Through the church walls she could hear what was inside if she leaned back and touched the boards — there was a low murmur, a strain of sad music from the pedal organ Wilhelmina Simpson had brought in from Boston and on which she would soon play “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” as Easter Sunday would be early this year, the moon almost full now and March not yet ended. The people inside that church did not realize that Thomasina would be able to sing resurrection anthems when Easter came. They did not know that her idea of resurrection was different from that of the Church, as were her ideas of Christ, of light, of immortality and holiness. Christ, for Thomasina, was not so much a person as an opening in the grass, a patch of sun, a warm spot in the loneliness. She had never been a person who respected stained glass or altars. That butterfly’s small early wings were her stained glass. That patch of earth, peeping through the melting snow, was her altar. Her mother had not called her Thomasina for nothing. “If you were a boy,” her mother had said when she was young, “I was going to call you Doubting Thomas, after the disciple who wanted to see Christ’s nail marks with his own eyes. But you were a girl. So I called you Doubting Thomasina.”
After the funeral, at which Wilhelmina Simpson played Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” the hymn she played at every funeral, the people walked down the hill to the cemetery, and the gravediggers, Simon Montague and Harold Pierson, lowered the coffins into the graves, and Thomasina watched the part of the procession visible from her sunlit corner. She stood there, the wind blowing her coat, a faintly ominous vision, a figure who had stepped out of the bounds of what was normal for people in this place. Those who stole a look in her direction felt someone should do something, someone should go to her, put an arm around her and guide her into the group; after all, they were supposed to be mourning with her. They thought someone should do this, but nobody did. When the handfuls of earth had been thrown into the graves, the crowd walked up to the tiny community hall across the road from the church, and they walked the way they had descended, along the east and north walls, not the south and west walls at whose corner Thomasina stood — all except Jacinta, who handed the baby to Treadway.
“Go in and get a sandwich and tea,” she told Treadway. “Talk to Harold Pierson about shovelling the ice off Thomasina’s roof before it slides off in a sheet and kills her.”
Jacinta picked her way through last year’s thistles. Snow filtered into her ankle-boots as she stood beside Thomasina, raising her face to the sun as Thomasina did, leaning against the church wall inches from where a spider with white stripes made an iridescent web. Not many spots trapped this kind of warmth in Croydon Harbour. Jacinta saw the blue butterfly — a small moth really; a mud-puddle moth, but pretty, and pale blue like the spring sky — and she knew what Thomasina was doing. Jacinta did not think her crazy, and she did not try to draw her to the reception or to move her from this moment of peace. Women did not get many moments like this in their lives, sun beating on their eyelids in a hidden corner and no one asking them for anything. No one asking them to find the salt, or wait for a man who might come home in three months but who might not. Women of Croydon Harbour knew what was expected of them at all times, and they did it, and the men were expected to do things too, and they did these, and there was no time left.
Jacinta closed her eyes long enough for tiredness to drain out of them. Not all the tiredness, but some of it. A spoonful of tiredness out of each eye. If only a person could stay like this as long as she needed; if only the sun could stay, and the wind not come up, and obligations not line the road.
All Thomasina wanted to do now was go home. Not to talk to well-wishers. Not to intercept casserole dishes full of cabbage rolls and moose sausage and Rice-A-Roni with ground caribou meat. Who would eat it? What Thomasina would eat, if she ate anything, was milk lunch biscuits and tea. The wind changed and the moment of peace in the sun was gone; the two women were chilled. Thomasina walked towards her house and Jacinta walked with her. They did not talk but went together into the kitchen, a plain kitchen, clean, with nothing but a tea canister on the counter. Thomasina boiled the kettle and put out biscuits and she and Jacinta sat there and were silent until Thomasina said, “What are you going to do about that baby?”
“Treadway wants him to live as a boy.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know how to argue with him. He’d say what I’m thinking makes no sense.”
“No sense?” In the years of her marriage to Graham Montague, that was a thing of which Graham had never accused Thomasina. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking maybe if we just waited everything would change.”
“It might.”
“But everything keeps shifting in my imagination. Other things. Completely different things. The baby’s ears. Or his face. I think, what if those or other things changed? I don’t want anything to change. I don’t want to do anything to the baby. I don’t want to make any mistakes.”
“You want to do everything right the first time? Is that what makes sense to Treadway?”
“I don’t know.”
“If sense is a partridge in the willows, you have to follow it. You don’t know where it’s leading. Do you call that baby a she?”
“No.”
“Have you tried?”
“Not out loud.”
“She might want to hear it. She might want to hear you call her ‘My little daughter.’”
“Thomasina.” Jacinta laid down her mug with the queen of diamonds on it. “I’m sorry you lost Annabel.”
Thomasina drank her tea. She smoothed the plastic tablecloth, which had permanent creases. She said, “You want to be careful what you let Treadway have done to that baby.”
There was a mirror on the wall and Jacinta could see both their faces in it. She realized that of the two, her own had no strength left, while Thomasina’s held reserves. She had walked here thinking she would comfort the other woman, but Thomasina did not need comforting.
“If a stranger came here now,” Jacinta said, “they would guess I was the one who had lost a man and a daughter.”
“You won’t lose Treadway unless you want to lose him. Treadway is a husband for life.”
“I know.”
“But it looks to me like I’m not the only one who has lost a daughter.”
“I’ve always felt,” Jacinta said, “that daughter is a beautiful word.”
The first thing Thomasina did when the funeral was over was rid the house of food she disliked. Venison sausages, large roasts of moose, seabirds Graham had caught in his net. These things filled a third of her freezer and were what Graham had wanted for his suppers, and she had not minded cooking them for him. Half the time he had cooked for himself. Theirs had not been a marriage of sharply defined roles. Men of the cove generally were kings outside their houses — kings of the grounds and sheds and fences — and the women were queens of inner rooms and painted sills and pelmets and carpet cleaners. Thomasina and Graham had come and gone as they pleased, each one knowing how to use a knife for cleaning fish or cutting bread, how to sweep a floor, how to mend a gate or clean the chimney. Thomasina had a grain of sense, men of the cove said, and she walked about in brown cardigans with her hair tidy but not styled. She did not own a pair of shoes in which she could not walk ten miles over rough ground.