Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [33]
“I’m goin’ to bed. There’s some of us have a day’s work to do come mornin’. Go on to bed, Sadie, ye need yer rest, and leave our very own Shakespeare here to himself.”
His eyes followed his wife as she moved away and disappeared behind the curtain into the shadow of their bedroom.
Peg looked into Nora’s startled eyes. “Your father was born not long after that. Not a happy situation, I’ll allow. But that’s how it was, how your grandfather told it to me.”
9
A mixture of anger, pity, and disbelief tugged at every muscle and fibre of Nora’s body, leaving her feeling confused and miserable. She pushed away from the table and, turning her back on Peg, gripped her forehead, feeling around her temples the beginnings of a headache.
So often she had thought of her grandfather as a kind of comic figure, a lone Irishman footloose and fancy-free in America; here today, gone tomorrow! That was Maureen’s fault, she thought angrily, with her constant playacting, her tendency to make light of everything, always poking fun at the “Returned Yanks” who came back to Ireland on holidays with their gaudy clothes and flaunting their wealth. What would she think now? Would she still find it funny?
“Nora.” Peg’s voice interrupted her thoughts. She had no idea how long she had been sitting with her back to the woman, lost in her own world.
“I’m sorry, I’m afraid I was miles away.” She turned around and pulled her chair in closer to the table.
“Nora.” Peg was hesitant. “I know I don’t know you well enough to be speakin’ so plainly but I’m gettin’ on now and want someone to understand how it was between Matt and me. In the past I’ve tried talkin’ to others, my sister when she was alive, a friend or two, but they just thought I was soft in the head. In the end I gave up, because I knew there was no sense talkin’ or trying to explain what they didn’t want to know or could never understand. But you want to know. Don’t you?”
“Yes, yes I do. It’s just not what I expected to hear.”
“I know.” She chuckled weakly and looked directly at Nora. “My father was right, I suppose; I had a liking for wanderers and drifters. But I’m tellin’ you now,” her voice became serious, “I have no regrets. No, my dear, not the one. I’ve been lonely in my time and I’ve cried my fill, but I’ve never been bitter or felt hard done by. Though there’s many a one will tell you different. But I knows the truth of it and I didn’t care then and I don’t care now what anyone has to say or what they thinks!”
Nora threw a worried glance in Peg’s direction just in time to catch a fierce flash of defiance in her eyes, and then it passed and her usual calm returned.
“I don’t know, girl, if you can understand what it was really like back then. Times was so hard, always the same, day in, day out, hard work, sickness, poverty, death. They came and went like the tide and there wasn’t a whole lot of anything else. I wanted to get away from it all, to be free. I’d have gone to St. John’s, gone in service, anything, but it was a dream, nothin’ more. There was no way out for the most of us.”
She shifted in her chair. “When Johnny went off at the beginning of the war, I envied him. I wanted to go with him. I knew from the talk of people coming back and forth to the island that women were going to France too. War girls. VADs they called them. Voluntary Aids, something like that. They helped with the war, even at the front! I thought I could do that too; I could look after Johnny and the other young Newfoundlanders, and more besides. I was young and strong, able for anything, better able than Johnny maybe. But, I’d promised my mother before she passed away that I’d take care of my father, no matter what, so what was I to do? I told Johnny to go on, thinkin’ how he’d come back with all the stories and excitement about England and France and the war. That’s how innocent I was. Well, it didn’t work out that way, now, did it? The young fellas was killed by the thousands and the ones that come back, the stories they had to tell was enough to give you nightmares. Leavin’ the island