The house was cloaked in silence, yet not that gentle repose which follows labour, but a silence heavy, sullen, and reproachful, as though the very walls bewailed our condition. The hearth, grudging in its charity, yielded but a few coals that glimmered faintly, more like dying eyes than living fire. Without, the Atlantic wind did assail the shutters with such relentless hands that each rattle seemed a reminder of the oceans dominion, boundless, bitter, and merciless. Mother was absent, as she was oft compelled to be, and thus the solemn task of contending with silence fell to me. I swept the boards, though they bore no dust, as if a tidy house might shame hunger into retreat. My hands, slight and cracked with lye, bore freckles upon the knuckles like scattered seeds pressed in pale clay. They marked me still a child, yet every motion denied the claim; childhood had been shed from me as one casts aside a garment ill-suited to the weather, and I knew not where it lay.
My hair, falling loose as I bent, was brown threaded with that faint red which a flame delights to awaken, as though the fire would claim me kin. My nose and cheeks, too, bore a dusting of freckles, faint as ash, yet visible to any who drew close. My eyes were brown, but the sun, when in kinder humour, could turn them the hue of honey. Such trifles might once have been deemed pretty, but prettiness is no coin in the market of want. What I possessed, more precious than outward bloom, was a steady hand. With it I might sketch, mimic, and when compelled, counterfeit. That hand became our bread.
Heath crouched before the hearth, coaxing the reluctant embers with all the recklessness of youth. His skin, darkened by sun even in the cruelest months, caught the faint glow, his nearly black hair falling untamed across his brow. His eyes, brown, quick, and sparking, seemed as though the fire kindled itself within them. Mischief was his constant companion, and already the village girls turned their heads to regard his handsome form; yet to me he was but my brother, restless, impatient, striving to draw vigour from sparks that would scarce oblige him.
Arabella had mounted her accustomed stool, that it might serve as her stage. Her hair, pale as straw, flew wild with every bow and curtsy; her eyes, blue as the encircling sea, held in the left a fleck of brown, as though the very earth had sunk within it. Her figure was slight, though her cheeks round, rising like lanterns whenever her smile broke forth. She swept her arm wide and, with a butcher's rough tone, proclaimed, "Finest beef, my lady!" Then, contorting her features to mimic the seamstress, she cried, "Mind your hem, miss, or you will shame us all!" Heath laughed uproariously, so that sparks leapt and died, and I, striving to repress my mirth, failed. Arabella, flushed with triumph, spun and dropped into a curtsy that nearly toppled her from her throne.
We were three of one blood, though the world discerned distinctions where we acknowledged none. Heath bore his father's sun in his skin; Arabella and I were pale as our mother. Yet we were all First Nations children, kin by heritage if not by hue. Strangers' eyes lingered too long upon Heath, slid too lightly over Arabella and me; but within these walls we knew no such division. We were a small, fragile nation: brother, sister, sister, and no one else.
The cupboard yielded naught but its hollow echo, wherein the faint rattle of a hinge seemed to mock our expectation. Heath, with laughter too keen to be wholesome, shut it fast, the sound like iron striking stone. Arabella essayed another jest, but hunger is a merciless adversary to wit, and her mimicry faltered. I drew the paper nigh unto the lamp and set my freckled hand upon the pencil as though the act itself were sacrament. Long had I studied Mother's script, the slant of her r's, the flourish of her name, and now I forged them with the diligence of a priest copying holy writ. Shame prickled, pride burned too, for in that moment necessity made sacred even the counterfeit of a hand.
Heath leaned over me, his breath warm with mirth. "Better than hers," he said. Arabella, in the grocer's pomp, declared, "Grand letters, fit for a queen!" I folded the paper once, twice, and slipped it into my pocket. Fear is a noisy thing, but I had learned long since to keep mine silent.
The air without cut sharp with salt and brine. Snow lay in rutted lanes, muddied by cart wheels, while gulls cried unseen above. Lamps glowed in windows that were not ours, their warmth a reproach to our want. Heath struck his stick against stones to make a march, while Arabella skipped beside him, cheeks ruddy, hair tossed by the gale, her blue eyes flashing, the brown fleck catching lantern-light like hidden earth. I pressed the folded note within my palm until my freckles marked its crease.
The Shoppe bell clanged as a rebuke upon our entry. The shelves bore little: sacks of potatoes, barrels of salt cod, jars of molasses, a few pale candles. Hunger struck sharper for the sight. The shopkeeper, stout and slow-eyed, surveyed us with the weariness of one who knows too well the debts of others. He had turned us away before, with the weary refrain, "Tell your mother she owes too much," and the memory made my throat tighten. I placed the note before him. He read it slowly, lips shaping each word. At length, with a sigh deep as the sea, he fetched a small sack of potatoes, a strip of salt cod, and a jar of molasses whose rim was sticky with use. He set them down with no kindness. "End of month," he muttered, as though the words themselves had grown weary with repetition.
I gathered the food in my arms. It was not plenty; it was scarcely sustenance. Yet it was something.
Heath, ever quick to reclaim mirth, seized the cod as soon as we stepped into the lane, swinging it by its tail as though it were a trophy. Arabella, with a queen's authority, snatched it back and, in the shopkeeper's gravelly tone, cried, "Her Ladyship's supper!" Their laughter rang sharp in the frosty air. Relief, sudden and fierce, wrung laughter from me as well, wild and brighter than the night deserved. Hunger makes jest desperate, but no less real.
The lane home was slick with ice, the ocean wind sharp against our faces. Heath carried the potatoes, the cod slung over his shoulder like a hunter's prize. Arabella clutched the jar of molasses to her chest as if it were a chalice of gold. My hands were free but for the folded note I had written, the ink still staining my fingertips. Salt air stung my throat. The gulls shrieked above us, wings flashing white against the black sky.
When the gate of our small yard came into view, I turned to Arabella. "See if there is a letter," I told her, though my voice was steadied as command, not hope.
She darted thither, her fair hair streaming in the gale, her cheeks ruddy as frost-bitten rose. She stooped at the post, and with a girlish squeal proclaimed, "'Tis Papa's very hand! I know it, Clara, I know it!" She held the folded paper aloft, her voice bright, breaking on its own joy.
Heath caught her by the arm, laughing. "How do you know his scrawl from any sailor's scribble?" he teased, though his eyes lingered on the paper with a strange hunger. Arabella wriggled free, running into the house, clutching the letter like a relic. I followed, my chest full with a belief I could not name, only cling to.
The fire was coaxed higher with Heath's scraps; Arabella placed the letter in my freckled hands as if it were too holy for her own. I smoothed its crease, saw the broken lines, the misspelled words, and I read them aloud:
Mi deer gurls,
I rite bad but I think on yu everi day. Luk after them yorselvs. Be brayv. I com wen I can. I wil be ther.
Pa
The kitchen hushed around us. Arabella leaned against me, her fair head warm, her sea-blue eyes soft as tide, the brown fleck in her left catching firelight like earth buried in sea. "He will come," she whispered. I pressed the paper against my chest, freckles marking the fold. I believed it still.
Heath sat apart, crouched by the fire. The flames lit his face, handsome in shadow, his nearly black hair falling into his brow. He said nothing. At last he murmured, not to us but to the coals, "You have letters. You have his hand. I have nothing." His voice was flat, but in it lived an ache deeper than hunger. He did not miss a man gone, but a man never there at all.
Mother had told us once of Matthew, Heath's father. She had been sixteen, heavy with child, when Matthew raised his hand to her. She caught him by the ponytail, dragged him down, and struck him again and again until his face was wet and he begged her to stop. She might have killed him, she said, had a mirror not betrayed her: her hair wild, her eyes mad, her fists no longer her own. The sight stilled her. She let him go and never looked back. Heath was born from that story, not from a man's love, nor even his cruelty, but from the violence of her refusal to break.
Heath's eyes now flickered like the coals he fed. "I wonder if he looked like me," he said softly. "If he laughed as loud." Then, as if ashamed, he snatched a scrap of bark and thrust it into the flame, laughing too roughly, drowning grief in sparks.
Arabella curled against me, her cheeks round, her lashes lowering as sleep crept near. She muttered lines from her play-voices, "Hot pies, a penny, a penny," before slipping into silence. I folded the cloth, set the knives in their row, shut the shutter against the sea's roar. Heath lay facing the door, his stick still clutched as if laughter were not armour enough. Arabella curled her feet beneath my skirt, stealing warmth. I pressed Father's letter under my palm, freckles marking the paper, as though my own hand could make its promise true.
Without, the Atlantic crashed, vast and endless, swallowing men without names and spitting their ships back broken. Within, we three clung to a page of rough ink, a sack of potatoes, a strip of salt fish, and one another.
Gone was childhood, but not hope. And in the dark, I believed.