Marilla of Green Gables

by Sarah McCoy

  “Congratulations!” John beamed.

  Marilla turned her face away to hide her welling tears. “It shouldn’t have been this way.”

  “What do you mean?” He laughed. “Of course it should!”

  He reached out to her and she bristled.

  “Don’t.”

  His arm fell and the flowers dangled upside down. “Marilla, I don’t understand.”

  Her finger smarted. She cupped her hands together to keep the pain from traveling to her head again. “Well, I’m sorry. I haven’t the time or energy to make you understand at the moment.”

  “But I—”

  “Please go,” she told him.

  He took a step forward, and she pulled back sharply. “Please.”

  His face changed from soft concern to a frown. He set the bouquet on the porch banister.

  “I only came to say how proud I am of you. You beat out Sam Coates and Clifford Sloane and all the naysayers. Mr. Murdock himself told me to congratulate you—and me. We did it together, Marilla.”

  She’d passed the exit exam? A swell of emotions spilled over. She wished her mother were there to hear the news. She wished she hadn’t treated John so harshly. She wished she had the words to tell him all that she felt. But it was like trying to fill a teaspoon from a waterfall. So her tongue stayed tied as he walked off the porch and down the lane, the dark curls of his head diminishing to a decimal point. When he finally vanished into the dip of the log bridge over the spring, Marilla took in the mayflowers, put them in a pitcher of water, and watched as their little star heads slowly lifted.

  Never mind today, she thought. There was no undoing the mistakes in it. But tomorrow was new with time aplenty to make things right.

  XIX.

  Avonlea Makes a Proclamation

  “There’s to be a town hall meeting tomorrow night,” Matthew said from behind the Royal Gazette.

  They were in the parlor. Hugh was having his nightly whiskey, while Marilla worked on her cotton warp quilt.

  “Aye, so I hear,” said Hugh.

  The front-page headline of Matthew’s paper read: “Lord Durham in Charlottetown on Royal Investigation of Rebellions.” Every village across Upper and Lower Canada had been issued an ordinance to prepare a representative statement regarding the political upheaval of the past year.

  “Councilor Cromie has promised to stay as long as it takes to hear every opinion. With the likes of the Whites in attendance, it’s going to be a long night.” Matthew chuckled.

  “Well, it’ll just have to get on without me.” Hugh stood and rubbed at some invisible ache in his arm.

  Marilla worried about her father. He pushed himself too hard on the farm and didn’t eat near as much as he used to. At first she’d taken it to heart—her cooking wasn’t right. But she’d been cooking the same for her family since before Clara died, so that reasoning didn’t hold water. As well, his hair had turned entirely gray in the last year, and his skin had dried crepey over his knuckles. He looked twice his age. She reckoned that, like herself, death had changed him. Talking about it wouldn’t change him back. So she let him be and simply put an extra pat of butter in his breakfast oats.

  Matthew lowered his paper. “You aren’t going to the meeting?”

  Hugh nodded. “I don’t believe in debating with the opposition. At the end, they’ll still stand on their side and we’ll stand on ours. Like two bulls pulling on opposite ends of a square knot. Just makes things tighter. Politics is a young man’s fancy. I’m set in my ways.”

  Marilla frowned. His words rang of fatalism, and despite her no-nonsense nature, she was covertly a hopeful spirit.

  “But your opinion would be calculated into the whole of Councilor Cromie’s proclamation. He’s sworn to report back to Queen Victoria the convictions of all of her royal subjects, not just those in attendance at the meetings,” she argued.

  Her outspokenness startled them.

  Since passing the exit exam, she’d felt a burgeoning confidence in using her abilities for more than just domestic duty. She’d been appraised beside her schoolmates—future men of Avonlea—and found equal, even smarter. There was power in knowledge. Like the gears of a steam engine, the more active knowledge was, the more force it produced.

  “If you be of a mind to go, Marilla, then you and Matthew can carry the Cuthberts of Prince Edward Island’s opinions to the councilor,” said Hugh. “I’m to bed now. G’night to ya both.”

  They wished him good-night.

  Matthew raised an eyebrow to her.

  “Either say what’s on your mind or go back to reading, but don’t sit there ogling me,” she said, not unkindly.

  He folded the newspaper. “I was over at the Blythes’ today helping Mr. Bell take ownership of a couple new cows.”

  The Bells’ farm was adjacent to Green Gables on the west side.

  “Spent some time talking with John while I was there.”

  “And?” She quickened the click of her needle loops.

  He cleared his throat but seemed to swallow the words before they came out. “He’ll be at the meeting tomorrow too.”

  Matthew rose and went out on the back porch to loudly suck his pipe.

  She hadn’t seen John for three weeks, not since the day the exit exam scores were posted. On the way back from town, she’d often thought about stopping by his house and had come up with half a dozen excuses to do so—from borrowing dough starter from his mother to returning one of their study books. Then she’d chastise herself: if John wanted to see her, he knew good and well where to find her. For her to seek him out wasn’t something proper young ladies did, and she was determined that although her mother wasn’t there to show her the ways of womanhood, she would grow up proper.

  She was glad to know that John would be at the town hall meeting. She cared for him more than any other boy in Avonlea. Besides Matthew, of course. Blood being thicker than water. If she couldn’t make John understand why she had acted the way she had, she hoped to at least show him that she wasn’t upset anymore. She stayed up later than usual that night, knitting her apple-leaf patches and stitching them together with the others. She might not have been as skilled as Rachel, but she gleaned great gratification from seeing a work come together nicely.

  Before the meeting the next day, she finally replied to Izzy. She wrote of her sewing project. It was a topic they could both take pleasure in while staying away from the ones that caused pain. Marilla decided it was the best way to begin their one-on-one correspondence. She also wrote about passing the exam, Lord Durham’s coming visit, and their cow Darling’s new calf, Starling. Mother and daughter were virtually indistinguishable: Darling and Starling. She ended the letter, quickly added a concise “Love, Marilla,” and then mailed it on the way to the meeting.

  Avonlea’s town hall was built in an odd place, too far off the beaten path from the rest of the municipal buildings, and on mired ground that had the consistency of sponge cake. Wagon wheels were perpetually getting stuck, and everyone knew where you’d been by the mud on your boots. Mrs. White said she had been “catastrophically against” the location. Marilla thought it odd for anyone to be so indignant over a plot of land.

  The Whites sat in the front row, with the Blythes directly behind them. Rachel turned to wave at Marilla when she and Matthew took their seats at the back of the crowded chamber. John’s head didn’t flinch.

  “We’re here to represent the family,” said Matthew, and by that he meant silent conservatism.

  Councilor Cromie took his chair at the front table, and the meeting came to order. The gathering swiftly grew from civil debate to grumblings to heads of families raising fists.

  “We should be faithful to God and country,” argued Mr. Murdock.

  “Silk-stockinged administrators holding power over the common man!” said Mr. Phillips. “With all due respect, it’s not as simple as ‘God and country.’ The people need a responsible government.”

  “What are you sugges
ting—a republic like America? Treasonous!” scoffed Mr. Sloane.

  “If it came to that, yes. The Tories fight for the old ways of sovereign rule, but the Reformers understand the complications of our modern politics,” Mr. Phillips continued.

  “I don’t see anything complicated in following the precepts of the Christian community,” said Mr. Murdock, sending Mrs. White into a tizzy in the front row.

  “As a Christian woman in this community, I’m tired of the Tories taking full ownership of our Lord Christ. Sacrilege!”

  “Reformer guilt,” someone jeered.

  Mrs. White stood straight up then and gave the gimlet eye to the whole of the crowd. “Care to say that to my face?”

  Mr. White pulled her down to sit.

  “God save the Tories, the Queen, and England!” shouted Mr. Blair.

  “God save the Reformers and the people of Canada!” Mr. Andrews retorted.

  Hostility lit the crowd like gunpowder.

  “I’d rather die than have the Tories tax my lands as they please, raise tariffs on our crops, and rule over us simply because they have titles and wealth. They see us as little more than peasants come to work the farms and send money back to their coffers!” said Mr. Phillips.

  “If discourse does not bring change, then liberal action is required,” added Mrs. White.

  “All four of my sons would fight to the death to uphold the government of the God-ordained royal family,” said Mrs. King, who played the organ at church. “The old ways are old for a reason: like the biblical commandments, they work!”

  “Now, now—order!” Councilor Cromie called. “Everyone!”

  Marilla sat beside Matthew with her chin tucked into her chest. How flippantly they spoke of death. Her mother was dead. Tory or Reformer didn’t matter when it came to the heart beating. These were her neighbors, the very people who’d come together beside her at her mother’s grave and held her upright. Now they threw hateful barbs at one another based on credos constructed by men who didn’t even live on Prince Edward Island and had no notion of their ways—old or new. Life as she knew it was unraveling beyond her control: her mother, Green Gables, John, Avonlea . . . the sum loss was too much for Marilla.

  She stood, heart clanging in her temples like cymbals.

  “I have something to say.”

  The Cuthberts hardly spoke in private, never mind in public. The crowd hushed. Every head turned toward her, including John’s.

  She gulped hard, but it was too late for silence. The words perched on the tip of her tongue.

  “I—we—the Cuthberts—have lost a great deal in the past year. I’m a God-fearing Presbyterian and a loyal subject of the Crown.” She sipped air and willed her thoughts steady. “Changes in Avonlea are going to come. Some for the better. Some for the worse. Some we won’t know, good or bad, until long after. Some we won’t ever know. I can’t say I understand why God saw fit to take my mother away. It’s changed my life. I look at the world differently now. Not as a child anymore. I see the morning sun, and I’m grateful for the people alive under it. You, neighbors, friends, and family, remain. I reckon we can disagree about a great many things, but we must find a way to be peaceable. Tory or Reformer, we are Avonleaers first. We must choose to compromise for the sake of our town and those in it. After God, loving thy neighbor is the greatest commandment, is it not? That’s what my father reads from the Gospel and what my mother believed.”

  Then she sat with her hand over her mouth. Shocked at the echo of her voice in the room.

  It was John who stood first and clapped. Marilla’s lips trembled.

  The applause gathered mass, reverberating through the town hall. People stomped their feet and cheered, “Hear, hear!”

  Matthew looked at her dumbfounded.

  She wished Councilor Cromie would hurry on with the official business.

  “I’ve said my piece,” she said to Matthew.

  “And more,” he replied.

  The hall was overly warm. Her vision began to blotch. She thought she might keel over. “I need fresh air.”

  Quietly, she exited out the back door while the town hall recorder took down the official statement dictation from Councilor Cromie.

  The lupines and June bells were in full bloom, lacing everything with the sweetness of honey even at night. The spring peepers in the pond chirped their song under the sky, cavernous and pulsating with stars. The distant forest was a blind spot in the nightscape, with Green Gables hidden somewhere in the folds between. She closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of sleeping clover fields and balsam firs.

  “‘To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene, where things that own not man’s dominion dwell, and mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been,’” she whispered. She enjoyed Lord Byron, despite the many who called him a heathen.

  “‘But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men, to hear, to see, to feel and to possess,’” quoted John.

  He’d followed her out and leaned against the side of the building.

  “From Shakespeare to Byron. You do impress.” Marilla smiled to see him.

  He came a step forward so that the starlight lit the grooves of his cheeks, the little pockmark at his temple, each whorl of his hair.

  “I can’t say ‘Solitude’ is my favorite poem. I prefer ‘She Walks in Beauty.’”

  Marilla blushed and was grateful for the darkness. “That’s an easy choice. I like the lesser-known verses. Their shine hasn’t been rubbed off from overuse.”

  She heard him laugh, though she couldn’t see it. He stood closer than the night let on.

  He took her hand, and she let him.

  “I liked what you said in there.”

  “When you asked me in the Agora, you didn’t give me time to think it over. I need time to think things over before I know my mind.”

  “That’s wise. But we don’t always have the time. Sometimes you just have to act. On a feeling.”

  She could smell the tobacco on his vest, peppermint on his lips.

  “We never spoke about—”

  “I know.” She cut him off. The past was done. There was no undoing. There was only now, with tomorrow fast approaching. “I’m sorry about the other week, John. I didn’t mean to be . . .” cold, cruel, angry, hurt, scared . . . “the way I was.”

  Sometimes, even after thinking over a thing, she still didn’t know the right words.

  He touched her cheek, drew her face up to his.

  “Marilla?” The doors of the town hall opened, light and voices spilling out.

  They separated.

  “Marilla?” It was Mrs. Blair. “There you are.” Seeing John, she cleared her throat. “I see young Mr. Blythe has found you first. Well, I hope you don’t mind if I borrow her for a moment. I have a proposition.”

  John tipped his cap. “Be seeing you,” he said to Marilla.

  She nodded and watched his figure evaporate into the night.

  Mrs. Blair took her arm with a good-naturedness that Marilla was unaccustomed to from the stern merchant. “The womenfolk of Avonlea have been discussing the formation of an official Ladies’ Aid Society, unassociated with any religious institution or political party. Currently, we have a diaspora of groups, from the Presbyterian Sunday school to the mission’s aid run by the nuns to a wide net of sewing circles and everything in between. So many branches collecting funds in support of worthy charities. How much stronger could we be in helping the poor and unfortunate if we united? The Avonlea Ladies’ Aid Society would bring us together for the greater Avonlea—as you so astutely said in the meeting. We could use a powerful voice like yours to lead.”

  Marilla shook her head. Mrs. White was the leader of the Sunday school and sewing circle. She couldn’t usurp the older woman’s position. While Marilla didn’t agree with the Whites’ politics, she was loyal to Rachel and her family, who had always been so kind.

  “I thank you, Mrs. Blair, but Mrs. White would be a better candidate.”

  “Euge
nia White can retain supervision of her individual flocks, but we need someone young and spirited.”

  “Well said in there, Marilla.” Mr. Blair came to his wife’s side.

  The rest of the town exited the hall. Couples clumped together in discussion while ambling slowly toward their homesteads. Their chatter drifted on the night breeze.

  “We best be going,” said Mrs. Blair. “But I hope your answer is yes.”

  Matthew was the last one standing in the soft circle glow of the building’s lanterns. Hands in pockets and cap pulled down over his eyes, she couldn’t read his countenance.

  She came closer until he saw her and gave a shy smile. He offered the crook of his arm and she threaded hers through.

  “Proud of you,” he said.

  “I guess I’ve broken the curse of the Cuthbert tongue.”

  He nodded. “If somebody was going to, you’d be the one.”

  She squeezed his arm. It felt wholly good—this moment—like awakening in the dark to the comfort of moonlight.

  “Let’s get home to Green Gables,” she said, and they walked home arm and arm, without a word passing between.

  XX.

  First Vote of the Ladies’ Aid Society

  June arrived in a torrential downpour of sunshine. Everyone in Avonlea was outside, drinking in the light like parched castaways on a deserted island.

  The first meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society was held at Green Gables. Marilla had never been the hostess of such a large gathering. She had to borrow chairs from Mrs. White, who loaned Marilla her best from her own dining room set. No one could dare say she was begrudging about not being asked to lead the new collaboration. However, Rachel confessed that when Mrs. Blair told her the news of Marilla’s appointment, Mrs. White had screwed up her nose and nearly set to fulminating. But Mrs. Patterson had been in agreement, and Mrs. White would not speak a word in opposition to the Reverend’s wife. So Mrs. White had swallowed her steam and said she would gladly mentor Marilla in the ways of charity administration. And so, having taken Marilla under her wing, she made good on her word. Marilla was grateful.