Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [87]
“I’m glad you came too, Mary Anne. Good news is always welcome.”
Mary Anne got up from the table then, said goodbye and left.
“It was a great relief to know that I didn’t have to hide what was happening anymore, that I didn’t have to face things on my own. Mary Anne was the best kind. She came by again the next day to tell me her grandfather had suffered the same thing years back when she was a child and she remembered quite well how it was. She was a great help to me in the months to come. It wasn’t easy to open up just like that to an outsider but I couldn’t have managed without her. I had never shared my business with anyone, especially with regards to Matt and me, never let them in our private life, but Mary Anne seemed to understand. She had the good sense to take things slowly, lettin’ me find my own way. I was glad of that.”
Peg, her eyes heavy with concern, looked at Nora. “It’s a hard way to go, you know. You need people around you who care.”
A car engine sounded in the distance and grew louder. A bright beam of light penetrated the thin blinds and briefly scanned the room as if seeking them out.
“That will be the crowd from the dance. They’re headed home.”
Nora looked at her watch: 12:30. Another car passed and another right behind. Music blared momentarily, someone yelled, a loud drunken yell. The car sped away and silence settled in again.
“I watched him slip back to his childhood. His garden became a playground. Days I saw a little boy playing in the mud, building castles, rapt in his own imaginings. He’d haul out the new carrots and turnip and then fill up the holes with water. It was terrible to watch. Other times he’d come in the kitchen and say, ‘I’m off to school now,’ and head off out the door. I was afraid for him to go out on his own, afraid he’d go too close to the cliffs. Times he couldn’t find his way back. He seemed to have no sense. There was one time when I tried to stop him goin’ off on his own, he turned and hit me hard. Knocked me right over, he did. I cut my head open on the door frame.
“I was about to give up after that but when Mary Anne come by and seen what had happened, she was full of wisdom. ‘Peg girl, he does that because he’s frustrated. He wants to go to school and no matter what you say it won’t make no difference. What my mother would do with Poppy when he’d be like that is she’d say, “Very good then, let’s go to school.” Then she’d lead him off down the road or into the garden or wherever until he’d forgotten all about school.’
“Sometimes I could laugh at things he’d do and the things I’d do to keep him happy.
“One day I realized that he could recite a lot of the stuff he’d learned off in his head. So sometimes I’d start him off with a few words I knew and off he’d go like one of them tape recorders. He’d be happy as a clam then. I got so I’d have a line ready in my head, ready to distract him. Not everyone understood what I was at, especially Pat. There was one day in particular when he came across from Placentia to check on us.”
Peg was in the yard hanging the washing on the line when Pat came around the corner of the house carrying a box of supplies.
“That’s a fine load of washing you have there, Aunt Peg.” He set down his load and then bent down to draw a heavy white sheet from the basin and throw it over the clothesline. “Matt should help with this. It’s hard on you.”
“Yes, he does normally but he’s at the garden now and content so I won’t bother him.”
“How is he these days?”
“Oh, best kind. We manage, the two of us.”
Pat stood next to her, helping to get the wet laundry on the line. When it was all done and neatly pegged she stepped back, and had he not been there to catch her, she would have tumbled to the ground. At arm’s length, he took a good look at his aunt. “You look exhausted, Aunt Peg, and that dress looks like it could do with a wash and a button sewn on.”
She looked down at her dress and was taken aback to see the front gaping open and the white