The Boys in the Trees (8 page)

There
is
a great deal of work to do, and Sarah can hardly remember what life was like before. The ticking of the clock, the chiming; another hour over. Now there are never enough of them in the day. Leaflets to print and distribute, schemes for raising money, always reports to write and meetings to organize. On her counter at Becks’, beside the stylish hats, there is a special wooden rack for their literature, and although it is frequently emptied, the taverns remain open and half the churches still use fermented wine. Her father used to like a glass with dinner, her mother too, and at Christmas he would pour for Sarah and Alice, a mixture that was mostly water. She shudders now to think of it. How those could have been the first steps on the road to ruin. She sees her father’s smiling face, thinks of the hours they spent at this kitchen table, going over plans for the shop, adding up columns of figures, and feels nothing but scorn for that foolish girl.

•  •  •

Alice hears Sarah moving about in her room and knows that she will soon be gone, making her brisk way down the street, the satchel stuffed with pamphlets banging at her leg. She slides her hand under the pillow and it closes around her father’s pocket
watch, cool against her palm. Sarah had wanted to sell it; she said they needed every cent, that they had to sell everything that had been his, even the shirts and jackets still holding the shape of his arms. She reached into the wardrobe and their mother began to wail, a piercing sound that grew steadily higher, louder. Pulling at Sarah’s arm and Sarah shook her off and then somehow their mother was on the floor, rolling back and forth, her hair falling over her face and her skirts all twisted. Howling and batting at the girls when they tried to help her up. They stared at each other, wide-eyed.
Mother
, they said.
Mother
. But she didn’t hear. Only calming, slowly, when Sarah said over and over,
I’ve put them back, I won’t touch them again, everything is just as it was. Just as it was
.

Later, in the kitchen, she said,
I can’t find his watch; have you seen his watch? She won’t notice that, and I could get a good price
. Alice shook her head, and Sarah said then it must have been stolen, it must have been Lucy that stole it. Another reason to let her go.

Alice was never allowed to touch the watch, when she was small and captivated by it, but her father would show her each time she asked. How to press down on the stem to pop open the case, the black hand ticking around, his initials engraved, and a date. His mother gave it to him the night before he sailed, along with a brand-new Bible. One of the grandmothers Alice never met. After she had looked at the face, puzzled out the swirling letters on the case, her father would press another spot to open the back, the tiny wheels and gears moving. He told her it must be kept wound, but she’s afraid to wind it now, in case someone hears the ticking.

•  •  •

When she hears the front door click, Alice swings her feet to the floor. Her head pounds with the movement and she closes her
eyes, waiting for it to subside. Remembers her father’s cool hand, his voice saying,
It will pass, Alice, and all will be well
. She thinks of all the things she heard her father say, through her life, all the words. And she knows that it is a strange and wonderful thing that from all those days and years of words, these are the only ones that bring with them the sound of his voice.
All will be well, Alice;
she can hear him.
All manner of things will be well
.

If she hurried to the front window she would see Sarah, already a small figure, leaning to the right a little with the weight of her scuffed brown satchel. Instead she goes to her own window, looks down at the grass, so green after all the rain, rolling away to the river where threads of white mist still hover.
Season of mists
, she thinks, but that’s another season entirely.

If she went to the front window she would also see the little white house, the
House of Horror
, the newspapers called it. Alice’s mother brought home a story the week after the murders. People in town saying there was something evil in the house itself, old Mrs. Hatch saying, in her rustling voice, that she had always known, could have told them, if anyone ever listened.
But many people have lived in that house
, Alice said,
other families
. Her mother stopped, with a hat pin in her hand, said,
And didn’t we wonder why they never stayed long?

Thinking of the house, Alice remembers seeing them all on the front porch, Mrs. Heath and the girls standing back while Mr. Heath turned the key, ushered them inside with a little bow, a flourish of his hand.
That will be Mr. Marl’s new bookkeeper
, her mother had said, standing at the window beside her.
They don’t have many things, do they?

Some days later she and Sarah called with their mother, carrying a plate of cakes, roses from their garden. Mrs. Heath, Naomi, asked first about the church, about who her husband
should talk to about a pew. She said that they had come from Toronto, that things had been very difficult there. That Mr. Marl’s advertisement had appeared like an answer to a prayer. She was pleased to hear about the Barnes’ school, just across the way, said that her older daughter stayed at home, but she would speak to her husband about Rachel attending. The two girls carried in a tray of tea things and then took their places on the settee on either side of their mother, although there wasn’t really room.

•  •  •

Sarah walks the long way around so she can stop by the railway station before she goes to the store. The world is clearer with her glasses and there are more people about than she’s used to this early, hooves and creaking cart wheels and the sound of voices. They are all moving toward the jail, even though there will be nothing to see, the execution taking place behind its high walls. She wonders if Heath can hear the voices, alone in his cell, if he hears the tone, the way his name is spoken. She hopes he does, hope it makes him quake; she still can’t believe how completely she was fooled. Those times he helped her with the Sunday school, the plans they made for excursions and concerts, for lessons. Not a hint of his black, black heart.

The heavy door of the station creaks as she pushes it open. The lamps are still burning and the room is empty, except for Abel Timms at his counter, the scratch of his pen as he writes in a big brown book. He nods to Sarah but then looks down again; she’s seen him staggering out of Malley’s tavern more than once. As usual, someone has emptied the rack and the papers lie strewn about the floor, some crumpled, some marked with muddy boot-prints. She returns those that are not badly soiled, and adds a few
new ones from her satchel.
TREMBLE, KING ALCOHOL!
, one says. And,
WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

Sarah’s father always said she had a fine mind, a man’s mind, said she would go to the new university when the shop improvements were paid for. She can’t help thinking about the different way she would have known this station. Waiting for the early morning train, coming back on Friday nights with her head stuffed full of everything she’d learned. She would have shared rooms in the city, would have met girls who were more like her, who talked about things besides the latest styles and who was walking out together. But she reminds herself that if things hadn’t changed she wouldn’t have come to know Mrs. Beck in the same way; she would have been exposed to all kinds of dangers without the clear knowledge she now possesses, without any kind of weapon against them. She would have married her fiancé, Gordon, and he might have become a drunkard, making her life a misery. The first time she stood on a platform her legs were trembling so much she didn’t think she could do it, but she did do it, and the audience applauded, and the women welcomed her like a member of a family.

•  •  •

In the kitchen there’s a sprinkling of crumbs on the table, a puddle of tea that Alice suspects has been deliberately poured, splashing the cover of the book that she doesn’t remember leaving just there. The pain nags behind her eye while she prepares her mother’s tray, reminding her that it is covered up, but not gone. She toasts bread and cooks an egg in its shell, pours a cup of tea and adds the last of the milk, two spoons of sugar. She takes a bite from a crust of bread but spits it out again. When her father was
alive they ate breakfast together in the dining room, and they still had Lucy to prepare it and bring the plates to the table. Alice’s mother wore her pink wrap, but her hair was brushed and pinned up and she told them all what she planned to do that day. Three afternoons a week she taught needlework and comportment to six young women whose mothers worried about their chances. When the weather was fine, they often took little stools out the back and sketched the trees and the flowers. Up in her own room, working on her lessons, Alice could smell lilacs through the open window, hear their voices twittering, swooping.

Lucy works for the Robinsons now, and a girl from across the river comes twice a week to do the heavy work and some of the laundry. They tried to manage on their own the first year, another of Sarah’s economies, but even she admitted it was too much. The cooking, the cleaning, the washing, the mending. Carpets not beaten for months on end, the stove not blackened. They talked about a Home Girl, but remembered one they had tried years before. Worse than useless, their mother said; she had to be shown every little thing, and woke them with her crying in the night. Mr. Heath told her once that the ship they came out on was filled with Home Children; very hard on his wife, he said, though he didn’t say why.

Life is easier now. Not like before, but not such a struggle, and there’s even time for a walk, some days, time to turn the pages of a book. Although for Sarah it’s only the Bible now, and she reads in a hard-backed chair at the kitchen table. Papers spread out, working on her lectures, her leaflets. Sometimes, walking through the room, Alice expects to see her father there; it reminds her so much of those months of planning the expansion of the shop, working out how much could be raised or borrowed. That Christmas it was
almost ready, the shelves built and the walls painted, a new, bigger sign over the door.

After the burial their mother took to her bed with the drapes drawn and when she did get up, days later, Alice had to help her decide what dress to put on. She’s better now; she walks to the grocer, the butcher; she prepares the meals and on their birthdays makes her special honey cake. But she seems to list a little when she walks, and the smallest thing will have her in a fluster. She likes to help in the school but her mind doesn’t stay on the lesson, and before long she is talking about a ballroom glowing with hundreds of candles, the line of young men with their hands held out to her. The children don’t mind. They put down their pencils and listen, or pretend to listen, to stories they’ve heard time and again. The slyer ones knowing the questions to ask, how to take them all farther and farther away from the open arithmetic text. The children don’t mind, but Alice does; she’s become quite serious about the school. Even the first fumbling year she realized that it was something she liked, and more, something she was good at. Finding the key to each child, seeing their brows unfurrow. She thinks, although she hasn’t mentioned it yet, that she would like to go for her certificate if the money can be found. And then maybe teach in the new high school and who knows, maybe some of her pupils will go on to do great things. Maybe one of them will say, years later,
I owe it all to my teacher, my first real teacher
.

•  •  •

Upstairs, Alice sets down the tray and goes into her own room, takes one swig from the bottle before she carries on down the hall, opens her mother’s door. As she pulls at the heavy drapes she thinks that they really should be cleaned. The girl might do
it, but she’d have to be paid extra and Sarah would have something to say about that.

It’s a quarter past seven
, she says, and her mother groans and reaches to touch the silver framed photograph beside the bed. Alice’s father adored her mother; no one told her that, but it was something she always knew. Maybe the way he bent his head to hear her light voice, the way he loved to tease. Once her mother stood before him, in a shimmering new dress made up by Miss Bolt.
Oh, my dear
, he said, sternly.
That color …
Putting aside his newspaper, walking slowly around her, taking a bit of fabric between his fingers. Stroking his chin.
It’s really too … too perfect
, he said, and Sarah and Alice laughed and laughed at the look on their mother’s face; she swatted at him and said,
Oh, Andrew
, and he laughed too, all of them laughing together. And Alice was struck by something that she’d never thought of before, by the fact that her parents were
people
, that they had lives before her, and without her. She was so taken with this thought that she whispered it to Sarah, who squinted her eyes behind her new spectacles and said,
What are you talking about? How silly you are; of course they’re people. What else did you think they were?
Later, in her room, Alice took a piece of paper and wrote her thought down. She’s certain she slipped it between the pages of a book, but she no longer remembers what book it was. Wonders if she will come across it years from now, and what it will be like, to see her childish hand again. Wonders if there will be anyone she can show it to. Once she had known, just known, that she would marry a handsome, brooding man who would somehow cross her path. Nothing like Sarah’s Gordon, with his heavy eyebrows, his awkward hands. Nothing like the boyish boys her friends whispered about. Not long before that terrible Christmas her family sat for the photographer, and with his wild hair, his
slender, stained fingers, with the way his words spun and flowed, Alice could hardly breathe when he touched her cheek, when he moved her head, just a little.

She met him again by chance, the first time by chance, walking by the river with a small book in her hand. He was setting up his camera on its heavy tripod and he asked if she would read to him while he worked; her voice sounded thin and a little silly at first, but soon she was lost in the words. He told her that an idea had just come to him, that he would photograph the same view every few days, the river, seen through one curving branch, that he would do it until the branch was completely bare. That first day the afternoon sun was still warm, the leaves just slightly tinged with orange.