Waiting for Time

by Bernice Morgan

  All in all Mary is disappointed.

  “'Tis like the Bible,” Vinnie had said and Mary had believed her, had expected stories of giants and floods, of storms and bolts of lightning coming out of heaven, yams with great ringing phrases, rolling words like those that leapt from Ned's mouth when he was happy or excited. Instead Lavinia has written of women clearing gardens, of making fish, or hay, or candles—mundane things Mary would not have given the time of day to.

  “Whenever is she goin' to get around to somethin' happenin'?” the old woman would ask peevishly after Rachel has been reading about berry-picking or boat building for an hour. Yet, when they do come to one of Lavinia's accounts of something happening, Mary is no better pleased, interrupting the girl's reading to insist that Lavinia has lied or completely misunderstood.

  “Put the rights of it down there,” Mary orders. And pointing to the white space around the edge of the page she dictates her own version of the event.

  Sometimes she feels the past pressing down on her like the lid of a coffin. All she wants is to sit alone and think about it, work out the way it really was. When this happens Mary says she is tired, wants to take a spell and contrives some message, anything that will get Rachel outdoors, breathing a bit of fresh air into her lungs. Cautioning the girl not to say a word outside the house about what they are doing, Mary sends her to borrow thread, to bring in wood or water, to check on the hens or shovel snow off the bridge.

  Still, they spend most of each day huddled by the stove, reading and writing, so content that sometimes it is late evening before they realize they have not eaten since morning. Suddenly famished, they warm soup Jessie has brought or get cups of tea and thick slices of bread spread with molasses. Rachel brings the food over to the fire, carrying it on Mary's old tin tray. They eat in companionable silence, staring into the embers and thinking about Lavinia and Thomas, Meg and Ben, about Moses and Ned and the Vincents, who are becoming more real to them than the people in the surrounding houses.

  And this is how Mary's part of the journal is written. All through those dim winter afternoons, as they sit, oblivious of snow hitting the window and piling against the storm door. The old woman remembering things she had hidden years before. The young woman forgetting things that had happened last summer—not thinking of the child growing inside her—not realizing that it, too, must be part of the story she is writing down.

  seven

  “ I minds me mother well but I hardly remembers me father's face—he was about the place but I thought no more of him than I did of the horse or the pig we kept each summer. He moved around like a beast, sort of hunched over and wearing a shaggy old jerkin made of sheepskin, mud coloured it was, same as his hair and face. I do mind he always carried a stick and would take a swipe at me or Tessa and bellow something we didn't understand.”

  “Me mother's name was Una, thinkin' back on it I believe he beat her. When he was home she scuttled around the house, dodging out of his way like a dog who expects to be kicked. I don't know what her last name was—maybe she didn't have one—I doubt they were married, we didn't have nobody like Meg to make us stand up before a preacher.” Rachel wrote down each word her great-grandmother dictated, even those she didn't understand.

  Mary Bundle was born in a part of Dorset called the Shepton Hills during the reign of George the Third. Her father, Walt Sprig, hired out to large landowners as a shepherd. Each year, soon as the days began to lengthen, he would take sheep high up into the hills, bringing them down in late fall, fat and ready for market. He was a silent, disagreeable man and the lonely life in the hills suited him.

  Una and the two girls lived in the hut built on a small plot adjoining acres of rye and oats belonging to Master William Potts, who lived in the village of Coltsford ten or so miles away. William Potts had many interests including a mill and brewery in Coltsford. He also owned the hut, but let the Sprig family live there on the understanding that they guard the crop and take care of his sheep.

  Una (Mary had never heard of anyone else with the name and wondered if she had gotten it right) was a thin, wiry woman, well under five feet in height. She did all the work around the place, raised turnips, beet and cabbage, kept hens, rabbits and a pig and grudgingly took care of the skeleton horse which she considered an extravagance since it was only used in winter and then just to take her husband to the public house in Coltsford. Una rushed from job to job like a small brown scavenger, demented with fear that winter would come before she was ready, half finishing one job before seeing another more urgent; hacking at the dry earth around her garden, lugging buckets of water from the river, pulling up a handful of weeds, flinging them at the rabbits, scrounging the woods for nuts, berries, for fallen branches which she piled on a hogshide and dragged home, stealing hay for the horse, creeping carefully around the edges of the field lest William Potts, during one of his infrequent visits, should notice.

  Una constantly patched the roof and walls of the hut, using anything she could lay hands on: sheep and rabbit skins, the hides of pigs, bits of wood, straw and sods. As a result, the house was infested with vermin and had the look of a large dirty animal squatting in the middle of a trampled piece of earth. In the fall she killed the pig, using every scrap of the animal, hooves, bones, skin and innards. What could not be eaten she rendered into oil to cook with or to make rushlight—which was not often needed, for Una went to bed as soon as it was too dark to work, mother and children falling together into a mound of ragged quilts, sheep and rabbit skins piled in one comer of the hut.

  When Mary and Tessa were old enough, their mother made some effort at compelling them to share in the work. But the girls were wild as goats and Una lacked the persistence to keep them at a job. She resigned herself to doing all the work alone, making them care for each other and, when he was born, for their brother John Luke. The baby was small and peevish and never stopped whimpering except when his mother's nipple or a tea-soaked rag was stuffed into his mouth.

  Year in, year out, the only people they saw were Master Potts' farm hands who came to harvest the crop, and the odd peddler or tinker who stopped to have a drink of water. They had never seen another female. Mary and Tessa grew like young animals, hide-and-seeking in the tall oats, playing at the edge of the wood and splashing in the river. The only unhappiness they knew was the surly presence of their father, which was infrequent, and the gnaw of hunger, which was so constant that they accepted it as a normal condition. They ate whatever they could find: nuts, mushrooms, berries, even seeds, and chewed on beet and raw turnip stolen from their mother's garden.

  Mary was seven or eight and her sister two years older the spring after John Luke's birth, when their father abandoned his family to become a soldier. On an all-night spree in Coltsford, Walt Sprig met two men going to join the Duke in Spain, where England was fighting the interminable Peninsular War against France. Returning to the hut he told Una, in a few grunted words, that he was leaving, snatched up the quilt that was covering the girls and stuffed it, along with cheese, tea, his extra leggings and his knife, into his skin bag.

  Mary remembered seeing him reach forward and lock his bony fingers around her mother's aim. Jerking the woman towards him he pushed his other hand into the pocket of her brin smock, pulled out the few coins she had tried to hide and transferred them to his own pocket. Una had pulled away and he let her go so suddenly that she fell atop the pile of rags and children. As he banged through the door, Mary caught a glimpse of his companions waiting across the garden. In the dawn mist they looked like men without legs. It was an image that stayed with her all her life, men moving legless through the grey light—moving away.

  Mary and Tessa did not miss their father, but before many weeks passed it was clear they would miss the few shillings he had provided. Flour and tea ran out long before anything had grown in the garden and they were surviving on two or three eggs the scrawny hens laid each day.

  Faced with starvation, Una took time to teach Mary and Tessa ho
w to get fish out of the nearby river she called the Watt. She showed the girls how to make a trug, binding a bit of pig gut around a curved stick, rubbing the rim with grease, whispering a spell as it was lowered below the surface of the Watt. Fish, Una told them, belonged to the moon and must be caught at the first light of dawn when they were still moon mazed.

  Tessa, usually the more adventurous of the two girls, simply sat on the bank, watching. She hated fishing, hated the cold water, the slippery fish, hated having to keep silent. The silence made her afraid. Una warned them if they heard anyone coming to drown the net, cover it in rocks, pretend to be just playing in the water.

  But Mary was enchanted by this simple method of getting food. The knowledge that she was doing something Master Potts would disapprove of made it all the more enjoyable. She would stand knee-deep in the river whispering the words Una had taught her: “Cold of May, heat of June, send me fishes of the moon,” and slowly lowered the net.

  Holding the trug still and taut below the water, she would watch her hands and feet turn blue and wavy. The instant she felt movement, Mary would snap the net shut, jerk it from the water, snatch the glittering fish and toss it to Tessa. Watching the fish sail through the air in a silver curve, Mary thought her mother was right, fishes were bits of the moon and Master Potts had no more right to them than she did.

  One day in late summer, after the oats and hay were harvested, after she had gone over the stubble gleaning every grain the men had missed, Una killed all the rabbits and skinned them. She pulled up most of the turnip and beet and collected eggs she'd been saving for weeks in a wicker basket lodged between rocks in the river. Then she harnessed the old horse up to their cart, loaded everything and set off with her children to Coltsford market.

  Mary and Tessa, leaving home for the first time, were beside themselves with excitement. It was a warm day and the path twisting and narrow, As the cart creaked along between fields of oats, through meadows and around clumps of trees, dust rose in little puffs from the wheels. Mary could taste the dust, the sunshine and the warm, ripe grain. The horse plodded along, at a pace that was much slower than walking and the girls began to ask their mother questions. It was the first time they ever had the opportunity to do such a thing. Indeed it seemed to them the first time they had ever seen Una sitting still.

  When Mary tried to describe her mother to Rachel, it was as she had seen her that day sitting atop the wooden cart on the way to Coltsford. Una, with her face leather brown from working outdoors in all weathers, with deep lines around her nose and mouth and her cheeks sunken where teeth had rotted away. Only her eyes were beautiful, large and grey, sometimes reflecting the blue sky, sometimes the green and gold fields.

  Una owned two items of clothing, a bag-like garment made of brin, which she wore most of the time under the dirty sheepskin jerkin her husband had left behind, and a worn brown dress she usually kept folded away inside a clean sack. That day Una had been wearing the brown dress. Sitting close beside her on the seat, Mary noticed for the first time that the dress once had a pattern of tiny roses, still visible under the collar and below the sleeves. Mary studied the small pink flowers and wondered if her mother had owned the dress when they were bright.

  Tessa, holding John Luke and sitting behind in the wagon, had nattered the whole way. Lighthearted and more talkative than Mary, Tessa kept pointing to things, insisting her mother and sister look—look at the scarecrow fluttering in a distant field, at larks swirling up out of the corn, at butterflies hanging like small blue clouds by the roadside, at the spire of a distant church.

  “Look! Look! Look!” Tessa squealed—the very stones on the road seemed beautiful and wonderfully different from anything she had ever seen before.

  Eventually, in a pause, Mary said: “Ma, yer dress got pink flowers on it—where did ya get it?”

  Una looked startled—maybe she had never heard her youngest daughter speak before. She looked down at herself as if wondering what she wore.

  “I got this dress before I come here. I worked two summers in the dairy at Rogers's farm—it were a nice place to work, warm and pleasant.”

  She rubbed the worn cloth between her thick fingers. “We used to sing to the cows when we milked them.”

  Mary gazed in astonishment at her mother, who was looking off into the distance and smiling.

  Think of wearing a pretty dress and singing to cows! “What did you sing, Ma?” Tessa asked. Never once had they heard their mother sing—not even to John Luke.

  The girls took turns then asking questions, pleading for details. What had the farm been like? Who were the other maids who sang and milked cows? Were they friends? Did they too have flowered dresses? And, most mystifying of all, why had their mother left such a place?

  But she would tell them no more. When they realized Una had gone into one of her trances, Tessa laid the baby on the pile of rabbit skins and both girls jumped down from the cart to run ahead, giggling together at the thought of their mother singing to cows.

  It was well past mid-day by the time they got to Coltsford. The houses were so close together the girls felt penned-in. There were people and dogs and horses everywhere, and, because it was market day, sheep and geese being herded through the streets. The noise and confusion frightened the children, John Luke bawled and the girls became quiet and climbed back up beside their mother.

  When they reached the market some people were already packing things away to go home. A large man, in a bright blue greatcoat that must have made him very hot, shouted that they had to pay him if they wanted to stop. Una fixed her eye on him, fingering the tooth she wore on a cord around her neck, and stared him down. Before Una's stare the man got smaller and smaller and then turned away.

  “We traded the rabbits and eggs for flour and tea,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter. “But no one wanted turnip so we had to take 'em back. I remembers gnawing on one going home in the dark. I allow the trip killed the horse, leastways I don't remember him after that. I knows he wasn't there next winter when things got so bad—we would have et him.”

  John Luke died. One morning Mary awoke knowing there was something different about the hut. She lay curled down against Tessa in the mound of dirty fur and wondered what it could be. She looked around at the rough walls, covered in white rime, at the shuttered hole where pale light seeped down around the edges of rabbit skin, at the small pile of brush near the firehole, at the iron pot, carefully balanced to protect a tiny flame that had smouldered all night. The room looked the same, dark and smoke blackened. As always, it smelled of oil and dirt, of sweat, boiled turnip and of the earth floor—a smell that was so much a part of her world that she did not notice it. That morning, though, something cold and strange was waiting in the room.

  Then she realized that the strange thing was silence—there was no whimper, no mewing sound from John Luke. Mary neither looked nor moved, she lay curved spoon-like into Tessa waiting for something to happen.

  Eventually Una stirred, woke, sat up and leaned over her son. She uncovered the miserable, yellow little body and cried. But only for a minute. Mary watched through half-closed eyes as her mother turned away from John Luke, stood up and started pacing around the room. She began picking things up, making a pile on the rough plank table, a mug, two knives, a small tin box she had pulled out from under a rock in the corner, the two remaining turnips and the flint. She put the last of the tea into the kettle, carefully shaking every grain out of the bag, poured boiling water into the pot and left it steeping on the hot ashes. Mary noticed that her mother was moving very slowly and that her hands shook as she poured the water.

  “Get up,” she told Mary and Tessa, who were still huddled next to their dead brother. Their mother took a spade from behind the door and went out, letting an icy blast of air into the room. Since the girls had been wearing every garment they owned to bed for a month, it took only a second to pull on patched boots and the heavy jackets their mother made by brailling rabbit skins together
with twine. The girls went over to the fire and held their hands as near as possible to the steaming kettle. As they squatted there, sniffing the smell of tea, Mary whispered to Tessa that John Luke was dead.

  When Una came back, her face and neck were wet with perspiration, but she had not been able to dig in the frozen ground. Without a word to the girls, their mother went to the same corner she had lifted the box from and began to dig in the earthen floor of the hut.

  When the hole was big enough she returned to the bed and rolled a sheepskin tightly around their brother. She started to pick him up but stopped and went to the table, gesturing to the girls to join her. When they were standing one on each side, Una eased up the lid of the rusty box and lifted out a brooch—tiny stones set in a circle of purple light. The girls gasped. Mary gazed covetously at the pin that seemed to draw every bit of light in the dark room into itself. It was the most lovely thing she had ever seen. How mean her mother was to have hidden it all these years! Tears gathered in the child's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. “What would it have hurt if me'n Tessa had been able to look at it betimes?” she thought bitterly.

  Una picked up the glowing brooch and pinned it into Tessa's heavy jacket—on the inside where no one could see—she patted the jacket.

  Mary was about to protest, when her mother reached into the tin again and pulled out two long hairpins. The wavy spikes were amber coloured, ending in miniature fans shaped from mother of pearl—it would be thirty years before Mary learned the name of the iridescent material. Una pushed the pins into Mary's thick hair, one on each side. Then her mother patted the pins, just as she had Tessa's jacket, in what might have been a blessing.

  Left at the bottom of the little box was a single button, silver with the outline of a large bird on its tarnished surface. Una Sprig picked up the button, rubbed it across her lips and put it back into the tin. She closed the lid, and, taking it over to the body, tucked the tin down inside the skin she had wound around her son. She picked up the small bundle, slowly carried it across to the hole she had dug, laid it in the ground and shovelled the dirt back over it.