Chapter 10 #23
“Well,” says the clerk, flushing, “I regret to—ah—inform you that there was an accident at that logging site, some weeks hence. The man in question was killed.”
Enda examines the two clerks in front of her. The fraying necktie of one. The livid and angry-looking pustules on the jaw of the other. Their fingernails ingrained with black rims of ink.
“An accident?” she parries, as if this is an argument she can win. “But he’s an experienced axe-man. He—he—he told me he knew how to stay out of trouble. He can’t have been—”
She will not say “killed,” she will not, because to say it would make it true, it would mean she accepts their explanation, when it cannot have happened, it cannot have taken place, there must be some mistake.
The two men exchange a glance. The young clerk fiddles with his cuffs, running a finger around them, as if they are too tight.
“It was in the river,” the other clerk says, “I believe. The timber was being sent downstream but the trunks became jammed and this man entered the water to release them—which, by the way, is not a practice recommended by the company—and he became trapped beneath them. His body was recovered further downstream. That is all I can tell you.”
Enda stares at the clerks. Their words are so perfunctory, but her mind is filled with the rushing of currents, the crash and power of the river, the jumble of wet tree trunks, their awful roll and weight, how they might overpower a man as if he were no more than a beetle, his head disappearing beneath them, his shirt filled to heavy saturation with water, his hands stiff with cold, unable to find a grip on the merciless wet bark, and what in God’s name was he doing entering the river, why was he asked to do such a dangerous thing?
“But…” she hears herself say, and she has no idea what will come out of her mouth next “…I have his accordion. I was…to keep it for him, he left it with me for…safekeeping and—”
“In that case,” the younger clerk exclaims, as if pleased to be able to be of use, “you could send it to his wife.”
“Wife?”
Enda finds that speaking this word aloud has done something strange to her: her throat prickles with a horrible dryness and her lips feel too frozen to move. She isn’t sure she will be able to say anything further.
“You mean—” she rasps out an approximation of speech “—his sister? The one living in Québec?”
The clerks regard her, the younger one with pity in his gaze.
No, they say, wife. He had a wife and children, up in the city, a boy and a girl, they believe, and the company intends to take care of them, in accordance with their policies.
They can let Enda have the address, if she just waits a moment, do you hear, wait here, wait, where are you going, it won’t take a moment, just wait.
Enda finds herself outside again, and it has begun to hail, and the pavements are covered with perfect miniature spheres of ice, and it is still falling, striking her on the head, and the sensation is like the sting of sewing needles dropped from the sky.
She turns a corner and another, her feet carrying her somewhere, anywhere.
She passes houses and street stalls, a group of children throwing a ball, a dairy where the rectangles of cobbles are outlined with thin opalised lines of milk.
It hurts, she finds, to move her eyeballs inside her skull, and her hands feel at once freezing cold and burning hot.
After a time, she discovers she is moving down the street where she lives, and she doesn’t know how this day will end, how she will get through it, and the next, and the one after that, what she will do, how she will live now.
The answer is about to appear, although she doesn’t know it yet, for when she reaches the rooming house she takes to her bed, she pulls the covers over her head and she closes her eyes, tight, and even when the landlady comes to find her the next morning, to ask why the stove isn’t lit, she will not open them, she will not move, she will not speak a word.
When asked if she has a fever, Enda nods, tucking her chin into her chest.
The landlady, spooked by the rigid white face of her maid-of-all-work, retreats.
There are rumours of typhoid in the town, and diphtheria.
She backs out of Enda’s cupboard-room, her handkerchief over her face; she leaves a pitcher of water for the unfortunate creature because no one could ever say she was an unchristian woman, and then she shuffles back upstairs, closing the kitchen door firmly.
Enda stays in bed for two days, then three. She watches the light filtering in from the kitchen rise, then fade, rise, then fade. She doesn’t think she will ever be able to get up again, that she may just expire here.
On the fourth day, or perhaps the fifth, she hears a knocking at the front door, followed by the low rumble of conversation. After a short gap, there comes a knocking at the back door.
Enda rolls into herself, closing her eyes.
The knocking turns to a pounding. Then someone, unmistakably, calls her name. It is a woman’s voice, low and insistent.
“Enda,” it says. “Enda. Open the door.”
Enda struggles to an upright position, dazed, afraid. The pounding comes again and, when she looks over, the door is juddering on its hinges.
She puts her legs out of the blankets and stands, unsteadily, pulling herself upright. She tiptoes across the kitchen flags, her bare soles cold against the stone.
“Enda!” the voice yells again.
Fearfully, Enda pulls back the bolt. She swings open the door.
There, on the back step, is a hallucination from Enda’s past, a figure dressed up as a woman from the peninsula, a thin and shabby apparition with bare legs under a faded skirt, a heavy shawl folded across the chest. This person stands there, in the lee of the doorway, a bundle on its back, a length of twine clutched in one hand, at the end of which is a dog.
It is the dog that recalls Enda to herself.
Bran, her mind tells her incredulously, it’s Bran.
The same starburst of white on the chest, the exact grey pelt.
Then she sees that it can’t be—this animal is too young, too lithe—and she is chiding herself for such a foolish thought, telling herself she is turning simple-minded, along with everything else.
Perhaps she does have a fever after all.
When the shawled person with the dog says her name, it comes to Enda who this is, and the shock of it is like the lash of the hailstones.
She cannot believe what her eyes are telling her; she must be going soft in the head, losing her reason.
It seems to be her sister, but it can’t be because she will be at home, in the cottage, and yet here she is, and pinned to her bodice is that blue tassel so beloved of their mother, but Enda must be hallucinating.
“Rose?” she whispers, because her voice is still gone, stolen away by the word “wife,” said in the offices of the timber company. “Is that you?”
Rose, because it does indeed seem to be her, here, on the back step of the rooming house, where Enda lives, alone, is inexplicably furious and looking as if she might belt her, is saying, You jade, you turncoat, you left me, how could you do that?
Enda doesn’t care about the fury, about all the hateful things Rose is calling her.
She crosses the ground between them in two strides, she goes to seize her sister by the shoulders, she tries to touch the blue tassel with her fingertips, but Rose sidesteps her, and Enda is saying, over and over, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
She offers Rose her hand, which Rose knocks aside.
Enda asks her, Will you come inside, what dog is this, where’s Eugene?
and at this her sister falls silent, her anger punctured.
She shuts her eyes. Her hands reach for the dog, her fingers plucking gently at the silk of its ears.
Rose shakes her head, back and forth, back and forth, tears slipping down her cheeks.
Enda looks on, appalled, afraid. Eugene without Rose is unthinkable. Where can he be? Who is looking after him?
“Dead,” Rose says, her voice flat. “Drowned. Off the side of the ship coming over. I couldn’t save him.”
Enda, swaying, puts a hand to her mouth. She murmurs their brother’s name. She tells her sister, over and over, that she is sorry, she is so sorry, she should never have left, it was a terrible mistake, she has regretted it ever since.
She reaches out to Rose again but the dog takes the gesture as directed to itself, and it makes a delighted lunge for Enda, paws landing on her nightgown, tail whipping back and forth, ears folded, eager to make the acquaintance of this new person, to sniff out what manner of human this is.
Enda, unable to resist, crouches, letting the dog lick her face and hands, running her hands through its tufts of fur.
“I should never have left you,” she says, as if to the dog. Without looking her way, Rose—so much older, her face sallow and pinched—lowers herself down to the step, rests her head in her hands, muttering that Enda looks like death warmed up, what can be wrong with her?
“Come here to me,” Enda says, still squatting next to the dog, her heart brimming with pity, with love, holding out her arms to Rose, and suddenly she is sure that she can tackle whatever is ahead of her, of them, that things will turn out, because her sister has come, Rose is here, and she won’t be alone, ever again.
“Come here to me now,” she says, and the dog looks from one to the other, and back again, its eyes anxious and alert, waiting to see what will happen.