Refuge Read online

  This is where she brought her lame and wounded: the blue jay with the broken wing, the nest of mouse pups abandoned by their mother, the barn cat that was half blind. She attached wire cages to the outside of the hut, carved splints and knotted slings. Every morning, she rowed herself across the strait with a muslin bag at her feet, bulging with table scraps, worms and crickets, various seeds. At the end of the day, she could scarcely pull herself away from the frail and broken creatures she’d rescued. She was convinced she could hear them calling to her in the night, their voices faint through the windows that May slammed shut against the dark.

  She barely knew her letters, but she understood the articulation of bones in their sockets, the cavities that cradle viscera, the placement of lungs and kidneys and heart, the organs of sight, digestion, reproduction, and thought. She watched her father peel the skin from the head of a slaughtered steer and work the jawbone, noting the movement of the various muscles of its face, tracing each strand from its origin to its final attachment, probing with instruments he fashioned from bits of metal that fell off his machines, peering into the light that poured down from six oil lamps hung from a contraption he’d rigged from a rust-pitted harvesting rake.

  She was never squeamish, not in the least. She had seen blood flow thin as water from a wound, seen it thicken to scarlet mercury, setting like chokecherry jelly as it cooled, darkening until it was black and sticky as tar, another substance altogether. Whatever shiver of discomfort she felt at the sight of blood was provoked only by the wrongness of it outside the body, when it should be coursing through its subcutaneous watershed, streams and rivulets of bright red that she would draw rippling down the outline of an arm or a leg, flowing up through the heart into the brain.

  The teachers at the school in the village sent home notes, occasionally venturing to the house themselves, clucking their ponies up the long, weed-choked lane, taking one aunt or another to task, urging them to intervene. And for a while the aunts, a series of strong-minded and agreeable women dressed in plain white blouses and dark, sturdy skirts, saw to it that she was washed and combed in the mornings, then force-marched down the dirt road with her sisters, dust rising in a wedge behind them. But the minute their attention was drawn to the lessons chalked on the board, she would slip out the door and run back the way she’d come.

  In the end, the teachers, the aunts, and even May gave up. The barn, with its makeshift laboratory and its rows of heaving animals with cracked teats and fevered udders, calves struggling to be born, chicks gasping their last breaths, horses with overgrown hooves and scabby eyes, became her nursery, her primary school.

  She was left to spend the daylight hours with her father, the experiments they performed causing such a shimmer of electricity between them that when they were compelled by one aunt or another to abandon the laboratory for the parlour, their brains would stay behind as if severed cleanly, still weighing and measuring and observing at such a pitch that their bodies quivered with imperceptible motion, a vibration and a pulsing that set the teacups on the mahogany table to tapping, the ferns in their wicker stands to trembling, the dust motes to dancing. Every object in the room would fidget with the force of their mental exertions although their faces remained smooth, nothing to reveal what was passing between them except for a certain distracted look in Papa’s silver-blue eyes, matched precisely by her own.

  Her father had nailed two wide hemlock boards across the manger in a back stall. That was where he performed his dissections and trials, analyzed the crops and intestines of the hens the aunts roasted for his Sunday dinners. He fed the birds greens or corn or crickets an hour, two hours, six hours before their demise, gauging how long it took the nourishment to move through the digestive tract, what effect each food had on the consistency and colour of the gastric juices. Inspired by his experiments, she designed trials of her own, keeping careful measure of the feed she offered to her furred and feathered patients, what was taken, how often and how much.

  Papa would bend over her mice and birds, inspecting the marks she’d scratched on a strip of birch bark.

  “But what have you learned, Cass?” he’d say. “It is not enough to observe, to know the facts. What do they mean?”

  She sensed there was an answer, although she could never think what it might be.

  “I don’t know,” she’d say, and he’d smile, “That’s a start.”

  Alone on the island, she fell into the habit of singing. Crooning it was, nothing as organized as song. A low sound to soothe the wounded and the dying, the slowly healing. Wordless, trailing melodies without end except for that imposed by a shout from a sister on the shore or her own realization that the sun had all but set. Singing took the place of talking, or at least eliminated the need for it, a melody rising from her lips no matter where she was, on the island or in the barn, at the supper table, tucked in the bed she shared with May, filling the empty spaces with meaningless sound.

  Being the youngest of the MacCallums was both her torment and her saving grace. Rarely noticed, she was seldom missed. She accumulated small comforts on the island: a blanket, a plate, a cup, a candle stub. She took to keeping an apple or two, a heel of bread, a rind of cheese tied in a cloth that hung from a branch inside her hut. No one seemed to care how long she stayed away.

  Except once, late in August, when the sky darkened without warning and a wind rose up, whipping Papa’s voice to ragged snatches through the trees.

  “Stay. Where. You. Are,” he yelled when she came to the water’s edge. He stood tall as a prophet in his flapping greatcoat, his fist raised in the air, silhouetted in a sudden flash of white against the towering, swaying spruce.

  They stood rooted to their opposite shores, peering at the water that heaved between them, the clouds surging above, swallows tumbling through the air. Then the storm bore down in earnest and he waved her back into the trees. For hours, she crouched in her hut, wrapped in a ragged quilt, thunder growling all around, erupting now and then in outrage, the gaps in the boards pulsing with wild light, then snapping back to blackness.

  Eventually she slept, dreaming strange and restless dreams of faces she had never seen, places she had never been. She woke at last in the quiet dark to Papa bending over her, whispering her name, lifting her up off the boughs, damp beneath her cheek, the needles shifting against her skin like small snakes licking their tongues in the curled shell of her ear.

  All my life, that dream has haunted me. Maybe it was a prophecy: that I would live as long as Methuselah, wait on this small island for a young supplicant to row across the water, struggle up the path, bearing her own brand of snake oil.

  A young woman who claims to be flesh of my flesh.

  Family, at this late date.

  After I have outlived them all.

  Her sisters scattered from the farm like leaves blown from a tree, their departures so sudden and unexpected that she walked about confused and faintly alarmed, as if she’d awakened and found first one bit of flesh missing, then another. Her only comfort was her father. She’d reach to touch his arm when he was close, and when he wasn’t, she’d search him out, settling quietly in a corner while he milked a cow or counted the speckles on a wren’s egg, content just to be nearby.

  Lizzie went first, marrying a boy who worked for his father on a farm two concessions over. Grace packed up and moved to the prairies with a sodbuster who’d come east with the sole purpose of taking home a wife. Belle moved into the village and rented a room in a house two doors from the church where she played piano on Sundays and conducted various choirs through the week. Lily took a job in a millinery shop in the city, where she saved enough to put herself through teachers’ training, then followed Grace to the prairies to become mistress of a one-room school in a place called Forget. Ruth and Winnie and Ida, only a year apart each, married boys they met at the fall fair dance, one a hauler with the feed mill, another a barber’s apprentice, the third
a salesman who peddled ladies’ lingerie door-to-door, all of them such good friends that they were married in a single ceremony at the farm the following spring, just a month before Archduke Ferdinand was shot and all the unmarried men were siphoned from the villages to the trenches in Europe, never to be seen again.

  She heard the war like distant thunder.

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” Papa said, although something in the look on his face made her turn to the newspapers piled at one end of the kitchen table to see for herself. That was how she learned to read, plucking words from the battlefields of the Great War — assault, occupation, resistance, no man’s land — strings of letters without meaning until her father gave them shape.

  Only May stayed with them on the farm. She was the middle sister, born the same year as the century. Lizzie was the eldest, but it was May they deferred to, the most serious and dutiful of them all, responsible before her time. The others left their hair loose as long as they dared, but May wound hers in a bun as soon as she could twist it tight and hold it firm. She even wore Mother’s dresses, made over for herself. “No point in letting them go to waste,” she said, never flinching as she cut into the flowered skirt, not even after Papa leapt from his chair and tore out of the room.

  Eventually May left, too, to work at a bakery in the city, so that for a few splendid months, she had her father to herself. They sat in silence over breakfast like an old married couple, looking up at each other as they scraped their plates clean, a simple nod enough to carry them back to the barn, the pleasures of experimentation and explication heightened by the thrill of the two of them alone together on the farm.

  But the pace of the city didn’t suit May, and the rough country pies and cobblers she made weren’t to city tastes, either, and so she returned. She became the daughter who stayed. There was one in every family, up and down the concession roads: the girl who tied on her mother’s apron and tended the house, the hens, and the gardens.

  The barn was her father’s place, and hers, so she saw it first — how he grew gaunt beside her in the makeshift laboratory. Through the fall he developed a cough, dry and rasping. Over the winter he weakened, his cough often damp with blood. She folded her own clean undershirts into poultices for his chest, smearing on the salve he made when the horses struggled for breath. In the small notebook he’d given her, she took note of the changes in his pallor, his diminishing vigour. But no amount of forehead-cooling or record-keeping had the least effect.

  When he could no longer leave the house, she brought him his contraptions to work on at the kitchen table, and when the cough kept him in his bed, she read to him there. Each time he whispered, “Here’s a question for you, Cass,” she’d open the slim notebook, leaning close and scribbling, even after he fell back against the pillow, calling for May.

  May changed his soaked sheets and brought him custards that she spooned between his lips, dabbing his mouth with a linen cloth.

  “I can do that, let me do it,” she begged, but May only shooed her out of the room.

  “Go clean up the kitchen,” her sister snapped, closing the door against her. “That would be a help.”

  Once, she burst into the room just as May was removing Papa’s nightshirt. His arm was caught behind him, and he was looking up at May, his eyes worn soft. “You’re so good to me,” he was saying, “just like your mother.”

  She coughed right at that moment, an eruption in her chest she couldn’t suppress, and May rushed to her, spun her around, and shoved her to the top of the stairs, hissing, “Stay out. You only make things worse.”

  After that, the door to her father’s room stayed firmly closed. For hours, she sat on the stairs, watching, hoping for a glimpse of Papa, a moment when she could slip inside to sit by his bed. But May never left. Then suddenly, it was too late: all the sisters were gathering to lay out their father in a narrow box in the parlour, the air thick with the smell of roasting meat.

  When she couldn’t stand it any longer, she pushed in a fury through the trees and swam the icy water to the island, where she hurled herself against the boards of the hut until the wood ripped free and the roof collapsed, birds rising raucous around her as their cages split and burst.

  My mind is restless as a cat. The minute I rest my eyes, my thoughts claw at one closed door or another, no logic to it at all.

  In the pines, the crows are cawing like madmen. I feed them, for the company of their calls. Slabs of stale bread that they dip in the lake. Maybe they’re hoping she’ll give them something too.

  I can make out her face now. Round, despite that skinny body. As if everything she eats goes to those high, full cheeks. Her nose is broad; the lips, generous. A smudge of dirt at her temple.

  I see her, but she can’t see me. I have wheeled my chair deep into the shadows, my back pressed against the kitchen door, my shawl over my head. The screens will haze my shape to a dark mound — a heap of old clothes, maybe, or a pile of garbage.

  I sit very still. I allow a faint hum to escape into the whine of the cluster flies, the piping of the frogs.

  When she knocks, I can refuse to answer.

  Until then, I watch. Collect what details I can.

  She was lying limp against the cold, damp earth when May found her and rowed her back to the house, dressed her in a clean, black skirt, held her upright at the graveside, frail and feverish.

  When Doctor Stevens discovered a spot on her lung, May brought her broth and custards, too, and Papa’s books to read. She grew weaker, her cough bloodier. The only tunes that left her lips were wretched moans. She refused to look at May, refused the food pressed on her, convinced it was her sister who had ferried home the disease that took her father from her.

  “She’s not like him,” she heard the doctor say to May. “She’s young and strong. With open-air treatment at the sanatorium, there’s a chance she will survive.”

  So her sister took a job in the kitchen of the sprawling hospital that was two days’ journey to the north and west. May packed a bag for each of them and pulled the latch closed on the empty stone house.

  She had no say in the matter. She watched from her nest of blankets in the back of the doctor’s boxy black motorcar, her eyes burning like hot coins in the hollows of her face.

  I am like Papa, she whispered to the cold, still air, although she couldn’t quite believe what seemed a certainty: that she would never see the island or the lake again.

  ~

  Consider the beetle, her father wrote in one of his notebooks. Take it out of the forest and set it on a rocky shore. Left long enough, through sufficient generations, its kind will be transformed. The shell will thicken against the sun, turn the colour of stone. Tiny leg-hooks will evolve to dig caverns in sand. It won’t happen in a day, it may take centuries to complete, but this is where adaptation begins — with the unfamiliar.

  “Cass,” Papa whispered, the last thing he said to her. “It’s the will to survive that makes us change.”

  ~

  She was a plain girl, square-jawed and small-eyed, her gaze sharp. Her hair was unruly, neither yellow nor brown. She had learned to keep it out of sight, braided into a thick rope that she tucked down the back of her dress or curled up inside her cap.

  At the sanatorium, the nurses washed her hair with carbolic, then cut it short. When one of them held up a mirror, her face, within its new frame of coarse curls, looked almost pretty, her skin pale with the wasting disease, her features honed. When she turned, her hair brushed her cheek, falling across her forehead in a thin veil that forced her eyes to open wide, so that she felt herself staring with wonder at her fate, just as she had stared at the fates of all the frogs and hens and heifers she had helped to their deaths on the farm.

  She did exactly as she was told, too weakened by loss and illness to resist. She lay in her narrow bed on the sprawling verandah of the sanatorium, breathing air filtered clean
by the pines. On either side of her, rows of women rested in their cure chairs, bound in flannel warmed in great ovens, the population on the long porches changing daily as patients were wheeled out and others settled into their place.

  She was the youngest on the ward, too young to have clear expectations of her future, so she didn’t fall into the despair that gripped the other women: mothers whose sons had died alone in the mud; wives mourning husbands who had never seen their daughters; young women whose lovers had deserted them at the first sign of the disease. She watched from the island of her sickbed as the wreck of their plans collapsed about them, convinced she could see the grey stain of death in their breath long before the women disappeared from the porch.

  “Cassie,” May said when she came up from the kitchens to visit at the end of the first week.

  “Call me Cassandra. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Don’t talk,” May said, standing stiffly by the bed. She reached toward the covers, then seemed to think better of it. “Behave yourself,” she said, her hands pressing a hollow into her skirt. “The sooner you get better, the sooner we can go home.”

  ~

  She spoke to no one, not even to herself. Swaddled deep in her blankets on the cure porch, she did nothing but rest, which seemed an activity in itself: rest before bed and rest after waking; rest to get ready for a meal and rest to recover afterward. The veil of trees beyond the railings was familiar and soothing, so that when she’d waken from a doze, especially in those first feverish days, she’d believe she was on the island, in her hut, recuperating alongside the squirrel pups, the wounded rabbit, the jay. Later, when she imagined her disease, it was in her father’s terms, shaped by their talk of war. “Think of the node,” Papa said, “as the body’s defences surrounding the invader and holding it siege until the infection withers, leaving nothing but a battle scar.”