Free House of Spells by Robert Pepper-Smith

tell how much you really matter. The kind of difference you make.
    My father, watching Rose return from the station, said, “You have to go with her.” He must have sensed my hesitation.
    Carrying that baby, she was hurrying, and she looked at the same time vulnerable and alone, determined and scared.
    She took me by the hand down the train corridor. We climbed into a narrow bed behind heavy curtains. I raised the blind to the lit-up platform that was rolling past at a walk, the clacking of the wheels and she on her side. Rose combed her hair while the newborn nursed at her breast. She had a nightshirt for me in a marbled green suitcase, warm from the stove where it had hung drying. Lying beside her I touched the little hollows in the small of her back that were the colour of pips left on raspberry canes after you pick the fruit.
    The bed was narrow, and I felt pushed against the metal wall. The heavy curtain smelled of rug cleaner. Rose’s feet were icy cold on my ankles. She said, “We’re going,” and I could sense her smile in the dark. She was going away to her new life, eighteen years old. People talk about responsibility, being mature, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. Mostly they mean, Do what I tell you. Outside I could see the dawn over the mountains through the flickering snow and when we went over the Palliser Bridge I saw my father’s mill upriver on the bank, snow-covered ice in the shallows. “Your feet smell, Lacey,” Rose said.
    I saw that the toes of my socks were stained with blood and fluid. In the hurry to leave our house, I’d put on the shoes I’d had on when I’d pressed my knees into the small of Rose’s back during the birth. Some of the blood must have seeped into them. I climbed out of bed to throw away my socks in the washroom, scrub my shoes in the sink with hand soap. I couldn’t scrub them hard enough to get that smell off. I hooked one foot then another in the sink, scrubbing at my feet and between my toes with a facecloth till they were red.
    When I returned to the train bed, Rose handed me her baby and said, “Walk him a bit for me, won’t you? I need to sleep.”
    That child hardly weighed more than the winter blanket I wrapped him in, and I felt his toes wriggling. I was worried that he might wake up and that I wouldn’t know what to do. So I kept walking, afraid that he would cry.
    We were standing on the metal plates between cars and I was watching the mountains through a window opening that had no glass in it. Snow hissed over the face of the mountain. We were slowly climbing out of the valley and I drew the blanket loosely over Senna’s face to keep him warm.
    In the train bed she’d told me she’d decided to call him Senna.
    I felt afraid without knowing why. In the village museum there are school photos from the 1920s: dirty-haired boys with wide, still eyes and girls with prim smiles, all out there in their faces — they had gone on to work in the sawmill or drugstore, marriage, the house on 4th Street, the kids, a trip to Scotland or Italy, piling up experiences like money deposited in a bank. Then a car accident or a heart attack, a funeral and a mossy stone, mostly the usual thing. It all made me feel so tired. But maybe a class photo, a bit of a second, was more than enough in any life, if you just paid attention to what you already have in your arms.
    In the winter of 1964, when I was eleven, I sneaked out at night to go ice fishing on Olebar Lake. I took a flashlight and a yew wood reel. I had a mason jar of crayfish in my coat pocket. It was so cold that the ice hummed like a violin string and stars glittered like a thousand miles of mica. Alberto Braz had marked the hole he’d chopped in the ice with a bundle of sticks tied with a ribbon that shimmered in the starlight. It was a long way out there and quiet and once I heard the huff of a moose in the dark firs along the far point. No one else on the lake that night, all the fishing huts