Read Online Extensions by Myrna Dey - Free Book Online

explain how much she longs for Cassie’s company. Oh, to be back in Wales or have her here with them on Vancouver Island. She misses Margaret and Gilbert too, but they both have families, and she knows Catherine is the one who will snatch her letter from the postman and read it to the others. Margaret will continue what she is doing even while Cassie reads — pickling, sewing, scouring floors, or scolding her two young children Gwynyth and Evan. She is like Tommy, always busy, not the kind to sit down and talk the way Catherine does. Jane could tell Cassie what she cannot tell Mama because she is too occupied with her sickness; or Tommy because he is always too tired from the mine or from fixing the house and saves his few words for friends at the Whistle Stop; or ten-year-old Gomer, who is too young to talk to about anything except to mind his manners.
    Families belong together, Jane is about to write, as she listens to the crackling swoosh of kindling burning down. She waits for the fire to settle into a gentle whisper before rising to touch the kettle to make sure she filled it the night before. Back at the letter, Mama’s voice enters her head and she hesitates. Mama gets impatient whenever she complains of being so far from the others. “You stir up discontent with that kind of talk. There are so many worse off than we are.” She uses the Monmouths back in Wales as an example. Mr. Monmouth lost both legs in a mine accident, and Mrs. Monmouth has to look after him as well as two children without normal brains who can’t walk or talk and have to be fed. Some sickness in the family that gets passed on. And all without money. That is true bad luck, Mama says.
    Jane tries to remember the Monmouths whenever she thinks about her own father and Margaret’s husband being killed in the same mine explosion, forcing her two older brothers, each in a different country, to look after the rest of the family.
    It happened so fast. Mama, Jane, and Gomer were suddenly on a ship to Canada last year to set up housekeeping for Tommy on Vancouver Island so he could provide for them. And back in Wales, Gilbert and his family shared his meagre wages with Catherine and Margaret and her two children. At least Margaret was able to keep her own little mine cottage where there was room for Catherine. Margaret’s fine sewing brings in a little more now, and Cassie started teaching children in first standard, so that will help. Who would have counted on Mama taking ill with a lung ailment on the boat and hardly having a day of strength since? They have to be thankful both voyages to British Columbia, their own and Tommy’s five years earlier, had taken place after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the country. Before 1885, Tommy told them, men would spend six months on a ship going around the tip of South America to get from Britain to the west coast. How would Mama have managed more than the two and a half weeks their journey took? Hard as the wooden benches in the train cars were, she felt less sick from the motion on rails than on waves.
    â€œâ€™Tis the shock of all that’s happened causing Mama’s illness,” Cassie wrote, but Jane is still trying to figure it out.
    She tries so hard not to complain that tears squeeze out of her eyes from the effort. What can she write? She tells Cassie that today she will go to Cruikshanks to do laundry. But will she say that Stella will probably ask her to make two or three pies; that she will leave Jane to mind her new baby when she goes to the fire boss’ house for tea; and that she will snatch the baby from her when she comes back, because she thinks Jane is getting too close to him? And she cannot tell that Stella has become so high and mighty she even puts her own underwear in for Jane to wash. For which of them is that a greater disgrace? She will write that Stella is only two years older than she is and that they were in school