Between the when of all that matters

, a short fiction work-in-progress set in Ottawa's Mechanicsville,

1.

He spit on the ground, like his father. Like his father. Spit, hitting ground, and coated in dust. Tilted, turned his head right, and projected. Small dribble, a string on his chin he wiped away with one sleeve. He would need further practice. Wiped, with left wrist.

The horses tied, stable. Watered and fed. A bucket. The cutter unloaded, the wagon. Unloaded, and the house fills, filled. His father, mother, and the twins. Elder brothers. The baby. All moved into the village, from his uncle's farm. The small house to this. A house with rooms. Wood frame, and wood siding. In a row, along.

Roderick, standing at the streetcorner, surveying. Whom his parents nicknamed Rory, standing. Eight years old. The stones that fill the back lanes, where the neighbour children run, throw sticks. Old mare, the milk deliveries. Small porch, and a side. A streetcar line.

And the bells, then. Ringing in from twin steeples, rising. Ringing throughout the neighbourhood. Sometimes he would feel a small shudder, through the ground or the walls of the house. It shook the ground, palms flat or one ear, held; echoes calling through God’s green earth.

When she heard the bells chime, his mother would lower her head, cross her chest with two fingers.

The previous night, his father talking to uncle John about their own father, and the day that he drowned. The two men whispering, late. Rory, long to bed. He crept out, listened. Shadow.

The morning he slipping into the river. His father a boy, and John caught up in the river. Why was he in the river. Why was he out so far.

He heard his father say that after he’d submerged, the worst was the silence. His own voice bouncing echoes out across the surface, unable to penetrate the skin of the water.

Long geographies. He knows of the villages that fire took, when his father was young. Orangeville, Rochesterville. A great gust of breath, blowing dust from a surface. Wiping it clean. A fire that swept through the lumberyards and crossed the river.

His father remembers, and his mother too. Entire villages, erased and displaced. A body count that could have been so much higher. His father says, they took that as luck. His grandfather, daily milk deliveries through mud, streets turned to smouldering ash. So much smoke, his father said, the sky had gone dark. But for the horrible flames, consuming all in its path.

2.

His mother, who taught school before marriage. Dash of books throughout the house she gently pushed on all her offspring: Silas Mariner, Just Mary Stories. Taught school, slowly done, once his oldest brother came. A brother, and a brother, and a sister, who died of scarlet fever, still a baby. The cold of the house when she died, the weeks their father took to reading passages from Genesis. When he was still small, not yet old enough for school. His hand, his hand down in the soil.

The day they wore their good clothes, when they put her in the ground. A memory, too young to fully remember. It shimmers, hazy.

Before him, there was another. His parents won’t speak of. The older two told him, another girl, three years old when Rory was born, three years old and outside, beyond their mother's eye. Beyond their mother's eye, caught underneath delivery wheels. The horse kicked, and the wagon rolled, and their mother wept for weeks. She would not come out. Mother of four living boys, and two lost girls. Their mother, mourning inside with Rory's bundled self.

The old shack, now this stranger house. A room or two, a loft for older children. The baby, still, their mother's arms.

Into the house, for the sake of his father’s new job. A job in a factory, he wasn’t sure where.

He didn’t like the idea of leaving them behind, in the graveyard by the Oak trees. Why couldn’t they bring them? He knew not to ask. Left behind with his grandparents and his Uncle Roderick. The same name as him.

In the beginning. And he wonders where God was when his sisters died. This house, that doesn't know them, the old home left behind. And he wonders, if no one remembers his dead sisters, will they have existed? Kicks, the dust. He walks up to their house, his fingers on the outer wall, he whispers to their new house. Home. He whispers his sisters' names into the walls, the foundations.

He has already met the house, but this, the house's introduction to them. He whispers, baby Christina Anne, toddler Sarah Jane. He says their names so this new house will know them. He needs the house to understand. He whispers their names.