Inland Navigation by the Stars. Anne Coleman

we three had gone to Quebec City to a wedding of some cousin of our father’s whom we’d never met before nor ever met again. Why Carol and I, and not Mother and Ruth, say, were chosen to accompany him, I have no idea. But it was an adventure and we loved being with him, hearing stories of his African adventures and even explanations of things like road signs and markings. I don’t know why I remember that last piece of trivia, but his voice explaining the meaning of the lines on the road has remained with me forever. We stayed at the Château Frontenac. I was eight or nine, and that early hotel experience made me richly enjoy hotel life ever since. This trip was before our father became uncomfortable with us, and having him to ourselves, as Carol and I did that week, made the experience a magic island of time.

      Then on the way back from Quebec City we stopped in Montreal at an old stone house. I’ve no idea now where exactly in the city it was. By that time the house on Beaver Hall Hill our father had told us about may have been destroyed. Or it may have been that house.

      ~

      It is an old stone house. We know it is old from the smell. It’s stuffy and there is a nasty smoke undertone that isn’t nice, not like the cottage’s wood smoke smell. It’s a house unlike any others we’ve been to. For instance, there are two staircases. We see one at the front of the house. It goes up right across from the front door, with a dark red carpet all the way up it to a landing, and the stairs turn so we can’t see if the carpet goes on. But we don’t go up that one, and instead go down a long dim hall, through a big chilly kitchen, and there is a second staircase. It is just wood, with no carpet, and steeper. Our father goes up first and fast and Carol and I try to keep up.

      Finally we get to the top of the house and are in what we know is an attic because when we look into the small rooms off the hall, the ceiling slopes steeply so that in parts of the room a grownup couldn’t possibly stand up, maybe not even a child.

      Daddy goes into one of these rooms and we follow him closely and peer around him to see the person we have come to see. He has told us almost nothing about who this person is, just that her name is Hattie and she is very old and weak now and it is important that we stop and visit her. We drive through Montreal every time we go to and from North Hatley but have never stopped at this house before. I wonder if maybe Hattie is dying and that is why Daddy is making this visit.

      I find looking at very old people frightening. I dread seeing something terrible, something horrible for the old person having it, and — this seems mean and makes me sad about myself — disgusting for me to have to see. I don’t know what might happen to a human body just before a person dies and I don’t want to know. I even get a little of that feeling sometimes when Grandma visits. I love Grandma and she is not so old that she’s about to die but I sometimes come upon something I wish I hadn’t. For example I once saw a strange, sort of flat, pink rubber bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door. It definitely was not a hot water bottle. I asked Mum what it was and she said it was an enema bag and explained what it was for as if it was quite an ordinary thing. It wasn’t a bit ordinary to me. Anyway, I don’t want Hattie to die right this minute while we are there. I hardly want to look at her but I do. Daddy takes my hand and we go forward to stand close beside the bed so she can see us. If she can look. I’m not sure if she sees us or not.

      Her face is very, very small. Her skin is wrinkled and looks like a walnut’s shell and is the same colour. Above her face is a small clump of white hair brushed to the side. There’s so little of it that I can see bits of her walnut head through it.

      “It’s Charlie, Hattie,” Daddy says. “I’ve brought my little girls, Carol and Anne, to meet you.”

      I try to smile. I know Daddy wants us to be friendly and I want to be kind. I can’t help looking at the rest of her, or as much as can be guessed at because she’s covered right up to her neck with blankets. A white sheet is folded down over the top one so the blanket doesn’t rub against her face. Someone must be looking after her, and carefully. I can see a potty under the bed, but it is empty and clean. Even so there is a smell that makes me feel a bit sick. Is it just oldness? There’s an on-top smell of some sort of not very nice soap, but underneath it is something else a bit like poo. I try not to breathe in very often. Which doesn’t work. Hattie’s whole self is really tiny; the covers barely rise over her body. It could be just a cat stretched out under there, and where what must be her feet poke up is not at all far down the bed. She is much smaller than I am. I suddenly think of the Egyptian mummies in the Royal Ontario Museum. Ruth always makes us have a good long stare at them whenever we go. It is almost impossible to believe they were once humans, in fact not really possible at all. I always think of them as female because of the name. Ruth says they weren’t necessarily but I never can bear to connect them with real humans, somehow especially women. They always give me a sort of shivery sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach but seeing Hattie is worse because she is actually still alive, even if barely, and I can’t pretend to myself she isn’t a human.

      When we leave that house and are driving away, our father tells us as much as he knows about Hattie’s early story. It is just like a story in a book, as many of the stories in our family are.

      One day my father’s maternal step-grandfather went to the railroad station in Montreal to collect something sent to him. He also found there a little girl whom no one had come to meet. He had arrived a little while after the train came in, to give the porters time to unload parcels. Everyone had already left the station. That is, not quite everyone: standing all alone in the middle of the huge, echoing waiting room was a tiny girl-child. She didn’t move at all, just stood there like a teeny statue.

      She was wearing an old coat that came down almost to her ankles and was missing some of its hem stitching so in those places it hung even lower. A label was pinned with a safety pin on the coat, with her name in a grownup’s hand. On her head was a floppy woollen beret. In front of her, its wooden handles clasped in both of her very small hands, she carried a cloth bag. She looked about six but later the family realized she had to be more than that, perhaps ten. She didn’t know her own birthday, nor her exact age. She was probably so small because she’d never been properly nourished. She had been sent over from England, as orphans or just very poor children often were in those days and even much later, to be taken into some household who wanted a child. Her story was rather like Anne’s in Anne of Green Gables, though Anne was just from another Maritime province. Unwanted children were shipped about the country and the world to help out on farm, or work as domestics in towns, or, if they were extremely fortunate, to live as family members.

      But no one had come for Hattie. Perhaps someone had observed the frail little soul and decided, no, there would be no usefulness there.

      Anyway, Grandfather Stewart, as he was called, and this is the only story in which he features, took her home for dinner. She stayed for the rest of her life. She had been a fixture in my father’s childhood in his visits, though rare, to the house on Beaver Hall Hill. And it was clear that day, by how badly he needed to see her one last time, and by his reaction when he saw the tiny bundle in the bed, that he had loved her. She must have been kind to a little boy who felt adrift in the world, as she had been.

      My father, despite the paltry share of love he had known when young, was sensitive, loving and exceptionally kind. He hated the very idea of an adult hurting a young person. I once told him of a girl in my class at Havergal whose father made her eat in the kitchen rather than with the family in the dining room. Her pimples disgusted him and put him off his food. My father’s face was stricken at this story; he was appalled by the cruelty of that father.

      My father was clever: from both his parents, despite their obvious personality weaknesses, he inherited brains, and clearly from some other antecedent a strong work ethic and strong sense of responsibility. After his father’s death my father, still a child, found jobs delivering papers, shovelling snow, any tasks for which a skinny kid could earn a few pennies. However that was inadequate and once into his teens he had to drop out of school in order to provide more. I’m not sure exactly at what age this dropping out happened, but I do know that he remained ambitious for an education. He continued his studies on his own and eventually, as an external student, took McGill entrance exams.

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