Girl Runner Page 3

I’m excited, impatient. I try to hold my breath. I mark Cora’s slow approach, measure her strides. Here she comes, proudly carrying the bottle of Mother’s tincture, marching with her chin in the air—and why should Mother trust Cora with the bottle just because she’s older? Here she comes, nearer and nearer, looking as if she’s forgotten we are meant to do this together.

  My exit could not be more perfectly timed.

  Cora is opposite my hiding spot when I rush out with a thrilling whoop.

  Cora shrieks. Into the air shoots the bottle.

  “It’s just me!” I laugh.

  But she isn’t laughing, and neither am I when we see where Mother’s bottle has landed. It’s struck a stone, and broken. We stare at the dark liquid leaking into the dusty roadway. We are each weighing our blame. Cora can say it’s all my fault for frightening her, but she was the one holding the tincture, and we both know our mother assigns consequences evenly. If our mother is anything, it’s fair.

  Cora’s eyes meet mine. We arrive at the same conclusion, at the same moment: we won’t tell. No one will ever know. Together, we kick the glass into the ditch with our tough-soled feet, and sprinkle dirt over the damp spot in the road, as if we expect someone to come looking for evidence.

  In silence, we continue to Edith’s. This time, I don’t run ahead.

  As we’re walking up the lane, Cora says, “You play with Little Robbie and I’ll do the washing up.”

  I say, “Little Robbie can help sweep. He’s handy with the dustpan.”

  It is rare for us to agree. I’m not certain I like it. I feel uneasy.

  Edith and Carson’s lane is bare, no trees, and there are no trees planted in the yard around the house either, not even young saplings. The grass is burnt away by the sun. I shoot a quick scanning glance, but I don’t spy Carson anywhere, and I hope I won’t; then I think, with horror, what about Fannie? I’m terrified of seeing them here, together, their presence like a haunting, like their languid selves might part the corn and float toward us, hand in hand. I’m shaky, almost glad for Cora’s presence. Everywhere I look, I see what’s been hidden, and there is doubleness layered behind what is, making a blur of the outlines, sickening me.

  Little Robbie is playing by himself in the shade on the porch. He runs across the hard dirt when he sees us, straight into my arms, and he steadies me like the kitten did.

  “Fetch your dustpan,” I boss him. “We’ve come to play house. You can be the big brother and I’m the mum!”

  He wriggles down, looks at Cora and tries to say something. He’s only got a few words, and he sucks his thumb every waking minute. But I understand what he’s asking even if Cora can’t.

  “Cora will be the wee granny,” I say, answering his question.

  Cora doesn’t like that one bit, and I’m relieved, like I’ve put something back where it belongs.

  “Hello Edith!” Cora calls brightly, going into the house ahead of us. “Me and Aggie have come to visit!”

  Edith says hello, but she doesn’t get up to greet us. The kitchen door smacks shut behind us. There is no screen in it, and the house is stifling, the counter swarming with flies and no wonder: it’s a jumble of dirty dishes and pots.

  Cora and I work together to set things straight. Edith rocks in a chair in the corner, in her lap a little handiwork. She shows it to us: she is embroidering tiny flowers and vines around the hem of a white nightgown such as a newborn baby might wear. She looks the same as always, tall like Fannie, who is her full sister, but gaunt at the extremities, thick in the middle. She and Fannie don’t look much like sisters, aside from their height, although both are very pretty, much prettier than Olive or Cora or I will ever be. Their mother must have been prettier than ours, that’s the plain truth of it. But Edith’s prettiness is faded, like it’s been left outside to curl and shrivel in the sun. She is younger than Fannie, but you’d never guess it.

  Cora and I stay as long as we can stand it.

  Little Robbie doesn’t want to let go of my hand. He follows me into the lane and I turn and walk him back to the porch again, and then again, and then I’m grown tired of it, and I speak sternly: “Little Robbie, I’m going on now! You can’t come!” I have to leave him crying and kicking his heels on the porch. I want to run to get away, but I’m suddenly weary. I keep checking over my shoulder to see whether Little Robbie is going to follow me again. When he doesn’t, I feel next thing to crying myself. He’s given up.

  Cora stays silent until we pass the faint traces on the road where the bottle broke, and then she says, “Did you see the loaf of bread? Mouldy. I should have thrown it out, but I don’t know if Edith has more.”

  “I think Edith looks poorly,” I say.

  Cora disagrees. “Edith always looks poorly.”

  I say, “She didn’t even get up from the rocker.”

  “She’s like that now,” says Cora, and she looks at me and frowns.

  I’m about to argue, but Cora repeats herself: “Edith is like that now, anytime we visit. You know that. There’s nothing new to tell Mother.”

  “I guess not,” I say slowly. I don’t want Mother discovering what we’ve done—or neglected to do—any more than Cora does.

  It seems Fannie’s returned because we’ve hardly arrived when she calls us in to set the table for supper. I argue that I still have to do the chickens. That’s a safe bet for me. I pretty much always have to do the chickens. I don’t want to see Fannie just now anyway, not at all.

  Cora says that’s okay, she will set the table. We glance at each other and I think, like twins.

  HERE IS THE EVIDENCE against Cora and me: we do not deliver the tincture. We do not tell our mother what happened to the bottle. We do not say that Edith is looking poorly (more poorly than usual?).

  But Edith is poorly, and she wakes the next morning in a worse state, a fact we learn when Carson arrives before breakfast and pounds on our door, like husbands do, shouting for Mother.

  There’s blood! We hear him say that, Cora and I.

  Cora and I are making eggs and biscuits for the hired men’s morning meal, and we don’t stop in our work. Olive has been churning cream for butter, and she runs to the door that opens out of the dining room, the first to get to Carson. I’m hardly breathing. Is this my doing? Cora rolls and cuts the biscuit dough into squares, her head bent, eyes wide, and I know that she is thinking the same.

  Fannie is not yet awake, but this isn’t unusual. Fannie is the last to rise. She’s not like the rest of us, but I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it’s only that she’s never hurrying to get somewhere.

  My mother is a blur of hurry. She fastens her boots. She keeps a sturdy canvas bag with handles in the cloak closet by the dining room door, prepared for any sudden need. In her work, needs almost always arrive suddenly. She checks the kitchen: “Good girls. Get the breakfast on for the men, and send Fannie to me when she comes down.” Her tone is serious, but unafraid.

  I let Cora tell Fannie. I don’t hear Fannie’s reply, just her feet on the steps and the door slamming behind her as she rushes off—as Fannie, who never hurries, runs now to help Mother, and Edith, and maybe too Carson, I think, and then I tell myself, For shame.

  Father seems not to hear the uproar; only he doesn’t touch his biscuits and eggs.

  “You put too much salt in,” Cora tells me, of the eggs.

  “You burnt the biscuits!”

  Father retreats in silence to the barn.

  After we feed the salty eggs and burnt biscuits to the hired men, who don’t complain, and after we clean up, Olive says we should get going on the beans today, even with Mother and Fannie away. Cora says, “Who put you in charge?” And Olive says, “Fine. Aggie and I will do it. Aggie’s a good worker, aren’t you, Aggie?” None of us mention George. He is being deliberately slow over his tea. But he hears us arguing in the kitchen and comes in with his cup and saucer, and says, “I’ll help you, Aggie,” and I’m pleased, even though I expect little from George’s help,
and little is what I get. But companionship counts for something. After Olive and I have picked a mass of beans, George and I tail and snap them in the shade on the long porch that runs the length of three sides of the house.

  Olive prepares the jars, and the hot water bath. George and I don’t talk about what might be happening at Edith’s. George tells me instead that he knows a boy who got into the army at fifteen.

  “What’d he want to do that for?”

  George says, “It’s better’n snapping beans.”

  “You want black toes?”

  “I’ll keep my feet dry.”

  “I’ll tell Mother.”

  “You won’t.”

  “You wouldn’t do it,” I say.

  George says nothing for a while. Then he coughs. His cough is ever present, a patient wheeze that worsens when there is chaff or dust around, or grass, or buds, or trees, or weeds, or hay, or animals, or smoke. He looks at me and says, “Why wouldn’t I, Aggie? Why’d you think I wouldn’t?”

  It will hurt him to say it. I hesitate.

  “Why, Aggie?”

  Because you’re snapping beans with me. Because of that cough. Because you’re skinny as a scarecrow. Because you like napping in the shade in the middle of the afternoon. Because they won’t have you.

  “Because you’re not allowed to be killed,” I growl with an angry force that hurts my throat.

  Mother says little when she returns, without Fannie, late in the afternoon. Mother is only stopping to gather fresh linens, and to prepare a tea from the dried herbs she stores, hanging, in the cellar. If she’s noticed the absence of the tincture she sent with us yesterday, she doesn’t mention it. In Edith’s house items might be lost or misplaced quite easily; a person would not expect to find anything where it ought to be found.

  But my hands start shaking at the thought.

  Mother sends me to the cellar with a candle to fetch up some herbs. I close my eyes and select them by scent: calendula, blue and black cohosh, anise, chamomile, red raspberry leaf. When I bring the herbs to Mother, she reads the fear on my face, if not the guilt, and she thanks me, her hand gentle along my cheek.

  “Your sister will recover.”

  I can’t ask about the baby that might have been.

  I burst into tears.

  3

  Conspirators

  WE’VE REACHED the elevator doors.

  Keep the nurse talking, distract her, there’s a girl. This is the slowest damn elevator you’re likely to encounter. I ride up and down on occasion. They push us outside to “catch the breeze,” as they call it, arranging us all in a row like sale items outside a discount store. Who would want us? The young and healthy march past, determined not to be depressed by the sight of us, warning them of things to come—if they’re lucky, I say, trying to pass the joke along to the crumpled crone in the chair beside mine, but as we’ve lost the ability to toss words through the air, I aim for psychic means, wondering whether she might hear me. Stranger things have happened. When she chuckles, I am certain she has. And then we are wheeled back inside to ride the slowest damn elevator in existence back upstairs again.

  This happens daily in fine weather, and never for the rest of the year.

  It hasn’t happened in recent memory, if recent memory is to be trusted, which I am not so certain it is. If you were to ask me to name the month, I couldn’t tell you. I could tell you the colour of the sky outside the window under which I was planted before the nurse woke me to say you were here: it was white. That could mean anything.

  The elevator doors open.

  “Keep her blanket tucked, and if she seems chilled, bring her home right away.” Is she really going to let me go? “Have fun, Mrs. Smart!” The nurse presses in to kiss my head, or more precisely, the woollen hat that is itching my nearly naked scalp.

  I hear what she’s said, what she’s called this place: home. I’m enraged, though I can’t think why. I’ve called worse places home.

  The girl has taken over the pushing and we bump too quickly into the sighing elevator, my knees squashed against the back wall.

  She doesn’t think to turn me.

  I can hear her hitting the buttons rather wildly, but now is not the time to panic. What’s her hurry? A certainty sits happily with me as we descend in slow motion, that the pair of them are attempting a breakout. A heist. I smile to my dull reflection on the silver wall.

  Am I conspirator or stolen object? How can I tell the difference?

  She is whispering—to herself, I think, and not to him or to me—but I nod anyway, to reassure her as she pulls me backward out of the elevator. The wheels catch on an edge of carpet, and in her struggle she nearly manages to dump me out, prevented only by the belt.

  I can hear the girl’s breathing accelerate as she rushes us through the mouldering lobby.

  The young man holds the door open.

  Max.

  There, I’ve remembered, and the girl is a green leafy vegetable like chard, but not chard. Bitter. I’m in my mother’s garden, travelling the rows, darting from end to end pulling peppers and tomatoes and beans while my brother George lies in the shade of his hat beside the wide basket I am working to fill.

  “Well done!” George crunches on a pickling cucumber I’ve brought to the basket. He’s supposed to be helping, but I don’t mind. I’ve got a job to do and I like a job to do; George likes not doing a job. So we’re both of us happy, together. Green cabbage, red cabbage, broccoli, parsley, celery, scallion, kale. Kale.

  Her name is Kale, or not quite, but close enough. Kaley, as I am called Aggie, not Aganetha; a pet name, a diminutive, most likely given in kindness, though not always. Depends who’s speaking.

  She’s got us smoothly through the door and we are whipping down the ramp and into the brightness of day. The air is damp, but chilly. I am confused, struggling to remember the hour, the season, the whole of it, struggling to place myself in time. My hands fumble at the blanket over my knees, and I discover it is wrapped all the way to my chest. The sun stinging my eyes. The wind catching my breath.

  I open my mouth to drink the heavy air.

  Thirst. I am thirsty.

  We cross a street without pausing, and the girl curses at a car that veers too near, though it’s clear she herself is at fault. We crash up and over the curb. I grunt. She’s got me turned on an awkward angle as she cranes to look behind, not ahead. She wants to be clear of the place from which we’ve escaped. Only when she’s sure do we stop.

  I think, We are under a tree. I think, The tree has its leaves. I think, The leaves are young. Clues abound.

  I hear what the girl’s saying, though it’s not directed at me. She is speaking to the young man, to Max, whose name I have no trouble remembering while hers already eludes me, vanished among the garden rows.

  She’s saying, “This is Aganetha Smart. We’ve got her! This is really her!”

  HERE COMES FANNIE down the lane.

  I’m walking the fence rail, my feet bare, the skirt of my dress tied into a knot at the side.

  The front field is a pasture for horses this summer, but today there’s only the old mare and her foal under one of the shade trees near the fence. The other horses are working—the light-legged gelding is pulling Mother to wherever she’s gone to help this morning, and the team is hauling the mower over the hay field, guided by one of the hired men.

  Here comes Fannie, closer and closer.

  I stop, one-legged on a post, but I don’t bother to wave. Fannie’s away inside her head, I can see it in her long stare, eyes ahead. She gives no sign of seeing me, passing right by, and turns toward the graveyard, though I think, perhaps, she’s going farther, elsewhere, to Carson and Edith’s. I feel invisible. Maybe I feel angry too.

  I jump from the post to the fence rail, and run toward the road in a series of hurried steps that turn to stumbles, to hesitation and wildly flailing arms. Watch me fall, Fannie, just watch me!

  George is lying under a shade tree n
ear the mare and her filly. He has seen. He jumps to his feet.

  But I won’t fall—I’m only tricking. I bend over with laughter as he jogs anxiously toward me.

  “Hey,” he calls. “Aggie!”

  I right myself. I’m pleased to have fooled someone: it makes me like George more. I turn the other way and sprint past him to where the fence stops, near the house, and I can see Olive hanging out a load of white sheets.

  She sees me too: “Have you mucked the chicken pen?”

  I pretend not to hear, and run back toward George, who leans on the fence, grinning, feeding the mare a handful of grain from his pocket. “How do you do it, Aggie?”

  “Easy,” I say, and I mean it.

  Motion comes lightly to me. Maybe this is how others feel about calculations and equations, or about words, or about their feelings, about choices, about right and wrong. Maybe this is how my mother feels when she’s helping a woman bring a new baby into the world. Maybe this is how my father feels when he’s building one of his inventions.

  What I make can’t be seen. It vanishes the instant it’s created. It can never be made in just the same way again. How can I ever grow bored of it?

  “I don’t think you’ll ever fall,” says George.

  “Of course I won’t.”

  The old mare is standing nearby, scratching her fat belly against the boards of the fence, and on impulse I step from fence to horse.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” George looks alarmed, and I like him even more. “What are you doing, Aggie?”

  “Watch me.”

  But the mare shifts uneasily. She’s ticklish. She doesn’t like where I’ve landed. I come into a crouch and stretch out my arms for balance. Toes dig in, heels grip, arches rise. Her thin summer coat is slippery, oily. The muscles in her shoulders ripple under my weight. I can feel every flicker rising up from her body through mine, and I rise too, to standing.

  “Come on, George! Get her going!”

  George glances around, but who’s to see the two of us playing, as we shouldn’t, on this summer’s afternoon?

  He reaches his arm around the mare’s head, firmly holding the bony frontal plate of her huge skull. A horse’s head is as long as a child’s torso, beautifully carved. George clucks his tongue, but his eyes are on me. We take a step and another and more, strolling into the middle of the grassy pasture. The filly keeps pace beside its mother’s rump.