Picking up a packet of starch at MacIsaac’s, James had to endure “You’ve got a very talented wife, Mr Piper.”
James paid. MacIsaac continued, “And how’s the wee lass?”
“She’s all right.”
“She’s got a gift, that one.”
James nodded. MacIsaac smiled and added, “Gets it from her mother, no doubt.”
James turned and left the store. He wouldn’t be taking Kathleen in there again. He decided he didn’t trust the bald man. He didn’t like the way he looked at children with his watery blue eyes and his big red face. If MacIsaac liked children so much why didn’t he have any of his own?
When James left, Mrs MacIsaac said to her man, “We shouldn’t let Piper set foot in here.”
MacIsaac smiled softly at his wife, then retired to his greenhouse. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Everyone liked MacIsaac, though not everyone understood how he could tolerate a man like Piper. But MacIsaac didn’t see the point in penalizing a man’s family for a man’s mistakes and that was what you did when you cut a feller off. People shrugged and figured maybe MacIsaac was just religious. And he was, in a way; he spent a lot of time finding medicine out in the fields where other people saw only stones and scrub. He cultivated the plants in his greenhouse. Never called in a debt. Pity about the drink.
At the end of that week, James sat down to his latkes and molasses and said, “I want you to quit your job now, missus, I’m earning enough at the pit.”
No answer. He looked up. Hard to know sometimes if she even registered a word he said.
“Did you hear me?”
“… Okay.”
“And don’t be traipsing around town on your own.”
How unhappy are they who have a gift that’s left to germinate in darkness. The pale plant will sink invisible roots and live whitely off their blood.
The first week away from the Empire was hardest. The empty house, and at night James, who required feeding and nothing else. She searched for the key to the piano, and finally pried the instrument open with a knife. But after a few numbers she fell silent. She needed a stage, not a garret. No audience, no show. Materia took her sheaf of music and put it in the hope chest.
She cleaned the house and cooked a lot. Ate. She didn’t have the heart to spend much time with Mrs Luvovitz because the boys, Abe and Rudy, were a reproach to her soul. How could it be that she loved another woman’s children and not her own? The interlude at the Empire receded and became unreal. Now that Materia was on her own again, with plenty of time to think, all her badness rolled back in and enveloped her: to have left her father’s house, to have disobeyed and dishonoured her parents — that was against the Commandments.
I have to go to confession, she thought, but then … in order to be forgiven I must be heartily sorry, but to be sorry for eloping means to be sorry for everything that came from it. And she couldn’t be. She still wanted her husband and that too was a sin: to want the man, and not the child that comes from the marital act. And so she would keep coming back to her original sin.
She resumed her prayers to the Blessed Virgin. It pierced her heart, and it seemed a dreadful vapour rose from the wound, when she realized she hadn’t given a thought to her daughter all this time. Not a note had she sent, no package of goodies from home, she hadn’t even asked James, “How’s the girl?” Materia saw herself in a clear glass at last, and it was monstrous.
Whom could she tell? No one. Yet she must tell or die.
In the second week, Materia left the house and walked to the cliff but didn’t linger there as she used to. She scrambled down to the rocky shore and walked. She didn’t sing, she talked and talked in her mother tongue to the stones, till she grew dizzy and the day grew grey and she lost track of where she was. Finally, as sometimes happens in this part of the world, the clouds lifted. A burning sky lit the sea in rippling tongues of red and gold. Materia fell silent. She faced the horizon and listened until she heard what the sea was saying to her: “Give it to me, my daughter. And I will take it and wash it and carry it to a far country until it is no longer your sin; but just a curiosity adrift, beached and made innocent.”
And so, day after day, Materia slowly let her mind ebb away. Until she was ready to part with it once and for all.
Quanto Dolor
“I’m very fond of dividing and classifying and examining, you see I’m so much alone, I’ve so much time for reflection, and Papa is training me to think.”
CLAUDIA, BY A.L.O.E.
The strike ended in April 1910, and James got a job on the surface as a checkweighman in reward for his loyalty. He had expected to see his pit buddy Albert up there too, had hoped to get a look at him in the light of day, but Albert had been let go. He had moved on to Sydney with many others from Fourteen Yard, and settled in Whitney Pier in the neighbourhood known as The Coke Ovens. There were lots of people there up from the West Indies; the Dominion Iron and Steel Company knew the value of a strong man who could stand heat. The Coke Ovens was a cosy community, its houses painted everything but white, snuggled right up against the steel mill. The mill put bread on the table and a fine orange dust on the bread.
In the boom town the company houses were tenanted once more, the Company Store took miners’ scrip again, the last children were buried and Kathleen came home. James had a surprise waiting: electric lights, and a modern water-closet complete with indoor toilet, enamel tub and nickel-plated taps, hot and cold.
What with his hours at the pithead, James could no longer drive Kathleen to and from Holy Angels. He hired a fellow from The Coke Ovens who drove his own horse and buggy. James was taken aback by his youth — Leo Taylor was barely sixteen — but he was steady, James made sure.
“No detours, straight there and straight home.”
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t want you talking to her.”
“No sir.”
“Don’t touch her.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“Don’t worry, sir.”
James reflected that he’d rather have a timid youth drive his daughter than a leering man. The fact that Taylor was coloured made James feel all the more confident of the necessary distance between driver and passenger.
Although she no longer had any buddies in the boom town, Kathleen was relieved to be living at home again. Boarding at Holy Angels had been lonely. At first she’d cried herself to sleep, comforted only by the notes and treats that her daddy sent. But she knew that sacrifices were being made, knew what was expected of her, didn’t flinch. She studied hard, obeyed the nuns and never complained, though she did pray for a fairy godmother to send her a friend, for there was no one to play with at Holy Angels. No boys. No cinders embedded in her knees. Other little girls weren’t interested in swordfights and adventure or in who could enact the most spectacular death scene. Other girls were preoccupied with meticulous feminine arcana of which Kathleen knew nothing; what was more, none of them had careers. Initially, her schoolmates had vied for Kathleen’s friendship — she was so pretty, so smart. But she failed to decode pecking orders, declined gracious invitations to braid other girls’ hair and made a lasso of the skipping-rope. They put her down as odd until, finally, they shunned her altogether.
Kathleen threw herself into her work and cultivated an insouciant nonconformity — her sash low-slung and tied in front, hat pushed back, hands jammed into the pockets that she ordered her mother to sew into her uniforms, her long hair waving loose. The nuns made allowances. She had a gift.