Free The End of the Point by Elizabeth Graver Page B

he was old enough to attend school himself. It had been Bea, for a time, that Callum wanted when he called out at night. It had been Bea who defended him from teasing, Bea who bathed him, until they grew older and he bathed himself. As Callum grew, a sullenness set in with him. His hands got rough from the ropeworks; he wore his apron when there was no need to, scissors poking from the pocket, jute clinging to his clothes like body hair. He began, at random moments, to say cruel, coarse things to Bea: about her weight, about what people said about girls who worked the laundry. He began (was it he who started their father in this direction?) to drink. And then he met Kate, the girl he would marry, and a certain pleasantness came back, but not toward Bea, especially, though he did stop being cruel. “This is my . . . sister,” he said once as he introduced her to a friend, and anyone might have noticed how he paused before the word, as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was.
    With her father too, Bea had once had glimpses of a person she could talk to, but that was years ago. One time, when she was six or seven, for some reason she could no longer remember, her father had taken her and Callum to work for the day. “This is where the china is,” he’d said, leading them to a side room where a sign read “Fragile Goods.” “You need to be banking that with straw, or it’ll break.” He told them that if someone wanted to send a plover’s egg or honeycomb as freight, it was written right into the books that the company was not responsible if the egg broke or the honeycomb got crushed, but it wouldn’t break, not if he had packed it. He was a proud and quiet man, her father (this was before the Great War, and she was younger than Janie; he had set her on a packing crate, said Do not swing your legs, and she had not).
    It was more words than she’d heard him say in years. She would always remember that—how he’d looked at her more than Callum as he talked, and she’d stared at him and listened as hard as she could, though she was, more than anything, confused. Why, anyway, send a plover’s egg alone on a train, or honeycomb? Over time, in her mind, the plovers’ eggs and honeycomb came to have something to do with her father and the Great War, with her father and the way that, after he came home from France, he scrubbed each night, scrubbed and scrubbed but always stank, for it wasn’t mostly glassware and china he was loading at the railroad; it was coal and ballast and manure, it was filthy sheep marked with chalk, bulls with crimson parts, and first her father was a Good Templar, not a drop of liquor in the house, and then, after her mother took sick, he brought in whisky for her pain, then his; he and Callum drank after work; he stopped washing; he “let himself go” (it was a phrase Mrs. P. used about people, along with “He’s lost his marbles” or “She’s got a screw loose”). And then her mother died, Callum married, her father’s sister Mary moved in, and when Bea brought up the idea of Canada with her father, he barely looked up from his newspaper.
    “Tilly’s going,” Bea said, mostly to fill the space. “Also her brother.”
    Her first response, when Tilly had brought up the idea, had been panic: first her mother gone, now Tilly. Then, as she was trying to absorb it, only half listening to Tilly talk on, her friend had suggested that she come too. Me? To Canada? It had never occurred to her, not once in her livelong days. Tilly laid out the arguments: how there was no work at home, even the laundry laying off, their own hours just cut by a third. And there are strong, handsome men in Canada, said Tilly. Loads of them, with beards. Beards? Bea laughed but felt repulsed. And money, said Tilly, and their own log houses—Scotsmen, loads of them, and the whole lot needing wives. Not long before Bea’s mother had lost the ability to speak, she had told Bea to look after herself now. She