Grist

by Linda Little

  His outbursts, though fierce, were set in a bleak landscape of silence. He seldom slept but slipped into bouts of unresponsiveness. Sometimes when I approached, his eyes had glassed over so wholly I was seized by the fear that he had died and had been lying here a cooling corpse as I went about my work. I would rush to touch him, feel the life in his skin and he, roused from his comatose state, would rage. “I never saw a woman sleep so much as you.”

  Abby came down with baby Lily and little Nancy Ann. She nestled the baby in my arms and unwrapped the dishtowel protecting warm sweet buns that released a bloom of cinnamon that nearly made me cry with the comfort.

  “Don’t you worry now. Dr. Thomas is not like a lot of them. I’m not saying he doesn’t do his share of clucking and rubbing his chin and charging you two months’ egg money for the joy of watching him, but he’s a fine bonesetter. His father was a bonesetter in Wales. Did you know that? So he learned the trade proper before any of that other poking and prodding and whatnot. Well, you know Jake Hollis. He broke his arm as a young fellow. You’d never know that today, would you? And Joe-Iron MacDonald with his leg—not even a limp. And Belle Matheson had two fingers set. And that fellow down by the ford, oh there’s no end to the folks Dr. Thomas has fixed up their bones strong as new.”

  Abby had us all settled at buns and butter and tea in no time. She carried Ewan’s in to him before I realized she had done it. Truth was, once I settled at the table with Abby’s baby, with the toddler at my feet and Abby bustling with such constancy and confidence behind me, exhaustion descended in a dead weight on my shoulders and I could not have faced him.

  “Where’s my wife?” The demand filled the kitchen. I stiffened. Abby’s response was too muted to make out but it sounded cheerful enough. And before I could pry myself off the chair Abby was back.

  “Don’t get up, my dear. He’s right as rain.” She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Men. They’re worse than youngsters when they’re sick.” She laughed and added, “Sometimes even when they’re not sick!”

  I listened for the crack of the plate against the wall but it did not come. I cringed in anticipation of one of his cruel outbursts but perhaps he was aware enough of outside company to restrain himself.

  “He hollers out, and will hardly eat a thing. Sometimes he says things…” I whispered, desperate to confide but horrified by the betrayal of relating Ewan’s wild behaviour.

  Abby set off into a peel of laughter. “See? Sounds like a babe to me! He’s only blowing the poison out of his system. Spouting like a whale. Don’t you take mind of anything he says now. You just tend to your work, talk cheerful to him and laugh at what he answers you—like it’s all jokes and fun.” She nestled in beside me and squeezed my shoulder, whispering now. “He’s going to be fine. All the men are like that. You know we can no more pass our patience over to the men than they can pass the strength of their backs over to us. They can’t help it any more than we can.”

  Then Abby was up and at the firebox with the poker, her voice back to its cheery normal. “Tea, buns and a nap is what’s for you, my girl. Me and the babies are here to see you get it before we go home again.”

  “FILL THE WOOD BOX,” HE HOLLERED IN MY FACE WHEN I BROUGHT in his supper. “It’s all but empty. Nothing but chips!”

  I retreated and brought in an armload, but it did little to appease him.

  “There’s not more than seven sticks in that wood box! Six more likely.”

  Perhaps physical distance gave me courage, perhaps exhaustion eroded my better intentions. My hurt flared to anger. “How would you know? You can’t see around corners!”

  “Count them,” he demanded. “How many?”

  There were six. I moved several sticks heavily in the box, then moved them again making the box sound full.

  “Fourteen!”

  “Liar!”

  He had been counting every armload in from the shed, every soft clunk into the firebox. For days, I suppose. Likely every footstep as well, every moment I sat in a chair, every click of a spoon on a pot. Keeping track—the empty box weighing on his mind always.

  “Fill the box!”

  “I’ll fill it when I want!” Even as I spoke I was shamed by my childishness, my fatigue, my inability to follow Abby’s wise advice. But even ashamed I remained stubbornly unrepentant. Angry. “There’s fourteen sticks,” I repeated. “Three quarters full.”

  I stalked to the bedroom door intending to shut it tight, but Ewan, goaded on by my childishness, lunged sideways as if to stand. He twisted, half caught himself on outstretched hands as he hurled to the floor. The splinted leg, a beast with its own will, gathered momentum and followed his torso out of bed. The leg clattered down on top of him. He cried out once in pain then lay silent and still where he had fallen. I ran to him, shrieked at the contorted huddle on the floor. I knelt beside him, reached out gingerly to touch him and saw his face streaked with tears of frustration.

  “Ewan,” I whispered. “It’s all right. Sh-sh now, don’t cry. It’s all right now.”

  I had to fetch Mrs. Cunningham to help me heft him back into bed, limp as a sack of corn. When I brought him a mug of tea he turned his face to the wall and would not eat or drink or speak for the rest of the day. I filled the wood box to overflowing. When daylight slipped away and I appeared with a lamp he spoke his first words since his outburst. “No light.”

  “Ewan, you must have a lamp. I thought perhaps I could sit a while and read to you. A piece from the Bible maybe. Or Oliver Evans, if you like.”

  “Leave me.”

  That night I crawled upstairs and sat by our bed numb from desperation. I found myself staring at the empty spot where Ewan would kneel for his nightly prayers and I knew the place must be filled. I crossed the room and sank down, clasping my hands and reproducing the words he might have said as closely as I could imagine them. Praying for my husband. “Our Father who art in heaven … make my wife diligent. Make her exalt Thee with her labour. Make her worthy of Thy blessing. Forgive her her trespasses.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  EWAN

  THE NIGHT SILENCE PRESSED IN ON HIM AS HE LAY IN the room off the kitchen, his body submerged in pain, his leg throbbing. He shunned the candle, preferring to hide in the dark. Ewan’s own father had died of a broken leg—suffered blood loss, then infection and fever. How did your father die, his wife had once asked. He was felled by a tree, he had said. Where was the point in yattering on? Gone is gone.

  In fact, a sudden gust and a bounce off a snag and his father had been pinned, his leg crushed by a great hemlock. Ewan’s brother had run for help and it had taken six men to lift the tree to free him they said. The men carried him home. Ewan and the younger children had been at school and arrived home just as the wretched procession was making its way across the barnyard. Ewan stood there chewing on his mitten as the troop of men passed in front of him. He remembered the parallel poles of the approaching stretcher. There was blood and—he was sure he had seen this, visible in the slanting afternoon light—jagged bone poking up. He did not remember his father’s face. He remembered the terrified silence of the house and the barred door of the bedroom where his father lay. Children were banished, questions forbidden.

  EWAN HAD NO MEMORY THAT PREDATED HIS PLACE IN THE mill—the broom, sacks, barrels, the warm smell of smoky wool when he buried his nose in the crook of his arm, the way the dust settled like a fine mist on his eyelashes and the fine hairs of his arms—all these things had always been. There must have been a first time Ewan had raised the sluice gate in the flume but he had no memory of a time before he knew the raspy slide of the little door within its wooden track. There was no time he could not hunker down by the edge of the millpond and scoop up a pail of water. Always he had shovelled oat husks into sacks as large as himself but still light enough to drag out of the mill and up the steps to the waiting cart. His first clear memory was of scooping up a small sack of fine white flour for a man in a shirt wit
h a collar. His father took the sack from Ewan and was tying it up when the man turned and appeared to address Ewan himself.

  “And how is Mr. Dusty today?”

  The man stared right at him. Ewan looked around. There was no one else. Ewan knew the answer to the question “How are you?” because his mother had told him the answer. It wasn’t a real question like other questions; it was just to see if a person knew their manners. The proper answer was “Fine thank you, ma’am,” or “Fine thank you, sir.” But Ewan did not understand who Mr. Dusty was or why the man had mistaken Ewan for him.

  “I’m not Mr. Dusty. My name is Ewan MacLaughlin,” he said.

  In his memory there were people everywhere all of a sudden, just like in a dream, looking at him and all laughing for no reason that Ewan could see. Farmers laughing. Everyone, even his own father, laughing at him. And there he stood, confused, with a gurgly feeling in his stomach.

  Ewan could never tell when laughing would start: at school, at the mill, anywhere. Sometimes people laughed at a lie, sometimes at a truth. Sometimes people laughed when things did not go as they ought. Or sometimes if things went exactly as hoped for. Ewan tried to categorize and predict but still laughter caught him by surprise. One day a boy or girl might speak to him as though they were friends but then the next they could as easily turn on him, their laughing mean. Ewan wanted predictability. He wanted the world to unfold as expected.

  He was not like his brothers Sander and Hector who were always anxious for things to go askew. In the winter they stole each other’s mitts and filled them with snow; in the summer they wrestled in the millpond, each trying to manoeuvre the other’s head below the surface, half drowning each other. One brother would burst to the surface gasping and furious. Hacking and red-faced he would lunge at his tormentor who would take off up the bank laughing like a maniac, keeping several paces ahead of the breathless pursuer. Then at the next opportunity they would be back at the game again. Once they rigged a pulley in the barn and hoisted the young calves into the mow. One toppled off the platform, broke its back and had to be slaughtered. Despite the loss of a good calf and the whippings, that night in bed they brushed their welts with their fingertips and laughed themselves silly. They hoarded little piles of pebbles around the mill and barn to ambush the squirrels and birds in the trees. They kept up a running competition with an inconsistent and illogical scoring system recorded in notches on a barn beam. The tally did little to record hits and kills but rather evoked the kinds of sabotage and squabbling they both delighted in. Their tussling braided into their laughter and back out again. Ewan watched. He worked and he waited.

  The shirts and trousers that Sander and Hector did not wear out came down, in time, to him. He loved the way these hand-me-downs enveloped him with the essence of his brothers. He rubbed his hands up and down the length of the sleeves and along the thighs of the trouser legs trying to absorb his brothers out of their clothing. Perhaps the intricate warp and weave held the secret information. How could they speak so easily about nothing at all and end up happy? How could they carry on so foolishly, tightly together, until they looked like two halves of the same animal? They could bump shoulders or hips or grab the other by the back of the neck with no more notice than scratching their own elbows. Ewan kneeled by his bed saying his prayers as he had been taught.

  Hector slipped up behind him and pressed his hand down on Ewan’s head until it hurt. “Offer your labours to the Lord,” Hector said, rolling his R’s ridiculously in imitation of the minister. “What have you done today with the hands God gave you?”

  Sander climbed onto the bed and hiked his nightshirt up to his waist, “Oh Lord, I have pulled the blessed bone You gave me until it gushed forth in a mighty froth. Glory be to the Almighty!” Hector strutted across the room. “Oh heavenly angels, spread your wings for me!” Hector and Sander laughed until they held their sides and tears ran down their cheeks. Ewan crawled into bed and pulled the covers over his head. He closed his eyes and listed his chores silently to God.

  When Ewan was twelve years old he had been whipped in school for idling, for daydreaming. He was to have been writing a composition about the Lancasters and the Yorks. But two rows behind him the boys in the upper class were being introduced to the principles of geometry and Ewan could not keep his ears to himself. Geometry—the word itself sounded like a magical incantation. A point. A line. Common words, yes, but Master was transforming them into tools to unearth some deeper meaning. No previous teacher had ever spoken like this, Ewan was sure of it. But this schoolmaster was exceptional. Master had been to school in Edinburgh. In addition to his regular teaching duties he offered lessons in Latin and navigation on Saturday afternoons for an additional fee. There were vague claims he had been an adventurer of some sort. In Africa perhaps. Rumour had it he was convalescing from some condition not spoken of. The left side of his mouth he propped up in a permanent sardonic smile at once inviting and dangerous. He amused at least himself with his rhetoric and most of the time seemed on the verge of some hilarity discernible only to the most sophisticated, or such was the tacit message. Half the population thought him ridiculous and good for nothing more than teaching, and the other half fought to feed him Sunday dinner and hear him string his lovely words together and imagine all the things their sons might learn from him. At school Master goaded and bullied with apparent good humour, his perpetual smirk interrupted by occasional terrifying flashes of temper.

  “A circle is a set of points equidistant from a given point,” Master declared. Ewan teased these words, turning them over in his mind, trying to decipher them. A point? A point. He had seen his father attach a string to a nail to draw a circle on a board. Ewan had done this himself and had admired the perfect circle. Did the master mean the point was the point of the nail? And equal distance? He marked a dot in his copybook, drew a crude circle around it, imagining a string to steady his hand. He drew in one tentative radius. Every radius must be exactly this length. A string would make it so. Of course he had known how this worked but now he saw why it worked. Behind him the master continued with his lesson.

  “A perfect circle exists only in space, gentlemen. Geometry is an art of the mind. It lives with God in a realm of metaphysics that few of you cherished sons of stone and lichen will ever glimpse. Nevertheless, feed upon this pearl, my churlish charges…”

  A perfect circle exists only in space. In the air? Ewan struggled to follow the master’s ongoing instructions. Fix upon a point in space. Ewan was unsure but focused on the upper right corner of the framed portrait of the Queen. Now, envision all points that are exactly one foot from it. When he pictured it, the circle emerged perfect and precise in his mind. He imagined another—two concentric circles. Exquisite. He drew a second wobbly circle in his copybook and stared hard at its obvious lopsidedness. But the master was right. Even if he had a nail and string the result would only be better, not perfect. When Ewan raised his eyes again all of creation lifted off the page. His scalp tingled, he felt lightheaded, his breath stilled in his body. Yes. A circle was an idea. Any drawn shape was only a crude representation. The beauty of the perfect idea welled up underneath his heart like a moth fluttering its wings. That he might have seen and used and identified circles and never have understood their essence, their perfection, struck him as profoundly sad and it seemed a matter of extraordinary luck that he had stumbled across this information. Ewan’s heart beat faster, a breeze passed through him blowing bits of his insides up into swirls. A line is the shortest distance between two points. Yes, exactly. He stared at the window, a rectangle. Where the sun slanted across the floorboards, a triangle. The corner of the room where two walls met the ceiling, the desks, the slates, the water bucket—all shapes fashioned in the image of a mathematical ideal. The globe of the world sat on its own special table by the window. Ewan stared, his fresh understanding enveloping it. Turn a circle in the air and it becomes a ball with a single, dead centre point deep inside—all points in every direc
tion equal distance from a given point.

  Gradually Ewan became aware of a vague whistling and laughter all around him. Master stood beside Ewan’s desk, with his arms folded, bouncing on the balls of his feet and looking about, whistling as though he had not a care in the world other than to pass the time ’til supper. All the children stared, giggling, waiting for Ewan to notice he was being made the centre of attention. Ewan looked up, his face burning.

  “Oh look, children, Master MacLaughlin has returned from his fantastical cerebral ramblings. With all this time for leisure perhaps, young sir, you would like to read out your composition for us all to enjoy? I am sure that with all your contemplations it must be an excellent one.”

  Ewan sat frozen.

  “No? Well, let me see.” The master held up Ewan’s copybook, soiled with two lopsided circles but not a single word beyond the title. “Now don’t be fooled, scholars. What we have here is a cunning visual representation of the two warring houses of England. But which wayward circle do you suppose, children, is meant to be the ‘rose’ of the Yorks and which to be of the unfortunate Lancasters? Which is meant to be white and which red? It is in this distinction that we will discover the thrust of this young philosopher’s argument.” The children readily joined in the mockery, relieved not to be the butt of scorn themselves. The master built their laughter to its apex then turned suddenly, slamming his fist on the desk, inches away from Ewan, his face black with anger. He abandoned his terrified pupils amid the very laughter he had engendered, turned on his heel and stalked to the front of the class where he grabbed the switch that stood in the corner. “Ewan MacLaughlin, come here.”