The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Jay Silverman, Executor of the Estate of Beverly Jensen, 2010

 

All rights reserved

 

“Wake,” “Gone,” and “Panfried” first appeared in
New England Review.
“Idella’s Dress” first appeared in
Sisters: An Anthology
edited by Jan Freeman, Emily Wojcik, and Deborah Bull (Paris Press, 2009). “Wake” was also published in
The Best American Short Stories 2007,
edited by Stephen King (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

 

Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Jensen, Beverly, 1953-2003.
The sisters from Hardscrabble Bay / Beverly Jensen.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-19024-1

1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. City and town life—Fiction. 3. New England—Fiction.
4. New Brunswick—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3610.E5625S57 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009049272

 

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April 1916

 

They had strung their shoes by the laces from a solitary elm before entering the woods edging the back field. Both girls were glad to shed them, to feel the cool slap of spring mud against their bare soles. Over the long Canadian winter, their feet had grown. The shoes, hand-me-downs from distant cousins, still molded by the shapes of other feet, cramped their toes.

“How much farther in are we going, Della? My feet are cold.”

“You want to find mayflowers for Mother, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Avis had plunked herself down on a rotting log, her knees splayed before her like grasshopper legs.

“Then come on.” Idella lifted a stray raspberry cane from in front of her face and kept walking.

“I’m stuck all over with damn burrs.”

Idella turned back. “Jesus, you look like a porcupine.” She started pulling the thorny clusters from the folds of Avis’s dress.

The dress, too, had been worn by some cousin—probably one of Aunt Eva’s girls from down in Maine. Avis twisted her skirt all in front of her like a washrag to get at the spines jabbing her skinny legs. “I got enough on me to fill a bucket.”

“You got some in your hair, even.”

“How come there’s none on you?”

“I look where I’m going.” Idella glanced ahead. “Come on. It’s near suppertime.”

“Is Mother going to get much bigger?”

“I don’t think she can. The baby’s due to come now.”

“I won’t be the baby anymore,” Avis said.

“You’re almost six. That’s not a baby.”

They walked along together, lifting back scruffy bushes, stepping over roots and fallen trees and patches of squelchy mud ripe with the smell of spring, until they entered a small clearing. Avis leaned against a large, moss-covered rock. Idella scooched down searching for bits of green beneath the crackly remnants of last year’s growth.

“Mother said to look for them on the edge of clearings.”

Avis squinched up her nose. “Something died around here. Something stinks.”

“Your feet. You stepped in something.”

Avis stuck her foot under her nose and laughed. “Yep. It’s me. You want a whiff?” She pointed it toward Idella.

“Quit it!” Idella scanned the clearing. Raspberry canes took up most of it. She circled the edge, to what looked like blueberry bushes between the low rocks. Then she saw the small white blossoms. “There’s mayflowers!”

Avis ran up behind her. “Where? Where are you looking?”

Both girls crouched over the small patch of flowers that flitted like tiny moths among the vines. “Mother said if they find a little sun, they can be open for May Day. They’re closed up now ’cause the light’s gone.” Idella lightly fingered a blossom. “Little white bits of things.”

Avis reached out to snap a stem. “Let’s pick ’em.”

“No!” Idella grabbed her hand. “They’ll wilt. We’ll get them in the morning. That’s May Day.”

“What if they’re gone? What if they get picked?”

“Who’s going to pick ’em?” Idella stood. “And don’t step on them. There’s not many.”

“What do you think I am, a horse?”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

Avis laughed, raised a foot over the flowers, and held her leg out wider. “Pissssss!”

“Avis!” Idella giggled and picked up her skirt bottom. She galloped ahead. “Or maybe just the horse’s ass!”

Avis snorted. When she got laughing about something, it came out like that. Dad called them “nose farts,” and when he said it, Avis snorted all the more.

“Come on!” Idella called behind her. “We’re late for supper.”

Breathless and laughing, pinching and poking and calling each other the names they’d heard the men use—“horseshit,” “jackass,” “goddamned Frenchie”—the girls emerged triumphantly from the woods. The sky was a milky expanse. It was dusk. Light drained from the clouds, leaving soft gray streaks and smudges of blacky blue. The girls scurried to get home before the dark set in. They found their cast-off shoes, dangling like drunken crows from their laces, and ran across the flat, scratchy fields, on home to supper.

 

“Where the hell did you two run off to?” Dad was standing in the middle of the kitchen, tall and straight as a pitchfork. They were good and late. “Five more minutes of waiting on you two and you’d have no goddamned supper at all.”

“Let them be, Bill.” Mother was slowly carrying plates to the table. Her belly was so big that she had to hold them way out in front of her. “Della, finish setting the table.”

Mother’s voice was tired sounding. Dad sat down at the table. Dalton, the oldest at twelve and the only boy, was already at his place, staring down at it, with nothing in front of him. No one said anything. There was a strong feeling not to. Still breathing hard from running, Idella set up all the plates and sat in her chair. Mother, standing in front of the stove, turned to Dad. “Bring this kettle to the table for me, Bill.”

Then she walked into her pantry, an alcove off the main room, and came back with Dad’s big knife. “Here’s your damn knife.” She placed it in front of him. “Now, hand me your plate, Della—Avis’s, too.” Idella handed Mother the plates, and one by one she ladled stew from the pot onto them and handed them back. It was chicken stew with carrots and potatoes. That was special, to kill a chicken. “Now, Dalton, give me yours.”

Dad grabbed the plate as it passed in front of him. “I work all goddamned day, sweating my arse off, and I have to wait like a damn dog? You’d feed that lazy bastard before you give me a pot to piss in.”

“Don’t worry, you’re not likely to starve.” There had been fighting going on. Mother took Dalton’s plate from Dad and heaped it with stew. Idella was afraid their being late to supper had started things off.

“Now give me your plate, Bill.” She spooned ladle after ladle of food onto Dad’s plate. “You damned fool.”

They ate without talking. The only sounds were Dad and Dalton chewing and scraping their forks up against the plates.

“Eat your food, Della,” Mother said quietly.

Idella forked a piece of carrot. She never could eat much when Dad was in one of his black moods. She tried mostly not to do anything.

“Where the hell were you two?”

“Don’t start something, Bill.” Mother’s voice was weary.

“I’m just asking them what in Christ’s name they were doing while we sat here waiting on them.” Dad turned to Idella. “Where were you, Della?”

“We were walking. In the woods.” The longer Dad looked at her, the more she felt she had to keep talking. “We were . . . we were looking for something.”

“It’s a secret,” Avis said, her mouth full of stew that she hadn’t dared to chew since Dad started in. “It’s a secret.”

“A secret?” Dad turned to Avis. “What kind of secret?” Idella thought that Dad might be teasing now, but she could never tell. That’s what made it so hard. Avis could pull him from out of his black moods more than anyone. “Who’s this secret from?”