The Innocent. Lynne Golding

been talking about wanting to see one at a high vantage point for some time,” Mother said. “You yourself offered her the attic view.”

      “I did,” Father conceded. “But we’ve checked the attic, and she’s not there.”

      Mother and Father rushed to dress. As they returned to the kitchen to pull on their old shoes and jackets, I heard them listing the tallest buildings in the town: the Dominion Building, the fire hall, the bell towers of nearly every church, the top floor of the Queen’s Hotel, the upper floors of some of the larger Brampton residences. My anxiety rose. I was worried for Ina being out alone in the dark rainy night, but I was petrified at the thought of Mother going into it as well. My lone pleas for her to stay behind, my declared confidence that Father alone could find Ina, my efforts to physically hold her back, were all in vain. Mother and Father told Grandpa where they would start and where they would end if every site in between required investigation and stepped out of the house, Father muttering all the while that Ina was too much like his mad sister.

      From the parlour, I watched them run down the street toward their first destination: the bell tower of the fire hall on Chapel Street, next to the site of the new library. The two human images, barely perceptible in the gas-lit streets through the tears in my eyes and the rain around them, soon faded from view. I cried out of fear for the safety of my mother, my sister, and my father, and when I remembered that my brother Jim was also out there, I cried even harder. Grandpa’s big, warm arms and his repeated mutterings of “it’s just rain” had begun to stem the tide of tears when we heard the first groans of thunder off in the distance. My wailings reached a new crescendo.

      Seeing the futility of theory on the subject (“thunder never hurt anyone”), Grandpa chose physical proof. He wrapped me in a quilt and carried me onto the big swing chair on the verandah. Under the verandah’s large roof, we were sheltered from the rain and the mounting wind. We sat there a long time, gliding gently as branches blew and rain pelted everything around us. Just when my tears stopped, when my breathing returned to an almost even rhythm, the thunder that had rumbled closer and closer was joined by a bright display of lightning.

      As I began to quake again, the storm raging around us, Grandpa decided to pursue a different tack to calm my fears: diversion. “Jessie,” he said, his big arms and the soft quilt wrapped around me, “is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

      Despite my extreme anxiety for the safety of my family and notwithstanding the concern I felt for my well-being, I was able to recall the one thing I wanted to discuss with Grandpa. My throat sore from sobbing, my words barely comprehensible for the little gasps that followed each syllable uttered, I managed to ask, “Grandpa, are you self-made?”

      “Yes, Jessie, I guess I am.” He began to tell me how that came about.

      * * *

      My grandfather, like so many immigrants to the New World, came to this land with only the clothes on his back, the skills of his trade, and a driving ambition to succeed. He was born on Christmas Day, 1835, in Wiltshire, England, the third of three children born to Joseph and May Brady, a working class couple. He had no formal education, but with the assistance of an older sister and the family Bible, he learned to read and write. All the arithmetic he needed to know he garnered in the course of his training to join his father in the masonry and building trades. As a child, he learned to count the nails and the pieces of brick, slate, and stone that had to be obtained at the beginning of a day and that which was left at the end. Later, as his father’s assistant, calculating the number of six-foot scaffolds required to build a one-hundred-foot-high belfry, he learned multiplication and division. Later still as his father’s partner, he learned the most important mathematical lessons of all, calculating the amount to charge a customer for a project, considering the cost of materials and labour and including a generous amount for profit. Jesse learned these lessons, and he learned them well, for unlike other students whose mistakes might cost them a mark on a test or even a grade at the end of term, Jesse Brady knew that his mistakes might cost his family members their meals for a time or his father his reputation more indefinitely.

      As Jesse grew older, the late-night hours that he formerly spent learning to read were spent sketching designs for large projects he and his father would one day undertake. He dreamed of futuristic building styles and revolutionary methods they would bring to their craft. He imagined the zeal with which he and his father would convince customers of the advantage of their designs and the effort they would take preparing drawings, assembling different tradesmen, ordering supplies, and executing their plans.

      The dreams rarely involved Jesse’s older brother Jack, who, though also trained as a mason and builder, shared none of Jesse’s enthusiasm for the trade, Jack preferred to spend his daylight hours being specifically directed in the next stone to chisel, brick to point, or lath to plaster, never taking the initiative in any such matter.

      Jack’s evenings, on the other hand, were devoid of any direction save that which polite society demanded, as he spent nearly all of them in the parlours of Wiltshire families with eligible daughters. Eventually, when Jack was twenty-four years of age and Jesse twenty-two, the many parlours Jack formerly frequented were reduced to a single one, and after three months of near-nightly visits to that specific parlour, an invitation was proffered to its owners and their family to take dinner with the Bradys after church the following Sunday.

      Knowing how important the first meeting of the two families would be to Jack, the Bradys spared no expense in preparing for the occasion. Jack and Jesse’s mother selected the best loin of pork, catch of trout, head of cauliflower, and round of cheese the local market could provide. The finest linen cloth was retrieved from the old trunk, what silver the family had was polished, the best china, though old and chipped, was pulled from its felt wrappings and set on the table. The Davises arrived. Warm greetings were exchanged. Convivial conversation ensued. Dinner was enjoyed. Impressions were made. By the late afternoon, when the party dispersed, Mr. and Mrs. Davis were entirely admiring of Mr. and Mrs. Brady; Mr. and Mrs. Brady were entirely admiring of Mr. and Mrs. Davis; Jack and Jesse Brady were each in love with Louisa Davis, and Louisa Davis, after three months of knowing Jack and only just having met Jesse, was smitten with them both.

      Two months later, when formal declarations of love to Louisa had been made confidently by Jack and regretfully by Jesse, when it was clear that Louisa could not decide which Mrs. J. Brady she preferred to be, and when it was equally obvious that Jesse and Jack could no longer work under the same merely framed roof, let alone live under another fully constructed one, Jesse left for the ports of Liverpool and thence for America. For six long weeks he lay in the bowels of the steerage compartment as his vessel was blown off course down to the Bay of Biscay before righting its course and crossing the Atlantic to its intended destination in Nova Scotia. Jesse Brady, just twenty-two years of age, contemplated all he left behind: a loving mother and sister, each of whom begged him to stay; an aging father and business partner, clearly resentful of his decision to leave; an aggrieved brother who considered Jesse’s feelings for Louisa to be a conscious attempt to usurp him; a woman whose eyes he could not stop his own from seeing, whose laughter he could not banish from his ears, whose scent he could not rid from his memory. What lay ahead of him? He did not know.

      Jesse spent a night in Nova Scotia before devoting nearly all of his remaining funds to the purchase of a ticket on a schooner that would take him east to the City of Toronto. The trip was providential, as on the first day of the short passage, Jesse befriended a successful builder named Nelson, returning to Brampton, a small 1,500-person village northwest of Toronto. On the second day, Nelson hired Jesse as one of his builders and convinced a middle-aged couple to follow them to Brampton. As the foursome completed their journey, the middle-aged couple hired Nelson to build their new homestead.

      It was a testament to Nelson’s marketing skills that he was able to convince not just one person but three people to follow him back to Brampton. But Nelson understood the promise of the small village that had recently been connected to Toronto and markets all over the world by the Grand Trunk Railway. The railway was revolutionizing the village that only ten years earlier had a population of just over five hundred, roads that were nothing more than mud tracks, no post office to its name, no local government,