Once inside, I lit a second lantern and placed the two at opposite ends of the worktable, and this made for adequate light. I started in on the toboggan long promised to a Mr. and Mrs. Kormiker, originally from Iceland but now living in Copenhagen. Mr. Kormiker was in banking. On a visit to Halifax they'd seen my uncle's brochure, probably in one of the hotels. It was very professionally done, that brochure, not inexpensively produced, either. Steven Parish had provided drawings of sleds and toboggans, as he had done for his own brochure of iron works — fireplace tongs, candelabra, stovepipes and such — that he forged on commission.
Now, Marlais, you might ask, why start up again with this particular toboggan?
Because while going through all the correspondence, I'd read the letters that Mrs. Kormiker had sent to Donald and Constance. Eleven letters in all, each cordial and filling no more than three-quarters of a single page of personal stationery. Her written English was excellent. In one letter she wrote, "Our granddaughter is now two years of age. Is it possible to have a toboggan made by your hand delivered for her sixth birthday?" This letter was dated April 11, 1941—the war had allowed it to cross the Atlantic. What most struck me was the faith that a simple transaction in life, with patience — because think how far in advance they were planning — could eventually take place between people an ocean apart. A bargain had been struck, and I'd inherited an obligation. I felt desperate to do some small dignified thing. What's more, I figured that if the granddaughter was two in 1941, that meant if I worked hard on the toboggan, I might not be all that late.
Mr. and Mrs. Kormiker wanted a 12-by-3-foot three-board called a dog toboggan, with an upright backboard. I had to hire Steven Parish to forge the triangular hitch with handle. I'd been concerned he wouldn't want to do the work for me. But as it turned out, he was noticeably only a little less friendly than he'd always been, which wasn't too friendly at all. He looked at my rough sketch of the toboggan and said, "Sure, I'll make the hitch. But I'll make it because Donald said you were a proper nephew to him, for the most part. But you have to pay me before I start."
Parish made the hitch with handle in two days. When I went to pick it up, he said, "Bring me any work you need done, Wyatt, and I'll do it. By the way, I've been up to Dorchester five or six times. Bleak place, eh? I made Donald a candle holder for Christmas last year. I never thought to ask if they allow him candles. Anyway, Donald's getting by."
Though the Kormikers' toboggan could be pulled by hand, it was really designed to be tied to a haul rope or reins. And they also wanted an attachable cargo box, so their granddaughter could fit snugly inside. There'd be plenty of room for quilts or blankets or overcoats in there, too, I learned from one of Mrs. Kormiker's letters: she and Mr. Kormiker had made their choice on the basis of sketches of five different types of toboggans my uncle had sent them.
And that's what I spent three full days and nights doing. Little sleep, no radio. My uncle had already fashioned the bow to three feet of curl. What was left for me to do was sand and attach the crosspieces, hinge the backboard behind the next-to-last crosspiece, and build the slush board my uncle had promised as an "extra." In addition, I had to build the cargo box from scratch, including gunwales, eyebolts and hinges. I had to fix the runners. Finally, I had to shellac the entire thing, curl to stern.
On my third morning of work, I completed the toboggan at about six A.M., but I hadn't been able to feel the tips of my fingers as I applied the shellac, because they were raw and numb from hours of sanding. My uncle had jars of salve for immediate relief after such long bouts. The salve was from Norway. I worked some into each of my fingertips but didn't feel that, either.
The toboggan weighed about thirty pounds. I set it across two sawhorses to allow the architecture to settle and plugged in an electric fan to help dry the shellac. It looked just fine. I recalled how when we finished a sled or toboggan, or the occasional horse-drawn sleigh, Donald would pour us each a shot of whiskey and we'd clink glasses and he'd say, "One down, and if we're blessed, ten thousand to go." I cleaned the tools, hung them in place, tidied up the shed and went in to wash up at the kitchen sink. Then I drove into town.
But instead of stopping, I drove past the bakery and on to Parrsboro and, as I thought I might, saw Tilda out on the end of the dock. If anything, it was raining harder than during the night, and it had rained all night. Now rain blew fiercely in from the Minas Basin. Half a dozen trawlers pulled at their tie ropes and knocked against the pylons. It was quite the storm, and yet there was Tilda, dressed in a rain slicker, dungarees, galoshes and a fisherman's hat tied under her chin, right out in it. To me the remarkable thing was that three men — I recognized Todd Branch and his neighbors Ralph and Alvin Drakemore, all from Upper Economy — just went about their business. They weren't going to head out in this weather and were battening things down on the deck of their trawler, shouting words I couldn't make out. They completely ignored Tilda, or so it seemed at first. But then Todd Branch went below, emerging with, of all things, a steaming cup of molasses tea, or coffee or cocoa or whatnot, and brought it to Tilda, and cupped Tilda's hands in his as she lifted the drink to her lips, as if he was helping a person to recover her strength after a deathly illness. The other two men didn't even look up. Tilda took another sip, nodded to Todd Branch and turned away from him. She went back to tasting the rain in her cup and talking to Hans Mohring. Todd stepped onto the deck of his boat. It seemed to me he carried out all of this like it was matter-of-fact, no more than a recently added chore. How many mornings had he brought a hot drink to Tilda?
The moment I stepped into the bakery, Cornelia set a cup of coffee and a cranberry scone in front of me, without my having asked for either. She sat down opposite me at the table closest to the window. "Look at that, will you?" she said. "Wind blew mud all the way in and my perfectly clean window's not perfectly clean anymore." She took a bite of toast.
"I saw Tilda at the Parrsboro Wharf just now," I said.
"You know, I thought that was your car going by."
"There she was. Just like you said."
"I saw her out there three mornings ago, and guess what?" Cornelia said. "Some schoolboys were taking potshots at whichever birds — cormorants mostly. And all at once, Tilda reached over and grabbed that rifle and took a few potshots of her own. Of course she missed everything except the water, but the sight made me laugh so hard. I was on my way back from picking up cranberry preserves from Mrs. Gerard's in Parrsboro when I saw that."
"I think she might've seen me," I said. "I hope she didn't think I was spying on her or something."
"You just gave in to curiosity, Wyatt. That's pretty human of you, and besides, Constance Hillyer confided in me."
"Confided in you what?"
"Confided in me about your feelings for Tilda," Cornelia said. "Look, Tilda's been a widow for merely a couple years. And I suppose life's as bewildering to her as it would be for any war widow, of which there's recent thousands, eh? Do you know, she spends half the night in the library, due to Mrs. Oleander's tolerance and hospitality. That's her narrowed horizons. House, wharf, library. Know what else? I think Tilda forgot how to sleep. I hear her playing the gramophone upstairs."