A woman wore boots amongst the great flags of bedclothing. Mrs. Sutter, dark-haired and tall, narrow in the shoulders, well-set in the hips. An occasional customer of his. A lot of people worked on the principle of spreading custom around, because you never knew when you’d need to spread your debts out a bit as well.
She came forward to him, her hands out, pallid from the soap and water.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, you were so brave, Mr. Shea.”
He didn’t know what she was talking about.
“You relieved poor Bert’s last moments, a friendly face bending over him. Constable Hanney told me.”
She began to weep. She smoothed her tears sideways with big, lovely, soapy hands.
“There was another man there,” said Tim.
“Yes, the hawker. God Almighty, that wouldn’t have been a particular comfort to Bert.”
He found himself in defence of Bandy Habash. “He behaved very, very well, Mrs. Sutter.” For one damn thing, he dealt with the horse who would have still been thrashing and heaving out there if he hadn’t. “He’s not a bad little chap.”
“Yes, but I know that you directed the rescue,” she said.
She didn’t know what a pitiable state Bert had been in. Bert in his ending needed the help of all parties.
Tim said, “I brought his two children with me. Both of them are indoors with yours. The girl Lucy. More presence than a judge, that Lucy. And then the poor little boy.”
He saw tall Mrs. Sutter, whose face poor de-faced Rochester had dwelt on, look away. He knew it was bad news. It astounded him the way women could set limits. The mothers and the motherers, and yet they always had definite ideas about what could be done with ease, and what the boundaries of content were.
Mrs. Sutter inhaled and was gathering herself for an answer when three or four children burst from the back steps. A boy, three girls and the children with whom he was now as familiar as if they had emigrated with him. Lucy, Hector. The oldest Sutter boy had proposed some sort of roughhouse, some racing around. Lucy stood back, weighing what it meant. Sharp-featured and calm. What a daughter! She did not blunder into things like the boy Hector. Every course she took a chosen one.
They all went shrilling off around the side of the house towards the front. Towards the Tradesmen’s Entrance. Lucy ran behind them, inspecting the Sutter yard as if she’d never seen it before.
Mrs. Sutter took a pair of child’s bloomers out of a basket, pegged them to the line, but then seemed to need to hang on to them for a sort of support. She stared very hard at the wet fabric.
“I’ll take the boy. But Bert wouldn’t have expected me to take the girl. She hates me. I’ve got no affection for her.”
“Is there someone else then?” asked Tim. “Who can take her? I have a third child on its way, and then my sister-in-law is emigrating, due here on the Aberdeen Line…”
“There’s no one else I can think of. I wondered would the nuns take her? Get somewhere with her? You know the nuns, don’t you? Wonderful music-teachers.”
He waited for her to say she could help with the expense. He was damned if he would mention it and draw her grudgingly into some undertaking. She let go of the bloomers and stood up and looked at him directly.
“She was the problem with Bert and me. She didn’t like me and did brutal things to the other children. Just to keep me in my place. She’s a brutal little thing.”
“I hadn’t noticed that.”
Mrs. Sutter looked away across her well-ordered backyard. Her garbage heap far off at the back fence. Her woodheap in order against the side fence. You could bet Bert had cut the wood and stacked it for her a week back, on some visit. The palpable benefits of marriage. Stacked wood, cut in regular sizes. A mound of kindling and a tidy little wall of split softwood. Tears appeared on Mrs. Sutter’s long lashes.
“But for her I would have been widowed twice, I suppose. I can’t live with her. Take her to the nuns. She is a destroying little soul. You’d think they would extend their charity to her and do her some benefit. I’m sorry about all this when you’ve already been so good…”
But however sorry she might be, Mrs. Sutter was implacable. She went on pegging her clothes.
“It occurred to me though,” said Tim. “Whether you’d buy the farm.”
“Oh no. No, there’s nothing for me in the farm. There’s something for the bank.”
Five minutes later, out the front by Tim’s wagon, the two Rochester children were making a supervised farewell to each other.
Hector cried, but Mrs. Sutter’s son and four girls began to distract him. Mrs. Sutter herself issued formal instructions from a distance. “Kiss good-bye to your sister now.”
Tim began offering Lucy consideration. “I’ll bring you to see him on the weekends.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Sutter. “Perhaps for tea on Sundays.”
Limited to such a small set of future reunions, Lucy gave her tear-stained brother an embrace more muscular than emotional. It was a hug which carried a sort of promise of return in it. Lucy climbed up into the cart without being asked to—she seemed to be too proud to face being directed as her brother had. Tim took the reins and turned Pee Dee’s head. Rolling downhill at last from Hector’s sadness, he could hear the widow and her children kindly turning young Hector’s attention to the Sutters’ aged dog.
“Well,” Tim said, shaking Pee Dee into a trot. “Your brother has a good billet there, eh. For you we might need to see the nuns. It’s good there I hear. Girls the one age as you. In from the farms. Friends to make. And no milking. Mind you, the nuns do have a cow or two, and the boarders take it in turns to milk. But that’s not every morning, is it?”
She said calmly, “I don’t mind milking. I have a poddy calf called Chuckles.” Her tough little hands were folded in her lap.
“You understand… there might be others who have a claim on the farm.”
She said nothing. Was she thinking of farms elsewhere that could be held on to?
“My own boy, Johnny. I’m sending him to the nuns from May. Sooner if the little ruffian gets into trouble. The boarding students down there… they complain about food. Well, you’ll have no need to. I’ll make sure you’ve got ham and chocolate, and a regular supply of cocoa.”
So these were items of the world’s trade to a doubting little orphaned heart. A full can of Fry’s Cocoa. She didn’t seem to take notice. Too busy tasting the world, gauging what it would do to her, doubtful of what he said to explain it to her.
“The Sisters of Mercy,” he muttered, more for his own comfort than hers.
“But I’ll need my clothes,” she told him suddenly.
“Of course you will, of course.”
“Hector will need his too. Mrs. Sutter’ll wash his, I suppose.”
Tim turned Pee Dee’s head towards Glenrock.
“Look,” lied Tim. “No one has anything against you.”
He knew she saw through that.
“I don’t have a thing against you. You’re a fine little woman. I wish there was room.”
“Your place is very small,” she stated. Letting him off the hook. Putting him on it.
Albert Rochester’s little farmhouse on a slope in Glenrock was the standard one they gave you a diagram of in A Guide for Immigrants and Settlers. It was supported not on piers of brick like Mrs. Sutter’s but on stumps of trees capped with a plate of zinc to defeat termites. It was unpainted, and the door had no lock. The inside walls, Tim found when he and Lucy entered, were not lined, but pasted over with old Heralds and Chronicles and Arguses. The energetic North Coast spiders had filled in every panel of the wall frames with misty web.