Dollybird (8 page)

CHAPTER 11

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“Who knows,
you might snag a husband along with the job.” The homestead officer's name was Walter. He was dressed in a black suit and bow tie, a sheen worn into the knees of his pants, the collar of his white shirt slightly frayed and grey. My ears turned hot.

“She's not looking for a husband.” Annie came to my rescue.

“Well, with her condition and all, she might do worse.” Walter surveyed me with a calculating eye, as though I were a heifer he might be considering at the local fair.

“I just need a place to see me through,” I said sternly. “Nothing else.”

“Whatever you say.” He bowed ceremoniously. “I only need your name and particulars and we'll do the paperwork. Won't cost you a thing.”

“Oh, I'm sure it'll cost somebody,” Annie murmured behind me.

Walter forced a smile, looked out the dirty window of his small office and shuffled some papers on his desk. “I've only got one prospect might take a dollybird. Flaherty. Young fellow from the East Coast.”

At least he was from home. It was a slight consolation; perhaps we'd share at least a common background in good manners.

“Found the kid a piece of land. He's coming in tomorrow to make it official. He's only getting a chance ‘cause the powers that be would rather have him out there homesteading than the bastard from Eastern Europe what applied.” Walter shrugged when Annie clucked her disapproval at his language. “That one's getting a piece of land two miles south, all carved up with ravines, lots of stones and scrub. It'll be perfect for him.” Walter laughed laconically. He was a grotesque man. He would sell his mother.

“And when do I meet this man, Flaherty?” I asked. “To decide if he's appropriate?”

“Appropriate?” Walter roared with laughter. “It'll be him choosing whether he'll take you. Not the other way round.”

The idiocy of the whole plan struck me. I was going to the middle of nowhere with a complete stranger to play house. A dollybird. I backed away. Annie touched my elbow. When I turned to her she looked wise beyond her twenty-two years.

“I don't see you have much choice, Moira,” she said quietly. “There's a contract you'll sign. He has to live up to it. You're not his slave, just his housekeeper. And if he hurts you, you can leave and he has to pay you for six months. Walter told me.”

I didn't trust Walter, but I had to trust Annie. She was right. There was no other choice. “All right then.”

Walter held the paper for me to sign. “The way the weather's warming, your man will be wanting to go soon. You'll be his in no time.” He winked as I lifted the pen.

“Not likely.” I marched out the door.

“I'll be fine,” I reassured Annie when she caught up to me outside. She had to get back to the rooming house for an
appointment
. I tried to smile, called, “Thank you,” as she rushed away, turning briefly to grin and wave.

I desperately wanted to believe everything would indeed be fine, that
my man
would at the very least be a decent human being whose intentions were as honest as my own.

“Well, hello there Moira,” a man's voice called out behind me. It was Silas, the rider from the buffalo stone. “So how is it I find you in Ibsen?” He fell into step alongside me.

I owed him no explanation but quickly told him of leaving Moose Jaw shortly after meeting him, for employment in Ibsen. It all sounded so respectable when I left out the part about Mr. Penny and the brothel.

“Mind if I walk with you?” He took my arm and glanced down at my belly protruding through the buttons of a coat grown too small. “I see you're pregnant.”

It was stunningly inappropriate, and I thought to tell him, but just then the honey wagon rattled by, pulled by a stringy mule driven by a young man. Several children followed, calling after him, taunting him with rhymes about his dirty occupation. He was clean-shaven, but one of those dark men who appear to have stubble ten minutes after they've shaved. A rim of black hair was visible beneath his cap. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place him. I'd seen the wagon from my window in the rooming house, and witnessed, too, these same children, their shrill voices rising an octave when he emerged from the outhouses carrying their buckets. Sometimes he tried to spray them a little as he swung the bucket up and over to dump it into the tank. I wished for his success. The children deserved a little of their own medicine. But he seemed only to be playing with them, and they ran screaming then, threatening with little conviction to tell their mothers, calling him names –
shithead
,
pissman
– their voices drifting away as he moved on.

We stopped to let the wagon pass. “Hey Silas,” the man waved, and Silas gave him a nod. I saw a child's small foot sticking out the end of the seat where he must have been sleeping beside the man.

“Now there's a sorry fellow. Only job he could get,” Silas said as the wagon moved down the street. He lifted his hat and ran long fingers through thinning hair. “Sounds like he's had a pretty rough time of it. Wife died of typhoid right after the birth.”

“Oh Lord.” I imagined his poor wife shaking with the
cold, the delirium of her fever. I'd seen it before. Victims of it,
everything inside purged from every orifice until their bodies
were mere shells. “The stench of typhoid is unbearable, you know.”

Silas raised his eyebrows and frowned. My neck and cheeks went hot.

“No, that's not what I mean. It's just an observation I've made.” He stopped walking. “No. You don't understand. My father's a doctor. I was his assistant.” The words tumbled out. “In fact I was planning to take over his practice before...well. Never mind.” I hurried away. “I have to be going.”

“Moira,” he called behind me. I turned briefly. “Anything I can do?”

I shook my head. What could he do? Let me be a doctor? Do real work? Live a real life? I walked quickly back to the rooming house where I boiled cabbage for women who led foul lives. While the baby kicked harder and deeper with every day, I would work and wait for my only chance to be somewhere else, someone else.

CHAPTER 12

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DILLAN

I'd had my fill
of moonshine. It was Silas brought it, brought the rotgut to this abandoned place, the dark sod shack I found after my ribs healed from Gabe's beating. People had stopped asking about the thief, bought my story of the dark and not seeing his face, thinking I was some kind of hero for trying to stop him. No one else knew about the girl being there, and we were both keeping our mouths shut.

“It helps chase those demons, boy.” Silas nodded at the jar in my hand.

What did he know of demons? He'd showed up shortly after I moved in, said he was a neighbour, said he could help a little, introduce me to people in the community and such. So far I was still on my own. But between tending the neighbours' livestock and driving the honey wagon I was making ends meets, feeding Casey okay. Didn't need nobody to take care of him either. He came with me to do the cow chores and then slept on the wagon seat while I dumped the foul buckets of them could afford to pay someone to deal with the stink coming from their prim asses. I was glad Casey was too little to understand what those young foggers were saying to me. Taffy wouldn't have liked him to see his old man put down. And I didn't want him getting no idea that was a proper way for kids to act. Casey would learn respect. I'd make sure of that. The Millers had been good to him. He'd grown, his cheeks fattened up a little. Mrs. Miller even cried a bit, handing him over and quick wiping her eyes like she knew it was silly. Just couldn't help herself. I looked over at him sleeping by the stove in a small bed fashioned out of wooden crates. Casey did that to people.

But I was getting all trapped up by the dark of winter. Couldn't sit still any more, my whole body aching for the sun. The shack was about a mile from town on a bit of a knoll. I liked it when I first saw it. Looking out the window over all that grass was just like looking out over the water at home. Bad choice for winter though. Windy as hell. The cold nosed around the sod in the windows and the snow blew in drifts against the door so every day I had to dig us out. So bloody cold. Casey slept with me so we could trap our heat. Even so, every morning the blankets were frozen to the end of the bed and iced under our noses where our breath froze. Kindle the stove to a roar, thaw the water and our bones, a little porridge and off for the day. When the snow blew hard we might as well have been a hundred miles from anywhere. On those days I could only keep the stove lit and hope the storm let up before the water run out.

Looking out now, I could see a huge moon, the cold hanging in the air, beautiful like I imagined diamonds might look.

“Holy Mother of Christ.” The moonshine whirled in my head. I leaned against the wall for support. “Godforsaken hellhole.”

“It doesn't sound like you left anything better behind.” Silas was always telling me it wasn't so bad a winter. He'd seen worse. He took a swig from the jar. Seemed immune to the stuff.

“Things were better there in some ways.” A dog or a coyote loped across the moonlit snow a hundred yards from the window, then disappeared. “Family, for one. The Flaherty clan watched out for one another. Everybody knew each other, the whole works transplanted into Cape Breton, following the first ones who came after the famine. They always talked about it.”

“So you were born here?”

“Yeah, but you'd not have known it. Didn't speak a word of English until they made us go to their schools. I was maybe seven or eight.” Children were cruel back then too, taunting; the teachers almost as bad. “We spoke the Gaelic. But you know it's funny. Each area had its own. It was so bad me and my wi... Well – people could live fifty miles apart and not understand each other.”

“She wasn't from your town then.”

He was a nosy bugger. “There was always the fiddle. Who needed to talk?” I smiled remembering. We knew how to have fun. ‘Come to the ceilidh,' they'd say and every house would show off the talents of them that lived there. “My mother loved the ceilidh.”

It was the only time I saw her laugh and stand up a little straighter. She'd stooped over with years of caring for all of us and worrying after my Da. But at a party she'd draw up tall and sing or play the fiddle a bit. Mostly she danced, stepping quicker as the night wore on, looking younger, even pretty. I'd be embarrassed and proud at the same time, watching from the floor with all the other kids, wondering if this woman was another person and my real mother was back at home bent over the stoves, pushing damp hair out of tired eyes.

“She didn't drink,” I said to Silas, and glared at the jar in his hand. With a head full of my mother, the moonshine was wrong. She left drinking to the men, who only came inside when the jug was empty and sat watching with stupid grins, or passed out in the corner, or worse, joined in with their laughing too loud and cursing in front of the kids. My Da was one of them, and all the warm feeling I got from watching Mother would turn bad.

“But my Da made up for it. Figured himself a regular troubadour, spouting the words of Robbie Burns as though the bard was one of his own. When he was drunk he forgot how much he hated the Scots.”

Silas's moonshine had fogged me over so I could barely see, forgot I was talking to him. But the memories were clear enough.

“My father is a bastard.”

“Oh?”

“She'd tell him, ‘Please Aiden. Let's just be going home now. It's late for the little ones.' Saving him his dignity. Not like Mrs. Hennesey, pulling her husband out by the ear, cursing him with every pinch, everyone laughing behind. Or Mrs. Dunhanley chasing hers out with her purse.” I laughed and Silas looked amused. I wondered if I had been as pathetic on those nights as her three boys, sullen and pimpled, trailing behind.

“I don't know why she cared about his good name,” I said, Silas just watching. “He'd stumble around, puking in the bushes, moaning about his sorry ass, how we'd be better off without him.”

It was true. But it suddenly felt like I'd said too much. Until I said it out loud I could pretend it wasn't what everyone knew and thought, could tell myself the town was wrong about my father, and the rest of us too. But far from home, drunk and lonely, it didn't seem to matter who knew. And telling it felt good.

“I grew up in a dump,” I said. “Barely hanging on, buildings leaning right out over the coulee on the edge of town.”

I heard myself saying the edge of town. It was the edge of the world. The house was a two-room shanty. Four of us slept in one tiny lean-to room off the kitchen. If you needed to piss in the night, you'd crawl over the others yelping and groaning, the same when you came back. The main room was the kitchen, where my parents' bed was tucked into the corner, three feet in the air on pine blocks. Underneath was a box-like crib pulled out for the two youngest to sleep in. And there always seemed to be baby sheep or pigs in the house. Mother hated it, but Da said we couldn't let them die of cold. It seemed an odd thing when only weeks later we'd butcher one of them that we'd saved.

“If I'd have stayed, I'd have done something with that place.”

“What'd you leave for?”

I didn't want to answer. Casey snuffled in his sleep. The boy's hair floated around his head, his face like an angel's in the glow from moonlight coming through the window. His right thumb was resting limp on his lower lip ready to comfort him. There was a knife-sharp twist in my gut. I'd like to think it was love, but I never knew for sure after Taffy. I grabbed the moonshine, took a swig and another, coughing hard and finishing off the jar, waving it at Silas.

“I've gotta get a place of my own. Walter says he has a good piece of land for me. All I have to do is go in and sign the papers. Don't know that I trust him though. Like he's not telling me something.”

“They usually give first chance to those who've farmed before,” Silas said.

“Yeah, well. I learned to stook and thresh and every other bloody thing they asked for on that harvest team.”

“There are others who have waited longer,” he said, his eyes like razor points behind his thick glasses. “Worked harder too.”

I knew it, but it was easier to begrudge someone else than figure out how to pull myself up. My head was buzzing.

“And there's the boy.” Silas jerked his head in the direction of the crib. “You're gonna need a woman out there for Casey.”

“I know, damn it. You can stop pestering me.”

“Just saying, I don't think you know how hard it's gonna be.”

“Oh shut up, you lumpy old man.” I smashed the jar onto the table and watched in surprise as glass sprayed across it and onto the floor. Casey started howling. “You get him. I gotta piss.”

Silas shook his head. “How the hell do I know what to do with this?” he muttered, walking over to Casey, who had sat up and was rubbing his eyes.

Silas bent and tried to wrap the rough blanket around Casey, picked him up and held him to his shoulder. I seen his face soften against Casey's hair and heard soothing noises coming from his throat. When I stomped out the door, Silas was patting and rubbing the boy's back as though he knew exactly what to do. I staggered to the side of the barn, sending the shadows of the horses into a skittish dance.