When the Bough Breaks Read online

  For Hannah and Julia Everett

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sincere thanks to my editors, Kathy Lowinger and Sue Tate, for their unstinting patience and support.

  For help in my research, I would like to thank the following:

  Deborah Hodge

  Georgia Robinson, Lindsay Public Library, Lindsay Ontario

  Catherine Shedden, communications officer, Trillium Lakelands District School Board

  Inspector Don Thomas, Kawartha Lakes Police Service

  The Peterborough Historical Society, and Elwood H. Jones.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  The Family

  A Long Road

  An Ordinary Day

  “There is nothing to steal”

  “I hate her”

  “She wants the baby”

  An Invitation

  “Promise me you'll keep us together”

  The Tea Party

  Finding Eddie

  The Scent of Lavender

  PROLOGUE

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  September 10,1922

  William Carr clatters up the stairs, out of breath from running in the summer heat. He is excited at the prospect of seeing his new baby for the first time. Arriving at the bedroom door, he knocks, opens it quietly, and whispers, “I've brought you some oranges.”

  Lillie leans back, her curly hair dark against the pillows. She smiles at her husband. “Here you are at last; our daughter has been waiting to meet you. Isn't she beautiful? Would you like to hold her?”

  William hesitates. “I'll just look at her … I've come straight from the stables. I didn't even change my shirt and I smell of horses,” he says, moving closer.

  “She won't notice, and if she does, she'll not mind. Go on, Will, take her; she won't break.” Lillie smiles proudly as William cradles his daughter as gently as if she were a skittish newborn foal.

  “Her eyes are blue,” he says.

  “She looks like you. You don't mind that she's a girl, do you?”

  “Now what kind of a question is that?”

  “Well, I don't know how much help she's going to be, mucking out the stable or shoeing horses,” Lillie says.

  “William answers his wife passionately, holding the infant tightly against his shoulder: “She'll have no need to work in the stables. I aim to buy her a silk dress and boots of softest leather. She shall have oranges every week. I'm going to take such care of you both. We'll give her everything we never had.” He places the baby gently next to Lillie, kneels down, and holds Lillie's hand against his cheek.

  “Millicent will have us to love her – what more can she possibly need?” Lillie says softly, and sings a lullaby to her baby daughter:

  Rock-a-bye, baby

  In the treetop

  When the wind blows

  The cradle will rock

  When the bough breaks

  The cradle will fall

  And down will come baby

  Cradle and all.

  “Promise me you'll always be there to catch her, William.”

  “I promise you, Lillie,” he says.

  THE FAMILY

  Mother is on her knees, washing the kitchen floor. “Hello, Millie, love,” she says, “I'm almost done. It won't take long to dry.” She pushes a stray curl out of her eyes, and I take off my shoes and wait. Mother wrings out the cloth and drapes it over the side of the bucket.

  “The first thing I plan to do in this house, when times take a turn for the better,” she says, sitting back on her heels and surveying the kitchen, “is to ask your father to put down new linoleum. It's so worn in places, you can't tell where the pattern begins or ends. It was already starting to fade when we moved in here.”

  “What color will you choose, Mother?” I ask.

  “Blue – as blue as the sea on a fine day,” she answers.

  “It won't stay blue for long, Mother. There'll be a path of muddy footprints when Hamish forgets to take off his boots,” I can't resist saying.

  “I'm only dreaming, Millie, just daydreaming, of new wallpaper, with a border of blue flowers.” Mother gets up awkwardly, and I take the bucket before she tries to lift it. I'm careful not to let the dirty water slop onto the clean floor, as I make my way into the scullery.

  “Hamish has gone with Father to the Price farm, bringing some tools and an old harness Father's mended. The son has moved to Peterborough; he's been hired by the railway. It's a piece of good fortune for him, but hard on the family, as he'll be missed on the farm. There's only the youngest daughter there now, since her sister married last summer.

  “Bring in the washing for me, dear. I'll make a pot of tea, and we'll have a bit of peace before the others come home for supper. The soup's simmering on the stove.”

  “It smells good and I'm hungry,” I reply.

  The stone floor in the scullery is uneven and slopes a bit towards the back door. The scullery was added on, after the house was built. The bucket is heavy – I empty the scummy water around the side of the house. My chickens are out, looking for worms. We have six hens, all good layers. We get enough eggs for each of us to have one or two a week, and Mother sells the rest at the market for seventeen to twenty-two cents a dozen, depending on the size. Once or twice, she even got twenty-five cents.

  The chickens have been my responsibility since I was ten, and I'm quite fond of them: Alice and Maggie, Sally and Fay, Lady Jane Grey – the smallest and the best layer and my favorite – and Jemima, who pecks and fights.

  The clothes on the line smell cool and fresh; the sun looks pale, as if newly washed too. I can feel spring all around me, almost here. I fold everything neatly, and stow the pegs away in a small canvas bag. When I was little, I'd make clothes-peg people by tying bits of ribbon and cloth around the pegs, and give them names. I made up whole families, and there was always a grandma and grandpa and lots of children. I still keep them at the back of a drawer in my dresser.

  We are a small family: just Mother, Father, me, and my brother, Hamish. I suppose people might say that we are lucky because we don't yell or fight, the way some families do. I admit that, at times, quite often in fact, I'm tempted to yell at Hamish, who looks like an angel, but can be very stubborn and is a bit spoiled.

  I've always called my parents Mother and Father. “Why would you change such beautiful-sounding names?” Mother asks. But Hamish decides to call them Ma and Pa once he starts school, and I notice he gets away with it. It's because he's a boy and the youngest, and because he's going to follow in our father's and Mr. Armstrong's footsteps.

  When Mr. Armstrong was alive, I called him Papa Joe, and he was the closest I ever came to having a grandfather. His name comes first on the sign above the forge: ARMSTRONG AND CARR, BLACKSMITHS. Mostly, my father shoes horses, but he can treat injuries too. Father can do everything: make tools look good as new, mend axles and wagon wheels, and fix harnesses that are almost worn through. He never throws anything away.

  This used to be Mr. Armstrong's house. He asked us to come and live with him in 1926, when I was four and Hamish only a baby. That was nine years ago, and I'm practically thirteen now.

  I remember how Papa Joe used to take me down Kent Street on a Saturday morning and let me choose a penny candy, and later, when Hamish was old enough, he'd come too.

  Mr. Armstrong died in 1929 – just before the big crash that turned the world upside down. The adults still talk about it. It seems as if overnight, we all got really poor, with not enough to eat sometimes, and more and more people unemployed. We've become accustomed to strangers passing through Lindsay on their way east – asking for food, looking for work, and offering to do any chores at all to get by.

  Father's custome
rs pay him, when they can, with food – potatoes or a pound of butter, a freshly caught fish or a rabbit – when they don't have any money, which is most of the time, he complains to Mother. But she says how fortunate we are, even though we're living through a depression, to have what we have.

  Father says he'll keep the name Armstrong on the sign forever, because he did his apprenticeship with Papa Joe when he was not much older than Hamish is now.

  At breakfast last week, Hamish asked Father, “Will you put my name on the sign too, one day? Will you write armstrong, carr, and son?”

  “Time enough to worry about that when you finish school and your apprenticeship. A name on the sign has to be earned.”

  “I'm almost ten. I know my way round the forge.” Hamish has an answer to everything.

  “I was twelve when I started working for Mr. Armstrong, but you can start right now. Do your chores the way I did – every single day, from the moment he took me on.”

  “I know,” Hamish sighed. “Sweep out the forge, pick up the nails, sort and stack the shoes, straighten the tools, don't let the fire go out…. I'm going, right this minute.” He ran off; Hamish would rather be in the forge helping Father than anywhere else. Mother bit her lip to keep from laughing.

  “That boy's not as keen on school as he should be. You're the only scholar in this family, Millie.” Father smiled, tweaking my braids. “Hamish has a natural way with horses so that even the nervous ones take to him; the lad will make out fine.” He swallowed the last of his tea and hurried off to work.

  Sometimes, just when I think he and Mother are about to talk about the old days, there's a shrug, a glance in our direction, and the talk turns elsewhere.

  I wish I knew more about my parents before they became my mother and father. Somehow we never get round to talking about “before.” Why don't we have any relatives like my friends Grace and Sadie do? And why is it such a big secret?

  One day, late last summer, Mother and I were sitting on the back porch, shelling peas for supper, and I was telling her how the teacher had asked each of us to describe our favorite book. Mine was, and still is, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Sometimes I think that if my hair were red like Anne's, instead of fair like my father's, my life would be so much more interesting.

  I told Mother how I'd read out the part where Anne waits and waits to find out whether Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are going to let her stay with them, even though she's a girl and they'd asked the orphanage to send them a boy to help out on the farm.

  Mother looked at me and, after a moment, said, “I was an orphan too, Millie.”

  The basin I was holding between my knees slid to the floor, and the peas rolled all over the cracked boards and down the steps into the stubbly grass. “An orphan like Anne? You mean, you lived in an orphanage?” I asked.

  Mother looked vexed. I don't know whether it was because I'd spilled the peas, or because it upset her talking about orphans, or because she hadn't meant to tell me she was one too.

  “I can't think why I told you that, Millie. It wasn't an orphanage the way you think of it. The Home was in a pretty English village. I lived in a beautiful cottage, with a garden full of flowers – not like Anne at all. Now fetch the broom, please, and let's try to rescue those peas.”

  Later, when I was setting the table for supper, I asked her: “Does Father know? I mean, about you being an orphan?”

  “You are a little goose. Your father and I don't keep secrets from each other. And it's not a secret – I never think about it, that's all.”

  But I thought she was behaving as though it was. If it was all so wonderful, why hadn't she ever told me before? This weekend Miss Tracy has set us an essay for homework. We are to write about ourselves and our family. I can write about myself and Hamish; that's the easy part.

  I was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and my family moved to Lindsay when I was four and my brother, Hamish, was one. Father is a blacksmith, and my brother will be apprenticed to him when he leaves school. Hamish has recently started a paper route, and my father fixed up an old bicycle for him to ride. Father finds a use for the oldest and rustiest tools and always says, “That will come in handy someday,” and somehow it always does.

  On Fridays after school, and for three hours every Saturday morning, I'm employed at Mercer's Drugstore on Kent Street. The first two weeks I was there, I worked without pay, just to show that I was responsible and could fit in, and then I was hired year-round.

  I really love everything about being there, and helping to keep the drugstore clean and shiny makes me feel necessary. I sweep up, polish the brass fittings, and clean the counters. I rinse bottles in the sink in the back room and write labels. I earn twenty-five cents a day, and Mother lets me keep ten – the rest goes into the winter-boot-and-clothing fund for Hamish and me. It's important that I have a job because I want to contribute like he does. After all, I am the oldest.

  Sometimes my friends and I go to a movie. We enjoy musicals, especially those with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. My brother and his friends prefer movies about Tarzan and his jungle adventures.

  My hobby is reading and I take out two books from the children's library every week. I aim to go to the Baker Business College in town when I'm sixteen. I'll learn shorthand and typewriting, maybe bookkeeping too. My ambition is to work in Eaton's mail-order department. It would be interesting to see what people order from the catalogs, especially at Christmastime.

  As I sit and chew my pencil, Mother comes and stands beside me. “Your penmanship is beautiful, Millie. Why are you looking so worried?”

  “Because my composition is too short, I haven't included enough information, and because I'm pretty sure that Denise Tetrault will get higher marks than me again – stuck-up creature. She goes around boasting anytime she gets a good grade, and I can't abide the way she flutters her eyelashes at all the teachers. She knows the names of everyone in her family right back to 1897, when her grandparents arrived in Lindsay from Quebec. She and her friend Francine speak French to each other, making us feel left out. Well, I'm going to learn a second language when we go to high school.”

  “Millicent Carr, whatever has got into you?”

  “I'm sorry, I just want to do well, and I don't know anything to write about our family, and Denise always acts so … I don't know … superior, as if she's looking down at Grace and Sadie and me.”

  “I can't conjure up more relatives for your composition, I'm afraid, but here's what I do know:

  “I was born in London, England, an only child, and both my parents died young. I never knew my father. My mother, Helen, told me I looked like him and that he was a sailor from Malta.”

  “I know where Malta is – it's an island in the Mediterranean Sea.”

  “There now, Millie, I'm sure Denise wouldn't know that…. My father drowned at sea when I was a tiny baby, and my mother died of tuberculosis when I was seven.”

  I want to ask Mother if that's when she got sent to the orphanage – when her mother died – but she got so upset that time she told me about being an orphan that I swallow the question.

  “Your father's parents died young too. Grandfather Albert was a groom for a London bus company, who died in a far-off war in South Africa, looking after the colonel's horses. Your grandmother died a few years later, and your father was sent to Canada when he was twelve years old. His younger brother stayed behind in England and he was adopted.”

  “That's horrible, Mother, separating brothers like that – poor Father.” I shudder, sad for him. No wonder he doesn't talk about the past.

  “The boys did meet again, Millie, when your father volunteered to fight in the First World War. I think your uncle Frank had decided to come to Canada and farm out here, after the war was over, but he died in France in 1917. It was just not meant to be….”

  “Is this story going to be all gloomy and sad, Mother? Didn't anything nice happen?” I ask.

  “Oh, Millie, of course some nice t
hings happened. I'd just got engaged to your father. Then I got my first job working outside the house; I was so proud when I could write him that I was working in a munitions factory, and that I was helping the war effort too. But he was horrified when I told him that I'd had to cut my hair, so that it wouldn't get caught in the machinery!

  “Every spare minute, even at coffee breaks, I'd knit socks and mittens and scarves to send to your father.” When he came home in 1918, at the end of the war, we were married.

  “We moved to Toronto, and William was taken on at Eaton's horse stables to look after the delivery horses. That's why Eaton's still sends us their spring and winter catalogs and a card at Christmas.

  “Those horses were looked after like royalty, but even princes and princesses get sick. There was an epidemic of pinkeye, and it spread so quickly, there was nothing to be done to save the animals, even though Eaton's had its own horse hospital. One hundred and fifty horses had to be put down – your father could hardly bring himself to go back to the stables after that. It reminded him of those dreadful war years.

  “After he returned from France, he told me that every time a new shipment of horses arrived, he knew they'd be lucky if they stayed alive more than a few days. Many were killed within hours. That's why he never talks to you and Hamish about the war.”

  Mother must have noticed by my expression that I don't think this part of the story is a very happy one either because she says, “Goodness, Millie, I'm all talked out, but if you promise not to write about it in your composition, I do have one more piece of information for you.”

  “I promise not to, Mother, but I hope it's nothing sad.”

  “It's something wonderful, and I've been waiting for a quiet moment to tell you about it. In three months' time, at the end of June, we'll be a family of five.”

  “You're going to have a baby! (I had wondered, but I didn't like to ask.) In three months means the baby will be born just as I start summer vacation. I'll be home to help you take care of it, but you'll have to teach me how to look after a baby – I can't remember much about Hamish when he was little. Have you and Father decided on names yet?”