Free The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver Page A

announcing the name of a town along the railway line: Over! Take your parcels! Mind the gap! Then he stopped and put a hand on her arm, but it seemed like someone else’s hand, just as her body seemed like someone else’s body. What was over? She’d let go of her mother because the nurse had made her. She’d left the hospital because her father led her out. What was over? She stepped away from her father. She was twenty-three years old. She knew how to iron; she knew how to love her mother. That was all. Poor lass, said her father when, finally, they were in their kitchen, among the cups and plates, sink and drying rack, a foreign country now. Poor lass, her father said again; whether he spoke about her mother or herself or both, she did not know. That was the last he spoke of it all, except to bring up practicalities around her mother’s burial.
    Only once did she cry, a few weeks after the funeral, walking and walking on the roads through town and then out of town, nearly to Padanaram, feet pounding, tears starting up only when the houses gave way to fields, her jaw set, fists balled against the sand-soft crumbling wall of grief. It was December and cold and she wore a hat but no scarf and the air scoured her lungs, and at some point she turned herself around, set one foot in front of the other, started back. When she got home, she cleaned out her mother’s clothes and sundries and brought them to the poorhouse, saving only a necklace, a shawl and her mother’s crochet needle (made from an eagle bone, her mother said) for herself. She cleaned the kitchen, stepping around her aunt, who was living there by then. That night, she cooked for her father, her aunt, Callum and Callum’s fiancée: smashed parsnips, beef in dark gravy, stewed apples. Then, without pleasure but with a plodding, almost endless appetite, she sat at her mother’s place at the table (her aunt occupied her own) and ate.
    At the laundry the next day, she tried to increase her hours, which she’d cut back during her mother’s illness, but business was slow and her mother was not there to stand up for her, and they said maybe by spring if things pick up. She offered to watch the three-doors-down neighbor’s infant two afternoons a week, and this was her comfort in the months to come: the firm weight of the boy as she rocked him by the stove, the way he woke reaching for her face. The neighbor paid her in sewing notions, which Bea accepted, and hemp bags from the mills, which she had no use for and refused. You need to get out, Tilly would chide her, making her walk to High Street to look in the window of the hat shop, or go to a dance now and then, though everyone knew there was only one man for every five girls and Bea’s mouth had no words inside it, and she had gotten, after having grown so thin, quite fat.
    Where was her father through all this? Her brother? Only years later, when she watched the Porters try to move through grief, would it occur to her to wonder. At the time, it seemed to her that sorrow was entirely her own territory. Her brother was getting married, after all. That he broke the news a few months before her mother’s death, and that it brought her mother some measure of peace, did not escape Bea’s notice, but more potent was her sense that both she and her mother were being quickly and practically replaced. Her father did not seem particularly changed after her mother’s death, though he must have been. Anyway, they were men, cut from a different cloth. She washed her brother’s and her father’s clothes and made their food and beds and said hello to them, good-bye, how was your day, have you got a cough, and that was that.
    It had not always been like this. When he was little, Callum had been her doughy, funny, white-faced, freckled boy, set apart from the other children by his limp and made Bea’s own by the fact that she cared for him after school when her mother was at work, fetching him from the neighbor’s until