Strum Page 6

  “What was she like?” she countered immediately.

  “As God was her witness,” he said slowly with a long drawn-out breath, “she was not afraid of hard work.”

  Father Jacob closed his eyes and reluctantly brought forth memories of a past that he had not evoked in over two decades. His twin sister was a devilishly strong-willed person; that he remembered. The farming life was only ever a duty to him, as the only son. She was his father’s right hand, and his sister embraced her responsibilities like a girl possessed by a demon. She worked on the land side by side with both male relatives, her small frame only half his father’s height and her fine fingers nearly bleeding, but they toiled until sundown each day, and at the end of the week there was no one who could bring customers and money to their market stall like she could.

  While he resolved to leave the land and become a priest as soon as his father would allow him, his sister’s attachment to the land and her enduring enthusiasm for the abundance of the harvest and increasing income from their labors never faltered. The proud radiance on her small face as she handed the weekly earnings to their Papa was invincible. And then he remembered their father’s betrayal — suddenly Father Jacob’s broad angular shoulders relaxed of their own accord and Isabelle sensed that the drawbridge over the fortress moat was being lowered momentarily for her to enter.

  “Did she play music too when she was young?” the girl asked boldly now.

  “No, child. She did not. There were fields to plow and harvests to gather, constant repairs and winter stores to attend to.”

  “Then where did she learn to play music like an angel?”

  “Like an angel indeed.”

  The priest hesitated, his eyes beginning to search the walls of the cabin to avoid the niece’s gaze. The bridge was starting to rise once again and quickly she followed up her line of questioning with a query that required a simple aye or nay. Her heart began to race and she felt a simultaneous panic and exhilaration in her breath like a fast rising tide.

  “Did she learn to play at a convent in Notre-Dame?” the girl continued, her eyes wide and beseeching the older man.

  “I would imagine so,” he said nodding his head, his eyes still trained upon the gray-white wall.

  “And was she at the convent for a very long time?”

  “Yes,” he murmured almost imperceptibly.

  “How long, Father?” the girl continued, her hope rising. “And how did I come to be born?”

  Her uncle now looked at her with little compassion, although in his formless but steady gaze she could see nothing of the anguish which began to rise in him as he looked upon his niece. For a moment he looked into the girl’s face and saw for the first time a painful likeness to his sister — the pointed chin and the broad forehead fringed with auburn rather than black, but the same pale translucent skin that evinced a finely formed porcelain mask over the young face; the eyes and lips so like his sister’s yet also so different. Where his sister’s eyes were amber like his own and her lips full, this girl’s eyes were the color of the forest. There he stopped short. The emerald green eyes of someone he once knew. He did not notice that her lips were small like a budding rose.

  The life her mother led before she was born remained a mystery. When Isabella discovered books in her mother’s meager belongings that bore the imprint of the convent’s seal, the only explanation she received was that her mother had once devoted her life to God. But she was a woman of few words. Her twelve-year vow of silence had made a lasting impression; even when she found herself eventually outside the strictures and confinement of the convent walls, her silence remained like an invisible cloister about her. She was impermeable to the rest of the world. Isabelle often felt she was on the outside of this wall looking in, for she knew very little, practically nothing, of her mother’s inner life.

  •

  The camp was smaller than Isabelle had envisioned. As the coach approached in the failing light that early spring evening, the girl felt weary to the bone, having traveled for three consecutive days on rough roads that jarred and jumped under the wheels of the horse-drawn carriage. Her bones seemed rearranged by the journey and she clutched her seat as if her life depended on it. On the long jaunting trip her uncle’s formidable attention was focused on a large, heavy, leather-bound bible in his lap, which he used as a sort of ballast to keep from pitching forward and sideways as the coach careened its way southeast into the interior of the wild Canadian landscape.

  The horses and coach drivers were changed every day on the journey and the last driver kept up a continuous monologue aimed at his passengers regardless of whether they could hear his words or not. Isabelle was not glad for this distraction, but caught a large enough fraction of his interpretation of the landscape to understand that they were nearing their final destination — the furthest eastern endpoint of the invisible line she had drawn from their original staging point at the port of Québec. They kept to the only road in the area, originally a horse trail regularly used by the natives, then recently cleared and widened by the loggers who had set up the new camp not seventeen years earlier.

  Of the original six passengers that disembarked from the ship and gathered to charter the coach three days earlier, only the girl and her uncle remained. By the time the road-weary carriage horses strode into the camp with their heavy hooves, the last rays of the sun were bleeding out and less than two dozen gas lamps formed a sparse constellation across the campsite. An early salute from a barn owl broke the settling silence.

  Isabelle could barely fight through her fatigue to alight from the coach and remain standing, as the driver handed down their baggage. A dark rounded figure carrying a kerosene lamp above her short frame rushed out of the cabin and with head slightly bowed, welcomed the priest and his charge to the camp.

  “I hope you had a tolerable journey, Father Jacob,” she said with motherly concern. “I hope your back did not bother you too much.” Then she looked at Isabelle quickly up and down and said, “And you must be Isabelle?”

  “Yes, Madame,” the girl replied with an awkward and regrettable dip of the knees.

  “You’re not as little as I imagined you to be. Sorry to hear about your mother.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “Welcome to Solpetrière, Isabelle. I am Madame Lowell. I am your uncle’s housekeeper. Why don’t you both take yourselves into the house and I shall be there shortly.”

  “Yes, Madame,” was all the girl could manage.

  “I will just help the driver here with the bags.”

  Father Jacob strode up beside Madame Lowell at that moment and stooped above them with his hand on the older woman’s shoulder for support.

  “Thank you, Madame Lowell,” the priest said quietly. Then he corrected himself self-consciously, “Amalie.” These were nearly the first words that Isabelle had heard from her uncle’s lips since they commenced their coach journey that morning. The tall man turned on his heels and moved toward the cabin slowly. Isabelle followed a few paces behind him unsure of her legs but keen to discover what a log cabin looked like from the inside. Isabelle did not stop to take up her bag although for a moment she dreaded to think how her precious cargo had survived its three-day journey through purgatory.

  She caught up to her uncle, who had already stepped through the threshold of the house, not waiting for her to find her way up the dark steps. Her new home was small with warm cedar log walls and simple rough-hewn timber furniture. To one side was a large iron pot-bellied stove upon which was nestled a black iron kettle steaming upon a glowing bed of coals, and a fat copper soup pot beside it, the lid only perfunctorily holding back the succulent warm smells of supper, a reward for their timely arrival.

  The priest motioned his niece to seat herself on the small lounge as he disappeared into his private room. Isabelle was glad of the seat, but decided to remain
standing and moved slowly across the room to look more closely at the books and photographs lined up along a small rough bookcase against the opposite wall. Two daguerreotypes leaned against the back of the shelf just above her eye level. The girl immediately thought it must have been Madame Lowell who put them there, as certainly her uncle would have placed them higher, at his eye level. She could just see in the dimly lit cabin the figures that faced her, standing with an eternal moroseness. The photographs fascinated her as she had never seen one before. Although the solemn pairs of eyes that stared back at her were unfamiliar, in one she made out the possible image of Uncle Jacob dressed in a black robe and standing beside another man in different robes, and yet another man in a soldier’s uniform.

  At that moment the baggage arrived with the housekeeper and the coach driver and together they arranged the cargo in a small pile in the corner of the cabin. Father Jacob appeared out of his room wearing a clean frock with a freshly scrubbed look about his countenance. The driver enviously eyed the soup pot, but bid his farewell and exited to tend to his horses for the night. Father Jacob picked up two leather valises and carried them into his room as Madame Lowell hurried behind him with two more, quietly urging him to be careful of his back.

  Madame Lowell was much older and plumper than her mother, Isabelle observed. She was stout and sturdy as a tree stump and twice the width of her reed-like Maman. Above her flushed and rounded face was a mop of silvery gray hair pulled loosely back in an untidy bun at the back of her creased neck. Her small mouth was shaped like a beak and overall her appearance was of a clucky old silver hen. Madame Lowell, Isabelle would eventually discover, was a Swiss-French widow who had been married to an Anglican minister, with whom Father Jacob had been acquainted in his earlier travels through Canada.

  Standing alone in the corner was Isabelle’s now somewhat bedraggled valise and she wondered if she should move it. But not knowing where to place it, she simply went to stand beside it and waited for the housekeeper to return to give instruction. Subsequently, Madame Lowell re-entered and without due consideration picked it up as if it was a mere feather duster. The plump rolls on her arms wobbled slightly but she did not seem to struggle at all with the weight.

  “Come along, child,” she motioned to Isabelle, “Your room is yet to be finished so you shall stay with me in the back house. Is this all you have?”

  “Yes, Madame,” said the girl with her eyes cast downward to avoid revealing the anxiety she felt at Madame Lowell’s careless waving of the bag about her as she spoke. The priceless contents were unknown to her; only Isabelle was privy to their preciousness, and she nearly reached out for the bag but realized that Madame Lowell was only being kind to assist her as she did, and might be offended by her protectiveness.

  “You’ll want to wash up a bit before supper too,” Madame Lowell now said, looking concerned at the girl’s dusty, crumpled, and bedraggled clothes and hair. Her shoes in particular were the worse for wear even though Isabelle had taken great pains to polish them with a bit of rag before she disembarked from the ship.

  Isabelle stood still.

  “Come with me,” Madame Lowell continued. “We’ll get you out of your dusty clothes and scrub you down. I suppose two weeks in a sailing ship and three days on the road without a decent bath would make anyone look like a street urchin!”

  Like a tired baby chick trying to keep up after its mother, Isabelle giddily followed the matron. They picked up the kerosene lamp from its peg on the porch and carried it down the steps and around the house to another small bungalow behind the main house connected by a covered walkway. With the cold seeping in through her thin frock, Isabelle picked up her step and kept close to the dark figure below the bobbing lamplight. Then the door of the cabin was prised open and immediately a waft of lemon polish and lavender found their way into Isabelle’s nose. She cried out with a half-anguished, half-delighted gasp as the rich warm smell all at once took her numb memories back to Father Pascal’s house, which her mother had always kept beautifully polished with lemon oil and freshly scented with the lavender flowers that bordered her lush potager.

  Madame Lowell turned around to study the girl’s face and saw quivering lips and tears welling up in the two emerald eyes behind the dusty mask. Without a word, she placed the valise carefully on the floor and, with a knowing sigh, put both her matronly arms around the girl in a soft maternal embrace. The tears rushed down her grimy cheeks carrying the salty grit and emotional detritus of the past months into her trembling lips. These she pressed exhaustedly into the plush and welcoming bosom of Father Jacob’s housekeeper.

  “Now, now, now,” Madame Lowell cooed, “You go ahead and cry. You must be very, very tired. We’ll wash your face and get you undressed and into the cot for a good sleep. You can have your bath in the morning.”

  She led the weeping girl into a bare closet-sized room with a tiny window set quite high, and a small cot which had a thin cotton gown folded neatly upon it. Isabelle let herself be helped out of her dusty shoes, barely able to remain standing on the cold timber floor, as Madame Lowell helped her undress, scrubbed her quickly with a washcloth, and pulled the nightshift over her. Pulling back the woolen covers, Isabelle slipped into the bed with a small whimper and was asleep before Madame Lowell bid her good night and closed the door behind her.

  The evening passed without dreaming for the exhausted girl. While her uncle dined in his room in the main house, she floated in the euphoria of a deep sound sleep, not even waking when the large russet bantam roused itself before the first light of dawn to announce the start of his day. At one point she drifted out of her slumber briefly to be met with the essence of lemon oil, but on this occasion it brought comfort rather than tears, and softly lulled her along on the placid ocean of sleep.

  When she finally awoke several hours later to the sounds of a dozen chickens clucking and rousing each other in the poultry joisting ground below the small window, she sat up in her cot to look around the room for the first time. It was small and likely a storage closet at one time as several deep shelves lined the wall opposite her. They held a veritable supply store’s variety of cleaning implements and old rags, including a bottle of oil that surely was the source of the lemon polish essence that had sent the homesick girl into a frisson of tears the night before.

  Across the room a small high window was left slightly ajar, rendering the sounds of the poultry below particularly distinct. The window beckoned her, and with the help of a small step-stool and standing on her toes, she was just able to take in the view afforded by the windowpane. Outside, the expansive view took her breath away. In the foreground, from the house to the animal shed a few yards away, the scene was familiar — under a large bare-limbed maple tree a dozen or so chickens scratching at a hard-packed dark brown surface bordered by an expanse of fresh lime-green grass glazed in parts with gleaming patches of melting ice. Beyond the roofline of the barn, the contours of evergreen treetops fanned out from every direction, extending higher and further than her eyes could comprehend. In varying shades of green from a deep emerald to a greeny-gray goose egg color that disappeared into the white of the clouds above the peaks, the vertical sea of conifers was as vast as the ocean she just crossed. Above the floating cloud line, the sky graduated to a brilliant azure blue that she had only imagined in her dreams.

  A firm knock on the door caught her gazing at this splendid view and woke her from the reverie of the scenery. Stepping down carelessly from her perch upon the stool, she suddenly found herself in a crumpled heap on the floor and gave a small cry. The door opened smartly and Madame Lowell came whirling in with her long skirt flying, nearly dropping the small tray in her hands, and her mouth opened in a small “Caw?”

  “Isabelle,” she clucked, “What are you doing there on the ground? Have you hurt yourself?” She placed the tray of breakfast on the cot and bent over awkwardly to assist the collapsed girl. Her
ankles were weakened from standing on her toes for so long peering out the window, and when she alighted on the ground from the height of the stool they had given out from under her.

  “I’m all right, Madame Lowell,” she replied quickly. “I just tripped over the stool. I am all right now.” Scrambling to her feet with the woman’s help, Isabelle hobbled over to the cot, sitting down abruptly and nearly disrupting the omelet and piece of toast on the small tray. “Oh, thank you so much for the breakfast, Madame Lowell. You needn’t have gone through so much bother for me. I was on my way out to help you with the housework. My mother was the housekeeper for Father Pascal in my hometown, you know. I always woke up early to help Maman with the chickens … ”

  “You never mind the housework today, my dear. I will expect some help soon enough, but today we shall get you cleaned up and fed, and then we will see what Father Jacob needs done.” Madame Lowell picked up the tray and motioned with her silver-gray head for Isabelle to follow. “Come on now; let’s sit you at the table to eat your omelet properly — parsley and onion to give a tired girl some energy. I will go and warm the well water for your bath, so don’t delay with the breakfast.”

  Isabelle sat for a moment longer and pondered her new life thus far. She remembered Madame Lowell’s motherly embrace the night before and realized that this woman was kinder to her than anyone she’d ever known. Her own mother remained distant in her silence, as did her uncle. Madame Lowell however kept up a constant dialogue and seemed genuinely concerned for her safety and comfort.

  I shall not let her down, Isabelle thought to herself. She gathered herself off the cot and limped in her bare feet out to the small hand-hewn kitchen table where Madame Lowell had left her breakfast.

  After she completed her ablutions in the warm copper hip-bath, Isabelle was grateful for the opportunity to pull on fresh undergarments, a clean dress and stockings retrieved from her case stowed underneath the cot. The temptation to pull out her guitar case and examine the instrument inside for any damage was on her mind, but instead she crept back into the kitchen in her stocking feet and found her shoes near the back door. They had been dusted and polished to a dull sheen. She lifted them to her nose and smelled the slightly rancid odor of animal fat on them, but was grateful that the job had been done for her. Putting them on, she felt like a newborn person.