The Incomers

by Moira McPartlin

  Ellie shakes her head. ‘This is nonsense; you must know to never do this — tinkering with the spirits. What would your parents say if they knew? You have no idea what you are doing.’

  She can see by the smirk that now appears on Carol’s face that her words have fallen among the thorns, never to be picked up.

  ‘My village has a sorcerer, but believers and non-believers will not cross him. He knows how to talk to the sprits, little girls do not.’ Even as the words leave her throat she can feel them lose their bite as they fly to the girls ears.

  The big girl, Carol, steps forwards at this and seems to have forgotten her escape.

  ‘Dae ye ken him then? This sorcerer? Does he put spells on people? Is it true that ye’re a witch?’

  Ellie wishes to cut her own tongue out. She should not have mentioned the sorcerer.

  ‘It is all nonsense. It must be ignored. Your priest will not be happy.’

  ‘You’ve changed yer tune, one minute it’s aw sorcerers and now it’s the priest. Make yer mind up.’

  Ellie wishes that the priest had caught the girls when he was out walking his dog. He would have burned them alive if he had.

  ‘Go home, little girls, and play with your dolls.’

  ‘Voodoo dolls, ye mean?’ Carol says, digging Mary in the ribs. Mary giggles.

  Ellie can feel her feet itch to be away from these silly children. They are more dangerous than the spirits they are playing with.

  ‘Go home, you do not belong in these woods, your parents will not like it.’

  Carol stands in front of Ellie, and for the first time she realises that this child is almost as tall as she and looks much stronger.

  ‘Why can’t we play in the wids if we want tae? We’ve played here afore you came and we’ll play when ye’re gone.’

  The way the words spit out of this child’s mouth hits Ellie like a threat.

  ‘You dinnae even belong here,’ Carol finishes with a swing of her bag. She plumps back on the grass pulling Mary down with her.

  ‘Come on, Mary,’ she says. ‘We’ll finish oor game. Ah’m not takin’ a telling fae that black witch.’

  Mary is now nodding in humble agreement, and Ellie’s blood is so hot in her veins that she forgets to point out to the pair that Mary and Ellie had arrived in this village about the same time. But she does not know how to answer the challenge either so she walks away further into the forest where she knows they will not follow her for fear of the fabled Flannel Foot. While these silly girls are not afraid of spirits, they are afraid of a mythical creature called Flannel Foot given to them by their parents to scare them away from the depths of these woods.

  Giggles follow Ellie into the deep wood, but she knows she is free of their physical presence. How could she have imagined Mary could be her friend? Carol has control over part of the girl and her parents control the rest. Ellie witnessed a spark of defiance the day Mary wiped the ashes from her brow, but that spark flares and dies under the slavery of conformity. The girl needs to learn to break free. Despite Ellie’s desire to help she knows it is too dangerous for her and her son. She will keep her head down. The birds are quiet again and the air is filled with expectation. A Harmattan-like chill breezes over Ellie and she shivers.

  She tries to forget the encounter and thinks of her task. The baby is quiet behind her. She knows he does not sleep by the small grinding noises he makes with his new teeth. He talks to her and his surroundings in his own language that she understands is full of love and reassurance.

  Some of the seeds Mr Winski had suggested Ellie buy from Woolworths had survived the frost but were babies still. They will not be ready for harvest until two new moons have passed. Mrs Watson’s book describes to Ellie a good salad weed called burnet, and Ellie remembers the picture and knows where she can find some.

  The forest is leading her on with its silence and peaceful embrace, gaps appear between branches exposing footways she has not noticed before, opening wide and saying, ‘Come in, Ellie, we have food for you in here.’

  She passes the log where she encountered Mr Winski’s pain. From here she can see the grass surrounding the site is overgrown but parts have been trampled as if walked on where it never has been before. Perhaps a large animal. She has noticed a red and white sign on the road next to the church, showing a deer running. Ellie thinks these deer live in this forest as well as in the estate.

  When she reaches the flattened grass she sees that an animal would not disturb so much foliage. A curtain of tall bushes with large purple flowers frames a path of broken and bruised branches. The path beckons Ellie, her instincts tell her she must be careful, but the devil on her shoulder urges her to go on. She ignores her instincts as she has many times in the past. Maybe she will find a new plant she can add to her potions. But as Ellie proceeds through the bushes she wishes she had not listened to her devil. The hair on her arms prickle and itch, and her mouth is dry with fear.

  She places her hand around her back to reassure Nat that she is okay, but she can feel the rhythmic breaths of his slumber. Branches grab at her hair, often catching and refusing for a moment to let her go. She wants to turn back, but her feet continue to move her forward. She hears a squabble of the crows, and when she pulls back a branch many black wings flash upwards before settling on a tree.

  She sees the feet first, suspended some inches from the ground. Black work boots polished to army standard, with smart heels that had clicked together when she last saw them. This is why the forest led her here. A latrine smell reaches her nostrils before the smell of death. As she walks to the tree, a cloud of buzzing flies lift from the suspended corpse. Ellie does not want to look at the face of this poor man, the crows will have feasted on their delicacy of eyes and the flies will have filled the cavities with their next generation.

  It is not as if she has not seen a hanging man before, but she has never seen a ripe one. The swollen face brings the memory back to her. An elder in her village threw his cloth over a tree and hung himself when the gods refused to give him a good harvest. These things were common when she was a girl, despite the church’s teachings.

  Ellie is surprised she can look on this sight without horror. What she feels is sadness that Mr Winski has chosen to end his torment in this most final of ways. She hopes that when his remains are put safely to rest, he too will find peace.

  Before Ellie leaves the site she bows her head and recites a prayer without knowing whether it is appropriate or not in this situation. She notices the duffle bag lying beside a log. The ground before the log bears a trail of damaged earth; this log has been dragged from another place. This log he used to stand on to bear his weight until he chose the moment to take control of his life and his death and kick it away. The duffle bag would have held the rope, this she now knows. He had passed her door with this bag before.

  How many times had he walked past her door on his mission and returned home unable to complete it? This is no lynching or cry for help. This time there is no aborted attempt; he did not intend to be found or stopped. Her medical training tells her he has not been dead long, perhaps a day. Ellie knows she cannot cut him down and James has returned this day to Glasgow. The priest will know what to do next, she will fetch the priest, but she does not want to leave the corpse – it does not seem right. He hangs so still and yet Ellie knows as soon as she turns her back the crows will resume their feast.

  Two rustle in a nearby tree, waiting. They always wait in pairs, these black scavengers. She wishes she were taller, stronger, to be able to reach and cut him down. When she was a young girl she could climb trees like a warrior. Her limbs had been long and thin as the tree itself. But she had stopped growing before her first bleeding time, and her thin limbs were filled with fat and could no longer carry her up a tree. Also, she did not want Nat to see. Even though he is too young for understanding, the sight is not good.

  Her baby fits so neatly into the curve of her back. Like one of her limbs, often she forgets he is t
here, were it not for the occasional massage he makes with his forehead between her shoulders.

  ‘Farewell my friend, I will get someone to look after you.’ She is nearer the big hoose, but she knows the priest’s help will be better. He might even be able to give the last sacrament, if that is permitted for someone who has committed such a mortal sin as to take their own life. She is certain Mr Winski’s troubled soul has long left his body behind, but it would be a comfort to his wife.

  The thought of his wife fills Ellie with a sense of urgency. She must be worried to sickness. Ellie picks up the hem of her skirt and runs through the woods. She arrives at the nuns’ graves in minutes and arrives so abruptly those little girls have no opportunity to hide their evil game again. Ellie does not stop to admonish them, let them call up the devil if they please for he has already done his worst today. The priest will deal with these children if they remain. That would be punishment enough.

  ‘What is it, Ellie?’ She hears Mary’s voice.

  ‘Nothing — no, the baby is ill,’ she calls back, for she does not want them venturing where they should best avoid.

  Ellie runs to the crumbling house at the edge of the wood where she knows the priest lives. The peeling paint door she hammers on is opened by a man-woman. Ellie recognises her from the church as Aggie Aitkin, ‘the housekeeper.’ She is normally found bustling around the edges of the altar steps, no doubt wishing she were a man and permitted to step where women are forbidden. Ellie thinks she is halfway there; she looks like a man with her wire-strength grey curls and sprouting face hair.

  ‘The Father, he must come quick.’

  ‘Father Grattan is busy just now.’

  ‘Tell him, tell him he must come with me now,’ she pleads, but even as the words leave her throat she can see the pursed lips of one who loses her water when she coughs. This man-woman is not going to help her.

  Ellie steps back into the path and shrieks as she used to call her father from his yam field. She does not know which room the priest will emerge from but she knows her call will bring him.

  Somewhere in the house a dog barks.

  ‘For goodness sake!’ The man-woman tuts. ‘Such an exhibition. Ah’ll fetch him,’ she says before closing the door against Ellie’s presence.

  In less than a minute the door opens and the priest steps out while shrugging on his jacket. ‘What is it, Ellie?’

  ‘You must come with me.’ Ellie is aware the man-woman watches. She does not want this news to race through the village like a bush fire.

  ‘There has been an accident in the woods. You will need your knife.’

  The priest’s eyebrows rise to his hairline then join in worry. He knows, she thinks. Maybe this happens in these woods before.

  Father Grattan turns into the kitchen and grabs a packet of cigarettes and a box of Swan Vestas from the counter and a pen knife from a drawer by the door.

  ‘Let’s go, show me the way.’ Then he turns. ‘Aggie, phone for the doctor.’

  ‘And the constable,’ Ellie adds.

  ‘Is that right, Father?’ the man-woman queries Ellie’s command.

  ‘Yes, get the police, we’ll be back soon.’

  The girls leave only a patch of flattened grass which Ellie does not point out to the priest. They will receive their punishment elsewhere.

  The birds scatter on their arrival at the hanging tree. Mr Winski looks almost the same, but the white mark a bird has left on his polished boot turns Ellie’s sadness into tears.

  ‘Poor bugger,’ Father Grattan says. ‘Look, I’m not going to be able to cut him down on my own, Ellie. Can you go back and fetch the police and the doctor and bring them here? I will wait and keep the birds at bay.’

  This time Ellie is content to leave Mr Winski in good hands.

  The thoughts of her husband’s broken promise to take Nat to Perth, her family’s plight and the dead seedlings have faded with the intense pain Ellie feels for Mr Winski. As she sits at the kitchen table and relays the day’s events to her husband Ellie feels numbness she has never experienced before. Her husband’s face shows shock but little compassion. He does not even want to try to understand this poor man’s horrors.

  ‘There is nothing you could have done to help him. He was always a bit weird, everyone knew that.’ And with that the subject is dismissed. Weird. This word, used by children and men.

  The Pairty Line

  ‘Did ye hear aboot the Pole?’

  ‘Aye, fund hingin’ in the wids, been missing fur days apparently. Ye cannae help but wonder aboot these foreigners eh?’

  ‘Awful business, but did ye hear who fund um?’

  ‘It wis that big coon, wisn’t it? A bit o’ a turn up that, eh?’

  ‘Can ye hear sumthing?’

  ‘Aye, possibly, whit is it? The pairty line?’

  ‘Thur ayeweys listenin’ in these days – get aff the fucking line, ya nosy bitch.’

  ‘How dae ye ken it’s a wumman?’

  ‘A jist dae.’

  ‘How’re ye feelin onyweys?’

  ‘Aw right, guid days an’ bad days, ye ken?’

  ‘It must be hard. How’s yir man taking it?’

  ‘Well, that’s another story, eh? — Did ah no say git aff the fucking line?’

  ‘That them gone then?’

  ‘Ah think so. Look, ah’m away fur a lie doon – ah’m fair worn oot.’

  ‘You dae that, hen, ah’ll ca’ ye later.’

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Every day Ellie walks up the estate path to the church to look for an intimation of Mr Winski’s funeral. It does not appear. She does not know what happened to his body that day after the constable was sick in the bushes and Doctor Hurry pronounced the body dead. The authorities sent her home and told her ‘her services were no longer required.’

  ‘Could you ask the Father about Mr Winski’s body?’ Ellie asks James at breakfast.

  ‘Look Ellie, this is none of our business. You should forget it. I bet the villagers have, it will be like the newspaper in the chip shop - old news. They will have moved on to someone else to talk about.’ He reaches over and takes her hand. ‘You just have to hope it isn’t you.’

  ‘What if he has to be buried in unblessed ground?’

  ‘I don’t think they do that any more. We don’t live in the dark ages, you know.’

  Images from her dreams follow Ellie into daytime. The shoe with the white bird-dropping comes into focus before the feet begin to swing. Often Ellie wakes in the night and smells the familiar smell of death. It is a dream, she knows this, but the smell of death remains in her nostrils, and each time it occurs she rushes to Nat’s room to check he is still breathing.

  What worries her most in these waking hours is this poor man’s burial. She hopes he has been taken to his motherland. He should be buried in his motherland.

  If Ellie were to die here on this foreign ground, would James take the trouble to transport her back to her land? She must remember to ask him. It would be good to have the warm red earth cover her body. With these thoughts Ellie feels the tightness in her chest and the smell of mother replaces death, and she does not feel well again until she is in bed and turns her body to cradle into James’s back, to feel his warmth and try to be safe.

  In the weeks after the incident, the few times Ellie is in her garden, when a shadow passes over her, she looks up expecting to see Mr Winski walking by, lifting his cap and clicking his heels. She knows that in her time at the witch’s hat house she exchanged only a few words with him, but in that time she felt a kinship.

  Each day brings warmer weather and yet Ellie finds it harder to raise herself out of bed in the mornings. James wakes first and expects his porridge to be on the table. She drags herself from the covers and pads through to the kitchen. The baby is chattering to himself in his cot, he is such a good boy, she will leave him there for a little while longer, he does not seem to mind his wet nappy too much.

  After she watches James leave
the house she crawls back into the cooling bed and pulls the covers over her head. Often it is not until Nat is screaming that she can summon enough energy to stand and face the day. By this time Nat’s nappy is so heavy with urine it hangs to his knees. A nappy rash blazes hot and sore all over his bottom and although she smothers this with cream, it does not clear up.

  This laziness must stop, Ellie tells herself every day.

  Almost two weeks after her terrible discovery in the woods, Ellie sits in her chair with the red check cushion and stares out of the kitchen window while the baby naps. The robin still visits the window ledge in the hope of a scattering of oats but Ellie does not just neglect her family, she has not put any oats out for days. This little bird will desert her soon, she thinks, if she does not do something. She only has to rise from her chair and go to the cupboard and step out the back door, but her arms are too heavy to lift herself and her feet are nailed to the floor.

  The sky is blue, it has not rained for over a week and although the kitchen is cool, Ellie knows that it will be warmer outside. She thinks about her plants and it occurs to her that she has not been out of her back door for over a week. The weeds are sure to be taking advantage of her neglect.

  The gate creaks; James has still not fixed it, and the oil she used has dried. She has lost the will to ask him again, it can hang from its hinges for all she cares now.

  There is a tap at her door. It will not be Mrs Watson because she is overseas with the Fairbairns. It will not be Dod, he never disturbs her. Like a spirit from the forest, he leaves his gifts for her on the coal bunker.

  The knock sounds louder the second time, persistent. As if whoever stands on the other side of the door knows Ellie is in here and will not take no for an answer. Ellie presses her palms into her chair and hoists herself up.

  A head appears at the window, a small neat head with searching eyes. It is Mrs Winski. The heart in Ellie’s chest thumps louder than it has for a long time. Since that terrible day Ellie had not thought about Mrs Winski; she had been too busy feeling sorry for herself. Now here is the widow at her kitchen door and Ellie does not know what to say to her.