The path from the teacherage to the Hastings Mill School followed the road for most of the way and then turned onto the wide plank boardwalk to the school door. The air was fresh this morning—only a little smoke hanging in the air as usual. A light breeze blowing toward the inlet ruffled my skirt and sent tiny dust devils scurrying in circles in front of me.
"Ain't usual, Miss MacDonald," the lamplighter told me last week. "We always get rain and some miserable weather every month, especially in June."
But I hadn't seen rain since April.
The salt from the ocean and the heavy sweet scent of blackberries blossoms mingled with the dust of the road. Closer to the school the smells of the mill prevailed: the grease from the machinery, wood-smoke from the cook shack, the sharp odour of sawdust and fresh wood shavings.
It was early in the day but the whine of the saws and the thump of heavy machinery in the low building near the wharf told me the men were already busy. A man shouted at a horse, winches creaked and groaned and logs bumped against each other and fell over the edge of the embankment in a sudden crescendo of sound to crash in the water below.
Smoke from the burner billowed over the houses near the mill and before the road dipped. I was high enough to see past the rough board homes to the trees beyond. This was very different from Ontario. There, the houses had tidy gardens of flowers and shrubs and well-pruned trees of apple and cherry and, occasionally, trimmed evergreens. Here the trees, the reason for all this industry, had been cleared away from the living area and kept back as though they were a menace. There were boards, bark and debris on the streets and in the water but, except for a few deciduous behind the school, no trees until the far edge of the clearing. There, they stood thick and tall. There, the forest stretched away from the cabins and cottages of Hastings, marching back into the wilderness for miles. The mill had cut timber only on this piece of land between Burrard Inlet and False Creek. Soon they were going to move south and east into the trees between Hastings and New Westminster to supply the great world market for masts and spars. The mill had been operating since 1869—seventeen years—and yet the surrounding settlement still looked like a temporary town, ready to be abandoned the minute the mill shut down.
Ten sailing ships in the harbour waited for the long spars to be transported to San Francisco, Australia and Europe. Holes had been cut into the ships' sterns to fit the 30-to-60-foot spars. Hastings Mill had orders for all the spars they could make and, by the looks of the forests around us and across the inlet to the north; the mill will be operating for hundreds of years yet.
I paused for a moment as I neared the mill yard and watched the oxen skid logs to the top of the embankment. The driver halted the big beasts and pulled a chain free, standing back as the huge logs tumbled down the greased cross poles into the water below. Spray rose into the air and the logs in the boom heaved on the ensuing waves until they settled again into a quiet pattern of brown and yellow lines.
My school day would start soon. I tucked my hair into its roll above my ears and at the back of my head and prayed it would stay there. It takes a great deal of effort to keep tidy, but I was determined to be a good example of respectability to the children. I was Amy MacDonald, school teacher of Hastings Mills, and I had position to maintain. I turned toward the school.
There was no real division between school and mill. The mill yard melded into the school yard without demarcation with hedge or fence. The children were used to the men and the noise and managed to keep out of the way of the equipment. The mill managers very kindly suppled most of our wants and allow us to use the old empty store for play time during the winter when the weather was inclement. The warm, dry room prevented many cases of ague and fever, at least in me. I supervised the play time and much I referred to do that out of the cold and wet.
Most of the children walked to school but John Exton was riding that fidgety mare again.
"John, put her down by the trees behind the school. It's too hot here in the sun anyway." That would keep the horse away from most of the children. I was afraid it would kick.
He nodded and led his horse away. Felicity Grant sent me a shy "Good morning, Teacher." She looked pale today—not her usual colour. I hoped she wasn't ill.
Eager students like Felicity make me wish I was a better teacher. I try, but I can't keep order the way good teachers can. The five-year-olds don't stay quiet and some days all seventy children whisper and mumble at once. It doesn't matter if they come from the mill cabins in Hastings or the fine railroad managers’ homes in Vancouver. They all talk. Some days this uncontrollable drone sings in my mind like a monotonous melody and I find myself almost hypnotized. It's an effort to shake it off, especially on a hot afternoon.
I looked over the water of the inlet and back toward the spit of land that was my present home. A faint haze of smoke hung on the tall pine trees. This morning, Lydia had used the stove in the summer kitchen, a few yards away from the main house, to boil the water for tea and for dishes. The stove would be cooling now, leaving only a trace of smoke in the air. We lit it as seldom as possible when the air was this hot and dry. I turned back to the school. It was in the shade of the old mill store until noon and was reasonably comfortable.
I taught arithmetic first subject in the morning. For one thing, I have an aversion to it, and teaching it first thing eliminates it for the rest of the day. And, for another, many of the older children had to help their parents in the afternoon and needed their basic curriculum before noon. Some of the girls worked out as domestics and some of the boys ran errands for businessmen in the city. They left school about eleven-thirty, so I tried to give them reading, spelling and arithmetic in the morning. Nature studies and history took up our afternoon.
I sent the ten- and eleven-year-olds in my fourth form to the shore near the mill wharf to collect sea shells. They had fifteen minutes to collect enough shells for their arithmetic lesson. They were learning division today and could divide sea shells into piles. A few shells would break during the morning and that would change their calculations, so they would argue and recalculate and come to a group answer at which point, theoretically, they would all understand the process. I gave the babies (I would have to stop calling those five-year-olds babies) buttons. They could try to discover the difference between three and four. Everyone was busy and I sat at my desk trying to get the spelling bee ready for later in the morning when Ruth Grant came to my desk.
"Please, Teacher. Felicity is sick."
I looked up at her sister. Felicity pushed buttons around on her table, but she was flushed now and her eyes looked red.
"You'd better take her home, Ruth, and come back when you can."
Ruth, a self- sufficient eight-year-old, took her sister by the hand and left.
Ruth wasn't back by lunch time but I thought her mother might need her help at home. There were other little Grants younger than Felicity and Mrs. Grant would be reluctant to send such competent help as Ruth back to school.
We were down to fifty pupils by two that afternoon. The weather had been unseasonably warm and it was difficult for anyone to concentrate in the stuffy confines of the classroom. The afternoon desertion of the older children happened every year towards the end of the school term but not usually as early as the second of June.
I was supposed to teach history this afternoon. I gave an art project to the babies (I must stop that) and tried to interest the older children in English history as it pertained to Canada.
I have trouble explaining Canada to the children. I argued with my Aunt Lydia about it last night after the supper dishes were cleared away.
“Canada will be a Dominion from sea to sea," Lydia said quoting from the Parliamentary report in the last issue of the Vancouver News. She dumped the crumbs from the table into the stove and continued talking. "It's natural to be one country—one country and British."
I picked up my cue. "It's not natural at all. I think we were tricked into this Confederation by that drunken Tory back east. We should get out before the easterners bleed us of our property, our taxes and our young people."
I try to take the opposite side of any political argument Lydia offered. When she was enthused, Lydia could talk for hours, quoting bits from newspapers and history books and giving pithy comments on politicians.
I nursed a warm cup of tea and sipped slowly trying to make the evening last a little longer. "I don't want to belong to the same organization as Toronto and Kingston. I think we should get out of it."
"Why? Toronto and Kingston were good enough for your parents."
"But my father and his friends and everyone back there in Ontario think they are the centre of the universe. They have no idea of our problems out west. Anyway, the practical problems of keeping in touch are beyond our abilities. The Rocky Mountains will always keep British Columbia separate from Central Canada."
"The railroad's been at Port Moody since November and you're still talking about being separate from Canada? We're getting closer all the time."
"It's at Port Moody but it's not going east. There is a big section around Kamloops Lake that isn't finished yet. Anyway, I'd rather have a fast link with San Francisco."
"Those rebels!" Lydia sniffed. The American Revolution was almost a hundred years ago but Lydia still maintained the British disdain for the colonists. You'd think she'd understand the Americans' rebellion; her Scottish ancestors fought the English at Culloden.
"You'll have to come to terms with the Americans sometime, Lydia. Vancouver is full of them."
"I suppose." She smiled and the hard lines around her eyes softened. She's my aunt—my mother's younger sister, but she’s only ten years older than me. We don't look alike. She has brown hair parted in the middle and pulled straight back into a bun and snapping black eyes in a heart-shaped face. She looks like an elegant cat. I look more like a mouse. I'm shorter than Lydia, and slimmer. Her nose is straight and patrician. Mine turns up at the end —just a little. Lydia says she's a black MacGillivray and I'm a green-eyed MacDonald and that we have hundreds of prototypes from generations back.
I still have my maiden name because at twenty-four I’m not married and don't plan on it. I came west at the request of the Mill manager who knew my father in Ontario. I had taught four years in a small town near my home and I was ready for a change. At the same time, Hastings Mill needed a schoolteacher. So here I was, Amy MacDonald, spinster of Vancouver.
Lydia is a Smith. She was born a MacGillivray but married Alistair Angus Smith when she was twenty-eight. He left home one day when Lydia was thirty and she hasn't seen him since. She is Mrs. Smith and I'm Miss MacDonald and we are happy with our settlement here in Vancouver.
"It's good to live without men," Lydia said suddenly.
"You don't count Stanley?" My brother lives with us.
"Stanley is fifteen and still manageable.'"
I had some doubt about that but he Stanley was usually amiable. "Why this particular evening is it good to live without men?" I had my own list of reasons but I wanted to hear hers.
"Because if there was a man in the house we'd never get to talk about politics. For some reason men think they own the subject."
"Well, they own the vote." I knew I’d provoked her but, as usual, it was irresistible. We both ardently wished for the vote but it didn't seem probable that the men of this country would loosen their hold on the government, and I didn't see how we could force them.
She snorted and banged a wooden spoon around the wash pan but didn't begin any discourse on women's right to the vote.
"You'd better tackle that arithmetic lesson. It doesn't get easier for the leaving."
She was right and it was a good thing I had prepared, as the next day the arithmetic lesson went better than usual.
In spite of what I had told Lydia last night, I think a Dominion of Canada may work. But there are so many problems that must be solved first. I find it difficult to explain our peculiar confederation. The Prime Minister of the country accepts graft, drinks and makes frivolous promises. Some people in this area and in the Port Moody area lost their savings because Van Home, the Canadian Pacific Railway General Manager and a friend of the Prime Minister, manipulated the terminal site. The railroad is coming here at monumental cost to the taxpayers and for the benefit of a few eastern financiers. Even our banking system is peculiar. If I put my savings into a bank in San Francisco I can borrow three times as much from that same bank. If I put my money in a bank in British Columbia I can’t borrow from that bank because my money goes back to Ontario. The savings of the people of British Columbia are used to develop the east. And I'm supposed to teach the children that British Columbia is Canada and has been part of the Dominion for fifteen years. It will be a long time before anyone here feels a part of the East. Perhaps we would have been better off with the United States.
I decided to teach ancient Greece. Afternoon sun beat down on the board walls and baked us as if we were sitting in a wooden oven. The children had tried and I had tried to grasp the world of ancient history, but the air was close—no breeze now—and the room was stifling. We abandoned school about two.
Outside the afternoon air was warm, but at least it was fresh. I had a cup of tea with Lydia, washed my face and then returned to Hastings to visit Mrs. Grant. I had a few buttons in a jar for Felicity and a bag of biscuits for the rest of the children.
The saws were noisier now as more men were working. A sailing ship was loading and there was much shouting and banging of timbers on the wharf and against the ship.
The Grant cabin was past the Caufield cottage and on the mill side of Dunlevy Street. I knocked and heard Mrs. Grant shout, "Don't answer the door. None of you children answer the door. Just a moment." The last, I assumed, was to me so I waited.
She opened the door herself. She was short, a solid sphere dressed in a plain brown dress, straight without bustle or crinoline and covered with a stained apron. Her brown hair escaped its pins into untidy wisps around her face. Her eyes were almost black and large, fringed with dark lashes and quite beautiful.
"Miss MacDonald. Don't come in. It's the measles."
We stared at each other. Measles! It would kill some of the children. It always did.
"So late in the year?"
She nodded.
"I've had them." I moved forward. It wouldn’t kill me.
She opened the door wide and I followed her inside.
We sat at her kitchen table in silence for a few moments. Measles can kill. Measles can leave children blind and stupid. There was always some disease waiting for children—consumption, fever, smallpox.
"Are you sure it's the hard kind?" German measles wasn’t as serious.
"It's the red measles all right," she said. "I've seen both kinds. And Felicity's real sick."
I pushed the buttons and the biscuits across the table to her.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Grant." I tried to stay calm. I wanted to scream at her to keep Felicity’s fever down and feed her water often, but Mrs. Grant knew better than I did how to keep death away.
She nodded. "You'd best warn the mothers, although they'll know fast enough. Measles don't hit just one."
"But most children survive measles without injury," I suggested tentatively.
"Yes," Mrs. Grant agreed. She was not suffering imaginary horrors. "Yes, I know. But I've got eight children. I hope they all come through it all right. It's going to be hard nursing for the next month."
I looked around the cabin. In these crowded conditions, all the children were going to be exposed to measles.
"I hope Felicity has a mild case."
"I gave her a draught of vinegar and I'll try a broth of honey vinegar and onion. The doctor will be out this afternoon but there's naught he can do." She shrugged her shoulders and I rose to go. There was nothing I could do either. I could feel my throat closing, my shoulders tighten. I took a deep breath and swallowed my worry.
"Thank you kindly for coming, Miss MacDonald. Felicity likes you real well. And Ruth too." She walked to the door with me.
"They're good children."
She smiled then. I left her at the cabin door, standing straight, watching me leave, marshalling her courage for the month ahead.
Booked on Murder (A Haunted Library Mystery)
by Allison Brook
