Out of the Mist (13 page)

Tucked into the Maple
Grove Valley below a narrow ridge, the house faced a quiet road
just inland from the Bay of Fundy. A few commuters passed early
each morning, going to jobs in Parrsboro. Pickup trucks rumbled
through on their way to pulp-cutting operations on the other side
of Cape Chignecto.

Arnold worked at one
of these operations, deep in the woods. It was too far to return
home at the end of a shift.

“
Are you sure you’ll
be all right, alone for five days at a time?” he’d asked, after
he’d got the job with the Shulie pulp operation.

“
I’ll be fine. I’m
used to being on my own. After all, think of the women whose
husbands were away fighting in the Second World War. They were on
their own for as much as six years. Nobody complained.”

“
Well, if you’re
sure….” He gave her a surreptitious glance. She was self-reliant,
but with no family in the immediate area, she’d have to ask
neighbours for any help she might need.

Now she saw him only
between late Friday evening and Sunday evening. At the end of their
brief visit, Arnold went to bed early, as he rose before dawn on
Monday to drive the 40 miles to work.

In the morning, Vera
looked at the cameo nestled in its box. She touched it. It was
warm. The profile took on the delicate pink of living human flesh.
Or could it be the sunlight reflecting off the rose
quartz?

She phoned the
museum.

“
We do have pictures
of the Bennett family,” said the volunteer who answered the phone.
“However, I’m not sure there will be enough detail for you to
identify the cameo. I’m sorry to tell you we’re closed until
tomorrow. Mr. Collins, the curator, is at a conference.”

Vera sighed and hung
up the phone. Studying the pictures would have to wait. In the
meantime, she decided to contact her old friend, Norbert Kelly, who
lived 20 miles away in the village of Port Hebron. Norbert knew
more than anyone about the people in this part of the county, their
family connections, and their lives. His memory was incredible. He
would certainly know the family, and maybe even have information
about the woman who wore the cameo.

Norbert was delighted
to hear from her.

“
We’ll have a good
old chin-wag,” he said. “I’ll see you this afternoon, and I’ll make
a molasses cake to have with our tea. Bring that cameo, Vera.
You’ve got me curious to see it now.”

She put the cameo and
a notebook in her backpack, hesitated a moment, and threw in a
camera as well.

Vera drove slowly
down the long, steep hill that ended at Port Hebron. There was
plenty of time to get to Norbert’s house, on the last street by the
river. On an impulse, she suddenly decided to visit the United
Church Cemetery, close to the junction with the main road to Port
Hebron. She parked the Honda, and walked into the older section.
Methodists and Presbyterians were laid to rest here, before most of
those churches merged to form the United Church in 1925.

A wrought iron fence
surrounded the graves which were laid out in neat rows and family
plots under old maples and older willows. Trees whispered in a
slight wind off the Bay. Stone angels marked the graves of
children. The air felt chilly, even on this mid-August day. Many
tombstones bore the year 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu
epidemic, including five Bennett graves.

Moss and a few faded
plastic flowers covered some newer graves. Vera idly wondered how
often relatives came to visit. She took a few pictures before
getting back on the road.

Norbert was taking a
warm molasses cake out of the oven when she came through the door.
The tea steamed in a brown crockery pot on the woodstove. Vera
greeted him with a hug, and sat at the kitchen table. She took out
the small box, opened it, and held it out to her friend. She felt
the heat of the cameo even through the box.

“
Can you feel that?”
she asked.

He looked bemused.
“Feel what?”

“
It’s warm. At least
it’s warm when I pick it up.”

Norbert had noticed
nothing. He scrutinized the cameo, examining it from all angles. He
gave her a long look, and handed it back to her.

“
Where did you find
this?” he asked.

“
I found it at the
back of a kitchen drawer. The pin caught in a rag.” She stirred
milk into her tea, and settled back with a slice of molasses cake.
Norbert added sugar to his tea, and took a bite of cake.

“
I don’t suppose I
told you about the first Bennetts to come around here,” he said.
“William Bennett came out from England with his parents as a child.
Went to sea when he was a young man. In those days, all goods came
across the ocean or along the coast. He travelled to England pretty
often, the Mediterranean, China a time or two, South America—even
went around the Horn. He’d come home every couple of years, always
with trinkets for Gladys and the girls. Old William owned a
schooner for a while. My father knew him well.”

Norbert blew on his
tea to cool it. William Bennett, he speculated, might have brought
the cameo home, as a gift for Gladys or one of his daughters. He
didn’t recall seeing any of them wearing it, but fashion had
changed by the time he was old enough to notice such
things.

Norbert had been a
boy of 15 at the time of the Spanish Flu so he remembered it, and
its terrible toll on the village, vividly. Soldiers returning from
the Great War had unknowingly brought home the infection. The flu
spread like wildfire, striking down previously healthy people in
only a day or two. They drowned in their own fluid-filled lungs,
leaving stunned families to deal with their loss. Most were young
men and women—not babies and old people epidemics usually took.
Dozens of villages were abandoned, even their names now forgotten.
Vera and Norbert had together visited several lost village sites.
Nothing was left now but yellow daffodils around cellar holes, and
country cemeteries with many crude wooden markers bearing the year
1918.

The Bennett family
lost William first, then Gladys, then three daughters to the
epidemic. Lucy, the youngest and only survivor, inherited the
family home in which she and her husband Malcolm Wilbur lived with
their two young children, before Malcolm was killed on a log drive.
Two years after Malcolm’s death, little James died of pneumonia.
Lucy stayed on at the house with her daughter Evelyn. One year, she
took her child to visit relatives in Boston, never to return. She
wrote to a distant cousin, who agreed to act as caretaker of the
Bennett house.

In the years
afterwards, the cousin rented out the house to summer tenants.
Evelyn came back occasionally for only a few weeks at a time, until
she was too frail to travel.

Vera listened
intently to Norbert’s story. She imagined the widowed Lucy and her
young daughter alone for days at a time, like herself, in the
silent house.

She often felt the
Bennetts had never left. The attic was chock-a-block with their
things: trunks of clothing, boxes of postcards and books, a
dressmaker’s dummy, a spinning wheel, a tea-set from China, even a
sewing machine with a heavy steel needle for sewing sails. Vera
often spent rainy afternoons in the dusty space, reading postcards,
trying on a dress from the Gay Nineties, and imagining community
life in an earlier time.

In those days, the
population was 10 times what it was now. Men fished, worked in the
mills, cut timber in the woods like Arnold did now, but not near
enough to come home often. Women raised large families and ran the
farms in the men’s absence. Gracious Victorian houses still dotted
the countryside, the former homes of lumber barons, shipbuilders
and prosperous farmers. The mansion of shipbuilder George Spicer,
now an inn, even had a ballroom with polished hardwood floors.
She’d applied for a waitress job there just a week ago.

Did Lucy Bennett wear
the cameo to a dance at that home? Those were happy days, before
the family was ravaged by the Spanish horror. Vera instinctively
picked up the cameo from its little box.

Norbert noticed the
gesture. “Something about that cameo speaks to you,” he
said.

She grinned
sheepishly. “It does. Maybe because I’m surrounded by their stuff.
I suppose we really should clean it out, especially the attic. It
hasn’t been touched in a good 50 years.”

A burst of heat
erupted from the cameo lying in her palm. It pulsed like a
heartbeat. She dropped it, clattering, to the floor. Norbert’s
eyebrows lifted. Slowly, Vera picked up the cameo. Her jaw dropped.
A spot of rosy colour highlighted the profile’s cheek.

“
Did you see that?”
she asked. Norbert shook his head.

Without thinking,
Vera hurriedly dropped the cameo in the box and clapped on the lid,
covering the flushed cheek.

Norbert poured her
another tea. “I think you might have stirred something up,” he said
carefully. “Or maybe something stirred you up.”

Sensing her unease
with the cameo, he suggested she leave it with him for a few days,
at least until Arnold returned and the three of them could decide
together what to do. Vera felt strangely reluctant to do
so.

“
I’ll take it home,”
she said. “Whatever it is, it can’t harm me. It’s only a piece of
jewellery.”

Vera drove back with
much on her mind. She made a simple dinner of fresh garden
vegetables and cold ham, and listened to CBC Radio for an
hour.

That night, she
dreamed of a dance at the George Spicer house. Fireflies glimmered
in the warm summer night. Young men and women waltzed to the
strains of piano and violin. Guests spilled out of the brightly-lit
room onto the lawn, laughing at a story. She heard a conversation,
whispered urgently just under the sound of the music, but could not
make out the words.

In the morning, Vera
felt calmer. She glanced at the cameo. The profile shone white
against the rose quartz. She touched the surface. It was cold—just
inert stone.

She drove to the
county museum, where the curator welcomed her to browse their photo
collection. Within minutes, she found an album of the Bennett
family, with captions in faded silver pencil. In one, William
Bennett stood unsmiling with his hand on Gladys’s shoulder. She
held a baby on her knee, and a toddler clung to her hand. In
another, little girls with giant hair ribbons posed demurely in
front of a potted fern.

Vera turned the page,
and swallowed. Here was the photo she remembered of the four
Bennett daughters. The middle woman wore a high-necked shirtwaist
blouse with a black ribbon around her neck, pinned with a cameo.
Trembling, she rose from the table, and asked the volunteer to
photocopy the picture for her. Vera drove home too fast, her mind
full of questions.

Heavy rain the next
morning meant no garden work, so she decided to spend a few hours
poking around the attic. There might be clues in one of the trunks
or wardrobes. She pulled the cord of a bare light bulb, creating a
pool of light in the middle of the open room. Shadows danced on the
walls. Outdoors, a sullen wind lashed rain on the old roof. The
attic smelled of ancient mouse urine and a slight sour odour came
from an old milk separator in a corner.

Vera pulled out a
cotton high-necked shirtwaist with leg-of-mutton sleeves from a
trunk. The fabric still smelled faintly of perspiration. An
ankle-length skirt of fine wool lay folded beneath the shirtwaist.
Both items appeared to be about her size. Faded velvet ribbons lay
in a jumble on one of the trunk’s papered shelves.

Suddenly inspired,
she went downstairs and returned with the cameo in its box. She
removed her tee-shirt and jeans, put on the shirtwaist and skirt,
and tied a black ribbon around her neck. Vera twirled slowly,
feeling the skirt brush the floor, imagining what it was like for
whoever wore these clothes more than a century ago.

Nestled in its cotton
wool bed, the cameo profile glowed rosy. It was warm. Vera picked
it up, and tried to fasten it to the ribbon. She fumbled with the
pin, missed the clasp, and poked the sharp tip under her
fingernail. She cried out at the sudden pain, and the cameo tumbled
onto the open trunk shelf. Blood welled up under her nail. A drop
fell on the cameo’s profile. She squeezed the finger in her other
hand to stop the bleeding. Her heart pounded, and her face
flushed.

A few minutes later,
the blood stanched, Vera noticed a cheval mirror next to a jumble
of bedroom furniture. It would be better to look in the mirror
while she pinned on the cameo. She drew the mirror on its casters
towards the light, and tipped it slightly to see herself
full-length.

She tugged loose her
ponytail, fastened the elastic just behind the top of her head and
puffed her hair out around her face, mimicking the pompadour
hairdos of the early 1900s. Her cheeks were still pink. Did they
wear make-up in 1905? She smiled coquettishly at her reflection,
imagining a young Lucy Bennett getting ready for a dance at the
Spicer home, wondering if Malcolm Wilbur might be there.

Vera retrieved the
cameo, and adjusted the mirror slightly so she could see to fasten
the clasp. The light bulb swayed—probably a draft from a loose
shingle. Something fuzzy obscured the image of the light bulb in
the mirror. Puzzled, she looked more closely. In the mirror, she
saw the hairdo, the black ribbon pinned with a cameo, but the face
that looked back was not hers. It was a woman with fair hair and
green eyes. She stared at Vera, her eyes wide. Vera stood frozen.
The image slowly faded.