The Quintland Sisters(6)
“I’m sure you’re tired,” she said, turning to give me her full attention, “but can you stay a bit longer?”
Marie-Jeanne caught a lift home with Dr. Dafoe after his last visit of the day and promised she’d stop in on my parents and let them know my whereabouts. Ivy and I took turns dozing fitfully while the other watched the babies and checked in on Mme. Dionne. M. Dionne had come inside after dusk, the day’s work done, but seemed to still be buzzing in bursts of nervous energy. Sometimes he stood absolutely still, only to dart off in a blur for another corner of the little house like a lizard, or a ghost. We wouldn’t see him for a while, then he’d slip down the stairs and we’d find him at Mme. Dionne’s bedside muttering softly to her in French while both Ivy and I were with the babies in the kitchen. The rest of his brood, it seems, have been dispatched to stay with aunts and uncles elsewhere in the hamlet.
At one point, long after night had fallen, he asked permission to see the babies, which struck me as strange, because they were his children, after all. I watched his face as he stood over them—he looks older than his years, a workingman’s face, heavy-lidded, weathered by seasons of hard labor out-of-doors. Even his earlobes seemed to be sagging away from his skull. As he gazed at his daughters, his twitching features didn’t so much soften as grow still. I could tell, these tiny creatures were provoking in him something closer to amazement than affection. And it’s true, they are so tiny and strange. The largest, according to a set of scales Ivy had brought, now weighed just 3 pounds, while the smallest weighed just 1.8.
“Will they live?” he asked Ivy. It was impossible to read his expression. She looked at him steadily and said in a firm voice that it was too soon to say.
Ivy is fast asleep now with her head cradled in her arms on the kitchen table, her knot of hair loose on her white throat. Mme. Dionne is snoring, deep in sleep at last. And so, too, are the babies—asleep and alive. I will put away my pen now, but I will let Ivy rest and keep watch a little longer on my own.
May 29, 1934
NEITHER IVY NOR I managed more than a few hours’ sleep, straining to listen to the faint cries from the babies over the thrumming of toads in the fields and the surprised warbles of whip-poor-wills hunting in the high grass. M. Dionne swept silently downstairs at dawn, nodded at us through the doorway, then turned to sit with the mountain of rumpled sheets and nightgown that was Mme. Dionne. After a few minutes, he stood from his wife’s bed and clumped into the kitchen, his boots leaving a trail of dried mud on the pine-plank floor.
“I’m going to bring Father Routhier again,” he said in French. Ivy was stooped over the pump at the sink, filling the kettle, and I looked up to see M. Dionne watching her. His eyes drifted wearily upward as she straightened to standing. He’s a funny-looking man: compact and wiry with protruding eyes and large, irregular ears that look to have been an afterthought, inexpertly attached to his head. “The babies will be christened today, just in case,” he said, and he headed out to his truck.
“He didn’t even stop to look at them,” I whispered. Ivy made a face and put the kettle on the stove.
If anything, the babies seemed even smaller that morning. Dr. Dafoe arrived bearing blankets, clothes, and diapers that were far too large and once again shook his round head at the sight of the tiny things.
“I’ve organized for breast milk to be shipped from Chicago and Toronto on the evening train. In the meantime we will make do with a mix of boiled water, cow’s milk, and corn syrup.”
Ivy and Dr. Dafoe mixed these ingredients according to a formula the doctor had devised. The air in the kitchen was thick and warm from the fire we’d been steadily feeding with wood through the night. By midmorning, you could already feel that the day had plenty more heat in store, but we couldn’t open the windows and door for any length of time without inviting in the flies, mosquitoes, dust, and curious faces of neighbors and children.
Once the milk had cooled, Ivy lifted the babies out of their nest one by one, holding each in the crook of her arm while Dr. Dafoe filled the dropper from the pot on the stove. Tired to the point of collapse, I took out my scribble book and tried to capture Ivy giving this mixture to one of the little ones, but either because I was too weary or because the proportions, in life, were so out of scale with normal, my drawing was terrible. We laughed over it afterward, Ivy and I: she brandishing a dropper the size of a sword, the tin of syrup as big as a grain silo, the babies, by contrast, small blossoms on a bend in a branch.
Midmorning, all the babies were asleep again and we were sweltering with them, the heat making me dozy. To keep ourselves from drifting off, Ivy and I told each other about ourselves. She is of French stock, her family having lived in the area for generations, and the youngest of five, with two brothers and two sisters. Her mother has passed on now, and Ivy had been living in the hospital dormitory at St. Joe’s for the past three years while she completed her nursing degree in North Bay. Her father, who works at the only mill left in town, moved to Callander after her mother died. All the other millworkers, like almost everyone else in these parts, are on government relief, particularly after the Payette Mill burned down in ’32. The J. B. Smith Mill was supposed to reopen next month, but it, too, went up in a blaze just last week, the flames leaping so high we could see them from our front lawn.
“I’m very lucky to have been given this assignment directly out of school,” Ivy said earnestly. She says she plans to work as long as she can and is in no rush to get married. “Married couples can’t qualify for relief, if they need it,” she said. I didn’t know that.