The Age of Water Lilies by Theresa Kishkan Page B

never been kissed. Oh, a peck on the cheek by her father or nurse, the Frenchman who brought special water lilies to her father and who kissed her hand, but never by a man whose mouth she had just drawn, whose arms had made her feel light-headed.
    His mouth was luscious, like ripe strawberries. Taking his lips from hers, he whispered in her ear, “Do you mind, Flora? I’ve wanted to kiss you since I first saw you walking across your brother’s orchard months ago, looking like a girl out of a painting.”
    â€œDoes it seem that I mind?” And they were kissing again.
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    It was a Saturday morning. Some of the orchardists were taking a day off, but the Chinese labourers were out in the orchards, hoeing the rows of potatoes between the small trees and making sure that bears had not damaged boughs, some of them propped with forked sticks. One orchardist had among his workers a couple, both Chinese, Song Lee and his young wife, May. The growing community had several businesses run by Chinese, one of them a laundry that was thriving. Song Lee came to Walhachin on his own from somewhere in the Fraser Valley. When his employer discovered he was married and that, unlike the other Chinese labourers, his wife lived not in China but with her parents in Vancouver, he gave Song permission to bring her to live in a tiny shack built of packing cases. She grew vegetables that she’d sell from a basket in front of her shack, a few chickens clucking nervously around her feet. When May first arrived, Flora bought early peas from her, a few lettuces, and some spring onions, and admired rows of tiny cabbage seedlings and the delicate ferny tops of carrots. May was a tiny woman with glossy black hair and a beautiful smile showing even white teeth. It was rumoured she was expecting a baby, though her slight frame revealed nothing. Or perhaps, thought Flora, the faintest swelling under her cotton jacket. It was so picturesque—the Chinese woman in her dark blue jacket surrounded by chickens, her baskets of vegetables looking exactly like a still life—that Flora went home for her Brownie camera and returned to take a photograph.
    â€œMay I take your picture?” she had asked, and after May shyly nodded, she snapped the pretty scene.
    On that Saturday morning, when a young boy came running up from the orchards, shouting for help, Flora dropped her needlework and quickly intercepted him on the road.
    â€œIt’s the Chinese lady, miss. She’s been bitten by a snake! I’m going to Flowerdews to see if the doctor is at lunch there.”
    Flora let him continue on and she called Mary from the kitchen.
    â€œWhat can we do, Mary? Do you have any experience with snakebite?”
    â€œPut the kettle on the hot part of the stove, Missus,” she said and ran down to the path by the river. She snapped some sticks from a young maple growing there and rushed back.
    â€œThis is good but depends on how bad the bite.” She was putting the sticks into an iron pot and covering them with hot water from the kettle. “I’ll let it steep for a few minutes and then we can go.”
    Standing on the veranda, Flora could see several people on their way down the orchards. Was the doctor among them? She couldn’t tell. He was a man who liked his drink, and she hoped he hadn’t begun on the many glasses of port he liked as an accompaniment to lunch. He wasn’t a young man either and was semi-retired; most people chose to go to Ashcroft or even Kamloops for medical care.
    Mary soon appeared with a basket on her arm. She and Flora walked as quickly as they could to where a small crowd was gathered around the moaning form of May Lee on the newly hoed earth of a potato bed. Someone had cut the lower part of May’s skirt and had used some of the cloth as a makeshift tourniquet on her upper calf.
    â€œIt was a rattlesnake,” a man whispered to Flora.