Housewrights by Art Corriveau

Author:Art Corriveau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Out in the barnyard, Lily gulped great breaths of fresh air. Why was she constantly doing this? She felt as though she had just been released from school. Oh, she loved her mother—she did—but it was always work between the two of them. Lessons to be learned, sewing to be critiqued, chores to be added to the list. Never any of the long, full silences she shared with her father. She missed him, suddenly. It was a longing that cut to her heart. She could see herself crawling into his lap to watch the sun set from his favorite rocker on the porch. She could feel his strong arms around her, his great hands resting in her lap, his chin perched on her collarbone. She could hear their deep silence drenched in cricket songs and the creak of oak against oak—communion. They both liked it simple, she and her father. And she wondered about this: how simple she liked it, and how complicated, in practice, it actually was.

She should probably go home and darn socks or start supper. But she knew she wouldn’t. She had been raised with boys. Could she help it if she liked boy things better?

Eventually she found the twins. They were with the sugaring sledge at the north end of the maple grove. Ian was giving the workhorses their oats while Oren unhooked buckets from taps and emptied them into the tub mounted on the runners of the sledge.

“Did you miss me?” Lily called.

“Those aren’t work clothes,” Oren shouted back.

He was right. She was wearing a long skirt and one of her faded calico blouses—the uniform of her mother’s kitchen. But she had prepared for the possibility that sugaring would not be over by the time she was released from pie-making. Pie-making: a bad taste, like castor oil, on her tongue—one that might be washed away with the overpowering taste of boiling sap. She hiked up her skirt. She was wearing her barn Levis underneath, along with her heavy wool socks and hobnailed boots.

“That’s my girl,” Oren crowed. “Grab a bucket. We’re late back at the sugarhouse. Your brother’ll scalp us.”

Indians, both of them. Abenaki Indians were the first to make maple syrup—or so the legend went. They taught the first French settlers how to collect sap and boil it. The French gave the Indians religion, the Catholic Church, in return. And small pox.

Lily leaned against the nearest maple and shimmied out of her skirt. She slung it over the seat of the sledge after retrieving a couple of mealy apples from the pockets. She had smuggled these from her mother’s kitchen to give to Molly and Dan. The new Dan. All of the Willard Belgians had been named Molly and Dan since before she was born. Farm animals were named like that. You didn’t make pets out of them. When a Dan died, you replaced him with a younger Dan. You never had to think twice when you called to him. But who, she wondered,

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