When the Bough Breaks

PROLOGUE

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
September 10,1922

W
illiam Carr clatters up the stairs, out of breath from running in the summer heat. He is excited at the prospect of seeing his new baby for the first time. Arriving at the bedroom door, he knocks, opens it quietly, and whispers, “I've brought you some oranges.”

Lillie leans back, her curly hair dark against the pillows. She smiles at her husband. “Here you are at last; our daughter has been waiting to meet you. Isn't she beautiful? Would you like to hold her?”

William hesitates. “I'll just look at her … I've come straight from the stables. I didn't even change my shirt and I smell of horses,” he says, moving closer.

“She won't notice, and if she does, she'll not mind. Go on, Will, take her; she won't break.” Lillie smiles proudly as William cradles his daughter as gently as if she were a skittish newborn foal.

“Her eyes are blue,” he says.

“She looks like you. You don't mind that she's a girl, do you?”

“Now what kind of a question is that?”

“Well, I don't know how much help she's going to be, mucking out the stable or shoeing horses,” Lillie says.

“William answers his wife passionately, holding the infant tightly against his shoulder: “She'll have no need to work in the stables. I aim to buy her a silk dress and boots of softest leather. She shall have oranges every week. I'm going to take such care of you both. We'll give her everything we never had.” He places the baby gently next to Lillie, kneels down, and holds Lillie's hand against his cheek.

“Millicent will have us to love her – what more can she possibly need?” Lillie says softly, and sings a lullaby to her baby daughter:

Rock-a-bye, baby
In the treetop
When the wind blows
The cradle will rock
When the bough breaks
The cradle will fall
And down will come baby
Cradle and all.

“Promise me you'll always be there to catch her, William.”

“I promise you, Lillie,” he says.

THE FAMILY

M
other is on her knees, washing the kitchen floor. “Hello, Millie, love,” she says, “I'm almost done. It won't take long to dry.” She pushes a stray curl out of her eyes, and I take off my shoes and wait. Mother wrings out the cloth and drapes it over the side of the bucket.

“The first thing I plan to do in this house, when times take a turn for the better,” she says, sitting back on her heels and surveying the kitchen, “is to ask your father to put down new linoleum. It's so worn in places, you can't tell where the pattern begins or ends. It was already starting to fade when we moved in here.”

“What color will you choose, Mother?” I ask.

“Blue – as blue as the sea on a fine day,” she answers.

“It won't stay blue for long, Mother. There'll be a path
of muddy footprints when Hamish forgets to take off his boots,” I can't resist saying.

“I'm only dreaming, Millie, just daydreaming, of new wallpaper, with a border of blue flowers.” Mother gets up awkwardly, and I take the bucket before she tries to lift it. I'm careful not to let the dirty water slop onto the clean floor, as I make my way into the scullery.

“Hamish has gone with Father to the Price farm, bringing some tools and an old harness Father's mended. The son has moved to Peterborough; he's been hired by the railway. It's a piece of good fortune for him, but hard on the family, as he'll be missed on the farm. There's only the youngest daughter there now, since her sister married last summer.

“Bring in the washing for me, dear. I'll make a pot of tea, and we'll have a bit of peace before the others come home for supper. The soup's simmering on the stove.”

“It smells good and I'm hungry,” I reply.

The stone floor in the scullery is uneven and slopes a bit towards the back door. The scullery was added on, after the house was built. The bucket is heavy – I empty the scummy water around the side of the house. My chickens are out, looking for worms. We have six hens, all good layers. We get enough eggs for each of us to have one or two a week, and Mother sells the rest at the market for seventeen to twenty-two cents a dozen, depending
on the size. Once or twice, she even got twenty-five cents.

The chickens have been my responsibility since I was ten, and I'm quite fond of them: Alice and Maggie, Sally and Fay, Lady Jane Grey – the smallest and the best layer and my favorite – and Jemima, who pecks and fights.

The clothes on the line smell cool and fresh; the sun looks pale, as if newly washed too. I can feel spring all around me, almost here. I fold everything neatly, and stow the pegs away in a small canvas bag. When I was little, I'd make clothes-peg people by tying bits of ribbon and cloth around the pegs, and give them names. I made up whole families, and there was always a grandma and grandpa and lots of children. I still keep them at the back of a drawer in my dresser.

We are a small family: just Mother, Father, me, and my brother, Hamish. I suppose people might say that we are lucky because we don't yell or fight, the way some families do. I admit that, at times, quite often in fact, I'm tempted to yell at Hamish, who looks like an angel, but can be very stubborn and is a bit spoiled.

I've always called my parents Mother and Father. “Why would you change such beautiful-sounding names?” Mother asks. But Hamish decides to call them Ma and Pa once he starts school, and I notice he gets away with it. It's because he's a boy and the youngest,
and because he's going to follow in our father's and Mr. Armstrong's footsteps.

When Mr. Armstrong was alive, I called him Papa Joe, and he was the closest I ever came to having a grandfather. His name comes first on the sign above the forge: ARMSTRONG AND CARR, BLACKSMITHS. Mostly, my father shoes horses, but he can treat injuries too. Father can do everything: make tools look good as new, mend axles and wagon wheels, and fix harnesses that are almost worn through. He never throws anything away.

This used to be Mr. Armstrong's house. He asked us to come and live with him in 1926, when I was four and Hamish only a baby. That was nine years ago, and I'm practically thirteen now.

I remember how Papa Joe used to take me down Kent Street on a Saturday morning and let me choose a penny candy, and later, when Hamish was old enough, he'd come too.

Mr. Armstrong died in 1929 – just before the big crash that turned the world upside down. The adults still talk about it. It seems as if overnight, we all got really poor, with not enough to eat sometimes, and more and more people unemployed. We've become accustomed to strangers passing through Lindsay on their way east – asking for food, looking for work, and offering to do any chores at all to get by.

Father's customers pay him, when they can, with food – potatoes or a pound of butter, a freshly caught fish or a rabbit – when they don't have any money, which is most of the time, he complains to Mother. But she says how fortunate we are, even though we're living through a depression, to have what we have.

Father says he'll keep the name Armstrong on the sign forever, because he did his apprenticeship with Papa Joe when he was not much older than Hamish is now.

At breakfast last week, Hamish asked Father, “Will you put my name on the sign too, one day? Will you write armstrong, carr, and son?”

“Time enough to worry about that when you finish school and your apprenticeship. A name on the sign has to be earned.”

“I'm almost ten. I know my way round the forge.” Hamish has an answer to everything.

“I was twelve when I started working for Mr. Armstrong, but you can start right now. Do your chores the way I did – every single day, from the moment he took me on.”

“I know,” Hamish sighed. “Sweep out the forge, pick up the nails, sort and stack the shoes, straighten the tools, don't let the fire go out…. I'm going, right this minute.” He ran off; Hamish would rather be in the forge helping
Father than anywhere else. Mother bit her lip to keep from laughing.

“That boy's not as keen on school as he should be. You're the only scholar in this family, Millie.” Father smiled, tweaking my braids. “Hamish has a natural way with horses so that even the nervous ones take to him; the lad will make out fine.” He swallowed the last of his tea and hurried off to work.

Sometimes, just when I think he and Mother are about to talk about the old days, there's a shrug, a glance in our direction, and the talk turns elsewhere.

I wish I knew more about my parents before they became my mother and father. Somehow we never get round to talking about “before.”
Why don't we have any relatives like my friends Grace and Sadie do? And why is it such a big secret?

One day, late last summer, Mother and I were sitting on the back porch, shelling peas for supper, and I was telling her how the teacher had asked each of us to describe our favorite book. Mine was, and still is, Lucy Maud Montgomery's
Anne of Green Gables.
Sometimes I think that if my hair were red like Anne's, instead of fair like my father's, my life would be so much more interesting.

I told Mother how I'd read out the part where Anne waits and waits to find out whether Marilla and Matthew
Cuthbert are going to let her stay with them, even though she's a girl and they'd asked the orphanage to send them a boy to help out on the farm.