GO FISH

They are going in two and three at a time, taking turns, speaking softly and dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs as they come out. They go together so they won’t have to be alone with her, that’s what Molly thinks.

They’ve taken out the bed that was in there and brought in a table from somewhere and put the coffin on it, and borrowed some chairs for people to sit and watch her and maybe say a prayer. It’s a small room, and with the table and chairs and the old pine wardrobe taking up almost an entire wall, there is hardly space to put yourself, and no way to avoid looking at the body. Vic and Morley go in together, and when they have seen it, they come out and get her cousins, Harry and Del, and Morley goes back in with them. That’s the way they work it, adults together and then one grown-up with the kids, so the young ones don’t have to face it alone.

Molly hangs back, keeping close to her mother, who sits in a green ladder-backed chair by the fire, dressed all in black. Her hands are folded in her lap and her head is tilted at a slight angle, as if she is straining to hear something. Or someone. She sits there, in that position, all evening, a slight smile on her lips, speaking only when she is spoken to, always in her soft, patient voice with its familiar Paisley accent.

Her father, as usual, does all the talking: “Morley! Thank you for coming. Yes, it’s a terrible thing. Terrible. Poor wee girl. She’s better now, though, that’s for certain. She’s in the arms of the angels.”

There being only the one chair left to sit on, he stands up the whole time, shifting the baby from one arm to the other. Molly offers to hold him but her father demurs; it gives him something to do, something to think about apart from the events of the past four days.

That’s all it has been, after all, just four days. Christmas morning Mina complained that her head hurt; she tried to get out of bed and slipped onto the floor, as if the bones in her legs were melting, and her mother gave her a spoonful of the patent medicine she keeps in the cupboard over the stove. The next morning she was worse; her mother put cold compresses on her forehead and tried to give her tea with laudanum but she spit it out, just cried and wouldn’t take it. By the afternoon Mina was delirious and Molly was sent to fetch the doctor. She had to take the streetcar to the doctor’s house and by the time she got there it was dark and there was a sign on the front door saying the doctor’s hours were nine in the morning to five at night. She knocked on the door anyway, not knowing what else to do, and a young girl in a maid’s uniform let her in and made her wait in the hall while she went to see. After a while the girl came back and said the doctor was on his way out, but he’d come first thing in the morning. So Molly took the streetcar back home by herself.

The doctor came the following morning, as he promised, but it was too late.

“Why on earth didn’t you call me sooner?” he asked.

Molly’s mother tried to explain but she couldn’t speak for crying and the doctor packed up his bag in disgust.

“You people,” he said, “you exhaust me. You come to this country with nothing, and you expect us to move mountains.”

“Please.” Her mother tried to compose herself. She couldn’t let him walk out with her daughter lying there ill, so tiny and so beyond helping. “Can’t you do something? There must be something you can give her . . . some medicine . . .”

“I’m not a miracle worker,” was all he would say. And he left.

Her mother sat by Mina’s side for the rest of the day. At last she turned to Molly and told her to go down to the store and bring her father home. “He should be here to say goodbye.” She didn’t need to say Mina was dying . . . that was clear.

Mina lived for another 12 hours, dying early in the morning of the 28th of December.  Her mother came and got Molly out of bed.

“Your sister’s gone,” she said. “I need you to go tell the family.”

By “family” she meant her family: her older sisters, Hetty and Vic, and Nell, her twin, her brother Ewan who married Rose, the one who died, and her half-sister, Maggie, from when her mother married a second time. There were others . . . a brother and sister who died as children, and the two oldest girls, Diana and Betty, who stayed behind in Glasgow. Her mother’s father was a bookbinder’s finisher for Blackie & Sons; after he died, Grandma married Hugh Guthrie, a house painter, and the family moved to Canada. Grandma and Grandpa Guthrie live in an apartment block two streets over; they look after the tenants and in return live rent-free in a basement suite.

Her father’s family is still back in England, except for an older brother and his wife, who live in Toronto, too far away to really be considered family. They will receive word of the death by one of the black-bordered funeral cards sent to relatives and friends:

IN LOVING MEMORY

WILHELMINA BLEWITT

BORN IN SPRAGUE, MANITOBA, JANUARY 2ND, 1922.

DIED IN ST. BONIFACE, MANITOBA, DECEMBER 28TH, 1924.

Call not back our dear departed, anchored safe where storms are o’er

On the borderland we left him, soon to meet and part no more.

When we leave this world of changes, when we leave this world of care

We shall find our missing loved one in our Father’s mansion fair.

“Father, in Thy hands I commend my spirit.” Luke 23:46

Earlier that morning, before sunrise, her father wakes her up “to say good-bye.” She’s sleepy . . . her toes on the frigid floorboards curl inward, her teeth begin to chatter as she follows him down the hall and into the room where he and her mother sleep. The window is, as always, propped open; her mother has an Old Country belief in the restorative properties of fresh air, no matter the season.

Her father picks up a candle, holds it near the body . . . the flame flickers in the draft.

“Come say good-bye to your sister,” he said.

She approaches the little white coffin. Five dollars, it cost . . . a lot of money. She looks down at the little face, eyes closed, curls spread out on the satin pillow. They’ve played a trick on her—this isn’t her sister. It doesn’t look anything like her.

She stands there, not knowing what to do. Is she supposed to kiss this . . . stranger?  Her father seems to expect something. He picks up Mrs. Broom, the raggedy doll that was her sister’s favourite.

“You can give her this,” he says, and she can hear in his voice that that there is no trick being played. She takes the doll and places it in the box, next to the small dead person who used to be her sister.

“Goodbye,” she says, and then, “Goodbye, Mina.”

She feels there’s something else, something other than this expected of her. But her father appears satisfied. “Go back to bed, now,” he tells her. “Get some sleep.”

Later that day it begins to snow; she’d like to go outside and build a snow fort with the neighbourhood kids but she has a sense that it would somehow be inappropriate. Her sister has died, which is a very serious thing to have happened; no one would want to see her running around in the snow as if it was nothing. If she’s very quiet, if she makes herself invisible, they might forget she’s around and she’ll find out what happened to Mina. This is often the way it works: grown-ups will talk about all sorts of things—interesting things—if they think she’s not listening. Or can’t understand what they’re saying. She’s eight years old now and understands a great deal, but they sometimes forget that.

All day people come and go; they hug her mother, shake hands with her father, look at her and her baby brother with great sadness, but no one says—really says—anything. She thinks perhaps this is the way it is when something terrible happens; it is so awful, so very bad, that it’s beyond saying anything at all.

Hetty and her husband, Alfred, live the furthest away, and are the last to arrive. They have no children of their own, but six years ago they adopted Ewan, Rose’s son, when she died in childbirth. It makes Alfred a kind of a saint as far as the sisters are concerned.

“There’s not many would do that,” Molly’s mother says, “raise up a boy who’s no real kin, and love him like his own. It shows the nature of the man and I won’t hear a word spoken against him.”

Now they enter the room with Ewan clutched between them, as if they are frightened he, too, might be carried off into the arms of the angels.

“Molly,” her father says, “take little Ewan here and you two go find something to do, there’s a good girl.”

Hetty hesitates, not wanting to let him go; her husband says something to her in an undertone and she nods . . . yes, all right.

“Off you go now, Ewan, with your cousin. Mind you behave yourself, there’s a good boy.”

Still unsure, the boy looks between them, and then at Molly, who has not left her mother’s side all morning. He is small for his age, and shy, in the way of only children, and not at all sure he wants to spend time alone with Molly. She’s tough, and a little scary; he finds her presence unsettling. He knows she’s his cousin, and therefore they should have lots of things in common, but whenever they are thrown together they’re like strangers. Her family moves all the time, for one thing, and for another, she is nothing like the little girls he plays with at his school—soft and freshly soaped and a little bit silly. Which is exactly how they are meant to be. Girls, he has decided, are rather useless; he once asked his father what girls were for, and his father said he had no idea, except perhaps to spend their fathers’ money. Molly’s father has no money, and she is all elbows and scrapes, not soft at all.

Reluctantly, he follows Molly out of the parlour into the small room at the back that serves as a storeroom and bedroom for her and Mina. Well, just for her now, he reckons. Molly sits on the bed and, after a moment, Ewan sits down beside her. There’s a silence while Ewan tries to think of something to say and Molly picks at a scab on her knee.

“Do you want to play cards?”

It isn’t what he expects her to say, but that’s the thing with Molly, she never says or does anything you expect her to.

“Okay,” he says.

“Good. I’ll get them.”

Molly scrambles down from the bed and hurries out to the kitchen to retrieve the pack of cards her father keeps in a kitchen drawer. She is relieved to have something to do, and she has thought of a way to bring up what is on her mind.

When she returns with the cards Ewan is leaning back against the wall, looking up at the ceiling.

“There’s a spider,” he says.

Molly settles herself on the bed and begins to shuffle the deck.

“Are you going to kill it?”

“Why should I?”

Ewan has no answer to this; he watches Molly shift the cards from one hand to another and tries not to think of the spider crawling around just over his head.

“What do you want to play?” Molly asks.

“Go Fish.”

“That’s for babies,” Molly says. “Do you know how to play gin rummy?”

Ewan shakes his head; it sounds vaguely unsavoury, but exciting.

“I’ll teach you,” Molly says. “We should cut the cards to see who deals but I’ll deal first and then it’ll be your turn, okay?”

She lays out the cards, one at a time, until there are ten in front of each of them, and then she puts one card face up in the middle, next to the rest of the pack.

“We should play for something,” she says.

“I can’t play for money,” Ewan says. “I’m not allowed to gamble.”

“No, me neither,” she says, although in fact the subject has never come up. After a moment she says, as if she has just thought of it: “I know. The loser has to tell something scary.”

“You mean like a ghost story?”

“No, something scary that really happened to you, Not made up. Okay?”

“I saw a fox get killed once, by a car—”

“Not now. Only if you lose.”

Ewan tries to pay attention while Molly explains the rules. She is surprisingly patient and it isn’t as complicated as he thought it would be.

“Why do they call it gin?” he asks.

Molly shrugs. She is concentrating on letting Ewan win, but he is very bad at cards and she has to make a lot of very silly mistakes in order for him to finally be able to say “Gin!”

“All right,” she says, laying down her cards, “I lost so I’ll tell you a scary thing that happened to me.”

“Okay.” Ewan is proud of himself for winning but not at all sure he wants to hear this. He sits very still and tries not to look nervous.

“When I went into the room where they’re keeping her—”

“Keeping who?”

“Her. My sister. I went in there and I saw her and—”

She pauses for dramatic emphasis, and then she says it: “She was black.”

There is a silence while Molly waits for Ewan’s reaction.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

Patiently, as she had been when explaining the rules of the card game, Molly says it again: “My sister, Mina. She was black. Her skin was turned all black.”

“Oh.” The boy is vaguely disappointed. He thought . . . well, he isn’t sure quite what he thought she would say but something other than this. Molly, he can see, expects some kind of reaction, so he says it again, “Oh!” And then, “That’s pretty scary. Really scary, I mean, that’s really scary.”

“Why do you think it happened?” Molly asks.

Because this is what she wants to know. This is what she will wonder about years later, when dying has become the norm and just about everyone she once knew has gone—none of them, as far as she knows, turning black in the process. So why did it happen to Mina? What caused it?

“I don’t know,” Ewan says.

“What did they do to her? What do you think they did?”

She isn’t just asking, she is demanding an answer. Somebody must know why it happened. Is this what happens when you die? Was her skin painted black and if so, who did it? And why?

“I don’t know.” He slips off the bed and she reaches out and takes hold of his shirt sleeve.

“Wait! Don’t go—just tell me what you think.”

“Stop it! Let go of me!”

She sees that he’s ready to cry. If he goes bawling to Hetty and Alfred she’ll get in trouble. He’s only seven, after all. He’s just a baby; he doesn’t have the answers to such things.

She lets go of his shirt and smiles. “It’s all right, I was only asking. Do you want to play another game?”

Ewan shakes his head. “I want to go home.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she says. “We’ll play Go Fish, all right? And you can deal. Would you like that?”

He hesitates. She picks up the cards strewn across the bed cover and arranges them back into a stack. He sees that she is being nice, now, and he is torn between wanting to deal the cards and wondering if she’s going to turn on him again.

“Here.” She holds out the deck of cards and smiles again. “It’s your deal.”

He climbs back on to the bed, beside her, and begins to share the cards between them. Glancing up at the ceiling, he sees that the spider is gone.