The Stone Angel (3 page)

I only ever saw him speaking alone with a woman once, and that was by accident. 1 used to walk out to the cemetery by myself sometimes, to read and get away from the boys. I had a place behind a chokecherry bush, at the
hill’s edge, just outside the fence that marked the cemetery limits. I’d have been twelve, or thereabouts, that afternoon.

They walked so quietly on the path farther down the hill, near the river banks, where the Wachakwa ran brown and noisy over the stones. At first I didn’t realize anyone was there, and when I did, it was too late to get away. He sounded peevish and irritable.

“What’s the matter with you? What’s the difference?”

“I was fond of him,” she said. “I loved him.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

“I did so,” she cried. “I did so!”

“Why did you say you’d come here, then?”

“I thought—” the thin high girl’s voice. “I thought, like you, what difference would it make now? But it’s not the same.”

“Why not?”

“He was young,” she said.

I thought he was going to hit her, perhaps say “hold out your hands, miss,” as he’d done to me. I didn’t know why. But through the leaves I could see destruction printed on his face. He didn’t touch her, though, nor say a word. He turned and walked away, his boots crunching on the fallen twigs, until he reached the clearing where he’d left the buggy. Then I heard his whip singing, and the horse’s surprised snort.

The woman looked after him, her face soft and blank, as though she expected nothing out of life. Then she began to trudge up the hill.

I felt no pity for her nor for him. I scorned them both—him, for walking here with her and speaking to her; her, because—well, simply because she was No-Name Lottie Drieser’s mother. Yet now, remembering their faces, I’d
be hard put to say which of them had been the crueler.

She died not so long after, of consumption. I thought it served her right, but I had no real reason for thinking so, except the fury children feel toward mysteries they have perceived but been unable to penetrate. I made sure I was the one to let him know, running all the way home from school to impart the news. But he never let on at all that he’d so much as exchanged a word with her. He made three comments.

“Poor lass,” he said. “She couldn’t have had much of a life.”

Then, as though recalling himself, and to whom he spoke, “Her sort isn’t much loss to the town, I’m bound to say.”

Then an inexplicably startled look came over his face. “Consumption? That’s contagious, isn’t it? Well, the Lord works in wondrous ways His will to perform.”

None of the three made much sense to me then, but they stuck in my mind. I’ve since pondered—which was my father?

The boys worked in the store after school. They didn’t get paid for it, of course. It didn’t do them any harm, either. Youngsters were expected to help out in those days—they didn’t laze around as they do now. Matt, skinny and bespectacled, worked doggedly, with neither a smile nor a complaint. But his fingers were all thumbs—he’d knock over a sack of lamp glasses or jolt a bottle of vanilla essence from a shelf, and then he’d catch it from Father, who couldn’t bear clumsiness. When Matt was sixteen, he asked Father for a rifle and leave to go with Jules Tonnerre to set winter traplines up at Galloping Mountain. Father refused, naturally, saying Matt would likely blow a foot off, and a pretty penny it would set him back to have an
artificial one made, and anyway he wasn’t having any son of his gallivanting around the country with a half-breed. I wonder how Matt felt, that time? I never knew. I never knew much of Matt at all.

We used to fish under the board sidewalks for coppers that had been dropped by careless Saturday night drinkers homeswinging from the Queen Victoria Hotel, and Matt would lower so seriously his string with its blob of well-chewed spruce gum. When he made a catch, he’d never spend it, or share it, not even if you’d given him the gum right out of your mouth. He’d put it away in his black tin cash box, along with the
shinplaster
, twenty-five cents in paper money, which the Toronto aunts had sent, and the half dollar Father bestowed at Christmas. He carried the key of that box around his neck like a St. Christopher medal or a crucifix. Dan and I used to tease him, dancing out of his reach.

I never saw him take any money out of that box. He wasn’t saving for a jackknife or anything like that. How mean I used to think him. I never knew the truth of it until years later, years too late, after I’d grown up and wed and gone to live at the Shipley place. It was Aunt Dolly who told me.

“Didn’t you know what he meant to do with his money, Hagar? I used to laugh at him, but he never paid any mind—that was Matt’s way. He meant to set up on his own, if you please, or study law down East, or buy a ship and go into the tea trade, such wild notions youngsters
get. He’d have been going on seventeen, I guess, when it finally dawned on him that the handful of nickels and quarters he had wouldn’t take him far. Do you know what he did? It wasn’t a bit like Matt to go and do a thing like that. He bought a fighting cock from old man Doherty—spent the whole lot at once, like a fool, and overpaid, I don’t doubt. He matched it with one of Jules Tonnerre’s, and Mart’s lost, of course—what did he know of birds? He brought it home—you and Dan must’ve been out, for I mind I was in the kitchen by myself—and he sat and looked at it for the longest time. It was enough to turn your stomach, its feathers covered with blood and the thing breathing very queerly. Then he wrung its neck and buried it. I wasn’t sorry to see it go, I can tell you. It wouldn’t even have made a boiling fowl. Too tough to be eaten, but not tough enough to fight.”

Daniel was a different sort entirely. He wouldn’t lift a finger to work, unless he was pushed to it. He was always delicate, and he knew very well the advantages of poor health. He’d shove away his porridge plate at breakfast, with the merest whiff of a sigh, and Auntie Doll would feel his forehead and ship him off to bed—“No school for you today, young man.” She’d run herself ragged, toting bowls of broth and mustard plasters up and down the stairs, and when he’d had his fill of coddling, he’d find himself feeling a trifle better and would progress to raspberry jelly and convalescence on the living-room sofa. Father had small patience with these antics, and used to say all Dan needed was fresh air and exercise. Sometimes he’d make Dan get up and get dressed, and would send him down to the store to clean out the warehouse. But sure as guns, if he did, the next day Dan would sprout chicken pox or something indisputable. It must have been mind over matter, for he
cultivated illness as some people cultivate rare plants. Or so I thought then.

When we were in our teens, Father used to let us have parties sometimes. He went over the list of intended guests and crossed off those he thought unsuitable. Among those of my age, Charlotte Tappen was always asked—that went without saying. Telford Simmons was allowed, but only just. Henry Pearl was an awkward one—his people were decent, but being farmers they wouldn’t have the proper clothes, Father decided, so it would only embarrass them for us to send an invitation. Lottie Drieser was never invited to our parties, but when she’d grown a doll-like prettiness and a bosom, Dan sneaked her in once and Father raised cain about it. Dan was fond of clothes, and when we had a party he would appear in something new, the money having been finagled from Auntie Doll. When he was not ill, he was the gayest one imaginable, like a water beetle busily boating on the surface of life.

White wooden lace festooned the verandas in those days, sedate trimming on the beige brick houses such as my father had built. Once there was a craze for Japanese lanterns, hung from the painted lace, crimson and fragile paper, bulbous and thin, ribbed with bamboo, flamboyant with gilt dragons and chrysanthemums. In each lantern there was a candle which never stayed alight for long, it seemed, for some eager lanky boy was always shinnying up the porch pillars, match in hand, to set the glow again for the reel and schottische we twirled. Lord, how I enjoyed those dances, and can hear yet the stamping of our feet, and the fiddler scraping like a cricket. My hair, pinned on top of my head, would come undone and fall around my shoulders in a black glossiness that the boys would try to touch. It doesn’t seem so very long ago.

In winter the Wachakwa river was solid as marble, and we skated there, twining around the bends, stumbling over the rough spots where the water had frozen in waves, avoiding the occasional patch where the ice was thin—“rubber ice,” we called it. Doherty from the Livery Stable owned the Manawaka Icehouse as well, and used to send out his sons with the dray and horses to cut blocks. Sometimes, skidding around a curve in the river, you’d see a dark place ahead, like a deep wound on the white skin of ice, and you’d know Doherty’s dray and ice-saw had been there that afternoon. It was at dusk, all shapes and colors having turned gray and indefinite, that my brother Daniel, skating backward to show off for the girls, fell in.

The ice was always very thick where the blocks were cut, so it didn’t break around the edges of the hole. Matt, summoned by our shrieks, skated close and drew Dan up and away. It must have been thirty below, that day, and our house was at the far end of town. Odd that it never occurred to Matt or me to take Dan into the first house we came to, but no—we were only concerned to get him home before Father got back that evening from the store, so no one except Auntie Doll would need to know. His clothes had frozen before we reached the house, even though Matt had taken off his own coat and wrapped it around him. Father was home when we got there—just Dan’s bad luck, for he got railed at good and plenty for not watching where he was going. Auntie Doll gave him whisky and lemon, and put him to bed, and the next day he seemed all right. I don’t doubt he would have been, too, if he’d been husky to start with. But he wasn’t. When he came down with pneumonia, all I could think for days on end was the number of times I’d believed him to be malingering.

The night Dan’s fever went up, Auntie Doll was over seeing Floss Drieser, Lottie’s aunt, who was a dressmaker. Auntie Doll was getting a new costume made, and she spent hours at the fitting sessions, for Floss heard everything that went on in Manawaka and was never shy about passing it on. Father was working late that evening, so only Matt and I were in the house.

Matt came out of Dan’s bedroom with his shoulders bent forward as though he were hurrying somewhere.

“What is it?” I hardly wanted to know, but I had to ask.

“He’s delirious,” Matt said. “Go for Doctor Tappen, Hagar.”

I did that, flying through the white streets, not minding how many drifts I stepped in nor how soaking my feet got. When I reached Tappen’s house, the doctor wasn’t there. He’d gone to South Wachakwa, Charlotte said, and the way the roads were, it wasn’t likely he’d be back until morning, if then. That was long before the days of snow-plows, of course.

When I got back home, Dan was worse, and Matt, corning downstairs to hear what I had to say, looked terrified, furtively so, as though he were trying to figure out some way of leaving the situation to someone else.

“I’ll go to the store for Father,” I said.

Matt’s face changed.

“No, you won’t,” he said with sudden clarity. “It’s not Father he wants.”

“What do you mean?”

Matt looked away. “Mother died when Dan was four. I guess he’s never forgotten her.”

It seemed to me then that Matt was almost apologetic, as though he felt he ought to tell me he didn’t blame
me for her dying, when in his heart he really did. Maybe he didn’t feel that way at all—how can a person tell?

“Do you know what he’s got in his dresser, Hagar?” Matt went on. “An old plaid shawl—it was hers. He used to go to sleep holding it, as a kid, I remember. I thought it had got thrown out years ago. But it’s still there.”

He turned to me then, and held both my hands in his, the only time I ever recall my brother Matt doing such a thing.

“Hagar—put it on and hold him for a while.”

I stiffened and drew away my hands. “I can’t. Oh Matt, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t. I’m not a bit like her.”

“He wouldn’t know,” Matt said angrily. “He’s out of his head.”

But all I could think of was that meek woman I’d never seen, the woman Dan was said to resemble so much and from whom he’d inherited a frailty I could not help but detest, however much a part of me wanted to sympathize. To play at being her—it was beyond me.

“I can’t, Matt.” I was crying, shaken by torments he never even suspected, wanting above all else to do the thing he asked, but unable to do it, unable to bend enough.

“All right,” he said. “Don’t then.”

When I had pulled myself together, I went to Dan’s room. Matt was sitting on the bed. He had draped the shawl across one shoulder and down onto his lap, and he was cradling Dan’s head with its sweat-lank hair and chalk face as though Dan were a child and not a man of eighteen. Whether Dan thought he was where he wanted to be or not, or whether he was thinking anything at all, I don’t know. But Matt sat there like that for several hours, not moving, and when he came down to the kitchen where I had finally gone, I knew Dan was dead.

Before Matt let himself mourn or even tell me it was over, he came close to me and put both his hands on me—quite gently, except that he put them around my throat.

“If you tell Father,” Matt said, “I’ll throttle you.”

That was how little he knew of me, to imagine I might. I used to wonder afterward, if I had spoken and tried to tell him—but how could I? I didn’t know myself why I couldn’t do what he had done.

So many days. And now there comes to mind another thing that happened when I was almost grown. Above Manawaka, and only a short way from the peonies drooping sullenly over the graves, was the town dump. Here were crates and cartons, tea chests with torn tin stripping, the unrecognizable effluvia of our lives, burned and blackened by the fire that seasonally cauterized the festering place. Here were the wrecks of cutters and buggies, the rusty springs and gashed seats, the skeletons of conveyances purchased in fine fettle by the town fathers and grown as racked and ruined as the old gents, but not afforded a decent concealment in earth. Here were the leavings from tables, gnawed bones, rot-softened rinds of pumpkin and marrow, peelings and cores, pits of plum, broken jars of preserves that had fermented and been chucked reluctantly away rather than risk ptomaine. It was a sulphurous place, where even the weeds appeared to grow more gross and noxious than elsewhere, as though they could not help but show the stain and stench of their improper nourishment.