“But I’m special,” Dorothy said.
“You always were, falling out of the sky that way.” She turned to Em. “I assume, madam, that it is all right for me to stay the one night? I can sleep in Dottie’s bed with her. It’s an old circus custom.”
I bet it is, I thought, but didn’t say it aloud.
She stayed two nights, and no one spoke about it until long after. That first evening, being a Saturday, Dorothy did her wire walk over the pigsty. Ozamandia played a flute as Dorothy performed, and though you probably won’t believe it, the sow and piglets got up on their hind trotters and danced.
Amelia was there as usual, of course, and she and Ozmandia became instant pals, both of them enthusing over Dorothy’s talents.
When we walked home, I tried to hold Amelia’s hand, feeling a sudden tenderness toward her I hadn’t felt in years, but she pulled her hand away.
“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t anymore.”
Amelia’s mother died that very night, with such a peaceful smile on her face, she hardly looked like the same woman. Only Henry and Em, Stan and Rand, and Dorothy came to the funeral.
Ozmandia sent a message the next month and Dorothy packed up her carpetbag, ready to leave the next morning. Stan was driving her by cart into the city; she was taking a steam engine train from there.
Em watched her go dry-eyed, but Henry was sobbing enough for the two of them. Stan and Rand were openmouthed, breathing hard.
I was there as well, watching Amelia go with her.
“Tom,” she’d told me last night, “I have never done anything for myself before. First there was mother, then there was you. I’ve taken the housekeeping money. I’ve been saving some for months. Sell Mother’s house for me and you keep half. Start that woodworking business for real this time. It’s the only thing you’ve ever really loved. I’ll write and tell you where to send my portion when I know.”
“Are you going to be a wire-walker?” I asked.
“I’ll take tickets, sell popcorn, clean out the lion’s cage. I’ll do anything they need, wear many hats, many heads. After all,” she said, “I’m well practiced in that sort of thing.”
And maybe she was, after all.
“Perhaps eventually they’ll let me try the wire.” She smiled. “Even though I’m probably too old.”
“Never too old,” I said, remembering her on our wedding day.
“Tom, you never could tell a lie,” she said. “Don’t start now.”
The cart pulled away and rolled down the dusty road, making it look for a minute like little imps were running behind. If you once start thinking that way about the world, it seems to go on and on.
I watched till the cart with my wife in it was out of sight. When I turned back, Henry was still standing there, the little dog on wheels cradled in his arms. I guess Dorothy didn’t need it anymore.
I guess Henry did.
A Knot of Toads
“March 1931: Late on Saturday night,” the old man had written, “a toad came into my study and looked at me with goggled eyes, reflecting my candlelight back at me. It seemed utterly unafraid. Although nothing so far seems linked with this appearance, I have had enough formidable visitants to know this for a harbinger.”
A harbinger of spring, I would have told him, but I arrived too late to tell him anything. I’d been summoned from my Cambridge rooms to his little whitewashed stone house with its red pantile roof overlooking St. Monans harbor. The summons had come from his housekeeper, Mrs. Marr, in a frantic early morning phone call. Hers was from the town’s one hotel, to me in the porter’s room, which boasted the only telephone at our college.
I was a miserable ten hours getting there. All during the long train ride, though I tried to pray for him, I could not, having given up that sort of thing long before leaving Scotland. Loss of faith, lack of faith—that had been my real reason for going away from home. Taking up a place at Girton College had only been an excuse.
What I had wanted to do this return was to mend our fences before it was too late to mend anything at all. Father and I had broken so many fences—stones, dykes, stiles, and all—that the mending would have taken more than the fortnight’s holiday I had planned for later in the summer. But I’d been summoned home early this March because, as Mrs. Marr said, Father had had a bad turn.
“A verrry bad turn,” was what she’d actually said, before the line had gone dead, her r’s rattling like a kettle on the boil. In her understated way, she might have meant anything from a twisted ankle to a major heart attack.
The wire that had followed, delivered by a man with a limp and a harelip, had been from my father’s doctor, Ewan Kinnear. “Do not delay,” it read. Still, there was no diagnosis.
Even so, I did not delay. We’d had no connection in ten years beside a holiday letter exchange. Me to him, not the other way round. But the old man was my only father. I was his only child.
He was dead by the time I got there, and Mrs. Marr stood at the doorway of the house wringing her hands, her black hair caught up in a net. She had not aged a day since I last saw her.
“So ye’ve left it too late, Janet,” she cried. “And wearing green I see.”
I looked down at my best dress, a soft green linen now badly creased with travel.
She shook her head at me, and only then did I remember. In St. Monans they always said, “After green comes grief.”
“I didn’t know he was that ill. I came as fast as I could.”
But Mrs. Marr’s face showed her disdain for my excuse. Her eyes narrowed and she didn’t put out her hand. She’d always been on Father’s side, especially in the matter of my faith. “His old heart’s burst in twa.” She was of the old school in speech as well as faith.
“His heart was stone, Maggie, and well you know it.” A widow, she’d waited twenty-seven years, since my mother died birthing me, for the old man to notice her. She must be old herself now.
“Stane can still feel pain,” she cried.
“What pain?” I asked.
“Of your leaving.”
What good would it have done to point out I’d left more than ten years earlier and he’d hardly noticed? He’d had a decade more of calcification, a decade more of pouring over his bloody old books—the Latin texts of apostates and heretics. A decade more of filling notebooks with his crabbed script.
A decade more of ignoring his only child.
My God, I thought, meaning no appeal to a deity but a simple swear, I am still furious with him. It’s no wonder I’ve never married. Though I’d had chances. Plenty of them. Well, two that were real enough.
I went into the house, and the smell of candle wax and fish and salt sea were as familiar to me as though I’d never left. But there was another smell, too.
Death.
And something more.
It was fear. But I was not to know that till later.
The study where evidently he’d died, sitting up in his chair, was a dark place, even when the curtains were drawn back, which had not been frequent in my childhood. Father liked the close, wood-paneled room, made closer by the ever-burning fire. I’d been allowed in there only when being punished, standing just inside the doorway, with my hands clasped behind me, to listen to my sins being counted. My sins were homey ones, like shouting in the hallway, walking too loudly by his door, or refusing to learn my verses from the Bible. I was far too innocent a child for more than that.
Even at five and six and seven I’d been an unbeliever. Not having a mother had made me so. How could I worship a God whom both Mrs. Marr and my father assured me had so wanted Mother, He’d called her away? A selfish God, that, who had listened to his own desires and not mine. Such a God was not for me. Not then. Not now.
I had a sudden urge—me, a postgraduate in a prestigious university who should have known better—to clasp my hands behind me and await my punishment.
But, I thought, the old punisher is dead. And—if he’s to be believed—gone to his
own punishment. Though I was certain that the only place he had gone was to the upstairs bedroom where he was laid out, awaiting my instructions as to his burial.
I went into every other room of the house but that bedroom, memory like an old fishing line dragging me on. The smells, the dark moody smells, remained the same, though Mrs. Marr had a good wood fire burning in the grate, not peat, a wee change in this changeless place. But everything else was so much smaller than I remembered, my little bedroom at the back of the house the smallest of them all.
To my surprise, nothing in my bedroom had been removed. My bed, my toys—the little wooden doll with jointed arms and legs I called Annie, my ragged copy of Rhymes and Tunes for Little Folks, the boxed chess set just the size for little hands, my cloth bag filled with buttons—the rag rug, the overworked sampler on the wall. All were the same. I was surprised to even find one of my old pinafores and black stockings in the wardrobe. I charged Mrs. Marr with more sentiment than sense. It was a shrine to the child that I’d been, not the young woman who had run off. It had to have been Mrs. Marr’s idea. Father would never have countenanced false gods.
Staring out of the low window, I looked off toward the sea. A fog sat on the horizon, white and patchy. Below it the sea was a deep, solitary blue. Spring comes early to the East Neuk but summer stays away. I guessed that pussy willows had already appeared around the edges of the lochans, snowdrops and aconite decorating the inland gardens.
Once I’d loved to stare out at that sea, escaping the dark brooding house whenever I could, even in a cutting wind, the kind that could raise bruises. Down I’d go to the beach to play amongst the yawls hauled up on the high wooden trestles, ready for tarring. Once I’d dreamed of going off to sea with the fishermen, coming home to the harbor in the late summer light, and seeing the silver scales glinting on the beach. Though of course fishing was not a woman’s job. Not then, not now. A woman in a boat was unthinkable even this far into the twentieth century. St. Monans is firmly eighteenth century and likely to remain so forever.
But I’d been sent off to school, away from the father who found me a loud and heretical discomfort. At first it was just a few towns away, to St. Leonard’s in St. Andrews, but as I was a boarder—my father’s one extravagance—it might as well have been across the country, or the ocean, as far as seeing my father was concerned. And there I’d fallen in love with words in books.
Words—not water, not wind.
In that way I showed myself to be my father’s daughter. Only I never said so to him, nor he to me.
Making my way back down the stairs, I overheard several folk in the kitchen. They were speaking of those things St. Monans folk always speak of, no matter their occupations: fish and weather.
“There’s been nae herring in the firth this winter,” came a light man’s voice. “Nane.” Dr. Kinnear.
“It’s a bitter wind to keep the men at hame, the fish awa,” Mrs. Marr agreed.
Weather and the fishing. Always the same.
But a third voice, one I didn’t immediately recognize, a rumbling growl of a voice, added, “Does she know?”
“Do I know what?” I asked, coming into the room where the big black-leaded grate threw out enough heat to warm the entire house. “How Father died?”
I stared at the last speaker, a stranger I thought, but somehow familiar. He was tall for a St. Monans man, but dressed as one of the fisherfolk, in dark trousers, a heavy white sweater, thick white sea stockings. And he was sunburnt like them, too, with eyes the exact blue of the April sea, gathered round with laugh lines. A ginger mustache, thick and full, hung down the sides of his mouth like a parenthesis.
“By God, Alec Hughes,” I said, startled to have remembered, surprised that I could have forgotten. He grinned.
When we’d been young—very young—Alec and I were inseparable. Never mind that boys and girls never played together in St. Monans. Boys from the Bass, girls from the May, the old folk wisdom went. The Bass Rock, the Isle of May, the original separation of the sexes. Apart at birth and ever after. Yet Alec and I had done everything together: messed about with the boats, played cards, built sand castles, fished with pelns—shore crabs about to cast their shells—and stolen jam pieces from his mother’s kitchen to eat down by one of the gates in the drystone dykes. We’d even often hied off to the low cliff below the ruins of Andross Castle to look for croupies, fossils, though whether we ever found any I couldn’t recall. When I’d been sent away to school, he’d stayed on in St. Monans, going to Anstruther’s Waid Academy in the next town but one, until he was old enough—I presumed—to join the fishing fleet, like his father before him. His father was a stern and dour soul, a Temperance man who used to preach in the open air.
Alec had been the first boy to kiss me, my back against the stone windmill down by the salt pans. And until I’d graduated from St. Leonard’s, the only boy to do so, though I’d made up for that since.
“I thought, Jan,” he said slowly, “that God was not in your vocabulary.”
“Except as a swear,” I retorted. “Good to see you, too, Alec.”
Mrs. Marr’s eyebrows both rose considerably, like fulmars over the green-grey sea of her eyes.
Alec laughed, and it was astonishing how that laugh reminded me of the boy who’d stayed behind. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know how your father died?”
“Heart attack, so Mrs. Marr told me.”
I stared at the three of them. Mrs. Marr was wringing her hands again, an oddly old-fashioned motion at which she seemed well practiced. Dr. Kinnear polished his eyeglasses with a large white piece of cloth, his flyaway eyebrows proclaiming his advancing age. And Alec—had I remembered how blue his eyes were? Alec nibbled on the right end of his mustache.
“Did I say that?” Mrs. Marr asked. “Bless me, I didna.”
And indeed, she hadn’t. She’d been more poetic.
“Burst in twa, you said.” I smiled, trying to apologize for misspeaking. Not a good trait in a scholar.
“Indeed. Indeed.” Mrs. Marr’s wrangling hands began again. Any minute I supposed she would break out into a psalm. I remembered how her one boast was that she’d learned them all by heart as a child and never forgot a one of them.
“A shock, I would have said,” Alec added.
“A fright,” the doctor added.
“Really? Is that the medical term?” I asked. “What in St. Monans could my father possibly be frightened of?”
Astonishingly, Mrs. Marr began to wail then, a high, thin keening that went on and on till Alec put his arm around her and marched her over to the stone sink where he splashed her face with cold water and she quieted at once. Then she turned to the blackened kettle squalling on the grate and started to make us all tea.
I turned to the doctor, who had his glasses on now, which made him look like a somewhat surprised barn owl. “What do you really mean, Dr. Kinnear?”
“Have you nae seen him yet?” he asked, his head gesturing towards the back stairs.
“I . . . I couldn’t,” I admitted. But I said no more. How could I tell this man I hardly knew that my father and I were virtual strangers. No—it was more than that. I was afraid of my father dead as I’d never been alive. Because now he knew for certain whether he was right or I was, about God and Heaven and the rest.
“Come,” said Dr. Kinnear in a voice that seemed permanently gentle. He held out a hand and led me back up the stairs and down the hall to my father’s room. Then he went in with me and stood by my side as I looked down.
My father was laid out on his bed, the Scottish double my mother had died in, the one he’d slept in every night of his adult life except the day she’d given birth, the day she died.
Like the house, he was much smaller than I remembered. His wild, white hair lay untamed around his head in a kind of corolla. The skin of his face was parchment stretched over bone. That great prow of a nose was, in death, strong enough to guide a ship in. Thankfully his eyes were shut. His hands were cros
sed on his chest. He was dressed in an old dark suit. I remembered it well.
“He doesn’t look afraid,” I said. Though he didn’t look peaceful either. Just dead.
“Once he’d lost the stiffness, I smoothed his face a bit,” the doctor told me. “Smoothed it out. Otherwise Mrs. Marr would no have settled.”
“Settled?”
He nodded. “She found him at his desk, stone dead. Ran down the road screaming all the way to the pub. And lucky I was there, having a drink with friends. I came up to see yer father sitting up in his chair, with a face so full of fear, I looked around mysel’ to discover the cause of it.”
“And did you?”
His blank expression said it all. He simply handed me a pile of five notebooks. “These were on the desk in front of him. Some of the writing is in Latin, which I have but little of. Perhaps ye can read it, being the scholar. Mrs. Marr has said that they should be thrown on the fire, or at least much of them scored out. But I told her that had to be yer decision and Alec agrees.”
I took the notebooks, thinking that this was what had stolen my father from me and now was all I had of him. But I said none of that aloud. After glancing over at the old man again, I asked, “May I have a moment with him?” My voice cracked on the final word.
Dr. Kinnear nodded again and left the room.
I went over to the bed and looked down at the silent body. The old dragon, I thought, has no teeth. Then I heard a sound, something so tiny I scarcely registered it. Turning, I saw a toad by the bedfoot.
I bent down and picked it up. “Nothing for you here, puddock,” I said, reverting to the old Scots word. Though I’d worked so hard to lose my accent and vocabulary, here in my father’s house the old way of speech came flooding back. Shifting the books to one hand, I picked the toad up with the other. Then, I tiptoed out of the door as if my father would have minded the sound of my footsteps.
Once outside, I set the toad gently in the garden, or the remains of the garden, now so sadly neglected, its vines running rampant across what was once an arbor of white roses and red. I watched as it hopped under some large dock leaves and, quite effectively, disappeared.