The Birth House. Ami McKay

here, Charlotte, see? Oh, never mind your trying to read it just now, I want Dora to hear it too. I’ll just read this bit out loud. It won’t take but a minute. Let’s see … here it is … the esteemed Dr. Cowan states, ‘Closely allied to food and dress, in woman, as a producer of evil thoughts, is idleness and novel-reading. It is almost impossible for a woman to read the current “love-and-murder” literature of the day and have pure thoughts, and when the reading of such literature is associated with idleness—as it almost invariably is—a woman’s thoughts and feelings cannot be other than impure and sensual.’ There now, Charlotte. There it is in black and white. Overthinking and novel-reading causes, at the very least, fretting, nightmares and a bad complexion.”

      This past autumn she was convinced that my bout with a cold and cough was brought on by my constant attention to Wuthering Heights. She even scolded Mother for letting me read it. “Lottie, whenever I see that daughter of yours, she always has a book under her nose! It would be one thing if she was studying psalms or even a verse or two of poetry … no wonder her health’s been compromised by the slightest change in the weather.”

      Mother laughed. “Oh, Fran, with all your talk, you’d think Dora’s caught her death just by reading about the God-forsaken moors of Yorkshire.”

      She turned to me and asked, “This is the one about the moors, isn’t it, Dorrie?”

      “Yes, Mother.”

      “And then there’s the one about that poor woman whose husband kept her locked in the attic … I always get them confused. Of course, I’ve got no time to read them myself, I’m so slow at it and all, but Dora’s kind enough to tell me about them from time to time. Don’t you worry about her, she’ll be back to feeling right in no time at all.”

      Aunt Fran lowered her voice. “Her cold is just the start of a greater sickness. These ‘stories,’ as you call them, will only lead her to more pain.”

      “Fran, talk plain, will you?”

      “I’m talking about derangement.”

      “Don’t be silly!”

      She whispered. “And deviant behaviours.”

      Aunt Fran decided it was best to give Mother her copy of The Science of a New Life. “Normally, I wouldn’t lend this out. But I’ll make an exception in Dora’s case. You can’t put this sort of thing off and expect it to cure itself.” She patted Mother’s hand. “I’ve marked several pages for you. The ones that apply to her condition.”

      Mother smiled and nodded. She no sooner put it on the dresser next to her bed than Father was ordering me to “Gather up those books of yours, Dora. Bring them out to the brush pile.” I acted as if I didn’t hear him and walked out to the pen to feed the sow. Before long I could hear the crackle of the fire, smell the smoke from dried twigs, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and all the rest. I leaned against the fence and cried. There’s no point in arguing with him. There never is. I’ll say one thing for the boys: at least they don’t cry. I’ll never understand you, Dora.

      Last night was the first night of bunking down. When I was little, I looked forward to cold December winds and the first snow, to Father closing off the upstairs and all of us children dragging our pillows, blankets and feather mattresses down to the front room. Each night we lay piled together, Mother kissing our cheeks in the order of our births—Albert, Borden, Charlie, Dora, Ezekiel, Forest and Gord—cozy and snug until the grass turned green in the spring. Although our winter sleeping arrangement has become crowded and a bit smelly in the last few years, I still love listening to Borden’s late-night storytelling: the time old Bobby One Eye paddled the riptides off Cape Split, how he and Hart Bigelow came to invent pig bladder baseball, the tale of the hidden treasure that’s never been found on Isle Haute, and the ghost of Old Cove Fisher’s lost foot.

      This year, Father didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I heard him arguing with Mother over it after breakfast.

      “Maybe she could stay at Fran’s for the winter.”

      Mother sounded upset. “Why would we send her away? Surely there’s enough room for sleeping.”

      Father lowered his voice. “She needs to act like a proper young lady.”

      “And she doesn’t?”

      “It’s just that with six boys …”

      “Judah Rare, you’re being foolish.”

      “She’s getting to the age where she might be considered, someone might think …”

      “That she’s a sweet girl who cares for her brothers?”

      “She and Charlie still hold hands whenever they walk down the road, and no matter how many times I’ve scolded her, she insists on getting in the middle of the boys when they wrestle or fight.”

      “Stop worrying over her. She’s got a pure and innocent heart. I’m almost certain she’s never even been kissed.”

      “That’s the trouble. No man wants a girl who’s always tied to her brothers. The longer we let this go on, the more people will think there’s something odd about it. Let’s send her to Fran’s. I’m sure your sister would be happy to—”

      “Yes, I’m sure Fran would be happy to make a housemaid out of my daughter. How we raise the children is our business and no one else’s. We’ll put Dora on the end after the twins, or lay her longways down by their feet, but she’s staying home and that’s that.”

      Father’s right in supposing I’ve lost my innocence, but it wasn’t by having my rose plucked in the middle of a field that hasn’t been hayed. (I can still look forward to a bit of blood on the sheets on my wedding night.) Still, a girl can lose her heart long before she gives it away. Mother’s never mentioned it, or maybe she was too busy to notice, but I remember exactly how it happened. It was the day Father showed me I was no longer a child.

      Before that day, I belonged with my brothers, I was one of them. If Borden or Albert teased me, I’d tease them right back. If Charlie put mud in my shoes, he’d find a toad under his sheets that same night. For every shove one of them gave me, I’d pinch two bruises into the fleshy part of a thigh or the back of an arm. Then Father put a stop to it. On a warm, sunny day (about the same time I started to bleed and my breasts began to feel heavy when I ran), Albert, Borden, Charlie and I snuck off to Lady’s Cove after school. The tide was just going out, the rocks were filled with pools of warm seawater, and a long strip of clay lay glistening at the edge of the shore. In the shelter of the cove, we did as we always had done: we stripped off our clothes and began throwing wet, heavy balls of mud and clay at each other. We must have been quite a sight, laughing and screaming, our bodies streaked with sloppy trails of brown and grey, but my name was the only name Father called out when he found us. It was a slow, angry insisting, Dora Marie Rare. I pulled my clothes over my dirty, crusty skin and he pulled me by my arm all the way home. I shouldn’t have argued with him, but it didn’t seem fair that I should be singled out. After all, it was Borden’s idea to go to the cove, it was Albert’s idea to wade in the water, it was Charlie who threw the first mud ball. Father didn’t care. He turned, took both my arms and shook me as he spoke. “I never want to see you behaving like that again.”

      “But, Father, I—”

      “Don’t make me cut an alder and take it to your skin, Dora.”

      When we got to the house, Mother greeted us on the porch, looking concerned. She must have spotted us coming up the road and seen from Father’s stride that he was angry. He ordered me to pump a bucket of water from the well. “Get yourself cleaned up before supper, and I’d better not find a speck of clay behind your ears.” When I came back into the house, I heard him complaining to Mother. “She’s too old to fall in with the boys, and she’s gotten some smart with her mouth too. Talk to her, Lottie, tell her she’ll never get a husband if she keeps it up. No man around here wants a wife who talks back.”

      He