by Ann Swinfen
Wilma was one of those absent today, so Tirza could sprawl across their shared tip-up bench and spread out her elbows on the desk when she was writing. She hoped the weather would keep Wilma snow-bound for days. It was much more comfortable to have a desk to herself. Miss Bennett was enumerating the exports of South American countries in that bright voice which was supposed to make you interested. Tirza’s eyes strayed to the window. Unlike most nineteenth-century schools, Flamboro’s had not been designed with the windows too high for idle pupils to gaze through, so Tirza could see the houses opposite the school and to the side of them a corner of the sea. The sun was out today and the wind had dropped again. Everything glistened under yesterday’s fresh coat of snow. During the night, frost had crystallised the soft surface, and the sun flashed from every fragment, so bright it was almost painful to look at.
The day dragged on. Tirza had found long ago that she could do her school work while attending with only half her mind. The answers seemed to come out of her mouth without any effort on her part, and they were right often enough for her to avoid exerting herself. During the algebra lesson she copied down the equations from the board and finished solving them while the pens around her were still squeaking laboriously. She could see Simon crossing out and starting again. When they had shared a desk they had sometimes helped each other, but, she thought with satisfaction, Wayne would not be much help with Simon’s algebra. She spent the rest of the lesson drawing Stormy Petrel from different angles on the cover of her workbook.
At last Johnny Flett, as bell monitor for this week, was sent out to ring the bell for the end of school. Simon waited for Tirza at the gate, but she turned away from the harbour.
‘Aren’t you going home?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I’m going to see Girna this afternoon. Do you want to come?’
Simon dragged his boots through the snow, looking shamefaced.
‘Nope. I don’t think so. Got to get home to help with the milking.’
She had known he would say that, but had given him the chance to come.
‘OK.’ She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’
She brushed the snow off the top of a boulder beside the school gate and sat down to strap on her snowshoes. Boots were adequate for walking around Flamboro or along the coast path to the farm, but she would need snowshoes to negotiate the deep drifts which built up in the hollows and corners of the forest.
To reach the woods she set out over an unmarked blanket of white beyond the schoolhouse which in summertime was a stretch of rough ground, marshy at the lower end where it dipped down towards the sea and thin and rocky at the top where it curved round behind the burying ground on the knoll up behind the church. In the late summer there were cranberries on the lower ground and blueberries higher up. From earliest childhood Tirza had known which were the best bushes. Now, however, not even the tops of the bushes showed above the snow, and she made the crossing to the woods across a blank white mound, swinging her feet wide in their snowshoes and leaving a double track like some monster bird.
It was quiet in the woods. The snow-laden trees muffled the sound of the breakers rolling in, so that they seemed far distant. If there were any birds or creatures about, they were hidden away taking shelter from the bitter cold. Tirza’s breath hung about her face like a frozen veil in the still air.
The trees here were wider spaced than in the woods round Gooseneck Lake. The people of Flamboro gathered fallen branches for firewood, which kept the ground between the trees clear. A network of small paths criss-crossed the forest. Tirza could see the tracks of deer and foxes and racoons, and a regular stitchery of bird-tracks. After climbing for a way, she turned and headed down a steep slope where glimpses of the sea showed beyond the trees.
Christina O’Neill, heaving up a bucket of water from her well, caught sight of Tirza’s red knitted muffler above her in the forest. She rested the bucket on the ground and waited for her daughter’s daughter to swing down the last few yards of the snow-covered path to her house. The water in the bucket swayed and slowed, islands of ice tinkling against the galvanised metal. The surface of the well water had been frozen, even deep below the ground where it lay, but the ice was thin enough to be broken by the weight of the bucket dropping on to it. Hard ice only formed in the well during the worst winters. Christina could remember just three years when she had been obliged to melt snow.
The cabin in the woods was an oddity – not quite an Abenaki lodge, not quite a European house. Christina had built it herself thirteen years ago when her daughter Louisa had married Nathan Libby and set up house with him on the harbour front in Flamboro. Until then she had lived in a small rented house at the back of the town, out of sight of the sea, where she had moved after the death of her husband when her daughter was seven. Tom O’Neill had been the town schoolteacher – the only teacher in those days, although Christina had sometimes assisted him – and while he lived the O’Neills had occupied the teacher’s half of the schoolhouse. After she was widowed, Christina rented the cramped, dark house, which was all that she could afford. Tom had died when he was barely past thirty, and other women, whose husbands had been lost along with their boats and all their gear, often pointed out to Christina that she was fortunate to receive any pension at all. But she had come to hate the mean rooms, the lack of air and light.
This forest north of Flamboro, however, belonged to Christina. Her father, Bruce Macpherson, a fur trader from Scotland who had worked the northern woods since he was fifteen, had bought it honestly from the Nation back in 1880 when he married her Abenaki mother, and it had passed to Christina as their only child. When Tom died, the selectmen of Flamboro had made Christina a fair offer for the forest, thinking the lumber would make the town a tidy profit and the cleared land would provide building space if the town needed to expand. The selling price for the forest would be enough for Christina to invest for a decent income, they said, instead of the few dollars she had to scrape by on.
‘No,’ said Christina, politely but immovably. ‘The forest is mine only in trust. It is the only heritage left of the Nation now that they have all been driven out of these parts. I may be only half-blood, but I do not intend to betray the trust. The forest will remain as it is. Louisa and I will manage on Tom’s pension.’
Once her daughter was married and settled, Christina’s thoughts had turned again to the forest. She began to build the house on the site of one of the old Abenaki summer settlements which had existed for centuries before the first English colonies in the area. In her childhood she had visited her mother’s people from time to time in the reservation further north, and the memory of their dwellings had stayed clear in her mind. But she had given her house a sturdy wooden floor raised up on a foundation of logs, to keep it warmer in winter, and the doors and windows were made of conventional trimmed wood and glass, instead of being closed with the Abenakis’ traditional hangings of animal skins.
Nathan had tried to dissuade her. Louisa had offered her mother a home with them. Nathan had said that if she wanted to live independently, he would pay the rent on the small house in Flamboro, but Christina had been adamant.
‘I shall feel at home in the forest. And I’ll be less than half an hour’s walk from the village. This is better for me.’
When he saw that he could not persuade her to change her mind, Nathan had helped with the building, although Christina had designed everything and done most of the work herself. Nathan had set in the windows, and insisted on sealing them well with builders’ putty, not the mud Christina wanted to use. And he had built her a huge fieldstone chimney, housing a wide fireplace and tapering gracefully towards the top. Now, after thirteen years, splashes of orange and sage-green lichen had begun to spread in intricate patterns over the stones of the chimney, the timbers had weathered to a silver grey, and the house looked like part of the forest.
‘Good afternoon, Tirza.’
‘Hi, Girna. Shall I carry the bucket inside for you?’
Indoors, the wooden cabin was warm from the fire of pine logs. Nathan had also installed a pot-bellied stove, and the walls were hung in wintertime with heavy hand-woven blankets which had once been part of Christina’s mother’s marriage goods. In the soft light from the kerosene lamp they looked rich and strange, like the hangings in an oriental palace. But by sunlight they were old, frayed at the edges and darned in places.
‘Simon and I had tea with the Boston ladies yesterday,’ said Tirza, tipping the bucket into the water storage tank.
‘How is Susanna?’
‘OK, I guess, but she was sitting down mostly. She showed us the new rug she’s making.’ Tirza hesitated. ‘Girna...?’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s the matter with Miss Susanna?’ Tirza coloured, aware that she was venturing on to a forbidden topic.
Christina took up her paring knife and began peeling potatoes for supper. The child couldn’t be protected for ever. Abigail treated her as though she was still six years old, and she was twice that.
‘She has cancer.’
‘Do you die of it?’
‘Most people do, yes. Eventually. Susanna’s got a fighting spirit, so she’ll last longer than most of us would.’
Tirza unwound her muffler and took off her windcheater slowly. She knew of cancer only as some dark adult secret, whispered about when children were not supposed to hear. She did not look at her grandmother as she laid her jacket over the arm of a chair and put her boots and socks near the hearth to dry out.
‘Does it hurt a lot?’
‘It can be very painful, yes. And makes you terribly tired.’
‘I wish the doctors could do something. She doesn’t deserve to die. She’s so kind. And she’s spent all her life looking after other people and not having any fun.’
Christina dropped the potatoes into a pan of water and put it on top of the stove.
‘I think you would find that she doesn’t think her life has been wasted. And she gets a lot of pleasure out of making her beautiful rugs. Go and see her as much as you can, you and Simon. I’m sure that cheers her up.’
Tirza turned her steaming socks and wandered off to the rough bookshelves that took up one wall of the main room in the cabin.
‘Simon is acting really weird. He says he doesn’t want the farm.’ She knew it was safe to talk about this to Christina, who would not repeat it to the Libby adults.
‘Does he not?’ Christina stood with a spoon in her hand and her head on one side. ‘Getting restless, is he? Well, some of the Libbys have always gone to sea instead of staying in Flamboro.’
Tirza laughed. ‘Simon won’t go to sea. He throws up even if I take him out in Stormy Petrel. He hates the sea.’
‘Well, maybe he’ll get over it. Are you staying to supper?’
‘No, I’ll have to get back. I brought you some things from Grandma.’
She rummaged in the burlap satchel that held her school books and brought out a Mason jar of plums and a heavy fruit cake. Christina took them with a sardonic look.
‘Well, I call that very kind of Abigail. I might starve for company, but she won’t let me starve for food. ‘Twould be bad for the Libby name.’
Tirza, uncomfortable, looked away. The Libbys, strait-laced, upright members of the Flamboro community, felt that Christina’s decision to live in the forest had somehow been intended to shame them. Why she should revert to the pagan ways of her ancestors, when she ought to live like the decent Christian she had been reared, was something unfathomable and a constant irritant in the family. Abigail hinted darkly that going away and getting educated at Vassar had turned Christina’s head. Even though she’d had the sense to come back afterwards and marry her childhood sweetheart, she’d gallivanted about training as one of the first women lawyers in New England, and that had not been the act of a sane woman who knew her place in the scheme of things.
‘What shall we read tonight?’ said Tirza.
‘I’ve been rereading Thoreau’s Walden.’ Christina picked the book up from the candle table beside her chair and sat down. ‘Whose turn is it to read?’
‘Yours.’
Tirza curled up on the floor at her grandmother’s feet with her back against the wall, warm with its covering of Abenaki blanket. The burning logs glowed behind the bars of the stove and the fire in the open hearth cast flickering shadows on the walls as Christina began to read.
Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days when I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand-heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.
‘Girna?’ said Tirza, interrupting. They were allowed to interrupt each other, if there was something worth saying. ‘How could it have been spring as early as that – only the end of March?’
‘Walden Pond is near Concord, in Massachusetts. A fair way south of here. Spring comes earlier there.’
‘How old was Thoreau, when he was building his house in the woods?’
‘About twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I believe. Why?’
‘Well...’ Tirza looked a little embarrassed. ‘I was thinking... How did you manage to build your own house? I mean, you must have been pretty old.’
Christina threw back her head and laughed heartily. ‘Yes, I suppose from your point of view, I was. Let me see. Your mother was married the previous fall, and like Thoreau I started to build this house in the spring. You were born that fall, 1929, so I must have been forty.’
Tirza shook her head. ‘I don’t see how you could do it.’
‘Child, we can mostly do the things we set our hearts on. And you will find, when you reach forty, that it is not such a great age after all.’
‘Why had you set your heart on it?’
Christina closed the book over her finger and gazed towards the black square of window, where the first light of the morning would show the sun sparking off the ocean just below the cabin.
‘I suppose it was partly instinct and partly reason. Something in the blood, do you think?’ She grinned down at Tirza. ‘Something speaking to me from my ancestors who had lived here for so many centuries. One day, you may feel it yourself, for you are the only one left hereabouts with Abenaki blood in your veins. But it was more than that. I had begun to feel, like Thoreau, that we do not need all the ornaments and appurtenances of modern “civilised” society. The necessities of life are very few: food, shelter, clothing, fuel, as he names them. If we can clear away the clutter in our lives, it is easier for us to understand what the real meaning of life is – why we are here on this earth at all.’
She looked around and smiled ruefully.
‘Not that I have kept to Thoreau’s strict regime.’
She gestured towards the books on the shelves and lying around in tottering piles, the paintings and artist’s materials strewn about, and the botanical specimens – some neatly labelled and mounted, others awaiting attention – all of which gave the cabin its
distinctive and somewhat crowded air.
‘Of course he only lived at Walden for two years. I’ve been here nearly thirteen, and I suspect he would have accumulated his magpie interests about him as I have. Shall I go on reading?’
‘Just one more thing. What does he mean by the winter of man’s discontent?’
‘It’s a quotation from Shakespeare:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
The opening words of Richard III. We must read that together – it’s almost the only Shakespeare we haven’t read, apart from Lear. Perhaps after Walden. And I want to introduce you to one of our own modern poets, Robert Frost.’
Christina opened the book again and found the place.
One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.