Howard Norman - What Is Left the Daughter

Parish made the hitch with handle in two days. When I went to pick it up, he said, "Bring me any work you need done, Wyatt, and I'll do it. By the way, I've been up to Dorchester five or six times. Bleak place, eh? I made Donald a candle holder for Christmas last year. I never thought to ask if they allow him candles. Anyway, Donald's getting by."

Though the Kormikers' toboggan could be pulled by hand, it was really designed to be tied to a haul rope or reins. And they also wanted an attachable cargo box, so their granddaughter could fit snugly inside. There'd be plenty of room for quilts or blankets or overcoats in there, too, I learned from one of Mrs. Kormiker's letters: she and Mr. Kormiker had made their choice on the basis of sketches of five different types of toboggans my uncle had sent them.

And that's what I spent three full days and nights doing. Little sleep, no radio. My uncle had already fashioned the bow to three feet of curl. What was left for me to do was sand and attach the crosspieces, hinge the backboard behind the next-to-last crosspiece, and build the slush board my uncle had promised as an "extra." In addition, I had to build the cargo box from scratch, including gunwales, eyebolts and hinges. I had to fix the runners. Finally, I had to shellac the entire thing, curl to stern.

On my third morning of work, I completed the toboggan at about six A.M., but I hadn't been able to feel the tips of my fingers as I applied the shellac, because they were raw and numb from hours of sanding. My uncle had jars of salve for immediate relief after such long bouts. The salve was from Norway. I worked some into each of my fingertips but didn't feel that, either.

The toboggan weighed about thirty pounds. I set it across two sawhorses to allow the architecture to settle and plugged in an electric fan to help dry the shellac. It looked just fine. I recalled how when we finished a sled or toboggan, or the occasional horse-drawn sleigh, Donald would pour us each a shot of whiskey and we'd clink glasses and he'd say, "One down, and if we're blessed, ten thousand to go." I cleaned the tools, hung them in place, tidied up the shed and went in to wash up at the kitchen sink. Then I drove into town.

But instead of stopping, I drove past the bakery and on to Parrsboro and, as I thought I might, saw Tilda out on the end of the dock. If anything, it was raining harder than during the night, and it had rained all night. Now rain blew fiercely in from the Minas Basin. Half a dozen trawlers pulled at their tie ropes and knocked against the pylons. It was quite the storm, and yet there was Tilda, dressed in a rain slicker, dungarees, galoshes and a fisherman's hat tied under her chin, right out in it. To me the remarkable thing was that three men — I recognized Todd Branch and his neighbors Ralph and Alvin Drakemore, all from Upper Economy — just went about their business. They weren't going to head out in this weather and were battening things down on the deck of their trawler, shouting words I couldn't make out. They completely ignored Tilda, or so it seemed at first. But then Todd Branch went below, emerging with, of all things, a steaming cup of molasses tea, or coffee or cocoa or whatnot, and brought it to Tilda, and cupped Tilda's hands in his as she lifted the drink to her lips, as if he was helping a person to recover her strength after a deathly illness. The other two men didn't even look up. Tilda took another sip, nodded to Todd Branch and turned away from him. She went back to tasting the rain in her cup and talking to Hans Mohring. Todd stepped onto the deck of his boat. It seemed to me he carried out all of this like it was matter-of-fact, no more than a recently added chore. How many mornings had he brought a hot drink to Tilda?

The moment I stepped into the bakery, Cornelia set a cup of coffee and a cranberry scone in front of me, without my having asked for either. She sat down opposite me at the table closest to the window. "Look at that, will you?" she said. "Wind blew mud all the way in and my perfectly clean window's not perfectly clean anymore." She took a bite of toast.

"I saw Tilda at the Parrsboro Wharf just now," I said.

"You know, I thought that was your car going by."

"There she was. Just like you said."

"I saw her out there three mornings ago, and guess what?" Cornelia said. "Some schoolboys were taking potshots at whichever birds — cormorants mostly. And all at once, Tilda reached over and grabbed that rifle and took a few potshots of her own. Of course she missed everything except the water, but the sight made me laugh so hard. I was on my way back from picking up cranberry preserves from Mrs. Gerard's in Parrsboro when I saw that."

"I think she might've seen me," I said. "I hope she didn't think I was spying on her or something."

"You just gave in to curiosity, Wyatt. That's pretty human of you, and besides, Constance Hillyer confided in me."

"Confided in you what?"

"Confided in me about your feelings for Tilda," Cornelia said. "Look, Tilda's been a widow for merely a couple years. And I suppose life's as bewildering to her as it would be for any war widow, of which there's recent thousands, eh? Do you know, she spends half the night in the library, due to Mrs. Oleander's tolerance and hospitality. That's her narrowed horizons. House, wharf, library. Know what else? I think Tilda forgot how to sleep. I hear her playing the gramophone upstairs."

"Anyway, my feelings for Tilda, as you call them?" I said. "They aren't in the least well met by her. How could they be? I put her husband out to sea, may he rest in peace, and I mean that. So my feelings are hardly the thing that'll solace her, if that's what you're saying."

"I'm saying what I just said, that's all."

"She must've been even more in love with Hans than I thought."

"No denying, Hans was allowed all her beloved places, village she grew up in to pillow talk, all so soon after they met, too. It fairly took your breath away."

"I thought about that night and day. In prison, I mean. Thought hard about that. And about other things, of course."

I tried lifting the cup of coffee Cornelia had brought to the table, but I dropped it and it smashed on the floor, coffee splattering.

"My goodness," she said, "you're a clumsy oaf this morning."

"Sorry. I worked on a toboggan all night. All that sanding numbed my fingers."

"Want another cup?"

"No thanks."

I picked up the pieces of the cup and put them in the wastebasket. Cornelia handed me a sandwich wrapped in a napkin. "It's halibut, onion, tomato and mustard," she said. "You put that in the larder, eh? I doubt anyone's making you lunch these days."

"Thank you. I'm a bit short of money just now, though."

"Do I look like a debt collector to you, Wyatt?"

"No, you don't, Cornelia. Thank you for the sandwich."

"Tilda should be back any minute."

"She'll come see me if and when she wants. I think that's best."

"I hope you try and make a go of your uncle's business, Wyatt."

"I got that toboggan finished, didn't I?"

Much of the rest of the day, not counting the time it took to eat the sandwich, wash some clothes in the sink, rinse and hang them to dry on a length of twine I'd rigged taut in the pantry, with three buckets side by side underneath to catch any drip, I drew up a rough design for a box in which to send the toboggan to the Kormikers in Denmark. Under a tarpaulin in back of the shed there was more than enough plywood to build it to adequate dimensions. The construction itself took about two hours. When I inspected the results, I thought, If I'm honest about it, this thing looks like a long coffin. A rueful, though not all that original, observation. And then your mind sometimes doesn't stop to charitable purpose: I thought, I'm sending this coffin to Denmark, a toboggan inside, whereas Hans didn't get even this much.