Dollybird by Anne Lazurko

froze. Kindle the stove to a roar, thaw the water and our bones, a little porridge and off for the day. When the snow blew hard we might as well have been a hundred miles from anywhere. On those days I could only keep the stove lit and hope the storm let up before the water run out.
    Looking out now, I could see a huge moon, the cold hanging in the air, beautiful like I imagined diamonds might look.
    â€œHoly Mother of Christ.” The moonshine whirled in my head. I leaned against the wall for support. “Godforsaken hellhole.”
    â€œIt doesn’t sound like you left anything better behind.” Silas was always telling me it wasn’t so bad a winter. He’d seen worse. He took a swig from the jar. Seemed immune to the stuff.
    â€œThings were better there in some ways.” A dog or a coyote loped across the moonlit snow a hundred yards from the window, then disappeared. “Family, for one. The Flaherty clan watched out for one another. Everybody knew each other, the whole works transplanted into Cape Breton, following the first ones who came after the famine. They always talked about it.”
    â€œSo you were born here?”
    â€œYeah, but you’d not have known it. Didn’t speak a word of English until they made us go to their schools. I was maybe seven or eight.” Children were cruel back then too, taunting; the teachers almost as bad. “We spoke the Gaelic. But you know it’s funny. Each area had its own. It was so bad me and my wi... Well – people could live fifty miles apart and not understand each other.”
    â€œShe wasn’t from your town then.”
    He was a nosy bugger. “There was always the fiddle. Who needed to talk?” I smiled remembering. We knew how to have fun. ‘Come to the ceilidh,’ they’d say and every house would show off the talents of them that lived there. “My mother loved the ceilidh.”
    It was the only time I saw her laugh and stand up a little straighter. She’d stooped over with years of caring for all of us and worrying after my Da. But at a party she’d draw up tall and sing or play the fiddle a bit. Mostly she danced, stepping quicker as the night wore on, looking younger, even pretty. I’d be embarrassed and proud at the same time, watching from the floor with all the other kids, wondering if this woman was another person and my real mother was back at home bent over the stoves, pushing damp hair out of tired eyes.
    â€œShe didn’t drink,” I said to Silas, and glared at the jar in his hand. With a head full of my mother, the moonshine was wrong. She left drinking to the men, who only came inside when the jug was empty and sat watching with stupid grins, or passed out in the corner, or worse, joined in with their laughing too loud and cursing in front of the kids. My Da was one of them, and all the warm feeling I got from watching Mother would turn bad.
    â€œBut my Da made up for it. Figured himself a regular troubadour, spouting the words of Robbie Burns as though the bard was one of his own. When he was drunk he forgot how much he hated the Scots.”
    Silas’s moonshine had fogged me over so I could barely see, forgot I was talking to him. But the memories were clear enough.
    â€œMy father is a bastard.”
    â€œOh?”
    â€œShe’d tell him, ‘Please Aiden. Let’s just be going home now. It’s late for the little ones.’ Saving him his dignity. Not like Mrs. Hennesey, pulling her husband out by the ear, cursing him with every pinch, everyone laughing behind. Or Mrs. Dunhanley chasing hers out with her purse.” I laughed and Silas looked amused. I wondered if I had been as pathetic on those nights as her three boys, sullen and pimpled, trailing behind.
    â€œI don’t know why she cared about his good name,” I said, Silas just watching. “He’d stumble around, puking in the bushes, moaning about his sorry ass, how