Sarah Ellis - Reading Henry

Flora longed for a family of her own after living in an orphanage for almost ten years. She found one with her aunt and uncle, though she spent long hours at the woollen mill, where the work was sometimes dangerous. When that danger strikes close to home, it is time for yet one more move, and trying to get along with new relatives.

December 10, 1888

Miss McPhee is getting married! She told us this morning just before the dinner hour. She is to marry Mr. Sutherland, who owns the feed and tack store in Kamloops. She showed us a photograph of him. He has a moustache but, thank goodness, no whiskers. I would not like to think of Miss McPhee marrying a man with whiskers.

After the news, Miss McPhee dismissed us and the boys just gobbled their dinners and roared outside to continue their snowball war. Even though there are now four boys in my family, I still find them mysterious. Have they no curiosity about interesting things? Of course, all the girls stayed in to ask Miss McPhee questions. Even cousin Martha, who cannot sit still and attend to her lessons, sat quiet as a mouse, listening.

The wedding will be on December 29. Miss McPhee is going to live in town in a house that Mr. Sutherland built, with plaster walls and a bay window. (Bertha David asked if she would have lace curtains and Miss McPhee said she hoped so, by and by.)

When Mr. Sutherland decided he wished to marry Miss McPhee he wrote to her father who lives in Ontario to ask for her hand. (Martha asked why he just wanted her hand and Miss McPhee laughed and sorted that out. She is so good at explaining things and not just Geography). Mr. McPhee told Mrs. McPhee who told Miss McPhees older sister who wrote to Miss McPhees middle sister who is also a teacher and lives in Victoria who told Miss McPhee that Mr. Sutherland said that Miss McPhee was his share of the worlds treasure. Even though Miss McPhees parents are sad that she will live so far away in British Columbia, they said yes.

Miss McPhees middle sister is sewing her trousseau. Miss McPhee remembered that she was a teacher and wrote the word trousseau on the blackboard so that we would learn the spelling. Then she forgot she was a teacher and told us that everything was scrumptious. She will have two nighties, two underskirts, four pairs of drawers and six slip-waists as well as dresses and a jacket. Imagine having that many clothes all new and all at the same time. And none of it made of old flour sacks, Im sure.

Then Bertha asked if Miss McPhee would wear some of her scrumptious trousseau to school after shes married and Miss McPhee told us that she would not be coming back in the new year. Martha started to cry and I could have cried too. I thought you understood that, said Miss McPhee. Married women cannot be teachers. Then she gave Martha a hug.

We talked so long that Miss McPhee forgot to ring the bell and in the afternoon we had to skip sums. You would think that would make cousin Henry happy, because he has trouble with sums, but it didnt. On the walk home I tried to talk to him about the wedding but he was silent, as usual. Auntie Janet says he is shy, but he only seems to be shy with me. And how can he stay shy for so long? It has been months since we came west to join Uncle Wilfs family.

I am happy for Miss McPhee. But Im sad for me. Will the new teacher be nice? And why cant married women be teachers? Back in Almonte nobody said that married women could not work in the mill. Even women who were expecting babies worked at the mill. I suppose being a teacher is more respectable. But getting married is also respectable. So wouldnt being a married teacher make you respectable times two? Life is not as tidy as sums.

December 11, 1888

Ive just come in from the barn. If I were blind, I would always know the barn by the smell. Horses, dust, leather, hay and, this evening, whisky. Ollie is out there treating one of the horses who has colic. The treatment is laudanum, whisky and water. Ollie said he would have the cayuse right as rain by the morning. Ollie says cayuse instead of horse.

Even though Ollie is just a cowhand he knows as much as a vet. Uncle Wilfred says that nobody can read the range like Ollie. Reading the range means that he can look at any field and figure out how many cattle can graze there and for how long. When he told me that, I thought of Mr. Houghton, the wool sorter back at the mill, and how he could read a fleece and know what sort of wool it would make.

Ollie likes to tell stories of the big cattle drives. Weeks and weeks of bannock, beans, bacon and coffee. Tonight he told me how you can get cattle to cross a river. If its spring, you rope the calves and put them in a boat and when the calves start bawling the other cows plunge into the river to follow them across. If its fall, it is harder. You make a trail down a steep bank and get the cattle moving and then the cowboys have to scare the cows by hooting and hollering and banging rocks in cans to force the cattle into the cold water.

Uncle Wilfred says that Ollie can be very fierce when he drinks too much whisky, but Ive never seen him fierce, only gentle with the animals, patient with explaining things and exciting when he tells stories. I suppose Miss Beulah Young and her Temperance ladies would try to make him sign the pledge and give up whisky for the rest of his life.

December 12, 1888

I told the news of the wedding over supper and everybody paid attention, but then Martha spilled her stew and baby Sadie started wailing, so Uncle James danced her around the room singing There is a Tavern in the Town. Then Uncle Wilf started to talk about how there is going to be a baseball game on New Years Day in Kamloops to celebrate an eclipse of the sun, and somehow the wedding was forgotten.

Before writing todays news in this diary I flipped back to read what I wrote in days gone by. So much has happened that it feels as though Im reading a storybook, a story about a girl named Flora, who found a family and worked in a woollen mill and had a kitten named Mungo. A little girl.

When I looked back to this exact day a year ago I noticed that there was no entry for December 12 and I remembered why. This was the day that Uncle James had his terrible accident at the mill. Nobody seems to have noticed. Perhaps he and Auntie Janet have remembered, but are not saying anything.

When I see Uncle James rounding up cattle or joshing with Ollie I can hardly remember the pale, angry man he was after his accident when the mill machinery mangled his hand.

If cousin Henry were friendlier I might talk to him about it. I know that a boy can be a good friend, because Murdo was. But Henry doesnt like me. I dont know why. I try to be kind. Sometimes I long for Alice and Mary Anne from the Home, or any girl my own age.

December 13, 1888

I thought I had imagined it but now I know. Henry is not just unfriendly. He hates me. We are doing long division in school. Miss McPhee tried every way to explain it to Henry but he just couldnt understand it. At supper Uncle Wilf asked about our day and I told everyone about long division and how I remembered how to do it from helping the boys at the Home. Then Auntie Janet said I was very good at household sums and figuring out if we could buy bacon, back in Almonte. Then Uncle asked Henry how he was getting on and Henry said that he hated long division and he hated school and then he stormed off to the barn. Auntie Nellie said she was hopeless at sums too and just to leave him be, but Uncle Wilf said Henry needed to do well at school to get on with life. Then he asked if I would help Henry. Secretly I thought that Henry might talk to me if we did long division together, so I said yes.