Our First Defence

 

Mother sat upright like royalty. Except for her shoulders, their rounding spelled trouble. Prim in her high-collared blouse, her coat buttoned to her throat and her hat pinned at a jaunty angle, she admonished my sister with her delicate, leather-gloved forefinger: “The hockey stick? In the sitting room?”

 

So like Mother, always fictionalizing reality. Ours was no sitting room. Ours was a small cabin. Thirty feet long, twenty wide; a tiny kitchen at the back and two miniscule bedrooms down one length. “Angel, did Olive put you up to this?” Mother demanded, pinching her skirt; its hem dusted the floor. Perched on the edge of the sofa like a runner, Mother was set and ready to go.

 

We could have been sisters, us three. Mother, in her mid-forties at that point, always looked young for her age. Angel and I were in our late twenties; Irish twins, born less than a year apart.

 

Mother’s head swivelled to the right, halting at the sight of me slumped in my invalid chair at the dining table (an uppity name for the four planks of re-used fir that Angel had nailed together). Mother could freeze anyone into silence. “Angel. I have been put upon forever by that creature,” she said, her head snapping back into place. “And now this. Is she trying to taunt me with that hockey stick? She knows how I feel about that branch of the family. Olive counselled you to situate that exactly there to spite me. And next to the other grandparent, to boot. Did she not?” My sister’s calm in the face of that dreadful chill lent me courage. I exhaled the air I had been holding.

Angel had curled her tidy, confident frame onto a dining chair opposite Mother on the other side of the coffee table. “No,” she replied, offering Mother another cup of tea, the ubiquitous brew of emotional restraint.

 

Standing stooped but proud between two pieces of antique furniture, its ironwood smoothed and dented by decades of winters, the hockey stick was not to everyone’s liking and presented a larger problem than we had anticipated. An inheritance from Grandad’s side of the family, the hockey stick, legend had it, was awarded to his father at a Mi'kmaq gift-giving ceremony. I had told Angel we should move it out of sight in advance of Mother’s visit.

 

Her visits were an oddity. A year or two would often pass before Mother would take the train from her home in Amherst to Brighouse, where Angel and I still lived in the cottage we had shared with Mother until the day she left. “You two manage better on your own,” our thirty-two-year-old mother announced to her sixteen-year-old daughter, Angel. Her departure was not entirely unexpected.

 

“You were right about the stews and whatnot,” Angel had commented from the front window where we watched Mother step briskly out of sight. In the two weeks prior to Mother’s departure, I told Angel on several occasions that something was afoot: Mother had been cooking stews and whatnot. And baking. And canning. All the while quietly weeping, a rarity, or singing, a daily joy to behold. Mother’s voice was spectacular. She had music in her bones, and had taught herself to play the piano, flute and guitar. She had recently bought a guitar from her meagre earnings.

 

As it happened, the day of the hockey-stick fiasco turned out to be Mother’s last visit. Mother died not long after and we never saw her again. “You are truly mad, Olive,” Angel had responded to my suggestion. “The hockey stick belongs to us. Not Mother. Grandad gave it to us.”

 

“To you.”

 

“Us,” she said. Just like Angel, always insisting my abilities were equal to hers.

 

On the left side of the hockey stick stood the piece of furniture willed to me by the grandparent from Mother’s other side of the family. “This bookshelf is gothic and God-awful, Olive, some ancestor’s idea of good taste,” Mother’s mother had said in the days before she died, her eyes milky, her breath foul, her love constant. “I wish I had more to give you, Pet, but it’s well built—God love it—and you’ll make the most use out of it of anybody.” And I had. Stuffed to the gills, the bookcase was now home to my research and writing along with an eclectic collection of books and magazines belonging to both me and Angel. The antique on the right side of the hockey stick—a glass cabinet—was, in contrast, a thing of beauty. It had not belonged to the family. Angel had found it at an estate sale across town, and seizing on its usefulness, had charmed its seller into a pauper’s price. She had jogged home, popping her head in long enough to say, “I’ve found the perfect shelves for Grandad’s tools,” before hauling my small wagon from the back shed, swapping the sleigh base for the wheels (the wagon hadn’t been used since winter), and wagon-in-hand jogged back to the estate sale. Little Angel—all four feet eleven inches of her—pulled the cabinet home.

 

Designed for fine china or cut glass, it housed three shelves of carving tools—another of Angel’s inheritance from Grandad. Following in his footsteps, Angel used the tools almost daily, always cleaning and oiling them and replacing them on their shelves. “Beautiful, Angel,” I agreed as she set the tools on their shelves for the very first time. One cabinet door had glass and the other did not, but when we kept the glass door cleaned, it was hard to tell that the other glass was missing. Our definition of beauty: Tools, a mess of papers and books, a hockey stick.

 

Angel curled a tip of her dark hair around her forefinger; her code to tell me all was well. “Milk?” she asked Mother with just enough sugar in her voice for a slight sweetening, and at the nod from a greying forelock, Angel selected the bone china creamer. So focused was Mother on the hockey stick that she had yet to notice the new creamer, a mismatch to the set of bone china, all chipped here or cracked there. When Mother saw the creamer, she frowned, leaned forward, and smirked. She started resurrecting a story, a worn-raw-by-the-telling story: “Do you remember the time Olive broke the handle of the creamer during one of her episodes—” but Angel, having seen the story fast approaching, interjected by asking Mother about the children. Mother, her husband Herman, and their three small children lived in Amherst. The children were a joy and a blessing, Angel was told.

Mother took her leave in less than ten minutes. Angel joined Mother at the door to say goodbye. Mother pecked her on the cheek and stuffed two bills into her hand, saying, “For whatever you two might require. I can see that another leather strap for the creature is certainly in order. She has chewed that one right through. Or foolscap, I suppose, you’re always running low on foolscap.” By now, Mother was desperate to be rid of us, but she paused before trying the door. “They weren’t given it, you know. They stole it,” she said.

 

“Stole what?” asked Angel.

 

Mother jutted her chin at the hockey stick. The front door would not give, but Mother had not forgotten the knack and was out in no time.

 

Mother had hung that door herself with the help of then-teenage Angel. Fifteen years ago, and not long before Mother abandoned one family to try her luck with another, the four-foot, nine-inch woman dragged home a door; booty from a local train derailment a couple of miles away. Many houses in Brighouse were adorned with such loot. The track’s steep incline and sharp turn, coupled with excessive speed, made for one derailment every few years. Mother and equally diminutive Angel—then fourteen years old—had struggled to put the door into place.

 

“Up a half inch on the left. No, too much. A little less,” I had coached from the sidelines.

 

With one hand on the partly hung door, the other slapping the air, Mother had barked, “Shut your trap, Olive. For the love of God, I’ll send you back to that hell hole, I swear.” Not that she could understand a single word I said. But my voice irked. I had only just returned home after having spent two years in the hell hole—The Halifax Asylum for the Indigent, Idiots and Incurables in Halifax. “Angel, tell her to button it, I can’t concentrate.”

 

Angel had looked at me and rolled her eyes. That day Mother was in no mood for Angel to translate Olive-Tongue. And so, the door was hung unevenly, giving Angel an opportunity to quip in her sassy way, “You should have listened to Olive,” when Mother would yard on the door. But within days, Mother had the knack—a bit of pressure here, a bit of a lift there, a quick turn of the knob. Mother called it, “our first defence,” and the name held. Years later, we added a second defence to the porch rafter. Neither, in the end, did us any good at all.