The shining fragments, p.6
The Shining Fragments, page 6
Joseph carried the silence that followed into the school room and into his dreams of Keady Fair. The street was a sea of people moving among the carts with yarns and trinkets and the livestock shuffling and sounding in their makeshift paddocks. A fiddler played where the streets converged, and Mam said: “Take care of Deary, Joseph.”
Two days later, Joseph watched from an open window as Tim was brought back on a coal cart. The driver pointed inside. Instead of bolting, Tim stood before the man and shouted something that drew the nuns outside. Joseph thought he heard one say: “Obey your father.” For a few moments Tim’s hollering turned to crying, which Joseph felt he shouldn’t watch. The cart pulled away. Sister Martha tried to put her arm around Tim, but he waved her off, as the nuns quietly stripped him of his pack, including Sister Mary Margaret’s knife, still wet with the blood of a groundhog. “Sweet,” Tim said later, “but tough to chew.”
“What was it like, Tim? Being out there.”
They sat in the yard near the tom cat sprawled beneath the thorn bush, sleeping off a new rip in his shoulder.
“A wonder, Joe.”
12
During the fourth winter, Benny moved to the Catholic boarding house for newsboys and apprentices — a rite of passage that some boys yearned for, but few experienced. Mother Superior and Father Tom preferred the Sunnyside orphans to stay and learn trades in the west end. Only the most wayward of the older boys went to board downtown, and then, only on condition that they would comply with the St. Nicholas Home rules. The Home was an upright place, said Father Tom. Most of the St. Nicholas boarders were in trades; the few who insisted on merely selling papers had more freedom, yes, but also faced more challenges.
“I want you to have this.” Benny handed Joseph the spike.
“But this is your best weapon.”
“There’ll be plenty more where I’m going.”
“I can’t take it, Benny.”
“I’ll have it,” Tim said.
“Very well then.”
The tracks left by the cutter in the new snow were soon covered by the footprints of the orphans, who kicked white clouds into the air and rolled, making fortresses and angels.
Deary made a snowman and studied it for a long time. She melted snow in a pot on the hearth to pour on her snow man so that he would turn to ice, digging with her bare fingers to shape a real face. “Frostbite!” Sister Martha said. “That’s all we need.”
The next morning, before breakfast, Deary was first out in the girls’ yard to gather more snow for melting. The snowman had turned completely to ice. Joseph walked to the fence to study the statue, sensing that he must not say a word. Even though Deary no longer spoke of her magic, Joseph believed that when the time was right something great would be revealed. Sometimes, when she was looking, he stood on his hands and she nodded. Sometimes he wanted to cry because they didn’t speak, but in secret, Joseph couldn’t cry anymore.
Deary’s breath touched the face of her frozen man. His eyes looked back at her, and at anyone who passed. His nose was straight and he had a full mouth, a torso and legs, and finally a robe. On the third day, after the schoolroom was tidied and the children had gone from the yard, Joseph watched Deary hacking at the neck of her snowman with a branch from the woodpile. She gouged at his face, sending the head rolling to the ground, where it broke in half. She stood for a moment with her head bowed, then returned the stick to the woodpile, brushed off her skirt, and came in for supper.
“Why did you do it, Deary? Why did you break your snowman?”
Deary’s eyes shone. “I wanted to know what it was like for God to let John the Baptist die like that.”
Three days later, Sister Martha sat on a parlour chair before a man in a black woollen jacket and a lady in a feathered hat, and a cameo brooch clasped tightly to the brown piping at her throat.
Joseph crouched outside the partially open parlour door.
“She is an anxious girl. She needs to be kept busy. In truth, too much time has been a problem for her here of late. She is the first to finish her lessons and they are always correct. She is bright, and capable of hard work.”
“Is she tidy?” the woman asked.
“Very.”
“Well mannered?” the man asked. “My wife and I do a lot of entertaining. She needs to know how to behave properly as a domestic.”
“She is exceptional,” Sister Martha said.
“Has she been with you a long time? Who were her parents?”
“The girl’s grandfather was a minister of the Anglican Church. The girl’s father, we were told, was well-educated, and at one time a teacher. His wife pre-deceased him. The girl came to us at age eight, after her father was killed in a road accident. We do take Protestant children, of course. They worship with us and are welcome.”
The man shifted in his chair. “Her breeding — ”
“ — must be no cause for concern,” his wife finished. “We have our own children to consider.”
Desperate — livid — Joseph fled to the yard. He ran at the ash tree and kicked it. Then he ran and kicked the shed, and the coop where the pigeons squawked and fluttered. Joseph kicked the brick wall below the refectory window. When he punched it, the wall stopped him. He sank down in the snow, holding his left hand and breathing hard. “She can’t leave. I won’t let her.” He said it so many times that the cold numbed his lips and battered knuckles. Joseph glowered at the dull sky, not caring if the Holy Ghost watched him. He wanted to pray, but he didn’t, because God wouldn’t answer him; an unanswered prayer was worse than none at all.
Deary’s belongings were quickly gathered into a carpet bag.
Deary was radiant. “I’ve been adopted.”
Joseph stared at her, and she was gone.
Paper
1887
13
During Joseph’s last summer at the orphans’ home, Sister Martha read Deary’s letter to the children. They had gathered in the parlour as though one of Deary’s plays were to be performed. Paper trembled in the old nun’s hand and periodically she pressed it to her chest. Deary wrote of angels in the plaster of her new house — angels who reminded her of the Sisters. She wrote of her new “parents” and her rose-striped attic room which she shared with Cook. “A good daughter is kind,” Deary wrote. Of the heat in the attic she had no complaint because the angels on the floor below cooled her with their wings. Myriad wonders awaited Deary each week in the Rosedale ravine where, in her few hours off, she communed with all that was holy there. Swaying trees and countless blooms whispered to her, reassuring her of every living thing’s worth. The ravine was Deary’s temple of gladness and she gathered its bounty in arms that eagerly bore wildflowers home.
Deary wrote of her “brother,” a horseman, who was teaching her to ride. She could stand barefoot on the horse’s back, she said — the horse showed her how. The horses spoke to her through her thoughts. At that point, Sister Mary Margaret smiled, though she seemed puzzled. She looked at Sister Bernardine, who rolled her eyes heavenward. With her smile fading, Sister Mary Margaret looked at Sister Anne who muttered: “God save the poor girl’s mind,” too audibly to go unnoticed as she left the room.
Joseph understood that Deary communicated with the horses, and with the trees, the flowers and ravine animals. He didn’t doubt her. If anyone could turn being hired as a domestic servant into an adoption, Deary could. Losing her only strengthened Joseph’s yearning.
Sister Martha resumed reading. “Glory be,” Deary said through the old nun’s hacking cough. “I keep up my knitting. I keep up my beads.” More spasms of coughing followed, then: “Tell Joseph a butterfly walked with me two miles and I heard the name Annie.”
Sister Martha regarded Joseph for several watery seconds after her spasms ceased. He knew that she didn’t doubt Deary either, though the other nuns thought Deary was touched. Despite her gruffness and rules, Sister Martha had a way of showing that she valued and quietly delighted in the girl’s imagination, and Deary had softened the older nun in a way no one else could, least of all Joseph. Sister Martha had gasped at the sight of Joseph’s broken hand on the day Deary left. She had seen through his lie about an accident and called the doctor. She prayed for Joseph, he knew, but she’d also seen his old speller and the laudanum bottle. She knew he was tainted. When Joseph thought of Sister Martha, he felt the weight of his sins; when he thought of Deary, he felt the excitement of longing and that miracles were possible.
Joseph urgently wanted the letter. Deary’s hands had touched it. Her pen had written “Annie.” But Joseph knew that Sister Martha, too, treasured it. She whispered a prayer, wiping a tear from her cheek and left the parlour in the other nuns’ care. Joseph sneaked after her. In the front hall, she opened the desk with a key that she pulled down from behind a picture of the Madonna and Child. Joseph, hidden by the doorway, listened to Sister Martha recite a psalm that all the orphans learned by heart, and he mouthed the words as she spoke: “If I ascend into heaven, thou art there; if I descend into hell, thou art present. If I take my wings early in the morning …” Sister Martha paused, shaking. Some of the words fell away. “There shall thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold me.” Sister Martha tucked Deary’s letter in the desk and locked it.
In the weeks that followed, Joseph often went back to the Madonna for the key, avoiding the Virgin’s tranquil gaze, and that of Jesus who held out his neatly severed, shining heart. Always, after reading Deary’s letter, he folded the page carefully and slipped it back in the drawer. Sometimes Joseph paused to touch the cane that sat on the desk’s shiny surface beside the Douay-Rheims Bible.
One day Joseph decided to write to Deary, and he stole a sheet of paper from the desk. More and more sheets went to his room, where Joseph whispered news and thoughts, imagining that Deary was listening.
Deary,
I saw three swans on the pond today. I thought one was you.
And I was a swan too.
— Joseph
Deary,
I held the handstand for three minutes.
— Joseph
Deary,
Should I move to St. Nicholas Home? It would make Sister
Martha’s life easier. I only cause her trouble, and she’s very sick.
— Joseph
He planned one letter that he resolved to post to Deary — the story he had wanted to tell her, through their silences and even through their handstands. Father Tom might call Joseph’s story a confession, but the story was too big for the confessional box: the box — and more — would break. But Deary would listen and understand — and not break, and he might not break either. If he could just put his story in words to her, the weight of it might lift. She would know how to answer.
One day, instead of finding Deary’s letter in the drawer, Joseph found another one. “Dear Sisters,” it read, “I write with regret to inform you of the disappearance of our serving girl, Miss Avery. The circumstances of her unannounced departure remain mysterious to us, though I am compelled to add that her time here was neither peaceful nor pleasant for our family. Under no circumstances is she to return here. While we bear the girl no ill will, please understand that we found her unsuited to our needs. You have done your Christian duty by her as we attempted to do, unsuccessfully. Sincerely yours …”
As soon as he finished reading, Joseph knew that he had to move to St. Nicholas Home. In order to find Deary, he would have to be in the city. With the newsboys, Joseph could at least please God to some degree by remaining a lodger under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Sister Martha said: “Joseph, stay out here and learn a trade. You can grow up strong and skilled right here.” Joseph saw the goodness in her watery old eyes, and that she wanted to help him, despite his many sins; he also saw that he was failing her again.
But Joseph had to find Deary.
14
Before he became a newsboy, Joseph had not fully known the January cold. Waiting for the pre-dawn streetcar to get the papers, Joseph watched Tim’s reddened fingers fumble with the match for their first shared cigarette of the day. At the Toronto Mail building, Tim reached for as many papers as his arms could hold: great twine-bound heaps. “Tomorrow I’ll have money for even more,” Tim said, grinning through chattering teeth. Joseph couldn’t imagine surviving the winter.
Soon Tim earned enough to buy blacking and brushes for the two of them. “Take the money first,” Tim said. “Never shine before you get the money.”
At St. Nicholas Home, the day did not begin with mass, as the boarders had to get out to work. Most were apprenticing tradesmen — “upright boys,” said Mr. Rory Murphy, the home’s watchful superintendent, who lit the lamps at five in the morning, and dimmed them after the evening mass, a light supper, and night school for the boys. Joseph could see that Rory Murphy considered the home’s few newsboys a dubious lot. Benny, for example, was long gone. Rory Murphy made sure that the Christian Brothers and four resident nuns maintained order. The Sisters provided the meals and lessons, and saw that each boy paid. But Rory Murphy walked the floors. He visited each room. The boys called him by his full name to his face, and by several others behind his back. Joseph and Tim gave up on playing cards.
Each morning Joseph ran north up Yonge Street to claim a corner. Men stepped down from the trams, reaching for coins, seeing only the words sprawled on mastheads, not the boy who sold them. For Joseph, saying “Thank you, sir” to deaf ears became like breathing. Adding “Good day,” occasionally met with a grunt. When a corner dried, Joseph ran west past hotels and stables with signs on the doors: “Irish need not apply.”
When the church bells rang at noon, Joseph gave up. He kept charcoal in his sock and drew on unsold newspapers. Joseph sketched women as they stepped out of church, doing his best to hide behind trees, or at least to divert his subjects’ glances if they noticed him. One husband finished a sketch with his boot. At close range, Joseph’s challenge was to memorize details of the scowls of the men whose shoes he shined. Each man’s mouth ended exactly below the centre of each eye, even as the mouth opened to say: “Watch what you’re doing,” “Rude little street Arab,” or, “What’s wrong with you, boy? Get on, you dirty Irish!” Each man’s eyes were central on the front of his skull. Every human face, regardless of its fury, followed rules.
In the late afternoon, Joseph found a tavern where the men playing euchre still occasionally took a morning paper. Joseph sold what he could, but the cards drew him. As Joseph watched the players set down trump cards and slough, he listened intently to their accounts of evenings at the music halls. Recitations of performers’ names and gag lines became almost liturgical; yet the magic of the gaslit halls fell short of the images Joseph assembled in his mind. As he hurried to five o’clock mass, on his knees in the St. Nicholas chapel, Joseph made the sign of the cross and offered his prayers, works, happiness, and miseries of the day to God, but his visions of the theatre were his own. Perhaps God didn’t want his visions anyway, he told himself. Like so much of Joseph’s experience, perhaps his imaginings were incongruent with anything God would want.
Yet Joseph knew the real reason why he couldn’t offer God his daydreams of the theatre: in his mind he placed Deary centre stage. Joseph said prayers for her, but he felt little comfort, because he prayed selfishly. He refused to make an offering of the joys and sufferings the thought of her brought him; he refused to give up anything about her, and God must have known. Maybe that was why He had taken her away.
Occasionally, instead of lingering with the euchre players or going to mass, Joseph took a meal alone at his favourite dining hall, Kit’s Hashery on Queen Street, a dark, wood-panelled room where the victuals were cheap and the patrons kept to themselves. Newsboys were allowed to forego night school for sales, as long as they were back before evening prayers and the dimming of the lights.
At dusk, the doors of the Telegram Building blew open and a white-bearded man appeared. “All right, then, boys,” was all he ever puffed at them as he counted their pennies. Joseph ran west, hugging the still-warm papers to his chest: “Appalling Tragedy! Whole Family Exterminated! Awful Crime at Battle Creek, Michigan! Get your Telegram!” Parked carriage horses whinnied and scuffed at the cobble. “Spring outbreak planned to avenge Riel’s death. Read The Evening Telegram!”
A woman lit a lamp in a rooming house window and for a moment Joseph paused to watch her. Undressing her in his mind, he lost track of time.
Then, “Cold and storm in all parts — severe snows in England! Chicago! Galveston Texas! Zero degrees in Palestine! Get your Telegram here!”
A girl on Leader Lane with a frayed white mantle and hair in tangles offered to show parts of her body for twenty-five cents. He followed.
“What do you want to see?” she asked.
“I’d like to draw you.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she said.
Her fingers gripped his wrist, pulling past law offices and a butcher shop, through a door that opened onto stairs leading up to a cracked sign: “Dressmaking. Millinery at reduced prices. We invite fine trade.” Upstairs, the girl led Joseph past a door where a woman’s voice whispered over the sound of a man groaning, to a storage room where dusty bolts of fabric lined the walls under a barred window. The girl’s coat fell to the floor. Joseph settled onto a stack of folded cotton.
Joseph drew the girl on “Situations Vacant,” “Help Wanted,” and “Personal.” Pencil marked the paper more precisely than charcoal, but never as darkly as he wished. He drew the naked front of her without looking at the page. When she turned around, she looked more like a boy. Focusing on the light and shadow was easier then, but at times his pencil tore the page.
