Mystical Rose Read Free Page A

Daddy and Uncle Brian were up at the mill drinking whisky, that cut flowers were fetching a penny a bunch in town.
    Cut flowers. What if they don’t come back? I asked Mama. What if they die and don’t come back? She hugged me. They will,she said. So I dragged myself out to the east field in the morning, and stood at the edge of the garden as the wind came up and bowed the white heads, and the purple, and the pink and yellow. And I took the old scythe with a new cutting edge I’d put on it, and went to work killing my garden.
    I made nine dollars that first year, selling bunches of flowers from the back of Gert’s daddy’s cart. Her mama would have remarried by then, and Gert’s new daddy had a livery business in town, which, and he was a very generous man, is how come we could get our corn to the mill without Victor. Gert still sat next to me in school, and liked me even if the boys mostly ignored her. She did, didn’t she? I’d hate to be wrong about that. I liked her too. Nine dollars was two weeks’ wages at the furniture factory or tannery. I gave the money to Mama and went out to my garden and cried, because it was just part of the east field now, bare and brown, and winter was coming.
    Please let me go to the movies, I said to my mama, the year my daddy died.
    A full-grown moose can derail a train, said Uncle Brian. I remember being on a sleeper from Sudbury to someplace and all of a sudden in the middle of the night — Bam! — like the end of the world. Throws me right out of the bunk. I’m thinking we’re caught in a landslide, and then I see the porter shaking his fists out the window. Fucking moose, he says, means we’re stuck here until they can send another engine. Timiskaming, that’s where we were going. Only we’re not. And then a huge shape lumbers past the window. I see it against the snow — a moose. It’s walking, and the train is derailed.
    Daddy poured a drink for each of them.
    Don’t go to the movies, whispered Mama. Don’t leave me here alone, Rose.

Robbie wasn’t there the first summer I worked for the Rolyokes, the summer when Admiral Byrd flew over the Pole, and Gert’s mom went crazy because Rudolph Valentino was found dead, and Houdini — the scariest thing I heard that summer — Houdini stayed underwater in a coffin for an hour and a half. I almost fainted when Mr. Davey read me the story from the newspaper. Robbie was off in Europe learning French, or shooting, or sailing.
    I didn’t even know there was a young Rolyoke. No one spoke of him. It wasn’t until we were sitting alone with the world beneath us that I realized who he was.
    I say, there! he called to me, a nicely dressed young man, squinting up. What are you doing? It’s too early for chestnuts, and besides, this is a private —
    His voice broke off. He stared harder. I should say we were about forty feet apart, vertically. I was halfway up a big chestnut tree with a coil of rope over my shoulder.
    You’re a girl, he declared in surprise. I suppose it was the workman’s trousers that hung on my skinny hips. They’d had to find apair from the boy who polished boots and silver. Not that a lot of girls wear dresses to climb trees. Did I blush? I didn’t like to be mistaken for a boy.
    He wasn’t local, I could tell by his accent, and because I didn’t know him. I took him for a guest at the big log house. I edged out along my branch, keeping a good handhold, and reached up to tie one end of the rope to the middle of the rotten bough above me. The air around me was heavy with dust and mould. A squirrel, scolding from a nearby tree, sounded very loud. I wiped cobweb out of my eyes.
    Careful, he said. Oh, be careful.
    Now it would have been my turn to be surprised. Concern was not something I was used to hearing in the voices of guests. Not concern for me. Guests belonged to a different world. Rich, seasonal transient, foreign, they looked and talked and acted in a way that would have been impossible for me