Free A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski

not even touch each other. She was watching the house. He was watching the church. What’s a stranger, her father shouted. Do you know what a stranger is? Yes, she answered very quietly, and this one wasn’t. He wasn’t, he could never be a stranger. He has been here always. All the years and months, every day since God had created the land and the sea and all that in them is. You have never seen the sea, said her father. Not yet, she replied, but one of these days he will come again, in a car this time, and he will drive me anyplace I want. And I shall ask for the seashore and I shall pick shells on the edge of the tide.
    All of them had looked there a thousand times when she went missing? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Whoever it was had taken her far away. Very likely she herself doesn’t know where she had been.
    Laurence sits sideways on the warm tombstone. Suddenly Summer has come in, and every stone is hot. He has to keep moving his bum to a cooler patch. He doesn’t want to get so far from the empty nymph that he cannot keep picking at it with the nail of his little finger. He watched the dragon unfold in the morning and dry its wings until it flew away. Now he’s not sure that he shouldn’t have captured it in a jamjar and looked at it a bit longer, just to get the idea of the veins on its glassy wings, just to decide what the pattern was before he lost it forever. Something must explain the way the way it flew, jerky but rhythmical as a grandfather walking with a stick along the hard towpath beside the canal. In his mind Laurence is making a song of it, regretting the departure of the newly born insect, regretting the staggering of grandfathers as they descend the bank to the dark canal below.
    ~~~

    There are two of them of course, and no grandmothers. It is vague where their wives have got to. There is a rumour that one of them is lying somewhere in the cold earth of the north, but the other – where can she be? No-one comes near answering that question, but Laurence believes she ran away with a Frenchman in her youth. Now that he has started French at school he hopes some day to find her picture in a book, a rather elegant figure leaning on a park bench in some misty place with her hands in a muff and looking dreamily up into the face of a man in dragoon’s uniform and a drooping moustache. It doesn’t surprise him at all that she seems so much younger than his mother.
    The grandfathers, the two old men, seem happy enough. They have known each other since they were boys and have come to be very like one another. They both are tall and thin with grey moustaches, and how to tell them apart is that one is much redder in the face than the other. They even live together in the same rooming house two streets away and they often come on Saturday to take Laurence fishing. They argue a lot but the boy doesn’t mind that. His parents don’t argue at all, at least not within earshot of their children. They throw warning glances at each other whenever the possibility arises. Laurence is amused by this but wishes they would have a spat now and then to lighten the leaden air that always seems to surround them when they are together.
    ~~~

    Nancy is talking to herself again. She talks all the time, Laurence tells the grandfathers, but she says nothing much. Perhaps she knows everything but gives nothing away. For a while Laurence doesn’t recognize this as a question and goes on pressing the bread-dough bait onto his hook. There’s a pause, a long one, all you hear is the babble of the child perched on the high bank above them playing one of her endless insect games where the beetles are kings and queens and the grass is a forest and a small yellow spider is, as she puts it, a captivated princess. From now on she will have to be taken on all the fishing trips. Girls must be watched, Mother has announced. They must never be left alone. Nancy must go fishing while the unwilling Bryll helps in the house, plumping pillows