Yes, Mama

by Helen Forrester

  So that was what the animal was. A goat!

  ‘Will it let me?’ asked Billy, as he knelt by the hearth to fill a mug of coffee. He sipped the bitter brew cautiously; he had never tasted coffee before. ‘I’ve never seen no goat before.’

  The woman laughed, as she put porridge out for her husband. ‘Where’ve you kids been all your lives? You’re the second boy we’ve had and neither of you’ve seen a goat!’

  Macdonald pulled back the sackcloth curtain and emerged, tightening his belt buckle as he came to eat his breakfast. He laughed with his wife. Take the little pail off the nail there – try milking her when you’ve tied her up.’

  Billy learned to hate that goat. He hated it even more than he had hated the subnormal boy who had bullied him as a child in the court.

  Shivering in the cold of the October morning, he forcibly dragged the reluctant goat out of the relative comfort of the barn, found a tree with less snow under it than most, and tethered the animal to it. Then he put the pail under the suspicious animal, squatted down by it and attempted to milk it as he had seen the cows milked in the dairy where Mike worked. The goat edged away, turned and butted him crossly. Billy unbalanced and toppled sideways. The goat backed away from him to the furthest extent of its rope, put its hard little head down and prepared to charge. Billy scrambled out of reach, his hands freezing in the snow.

  From the doorway, Macdonald guffawed with laughter. He came forward, picked up the pail and motioned Billy to watch him. He went up to the angry animal, spoke surprisingly softly to her, squatted on his heels and put his head against her side and she let him milk her, while she took occasional bored nips at tufts of grass poking through the snow. Occasionally, she raised a resentful, malevolent eye towards Billy.

  The goat did not produce much milk, and Macdonald said she was nearly ready for mating again, but the nearest billygoat was almost fifteen miles away; it was a long way to take her.

  ’is that the nearest farm?’ asked Billy, thoughts of escape to the forefront of his mind.

  ‘Yes. And there’s only a narrow trail to it; I can’t get the cart through from this side.’

  He handed the pail to Billy and told him to take it to Mrs Macdonald.

  ‘Anybody else live round here?’ asked Billy, trying to sound casual, as they walked towards the cabin.

  ‘There’s the Metis village that you saw, but that’s nearly twenty miles from here. They trap, and there’s one or two more as come from further away; they’ve got traplines along the river.’ He pointed to the water barrel. ‘Fill it up for her. Then we’ll finish roofing the barn. The horse’s got to have cover for winter.’

  The following day, Macdonald took the horse to the field he was clearing for ploughing in the spring; there were, apparently, numerous tree roots that he had either pulled loose or dynamited out and he needed to clear them away, if they had not already frozen to the ground.

  Billy was left to help Mrs Macdonald. He hauled more buckets of water from the river than he cared to remember, to fill the water-barrel and a tin bath for doing the washing. By the time he was finished, he was sopping wet down one side of his breeches and his boots squished as he moved around. The water was bitterly cold, and he was thankful when Mrs Macdonald called him indoors to build up the fire for her, while she kneaded bread dough, using a piece of old dough as a raising agent. His boots were hardly steaming in the hearth, when she took him outside again to show him, quickly, how to fire a clay oven which her husband had built for her near the door. She said she would bake the bread and a rabbit pie in it.

  The baby yelled, and he was told to stay out of the cabin while she gave the child her breast. Later, while the baby, swaddled in its rabbit skins, slept in its parents’ wooden bed behind the sackcloth curtain and the bread was left to rise on the hearth, she and Billy pulled out the last of the carrots from the vegetable patch; not having time to harvest them earlier, she had hastily heaped earth and leaves over them in the hope they would not freeze. In these temporary clamps, they appeared to have survived, so they buried them in wooden boxes of river sand which Mrs Macdonald had dried at the side of the fireplace.

  Finding that Billy was interested in what she was doing, she began to talk a little. She told him that the barrel in the corner of the cabin was filled with sauerkraut. He did not know what that was, so she explained that it was shredded, salted cabbage being allowed to ferment in its own juice. ‘A German showed me how to do it,’ she volunteered.

  She asked if he could fish, because she had learned from the Indians how to dry fish, though there was not much time before the really intense cold set in. ‘We’ve done well this year to have such a mild autumn,’ she told him.

  ‘I never learned to fish,’ Billy said, in response to her question. There isn’t many fishes in the Mersey now. Me Dad told me that when he were a boy he went fishin’ with his Dad, and they always ate fish of a Friday. Now you got to go out to sea to get it – into the Bay, like.’

  ‘There’s a lake near here full of them,’ Mrs Macdonald informed him. ‘But Angus hasn’t got the time; he must get the land cleared.’ She sighed. ‘If I’d got some money, I could buy any amount of fish from the Metis. Somehow, I’ll get Angus to teach you how to ice fish – that would help feed us in the winter.’

  In the late afternoon, Macdonald returned. The horse was dragging a spruce which had been roughly cleared of most of its branches.

  Billy’s immature muscles already ached as if he had been beaten, but after a piece of bread and a cup of coffee, Macdonald ordered him to take the other end of the saw and help him reduce the spruce to logs. When Billy did not pull or push hard enough, Macdonald cursed his ineptitude.

  From the general tenor of the tirade, Billy learned that the same threat that beset Mrs Macdonald with her store of carrots, onions and sauerkraut, also bedevilled her husband. The winter.

  The wood pile must be built up and up. Every scrap of food they could raise or barter for must be stored before the winter fell on them. Hay and oats and anything that could be culled from the forest or begged from the settlers he used to work for – the neighbour with the goat – must be collected to keep the horse and the goat alive.

  When Macdonald paused to wipe the sweat off his face, Billy said, ‘The Missus says as you’ll teach me to fish.’

  ‘Aye, I will. And to trap rabbits.’

  The pain in Billy’s back when he was roused the next morning made him cry out. Mrs Macdonald laughed at him and said he’d get used to it and to go and get her some more wood.

  Outside, it was freezing and a powder of fresh snow lay on the ground. His damp boots were soon icy, as he hefted the split logs into the cabin.

  At the end of a month he was still as hungry as he had ever been in Liverpool, and he was struck or kicked far more by both husband and wife than he had ever been in the great port.

  No matter how he phrased the question, neither husband nor wife would tell him where he was. That information, they reckoned with a sly grin to each other, would give Billy a basis on which to work out how to run away, like the previous orphan had.

  Remembering that the Macdonalds were supposed to supply him with clothes, he asked Mrs Macdonald if she could give him a pair of gloves. ‘Me hands is so cold they froze to the bucket handle this morning,’ he told her, fear of what the cold might do to his hands making him desperate.

  She looked at him as if he had asked something absurd. Then she went to a wooden trunk in the storeroom and rummaged through odds and ends of clothing. She fretfully flung him a pair of her husband’s old socks with large holes in their heels.

  As he caught the socks, hatred of her seethed in him. Young and terribly disappointed, he gave no thought to her despair. He was, however, thankful to slip his hands into the heavy, smelly socks.

  The water-barrel had been moved inside the cabin. Now she told him to refill it, as usual. ‘Remember to keep breaking the river ice, to keep it open round where you get the water. Soon you�
�ll have to cut steps through it to get at the water.’

  Billy nodded. He had already been breaking the ice for some time, with the aid of a dead branch. When he contemplated Mrs Macdonald’s forecast, he began to shake with fear. Would he freeze, too?

  Could he follow the railway lines back to Toronto? he wondered frantically. How far did a train travel in a day and a night?

  A few days back, he had tried to retrace his way to the Metis village, because he could not even follow the railway track until he found its shining lines. He had hoped that the Metis family he had met on his arrival might listen to him and help him. But within twenty minutes, mistaking an animal track for one of the turnings he had originally taken, he became lost. Fortunately, in his subsequent panic, he walked in a circle, and in the forest’s uncanny silence he had heard Mrs Macdonald’s voice shouting angrily for him. He had stumbled back to her through the bush and got a sound cuffing for his pains. She also told him that, earlier in the year, her husband had shot a cougar trying to get at the goat, and that it was capable of eating a boy.

  ‘What’s a cougar?’ he had asked, as he thankfully swept the floor of the cabin for her and got warm again.

  ‘It’s like a lion.’

  After hearing that, Billy never left the clearing alone, except to go for water, and sometimes in the evening, if he had to walk the trail to the river, a rustling in the undergrowth would cause him to break out in a cold sweat.

  One night, in the cabin, when he was whittling dowels for his master, he thought about the Metis children at the railway halt. He wondered if they went to school. This reminded him that he was supposed to be sent both to church and to school.

  School seemed suddenly like a rest cure, five or six hours of perfect peace after the intolerable load of work he was doing. He did not care about church, but attendance would ensure a comfortable sitdown, a happy change from working seven days a week from long before dawn to after dark. He paused in his whittling, penknife idle, while it struck him that he did not even know what day it was.

  Sunday had been a day when both his father and mother had been at home; frequently it had been a day on which they went down to the shore to pick amongst the rubbish thrown up by the tide for anything that might be useful, a day when Polly sometimes came, bringing her wages and interesting gossip. An agony of loneliness went through him.

  Macdonald looked up from the horse-collar he was repairing, and Billy hastily resumed his careful whittling.

  The prim lady at the Home in Toronto had promised that someone would visit him at the farm where he settled, to check that he was happy and behaving well. Not realizing the complexity of arranging such a visit, or that it might cost money, he had waited as patiently as he could for the visitor to arrive, so that he could ask to be moved. But, like many other such children, he was in a place so isolated that no local worthy could be recruited to visit – not that it would necessarily have done much good; children were usually interviewed in the presence of their employers and were too afraid to complain.

  Since his arrival at the cabin, Billy had seen no other person than his employers, and he wondered, suddenly, if other settlers disliked the Macdonalds as much as he did.

  With a small burst of bravery, he broke the silence of the cabin, by asking Macdonald, ‘When will I be able to go to school? And church? Like the lady at the ‘Ome promised?’

  Startled out of his usual moroseness, Macdonald stared at the boy, his needle poised over the collar’s leather. Mrs Macdonald laughed almost hysterically.

  ‘Where’d you go? The nearest school is thirty miles off. And church the same. Have to wait for months, sometimes, for a priest to come through to marry you – or christen you.’ He gestured with his needle towards the child sleeping on its mother’s lap. ‘He’ll be on his feet before he’s christened.’ He resumed his stitching, and then went on, ‘Anyway, you’re too big to be wasting your time in school; I can’t spare you.’

  Having got the man to talk, Billy asked once more, ‘Well, what’s the name of this place and the name of the place where the school is.’ He tried to sound casual and went gravely on with his whittling, as he waited for a reply.

  Macdonald growled, ‘None of them’s got names yet.’

  Billy picked up another piece of wood and began carefully to pare it into rough shape. He wondered if the boy Mrs Macdonald had mentioned before had run away. ‘What happened to the boy you had before me?’

  ‘Drowned. He tried to cross the river on the ice and it gave under him. That’s what comes of running away.’

  Billy was shocked at Macdonald’s laconic response.

  ‘That was proper awful!’

  ‘Bloody fool. Should’ve known better.’

  II

  Was it always going to be like this? Billy wondered. His ears hurt as they warmed up again, after going for the day’s water. He stood inside the cabin at the foot of the steps, brushing the last of the snow still on his boots with a besom Mrs Macdonald had made. One boot had a small hole in the bottom and he had stuffed some straw from the barn into it to stop his foot freezing; he feared having to ask Macdonald for leather and tools to mend it.

  Before he could take his overcoat off, Mrs Macdonald turned from feeding the baby cuddled under her shawl, to say, ‘Go and open up the oven and get the bread out for me; it’ll be more than done.’ The baby lost her breast and whimpered. ‘Take the basket off the shelf to carry it in.’

  With a sigh, he swung the basket down, while she grumbled, ‘After this lot we’ll be down to bannock. It’ll be too snowy out there to use the oven.’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ he agreed indifferently. If you had any sense you said as little as possible to the Macdonalds. Then you could not be clouted for impudence.

  ‘Have you got the peel?’

  He hastily unhooked, from a wooden peg by the door, a long-handled wooden shovel with which to get the bread out of the hot oven.

  He had never been given this job before, but he had noticed that Mrs Macdonald was slowly pushing many of her household chores on to him – he had done a bath full of washing for her only a few days earlier, spreading the garments out on the bushes to dry. At first they had frozen; yet, to his astonishment, they had eventually proved to be almost dry.

  He approached the oven with respect. He reckoned it must be very hot, but when he put his hand on the outside it was merely comfortably warm. Very cautiously, he opened the wooden door which was lined with metal. As the interior heat hit the cold air outside, a burst of steam blew into his face. The odour of the bread made his saliva run.

  With great care, he first took out a covered stewpot and stood it in the shallow basket. Then, one by one, he shovelled out the round loaves and laid them in the basket, round the pot. When he had finished, he stood in the warmth still emitted by the oven and looked down at the bread. Hunger was a constant pain with him, and he suddenly pulled the sock off his hand, bent down and snatched up a loaf. Despite the bitter air, it was still extremely hot, but he broke it open and shoved a cob into his mouth. Though it burned the top of his mouth, it was good beyond words, and he tore another piece off and crammed it into his mouth.

  Absorbed in the rapture of eating, he did not hear the quiet plod of the horse’s hooves or the squeaking wheels. The whistle of Macdonald’s buggy whip, as he bent from the seat of the cart and swung it across the boy’s back, was the first indication Billy had of Macdonald’s return from his field with a load of stones he intended to use to hold down the edges of the barn roof.

  Billy nearly choked on the bread, as he cried out and swung round to face his attacker.

  Red with fury, Macdonald leaped from the cart and caught him by the shoulder, forcing him to turn his back. ‘I’ll teach you to steal,’ he roared. He raised his whip again and hit the boy across the back with the handle. The end of the lash snaked viciously round Billy and cut his lower lip.

  Billy struggled to escape the remorseless grip as the blows rained down on him. ‘I were th
at hungry,’ he appealed frantically. He put his hand to his bleeding lip.

  Macdonald hurled him face down on the oven’s curved side and, holding him by the back of the neck, beat him unmercifully.

  Twelve-year-old Billy was strong, but he was no hero. He howled so loudly that Mrs Macdonald came flying out, the baby crying in her arms. ‘What’s he done?’ she cried. She stopped, to look bewilderedly at her loaves scattered in the snow and the stewpot, half-tipped over. Then she saw that Billy was bleeding at the mouth, and she yelled, ‘That’s enough, Angus! You’ll kill him!’

  Macdonald let go and threw Billy to the ground. Weeping and bleeding, he crawled through the snow to seek sanctuary behind Mrs Macdonald.

  Ignoring him, Mrs Macdonald bent down to rescue the loaves and straighten the stewpot before it lost all its contents. The baby objected to being jostled about and cried all the harder. The half-eaten loaf told its own story.

  ‘You greedy bugger,’ she fulminated at Billy struggling to his feet, and sped back indoors out of the cold.

  Macdonald strode back to the horse, to lead it to the barn. He turned and barked at Billy, ‘You get over to the barn and get the ladder out, and you lay these stones along the edge of the roof till I tell you to stop, you damned thief.’

  Unable to straighten his back properly, Billy dragged himself towards the barn. Sobbing, he looked down at his long, clumsy overcoat. Added to its dirtiness, it now had bloodstains from his swelling lip.

  The stones would be frozen, he thought hopelessly; Macdonald must have had to use a pickaxe to loosen them from the pile by the field. Fear of further beating, however, drove him painfully towards the barn, to wait sullenly by the ladder while Macdonald unharnessed the horse and tipped the cart to let the stones roll off it.