Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani

boy in Ally’s grade who’d earned his nickname by bringing soggy tomato sandwiches to school for lunch. Even the paper bag that held them had wet patches. At recess, Sog told Ally he loved her, and on the following Sunday I read, cryptically, “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down.” We laughed as if we were possessed. Neither of us was interested in love. Not then.
    “Lazarus did stinketh,” Ally read aloud.
    We marvelled, not only at the miracle, but at the word stinketh , which we incorporated into our private lexicon. When we carried garbage out to the refuse pit at the back of the property, Ally held her nose and shouted, “This is disgusting! The whole place doth stinketh!” When a squirrel got into the root cellar and died, we were told to carry its rotting body outside on a shovel. “Truly,” we complained, “this bringeth no amusement.”
    At night we lay on our backs in our double bed and invented sentences for thither and nay and doeth and smite and belongeth. “Shew us the door,” we mock-read one Sunday. “We wisheth to play, and desireth fresh air.”
    A firm response came from the next room. “It behooveth thee to read until thy time is up. Then shall thee be shewn the door.”
    But Lazarus did stinketh—or so the Bible said.
    What did Lazarus learn the second time around? That’s what I wanted to know.
    Grand Dan’s Bible readings were from Ecclesiastes, which she freely quoted and which I learned, by listening. “You’re the one with the memory,” she told me, as I followed her around and recited: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
    Ally and I read other books besides the Bible, any books we could find. I was making slow progress through Grandfather’s fifteen volumes of Dickens, my favourite being Great Expectations. Another of my favourites was The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book , which Ally—not I—had received for her birthday from Aunt and Uncle Fred. I resented this because I was the one who’d been born the same day as the Princess of York. But no one else recognized the slight. A book was to be shared no matter whose it was. This book came into the house not long before the abdication, after which Lilibet found herself in direct line for the throne.
    Every adult we knew had something to say about the abdication of King Edward VIII, one of the great-grandsons of Queen Victoria. It was a tragedy. It was treason. It was an honourable act because he had the backbone to stand up and claim his lady love. He didn’t want to be King anyway. He didn’t have it in him.
    The town, busy preparing for Christmas, was quick to pledge allegiance to His Majesty, George VI, the new king. “We shall rally round and give him our support,” the mayor declared.
    In our one-room school, Miss Grinfeld stood at the front of the classroom beneath a sagging bell of green crêpe paper, which the tallest of the grade eight boys had strung from the ceiling the week before. She bowed her head and wept. At recess, I heard her mutter, “Oh Eddie, Oh Eddie.” She had had a glimpse of him when he was still the Prince of Wales, during his two-month tour across Canada after the First Great War. In January, when we were back at school again after Christmas holidays, she read the “Message of Abdication” aloud, in its entirety, and wept again.
    The women of the town were bereft. They came into the store and spread even the tiniest bit of news, which our father sometimes brought home. The customers had believed in the Prince. They’d loved him. But he had chosen Mrs. Simpson of Baltimore with her cool, cameo profile. He sailed from Portsmouth on board a destroyer and left the mother country behind. He landed at Boulogne and entrained for Vienna and went on to the castle of Baron de Rothschild in Austria. Later, after Mrs. Simpson’s divorce, they married. But she was no princess, said the women of the town. She wore a long narrow dress with a plain