He pondered. He would enter: No wind. Yet he felt the poetry inherent in his pen, ink easing down the nib’s tapering slit. Instead, he wrote: Air still.
In the shadow of the fence, frost lay within declivities—cupped leaves, an empty space where he had dug up a day lily—and he saw where a cat had walked. He was tempted to write of this, the meandering black dots of a cat’s paws, how this record of an encounter between fur and ice in the autumn stillness was equivalent to his own feelings; and then he thought of the rooms of his house, the glossy furniture and the smell of dinner, his skates hanging by their laces and Permelia’s thick woollen coat which she had disinterred from the attic this morning.
Heavy frost, he wrote, bearing down so that the ink welled and made a bubble, which he blotted with the edge of a cloth. He compressed his lips. Smell of snow but no flakes as yet.
He slid the pen into its holder. He could not tell Permelia what it had done to him, being featured in Mr. Train’s articles, articles that had been read in Toronto, New York, London. White slave auction. Degrading, inhuman, unchristian. Slave driver with his long whip. She could not know how it was when he met with town officials, their pens etching for posterity the various reports—amounts gathered from the town for relief of the poor: from the Christmas day collection, from the tax on dogs, from the penalty on horses running at large. Amounts billed by him, Overseer of the Poor, for items purchased by pauper owners and due payable: twill homespun trousers, socks, shoes, burial shrouds, coffins. How, at these meetings, he read aloud his accounts written over the past months, hard voice masking his increasing shame: a chair ruined as a result of being thrown out the window of Joshua Calkin’s home by an angry pauper; a doctor’s visit occasioned by a knifepoint struggle between Abraham Guntery and Miles Perkins; ditto by two boys turned out on a winter’s night, walking twelve miles until they found someone to take them in; coroner’s charges for a man found frozen to death in a shed. He passed over his ledger for inspection, expenses neatly itemized, stories dutifully dated.
At the last meeting, after receiving back the inspected book, which he privately thought of as a codification of despair, he softly settled folded hands on its cover. He knew that with this gesture he both protected those shut within the book’s darkness and made his decision to resign as Overseer of the Poor, imagining Permelia’s fury yet forgiving her in advance, for she could not imagine these meetings: glazed eyes, yawns, arms stretched overhead pulling shirts from waistbands. Jokes and guffaws. Self-important solemnity. His own hidden self-loathing.
Or, perhaps, yes, she could imagine this, and would not find it shocking. Nor be disturbed and moved to protest.
Before leaving for the store, he asked Permelia to join him in the parlour. She sat beside a hanging ivy, absently picking through its leaves for those turned leathery and brown.
“Whyever are we sitting in the parlour, Harland? Do you want me to call for tea? Although I am replete. We only just finished breakfast.”
“I need to discuss with you a decision I have taken.”
She gave him her full attention, repressing a belch, hand against lips. They had been good friends, once. She had found Harland handsome and pleasant. That, with his promise of financial success, was enough to convince her to bring all her persuasive seductions to play, when she was seventeen and slender.
“My dear, I am going to resign my position as Overseer of the Poor.”
She glared at him over her hand.
“You are not allowed. You will be disgraced. You will…you will be forced to pay a fine!”
“Yes. And the fine will go towards the upkeep of the poor. Goodness knows they deserve it.”
“They do not deserve it. They are uneducated, lazy good-for-nothings prone to drink.”
He considered her outraged face. She had been, if not poor, then perilously close to being so: her mother’s house, in need of paint; her own dresses, painstakingly repaired. The self-righteousness, however, was occasioned by propaganda. Permelia had recently joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. He pitied those husbands now lectured upon the evils of alcohol in the home. He did not drink, did not like the way it dulled his mind. He observed the loudness of men at gatherings and the way in which they were liable to become expansive, making disastrous personal confessions, revealing alliances best kept hidden.
“Forgive me, Permelia, but you do not know of what you speak. I am familiar with many cases—”
“You always take this tone with me, Harland. You do not know of what you speak. You do not know the needs of young women, of how every cent coming into this house counts, and of what your decision may cost us. Shop at Fairweather’s Gentlemen’s Clothing? Why, he’s the man who…”
He looked out the window as she spoke. He saw the cat whose prints he had seen earlier. It was a calico, white with splotches of butterscotch and black. He watched how fastidiously it negotiated the damp leaves, as though treading upon them only out of necessity.
—
Flora was coming from the barn with a basket of eggs when a farmer drove horse and wagon up the lane. He carefully lowered a burlap bag bulging with chickens.
“Here you go, then, miss.”
“But Mr. Franklin, we didn’t order…”
“No charge, had more than I needed.”
Flora set down the eggs and reached up with both hands to accept the neck of the lively bag, which made sudden explosive heaves.
Josephine’s parents were visiting; Mrs. Linden had tiptoed upstairs to console her daughter, bearing a tin of toffee, since this morning
