The Stone Angel (15 page)

I had no money of my own, but I discovered a way to get some. Actually, although it pains me to admit it, it was Bram’s daughter Jess put me up to it. She had new shoes with ungainly brass buckles, and when I asked her how on earth, she said, “From the eggs, what else, don’t tell me you don’t?” If farm women are going to hinch a little on their husbands, it will be from the cash on eggs, and everyone knew this except myself I sniffed and gave her to believe it was beneath me, for she was a slovenly creature, that Jessie—who could ever have thought of her as my boys’ half-sister? But where else could I get cash? So I copied, and Bram never said a word, and I never knew whether he realized it or not. I thought I had the odd dollar or so owing to me anyhow, for keeping chickens Messy things—how I detested their flutter and squawk. At first I could hardly bring myself to touch them, their soiled feathers and the way they flapped in terror to get away. I got so I could even wring their necks when I had to, but they never ceased to sicken me, live or dead,
and when I’d plucked and cleaned and cooked one, I never could eat it. I’d as lief have eaten rat flesh.

I bought a gramophone with a great black cornucopia on top and a handle you had to crank incessantly, and records to go with it.
Ave Maria, The Grand March from Aïda, In a Monastery Garden, Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms
. They had
Beethoven’s Fifth
listed in the catalogue as well, but it was too expensive. I never played them in the evenings when Bram and Marvin were there. Only in the days.

John didn’t take to music very much. He was wild as mustard seed in some ways, that child. He’d come out with swear words that would curl your hair, and I knew where he’d got them. After he started school, the teacher sometimes sent me a note (through the mail, not trusting John to deliver it) saying he’d been caught fighting again, and I’d scold him all right but I don’t know that it ever did much good. Those teachers, though—they asked the impossible if they thought they could keep boys from fighting. It didn’t seem likely to me that he fought more than most. That didn’t worry me half so much as his friends. He had a knack for gathering the weirdest crew, and when I asked him why he didn’t chum with Henry Pearl’s boys or someone halfway decent like that, he’d only shrug and retreat into silence.

Once when I was out picking saskatoons near the trestle bridge, I saw him with the Tonnerre boys. They were French half-breeds, the sons of Jules, who’d once been Matt’s friend, and I wouldn’t have trusted any of them as far as I could spit. They lived all in a swarm in a shack somewhere—John always said their house was passably clean, but I gravely doubted it. They were tall boys with strange accents and hard laughter. The trestle
bridge was where the railway crossed the Wachakwa river a mile or so from town. The boys were daring each other to walk across it. There were great gaps between the beams, so they teetered along on the thin steel tracks as though they’d been walking a tightrope. I shouldn’t have yelled at John. He might have fallen, and even though he couldn’t have gone right through the bridge, he might have broken a leg if he’d caught and twisted it between the beams.

He almost overbalanced at my voice, and I, terrified at what I’d done, could only stand in the bushes far beneath and stare upward at him. Then he righted himself and I could draw breath. The three Tonnerre boys tittered.

“My gosh!” John cried. “Watch what you’re doing, eh? I could have taken a header.”

“Get down,” I said. “Get down from there this minute.”

“I’m okay,” he said sullenly. “For Pete’s sake, I’m all right.”

“Get down. Do you hear me?”

The Tonnerre boys had reached the other side, and were now sprawling on the embankments, throwing pebbles down into the river and looking slit-eyed at him. I knew I’d blundered, but I couldn’t bring myself to go back on it.

“What if a train came along?” I demanded.

“There’s nothing due until the six-fifteen,” he said, “and that’s not for an hour.”

“Nevertheless,” I said. “Nevertheless.”

“Oh jumping Jesus,” John said. “Okay, okay.”

He walked back, never looking at the sly glances of the Tonnerre boys on the far side of the bridge. He never looked at me, either. He walked right past me, and away.
There was anger in his face, but I fancied I saw there, as well, just a suggestion of relief. If he ever went there again, he never said. And if he chummed around again with the Tonnerre boys, I never knew.

When the war came—that would be the First War, of course—Marvin joined up at seventeen. I suppose he must have lied about his age. I made no attempt to stop him, feeling that there was, after all, such a thing as duty, and Henry Pearl’s eldest son had gone, and Jess’s Vernon, and Gladys had two boys in the Army. I thought Bram would raise a rumpus, considering how much he relied on Marvin to help around the place, but he didn’t.

“He’ll be as well, away,” Bram said.

Not a word about duty, or country, or anything like that, not from Bram. Merely,
He’ll be as well, away
.

When Marvin came to say good-by, it only struck me then how young he was, still awkward, still with the sunburned neck of a farm boy. I didn’t know what to say to him. I wanted to beg him to look after himself, to be careful, as one warns children against snowdrifts or thin ice or the hooves of horses, feeling the flimsy words may act as some kind of charm against disaster. I wanted all at once to hold him tightly, plead with him, against all reason and reality, not to go. But I did not want to embarrass both of us, nor have him think I’d taken leave of my senses. While I was hesitating, he spoke first.

“I guess I won’t be seeing you for quite a while,” he said. “Think you’ll be all right, here?”

“All right?” I was released from my dithering, and could be practical once more. “Of course we’ll be all right, Marvin—why shouldn’t we be? Well, you take care, now, and be sure to write. You’d better be getting along, or you’ll not get into town in time to catch the train.”

“Mother—”

“Yes?” And then I realized I was waiting with a kind of anxious hope for what he would say, waiting for him to make himself known to me.

But he was never a quick thinker, Marvin. Words would not come to his bidding, and so the moment eluded us both. He turned and put his hand on the doorknob.

“Well, so long,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

He sent postcards from France, saying precious little. He fought at Vimy Ridge, and lived through it. But he never came back to Manawaka. When the war was over, he went out to the coast, worked as a logger, I think, and then as a longshoreman or some such thing. He wrote home once a month, and his letters were always very poorly spelled.

It had been Bram and Marvin, the two of them, for years. You’d think Bram would have paid more heed to John after Marvin left, but not a bit of it. John was only seven then, and too young to be much help, and Bram resented that, for Marvin had done so much of the work. Sometimes in winter, if it got to forty below, Bram would drive the boy to school in the cutter, sheltered and relatively warm, when John would have frozen his face going in on his own horse Pibroch. John always maintained it wasn’t cold enough to need the cutter, and then Bram would get annoyed, for he did not want to miss the opportunity of a day in town, swapping stories with Charlie Bean or whatever it was they talked about in the dung-steamy caverns of Doherty’s Livery Stable.

Bram used to wear an overcoat that Matt’s widow had given to me to cut down for Marvin, and I never got around to it. My bother Matt had been a skinny round-shouldered man, and on Bram’s broadness the two sides
of the coat tugged and never quite met properly at the front. The pockets were always swollen with odds and ends—a jackknife with which he used to pare his fingernails, a yellow oilcloth roll of Bull Durham and his pipe, scraps of frayed binder twine, a bag of sticky peppermints bearded with bits of fluff. Never, of course, a handkerchief. He had a drawerful of those, given by me at Christmas—I used to wonder if he wanted them buried with him, like an ancient king, so he need never use his fingers for that purpose in heaven. He wore a thick gray wool-felt cap, and when the ear lugs were pulled down, you couldn’t tell felt from beard. He used to snort and rumble like a great gray walrus. The cold weather always made him swear. Off they’d go, not speaking to one another, not even troubling to pass the time of day.

Once when they got home at night, and Bram was still in the barn, John, stuttering a little as though trying to make up his mind whether to tell me or not, finally burst out:

“Listen, you want to know something funny? You know what the kids call him? Bramble Shitley. That’s what they call him.”

I lowered my eyes to him, wondering—not for the first time—what he’d had to endure.

“That’s a good one, eh?” John said.

And then he cried. But when I tried to put an arm around him, he pulled away, clattered upstairs to his own room and locked the door.

Marvin had always been the one to take the eggs around. Most went to the Manawaka Creamery, but we sold as many as we could to town families, for we got more that way. When Marvin left, Bram took them in for a while, but then I hadn’t even the few filched coins as
mine. I saw I’d have to take the eggs in, myself. That Saturday John and I went in, when Bram went to get what groceries we needed. January it was, and bitter, that evening, as we knocked at a back door. I was tired, and hardly knew which house it was, anxious only to get the dozen little baskets delivered so I could go home and sleep.

A girl about John’s age answered the door. She’d certainly been dolled up by someone, and no mistake. Her yellow and carefully ringleted hair was topped with a blue satin bow, and her white crepe de Chine dress was held with a pale blue sash. Behind her, warmth flooded from the kitchen, and I caught a glimpse of cupboards and an icebox painted primrose and trimmed with green. She looked at me, at John, at the basket in my hands. Then, inexplicably, she giggled.

“Hello, John,” she said. She turned and screeched—“Mother! The egg woman’s here!”

The egg woman. I didn’t look at John, nor he at me. I think we both looked blindly ahead at the lighted kitchen, like bewildered moths.

The girl’s mother appeared, and it was Lottie.

I don’t remember what she paid me, nor what words were spoken. I remember only her eyes, the yellow light in them, and the way she took the basket so tenderly as if it mattered to her not to break the frail nestled globes within, as though they were a kind of treasure to her. And then we went away.

“What’s Telford Simmons now?” I had to ask.

“Bank manager,” John said, his voice as cold as the night we were driving in. “I thought everyone knew that.”

“Such a homely boy he used to be”—I did not really want to say a word, but out and out they came—“and
none too clever, either. He’s got there more by good luck than good management, if you ask me.”

Then a thing happened which I can’t put from mind, even now.

“Can’t you shut up?” John cried. “Can’t you just shut up?”

A Rest Room had recently been established in the town. I’d never been inside it, not fancying public conveniences. But I told John to let me off there that night. One room it was, with brown wainscoting and half a dozen straight chairs, and the two toilet cubicles beyond. No one was there. I made sure of that before I entered. I went in and found what I needed, a mirror. I stood for a long time, looking, wondering how a person could change so much and never see it. So gradually it happens.

I was wearing, I saw, a man’s black overcoat that Marvin had left. It was too big for John and impossibly small for Bram. It still had a lot of wear left in it, so I’d taken it. The coat bunched and pulled up in front, for I’d put weight on my hips, and my stomach had never gone flat again after John was born. Twined around my neck was a knitted scarf, hairy and navy blue, that Bram’s daughter Gladys had given me one Christmas. On my head a brown tam was pulled down to keep my ears warm. My hair was gray and straight. I always cut it myself. The face—a brown and leathery face that wasn’t mine. Only the eyes were mine, staring as though to pierce the lying glass and get beneath to some truer image, infinitely distant.

I walked out into Saturday’s throng of people on the Main Street sidewalk, boots and overshoes crunching and squeaking on the hard-packed snow. Among the cutters and sleighs on the road, a few motorcars spun and
struggled, their drivers sitting high and proud, punching the horns and making them rudely say “a-hoo-gah!” like boys with paper tooters at a party.

Currie’s General Store
. The sign still said the same, for the man who bought it from the town thought he’d damage trade to change the name. God knows how long since I’d been inside it, but my feet took me there, and in my head was only the thought of buying some decent clothes, clothes to render me decent. I didn’t have the money, but it seemed to me that as my father had begun the store they might afford me credit for this once. I’d never asked for credit anywhere before.

As in Father’s day, the groceries were sold at the front counters, and all around were barrels of dried apples and apricots, shriveled and desiccated, kegs of sultanas and coarse brown sugar, orange mousetrap cheese large as a wagon wheel, a glass cabinet with jelly doughnuts and chocolate eclairs and bakery bread, open wooden boxes full of boughten cookies, gingersnaps as hard as slivers of stone, and those raisin biscuits we used to call “squashed flies.” At the back was the section where yard-goods were sold, and ladies’ and children’s ready-to-wear garments hanging dejectedly on racks.

The manager greeted me courteously enough, listened and nodded, cleared his throat and didn’t look at me. I’d stumbled halfway through my spiel before I realized it was a plea and not the aloof request I’d intended. I would have gone on, though, even knowing that, if there hadn’t been an interruption.

The young man excused himself and flurried off. I waited beside a counter, almost hidden by stacked bolts of cloth. Then through the bee-like drone of general noises, I heard Bram’s voice.