The Seary Line (33 page)

“Your father would've wanted to be here, I bet.”

“Yes.” Elise closed her eyes.

“He would've been right proud.”

Elise smiled, opened her eyes then, but didn't look at Stella. “Yes.”

Stella continued the chatter, she preferred bickering to silence. “Such a curious time of birth.”

“Curious?”

“You know. Being born like that.”

“Like what? You say it like I had control over the whole thing. Like I planned it that way.”

“Don't be silly, Elise.”

“Silly, now, am I?”

“I minds being a bit sensitive after you and Robert was born.”

Eyes turning toward heaven. “I'm hardly sensitive. I'm right fagged out, but hardly sensitive.”

Stella folded her hands in her lap, pinched her own fingers. “I was just wondering when her birthday would be so I'd know when to. . .when to send a card or a little something.”

“Well, I don't rightly know.”

“What's that?”

“Joseph and I've decided to let her choose.”

“Let her choose? Her own date of birth? Don't you got no certificate?”

“They put something down, but we don't heed that. 'Tis just a piece of paper.”

“But surely, the doctor–”

“The doctor said it was my decision, based on the time she came out, but that seems unfair.”

“You mean she's going to grow up not knowing what day she was born on?”

“She wasn't born on neither day. She was born between two days. Don't you understand? We'll just wait until she decides.”

“But wouldn't it make more sense if you–”

“Really, Mom, I just had a baby three days ago. I'm exhausted, and you want to quibble about nothing. Do you think I should be the exact same parent as you were?”

Stella was about to speak, when Elise patted her hand, pacifying smile. “I really wasn't looking for an answer there.”

Stella closed her mouth again, and as if on cue, a newborn mew came from a room down the hall.

“I'll go fetch her.”

“Thank you, Mother. Now that would be a help. And if you could pass me my cigarettes again? I don't want to lean that far.”

In the tiny room farthest from Elise's, Stella found Summer Fall Lane. She was in a painted wooden crib, dancing lamb on the headboard, sheep mobile clamped onto the white railing. She wore a pale pink sleeper, tiny mittens tied at her wrists. Stella noticed the mustard stains near her legs.

“Wait here one second, my little lover,” Stella whispered, hand gently on the baby's belly. “I'll fix you right up.”

Warm washcloths in hand, Stella plucked up Summer, and laid her on the change table. She thought of Elise as she
cleaned the baby, thought of the endless questions she'd had in those first few days. Every hour or two, Leander ran to fetch his mother: “Stella is worried,” and Mrs. Edgecombe would drop what she was doing, come huffing down the lane, sometimes bits of salt fish or pinches of dough still clinging to her hands.

While washing Summer's mottled bottom and swollen parts, Stella remembered why she'd been afraid when Elise was a baby. Liquid leaked from her tiny nipples. Her baby face had been covered in blemishes, blotchy rashes creeping into the folds of her neck. Her bony lower back was marred with what looked like bruises. “Witch's milk. Typical,” Mrs. Edgecombe had said with a nod. Or, “Milk spots. All of mine had it.” Or, “Not sure, maid. Thin skin, I allows. It'll fade.”

Stella had been in St. John's over two hours now, and Elise had not asked her a single question. Not a single one – as though Elise was making an unmistakable point of rejecting her own mother. Rejecting Stella's ways. Her ideas.

Stella pinned the cloth diaper just underneath the blackened knob of cord, and wondered if she had done something wrong when raising Elise. But no, Stella told herself, she had been reliable and constant. Firm and loving. She had been the best mother she knew how to be, and it certainly wasn't her fault if it never took.

Seated now in a rocker, she nestled the baby in the crook of her elbow. Summer's arms flailed, mouth struggled to find something. Stella pressed the fist to the mouth, watched in amazement the intuitive suckling.

Looking into the baby's eyes, Stella understood why Elise had mentioned their colour. They were like the bottom of an untouched puddle, in the instant before the stomp. So clear, but at the same time, begging for disruption. Summer stared up at Stella, unapologetically, and Stella had to
remind herself that this child, with her black doll's hair, was only three days old.

Summer Fall. Stella shook her head, clicked her tongue softly. How could someone who weighed not more than a good-sized bottle of beet be eternally wedged between two seasons? Surely an unkind place for a newborn baby. A nowhere sort of place. And even though Stella tried to assuage it, a damp sadness had caught in her throat, made her want to cry.

Stella returned home to days of impossible quiet. Visitors were few and far between. Many of the children who had plodded about, harping and throwing rocks and striking her fence with sticks, were now grown and gone away. She had long ago sold two parcels of her land, and the robin's egg blue saltbox constructed on the lot to the north housed an elderly couple who rarely emerged. To the south, a skeleton of a home stood, frame grey and warping in the salt air. On blustery days, the wind would whip through the boards, squeal and moan. But, since she came home, the wind never uttered a single sigh.

Stella had not received a letter from Robert in six months. After university, he had moved to Toronto, taken some sort of position in a bank that was never fully explained. When he first went away, he wrote every two weeks, then it slowed to once a month. And more recently, his letters had stopped altogether, only to be replaced by letters from his new wife. A woman named Jane, who with perfect script, wrote endless pages about the richness of their everyday: their adored pet cat, Elmer, who owned its own chair; a gnarly old peach tree in her yard that she'd
coaxed into producing; imminent plans for a baby, her secret hope for a boy. Stella felt only hollowness when she read each letter.
Dear Mom, When are you coming to stay?

During the past summer, Nettie Rose, Stella's best friend, also left Bended Knee. She had moved to a small apartment in St. John's, in order to be closer to her daughter Grace. In recent years, Nettie Rose struggled to take care of herself. She'd told Stella she didn't know what to do first. “Can't stand owning all this time,” she'd said. “Carefree afternoons? You can have them for me.” Her life had taken a shift towards simplicity. Most of her many children gone. Grandchildren distant. Husband no longer on the earth. Idleness caused rust to bloom from within, and Nettie became forgetful. After she had caused a small fire, a greasy pan, blackened fish, she decided to move. “Be where someone is apt to keep an eye on me. I needs that. There idn't nothing wrong with owning up to it.”

During her time with Elise and Summer Fall, Stella had visited Nettie. But the meeting was awkward, strangely upsetting. In that stuffy place on a third floor, Stella complimented Nettie's matching plates, framed pictures of seashells and pink roses, yellow furniture set, polka-dot cushions. She told Nettie she adored her bright red upholstered rocker that looked soft, but really wasn't. When Nettie had sold her house, contents were included, and now, Stella's particular kitchen chair was no longer available. The kitchen table that she usually leaned upon was gone, replaced by plastic covered pressboard, cold metal legs. Nettie yammered on about a man named Milton Berle, how happy she was to have discovered him on her small television set. “Never laughed so hard in my life,” she crowed. Stella nodded, though that comment jabbed her. She didn't finish her tea. It didn't taste the same when served in a heavy mug.

And now, with everyone gone, Bended Knee felt like a foreign village, bleak and somewhat uninviting. People continued to be helpful and generous, but she didn't appreciate it when Jo Taylor tucked a complimentary tub of candied fruit in among her purchases. Or when Skipper Johnson layered on an extra piece of dried cod, his wink and wide smile doing nothing to disguise the hint of pity in his eyes. And when Johnnie, one of Nettie's sons, still a bachelor, stacked a row of spruce logs by her back door, he wouldn't accept so much as a thimble of rum for payment. Such generosity embarrassed Stella, made her feel older and less competent than she was. The look on their weathered faces told Stella they believed she was a woman who hadn't had her fair share of luck.

When the few straggly trees separating the homes were stripped bare, the sight of the unfinished shell nearby bothered Stella more and more. But instead of drawing the curtains, she began to watch it, the way long shadows moved through it, the sun making rectangles and triangles dance upon the frosty earth. She sighed when birds rested in tight corners or when stray dogs hunkered beneath a lean-to of abandoned boards during rainstorms, drops like nails. Whenever she noticed a couple strolling up the lane, she would wait to see if they slowed, took interest. Perhaps they would be the owners. Ready to complete what they had started. But no creature, bird, dog, or person, ever lingered near the structure for any length of time. Like a joke, it was left standing there, a man's dream for home and family. Alone, against the sea, with empty eyes, holes instead of doors. A sad joke. Stella finally had to look away.

As fall gave way to winter, Stella rarely used her kerosene lamps. She took to eating an early meal, usually fish boiled on the stove, potatoes or bread, some sort of
pickles. Occasionally she would make a grunt with a scoop of partridgeberries from the keg in the back porch. Afterwards, she would sit there in the dim light, missing the harvest moon. Some evenings she hummed softly to herself, but being alone, the humming echoed. Mostly, she quietly sipped her tea. Until darkness drove her to bed.

When winter's bitter hand gripped Bended Knee, Stella closed the door to the kitchen, caging the heat, and she took to sleeping on the daybed. She ate sitting near the stove in a hefty chair Leander had made. It was one of his last projects, thick wooden arms and back. On each side near the top, he had fastened what he called “a wooden ear,” a piece of birch shaped and sanded into half a heart. Stella had wanted him to stop, to rest, but he pressed on. Told her, “No matter where I is, my dear, I'll hear you.” And she had taunted, “I believes your ears is a mite bit smaller than that, now, Leander. Just how far do you reckon on going?”

Now, when she thought of those words, her smirk quickly turned into a frown.

Some nights, as she sat in the chair, she tried to talk to Leander. Tried to tell him about her day, her meal, how she'd burned her little finger on the iron. Sometimes she'd talk about the times they had when they'd just married. She told him about Johnnie, who would dig a trail to her back step after each storm, and fetch a few paper bagfuls of groceries from the shop. Mentioned how he was such a rabble-rouser as a boy, but had grown into a decent man. Leander would remember that, all the trouble that boy had caused. There were plenty of engaging stories.

She would keep her voice nice and light, imagining her words traveled from her mouth into those two cuplike wooden ears, then directly to Leander. But, her pleasantness always deteriorated, and instead, she found herself asking
him, “Where have you gone off to? Where have you gone? What kind of cruelty is this? To leave me all alone.” Darkness pushed her own voice back into her face, and her loneliness, out loud like that, only made things worse.

One afternoon, when blinding light bounced off the snow, penetrated her window, and made her small kitchen feel too close to heaven, Stella bundled in a blanket, sneaked into the coolness of the front room. It was quieter there, and Stella felt as though she were taking a break, away from the never-ending crackle of the fire and the relentless gales drilling the outside boards. Seated in a chair, soft cushion against her lower spine, she inhaled the odours of this space. There was history in those smells, damp books, woolen sweaters, four picture frames that hung behind her and perfumed the air with woody sweetness. Comforting, yet she sensed these smells didn't belong to her.

Glancing about, she identified her mother's blanket, the stump-like stool where her father would rest his feet, Leander's pieces of furniture, a forgotten pair of Elise's buttoned-up shoes side-by-side beneath a chair, Robert's navy sweater with the hole in the elbow that he'd left behind. All items belonging to others. The only thing she owned (other than the walls and the windows and the ceilings) was a tall cabinet made of pine. Leander had built it for her, designed to house her most precious possessions. It was sturdy, and the wood, aging gracefully, had developed a soft tawny colour. Leander had purchased green milky glass knobs, and she touched one now, but didn't open the drawer. She didn't want the additional reminder that nothing lay inside.