The Sister's Tale by Beth Powning (e reader for manga .txt) 📕

of the horse’s sweat; purple-black flies hovered as if suspended from strings. Mr. Tuck drew horse and wagon to a standstill behind the barn and Flora slid down and ran into the workshop. She began a frantic tugging—buttons, tipped to fit through holes. Hooks, behind her neck. Panic changed the place’s shape, brought details into focus. Saddle rack marks, pale, on the walls. Cobwebs, and the expanse of workbench where the miniature house had been, and a small brass duck on a windowsill.

Jasper Tuck came through the door. He threw down a paper parcel—stove bolt, corner irons and matches he had purchased to validate Flora’s supposed trip. He sat on the edge of a chair, hands on his knees.

“What did you say to her?”

“What you told me to say. That it would be the only house like it. That it would be just like her own house.”

“What did she say?”

Flora could not tell him that every subsequent statement from Mrs. Dunfield’s lips had been about him. Who was he? Who were his people? Where did he come from?

“She said it was beautiful. She said they couldn’t afford to buy one but maybe someday. Someday, she said. She would like to have one.”

“You’re lying, aren’t you.”

“I don’t lie.” But sometimes I have to.

He was a sprung hinge, on his feet, grasping the tab of cloth across her breast, pulling her to him. She cried out, pushed against his chest.

“She wanted to know about me. Eh?”

“I said you came from up north.”

“You could have tried harder.” He grasped her shoulders and shook her.

“I don’t know anything about you.” Her head snapped forward, flung back. His thumbs dug into the hollows beside her collarbone, opposing fingers like steel.

She drove her head into his chest, twisted. She brought up her knee and he bent forward, released her. She felt desire between her teeth, the bite she had not taken. They stared at one another, panting. She heeled her hand into the violated hollow, rubbing the pain.

“Why wouldn’t I want to sell one of the houses?” Thick, hot. “Of course I want to. It’s my living, too. I can’t help what happened. It wasn’t my fault.”

The clicking of a lawnmower, snipping off the tops of the grasses. Their own breath.

Grief, in her throat, like all the disappointments she had ever suffered: a dormancy, awakened.

—

Enid sat at the kitchen table, reaching down to retrieve onions from a bushel basket at her side. A rack of Mason jars steamed, sterilizing, in a blue-speckled tub on the wood stove.

“This house has changed,” Ellen said.

She was in one of her moods. Nothing was right. The dill seed was too soft. The cucumbers were the wrong variety. Mmm, Enid agreed, diffusing, as Flora had told her to do.

“Never would have seen a cracked windowpane when Captain Galloway was alive. Veranda floor was fresh-painted every spring. Once he brought a carton of ready-made pickles from one of them countries. Portugal, I think. No, Greece. Now, they were nice little cucumbers.”

Enid said nothing. She was worried about Flora, who had gone to Hampton with Mr. Tuck and had not yet returned. There had been so few men in Enid’s life. She did not remember her father. In the workhouse, men and boys were reduced to the sound of gravel-making in the hidden yard. Hammers on rocks, chinking. On the ship, she had seen sailors up close, sluicing the vomit-slimed floor of their cabin. Watch caps, whiskers—like horses, mute and powerful. Once she’d arrived in Canada, there were men on the Halifax streets, hunched on the seats of wagons, walking the aisle of the train. Never speaking to her. Never touching her. Only their eyes, watching. Then the boy. Mr. Mallory. Jasper Tuck.

“She’ll be all right,” Ellen said, interpreting Enid’s silence. “I’ve heard her stand up for herself.”

“But you don’t trust Mr. Tuck.”

“I only met two men I trusted. Mr. Dougan and Captain Galloway.”

“What about Mr. Fairweather?”

Ellen’s sleeves were rolled up. The flesh of her upper arm hung in a fan of fatless wrinkles. The white skin quivered as she chopped onions, fresh from the soil. She paused to wipe away onion-tears. “We’ll see about Mr. Fairweather.”

“He found me. He saved me.”

“That he did. ’Tis not you I worry about with that one.”

A cricket, close by on the side veranda, started up his strident sawing.

“Were you ever married, Ellen?”

Ellen continued chopping the onions. Her mouth tightened at the corners. She took a breath that lifted her chest beneath the water-spotted bib of her apron.

“Was. For a time. Your age, I was.”

The knife pivoted onto its point beneath her hand. Fell through the onion. Its juices, released.

“I ran out of the house. A mass of bruises, I was. There was a dog on a rope and I let him loose. He scurried down the lane, scared as me. I remember it was pouring down rain and the fields were covered with blackbirds. They all flew up and me running through the mud. And I thought free as birds. Free as birds.”

She wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

Flora walked into the kitchen. Amid the tang of onions, she thought nothing of Ellen’s tears. She went to the sink and turned the tap and filled a glass with cloudy water. She drank with her back to them.

“Flora?” Enid said. “Did you go to Hampton?”

On the stove, the Mason jars made a thin tinkle as the water came to a rolling boil. Flora rinsed the glass and set it into the dish drainer. She turned to them, her eyes dark, furious. She tossed a wrapped parcel onto the table. “The bolt. And other things.”

Enid dropped her knife.

“Was it Mr. Tuck? Did he…”

Flora smiled, strained. “No, no. I’m just tired, Enid. It was a long, hot morning and in the end we…we didn’t get very much.”

“I’ll go next time,” Enid said. “Why couldn’t I? I would like to see Hampton.”

Flora shook her head, looked away.

Ellen crossed her arms, knife in hand, watching the sisters. Her eyes narrowed,