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Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet, in memory of her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one...
Hagar Shipley has lived a quiet life full of rage. As she approaches her death, she retreats from the squabbling of her son and his wife to reflect on her past – her ill-advised marriage, her two sons, the harshness of life on the prairie, her own failures and the failures of others.
‘Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
—DYLAN THOMAS
Cover
Welcome Page
About The Stone Angel
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
About Margaret Laurence
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Copyright
I could not speak for the salt that filled my throat, and for anger – not at anyone, at God, perhaps, for giving us eyes but almost never sight.
Most introductions should carry a warning: Spoiler alert. But then the same can be said of book blurbs which, while they sell the book, also colour – before a single page has been conned – the reader’s expectation. Margaret Laurence (1926–1987) asked Sara Maitland to print her introduction to Virago’s 1987 reprint of The Stone Angel (first published in 1964) as an afterword. She wanted readers to come to the book uncoached.
This edition puts the introduction first. Readers keen to cut to the chase are free to ignore it. I set it first because, in the half century since the book was originally published, upheavals in writing, readership, feminism and much else have occurred, and The Stone Angel – widely billed as a classic of Canadian literature – divides readers in ways that serious literature, no matter how amusing and wry the writing, often does. Those seeking characters with whom they can identify, a sympathetic narrator, conventional uplift or tragedy, are going to be puzzled and disappointed by a book so apparently conventional, yet so determinedly offbeat.
Hagar Shipley, the subject of the book, is actually two characters: the protagonist and the narrator. The protagonist grows from girlhood to old age and we build up a sense of her life from flashbacks to the critical moments in her life, moments that propel her to her sense of loss and failure. The flashbacks are occasioned by objects (a dish, a painting, a photograph, a decanter), fleeting impressions (a smell, a breeze, a sudden change of temperature), or by more conventional causes: incidents, conflicts in the present. The division between past and present, memory and now, is permeable. The older we get, the more potent memories become, more potent, even, than present pain and regret. ‘Perhaps being old means having lighted rooms,’ says Philip Larkin, ‘and people in them, talking...’ Hagar the narrator takes us into those rooms, identifies the speakers and replicates their speech, apparently verbatim. She interprets and provides a running commentary. A life story emerges in snippets, heady with symbolism and self-analysis. When the protagonist has made or makes a mistake, the narrator knows: she explains it.
If only the two Hagars could be rolled into one! If the narrator’s self-knowledge were registered in the protagonist’s self, the book would have a very different feel and a warmer outcome. But Laurence is not out to console or reassure us. She is no sentimentalist. She builds to the book’s tragedies, its multiple seeming-endings, with care: it is not until two-thirds of the way through the book that we know what caused Hagar’s core tragedy, and it is only as if reluctantly, with pain, that Hagar the narrator lets it surface from the protagonist’s repression.
The first figure we meet in the novel is the stone angel: a large, conventional marble monument imported at great expense from Italy and set up on the tomb of the narrator’s mother. Hagar is a little girl, the angel looming large and giving form to her impotent grief. It is blank-eyed, ostentatious, expressive not only of a widower’s bereavement, but also of his place in the community: a social as much as a spiritual ostentation. The book revisits the angel from time to time – we see it vandalised, then weather-beaten – as the novel progresses through the ninety years of Hagar’s life. The years pass and it gathers further symbolism, later family graves congregate in its shadow. Hagar can fly, and does, escaping Manawaka (Laurence’s imagined town, based on her birthplace Neepawa, Manitoba, which she left when she was eighteen). But she is drawn back by memory and then, in fact, by the inert angel lodestone: what it expresses and what it fails to express.
Two stories run in counterpoint through the novel: the underlying story of Hagar’s life, marriage, motherhood and unfulfilment; and the story of how her first son and daughter-in-law, now her carers, given her increasing frailty and cantankerousness, are trying to get her into an old people’s home. The stories comment on one another. Hagar’s marriage to Bram, a sexually attractive and active man, but coarse by comparison with her more refined people, fails because she does not admit her pleasure in sex and cannot, in the end, talk to her husband. As a result, she cannot talk to her children or, honestly, to herself. The continual honouring of outdated, destructive proprieties makes her life joyless. She feels endlessly judged by society and unable to declare independence or to take wing and decisively escape. When she leaves Bram she breaks with her duties, but never loses a tethering sense of responsibility, the enervating conscience, which is always social more than spiritual: what is expected, what is correct, rather than what is right.
Margaret Laurence’s narrator always speaks of an ‘us’, as though we as readers share in Hagar’s condition. This is, I think, what makes some readers recoil: Hagar has reached the age of ninety with courage and with a degree of resourcefulness, but without joy. All her relations, with parents, spouse and children, have been deeply marred, less by a lack of sight – she always seems aware of the consequences that will follow from her deeds – than of voice; she always knows what she should or might have said, but didn’t. The narrator, who is highly articulate about the ‘other’ Hagar, addresses readers as if we all shared in Hagar’s condition. This deep pessimism is what makes the book both memorable and rebarbative. The paralysing proprieties, rooted in crusty Protestantism and social conservatism, require that everyone be judged, including ourselves, by the strictest hand-me-down rules, conventions and prejudices. Social and sexual roles are fixed, and individuals are measured by how well or ill they fit those moulds.
In Hagar Shipley, Margaret Laurence indicts the provincial conservatism in which she had grown up. When the great drought comes and the community is driven to the brink of ruin, Hagar visits the house of her old friend Lottie, a once-successful conformist. The symbols of correctness are still in place in a rictus of propriety: ‘Crocheted doilies were sprinkled in profusion, making the room seem as though it had suffered some snowstorm of stiff lace’. That metaphorical ‘snowstorm’ wonderfully brings the elemental to bear, even if the alliteration is overdone.
Very gradually, Hagar’s deep concerns surface; her doting, possessive, ineffectual love for her second son, John, and how her love maims them both. As the novel advances, the narrator loses control of the story; the living Hagar sets off on her adventures, the movement of the story becoming more and more dreamlike. Having escaped, Hagar finds herself at a deserted cannery, where the nightmare in which past and present mingle in shared fear and recognition is enacted. The book might end there, but Hagar’s world has to be reined in and diminished as her illness grows and her time runs down. She wants to hear ‘the terrible laughter of God’, but it does not reach her ears.
It might be thought that with all Margaret Laurence’s characters, remorse and self-knowledge come too readily: a deep rationality underlies her dark vision, the rationality of her narrator. They all seem to understand the darkness, which rather diminishes its fear and its drama. But Laurence does not intend that the novel should be conventionally dramatic: it is a demonstration, full of informative and reflective conversations, conducted in a language that is quite stylised: prose masquerading as speech. ‘I must always, always, have wanted that – simply to rejoice. How is it I never could?’ And shortly after, ‘Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. I was alone, never anything else, and never free, for I carried my chains within me, and they spread out from me and shackled all I touched.’ She becomes, in the end, the angel, observed by her other self as the darkness rises.
Those readers who labelled Margaret Laurence as a proto-feminist when her work was being re-discovered in the 1980s, sold her work short. Certainly her protagonist is a strong woman, but not an imitable one, and not a readily sympathetic one. Laurence was writing a book less in a realist tradition, more in the manner of, say, Bunyan, or of the George Eliot of Silas Marner, a book tending to allegory, rich in symbolism, whose literal aspects are vivid and real, but whose fictional reality is of a different order from the ‘realism’ with which she is often robed.
Michael Schmidt 2016
Above the town, on the hill brow, the stone angel used to stand. I wonder if she stands there yet, in memory of her who relinquished her feeble ghost as I gained my stubborn one, my mother’s angel that my father bought in pride to mark her bones and proclaim his dynasty, as he fancied, forever and a day.
Summer and winter she viewed the town with sightless eyes. She was doubly blind, not only stone but unendowed with even a pretence of sight. Whoever carved her had left the eyeballs blank. It seemed strange to me that she should stand above the town, harking us all to heaven without knowing who we were at all. But I was too young then to know her purpose, although my father often told me she had been brought from Italy at a terrible expense and was pure white marble. I think now she must have been carved in that distant sun by stone masons who were the cynical descendants of Bernini, gouging out her like by the score, gauging with admirable accuracy the needs of fledgling pharaohs in an uncouth land.
Her wings in winter were pitted by the snow and in summer by the blown grit. She was not the only angel in the Manawaka cemetery, but she was the first, the largest and certainly the costliest. The others, as I recall, were a lesser breed entirely, petty angels, cherubim with pouting stone mouths, one holding aloft a stone heart, another strumming in eternal silence upon a small stone stringless harp, and yet another pointing with ecstatic leer to an inscription. I remember that inscription because we used to laugh at it when the stone was first placed there.
REST IN PEACE.
FROM TOIL, SURCEASE.
REGINA WEESE.
1886
So much for sad Regina, now forgotten in Manawaka – as I, Hagar, am doubtless forgotten. And yet I always felt she had only herself to blame, for she was a flimsy, gutless creature, bland as egg custard, caring with martyred devotion for an ungrateful fox-voiced mother year in and year out. When Regina died, from some obscure and maidenly disorder, the old disreputable lady rose from sick-smelling sheets and lived, to the despair of her married sons, another full ten years. No need to say God rest her soul, for she must be laughing spitefully in hell, while virginal Regina sighs in heaven.
In summer the cemetery was rich and thick as syrup with the funeral-parlour perfume of the planted peonies, dark crimson and wallpaper pink, the pompous blossoms hanging leadenly, too heavy for their light stems, bowed down with the weight of themselves and the weight of the rain, infested with upstart ants that sauntered through the plush petals as though to the manner born.
I used to walk there often when I was a girl. There could not have been many places to walk primly in those days, on paths, where white kid boots and dangling skirts would not be torn by thistles or put in unseemly disarray. How anxious I was to be neat and orderly, imagining life had been created only to celebrate tidiness, like prissy Pippa as she passed. But sometimes through the hot rush of disrespectful wind that shook the scrub oak and the coarse couchgrass encroaching upon the dutifully cared-for habitations of the dead, the scent of the cowslips would rise momentarily. They were tough-rooted, these wild and gaudy flowers, and although they were held back at the cemetery’s edge, torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking there could catch the faint musky dust-tinged smell of things that grew untended and had grown always, before the portly peonies and the angels with rigid wings, when the prairie bluffs were walked through only by Cree with enigmatic faces and greasy hair.
*
Now I am rampant with memory. I don’t often indulge in this, or not so very often, anyway. Some people will tell you that the old live in the past – that’s nonsense. Each day, so worthless really, has a rarity for me lately. I could put it in a vase and admire it, like the first dandelions, and we would forget their weediness and marvel that they were there at all. But one dissembles, usually, for the sake of such people as Marvin, who is somehow comforted by the picture of old ladies feeding like docile rabbits on the lettuce leaves of other times, other manners. How unfair I am. Well, why not? To carp like this – it’s my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom. Marvin thinks it disgraceful of me to smoke, at my age, ninety. To him there is something distressing in the sight of Hagar Shipley, who by some mischance happens to be his mother, with a little white burning tube held saucily between arthritic fingers. Now I light one of my cigarettes and stump around my room, remembering furiously, for no reason except that I am caught up in it. I must be careful not to speak aloud, though, for if I do Marvin will look at Doris and Doris will look meaningfully back at Marvin, and one of them will say, ‘Mother’s having one of her days.’ Let them talk. What do I care now what people say? I cared too long.
Oh, my lost men. No, I will not think of that. What a disgrace to be seen crying by that fat Doris. The door of my room has no lock. They say it is because I might get taken ill in the night, and then how could they get in to tend me (tend – as though I were a crop, a cash crop). So they may enter my room any time they choose. Privacy is a privilege not granted to the aged or the young. Sometimes very young children can look at the old, and a look passes between them, conspiratorial, sly and knowing. It’s because neither are human to the middling ones, those in their prime, as they say, like beef.
I’d be about six, surely, when I had that plaid pinafore, pale green and pale red – not pink, a watery red, rather, like the flesh of a ripe watermelon, made by an aunt in Ontario and grandly piped in black velveteen. There was I, strutting the board sidewalk like a pint-sized peacock, resplendent, haughty, hoity-toity, Jason Currie’s black-haired daughter.
Before I started school, I was such a nuisance to Auntie Doll. The big house was new then, the second brick house to be built in Manawaka, and she had the feeling always that she must live up to it, although she was hired help. She was a widow, and had been with us since my birth. She wore a white lace boudoir cap in the mornings, and shrilled at me like a witch when I tweaked it off, exposing her frizzled mop to the chortling eyes of Reuben Pearl who brought the milk. At such times she’d ship me off to the store, and there my father would sit me down on an empty upturned apple-box, amid the barrels of dried apricots and raisins and the smell of brown paper and sizing from the bolts of cloth in the dry goods section, and make me memorize weights and measures.
‘Two glasses, one noggin. Four noggins, one pint. Two pints, one quart. Four quarts, one gallon. Two gallons, one peck. Four pecks, one bushel.’
He’d stand there behind the counter, bulky and waistcoated, his voice with its Scots burr prompting me when I forgot, and telling me to concentrate or I’d never learn.
‘Do you want to grow up to be a dummy, a daft loon?’
‘No.’
‘Then concentrate.’
When I repeated them all through, Troy Weight, Long and Lineal Measure, Imperial Dry Measure, Cubic Measure, he’d nod.
‘Hayroot, strawfoot,
Now you’ve got it.’
That’s all he’d ever say, when I got it right. He never believed in wasting a word or a minute. He was a self-made man. He had started without a bean, he was fond of telling Matt and Dan, and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps. It was true. No one could deny it. My brothers took after our mother, graceful unspirited boys who tried to please him but rarely could. Only I, who didn’t want to resemble him in the least, was sturdy like him and bore his hawkish nose and stare that could meet anyone’s without blinking an eyelash.
The devil finds work for idle hands. He put his faith in homilies. They were his Pater Noster, his Apostles’ Creed. He counted them off like beads on a rosary, or coins in the till. God helps those who help themselves. Many hands make light work.
He always used birch for whippings. That’s what had been used by his father on him, although in another country. I don’t know what he’d have done if no birch had flourished around Manawaka. Luckily, our bluffs sprouted a few – they were thin and puny, and never grew to any height, but they served the purpose. Matt and Dan got the most of it, being boys and older, and when they did, they’d come and do to me as they’d been done to, only they used maple, green switches with the leaves still on. You wouldn’t think those soft leaves would sting, but they did, on bare flanks still pudgy with baby-fat, and I’d howl like the triple-mouthed beasts of hell, as much from shame as hurt, and they’d hiss that if I told they’d take the saw-toothed breadknife that hung in the pantry and open my throat and I’d bleed to death and be left empty and white as Hannah Pearl’s stillborn baby that we’d seen at Simmons’ Funeral Parlour in its white satin box. But when I’d heard Matt called ‘four eyes’ at school, because he had to wear glasses, and Auntie Doll scold Dan because he’d wet his bed although he was past eight, then I knew they’d never dare, so I told. That put an end to it, and what they got served them right, and he let me watch. After, though, I was sorry I’d witnessed it, and tried to tell them so, but they wouldn’t hear me out.
They didn’t need to talk as though they were the only ones. I got it, too, although not often, I have to admit. Father took such a pride in the store – you’d have thought it was the only one on earth. It was the first in Manawaka, so I guess he had due cause. He would lean across the counter, spreading his hands, and smile so wonderfully you’d feel he welcomed the world.
Mrs. McVitie, the lawyer’s wife, bonneted garishly, smiled back and asked for eggs. I remember so well it was eggs she asked for – brown ones, which she thought more nourishing than the white-shelled kind. And I, in black buttoned boots and detested mauve and beige striped stockings worn for warmth and the sensible long-sleeved navy serge dress he ordered each year from the east, poked my nose into the barrel that housed the sultanas, intending to sneak a handful while he was busy.
‘Oh, look! The funniest wee things, scampering—’
I laughed at them as they burrowed, the legs so quick and miniature you could hardly see them, delighted that they’d dare appear there and flaunt my father’s mighty moustache and his ire.
‘Mind your manners, miss!’
The swipe he caught me then was nothing to what I got in the back of the stores after she’d left.
‘Have you no regard for my reputation?’
‘But I saw them!’
‘Did you have to announce it from the housetops?’
‘I didn’t mean—’
‘No good to say you’re sorry when the damage is done. Hold out your hands, miss.’
I wouldn’t let him see me cry, I was so enraged. He used a foot ruler, and when I jerked my smarting palms back, he made me hold them out again. He looked at my dry eyes in a kind of fury, as though he’d failed unless he drew water from them. He struck and struck, and then all at once he threw the ruler down and put his arms around me. He held me so tightly I was almost smothered against the thick mothball-smelling roughness of his clothes. I felt caged and panicky and wanted to push him away, but didn’t care. Finally he released me. He looked bewildered, as though he wanted to explain but didn’t know the explanation himself.
‘You take after me,’ he said, as though that made everything clear. ‘You’ve got backbone, I’ll give you that.’
He sat down on a packing-case and took me on his knee.
‘What you must realize,’ he said, speaking softly, hastily, ‘is that when I have to take the ruler to you, it hurts me just as much as it does you.’
I’d heard that before, many times. But looking at him then from my dark bright eyes, I knew it was a barefaced lie. I did take after him, though – God knows he wasn’t wrong in that.
I stood in the doorway, poised and ready to run.
‘Are you going to throw them away?’
‘What?’
‘The sultanas. Are you going to throw them away?’
‘You mind your own business, miss,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll—’
Stifling my laughter and my tears, I turned and fled.
Quite a number of us started school that year. Charlotte Tappen was the doctor’s daughter, and she had chestnut hair and was allowed to wear it loose, with a green bow, when Auntie Doll was still putting mine in braids. Charlotte and I were best friends, and used to walk to school together, and wonder what it would be like to be Lottie Drieser and not know where your father had got to, or even who he’d been. We never called Lottie ‘No-Name’, though – only the boys did that. But we tittered at it, knowing it was mean, feeling a half-ashamed excitement, the same as I’d felt once seeing Telford Simmons not bothering to go to the boys’ outhouse, doing it behind a bush.
Telford’s father wasn’t very highly regarded. He kept the Funeral Parlour but he never had a nickel to bless himself with. ‘He fritters away his cash,’ my father said, and after a while I learned this meant he drank. Matt told me once that Billy Simmons drank embalming fluid, and for a long time I believed it, and thought of him as a ghoul and used to hurry past him on the street, although he was gentle and shambling and used to give chocolate maple-buds to Telford to distribute to us all. Telford had curly hair and a slight stammer, and all he could find to brag about was the occasional corpse in the cool vault, and when we said we didn’t believe he could really get in, he took us that time and showed us Henry Pearl’s sister, the dead baby. We went in through the basement window, the whole gang of us, Telford leading. Then Lottie Drieser, tiny and light with yellow hair fine as embroidery silk, bold as brass although her dress was patched and washed raw. Then the rest – Charlotte Tappen, Hagar Currie, Dan Currie, and Henry Pearl, who didn’t want to come along but probably thought we’d call him a sissy if he didn’t, and chant about him as we sometimes did.
‘Henry Pearl
Looks like a girl—’
He didn’t, as a matter of fact. He was a big gawky boy who rode in from the farm every day on his own horse, and who never had much time to go around with us because he had to help so much at home.
The room was chilly, like the town icehouse, where the blocks cut from the river in winter were stored all summer under the sawdust. We shivered and whispered, terrified at the bawling-out we’d get if we were caught. I didn’t like the looks of that baby at all. Charlotte and I hung back, but Lottie actually opened up the glass-topped lid and stroked the white velvet and the white folds of satin and the small puckered white face. And then she looked at us and dared us to do the same, but no one would.
‘Scaredy cats,’ she said. ‘If ever I have a baby, and it dies, I’m going to have it all done up in satin just like this.’
‘You’ll have to find a father for it first.’
That was Dan, who never missed a chance.
‘You shut up,’ Lottie said, ‘you shut up, or I’ll—’
Telford was dancing up and down with panic. ‘Come on, come on – we’ll really catch it if mamma sees us here—’
The Simmonses lived above the Funeral Parlour. Billy Simmons wasn’t anything to worry over, but Telford’s mamma was a pinch-faced parsimonious shrew who would stand on the doorstep and hand Telford a cookie after school but never had one to spare for any other child, and Telford, mortified, would chew dryly on it under her waiting eye. Out we all trooped, and as we went, Lottie whispered to Telford in a coy voice that made Charlotte and me double over with laughter.
‘Don’t be scared, Telford. I’d stick up for you. I’d tell your mother it was Dan made you do it.’
‘I’d as soon you didn’t,’ Telford puffed, pulling his short legs out over the casement. ‘It wouldn’t help a speck. She’d never listen to you, Lottie.’
When we were out on the lawn, and the basement window closed and everyone safe and innocent once more, we played shadow tag around the big spruce trees that shaded and darkened that whole yard. All of us except Lottie, that is. She went home.
I was clever in school, and Father was pleased. Sometimes when I got a star for my work, he’d give me a paper of button candies or a handful of those pastel lozenges that bore sugary messages – Be Mine, You Beauty, Love Me, Be True. We sat around the dining-room table every evening, Dan and Matt and I, doing our homework. An hour was required, and if we had no more schoolwork to do, Father would set us sums and dispense advice.
‘You’ll never get anywhere in this world unless you work harder than others, I’m here to tell you that. Nobody’s going to hand you anything on a silver platter. It’s up to you, nobody else. You’ve got to have stick-to-it-edness if you want to get ahead. You’ve got to use a little elbow-grease.’
I tried to shut my ears to it, and thought I had, yet years later, when I was rearing my two boys, I found myself saying the same words to them.
I used to dawdle over my homework so I wouldn’t have to do the sums he set. We had the Sweet Pea Reader, and I would trace the words with my finger and stare at the little pictures as though I hoped they’d swell and blossom into something different, something rare.
This is a seed. The seed is brown.
But the stiff black seed on the page stayed the same, and finally Auntie Doll would poke her head in from the kitchen.
‘Mr. Currie – it’s Hagar’s bedtime.’
‘All right. Up you go, daughter.’
He called me ‘miss’ when he was displeased, and ‘daughter’ when he felt kindly disposed towards me. Never Hagar. I’d been named, hopefully, for a well-to-do spinster great-aunt in Scotland, who, to my father’s chagrin, had left her money to the Humane Society.
Once, my hand on the polished newel-post at the foot of the stairs, I heard him speaking to Auntie Doll about me. ‘Smart as a whip, she is, that one. If only she’d been—’ And then he stopped, I suppose because he realized that in the dining-room his sons, such as they were, were listening.
We understood quite clearly, all of us, even then, that when Father spoke of pulling himself up by his bootstraps he meant that he had begun without money. But he’d come of a good family – he had that much of a head start. His father’s portrait hung in our dining-room, the oils olive-green and black in the background around the peaked face of the old gentleman who sported incongruously a paisley waistcoat, mustard yellow with worm-like swirls of blue.
‘He died before your birth,’ Father would say, ‘before he even knew I’d made good over here. I left when I was seventeen, and never saw him again. You were named after him, Dan. Sir Daniel Currie – the title died with him, for it wasn’t a baronetcy. He was a silk importer, but he’d served with distinction in India in his younger days. He was no great shakes as a merchant. He lost nearly everything, through no fault of his, except he was too trusting. His partner cheated him – oh, it was a bad affair all around, I can tell you, and there was I, without a hope or a ha’penny. But I can’t complain. I’ve done as well as he ever did. Better, for I’ve trusted no partners, nor will I ever. The Curries are Highlanders. Matt – sept of what clan?’
‘Sept of the Clanranald MacDonalds.’
‘Correct. Pipe music, Dan?’
‘Clanranald’s March, sir.’
‘Right.’ And then with a look at me, and a smile: ‘The war-cry, girl?’
And I, who loved that cry although I hadn’t an inkling what it meant, would shout it out with such ferocity that the boys snickered until our father impaled them with a frown.
‘Gainsay Who Dare!’
It seemed to me, from his tales, that Highlanders must be the most fortunate of all men on earth, spending their days in flailing about them with claymores, and their nights in eightsome reels. They lived in castles, too, every man jack of them, and all were gentlemen. How bitterly I regretted that he’d left and had sired us here, the bald-headed prairie stretching out west of us with nothing to speak of except couchgrass or clans of chittering gophers or the grey-green poplar bluffs, and the town where no more than half a dozen decent brick houses stood, the rest being shacks and shanties, shaky frame and tarpaper, short-lived in the sweltering summers and the winters that froze the wells and the blood. I’d be about eight when the new Presbyterian Church went up. Its opening service was the first time Father let me go to church with him instead of to Sunday School. It was plain and bare and smelled of paint and new wood, and they hadn’t got the stained-glass windows yet, but there were silver candlesticks at the front, each bearing a tiny plaque with Father’s name, and he and several others had purchased family pews and furnished them with long cushions of brown and beige velour, so our few favoured bottoms would not be bothered by hard oak and a lengthy sermon.
‘On this great day,’ the Reverend Dougall MacCulloch said feelingly, ‘we have to give special thanks to those of our congregation whose generosity and Christian contributions have made our new church possible.’
He called them off, the names, like an honour role. Luke McVitie, lawyer. Jason Currie, businessman. Freeman McKendrick, bank manager. Burns MacIntosh, farmer. Rab Fraser, farmer.
Father sat with modestly-bowed head, but turned to me and whispered very low:
‘I and Luke McVitie must’ve given the most, as he called our names the first.’
The people looked as though they wondered whether they should clap or not, ovations being called for, and yet perhaps uncalled-for in a church. I waited, hoping they would, for I had new white lace gloves and could have shown them off so well, clapping. But then the minister announced the psalm, so we all sang mightily.
‘Unto the hills around do I lift up
My longing eyes.
whence for me shall my salvation come,
From whence arise?
From GOD the LORD doth come my certain aid,
From GOD the LORD, who heaven and earth hath made.’
Auntie Doll was always telling us that Father was a God-fearing man. I never for a moment believed it, of course. I couldn’t imagine Father fearing anyone, God included, especially when he didn’t even owe his existence to the Almighty. God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.
He never missed a Sunday service, though, nor a grace at meals. He said it always himself, slowly, while we fidgeted and peeked.
‘Some hae meat and canna eat,
Some would eat hae lack it.
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thanked.’
He did not marry again after our mother died, although he sometimes spoke of finding a wife. I think Aunt Dolly Stonehouse fancied he might eventually marry her. The poor soul. I was fond of her, although she made no secret of the fact that Dan was her favourite, and it seemed a pity that she believed Father held back because she was such a homely woman with her sallow skin that was never greatly improved by the witch-hazel and lemon juice she dabbed on, and her top incisors that protruded like a jackrabbit’s. She was so conscious of those teeth of hers, she used to put one hand in front of her mouth when speaking, so that half the time even her words were hidden by a screen of fingers. But her appearance wasn’t what would have decided Father. Matt and Dan and I always knew he could never have brought himself to marry his housekeeper.
I only ever saw him speaking alone with a woman once, and that was by accident. I used to walk out to the cemetery by myself sometimes, to read and get away from the boys. I had a place behind a chokecherry bush, at the hill’s edge, just outside the fence that marked the cemetery limits. I’d have been twelve, or thereabouts, that afternoon.
They walked so quietly on the path further down the hill, near the river banks, where the Wachakwa ran brown and noisy over the stones. At first I didn’t realize anyone was there, and when I did, it was too late to get away. He sounded peevish and irritable.
‘What’s the matter with you? What’s the difference?’
‘I was fond of him,’ she said. ‘I loved him.’
‘I’ll bet you did.’
‘I did so,’ she cried. ‘I did so!’
‘Why did you say you’d come here, then?’
‘I thought—’ the thin high girl’s voice. ‘I thought, like you, what difference would it make now? But it’s not the same.’
‘Why not?’
‘He was young,’ she said.
I thought he was going to hit her, perhaps say ‘hold out your hands, miss’, as he’d done to me. I didn’t know why. But through the leaves I could see destruction printed on his face. He didn’t touch her, though, nor say a word. He turned and walked away, his boots crunching on the fallen twigs, until he reached the clearing where he’d left the buggy. Then I heard his whip singing, and the horse’s surprised snort.
The woman looked after him, her face soft and blank, as though she expected nothing out of life. Then she began to trudge up the hill.
I felt no pity for her nor for him. I scorned them both – him, for walking here with her and speaking to her; her, because – well, simply because she was No-Name Lottie Drieser’s mother. Yet now, remembering their faces, I’d be hard put to say which of them had been the crueller.
She died not so long after, of consumption. I thought it served her right, but I had no real reason for thinking so, except the fury children feel towards mysteries they have perceived but been unable to penetrate. I made sure I was the one to let him know, running all the way home from school to impart the news. But he never let on at all that he’d so much as exchanged a word with her. He made three comments.
‘Poor lass,’ he said. ‘She couldn’t have had much of a life.’
Then, as though recalling himself, and to whom he spoke, ‘Her sort isn’t much loss to the town, I’m bound to say.’
Then an inexplicably startled look came over his face. ‘Consumption? That’s contagious, isn’t it? Well, the Lord works in wondrous ways His will to perform.’
None of the three made much sense to me then, but they stuck in my mind. I’ve since pondered – which was my father?
The boys worked in the store after school. They didn’t get paid for it, of course. It didn’t do them any harm, either. Youngsters were expected to help out in those days – they didn’t laze around as they do now. Matt, skinny and bespectacled, worked doggedly, with neither a smile not a complaint. But his fingers were all thumbs – he’d knock over a stack of lamp glasses or jolt a bottle of vanilla essence from a shelf, and then he’d catch it from Father, who couldn’t bear clumsiness. When Matt was sixteen, he asked Father for a rifle and leave to go with Jules Tonnerre to set winter traplines up at Galloping Mountain. Father refused, naturally, saying Matt would likely blow a foot off, and a pretty penny it would set him back to have an artificial one made, and anyway he wasn’t having any son of his gallivanting around the country with a halfbreed. I wonder how Matt felt, that time? I never knew. I never knew much of Matt at all.
We used to fish under the board sidewalks for coppers that had been dropped by careless Saturday-night drinkers homeswinging from the Queen Victoria Hotel, and Matt would lower so seriously his string with its blob of well-chewed spruce gum. When he made a catch, he’d never spend it, or share it, not even if you’d given him the gum right out of your mouth. He’d put it away in his black tin cash box, along with the shinplaster, twenty-five cents in paper money, which the Toronto aunts had sent and the half dollar Father bestowed at Christmas. He carried the key of that box around his neck like a St. Christopher medal or a crucifix. Dan and I used to tease him, dancing out of his reach.
‘Nyah, nyah, Miser Matt,
You can’t catch me
For a bumblebee...’
I never saw him take any money out of that box. He wasn’t saving for a jack-knife or anything like that. How mean I used to think him. I never knew the truth of it until years later, years too late, after I’d grown up and wed and gone to live at the Shipley place. It was Aunt Dolly who told me.
‘Didn’t you know what he meant to do with his money, Hagar? I used to laugh at him, but he never paid any mind – that was Matt’s way. He meant to set up on his own, if you please, or study law down east, or buy a ship and go into the tea trade, such wild notions youngsters get. He’d have been going on seventeen, I guess, when it finally dawned on him that the handful of nickels and quarters he had wouldn’t take him far. Do you know what he did? It wasn’t a bit like Matt to go and do a thing like that. He bought a fighting cock from old man Doherty – spent the whole lot at once, like a fool, and overpaid, I don’t doubt. He matched it with one of Jules Tonnerre’s, and Matt’s lost, of course – what did he know of birds? He brought it home – you and Dan must’ve been out, for I mind I was in the kitchen by myself – and he sat and looked at it for the longest time. It was enough to turn your stomach, its feathers covered with blood and the thing breathing very queerly. Then he wrung its neck and buried it. I wasn’t sorry to see it go, I can tell you. It wouldn’t even have made a boiling fowl. Too tough to be eaten, but not tough enough to fight.’
Daniel was a different sort entirely. He wouldn’t lift a finger to work, unless he was pushed to it. He was always delicate, and he knew very well the advantages of poor health. He’d shove away his porridge plate at breakfast, with the merest whiff of a sigh, and Auntie Doll would feel his forehead and ship him off to bed – ‘No school for you today, young man.’ She’d run herself ragged, toting bowls of broth and mustard plasters up and down the stairs, and when he’d had his fill of coddling, he’d find himself feeling a trifle better and would progress to raspberry jelly and convalescence on the living-room sofa. Father had small patience with these antics, and used to say all Dan needed was fresh air and exercise. Sometimes he’d make Dan get up and get dressed, and would send him down to the store to clean out the warehouse. But sure as guns, if he did, the next day Dan would sprout chickenpox or something indisputable. It must have been mind over matter, for he cultivated illness as some people cultivate rare plants. Or so I thought then.
When we were in our teens, Father used to let us have parties sometimes. He went over the list of intended guests and crossed off those he thought unsuitable. Among those of my age, Charlotte Tappen was always asked – that went without saying. Telford Simmons was allowed, but only just. Henry Pearl was an awkward one – his people were decent, but being farmers they wouldn’t have the proper clothes, Father decided, so it would only embarrass them for us to send an invitation. Lottie Drieser was never invited to our parties, but when she’d grown a doll-like prettiness and a bosom, Dan sneaked her in once and Father raised cain about it. Dan was fond of clothes, and when we had a party he would appear in something new, the money having been finagled from Auntie Doll. When he was not ill, he was the gayest one imaginable, like a water beetle busily boating on the surface of life.
White wooden lace festooned the verandahs in those days, sedate trimming on the beige brick houses such as my father had built. Once there was a craze for Japanese lanterns, hung from the painted lace, crimson and fragile paper, bulbous and thin, ribbed with bamboo, flamboyant with gilt dragons and chrysanthemums. In each lantern there was a candle which never stayed alight for long, it seemed, for some eager lanky boy was always shinnying up the porch pillars, match in hand, to set the glow again for the reel and schottische we twirled. Lord, how I enjoyed those dances, and can hear yet the stamping of our feet, and the fiddler scraping like a cricket. My hair, pinned on top of my head, would come undone and fall around my shoulders in a black glossiness that the boys would try to touch. It doesn’t seem so very long ago.
In winter the Wachakwa river was solid as marble, and we skated there, twining around the bends, stumbling over the rough spots where the water had frozen in waves, avoiding the occasional patch where the ice was thin – ‘rubber ice’, we called it. Doherty from the Livery Stable owned the Manawaka Icehouse as well, and used to send out his sons with the dray and horses to cut blocks. Sometimes, skidding around a curve in the river, you’d see a dark place ahead, like a deep wound on the white skin of ice, and you’d know Doherty’s dray and ice-saw had been there that afternoon. It was at dusk, all shapes and colours having turned grey and indefinite, that my brother Daniel, skating backwards to show off for the girls, fell in.
The ice was always very thick where the blocks were cut, so it didn’t break around the edges of the hole. Matt, summoned by our shrieks, skated close and drew Dan up and away. It must have been thirty below, that day, and our house was at the far end of town. Odd that it never occurred to Matt or me to take Dan into the first house we came to, but no – we were only concerned to get him home before Father got back that evening from the store, so no one except Auntie Doll would need to know. His clothes had frozen before we reached the house, even though Matt had taken off his own coat and wrapped it around him. Father was home when we got there – just Dan’s bad luck, for he got railed at good and plenty for not watching where he was going. Auntie Doll gave him whisky and lemon, and put him to bed, and the next day he seemed all right. I don’t doubt he would have been, too, if he’d been husky to start with. But he wasn’t. When he came down with pneumonia, all I could think for days on end was the number of times I’d believed him to be malingering.
The night Dan’s fever went up, Auntie Doll was over seeing Floss Drieser, Lottie’s aunt, who was a dressmaker. Auntie Doll was getting a new costume made, and she spent hours at the fitting sessions, for Floss heard everything that went on in Manawaka and was never shy about passing it on. Father was working late that evening, so only Matt and I were in the house.
Matt came out of Dan’s bedroom with his shoulders bent forward as though he were hurrying somewhere.
‘What is it?’ I hardly wanted to know, but I had to ask.
‘He’s delirious,’ Matt said. ‘Go for Doctor Tappen, Hagar.’
I did that, flying through the white streets, not minding how many drifts I stepped in nor how soaking my feet got. When I reached Tappen’s house, the doctor wasn’t there. He’d gone to South Wachakwa, Charlotte said, and the way the roads were, it wasn’t likely he’d be back until morning, if then. That was long before the days of snow-ploughs, of course.
When I got back home, Dan was worse, and Matt, coming downstairs to hear what I had to say, looked terrified, furtively so, as though he were trying to figure out some way of leaving the situation to someone else.
‘I’ll go to the store for Father,’ I said.
Matt’s face changed.
‘No, you won’t,’ he said with sudden clarity. ‘It’s not Father he wants.’
‘What do you mean?’
Matt looked away. ‘Mother died when Dan was four. I guess he’s never forgotten her.’
It seemed to me then that Matt was almost apologetic, as though he felt he ought to tell me he didn’t blame me for her dying, when in his heart he really did. Maybe he didn’t feel that way at all – how can a person tell?
‘Do you know what he’s got in his dresser, Hagar?’ Matt went on. ‘An old plaid shawl – it was hers. He used to go to sleep holding it, as a kid, I remember. I thought it had got thrown out years ago. But it’s still there.’
He turned to me then, and held both my hands in his, the only time I ever recall my brother Matt doing such a thing.
‘Hagar – put it on and hold him for awhile.’
I stiffened and drew away my hands. ‘I can’t. Oh, Matt, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t. I’m not a bit like her.’
‘He wouldn’t know,’ Matt said angrily. ‘He’s out of his head.’
But all I could think of was that meek woman I’d never seen, the woman Dan was said to resemble so much and from whom he’d inherited a frailty I could not help but detest, however much a part of me wanted to sympathize. To play at being her – it was beyond me.
‘I can’t, Matt.’ I was crying, shaken by torments he never even suspected, wanting above all else to do the thing he asked, but unable to do it, unable to bend enough.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Don’t then.’
When I had pulled myself together, I went to Dan’s room. Matt was sitting on the bed. He had draped the shawl across one shoulder and down onto his lap, and he was cradling Dan’s head with its sweat-lank hair and chalk face as though Dan had been a child and not a man of eighteen. Whether Dan thought he was where he wanted to be or not, or whether he was thinking anything at all, I don’t know. But Matt sat there like that for several hours, not moving, and when he came down to the kitchen where I had finally gone, I knew Dan was dead.
Before Matt let himself mourn or even tell me it was over, he came close to me and put both his hands on me – quite gently, except that he put them around my throat.
‘If you tell Father,’ Matt said, ‘I’ll throttle you.’
That was how little he knew of me, to imagine I might. I used to wonder afterwards, if I had spoken and tried to tell him – but how could I? I didn’t know myself why I couldn’t do what he had done.