Yes, Mama
Page 14
As Billy hesitated on the doorstep, it seemed to him, in the poor light of an oil lamp and an open fire, that he saw nothing but eyes. They peered out at him from rough bunks against the walls; they stared up at him from the floor and from round a wooden table.
Gradually the eyes had faces added to them and then untidy bodies. A woman was squatting by the fire, cooking something on a heated stone. She wore a long, brightly printed cotton skirt with what looked like a black, woollen bodice. As the man sat himself down at the table, she glanced up at Billy and said to him in a strong Scottish accent, ‘Come to the fire. You must be cold.’
As Billy nervously advanced towards the blaze, she rose and gingerly picked up some of the hot bannock she had been cooking and put it in front of the man at the table. She spoke to him in a strange language, as she took down a mug from a shelf and poured out coffee for him from a pot which had been standing in the hearth.
The dark brown children – for most of the eyes belonged to children – slowly began to gather round Billy. They touched his long overcoat and giggled, black eyes reflecting the dancing flames of the fire. He felt suddenly safer and grinned back at them.
Their mother was going to a tumbled bed at the further end of the big, stone fireplace. She carried a mug of coffee with her, and a thin, wrinkled hand took it from her. A white head was turned. For a second, Billy was the recipient of a glance so piercing that it seemed to the boy that in that moment a total inventory of him had been taken. Then the eyes were politely averted.
Billy timidly extended his hands to the fire and rubbed them. If the weather was as cold as this in October, he wondered what it would be like in January; he wished he had some gloves.
He looked surreptitiously round the hut. The interior was not unlike the cellar dwelling in which he had grown up, except that the smell was different and the fire seemed enormous.
The woman put a warm piece of bannock into his hand and then distributed pieces to the children. He stood near the fire with the other youngsters and wolfed down the food gratefully, while the woman explained to him in good English that he was to wait with them until full daylight and then a man would come for him.
She turned to her husband and spoke to him in their own language. He nodded, and grunted agreement. ‘Macdonald,’ he said directly to Billy.
The woman poured coffee for herself, and Billy watched her shyly. Then he ventured a question. ‘Are you farmers?’
She took a sip from her coffee, and then answered, ‘No. We trap.’
The blank look on Billy’s face made an older girl begin to giggle, and her mother, realizing that he did not understand, explained, ‘We trap animals – beaver and foxes mostly – for their fur. Soon it’ll be time for my husband to set his trapline.’
At this interesting reply, a whole mass of questions tumbled into Billy’s head, but the parents were obviously taciturn, so he ventured one more only; he felt he had to know the answer. ‘Are you Red Indians?’ he inquired, with breathless interest.
The woman smiled, and glanced at her silent husband placidly stirring his coffee. Billy realized suddenly that, unlike the rest of the family, her eyes were blue like his mother’s. ‘No,’ she responded slowly. ‘We’re Metis people.’
Billy was very disappointed; he had looked forward to meeting a Red Indian, complete with feathered headdress and tomahawk, as described to him by Polly. He wondered what a Metis was.
The mother turned to the children and said something in the second language. A small boy opened the door. The morning sun was flooding the clearing with light, and the children wandered out into the warming sunshine, except for two babies crawling about on the floor. The biggest youngster, a girl with a long black plait, pulled at Billy’s sleeve and indicated that he should go out with her. He glanced back at the woman and the quiet brown man drinking his coffee. She nodded agreement, so he followed the girl outside, at the same time struggling out of his coat. He laid coat and cap on top of his trunk. Without them, he hoped that other people would not stare at him; his jacket, breeches, long socks and black boots would, perhaps, look similar to the garments of his Metis host.
The girl indicated to him to wait, while she went to pick up a couple of buckets from beside the corner of the cabin. The tiny settlement was gradually coming to life. A man in a tall, widebrimmed hat brought out a horse, mounted it and rode away into the forest. An old woman crouched over a smoky fire with fish drying over it. Innumerable children ran about and then came to stare at him. The girl turned to shout at them in the strange tongue, which everybody except himself seemed to understand.
As the girl returned with a clanking pail in each hand, he asked, ‘Can you speak English?’
The girl was the same height as he was. Her almond eyes twinkled at the question. ‘Yes. Why?’
‘Well, nobody else seems to, except your Mam.’
‘A lot of us can speak it – if we feel like it! Even Dad knows it, though he speaks Algonquin mostly. Mother’s father was from Scotland. He came out here to buy furs and then he married Grandma and stayed, to trap himself.’
While Billy digested this information, she led him along a path from behind the cabin to a little river, where two women were filling buckets with water.
Steadying herself by holding on to an overhanging tree branch, she reached down and filled the buckets from the swiftly flowing water.
Billy insisted on carrying one of the filled buckets back for her and in tipping its contents into a barrel by the cabin door. It took three trips to the river to fill the barrel, and Billy’s aid to the girl brought forth some good-humoured jeering from a couple of youths lounging in the doorway of one of the homes.
Billy did not understand the words, but realized they were disparaging, and he asked, ‘What did they say?’
She hesitated, and then said, with a grin, ‘They said you were doing women’s work and you must be like a woman.’
Billy scowled. ‘Dirty bastards,’ he snarled, but decided that it was not worth a fight, particularly when the opponents were taller.
They had just put away the buckets, when a heavily-built white man clumped past them and, without knocking, entered the cabin.
He came out again almost immediately. Billy stared apprehensively at him. ‘Come on, you,’ he ordered the boy testily. He bent and pushed Billy’s overcoat and cap into the dust, to pick up the trunk and swing it on to his back.
Billy picked up his coat and cap and then glanced back at the girl. Her face was expressionless. His earlier fears returned to him, but he said to her, ‘Thank your Mam for me.’ Then he ran after Macdonald.
His new master crossed the railway line. On the other side was a lane where a horse and cart stood waiting. The man slung the trunk into the back of the cart and indicated that Billy should climb in after it.
He scrambled up beside a heavy sack of flour and stood uncertainly for a moment, not sure what to do.
‘Sit down, you stupid bugger,’ Macdonald snarled.
Billy hastily squatted down, his back against the side of the cart. Some of the children from the settlement had followed them and were standing on the higher ground of the railway embankment. He waved to them and they waved back. He felt better.
Macdonald mounted the driver’s seat, cracked his whip and the horse started forward. The sudden upward jerk of the two-wheeled cart sent both Billy and his trunk skidding backwards to the tail. Macdonald laughed.
Ruefully rubbing a banged elbow, Billy crawled to the front of the cart and sat with his back to the driver. His fears returned.
The lady at the Toronto Home had explained to him that he would be bound to this white man until he was eighteen – and that would be nearly seven years. He was to work for him and, in return, he would be fed and clothed and sent to church and to school. At sixteen, he would be entitled to wages – two or three dollars a month. But in the streets and warehouses of Liverpool, Billy had seen types like Macdonald before and he was filled with dread.
Chapter Fourteen
I
The cart bumped its way slowly along a narrow lane thickly carpeted with pine needles. Once or twice, between breaks in the trees, Billy caught a glimpse of a twist of smoke against the intensely blue sky, a suggestion of human habitation. There seemed, however, to be no sound left in the world, except for the squeak of the cart’s wheels and the muffled clop of the horse’s hooves. To Billy, used to the hurly-burly of the docks and the city, to a boy who had never even seen the English countryside, it was extremely frightening. But most of all, he feared the man who was driving. At one point, he got up enough courage to kneel up behind him and ask him, ‘Where are we? What’s the name of the place we’re goin’ to?’
The response was curt. ‘Sit down, and mind your own business.’
Billy sat down. He longed for something to eat and for a horse blanket like the one Macdonald had across his knees, to wrap round himself to keep out the chill invading him.
They turned off the track they had been following on to an even bumpier one, and then several more turns, each time on to a narrower path. The pine trees closed in more tightly than ever, brushing their fronds against the cart and shutting out the sunlight. Billy felt as if a gaoler had closed the door on him.
In the afternoon, when it seemed as if they would never get out of the forest, the track debouched into an area where raw tree stumps indicated a fresh clearing. There was a large vegetable patch partially harvested; and newly washed clothes had been laid out to dry over a few bushes which had already lost their leaves to autumn. From a rise in the ground, came an unexpected plume of smoke. A baby wailed in steady, demanding notes, and from a nearby tree, a tethered goat complained loudly. Billy looked at the goat in bewilderment and decided it must be some kind of sheep.
The driver shouted at the horse and the cart stopped at the rise in the ground. Billy kneeled up to see over the side of the cart. To his astonishment, he was in front of a cabin half-buried in the ground. The roof was covered with turf.
Nearby, a rough enclosure had been made of logs and looked as if it were in process of being roofed with timber.
A woman holding a tiny baby wrapped in fur came up out of the cabin. She had on a black skirt and shawl, such as Billy’s mother had worn; her long, narrow face was red, as if she had been in the sun too long; her hair was scraped back from it and tied in a knot on top of her head. As Macdonald climbed down from the cart, she said in a strong Scottish accent and without preamble, ‘I want some water.’
Billy climbed carefully over the back of the cart and dropped to the ground. He was stiff with cold and the long hours of sitting in an awkward position. ‘Give ’im the bucket,’ Macdonald growled.
To Billy he said, ‘Put that fancy overcoat down and get ’er some water.’ He pointed to a narrow path leading into the trees on the other side of the clearing.
Bewildered and scared, Billy was slow in finding a place to lay his coat down. The man came to where he stood glancing anxiously about him, and shouted into his face, ‘Get a move on. When I tell you something, you run and do it. Understand?’ Bloodshot eyes glared at him from a bristled face.
Billy hastily bundled up the coat and laid it near the logs which formed the visible part of the cabin. Mrs Macdonald picked up a galvanized bucket and handed it to him. He snatched it from her and ran towards the path which had been indicated. The pines’ long fingers seemed to lock over his head, but after a couple of hundred yards the pencil-thin path sloped down to a narrow swift-flowing river with more close-packed forest louring at him from the further bank.
For a moment, he could not think how to dip the bucket into sufficiently deep water to fill it without getting his boots soaked. In a semi-panic, he scouted up the river a few yards, following another little path. At the end of it he found a point where the river swirled in and out of a slight curve in the bank. He lay on his stomach and dipped the bucket in.
When he first tried to lift the vessel out, it was so heavy that he splashed half the contents over its sides. He tried filling it again and, when hauling it out, he rested it, half way, on a jutting stone. He scrambled to his feet and managed to get it up on to the bank. He carried it slowly and carefully back to the cabin.
‘You took your time,’ the woman snarled at him, and snatched the pail from him so clumsily that she splashed herself. ‘Careful!’ she shrieked at him, as he looked helplessly at her, his throat constricted with dread of the whole place and its inhabitants.
He spent until nightfall helping Macdonald roof the unfinished building he had noticed on his arrival. He was sick with hunger.
For the most part, the time was spent in silence, but he did learn that Macdonald was clearing his first quarter-section. This alerted Billy to the fact that an immigrant could, indeed, own land, and he ventured a cautious question or two as to how the quarter-section had been acquired.
Macdonald told him that when he first came out from Dundee, he had worked on the farm of an established settler. Later on, when he had obtained the land, he had commenced to clear it during quiet months on his employer’s farm. The family had lived in a lean-to tent while he built the cabin. He had hoped to get a crop in that summer, but had managed only a large vegetable patch.
‘If we get through this winter,’ he told Billy gloomily, ‘it’ll be a bleedin’ miracle. The other boy they sent me was no help.’
More fear clutched at Billy’s throat; he knew how, even in Liverpool, a bad winter could pick people off.
As the sun went down, Billy was ordered to put away the saws and axes, while Macdonald milked the goat.
Macdonald had actually driven down to the Metis village the day before and had continued on to a farmer who owned a small mill. There, he had bought a sack of flour for the winter and had picked up Billy at the railway halt on his return journey. Together, they now heaved the sack into the cabin.
Mrs Macdonald complained that she did not know where to store it. Macdonald told her sharply to shut up; she was lucky to have it.
The interior of the cabin seemed to Billy’s weary eyes infinitely cosy. A good wood fire blazed in a stone hearth. The floor was earthen, but that was no different from the floor of the cellar in which he had lived with his parents. The walls were made of logs chinked with clay. Near the top of one wall a pair of shutters opened to the fresh air. At one side a sacking curtain was drawn across the little room and on another side was a closed door, which Billy later discovered led to a storeroom. A couple of benches and a table, obviously homemade, and a bunk against a wall, appeared to be the only furnishings. On the walls were hung tools, basins, a tin bath and some articles which Billy did not know the use of.
A pannikin of water lay on the table and Macdonald rinsed his hands and face in it and dried himself on a piece of rag. He indicated to Billy that he could do likewise and should then take the pannikin outside and empty it on the vegetable garden. Billy did as he was told. When he seized the handle of the shallow pan, he slopped the water on the floor, and Mrs Macdonald’s tight lips exploded with an angry ‘Tush! Look what you’re doing.’
He came back into the cabin to find a modest dish of rabbit stew and potatoes waiting for him. He thankfully ate this whilst standing at the table. The Macdonalds sat down on a bench side by side, the baby sleeping in its mother’s lap, and ate much larger helpings.
As soon as Billy put down his empty plate on to the table, Macdonald
told him, ‘Go out and split some logs from the woodpile and bring them in for the Missus.’
‘Lay them at the side of the chimney here, to dry,’ Mrs Macdonald chimed in, as she rose from the table, holding her baby against her shoulder.
Billy looked longingly at the remains of the stew in an iron saucepan on the table, but the hint was not taken. He turned, and trailed slowly up the wooden steps to the door.
Billy had expected that outside it would be dead dark, but once his eyes got used to it, he found he could see fairly well in the starlight. He went, first, down to the privy, a hole in the ground inside a shack as yet unroofed.
As he split the logs, he remembered when he had helped his father do the same thing. They would go at night to the shore to steal driftwood, bits of wrecks, wooden boxes, even trees, swept on to the river shore by the tide, and the next day they would reduce them to firing easy for his mother to handle. Swaying with fatigue and lack of sufficient food, he let the tears fall. ‘Aye, Mam,’ he cried to the uncaring pines.
He stumbled back and forth to the stove with the firewood, until Mrs Macdonald said it was enough and that he could go to bed in the bunk by the storeroom door. He took off his boots and, after opening them out to dry, he fell into the coffinlike bed and spread over himself the coarse blanket he found there. Without even a straw mattress or pillow, the bed was hard, but he was so exhausted that he slept immediately. He awoke, feeling very cold, when Macdonald shouted to him from behind the sacking curtain to make up the fire.
Except for a few embers on the hearth, the cabin was dark, and Billy could not at first think where he was. Then memory reasserted itself, and he stumbled out of the bunk to do as he was bidden.
It was still dark outside, when Mrs Macdonald shook him and told him it was time to get up. The baby was sobbing heartily and, from behind the sackcloth curtain, Macdonald shouted to her, ‘Can’t you shut the brat up?’
She did not answer him. Working by the light of the fire, she was stirring something in a saucepan; the baby, to Billy’s complete astonishment, was hanging in what appeared to be a bag hung on the wall beside the fireplace. He dared not remark on it. Agonizedly stiff and cold, he staggered towards the warmth of the fire, and was immediately handed a plate of porridge. ‘Eat up,’ Mrs Macdonald commanded, ‘there’s coffee in the pot on the hearth there. Then get your boots on and get the goat out of the barn. See if you can find a tree to tether it to where the grass is clear of snow.’