After River by Donna Milner

only meant it in the kindest of ways.’
    â€˜There is nothing kind about insinuating,’ my mother started, enunciating each word in a voice so brittle, so unlike her, that I grabbed her hand. She stopped and looked down at me, clamped her mouth shut, and squeezed my hand. She then nodded to her friends, spun around and marched away straight-backed with me in tow.
    For the next few weeks my mother did the Monday ironing by herself. ‘Where’s the steam team?’ my father asked at lunch on the first Monday Ma Cooper and Widow Beckett were absent.
    â€˜I told them not to come,’ Mom said. ‘They needed a break.’
    A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, they showed up at our door just as all my parents’ friends and neighbours did each year. They stood on the enclosed porch stamping snow from their boots and looking a little sheepish. As my mother ushered them in, hugged them, and wished them Merry Christmas, I swear that I saw stern old Ma Cooper blink back tears. Widow Beckett’s voice caught as she said, ‘We’re so sorry, Nettie.’
    Mom shushed her and said, ‘That’s forgotten.’ And she meant it. ‘Forgive and forget,’ that was Mom’s credo in life.
    â€˜It’s okay if you bruise easy,’ she often told me. ‘As long as you heal quick.’

Chapter Nine
    T HINGS WENT BACK to normal after that. Monday’s ironing and gossip days continued and the incident was never spoken about again. But every time I ran into Ma Cooper, she found some reason to throw a compliment at me, while Widow Beckett nodded agreement. Most of her compliments revolved around the other thing I heard her say about me that night, which was that I was brilliant. Brilliant. That was a word I knew. It felt so good to be called brilliant that I chose to ignore the sympathy I had heard in their voices at the Christmas concert.
    The only other person who ever called me brilliant back then was Boyer. From the time I could hold a book my oldest brother was my mentor. But I was not brilliant. I had a good memory. That’s all. I could memorize anything: facts, numbers, names, words, and nursery rhymes. ‘It’s like taking a snapshot, Nat,’ Boyer taught me. ‘And then you keep going back to it, checking the picture often, until as soon as you see the first word or two, the others will follow like a series of mental dominoes.’
    Still, it was not brilliance. It was nothing more than the mental gymnastics I learned from him.
    It was Boyer who was brilliant; Boyer who had the analytical mind that craved knowledge. And it was Boyer who saw it as hismission to pass along that love of learning. Mom told me once that after Boyer’s first day of school he raced into the house and announced he was going to be a teacher when he grew up.
    â€˜A teacher?’ Dad laughed. ‘You don’t need to be a teacher. We’re farmers.’
    â€˜Boyer’s face fell,’ Mom said, ‘“Can’t I be both?” he asked. When your father didn’t answer I told him ‘“of course.”’
    So Boyer began to bring his books home from school every night to practice teaching on Morgan and Carl on the wooden apple crates he hauled up to their shared bedroom.
    Not long after, when I was old enough to join Boyer’s makeshift classroom, Morgan and Carl started school and lost interest. I never did.
    Do all little girls think they will marry their older brothers when they grow up? I did. Up until I was six years old I assumed it was the natural order of things, that one day Boyer and I would be just like Mom and Dad. It was not until a week before I started school that Morgan and Carl put an abrupt end to that childish notion.
    Boyer was an altar boy for a number of years. When he was thirteen he began spending time in discussions with our parish priest, Father Mackenzie. They met each week, either at St Anthony’s or at our