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and there it has stayed ever since.
    She had drawn strength from her eldest daughter that day. And after that, responsibility fell to Agnes, more responsibility than should ever have been pressed on a young girl. Mamo knew this, but had little choice when she needed help with the younger three. There was another journey to face over land, after they left the ship, and few prospects at the end of it—except for a cousin Mamo had in Mystic. Any hope they were able to muster had been tied up in the existence of that one cousin.
    But Agnes had missed her father. Mamo could scarcely grieve, herself, because she was always aware of the wretched, unuttered sorrow of her eldest daughter. Agnes had begged a scrap of black material from a widow on the ship and she stretched and flattened it and tied it around her neck, a ragged band that she refused to remove. Her eyes dulled; her face became set in some fixed memory or promise of her own. If she wept, she wept away from Mamo’s view. And then, one year later to the day, she untied the black rag from her neck and burned it, and ended the mourning for herfather. But she was no longer given to laughter. Never the way she had been, as a child.
    It was Mamo’s ability to tailor a man’s suit that had kept the family alive. Eventually, she made the decision to move to Ontario, to the rapidly growing one-company town on the Bay of Quinte. Later, when Agnes undertook to marry Dermot O’Neill in Deseronto, Mamo watched her daughter take on even more responsibility. First, with the birth of Bernard and his poor lung; the loss of a baby girl in childbirth after that; and finally, with the births of the other three. It was during the time between Grania’s and Patrick’s births that Dermot purchased the house and hotel. Agnes has never had a chance to pause. If the opportunity were given to her, she would probably not be able to stop. Mamo cannot even imagine Agnes looking around and saying, “Now, I will have a short rest.”
    Mamo knows that Agnes has not forgiven herself for Grania’s deafness, that she will always blame herself for the high fever. For taking five-year-old Grania, the night she was so ill, through the open passageway in winter so that she could keep her close, keep her on a cot in the hotel kitchen and watch over her while she worked. But the scarlet fever had been relentless. Grania’s temperature had risen higher and higher. Dr. Clark was called and gave instructions to sponge the child, to rotate wet cloths from groin to underarms to abdomen to forehead to chest. Wringing the cool cloths from the basin of water, lifting one and laying another, Agnes’ hands moved round the child’s body as if it were a clock face, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. But the fever did not come down.
    Agnes has been hard on herself ever since, but what she does not recognize is that she is also hard on the child.
    These are the thoughts that Mamo sifts and sorts through her mind as she sits and dozes by Grania’s bed. She has not changed from her long grey skirt, the knitted vest fastened over her high-necked blouse. Tied over both is a grey-blue apron with a wide band that buttons at the back of the waist. Mamo never wears yellow.Yellow is the colour of marigolds, the flower of death. She holds Grania’s hand and stays all night beside the child’s bed. She dreams of Agnes and the black rag around her neck. She is surprised when Agnes, the child she once was, stands beside her chair and laughs her lighthearted laugh. Mamo reaches out but she is not quick enough, and when she wakes, it is Grania’s hand she is holding.
    Now, another voice enters her dreamlike memory. It is a voice she overheard a few days ago, after she took Grania shopping and left Meagher’s store hand in hand with the child. The door made a clean slap behind them and a woman’s voice trailed through the screen and out into the summer air. “Did you see the way she looked at that child?”