The Stone Angel (2 page)

They didn’t need to talk as though they were the only
ones. I got it, too, although not often, I have to admit. Father took such a pride in the store—you’d have thought it was the only one on earth. It was the first in Manawaka, so I guess he had due cause. He would lean across the counter, spreading his hands, and smile so wonderfully you’d feel he welcomed the world.

Mrs. McVitie, the lawyer’s wife, bonneted garishly, smiled back and asked for eggs. I remember so well it was eggs she asked for—brown ones, which she thought more nourishing than the white-shelled kind. And I, in black buttoned boots and detested mauve and beige striped stockings worn for warmth and the sensible long-sleeved navy-blue serge dress he ordered each year from the East, poked my nose into the barrel that housed the sultanas, intending to sneak a handful while he was busy.

“Oh, look! The funniest wee things, scampering—”

I laughed at them as they burrowed, the legs so quick and miniature you could hardly see them, delighted that they’d dare appear there and flout my father’s mighty mustache and his ire.

“Mind your manners, miss!”

The swipe he caught me then was nothing to what I got in the back of the store after she’d left.

“Have you no regard for my reputation?”

“But I saw them!”

“Did you have to announce it from the housetops?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No good to say you’re sorry when the damage is done. Hold out your hands, miss.”

I wouldn’t let him see me cry, I was so enraged. He used a foot ruler, and when I jerked my smarting palms back, he made me hold them out again. He looked at my dry eyes in a kind of fury, as though he’d failed unless he
drew water from them. He struck and struck, and then all at once he threw the ruler down and put his arms around me. He held me so tightly I was almost smothered against the thick moth-ball-smelling roughness of his clothes. I felt caged and panicky and wanted to push him away, but didn’t dare. Finally he released me. He looked bewildered, as though he wanted to explain but didn’t know the explanation himself.

“You take after me,” he said, as though that made everything clear. “You’ve got backbone, I’ll give you that.”

He sat down on a packing-case and took me on his knee.

“What you must realize,” he said, speaking softly, hastily, “is that when I have to take the ruler to you, it hurts me just as much as it does you.”

I’d heard that before, many times. But looking at him then from my dark bright eyes, I knew it was a barefaced he. I did take after him, though—God knows he wasn’t wrong in that.

I stood in the doorway, poised and ready to run.

“Are you going to throw them away?”

“What?”

“The sultanas. Are you going to throw them away?”

“You mind your own business, miss,” he snapped, “or I’ll—”

Stifling my laughter and my tears, I turned and fled.

Quite a number of us started school that year. Charlotte Tappen was the doctor’s daughter, and she had chestnut hair and was allowed to wear it loose, with a green bow, when Auntie Doll was still putting mine in braids. Charlotte and I were best friends, and used to walk to school together, and wonder what it would be like to be Lottie Drieser and not know where your father had got to,
or even who he’d been. We never called Lottie “No-Name,” though—only the boys did that. But we tittered at it, knowing it was mean, feeling a half-ashamed excitement, the same as I’d felt once seeing Telford Simmons not bothering to go to the boys’ outhouse, doing it behind a bush.

Telford’s father wasn’t very highly regarded. He kept the Funeral Parlor but he never had a nickel to bless himself with. “He fritters away his cash,” my father said, and after a while I learned this meant he drank. Matt told me once that Billy Simmons drank embalming fluid, and for a long time I believed it, and thought of him as a ghoul and used to hurry past him on the street, although he was gentle and shambling and used to give chocolate maple-buds to Telford to distribute to us all. Telford had curly hair and a slight stammer, and all he could find to brag about was the occasional corpse in the cool vault, and when we said we didn’t believe he could really get in, he took us that time and showed us Henry Pearl’s sister, the dead baby. We went in through the basement window, the whole gang of us, Telford leading. Then Lottie Drieser, tiny and light with yellow hair fine as embroidery silk, bold as brass although her dress was patched and washed raw. Then the rest—Charlotte Tappen, Hagar Currie, Dan Currie, and Henry Pearl, who didn’t want to come along but probably thought we’d call him a sissy if he didn’t, and chant about him as we sometimes did.

He didn’t, as a matter of fact. He was a big gawky boy who rode in from the farm every day on his own horse,
and who never had much time to go around with us because he had to help so much at home.

The room was chilly, like the town icehouse, where the blocks cut from the river in winter were stored all summer under the sawdust. We shivered and whispered, terrified at the bawling-out we’d get if we were caught. I didn’t like the looks of that baby at all. Charlotte and I hung back, but Lottie actually opened up the glass-topped lid and stroked the white velvet and the white folds of satin and the small puckered white face. And then she looked at us and dared us to do the same, but no one would.

“Scaredy cats,” she said. “If ever I have a baby, and it dies, I’m going to have it all done up in satin just like this.”

“You’ll
have to find a father for it first.”

That was Dan, who never missed a chance.

“You shut up,” Lottie said, “you shut up, or I’ll—”

Telford was dancing up and down with panic. “Come on, come on—well really catch it if mamma sees us here—”

The Simmons family lived above the Funeral Parlor. Billy Simmons wasn’t anything to worry over, but Telford’s mamma was a pinch-faced parsimonious shrew who would stand on the doorstep and hand Telford a cookie after school but never had one to spare for any other child, and Telford, mortified, would chew dryly on it under her waiting eye. Out we all trooped, and as we went, Lottie whispered to Telford in a coy voice that made Charlotte and me double over with laughter.

“Don’t be scared, Telford. I’d stick up for you. I’d tell your mother it was Dan made you do it.”

“I’d as soon you didn’t,” Telford puffed, pulling his
short legs out over the casement. “It wouldn’t help a speck. She’d never listen to you, Lottie.”

When we were out on the lawn, and the basement window closed and everyone safe and innocent once more, we played shadow tag around the big spruce trees that shaded and darkened that whole yard. All of us except Lottie, that is. She went home.

I was clever in school, and Father was pleased. Sometimes when I got a star for my work, he’d give me a paper of button candies or a handful of those pastel lozenges that bore sugary messages—
Be Mine, You Beauty, Love Me, Be True
. We sat around the dining-room table every evening, Dan and Matt and I, doing our homework. An hour was required, and if we had no more schoolwork to do, Father would set us sums and dispense advice.

“You’ll never get anywhere in this world unless you work harder than others, I’m here to tell you that. Nobody’s going to hand you anything on a silver platter. It’s up to you, nobody else. You’ve got to have stick-to-itiveness if you want to get ahead. You’ve got to use a little elbow grease.”

I tried to shut my ears to it, and thought I had, yet years later, when I was rearing my two boys, I found myself saying the same words to them.

I used to dawdle over my homework so I wouldn’t have to do the sums he set. We had the
Sweet Pea Reader
, and I would trace the words with my finger and stare at the little pictures as though I hoped they’d swell and blossom into something different, something rare.

This is a seed. The seed is brown
.

But the stiff black seed on the page stayed the same, and finally Auntie Doll would poke her head in from the kitchen.

“Mr. Currie—it’s Hagar’s bedtime.”

“All right. Up you go, daughter.”

He called me “miss” when he was displeased, and “daughter” when he felt kindly disposed toward me. Never Hagar. I’d been named, hopefully, for a well-to-do spinster great-aunt in Scotland, who, to my father’s chagrin, had left her money to the Humane Society.

Once, my hand on the polished newel post at the foot of the stairs, I heard him speaking to Auntie Doll about me.

“Smart as a whip, she is, that one. If only she’d been—”

And then he stopped, I suppose because he realized that in the dining-room fris sons, such as they were, were listening.

We understood quite clearly, all of us, even then, that when Father spoke of pulling himself up by his bootstraps he meant that he had begun without money. But he’d come of a good family—he had that much of a head start. His father’s portrait hung in our dining-room, the oils olive-green and black in the background around the peaked face of the old gentleman who sported incongruously a paisley waistcoat, mustard yellow with worm-like swirls of blue.

“He died before your birth,” Father would say, “before he even knew I’d made good over here. I left when I was seventeen, and never saw him again. You were named after him, Dan. Sir Daniel Currie—the title died with him, for it wasn’t a baronetcy. He was a silk importer, but he’d served with distinction in India in his younger days. He was no great shakes as a merchant. He lost nearly everything, through no fault of his, except he was too trusting. His partner cheated him—oh, it was a bad affair all around, I can tell you, and there was I, without a hope
or a ha’penny. But I can’t complain. I’ve done as well as he ever did. Better, for I’ve trusted no partners, nor will I ever. The Curries are Highlanders. Matt—sept of what clan?”

“Sept of the Clanranald MacDonalds.”

“Correct. Pipe music, Dan?”

“Clanranald’s March, sir.”

“Right.” And then with a look at me, and a smile: “The war cry, girl?”

And I, who loved that cry although I hadn’t an inkling what it meant, would shout it out with such ferocity that the boys snickered until our father impaled them with a frown.

“Gainsay Who Dare!”

It seemed to me, from his tales, the Highlanders must be the most fortunate of all men on earth, spending their days in flailing about them with claymores, and their nights in eightsome reels. They lived in castles, too, every man jack of them, and all were gentlemen. How bitterly I regretted that he’d left and had sired us here, the bald-headed prairie stretching out west of us with nothing to speak of except couchgrass or clans of chittering gophers or the gray-green poplar bluffs, and the town where no more than half a dozen decent brick houses stood, the rest being shacks and shanties, shaky frame and tarpaper, short-lived in the sweltering summers and the winters that froze the wells and the blood.

I’d be about eight when the new Presbyterian Church went up. Its opening service was the first time Father let me go to church with him instead of to Sunday School. It was plain and bare and smelled of paint and new wood, and they hadn’t got the stained glass windows yet, but there were silver candlesticks at the front, each bearing a tiny plaque with Father’s name, and he and several others
had purchased family pews and furnished them with long cushions of brown and beige velour, so our few favored bottoms would not be bothered by hard oak and a lengthy sermon.

“On this great day,” the Reverend Dougall MacCulloch said feelingly,” we have to give special thanks to those of our congregation whose generosity and Christian contributions have made our new church possible.”

He called them off, the names, like an honor role. Luke McVitie, lawyer. Jason Currie, businessman. Freeman McKendrick, bank manager. Burns Macintosh, farmer. Rab Fraser, farmer.

Father sat with modestly bowed head, but turned to me and whispered very low:

“I and Luke McVitie must’ve given the most, as he called our names the first.”

The people looked as though they wondered whether they should clap or not, ovations being called for, and yet perhaps uncalled for in a church. I waited, hoping they would, for I had new white lace gloves and could have shown them off so well, clapping. But then the minister announced the psalm, so we all sang mightily.

Auntie Doll was always telling us that Father was a God-fearing man. I never for a moment believed it, of course. I couldn’t imagine Father fearing anyone, God included,
especially when he didn’t even owe his existence to the Almighty. God might have created heaven and earth and the majority of people, but Father was a self-made man, as he himself had told us often enough.

He never missed a Sunday service, though, nor a grace at meals. He said it always himself, slowly, while we fidgeted and peeked.

He did not marry again after our mother died, although he sometimes spoke of finding a wife. I think Aunt Dolly Stonehouse fancied he might eventually marry her. The poor soul. I was fond of her, although she made no secret of the fact that Dan was her favorite, and it seemed a pity that she believed Father held back because she was such a homely woman with her sallow skin that was never greatly improved by the witch hazel and lemon juice she dabbed on, and her top incisors that protruded like a jack rabbit’s. She was so conscious of those teeth of hers, she used to put one hand in front of her mouth when speaking, so that half the time even her words were hidden by a screen of fingers. But her appearance wasn’t what would have decided Father. Matt and Dan and I always knew he could never have brought himself to marry his housekeeper.