soft spot at the top of its head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Our parents and teachers say it’s a miracle, but it’s not. It’s going to happen no matter what, there’s no choice in the matter. To my mind, a miracle is something that could go one way or another. The fact that something happens, when by all rights it shouldn’t, is what makes us take notice, it’s what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that’s made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead … that’s the miracle.
3 (#ulink_863894db-8997-552b-80d9-d923afb0fcf0)
LATE IN NOVEMBER we bank the house, always on a Saturday. Even with all nine of us stuffing baskets of eelgrass around the house’s foundation, it still takes a good part of the day to get it done.
Just after high tide, I went down to the marsh with Father and my two older brothers, Albert and Borden, to pitch the tangled heaps of grass onto the wagon. Mother stayed behind with the rest of the boys to pound stakes and build a short stay fence that would hold the grass in tight to the stones. By December, when most families have finished the job, it looks like all the houses in the Bay have settled in giant bird’s nests, ready to roost for the winter. Uncle Irwin and Aunt Fran pay to have neat, tight bales stacked around their house. Others swear by spruce bows all heaped up on the west side, facing the water. Father says he’s too smart to waste good hay and that the porcupines’ll clean the needles off the spruce in one meal, so we’re stuck doing things the hard way.
At least the twins, Forest and Gord, are big enough to help this year. Even though they’ve turned eight, they still act like whimpering puppies, forever tugging at my sleeves, following me, calling my name. Every day we walk the Three Brooks Road, the same round loop. Past Laird Jessup’s place, then down along the pastures and the deep little spot where the brooks all meet, then on around to school. Sometimes we go down to the beach to play, or out to the wharf to fetch Father, who always takes us back on the other side, the Sunday side of the loop. Up to the church, then on past Aunt Fran’s place, up to Spider Hill and home again. Boys ahead and boys behind. I’m the only girl stuck in the middle of six boys who spend most of their days poking, laughing and wrestling together as they trip and drag their muddy boots through my life.
Mother says I shouldn’t complain. She’s got her own rounds to make. Up before dawn, down to the kitchen, out to the barn, back to the kitchen, down to Aunt Fran’s, over to the church, back to her kitchen. She holds the boys close to her every chance she gets. They wiggle and roll their eyes as she kisses the tops of their messy heads. She sighs as she lets them go, watching them run off to play “Things aren’t as certain as they used to be.” She’s not talking about their age or the fact that they’re always outgrowing their shoes. It’s the war, she means to say, but won’t. It’s the war that she’s afraid of, that’s got her wondering how long she can keep her boys at home, that has us listening to gossip and reading headlines and moving in circles, as if we might cast a spell of sameness to keep the rest of the world away.
Banking the house took so long that I was late getting to Miss B.’s. I have been visiting her every Saturday since we buried dear little Darcy. It’s a relief to get to her door, to sit at her kitchen table, to be able to breathe and sigh and even weep over my small, blue memory of him. I’ve told the tale only once, to Mother. When I came to the part where Mrs. Ketch refused the child, it was all she could do not to shake and cry all over me. Instead, she held her breath, closed her eyes and whispered, “God forgive, God bless.” Although I can still feel the weight of his body in the crook of my arm, I won’t put her through hearing of it again. She wasn’t there; she doesn’t need to know how much it still comes to my mind. And now there’s no one else to tell. Father wouldn’t know what to say. He’d be angry with me for bringing it up at all. My dear cousin, Precious, though she hangs on every word of a good story, is still Aunt Fran’s child … any news that’s ugly or sad is not allowed in their house: words of sensation and death leave a sinful mark on the walls of a good christian home. (Aunt Fran prefers to carry her gossip under her hat and deliver it to everyone else’s door.)
I’m Miss B.’s only guest on Saturdays, or any other day of the week. I’m the only person in all of Scots Bay who dares make a friendly call to the old midwife. As a child, I was always happy when Mother had reason to send me to Miss B.’s cabin, happy to walk down the old logging road, away from Three Brooks Road and our house full of boys, happy just to sit with her in her garden, or in her kitchen filled with, as she says, “things to make you wonder.” A tarnished, round looking-glass hangs by the door. Jars and bottles of herbs, salves and tinctures line her cupboards. Feathered wings are tacked up over the door and every window. Crow, sparrow, dove, hawk, owl. One large, dark wooden crucifix hangs over her bed, while the rest of the two-room log cabin—every wall, shelf or tabletop—is covered with tallow candles and a thousand Marys. I did my best not to ask questions, but if she spotted me staring at something, she’d be quick to recite a verse or sing a song about whatever it was. (Although sometimes she’d just smile and say, “Never mind that just now, Dora. If I told you, you’d never believe.”)
It’s long been understood that, unless you’re a woman who’s expecting, or you’ve got an ailment that can’t be cured, you’re better off not to bother with her. Never break bread with midwives or witches; your skin’ll soon crawl with boils, hives and itches. I don’t know who’s worse about spreading such rumours, schoolyard tattletales or the ladies who run the White Rose Temperance Society. Those women never give Marie Babineau more than three words about the weather, some cold today, fog comin’ in, strong south wind … They’re careful not to form their words into a question or to invite her into their conversations. They ignore her gap-toothed smile and never look twice at her brown, wrinkled face. They spread loudmouthed gossip about the green stink they say comes from her breath and “out every wine-soaked pore of her body.” Aunt Fran says it’s like soured, mouldy cabbage. Mrs. Trude Hutner argues, “I’d say it’s more like a wet dog that’s been nosing around a skunk.” Most of the Ladies of the White Rose don’t have babies underfoot anymore, so they feel they haven’t any need for Miss B. Along with their age, comfortable size and the scattered prickly hairs sticking from their chins, they’ve forgotten Miss B.’s sweetness and everything she’s done for them. They forget that when you’re close to her, eye to eye, she smells as honest and kind as the better parts of hand-picked herbs and fresh-ground spices. Her sighs are full of lavender, ginger and fresh-brewed coffee … her laughter leaves hints of chicory, pepper and clove.
Always keep at least three pots on the stove. One for tea, one for the simples and one for coffee with blue sailors. “You know I never touch the coffee but my one cup that gets me goin’ of a morning. Any more’n that and I gets the jumps,” she says as she bounces in her rocking chair. “I only lets it go on sim-merin’ �cause I like the black, grumbling smell of it. Brings a man to mind, it does.”
She makes a great show when I visit—fussing over her iron pots and teacups, serving lavender tea and beignets, each one a plump, warm square of sugar-coated heaven melting on my tongue. I’m grateful (in the most selfish way) that no other fingers are pinching at the chipped, yellowing edge of Miss B.’s best serving plate every Saturday afternoon. No, the Ladies of the White Rose, who once called on her to birth their babies and cure their ills, politely ignore the river of stories that sit ready on her every breath. They are deaf to her wise, loose chatter, peppered with lazy French and the diddle diddle dees of Acadian folk songs.
Miss Babineau’s great-grandfather Louis Faire LeBlanc was the last baby to be born before the British drove his family and the rest of the Acadians from their settlement along the dyke lands of Grand Pre. Miss B. sighs and clutches the mass of rosary beads twisted around her neck whenever she speaks of it. “The precious seeds of Acadie were scattered across the earth, the names LeBlanc, Babineau, Landry, Comeau, all planted along the bayous with bayonets, ashes and blood.” Many died on the difficult journey to Louisiana, but little Louis Faire lived. “He grew to be a strong, fine man. Blessed by the Spirit. Called of angels, he was. The sick, the weary, them that was gone out of their heads … they all come to Louis Faire. A traiteur, he was. He put his hands on their heads and their bodies—lettin’ the prayers come down, right through his mouth, healin’ them. Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Baby Jesus. Thank the Father in Heaven. Amen.”
At seventeen (the same age I am now), Miss B. was visited by Louis Faire in a dream. He spoke to her, telling her that God had chosen her to take the sacred gifts of the traiteurs back to his homeland. The dream lasted all through the night and into the next morning, her great-grandfather’s spirit whispering secret remedies and prayers of healing in her ears. When it was over, she began walking, leaving her family behind as she made her way from Louisiana to Acadie. No one is quite certain of how she ended up in Scots Bay instead of the fertile valley of her ancestors. All she will say is, “It was for Louis Faire that I came back to his homeland, but only God could make me live in Scots Bay.”
Mother says Granny Mae once told her that Miss B. had had a vision, a visit from an angel, right here in the Bay. “When Marie Babineau got to Grand Pre and saw the beautiful orchards, fields and dyke lands that had once belonged to her family, she was so overwhelmed with sadness that she ran, crying, up North Mountain and all the way to the end of Cape Split. While she sat at the edge of the cliffs, weeping, an angel appeared, comforting her, reminding her of her dream and of the gifts Louis Faire had given her before her journey. The angel explained that, in fact, she was the spirit of St. Brigit, the woman who had served as midwife to the Virgin Mary at the birth of Christ, and that she had been sent to bless Marie and ask her if she would dedicate her hands to bringing forth the children of this place. Grateful for the angel’s tender care, Marie vowed to do what God had asked of her.” You can’t say no to something like that.
Aunt Fran says it’s more likely that she took up with a sailor, and when he got tired of her talking, he dropped her here on his way home to his wife. It doesn’t matter. I’d guess she’s so old now that nobody cares about the whens, whys or hows of it, as long as she’s got “the gift” whenever they need it.
Miss B. never asks for payment from those who come to her. She says a true traiteur never does. Grandmothers who still believe in her ways and thankful new mothers leave coffee tins, heavy with coins that have been collected after Sunday service. In season, families bring baskets of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and anything else she might need to get by. They hide them in the milk box by the side door, with folded notes of blessings and thanks, but never stay for tea.
It was starting to get dark by the time we settled in for beignets and conversation. Not long after, I heard an odd stuttering sound from the road. I looked out the window and could just make out that there was an automobile coming towards the cabin, the evening sun glowing gold on its windshield. No one in the Bay owns even a work truck, let alone a shiny new car like that. Most men call them “red devils,” believing that just the sound of one is a sure sign that their horses will bolt and their cows will dry up for the day. No one comes out here from away unless they’re lost or looking for someone. No one comes down the old logging road unless they need to see Miss B. There’s one road in and one road out … and it’s the same one.
Miss B. took her teacup from the table, dumped what was left into a pot on the stove and stared into it, shaking her head. “Get up to the loft and hide behind the apple baskets. I think there’s some quilts you can pull over your head. Don’t you let out a peep.” The sound of the car was outside the cabin now, slowing and then sputtering to a stop in the dooryard. I started to question Miss B., wondering why she was acting so alarmed. She frowned. “Trouble’s come, I’m sure of it. I seen it in my leaves just yesterday and didn’t believe it, but now it’s here in this cup too. A bat in the tea, two days in a row … says someone’s out for me. I’d better take care in what I say and do. Shame on me for not trusting my tea. Go on now, get up there, before it comes for you too.” To please her, I climbed the old apple ladder that was fixed to the wall, pushed at the square lid that covered the small opening to the loft and crawled up into the space above the kitchen. Hiding under a worn wool blanket, I lay flat on my belly, peering through the loose boards into the kitchen below. Miss B. was squinting, looking in my direction. I whispered down to her, “I’m safe.” She smiled and nodded, then put her finger to her lips and turned to answer the knock at the door.
A tall, serious-looking man stood in the doorway. He introduced himself as, “Dr. Gilbert Thomas.” Miss B. invited him in, took his long overcoat and hat, and wouldn’t let him speak again until he was settled at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. She patted his shoulder and then smoothed the slight wrinkle she’d made in his dark suit coat. “Well, ain’t you tied up proper, like every day was Sunday?” Taken by her kindness, his voice halted and stuttered each time he tried to say shouldn’t and don’t, as if the words were too painful to get out. He sat cockeyed to the table, his knees too high to tuck under it, his fine, long fingers shyly wringing the pair of driving gloves that were sitting in his lap. Except for the hints of grey in his hair that shone silver when he turned his head, Dr. Gilbert Thomas looked as if someone had kept him clean and quiet and neatly placed in the corner of a parlour since the day he was born.
In a slow, steady tone, the doctor began what sounded like a well-rehearsed speech. “As a practitioner of obstetrics, I am bound by an oath to my profession to come to the aid of child-bearing women whenever possible.” He winced back a sip of Miss B.’s strong coffee and continued. “You, as well as other generous women in communities throughout Kings County and across the Dominion have had to serve in place of science for too long.”
Miss B. smiled and pushed the sugar bowl and creamer in front of him. “A little sugar there, dear?”
“Thank you.” He spooned in the sugar and doused the coffee with a large splash of cream. “Imagine the benefits that modern medicine can offer women who are in a compromised condition … a sterile environment, surgical procedures, timely intervention and pain-free births. The suffering that women have endured in childbirth can be a thing of the past—”
Miss B. interrupted him, catching his eyes with her gaze. “What you sellin’?”
Dr. Thomas’s stutter returned. “I, I … I’m just trying to tell you, inform you of—”
“No. You ain’t tellin’, you sellin’ … if you gonna come here, drummin’ up my door like you got pots in your pants, then you best get to it and we’ll be done with it.”
She waved her hand in the air as if to shoo him away. “Oh, and by the way, whatever it is, I ain’t buyin’. I figure if I tell you that right now, you’ll either pack up and leave or tell me the truth.”
Dr. Thomas continued. “The truth is, Miss Babineau, I need your help.”
She settled back in her chair. “Now we’re gettin’ somewheres. Go on.”
“We’re building a maternity home down the mountain, in Canning.”
Miss B. interrupted him. “One of those butcher shops they calls a hospital?”
Dr. Thomas answered. “A place where women can come and have their babies in a clean, sterile environment, with the finest obstetrical care.”
She scowled at him. “Who’s this �we’?”
“Myself and the Farmer’s Assurance Company of Kings County.”
“How much the mamas got to pay you?”
He shook his head and smiled. “Nothing.”
Miss B. snorted. “You’re a liar.”
“I won’t charge them a thing. I won’t have to, we—”
“You got a wife?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s a good girl, a lady who deserves the finer things?”
“Well, of course. But I don’t see—”
“How you expect to keep her if you don’t make no money?”
He laughed. “I get paid by the assurance company.” He lowered his voice and smiled. “And you could get paid too … if you participate in the program. They’ll give you five dollars for every woman you send to the maternity home.”
Miss B. got up from the table. “What I gots, I give, and the Lord, He takes care of the rest. There’s no talk of money in my house, Dr. Thomas.” She held his coat and hat out to him. “I gots all I need.”
Dr. Thomas took his belongings from her, but motioned towards the table. “Please, I didn’t mean to offend you. Let me at least have my say and then I’ll go.”
She poured the doctor another cup of coffee and sat back down at the table. “You got �til your coffee’s gone or it turns cold.”
Dr. Thomas quickly made his case. “Many families in Kings County, Scots Bay included, already own policies with Farmer’s Assurance. A small fee, paid each month, gives these families the security of knowing that if something happened to the man of the house, he could get the medical attention he needed and they could still go on.” He spooned more sugar into his cup. “As you well know, the mother is just as important as the father; she’s the heart of the home, she’s what keeps everything moving.”
Miss B. nodded. “I always say, if the mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
Dr. Thomas grinned. “Exactly! For the price of what most households spend on coffee or tea each month, a husband can buy a Mother’s Share from Farmer’s Assurance. This guarantees his wife the happiness of a clean, safe birth and the comfort of having her babies at a Farmer’s Assurance Maternity Home. The family can rest well knowing that �Mother’ will be well cared for during her confinement.”
Miss B. stared at him. “What if a mama wants to have her baby at home?”
Dr. Thomas looked confused. “Why would she want to do that when there’s a beautiful new facility waiting for her?” He tried again to convince Miss B. “You are a brave woman, Miss Babineau, taking on this responsibility all these years. Everyone I talk to has said how skilled you are, how blessed, but with new obstetrical techniques available, women can rely on more than faith to see them through the grave dangers of childbirth.”
Miss B. sat there, humming and knitting, looking up at him every so often as if to see how much longer he was going to stay.
Frustrated, Dr. Thomas tried to further the conversation. “Do you know Mrs. Experience Ketch?”
Miss B. took a sip of tea. “Some.”
“Her husband, Mr. Brady Ketch, came to my offices about a month ago with some disturbing news. Since you’ve had your hands on so many babies in this area, I wonder if you might be able to make some sense of what he told me.”
Miss Babineau smiled. “I’ll certainly do whatever I can.”
The doctor’s tone grew serious. “Mr. Ketch was quite distressed. He said that his wife was bedridden and too weak to stand. He was afraid she might die. I followed him to their home and found her to be in poor health. She was pale and wouldn’t speak.”
Miss B. shook her head. “Well, that’s just some awful. I hope you could help her.”
“I made her as comfortable as I could under such circumstances, but there’s one thing I still don’t understand. When I asked Mr. Ketch what had brought about his wife’s illness, he said that she had just given birth the day before, and that you and a young girl were there to attend it.” Dr. Thomas stared at Miss B. “Was there nothing you could do to keep her from falling into such poor condition?”
Miss B. completed her row of knitting and shook her head. “Did you happen to catch wind of the man’s breath?”
Sugar spilled from the doctor’s spoon before he could get it to his cup. “Pardon?”
“I’m sorry to say so, Doctor, but the only truth Mr. Brady Ketch is good for, is in tellin’ the innkeeper when he’s reached the bottom of a whiskey barrel. If his wife’s in trouble it’s �cause he can’t keep his hands from her one way or another. If he’s not puttin’ a bun in her oven, he’s slapping her black and blue. If I’ve ever given Experience Ketch a thing, it’s been to tell her she’s workin’ herself to death.”
“Are you telling me that you don’t know anything about her having a baby?”
Miss B. pulled on the ball of yarn in her lap. “Did you see one there?”
“No, Mr. Ketch said it was a stillbirth.”
Miss B. rolled her eyes. “Why, I’d guess we’d both know it if she’d just had a birth, as I’m sure you gave her a thorough examination.”
He drummed his fingers on the table, staring at his cup. My handkerchief was sitting near it, the one that Precious had given me for my last birthday, my initials embroidered in a ring of daisies. “Mr. Ketch said Mr. Judah Rare’s daughter might be able to shed some light on the matter.”
“Miss Rare is a proper young lady who’s kind enough to keep company with a wretched, feeble granny like myself. She’s also wise enough to know better than to find herself in Brady Ketch’s part of the wood. Nothin’ there but lies and brew. Either one you choose, you’re askin’ for trouble.”
Dr. Thomas picked up the folded square of cloth and looked it over. “Dora’s her name, isn’t it? I stopped by her house and spoke with her mother before I came to call on you. What a kind woman she is. She guessed that I might even find her daughter here, with you.”
Miss B. calmly put out her hand, reaching for the handkerchief “Left this behind last time she was here. You know how forgetful them young girls can be. Can’t tell you what they done that same mornin’, never mind yesterday, or last week. Some flighty too, never know when she’ll show her face at my door.”
Dr. Thomas frowned as he chewed on the inside of his cheek. It’s the same thing Father does when he knows something he’s planned on paper isn’t going to work with hammer and nails. “Maybe I’d better visit Mrs. Ketch again and see if she can remember anything now that she’s back on her feet.”
Miss B. gave a cheerful response. “No need for that, my dear. Brady Ketch may well forget he ever knew you and shoot you on sight. It’s best you leave the women of the Bay to me.”
The doctor mumbled under his breath. “Leave them to have their babies in fishing shacks and barns.”
Miss B. scowled. “What’s that?”
“I think you should be made aware that the Criminal Code of 1892 states: �Failing to obtain reasonable assistance during childbirth is a crime.’”
Miss B. ignored him and said, “I’m wonderin’. Doctor, how many babies you brought into this world?”
“During my residency in medical school, I observed at least a hundred or more births—”
“How many children you caught, right as they slipped out of their mama’s body?”
“Well, I—”
Miss B. stopped him from answering. “It don’t matter …” She pulled at the tangled mass of beads around her neck. “See these? That’s a bead for every sweet little baby.” She pulled the longest strand out from the neck of her blouse. “See this?” A tarnished silver crucifix dangled from her fingers. “As you’ve probably heard tell … this child’s mama �give it up’ in a manger.” She let it fall to her chest. “So’s next time you come out here, tryin’ to save the barn-babies of Scots Bay, you remember who watches over them.” She stood up from her seat. “I believe your coffee done got cold, Dr. Thomas. I’d ask you to stay for supper, but I know you’ll want to get back down the mountain to your dear wife. The road has more twists when it’s dark.”
Mother didn’t wait long to ask me what it was Dr. Thomas wanted. “Did he find you at Miss B.’s? He seemed nice enough. Quite the thing to come way out here. Your brothers couldn’t get over that automobile of his. What’d he want, anyway?”
“He just wanted to find out how many babies were born in the Bay last year. Part of some records they keep for the county, or something like that.”
“That’s interesting. How many babies were there?”
“When?”
“Last year. How many babies were born in the Bay last year? I can think of three, at least. There was Mrs. Fannie Bartlett, and—”
“Oh, you know, I can’t recall. I think she just laughed and said, �the usual.’ You know Miss B.”
Mother went back to stirring a big pot of beans on the stove, wiping her brow as she inhaled the word yes.
~ November 16, 1916
Never have I had so many things I couldn’t say out loud. At least my journal listens to the scribbling of my pen.
When Dr. Thomas left Miss B.’s, his face was all flushed, looking like he wouldn’t be happy until he’d found a way to make Miss B. say she was wrong and he was right. I told her that I couldn’t bear to see her locked up behind bars, that maybe she should consider asking the women of the Bay to seek Dr. Thomas’s care from now on, but she just smiled and strung a single bead of jet on a string and hung it around my neck. “He ain’t gonna come back. There’s nothin’ out here for him. All the money’s down in town. Them people down there come to doctors with every little ache and pain. They empty their pockets right on the examinin’ table. Why’d he want cabbages and potatoes for pay, instead? Besides, a man who can’t drink my coffee straight ain’t got nerve enough to do me harm.”
She’s probably right, but it hasn’t kept the nightmares away. It’s been the same one for the past three nights. First I’m dreaming I’m with Tom Ketch, and he’s looking down on me, gentle and sweet, like he might even kiss me. I close my eyes, but when I open them, Brady Ketch is holding me tight, his unkempt beard scratching against my cheek, his foul tongue pushing into my mouth. I try to scream and my voice won’t sound. I try to get away and my body goes limp, like I’ve got no bones, and then I’m falling, falling into the ground, into the dark, wet hole under the Mary tree. There’s moss and bones, leaves and skulls, potato bugs and worms. I can hear a baby crying. I dig through the muck until I find it. It’s Darcy, only this time he looks like the most perfect baby in the world. He’s pink and beautiful, plump and whole, his clear blue eyes staring up at me, waiting for me to take him home. When I go to reach for him, the Mary tree comes to life, her roots turning to arms as she pulls the baby up from under the moss. I call out to her, “I’ll take care of him this time, I promise.” She doesn’t speak; she just takes Darcy and starts to walk away. I cry out again, “Please, bring him back. I’ll take care of him.” I follow her, hoping that at least she’ll take him up to heaven, but she just keeps on going, walking out of the woods and down the mountain, until she’s standing at Dr. Thomas’s door.
~ November 20, 1916
Tonight we strung apples to dry and made coltsfoot cough drops. Miss B. pulled what looked to be an old recipe book from the shelf and placed it on the table in front of me. “This here’s the Willow Book.” She closed her eyes and stroked its cracked leather cover. “For every home in Acadie that was burnt to the ground, there’s a willow what stands and remembers. By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. We put things here we don’t want to forget. The moon owns the Willow.” She untied the thick piece of twine that was holding its loose, yellowed pages together, thumbing through until she found what she was looking for. “Thank you, Sweet Mary. Here it is: coltsfoot. Some likes to call it the son-before-the-father �cause it sends up its flowers before the leaves. Just the thing for an angry throat. You write your name down in the corner of the page, Dora. So’s you remember to remember.”
From the last apple, she made a charm, grinning and singing as she pared the peel away to form a long curling ribbon of red. “The snake told Eve to give Adam her apple, oooh, Dora, who gonna get yours?” She threw the peel over my left shoulder and then stooped on her hands and knees to study it. She crossed her chest, then drew a cross in the air. “Look at that … I sees a pretty little house, a fat silk purse and the strength of a hunter’s bow.”
I bent down to join her. “What does it mean?”
“Nothin’—not right now, anyways.” She patted my hand as I helped her to her feet. “You’ll knows it when it do.”
I’d beg her to tell me more, but there’s no use in bothering Miss B. with questions. She’s said all she wanted to say. I suppose Tom Ketch is a hunter; he’s got to have a bow, living in Deer Glen and all … but there’s no pretty little house and not enough money to fill a thimble, let alone a silk purse. Miss B.’s never wrong about these things. She can tell a woman that she’s with child before the woman knows it herself. She can tell if it’s a boy or a girl, and the week the baby will arrive, most times getting it right down to the day. She can touch a person’s forehead, or hold their hand, and tell them what’s making them sick. So, even though she never said who, or even when, I can’t stop guessing at her clues and thinking over each word.
4 (#ulink_a949bd01-a313-5920-86bb-b501d544d8ea)
THINKING IS SOMETHING that Father says I do entirely too much of: “You think on things too long, especially for a woman.” At first I thought it was just something that fathers tell their daughters, but he’s not alone in this; Aunt Fran never seems to tire of carrying her journals of medical findings to the house and reading aloud from them during tea with Mother and me. Her latest is The Science of a New Life by Dr. John Cowan, M.D. “It’s right here, Charlotte, see? Oh, never mind your trying to read it just now, I want Dora to hear it too. I’ll just read this bit out loud. It won’t take but a minute. Let’s see … here it is … the esteemed Dr. Cowan states, �Closely allied to food and dress, in woman, as a producer of evil thoughts, is idleness and novel-reading. It is almost impossible for a woman to read the current “love-and-murder” literature of the day and have pure thoughts, and when the reading of such literature is associated with idleness—as it almost invariably is—a woman’s thoughts and feelings cannot be other than impure and sensual.’ There now, Charlotte. There it is in black and white. Overthinking and novel-reading causes, at the very least, fretting, nightmares and a bad complexion.”
This past autumn she was convinced that my bout with a cold and cough was brought on by my constant attention to Wuthering Heights. She even scolded Mother for letting me read it. “Lottie, whenever I see that daughter of yours, she always has a book under her nose! It would be one thing if she was studying psalms or even a verse or two of poetry … no wonder her health’s been compromised by the slightest change in the weather.”
Mother laughed. “Oh, Fran, with all your talk, you’d think Dora’s caught her death just by reading about the God-forsaken moors of Yorkshire.”
She turned to me and asked, “This is the one about the moors, isn’t it, Dorrie?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And then there’s the one about that poor woman whose husband kept her locked in the attic … I always get them confused. Of course, I’ve got no time to read them myself, I’m so slow at it and all, but Dora’s kind enough to tell me about them from time to time. Don’t you worry about her, she’ll be back to feeling right in no time at all.”
Aunt Fran lowered her voice. “Her cold is just the start of a greater sickness. These �stories,’ as you call them, will only lead her to more pain.”
“Fran, talk plain, will you?”
“I’m talking about derangement.”
“Don’t be silly!”
She whispered. “And deviant behaviours.”
Aunt Fran decided it was best to give Mother her copy of The Science of a New Life. “Normally, I wouldn’t lend this out. But I’ll make an exception in Dora’s case. You can’t put this sort of thing off and expect it to cure itself.” She patted Mother’s hand. “I’ve marked several pages for you. The ones that apply to her condition.”
Mother smiled and nodded. She no sooner put it on the dresser next to her bed than Father was ordering me to “Gather up those books of yours, Dora. Bring them out to the brush pile.” I acted as if I didn’t hear him and walked out to the pen to feed the sow. Before long I could hear the crackle of the fire, smell the smoke from dried twigs, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and all the rest. I leaned against the fence and cried. There’s no point in arguing with him. There never is. I’ll say one thing for the boys: at least they don’t cry. I’ll never understand you, Dora.
Last night was the first night of bunking down. When I was little, I looked forward to cold December winds and the first snow, to Father closing off the upstairs and all of us children dragging our pillows, blankets and feather mattresses down to the front room. Each night we lay piled together, Mother kissing our cheeks in the order of our births—Albert, Borden, Charlie, Dora, Ezekiel, Forest and Gord—cozy and snug until the grass turned green in the spring. Although our winter sleeping arrangement has become crowded and a bit smelly in the last few years, I still love listening to Borden’s late-night storytelling: the time old Bobby One Eye paddled the riptides off Cape Split, how he and Hart Bigelow came to invent pig bladder baseball, the tale of the hidden treasure that’s never been found on Isle Haute, and the ghost of Old Cove Fisher’s lost foot.
This year, Father didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I heard him arguing with Mother over it after breakfast.
“Maybe she could stay at Fran’s for the winter.”
Mother sounded upset. “Why would we send her away? Surely there’s enough room for sleeping.”
Father lowered his voice. “She needs to act like a proper young lady.”
“And she doesn’t?”
“It’s just that with six boys …”
“Judah Rare, you’re being foolish.”
“She’s getting to the age where she might be considered, someone might think …”
“That she’s a sweet girl who cares for her brothers?”
“She and Charlie still hold hands whenever they walk down the road, and no matter how many times I’ve scolded her, she insists on getting in the middle of the boys when they wrestle or fight.”
“Stop worrying over her. She’s got a pure and innocent heart. I’m almost certain she’s never even been kissed.”
“That’s the trouble. No man wants a girl who’s always tied to her brothers. The longer we let this go on, the more people will think there’s something odd about it. Let’s send her to Fran’s. I’m sure your sister would be happy to—”
“Yes, I’m sure Fran would be happy to make a housemaid out of my daughter. How we raise the children is our business and no one else’s. We’ll put Dora on the end after the twins, or lay her longways down by their feet, but she’s staying home and that’s that.”
Father’s right in supposing I’ve lost my innocence, but it wasn’t by having my rose plucked in the middle of a field that hasn’t been hayed. (I can still look forward to a bit of blood on the sheets on my wedding night.) Still, a girl can lose her heart long before she gives it away. Mother’s never mentioned it, or maybe she was too busy to notice, but I remember exactly how it happened. It was the day Father showed me I was no longer a child.
Before that day, I belonged with my brothers, I was one of them. If Borden or Albert teased me, I’d tease them right back. If Charlie put mud in my shoes, he’d find a toad under his sheets that same night. For every shove one of them gave me, I’d pinch two bruises into the fleshy part of a thigh or the back of an arm. Then Father put a stop to it. On a warm, sunny day (about the same time I started to bleed and my breasts began to feel heavy when I ran), Albert, Borden, Charlie and I snuck off to Lady’s Cove after school. The tide was just going out, the rocks were filled with pools of warm seawater, and a long strip of clay lay glistening at the edge of the shore. In the shelter of the cove, we did as we always had done: we stripped off our clothes and began throwing wet, heavy balls of mud and clay at each other. We must have been quite a sight, laughing and screaming, our bodies streaked with sloppy trails of brown and grey, but my name was the only name Father called out when he found us. It was a slow, angry insisting, Dora Marie Rare. I pulled my clothes over my dirty, crusty skin and he pulled me by my arm all the way home. I shouldn’t have argued with him, but it didn’t seem fair that I should be singled out. After all, it was Borden’s idea to go to the cove, it was Albert’s idea to wade in the water, it was Charlie who threw the first mud ball. Father didn’t care. He turned, took both my arms and shook me as he spoke. “I never want to see you behaving like that again.”
“But, Father, I—”
“Don’t make me cut an alder and take it to your skin, Dora.”
When we got to the house, Mother greeted us on the porch, looking concerned. She must have spotted us coming up the road and seen from Father’s stride that he was angry. He ordered me to pump a bucket of water from the well. “Get yourself cleaned up before supper, and I’d better not find a speck of clay behind your ears.” When I came back into the house, I heard him complaining to Mother. “She’s too old to fall in with the boys, and she’s gotten some smart with her mouth too. Talk to her, Lottie, tell her she’ll never get a husband if she keeps it up. No man around here wants a wife who talks back.”
He acted as if it made him sick just to look at me. He shook me so hard he put his fears right into my body. He let go of every nasty thought, every father’s nightmare, and put them in my head—the desire to watch animals mate in the spring, the thoughts of wanting to be touched, the need for men to notice me. I couldn’t have stayed innocent, even if I’d wanted to. I guess he finally realized that there’s no way to stop a girl from becoming a woman.
At least I’m not as far gone as Grace Hutner. She has a way of speaking, putting her finger to her chin and rolling her eyes while she giggles … it’s as sly as any county-fair magician or snake oil salesman. There’s always a slight dip to the front of her blouse and an impatient turn to her ankle as she sticks her leg out to the side of her desk or into the aisle of the sanctuary at church. The lightness of her hair and the blue of her eyes fool most everyone into thinking she’s perfection walking. Her one-dimpled smile pulls everyone into her path, boys, girls, men. They fall right to her side: “Do you need help carrying those books, Grace?” “Tell us about your new dress, Grace.” “A young thing like you shouldn’t walk alone.” Every churchgoing boy in the Bay, including both Albert and Borden, has rolled her in the hayloft. The only time I’ve ever seen the two of them come to blows was over her. She had them each believing her heart belonged to him. Even though they made peace and forgave each other when she took up with Archer Bigelow, she can still get them to argue over which one of them gets to walk her home from church. All the boys want her, and every little girl wants to be her. Grace Hutner could make a man want to go blind, just so he could better hear her lies.
I’ve “borrowed” a few books from a dusty, forgotten cupboard at the schoolhouse, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen among them. Miss B. lets me keep them at her cabin as long as I read them aloud to her while she makes clay pipes with her willy-nilly fingers. She teases me, holding my wrist before and after each reading, counting my heartbeats. “Your heart’s not changed a flit, your skin’s not hot … you sure you’re alright?” We have formed a reading circle for two, un veille du mot, as Miss B. calls it, and have begun with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. The heroine, Catherine Moreland, is falling in love with the dashing, yet passive, Henry Tilney. She is seventeen.
Once I figured Aunt Fran’s copy of The Science of a New Life had been forgotten, I stole it too and hid it between my mattress and the boards of my bed. Dr. John Cowan and I have gotten to be on quite intimate terms.
Let us glance at some of the results of masturbation, as affecting the health and character of the individual; the array is altogether an undesirable one: headaches, dyspepsia, costiveness, spinal disease, epilepsy, impaired eyesight, palpitations of the heart, pain in the side, incontinence of urine, hysteria, paralysis, involuntary seminal emissions, impotency, consumption, insanity, etc.
The female, diseased here, loses proportionably the amiableness and gracefulness of her sex, her sweetness of voice, disposition and manner, her native enthusiasm, her beauty of face and form, her gracefulness and elegance of carriage, her looks of love and interest in man and to him, and becomes merged into a mongrel, neither male nor female, but marred by the defects of both, without possessing the virtues of either.
Dr. Cowan may go on to call it self-abuse, but I like to refer to it as practising patience. What’s the harm in thinking of love? Is bringing around little heartaches under my covers any different from mouthing the words of the Brownings or Keats or Christina Rosetti? Just yesterday I took another book from Miss Coffill’s library at the schoolhouse, this time a poetry collection. Come to me in the silence of the night; Come in the speaking silence of a dream. I’ve marked my favourites with bits of string. Like my hands down between my legs, the words are sweet, and nothing but wishes.
~ December 1916
Dr. Thomas has not been back to bother Miss B., but Aunt Fran reported the other day that the maternity home in Canning is nearly finished and there’s to be a “Ladies Tea” for the women of Scots Bay. She’s encouraging all “the fine ladies of the Bay” to attend. Of course, she gets herself excited over any occasion that calls for her to wear a new hat and lift her pinky. She was also quick to inform me, “Dr. Thomas will be presenting a lecture on �Morality and Women’s Health,’ something I think you’d quite enjoy, Dora.”
The more I learn about them, the more I realize I’m not much for doctors.
5 (#ulink_41895ea7-081d-539b-ac48-10d1fda3b380)
THREE TEAMS OF STURDY horses hitched to three beautiful new sleighs were waiting at the Seaside Centre. Courtesy of Dr. Thomas.
Mother said I would have to take her place in representing the Rare family, since she had far too much work to do at home. I tried to convince Miss B. she should come along for the ride, but she refused, saying, “I ain’t been down North Mountain since the day I arrived. It’s been so long now, I guess I’d up and turn to dust if I set as much as one toe outside the Bay.”
Aunt Fran told Mother not to worry. “I’m already going, in an official capacity as secretary of the White Rose Temperance Society, so it’s no trouble to watch over my dear young niece. I’ll see that she minds her p’s and q’s.” Precious had begged her mother to include her as well, but Aunt Fran put her off, explaining, “You know how you suffer in the cold. Who knows what state you’d be in after riding down the mountain and back?” She smoothed Precious’s hair and retied the bow at the end of her braid. “What do we always say?”
Precious chimed in with a reluctant sigh. “Think of yourself, think of your health.”
Aunt Fran smiled and popped a lemon drop in Precious’s mouth. “Well done, dear, well done.”
Poor Precious waved us off and began to make her way home, but not before she made me promise to tell her “every little thing that happens.”
Aunt Fran was dressed in her Sunday best. When Mrs. Trude Hutner made a fuss over Fran’s new rabbit fur muff, Aunt Fran insisted that Mrs. Hutner and Grace ride opposite so they could continue their conversation. She handed the muff to Mrs. Hutner for a proper inspection. “It arrived yesterday. Irwin said I should pick out an early Christmas gift from the Eaton’s catalogue. At first he suggested that I might like a new coat, but I told him �no,’ of course, what with the war on and all. This is all I need. I was going to wait until church tomorrow to use it for the first time, but this seemed like the perfect occasion.”
Mrs. Hutner nodded as she stroked the soft white fur. “Like a little bit of heaven, I’d say … but practical too.” She slipped her hands inside the muff and grinned. “I think it’s time I had a new one myself. Perhaps I’ll give Grace my old one and mail in my order to Eaton’s this week.”
Aunt Fran tried her best to fight the disapproving look from her face. The two women are friends, but only because they are both in the position of having much more than most women in the Bay. Evidently, it takes equally thin parts of kindness and sincerity to marry well. “There was a lovely one made from beaver, pictured right next to this one. You’d certainly look smart in such a dark colour, if I do say so myself.”
Mrs. Hutner pouted and handed the muff back to Aunt Fran. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Most of Aunt Fran’s time (and much of Uncle Irwin’s family fortune) goes towards her need for having. Last Christmas it was Irish linens, after that, French lace table runners, and then it was figurines made from Italian porcelain … mostly birds, insects and fruit. These days, her fancy’s gone towards collecting spoons, hundreds of them, engraved with the faces of royalty and the great wonders of the world, the likes of which Aunt Fran would never dream of leaving her comfortable home in the Bay to see. She faithfully polishes them, singing hymns all the while, grinning as her reflection turns in the bowl, right side up, upside down, right side up, upside down. They line her parlour wall, each one a useless droplet of silver, but delicate enough not to offend God or any of the good Christian ladies of the Bay.
Mother always smiles to herself whenever we visit Aunt Fran. “A woman’s got to have something to set her clocks by … Fran’s cuckoo sings somewhere between spouting off Bible verses and rubbing those spoons.” I’ve never heard her complain about Fran’s treasures or how little she has for herself. She spends day after day sweeping dust and dirt out the door, one mealtime running into the next, her heavy, tired feet shuffling in front of the hot cookstove. Her back aches from wringing clothes over the washtub and tugging milk from the Guernsey’s udders. She was the pretty one who married for love. Seven children later, I hope she holds tight to that thought, as she tucks our dreams safely under our pillows and kisses Father good night.
I watched the trees go by, birch branches sparkling in the sun, spruces flocked white with fresh, wet snow from the night before. The horses kept a brisk pace, the sleigh cutting a clean path as we made our way down the mountain, winter-brisk air rushing past our faces. Fran shouted above the jangling of the sleigh bells. “I also got three new spoons … Buckingham Palace, the Pyramids of Giza and the Taj Mahal. You should come to tea next week and see them, they are glorious, simply glorious!”
Mrs. Hutner paused and buttoned the collar of Grace’s coat to the very top. “Only if you’ll come and see my newest pretties …” Grace smacked her mother’s hand away and pulled the button loose again.
Aunt Fran clapped her hands together. “Oh, Trude, did you get it already?”
Mrs. Hutner reached for Grace’s hand and squeezed it, tight. “Yes, the box arrived three days ago.” She spoke at a fast, excited pitch. “The Gilded Lotus. Rose medallion pattern, covered with flowers and gilt, and the charming face of an empress looks back at you from the bottom of each cup. They’re so small and delightful, each one with its own little rounded cover, like a tiny Chinaman’s hat. Guywan they call it, a covered cup.” Grace wormed her hand away from her mother’s grasp and then slowly dug her heel into the toe of her mother’s boot. Mrs. Hutner’s eyes began to water. “They have no handles, you know.”
Aunt Fran handed her a handkerchief. “How very odd.”
Mrs. Hutner dabbed the corners of her eyes. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve been feeling under the weather.”
Aunt Fran nodded in sympathy. “Something’s going around. The Widow Bigelow started off with a slight cough, but wound up in bed for a week. I guess it’s a good thing we’re going to see the doctor.”
The Canning Maternity Home sits at the top of Pleasant Street. The tall, straight house looks as if it sprang up, white and clean, from nowhere. A stranger to the area would never guess that the place was once the rundown, forgotten house of Captain Robert Dowell, an English ship’s captain who had a wife in London and an extra wife right here in Canning, Nova Scotia. His tombstone in the Habitant Cemetery reads:
Captain Robert Dowell
1836–1883
Who gave up his life
to his one true love,
the sea.
Most people might take those words to mean that he drowned, but the fact of the matter is, Captain Dowell met a more sinister fate. After Emily Dowell, wife number two, received a letter from Lucinda Dowell, wife number one, the two women made an agreement. They vowed that the Mrs. Dowell who saw darling “Robbie” next would take a butcher’s knife and run it deep into his unfaithful heart.
It was Emily who met him first. It was Emily who waited in the dark of the wharf, Emily Elizabeth Dowell, née Trublood, the fair-faced daughter of the Honourable Judge Kingston Trublood. It was Emily who stabbed Captain Dowell, shoved him in the water and made good on the chance to right a wrong. Sadly enough, Emily couldn’t live with the consequences. She couldn’t bear to think that her own father might have to put her head in a noose. When she was done, she turned the knife on herself. Her marker is set next to her husband’s. Underneath a carved hand that points to heaven, it reads:
Emily Elizabeth Trublood Dowell
1858–1883
Faithful consort
True of heart
The mystery of their two bloody bodies floating in the Habitant River might never have been solved, except for a letter that the Canning postmaster received after their deaths.
Manchester
England
October 25, 1883
Attention: Postmaster
The Village of Canning
Kings County, Nova Scotia
Canada
Dear Postmaster, It has been many months since I have heard from my dear friend, Mrs. Emily Dowell. Does she still reside there? Is she well? Please tell me, have she and her dear husband settled their differences? I wouldn’t trouble you, but it isn’t like her not to send word. We are relatives of a sort, through marriage, and I am most anxious to hear news of her.
Awaiting your kind response,
Mrs. Lucy Dowell
The postmaster, a Mr. Martin deGroot, sent a quick response to Lucy Dowell. Even after the gruesome details were explained, they continued to exchange letters, Lucy telling of the lonely damp weather of Manchester and Martin cursing the long Nova Scotia winter. It wasn’t long before the postmaster realized it was the perfect match, Lucy being a widow, and he being in need of a wife. In the spring he sent for her, and Lucy Dowell became Mrs. Lucy deGroot.
Mother and Aunt Fran’s side of the family is connected to the deGroots through their great-great-grandmother’s sister. She left the Bay to marry into the strong Dutch family and never returned. Mother always points out the deGroot orchards on the way to Canning. “There’s the finest apples in Kings County.” They are round and plump with a red blush, just like the rest of our deGroot cousins, not at all like the small, tart fruit that grows in the Bay. We see the apples and the cousins once a year, in the autumn. Father brings new barrels down the mountain, and in return we get our share of apples and cider.
It was because of that simple tradition between our two families that Charlie and I always felt we had the “rights” to crawl through the broken cellar door of Captain Dowell’s house. Despite the boarded windows and the faded “no trespassing” sign, we figured (through murder, marriage and loose blood ties) that the house was ours. We’d sneak off to the house whenever Father let us tag along on his Saturday trips to Canning. To clean out the ghosts, we’d run up and down the stairs, howling and screaming. After that, we’d sit in the attic, silent and still, to see if they’d return. Even the ghosts wouldn’t recognize the place now.
Mrs. Dr. Thomas is a sweet woman, and although I found her to be kind enough, she seemed almost giddy with hospitality. She bounced as she led us from room to room, her expectant belly pushing forward, her hair piled in girlish ringlets atop her head. She rested her hands on her round stomach. “It’s our first, and hopefully one of the many babies to be born at the Canning Maternity Home.” She winked at Aunt Fran. “We ladies of Kings County are lucky to be in such good hands.”
We followed her through the first floor, touring a small sitting room, Dr. Thomas’s examination room, a large kitchen and sleeping quarters for two nurses.
The second floor had been turned into one large room. The white walls were lined with neat, square cupboards filled with folded towels and blankets. Under the far window were three large washbasins. Straight down the middle of the room were two long rows of empty white bassinettes. This was the nursery.
Dr. Thomas greeted us as we approached the third floor. “Welcome to the delivery room, ladies.” The top post of the banister, once dark with carved sea serpents and sailing ships, had been painted over, whitewashed like everything else. The dreary attic was now a wide, ample space. Ten spare beds with tight white sheets lined the walls. In the centre of it all was a large table, set with candles, finger sandwiches and fine china. Dr. Thomas motioned for us to be seated. “Please, won’t you join me for tea?”
He took each of the ladies’ hands as they entered the room, complimenting their dresses and hats, commenting on mutual acquaintances, distant relatives and the weather. He paused when he came to me, repeating my name after I said it. “Miss Dora Rare. A lovely name.”
We sipped our tea as Dr. Thomas explained “the advantages of modern childbirth.” He pulled on a sheet that was hanging from the ceiling and let it fall down as a partition between two beds. “At the Canning Maternity Home we have both privacy and efficiency. Up to ten women can labour at once and still have the best in obstetrical care.” He pushed the sheet back and tied it to the wall. “And more beds can be added as needed.” He stood at the end of a bed and turned a crank. The head of the bed rose and lowered and then rose again. “The new mother can labour and rest in the same bed.” He bent down and yanked a metal footing from either side of the end of the bed, smacking them into place with a hard jolt. “Stirrups. For support during birthing.”
The ladies all smiled and nodded. While they continued to eat their tiny sandwiches, Dr. Thomas wheeled over a metal cart. It was draped with a sheet and looked something like a caddy for tea and sweets. Aunt Fran gasped when he revealed the contents of the tray. The doctor chuckled. “It may look ominous, but I assure you, it’s all part of progress.” The tray was cluttered with shining silver knives, scissors and other medical instruments. Stored in the compartment beneath were jars of every shape and size. He took two medicine bottles and nestled them around the flower arrangement in the centre of the table. “Pituitrin and chloroform, a mother’s two best friends.” He then held up a pair of large wide tongs. “Forceps, the obstetrical physician’s best friend.” He passed them around the table. “I brought out all these things—the surgical knives, the scissors, the needles, the bottles of ergot and ether—not to frighten you, but to show you the path of modern medicine. These things hasten childbirth and put the labour process in the doctor’s hands. He has complete control. The faster the birth, the less chance for infection, and the less time the mother has to suffer. I’m sure you’d all agree, the less a woman has to suffer, the better.”
The women whispered and nodded, Trude Hutner adding, “Two days of labour it was with my Grace.” She patted Grace’s hand. “Can you imagine? Two whole days.”
Dr. Thomas sat down at the head of the table. “Late last week I was called to a birth in the village of Baxter’s Harbour. The local midwife attended the young mother’s birth, but as the labour progressed, it was clear that the mother was in much distress. The father, having been sent away from his home by the midwife, had sense enough to come to Canning to enlist my help. When I arrived, the mother was in a state of utter exhaustion and was too weak to deliver the child. It was too late for her to get any relief from the medicine I administered, too late for the use of forceps.” He shook his head. “That poor mother and her child are not alive today.” He took the forceps and placed them back on the cart. “Every time I recall that tragedy, I realize that there are more occasions than any of us care to think when a physician’s hand is the only saving grace.”
While the ladies were all shaking their heads in silence, Dr. Thomas continued, looking in my direction. “I don’t think that young mother was much older than your dear Miss Rare.” The ladies all turned and looked at me. “She’s the perfect example of one of Scots Bay’s fine young ladies who will be needing my assistance in the future.” He smiled and then winked at me, as if he knew me, as if we shared a secret (or as if he might have known I was hiding at Miss B.’s the day he called on her). My face, my ears, the back of my neck went hot. “It’s never too soon to start thinking about the day she’ll be a bride, a wife, a mother.”
As the ladies all agreed with Dr. Thomas, Grace choked on a petit four. Mrs. Hutner poured more tea in her daughter’s cup and encouraged her to drink (or at least hold her cup to her face to stifle her laughter).
Dr. Thomas placed a small booklet next to each place setting around the table. “A Mother’s Share from the Farmer’s Assurance Company would make a wonderful gift for a new bride.”
Mrs. Thomas added, “For any woman, really.”
The doctor stood behind his wife and placed his hand on her shoulder. “It gives a woman the peace of mind of knowing that she has a safe, clean place to have her babies.”
Although impeccable with his manners and polite at every turn, it was clear to me that Dr. Thomas was less concerned with a woman’s circumstances and more concerned with selling his services. You ain’t tellin’. You sellin’. Thinking of Miss B., I raised my hand to speak, my voice wavering as I questioned Dr. Thomas. “What about the cost? I don’t know many families in Scots Bay who can afford what you’re asking.”
Aunt Fran hissed at me. “Dora, don’t be rude.”
Mrs. Thomas smiled. “What a family spends on coffee and tea each month could easily buy a share.”
Not feeling as if I’d had a proper answer, or that Mrs. Thomas had the slightest notion of what the word cost means to most families in the Bay, I ignored Aunt Fran’s scolding and held up the back of the pamphlet. “But it says right here, �A Mother’s Share costs twenty-five dollars for one year.’ That’s an awful lot of coffee beans.”
Aunt Fran snatched the pamphlet from my hand and whispered, “I won’t hear another word from you.”
Dr. Thomas interrupted. “No, she’s right, not every woman may be able to afford her own share, but that’s why I’ve brought you ladies here today. This is a wonderful chance for women’s organizations like the White Rose Temperance Society to help the ladies of their community. What price, I ask you, is greater than life?”
Although she was all politeness and smiles, when the tea was over, Aunt Fran was the first to head to the door, pulling me along and muttering under her breath as she went. “For heaven’s sake, my own niece. If I’ve told Lottie once, I’ve told her a thousand times, you’ve got to keep an eye on that girl. Keep her away from books and those boys.”
Dr. Thomas followed close behind. “Mrs. Jeffers, a word, if you please?”
She turned, forcing her angry grimace into a pleasant smile. “Certainly, Doctor, although we’ve already taken up so much of your time today.”
He took her hand in his. “I wanted to thank you for coming and for bringing your niece along with you. It’s a pleasure to see such thoughtfulness in a young lady, don’t you agree?”
Aunt Fran blushed. “Why, yes, how kind of you to say so. I’m always telling Dora that she needs to speak up more, open that dear mouth of hers on occasion.”
Dr. Thomas looked at me. “So good to see you, Miss Rare. Please give Miss Babineau my best, will you?”
I nodded. “Yes, I certainly will.”
Aunt Fran interrupted. “Dora, dear, you neglected to tell me that you had already made Dr. Thomas’s acquaintance.”
Before I could insist that we’d never met, Dr. Thomas looked at me and grinned. “I imagine that Miss Rare is hiding all sorts of surprises.”
6 (#ulink_7f3f9003-b31e-52b4-9698-4758c6b8b46f)
MY SATURDAY VISIT with Miss Babineau the following week was spent at Mabel Thorpe’s place. Miss B. had her birthing bag packed and was ready to go as soon as I walked through the door. “Turn yourself around. Mabel’s bornin’ her third, so we’d best get over to the house and lend a hand.” I thought of Mrs. Ketch and of baby Darcy and how I held him until his breath was gone, his body cold. In the time that had passed since his birth, my nightmares had disappeared only to be replaced with the thought that perhaps I had caused his death, that Laird Jessup had been right to blame his calf’s misfortunes on me, that my presence at any birth somehow brought on ugliness—pale misshaped bodies, weak hearts and eventually death. “I don’t think I’d be much help. Maybe I should go back home.”
Miss B. took my hand, pulled me out of the house and started walking down the road. “It’s gonna be just fine. Don’t you worry.”
I should know by now, once Marie Babineau’s mind’s made up, there’s no saying no.
The walk was cold and long. By mid-December the trees are naked, the Bay has turned the colour of lead and the winds have changed, pushing the grass down, ignoring our lives as it cuts the breath short and shallow, forcing us to move from fire to fire. Mabel’s house sits along the main road where it branches off towards Cape Split, just after the shipyard and Hardy Tupper’s blacksmith shop. It’s no different than all the other Thorpe houses in the Bay, framed straight and square like a saltbox, with one chimney poking up through the middle of the roof. This is how the Thorpes are too, plain living and dependable, every last one.
Once inside, Miss B. was quick to push Mabel’s husband, Porter, and their two small children out the door and off to stay with his sister’s family down the road. “That wife of yours has to think on this baby now. The little ones won’t know why she’s not actin’ herself, and dear Mabel can’t do what she needs to if she’s frettin’ over givin’ them a fright.”
Her belly almost too wide between them, Mabel leaned towards her shy, quiet husband, giving him an awkward kiss on the cheek. She tousled the hair on her little girls’ heads saying, “You be some good for your auntie. Mind your daddy and say your pleases and thank-yous.” Two little strawberry-blond heads nodded together as they looked up at their mother, smiling, reaching out their hands to rub the roundness of her one last time. At four and five they are perfect stair steps, both freckle-faced and as sweet-natured as their mother. Big as a barn and nearly ready to drop, Mabel Thorpe still made motherhood look easy. Miss B. says, “It’s a mama’s faith what keeps her children right. I’m not talkin’ �bout the churchgoin’ kind, neither. Miss Mabel’s got faith in goodness. Tell me you can’t help but believe in it too just by lookin’ at her.”
Soon after they left, two of Mabel’s neighbours, Bertine Tupper and Sadie Loomer, arrived. Miss B. greeted them by kissing their cheeks and teasing them about the difference in their heights. “Well, if it ain’t the broom and the bucket.” Bertine’s as tall and sturdy as you’d expect a blacksmith’s wife to be, while Sadie, though wiry and rough as a sailor with her talk, isn’t much taller than my youngest brothers. They came through the door cradling baskets filled with tiny quilts, cradle blankets and baked goods. Miss B. cooed over Bertine’s knitting, smoothing the folds with her blue-lined hands. “L’amour de maman. A mother’s love.” Then she set us all to work, even Mabel. “It’s too early to be puttin’ yourself to bed, little mama. You know right well you gots to keep on movin’ so’s you can open up them bones.” Mabel didn’t argue. She busied herself with her friends, moving back and forth between sifting flour and gripping the edge of the kitchen table when her pains grew too hard.
From three different outports in Newfoundland, Mabel, Bertine and Sadie all came to the Bay about the same time. They’re what Aunt Fran calls women from away. She says it means they couldn’t find husbands in their own villages, so they had to find a way to get “hitched” to men from somewhere else. “Newfoundland may as well be the moon the way those women act sometimes. When you’ve got no family to speak of, no one knows who you really are. I suppose that’s what they want, running off like that from home, like they’ve got something to hide.” I think they’re wonderful, and even brave, sitting together at church socials, laughing louder than Aunt Fran thinks they should. They seem more like sisters (or at least how I imagine sisters might be).
Miss B. called to me. “Dora, go out and fetch us some fresh eggs. It’s time to make the groanin’ cake.”
Some say the groaning cake, or kimbly, brings good fortune to the new child. These days, most people save the tradition for when the mother’s churched. The first Sunday she can get out of bed and take the baby to services, the father stands outside the church door and hands each mother in the community a little cake wrapped in brown paper and red ribbon. Mabel wanted to do it the old way, where the mother breaks the eggs and mixes the batter herself just before the baby comes. “It fills the house right up with sweetness. That’s the way my mother and all her sisters did it back home.”
Bertine nodded in agreement. “My granny always said just the smell of it baking cuts the pain.”
Sadie added, “As soon as you think a baby’s coming, it’s time to tie lavender to the bedposts, put an axe under the bed and a cake in the oven.”
Miss B. smiled as she lifted the cozy off the teapot. “The scent of a good groanin’ cake, a cuppa hot Mother’s Tea and time. Most times that’s all a mama needs on the day her baby comes.” She handed Mabel a cup. “Plenty of time to do whatever she needs, tell whatever story’s on her mind, time enough to say all her prayers.”
As the afternoon wore on, Mabel became more and more quiet, stopping every once in a while to hold her stomach and let out a groan. After her water broke all down her legs and she got to where she couldn’t hold a spoon in her hands or a smile on her face, Miss B. led her back to the bedroom. She unpacked three glass jars from her bag, sterilized scissors, scorched muslin and castor oil. She sang and prayed over them, and after that, over anything else she touched. It was getting dark now, so I lit a few lamps and brought them into the room.
Sadie and Bertine took turns telling Mabel gossip as they pulled a clean nightdress over Mabel’s round belly.
“And then Bertine gots her foot tappin’. You know the way she does when she thinks she’s been lied to, says, �well, isn’t that interesting’—an’ all that.”
Mabel paced back and forth, trying to keep her mind from her pain.
“I just thought it was awful interesting that Mrs. Trude Hutner would say she already knew whats how to thrum a pair of mitts when you know right well she’s never knitted a proper mitt, nor sock, nor a bloody thimble for her thumb. These women around here like to think they know it all … she wouldn’t have to stuff the Canning Register down her husband’s boots if she knew to make a proper sock.”
Sadie’s half Bertine’s size, but it didn’t stop her from teasing. “Shut it now, Bertine, and let me tell it right. No one wants to hear about your blessed wonderful socks … again.”
Mabel reached for the bedpost, groaning with pain. “Here it comes.”
Miss B. clutched at the rosary beads around her neck. “Hold on to it, don’t you go pushin’ just yet.” Sadie and Bertine rushed to their friend, holding her up on either side. With every moan Mabel let out, they did their best to comfort her, saying, “You’ll be fine, just a little while longer, you’ll be fine,” but when her pains came in waves, each one following on top of the next, they gave up their words. Miss B. closed her eyes and listened. “There’s a sound that creeps up … it’s like no other sound I ever heard. When it pulls at the hairs on the back of your neck, that’s how you knows it’s time.”
Miss B. asked me to bring in a bowl of warm water and a clean towel. She spread blankets on the floor, making a soft nest at Mabel’s feet. “You gotta get on your knees now, dear, it’s time you gonna push.” Bertine and Sadie got down on the floor with her, giving Mabel their shoulders to hold on to. Miss B. sprinkled a few drops of castor oil in the water, prayed over the bowl, wrang out the steaming cloth and placed it against the red, bulging skin between Mabel’s legs. She looked at me and motioned to a small stool beside her bag. “Bring that stool and come hold this for me. Keep it close and warm so she don’t tear.”
Mabel cried out as the next pains began. Miss B. knelt beside me. I started to move to change places with her, but she whispered in my ear, “You stay put.” She looked up at Mabel. “Now we push, little mama, now we push.”
It was tight and round where I held the cloth, and as I pulled my hand away, I could see the dark of the baby’s hair. As she pushed, Mabel’s body seemed to open up as wide and full as her wailing. When the baby’s head moved out into the light, I saw that its face was starting to turn blue. Miss B. whispered in my ear, her voice calm and steady. “It’s just a corded birth. You gonna get him loose so he can breathe.” I held my breath as Miss B. went on. “Feel your fingers �round the neck. Can you slip the cord over the baby’s head?” The wet bumpy cord was taut and pulsing. There was barely a finger’s width of space to hook my fingers underneath. Not wanting to frighten Mabel, I turned my head towards Miss B. and mouthed the word no. Miss B. called out to her, “God knows you’re tired, dear, as do all the angels in heaven, so on this next push they’re gonna help you get that baby out.”
Mabel whimpered, her body shaking and weak. “I don’t know if I can.”
Miss B.’s voice was firm. “You ain’t got no choice … now here we go. Mother Mary, help this mama, help this baby, Mother Mary, Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of the Moon and Star of the Sea, Ave Maria Stellas … un, deux, trois …”
Mabel closed her eyes and let out a long, anguished wail. Bertine and Sadie cried out loud beside her, moaning right along with her, all three women letting out heavy groans. As the baby slipped out, all milky-looking and wet, I pulled the cord free from its neck. Miss B. scooped the baby up, opening its tiny mouth with her fingers. She held her mouth to the infant’s, her cheeks puffing with gentle breaths, then made the sign of the cross over and over as the baby gave its first cry.
It was late by the time we finished tending to Mabel and her new baby, clearing away the bloodstained sheets, spooning fennel broth between Mabel’s tired lips. Miss B. squeezed drops of watery red alder tea into the infant’s mouth “to clear the liver and cut the hives.” When mother and child were sleeping, we left them to Sadie and Bertine’s care. I recorded the day’s events in the Willow Book, still amazed at the way it felt to be the first person to bring her hands to a child’s life. While it cannot replace the sadness I feel over Darcy, it has changed me, somehow opening my heart again.
December 8, 1916. Evening, about half-past eight.
Mabel Thorpe has another beautiful baby girl.
Her name is Violet.
Not wanting to wake up my family, I stayed over at Miss B.’s cabin and slept in her rocking chair until dawn. I woke to find Miss B. standing beside the rocker, praying over me.
She whispered, “You believe in spirits of the dead?”
Thinking I was dreaming, I whispered back. “Yes.”
“You know where they lives?”
“Right here. Right where we are. Everywhere we are.”
“How you know this?”
“I just do.”
7 (#ulink_6f94fd82-ae82-5378-9e7d-35c223d95102)
EACH SUNDAY AT the Union Church we recite the Apostles’ Creed. The voices of the congregation rise up together in holy-mouthed repetition, saying, “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” When my Auntie Hannah June died, she came to me in spirit. She told me she’d forgotten to do something before she left. She’d forgotten to write down her mother’s recipe for brown bread. Hannah June was always the one to make the bread, for every social and family picnic. She guarded the secret with her life and never bothered to write it down. I guess she thought it was the one thing that meant she was needed. Maybe she was right.
At family gatherings, everyone always waited for her arrival, anticipating the basket of warm, doughy sweetness she would bring. Once, before a Women’s Institute bake sale, I saw her standing just outside an open window at the Seaside Centre, as if she was waiting for someone to say her name. No sooner had Aunt Fran said, “Where’s that Hannah June and her brown bread?” then in she came, flour still clinging in the wrinkles of her hands, smelling like yeast and molasses.
The Sunday after she died, there in the middle of church, while everyone else was saying, “To thee all angels cry aloud; The heavens, and all the powers therein; To thee cherubim and seraphim continually do cry.” Auntie Hannah June’s ghost settled down beside me and led my pencil across the inside of the back cover of the hymnal. To my dear sister Maude, ¼ cup molasses, ½ cup oats, 2 egg yolks … I passed the book behind me to Aunt Maude. She cried, right there in the pew, trembling and dropping wet tears all over the place.
The morning after Mabel’s birth, Miss B. had gone on about her thoughts of the dead, sitting down in a chair next to me in her kitchen, clutching my hand. “Wherever them spirits lives, up or down or in the treetops, hidin’ behind gravestones or under my bed, I’m goin’ there soon. Goin’ to meet with Mary and the angels, my maman and my grandpapa Louis Faire.” She opened her eyes wide and stuck her face in front of mine. “See? The brown of my skin and the bright of my eyes is all muddy with clouds … my knittin’ needles been playin’ waltzes instead of jigs.”
I started to speak, but she put her finger to my lips. “Shh … I gots to give it up and it’s you that’s got to follow.” She pulled at the tangle of beads around her neck, her bony fingers tugging apart the strands of pearl, jet, coral and wood. A single black strand came away from the rest, weighted with a silver crucifix, a long brass key and a small leather pouch. “Keeps the gris-gris, the evil eye and the voodoo away.” She held the rosary beads to her lips. “I remember the day you arrived.”
“The day I was born?”
“Oh no, long before that … I’m talkin’ about the day your spirit came down and started flutterin’ around in your mama’s belly like a pair of butterfly’s wings.”
She slipped the beads through her fingers, one after another, as she spoke. “Your mama had come to me crying, convinced that the baby in her belly was dead. She’d had a dream, a vision of a beautiful lady with hair as dark as night and sparklin’ green eyes. She done thought it were an angel from God, come to tell her that the baby had gone to heaven.”
“I just knew that weren’t the way it was, so I sat her down, brewed her some raspberry tea and began talkin’ to her belly. It wasn’t but a minute later that she felt you beginnin’ to move.” Miss B. laughed. “I told your mama not to worry, that her dream was showin’ her that she was gonna have a fine baby girl. Oh, she could hardly believe it, the wife of a Rare man havin’ a girl. But after you started kickin’ her in the ribs, she trusted me, she knew it was true, not like your father … he wouldn’t hear it, no matter how many times I grabbed him after church and swore on the reverend’s Protestant excuse for a Bible. Why your daddy almost went and fainted when you didn’t have a piddler danglin’ between your legs.” She placed the crucifix, key and pouch in the palm of her hand, the beads trailing down in her lap. “I knew from the start who you was, Dora Rare. You’s what I call lagniappe, a little something extra.”
“Miss B., I’m not sure what you mean by all this.”
She went on, stroking the crucifix as she spoke. “I know most folks think what I do ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of witchery, but everything gots a reason, I promise you that.” She looked up at me. “It’s the things they can’t see, the things they’re afraid to get an understandin’ of that I gots to pass on to you.” She laid the strand of beads in my lap. “It’s time I gave this to you.” She put her fìnger to the pouch and made the sign of the cross. “This holds the veil, the caul that covered your eyes at your birth.” She untied the ribbon that held the pouch shut and gently fished out the contents. It was a homely little thing, unremarkable, looking much like the withered red bits of Irish moss I often find in the twins’ coat pockets. Once considered a treasure, now forgotten and left behind.
“Seein’ how he couldn’t brag you was a boy, your daddy bragged over that caul. As any good sailor knows, a caul’s as good as any blessing of St. Christopher, it brings fair wind and plenty of it, and it’ll save �em from drownin’ too. You weren’t even a day old, and the men were all fightin’ over it. A letter even come from as far away as Halifax, offerin’ great sums of money, but your maman thought better of it and give it to me to keep safe. It couldn’t get no safer than hangin’ �round my neck, burnin’ next to my heart while I whispered to it, day on day, night on night. I give it all the words of Louis Faire, all the secrets of the simples, all my prayers to Mother Mary, all what’s written in the Willow Book. This is how I knows that you are my follow, the next traiteur.” She hung the strand of beads around my neck, her hands shaking, her eyes pleading and haunted. “You have to take it from me, Dora, take the prayers, the secrets. If you don’t, they’ll be lost, and I’ll never have a moment’s peace on the other side. Stay with me �til I cross over. It won’t be long; the grave’s not too far off now. I know I won’t see another winter.”
I tried to calm her. “You’re just tired, Miss B. A good night’s sleep and you’ll be fine.”
“You proved yourself with Mabel’s little one. The women here, they’ll need someone. They’ll need you.”
I laughed and teased her, hoping she would leave it alone for now. “By the time you die, Dr. Thomas’ll have built one of his fancy maternity homes right here in Scots Bay Maybe even two.”
She grabbed my arm and held tight, muttering a stream of prayers in French. “They need you.”
Frightened, I twisted away from her, making my way to the kitchen to put on my coat and boots. “Mother needs me at home. I’m too young. I’m sorry …” I left the caul and Miss B.’s beads on the table and ran to the door.
She called out after me. “You must take it. It’s what God means for you. It is your destinée …”
8 (#ulink_d7f11156-faac-5d1d-beae-073da69a575e)
ISPOKE WITH MOTHER about what went on at Miss B.’s. We were doing the mending after breakfast, pushing darning eggs down into the heels of Father’s socks, hoping to make them last another winter. The only time words come easy between us is when we’re busy. Everything I’ve learned from Mother, every bit of her truth, has been said while her hands were moving.
When I finished telling her of Miss Babineau’s offer, she paused and looked up from her knitting. “And what did you say?”
“I told her no, of course. I can’t leave you to take care of the boys alone.”
Returning to her handwork, she looped the yarn into a tight knot. “I know you don’t think I know much about the world, but I hear what’s going on. Newspapers get here often enough, and God knows Fran tells me what’s fashionable and so on.” She cut the end loose with Father’s old pocketknife. “Things are changing for women. They want a say in things, to be their own persons. Some girls are working at jobs where they make their own way. If we lived in a bigger place, there might be more opportunity for you. I’ve heard that out west and even in some towns down towards Halifax, girls your age are doing men’s jobs, working on farms while the men are away … but here in the Bay there isn’t room for it, the men’s pride won’t have it. You know how it is, a girl lives with her parents until she gets married, and then she spends the rest of her life raising babies, cooking, cleaning, waiting on her husband. Do you really want to go from helping me take care of all these boys to taking care of another man?” She was fishing for a small white button in the bottom of a canning jar. “I know Marie Babineau doesn’t have much, but she’s got one thing I’ve never had, and that’s quiet. I can only imagine having moments all to myself that no one else knows about.” Her eyes squinted and narrowed as she guided the end of her thread through a small, shiny needle. “Your father wants you to stay with Aunt Fran.”
“I thought he’d given up on that.”
“He spoke about it again just yesterday morning. He said you’ve been breaking the rules.”
“What rules?”
“He saw you sleeping next to Charlie again, Dora.”
“It was cold, the twins stole my blankets, and Charlie offered to share. I don’t see why he thinks it’s so wrong.”
“He just does.”
“So he thinks I’m some sort of …”
“He’s your father and he wants what’s best for you.”
“He doesn’t know the first thing about me, let alone what’s best for me.”
“Your father …” She lowered her voice to an angry whisper. “Your father is a good and honest man whose only weakness is having pride in his work and his family. You’ll not speak that way about him again.”
“Mother. I’m sorry, I—”
“The truth is, we’ve barely enough for the winter this year. Albert and Borden are going off to join the war. They want to do their part. I know you don’t want to go to Fran’s, but now with Miss B …. you could stay with her.” She stitched a patch on the knee of Father’s overalls. “I don’t think it’s much to ask, considering … just for a little while.”
I tried to find a way out of it. “We could sell my caul. Miss B. said people offered money for it when I was born.”
Mother shook her head. “That was a long time ago. No one believes in that sort of thing these days.”
“But I don’t want to leave home. I don’t want to leave you.”
She took my hands in hers. “My gram always said, Each day brings another handful of opportunities. It’s up to you to make the best of what you’re given. And that’s just what you’re going to do. With all the young men going off to fight in the war, who knows what will happen to them. You’ve got to think of a future for yourself, just in case.”
Every summer, for “Mary’s day,” Miss B. makes a gift, a Lady Moon for each of the girls in the Bay who’s turned eight in the past year. They’re simple little things, rag dolls wrapped in blue dresses, stitched with crescent moons and stars, hands sewn together in prayer, bodies stuffed with dried seaweed, rose petals and lavender. Mothers, too polite to refuse them, turn their heads when their daughters leave them behind, tucked behind the headstones in the cemetery beside the church or fallen into a puddle alongside the road.
There have been few things in my life that I’ve called mine. Anything that was important or special disappeared soon after it came to my hands. No matter how well hidden, my dolls and their tea sets were eventually found, lined up on the fence and destroyed. Smooth beach stones flew from my brothers’ slingshots, knocking my treasures into the pigpen. Father tried talking to them, but he never blamed them, never punished them for it. That’s what boys do. This is why I set my Lady Moon free. And not just my Lady Moon, but all of the other forgotten dolls as well. Some years I’ve found only a single doll lying on the beach, other years there have been as many as five sweet faces crowded into a round-bottomed basket, trimmed with a torn piece of cotton for a sail. I tell them all a secret and set them afloat from Lady’s Cove as the tide goes out. They bob and bounce on the waves as I send them away, hoping they’ll get to a place where they’ll be loved. It’s for their own good.
Destiny or “just in case,” it’s two weeks to Christmas, and then I’ll be staying with Miss B. I’ve come to know her enough that it shouldn’t scare me, but it does. I don’t know that I’ll ever have her kind of wisdom, or the courage it takes to live like her—to be given such little respect, to be alone. I’m scared of what it means to take a step, any step, that’s not in the direction I dreamed I’d go. But I’m seventeen, never been kissed, and there’s no one in sight for love, let alone marriage, and there’s nothing else to do.
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ANGELS AND SHEPHERDS, three Wise Men and a Virgin all paraded through the sanctuary, put on their play and paraded out. Aside from the trail of dung left behind by my brother Gord’s pet lamb, Woolly, the Scots Bay Christmas Eve Pageant of 1916 was the same as always … ordinary, somewhat smelly, and more or less a success.
Just as she has for the past ten years, Aunt Fran acted as Madame Director. I had suggested that this year we put on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol instead of the usual nativity play, but Fran scowled and argued, “The Christmas season is for celebrating the birth of Christ, not some cripple named Tom.”
“It’s Tim.”
“What?”
“The child in A Christmas Carol is Tiny Tim.”
“Fine. Christmas is about Christ, not crippled Tiny Tim. It’s too late to choose a different play. We already have all the costumes, and I’ve chosen the music. Besides, aren’t there ghosts in the Dickens play? It would be more than dreadful to frighten the small children of our community on Christmas Eve. May I assign the parts now, Dora?”
My cousin Precious made a fine but forgetful Virgin Mary. She’d open her mouth wide each time she lost her lines, waiting for Aunt Fran to clear her throat and bellow out Mary’s words while crouched behind the pulpit. The stuffed bird perched in the mass of feathers on Fran’s new Christmas hat seemed to peer out to the audience as she cupped her hand aside her mouth and announced, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Laaaard.” Precious-Mary would then repeat, as if she’d just remembered a forgotten item from a grocery list, “Oh yes, that’s right … I am the handmaid of the Lord.”
The only other excitement came when Grace Hutner, leader of the chorus of angels, presented her solo. Two young shepherds stood behind her, leaning on their crooks, holding their long wool beards to their faces, trying (not quite hard enough) to hide their snorts of laughter each time she sang out the word purity.
As tradition holds, the narrator wasn’t to be revealed until after the play ended. Aunt Fran pointed up to the choir loft and proudly announced, “This year, our own dear Reverend Covert Norton agreed to wear the star-singer crown. I’m sure you’ll all agree that it was as if God himself were speaking to us from heaven.”
Most of the congregation seems to enjoy the reverend, but I find his Free Will Baptist preaching overbearing and vulgar. He’s got a sore, narrow-eyed look from the pulpit and is always lapping his tongue at the pocket of his left cheek. What’s worse is the way he’s prone to shout and spit, spraying hellfire and tobacco every time he shakes his fist. Aunt Fran has been generous enough to pay for him to stay through Christmas. “His boldness is just what the Bay needs. He’s a man of God who speaks the truth �til it hurts.” What was supposed to be a temporary post until a new Methodist minister could arrive has gone on for nearly a year. After what I witnessed tonight, I’m afraid he’ll never leave.
Halfway home, mother noticed that she had forgotten her Bible. She tried to make light of her forgetfulness by saying, “I suppose there’s no safer place for it than in our dear little church,” but I could tell she felt lost without it. I volunteered to go back and fetch it for her, welcoming the chance to walk alone, snow crunching under my feet, surrounded by stars and the woody-sweet smell of chimney smoke.
The main doors to the meeting house were locked, but I managed to clear the snow away from the half-door in the back of the church. When I was small, Albert warned that the tiny door facing the cemetery was a coal chute that led straight to hell. I would laugh and say, “God wouldn’t put such a thing in a church!” Albert would just smile and shake his head. “Of course he would, Dorrie, that’s where the reverend puts the bad children who keep their eyes open during prayer.” After that I kept my eyes pinched shut, right through the sermon and on to the end of the benediction with its “God be with you �til we meet again.” Perhaps Albert would be interested to know that his coal chute to Satan is merely an opening to the staircase that leads to the bell tower.
On the opposite side of the stairwell was a second door, an opening to the back of the sanctuary. As I pulled the heavy door towards me, I found that the doorway was covered with a large tapestry. The wide, purple banner embroidered with crown and cross was a recent donation by the Ladies of the White Rose Temperance Society Candles and lamps still flickered in the sanctuary. Peering from behind the folds of cloth, I spotted two people moving in and out of the shadows of the choir loft. A woman was bent over the railing, her skirts and petticoats lifted high on her back, bouncing. Reverend Norton stood behind her, grasping her hips, shoving his half-naked body hard against hers over and over again. His voice was quiet at first, and though I couldn’t catch what he was saying, it was clear he had control of the woman, leading her along with his heavy-breathed talk.
I’m familiar with the muffled sounds of my parents “stretching the ropes” of their bed. It usually starts with Father’s low voice mumbling, followed by hints of Mother’s laughter. It’s hard to ignore the rhythm and thump of it, but somehow it comes faint to our ears and just shy of embarrassment. There in the church I had found something quite different. I knew I was trespassing on a secret.
Reverend Norton’s face was determined, his voice growing loud and commanding, the words want, come and give grunting out from his mouth. For the longest time the woman was silent, and I wondered if he was forcing her to take him. Just as I had made up my mind to yell out for him to stop, the woman cried out, moaning, “Oh God, oh, oh!” Reverend Norton pressed himself tight to her, her petticoat now falling quiet around her, his face groaning and shiny with sweat.
He grinned as she turned to face him. He kissed her lips, then her cheek, and whispered something in her ear. She nodded while she tugged at her skirts and hastily pinned on a feather-laden hat … Aunt Fran’s glass-eyed phoebe winked back at me in the candlelight.
~ December 25, 1916
Stockings for all, filled with saltwater taffy, peppermint sticks and an orange in each toe. Mother had sewn two new white aprons for me to wear when I’m helping Miss B. When Father wasn’t looking, she handed me a well-worn edition of A Tale of Two Cities. “I found this in Fran’s cupboard the other day. She’ll never miss it.”
It was a fine enough Christmas, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about last night, how I stood like a statue while they laughed and pecked at each other with no remorse. I’ve never thought of Reverend Norton as anything but foul, but Aunt Fran! She flitted about all Christmas evening as if nothing were wrong. I had to excuse myself halfway through dinner. Mother felt my forehead and reminded me to thank Fran for the lovely new diary and pen set she’d given me. (If she could only see what I’m writing in it!) I can’t tell Precious. I shouldn’t tell Miss B. I’d like to tell Mother, but I’m not certain it would do any good. And if she told Father and he told Uncle Irwin … that would put a stop to it. But then I think it might put a stop to everything about Aunt Fran. Uncle Irwin’s a quiet man as it is, and when he’s mad, he stops speaking altogether. Word of his wife’s infidelity might leave him silent for at least a month, maybe three, maybe six, maybe forever, and that’s the worst thing anyone could ever do to Fran. If Uncle Irwin didn’t listen to her chatter, didn’t notice her dress, her hair, or whatever little thing she’s going on about, I think she’d just shrivel up and disappear. Maybe that’s what did it in the first place. Reverend Norton’s always coming for Sunday supper, always making a point of thanking Fran for her contributions to the missionary effort. He’s been seeing her. He’s noticed her so much that now she’s his. “Sold to the highest bidder,” as Miss B. says. If he leaves by spring, I won’t tell. If not, I don’t know what I’ll do.
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Tales from New Zealand
A delightful gathering was held Saturday-last at the home of the Widow Simone Bigelow in Scots Bay. Residents of the Bay included Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Jeffers and their daughter, Precious, Miss Marie Babineau and Miss Dora Rare, as well as Masters Archer and Hart Bigelow, sons of the gracious hostess. As the highlight of the evening, Professor John Payzant, brother of Mrs. Bigelow, shared tales and treasures from his days in New Zealand. He has been visiting from Halifax during the winter holidays. Special guests from Canning were the Reverend Covert Norton and Dr. and Mrs. Gilbert Thomas, who were happy to say that the weather was quite fine and the sleighing good for their visit to the Bay.
The Canning Register,
January 15, 1917
AUNT FRAN MAY HAVE married into her share of money, but the Widow Simone Bigelow is by far the wealthiest woman in the Bay, and in many ways the saddest. Descended from Marie Payzant, the Widow Bigelow inherited the legendary Huguenot woman’s poor luck in keeping husbands. Married first at fifteen, she lost Mr. James Rafuse within one month of their wedding. He fell off the roof of a neighbour’s barn. Another suitor, a Mr. Samuel Huntley, was thrown from his horse on his way to the Union church only minutes before they were to be wed. At twenty, she married Captain William Bigelow. They settled down in the grandest house in the town of Parrsboro, where she soon after gave birth to a son, Hart Payzant Bigelow. Three years later, Captain William Bigelow sailed to the West Indies on the schooner Fidelity
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