My Ghosts (2 page)

Kez and Nan muttered across Clare, in the bed they all shared, saying, “That Ross, he always did think only of himself.” There was a time when she thought his leaving was like one of those old songs, a great quarrel and a disowning, the details hidden somewhere in the words that bounced around above her head. But it may have been as her sisters said, that Ross just turned his back, and walked off into a life all his own. No care for their father’s long death. No thought for their mother and the way she sat down at the table when his rare letters came, her fingers tracing each word before she read them slowly out loud. How many trees cut and split, and the cow stumbling into a mire. The birth of a baby girl, named for his wife’s dead sister. And the boys who came after, that she’d never hold in her arms.

Clare wants to keep thinking about time, but the past keeps intruding, and she wonders if that’s a clue. Like the hints her teacher used to give, trying to draw answers from their blank faces. “Think about it this way,” he would say. “Think about what you know.” The same teacher who showed them a card with a drawing of a girl, an old-fashioned cap perched on her head. Long hair flowing over her shoulders and a dark line of ribbon around her neck. “Keep looking,” Mr. Dunbar said, and suddenly it became a picture of an old crone; the same white cap, but the chin now a hooked nose, the necklace a dark slash of mouth. Once you had seen that, your eyes switched back
and forth, but you could never see them both at once, could never catch whatever it was that made the picture change.

She doesn’t know why she feels as if there’s a puzzle to solve. Steps to take, questions to ask. But remembering the magic picture makes her think of Aunt Peach, who lived with them before Clare went to school. Not really an aunt, but some kind of cousin with nowhere else to go. Always cold, her crooked hands clutching at her grey shawl, a whistle in her breathing, in her voice. She used to wander out in the street, calling the long dead in for supper. Set off for the shops in the middle of the night, her bony feet bare and bruised by the stones in the road. A sudden cry in the house—
Peachey’s out, she’s out!
—and everyone running to search for her.

Even in her chair by the stove Aunt Peach didn’t know anyone’s right name. Clare’s mother said that her memories were all scrambled up, like a big mess of eggs. Now she thinks that Aunt Peach was somehow cut loose from time, the way she herself has been. “What’s my name?” Aunt Peach used to say. “What’s my name?” And when they told her, she’d repeat it again and again, like the name of a town, or a river in Africa. Something to memorize, something just as removed.

“You had a fever, that’s all,” Kez says. Clare isn’t sure that was all, but it’s enough to know for now. Kez climbs the stairs with a bowl and spoon rattling on a tray, with the pale china jug. She helps Clare wash, waits while she spoons in soup or stew, tears off small pellets of bread. It’s not like Kez to be so patient, to speak so soothingly. Nan is the soft one, the one who will listen to anything. The one who used to whisper, “Sorry lovey, so sorry honey,” as she cleaned and bandaged a scraped shin. More motherly than their own mother if that was how you
measured it, but maybe she just had more time. Clare’s mother was always in motion, and she fretted about the rent, about the accounts her father took so long to collect. The price of sugar, and how quickly the boys grew out of their boots. Always food to prepare and washing to do and mounds of mending, her needle held close to the light. A pat on the head, a quick touch on the shoulder, but no time, or not that Clare can remember, to sit quietly with her arms wrapped around a child on her lap.

“Where’s Nan?” she thinks to ask. “She’s not caught my fever, has she?” Kez tells her that Nan hurt her knee, that it’s swollen up like anything and she can’t do the stairs. She says it happened when they were dancing in the kitchen, that Ben was there, that Charlie had stopped by and was showing them some steps he said were all the rage. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear us all the way up here,” Kez says, “we were laughing so hard.”

It might be true. Their brother Charlie usually brings some wildness with him and he always has the latest knot in his tie, the most fashionable collar. She can picture her brothers and sisters dancing all over the kitchen, the table and chairs moved aside and steam hitting the dark windows, running down in streams. It might have happened, and Nan might have twisted her knee, but she thinks it more likely that Kez is making it up, a cruel reminder that all kinds of things are going on without her.

Her sleep is still sudden and deep; days pass, and when she’s awake her floating mind snags on thoughts that she tries to examine. Something has happened to her body, she knows that. A walk across the room wears her out, her limbs at the same time so heavy and so weak. She’s not sure why, but she senses that it’s important to keep her mind tethered to this notion of time, to rein it in when it scatters and wanders too far. Another
kind of exercise, like the way Kez makes her shuffle from her bed to the doorway, so her feet don’t forget what it’s like.

Clare doesn’t think there’s anything in her books that will help, and besides, someone has taken them away. The little wall shelf empty, except for the doll her father made from bits of wood and knotted string, a faceless circle for its head, topped with a mess of fine woollen hair. She’s puzzled by the doll, doesn’t think that it has always been there, but that’s not what she wants to be thinking about, so she closes her eyes and tries to remember, instead, all the things she knows about time.

People used to believe that the sun rode the sky like a fiery horse and chariot, dragging the night behind; she remembers learning that. An answer to a question that was satisfying enough, that let them live their lives by the broad rhythm of light and dark, free to eat when they were hungry, rest when they were tired. Now she asks herself why that wasn’t the end of it, why someone felt a need for more order, and then more. For sundials and church bells, for school bells and ticking clocks and watches. For the time-ball that dropped like a slow stone, her father lifting her onto his shoulders to see over the tall people in front of them. All of it marked out, ticking away, days and hours and minutes, the present divided into smaller and smaller pieces, as if that could keep you from looking into the great black expanse of the future. Darkness on the other side as well, years and years, thousands of them, millions, it’s said, since the world began. Time that existed so long before there were men to think of it.

Clare imagines that kind of time as the inky black cloth her father rippled out onto his long table. A dark, flowing mass that he measured and cut, tamed to take on the shape of a man. She used to hide under that table, too, listening to
the stories he told himself as he worked, the songs he sang so softly. Not even thinking until much later that he had known she was there, of course he had, and the stories were for her. Tamlane with the Elfin Queen, and Thomas the Rhymer. The long song about the cold blowing wind. “Little pitchers,” she remembers him saying sometimes, when her mother stood, cross, in the doorway.

She can’t picture her father’s face, except at the end. Those last days at his bedside, when the time between his eyes flickering open grew longer and longer, as if he was getting used to how it would be. But she remembers how strong his arms once were, lifting her through the air. And she remembers his foot tapping when he played his old fiddle, and how she loved the times when the neighbours came with more fiddles and drums, when the music was loud in the crowded kitchen, everything a swirl of colour and sound. Hands clapping and her father’s eyes closed, his knee bent and lifting and his boot crashing down.

After he died they had to sell the long table and the sewing machine, the box of chalk his fingers had held. Their mother wrapped his fiddle in a baby-sized quilt and sent it to Ross, even though Charlie was the one who made music from everything he touched. A pair of spoons or sticks of kindling, the battered squeezebox he spent hours cleaning and patching, and working the stuck buttons free. He must have minded about the fiddle, but that’s just how it was, everyone in their place and things decided. Ross the eldest, if you didn’t count Wee Alan, and entitled to certain things, even though he’d walked away. Ben, the next son, stepping into Ross’s place, handing his pay envelope to their mother and later to Kez and Nan, who cooked and cleaned, who walked together to the shops every
day and always came home with something they’d found, even if it was only a story to tell. No question but that Charlie would apprentice to the jeweller on King Street, a man from the same church, who dressed in plain suits their father had made. Or that Clare would become a teacher; what better way to earn her living, to make use of all she’d learned. A girl always top of her class. A girl who loved everything about going to school, loved even the smell of the classroom. The sleepy, chalk-dust light that fell through the tall windows.

October

The season is changing, autumn-blue sky hard against the attic window. There’s a perfect red leaf on the tray Kez brings; “It’s glorious outside,” she says. Clare keeps the leaf until it dries and curls, crumbles it to powder and watches how it hangs in the air when she blows. Thinking,
That’s time too, what it does
.

Later, her brother Ben climbs the stairs, to tell her that Principal Thomas has stopped by. That he drank a cup of tea, ate two pieces of Nan’s seed cake and said he’d had to hire another teacher to take Clare’s place. Perhaps next fall, he’d said, when she had completely recovered, perhaps then he could find her a new position. “He left this for you,” Ben says, tugging a thin green book from his pocket. “He said you’d been discussing it.”

Clare has no memory of that discussion, but when Ben is gone she runs her fingertips over the cover of the little book, a beautiful deep green, like the trees in Moss Park when the light is beginning to fade. It’s called
Elementary Astronomy
, and she turns the clean pages slowly, looking at the simple illustrations.
Circles and ovals and lines with arrows, a tiny man on a hill with a telescope. The patterns of the fixed stars that you can only see when you’re told what they’re meant to be.

She knows it’s not right, but all she feels is relief at losing her place. As if she’s put down some heavy thing she hadn’t even realized she was carrying. She remembers, but distantly, how proud she was of her first class certificate, how happy when Principal Thomas opened the door and showed her the empty classroom that would be hers. She remembers counting off the days last summer, waking earlier and earlier as the time drew closer.

But when the first day of school finally came it was hard to open her eyes, and the bedclothes seemed an impossible weight. She remembers how carefully she began to brush her hair, and then her arm was so tired and she realized that she’d been brushing and brushing for who knew how long, staring at herself in the mirror. “Pull yourself together,” she said then, and the moment she said it she felt as if she was fraying at the edges, sliding away. The dishes Nan set on the table made a hollow sound, and the buildings she walked by on her way were all sharp lines and colours, like the rows of thin-shouldered children, their piercing voices. She understands now that her fever was coming on, but that day all she knew was that things were not quite right, and she thought that she just needed to
concentrate
. But the next day was the same, only more so. Like a dream, in the moments before you realize that it
is
a dream, that terrible feeling of everything sliding out of control. Next fall is a long way off, but it feels as if a door has closed quite firmly; she can’t imagine herself trying to do it all again.

Kez has brought her the old brown sewing box, the button jar and the smooth darning egg Clare loves to hold in her hands, along with a pile of things to be mended. “Nothing too tiring,” she says, as she leaves with the tray, “but it will give you something to do.” Clare thinks for the first time of how much extra work she’s causing, how it’s not only her days and nights that have changed. She will do the mending, make herself useful, and she thinks that she might even learn something from the tears and frayed seams, messages from the lives going on in the rest of the house. They’re none of them the mud-slinging, tree-climbing children they once were, but Ben still sheds buttons almost daily, and his jacket pockets often tear from the notebooks and sharpened pencil stubs he stuffs them with. Nan’s blue dress has a pattern of tiny singed holes near the hem, sparks scattered from their father’s old pipe when she knocks it on the sole of her shoe. Sitting on the back steps in the dark, having her quiet smoke, her body in their father’s shape, elbows on her knees and right hand cupped around the bowl. They all know not to say a word, if they happen to open the door to a curl of scent that reminds them of another time.

The clothes in the mending pile have only the usual types of damage, tell her nothing she doesn’t already know. She concentrates on her neat, small stitches, the tiny snap of the thread in her teeth. “Was it Rumpelstiltskin?” Kez says, when she picks them up in the morning. She gives a little jump and tries to click her heels, laughs the witchy cackle their mother used to do when they begged for one of her stories, a thing Clare hadn’t known she remembered. She thinks of something Ben told her once, a trick he used when he studied for examinations. He said that he imagined the tall old dresser in the kitchen, that he lined his facts up, put them in different spots
in different shelves and drawers, and he said that he could always call that picture to mind, find anything he needed that way. It never worked for Clare, but she thinks now that maybe her mind is something like that dresser after all, drawers and compartments swollen shut by age and weather; she wonders what else might be hiding there, waiting to slide suddenly free.