Grist

by Linda Little

  “Ewan, for heaven’s sake. You deliberately misunderstand me.”

  “You imagine your sons growing up soft and womanish without ever knowing the shame of sweat or calloused hands—never knowing the shame of their father’s work!”

  “Stop, Ewan, you know that’s not true. I was only saying there’s no reason you should be held back by a wife and a baby or two. We could manage. The farm and the mill both produce an income. You could do the work you love. You could follow your true vocation.”

  “My vocation is as a miller. As my father’s was. As my sons’ will be.”

  “Tell me this then. If God wanted you to be a miller all your life why did He give you the mind of an engineer?”

  “The first three boys go to the mill! If God had wanted me for an engineer He would not have sent me to be the third-born son. He sent me to be a miller and He will send me sons who will be millers.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t confused God’s Law with your mother’s law?”

  He was on his feet now, enraged. And I knew I had gone too far. Daisy clung to my skirts, whimpering in fear.

  “Three sons,” he said, leaving the words frozen in the air. Then he was gone and our Sunday lay in ruins. He would remain angry for days, perhaps weeks now. And I was to be left with this time for contrition and regret, or so my husband would suppose. He would turn directly to God to support his notions, leaving me disarmed. I heard him at his appeals before bed and set out to meet him on the same battleground.

  “Holy Father, make me worthy of Thy service. Take the labour of my hands and bless us as we labour in Your glory. Lord, forgive my wife her temptations and evil thoughts. Make her diligent; heal her of her sloth and her pride and make her deserving of Your blessings. Oh Lord, send me a son to carry on Your holy work according to Thy will. For Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

  “Our Father who art in heaven. Thank you for this wonderful day, our home, our hearth, our health. I thank You for our wonderful little daughter and ask You to guide my hand and my heart in the raising of her. I pray you open my husband’s heart and his mind to the possibilities of Your wondrous world, to help him raise his eyes above the labours of his trade and see the miracles of Your creation. Send him patience and wisdom. Above all I ask for the blessing of another child.”

  “Holy Father, accept the labour of my hands as I work in Your service. Forgive the indulgences of my wife. Forgive her her trespasses, keep her hands from idleness, and make her worthy of the blessing of a son. Make her humble and obedient to Thy will. Take my labour as an offering of contrition for her headstrong notions. Bless me with a son…”

  “Oh Lord, please give my husband the wisdom to moderate his excesses, to see the beauty and diversity in Your divine plan…”

  And so it went. But duelling vespers was a game I could not win. My prayers had not the slightest impact on Ewan except to highlight further my shortcomings. Ultimately it was me who suffered from the nightly barrage of imagined sins, unfair criticism and worst of all the insidious repetition that my behaviour was to blame for my empty womb. Like water on stone, as they say, wearing away, drip, drip, drip.

  Then Ewan received a letter from a miller in King’s Cove craving his expertise. The man had a wheel that needed replacing as the one he had had never been exactly fit. Also he wanted Ewan to devise a delivery system between the wheat stone and a new bolter and to diagnose a persistent problem with a bearing. Ewan stared at me with accusing eyes and declared that he would go and that I would manage the mill as I had before. A bit of work would do me good, he said. God had smiled on me the last time I had kept the mill. Only the laziest most miserly wife would object to such a small task as running a bit of grist through the stones.

  I did object, however. What was I to do with Daisy? As it was she loved dashing about the brook and the pond and the dam, the mesmerizing lure of the waterwheel. During the summer she was always pulling at my arm for a chance to float her little stick boats, searching the bank for the best leaves for sails. Like her father she loved to build little levees and dams and divert trickles to make pools. Come winter she loved to run out on the ice, slipping and sliding. How was I to tend to Daisy and mill at the same time? Did he want his daughter left in the hands of that brutish Cunningham girl? “No Cunninghams,” he said. “I was in a mill by her age. Set her to sweeping.”

  EWAN LEFT THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS. IT WAS SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE I received word from him via the post and Nettle’s delivery. His job was extended, he said, and he would be another two weeks. I waited but instead of his return, another note arrived. He had received another commission from a carding mill a little farther along the shore and would look at it before he left the area.

  Winter had well and truly settled in. The house breathed in the cold all night, sucked it in through the cracks in the wood, the skin of the window glass and held it silent as a lung. The windows, opaque with frost-painted finery, shimmered with cold. The cold called out to cold, gathered cold, folded cold over itself, growing layers, thick and still, of cold. In the morning ice lined the washbowls and the wood creaked. The clang of the stove lid, cast on cast, was the sound of cold, as lonely as an echo. The cold came in the darkness that pushed in at both ends of the day. But below the frozen surface, beneath the frozen soil, through the fissures in the rock and the land, always beneath our feet, water trickled through the land to the brooks, to the rivers, to the sea.

  On the sixth of February I awoke as usual. From the brightness of the stars I could see it would be clear and fine when the sun rose. The snap of flame in the firebox thawed the air in a small sphere around the stove, struggled to push beyond. I always left Daisy in her bed, in the pocket of warmth of her own making, carried her clothes to the kitchen and set them above the stove to warm while I tended the beasts in the barn, feeding hay and hauling water that sloshed in icy taunts on my fingers and feet.

  As usual that morning I called for Daisy when I returned. The kitchen, warmed and brightening with the earliest sunlight, always lifted my spirits. She ran from her little room, hopped up and down in front of the stove, her feet bundled inside her heavy socks, her woolen nightdress shedding its sleepy creases. She chattered as she dressed, her little arms and legs trying to keep pace with her mouth. It was as if the words that flowed through her were dammed by the silence of sleep and the morning opening of the sluice sent them spilling in a rush over her. “The cow was in the kitchen in my dream but we were friends and we had bread and bacon. Sometimes people play with other little girls all day long. That’s what I’ll do when I go to school. I’ll knit my own socks. I’m learning to knit now, aren’t I? Tinker tailor soldier sailor. Tinker-tailor. Tinker-tailor…”

  We ate our oatmeal with sugar and milk. I had had our tenacious little Shorthorn bred late and hoped she would carry us through the winter. Down at the mill I had finished with a large order of oatmeal and had several grists of wheat awaiting me. Daisy bundled her dolly against the cold and we strolled down to the mill, her little mittened hand in mine. Although I had no oats roasting I set a fire in the kiln fireplace for the little warmth it could throw. At least there was no danger of Daisy by the open water at this time of year and she could play by the hearth as I worked.

  I was an hour at the ice, hacking away, freeing up the axle. At first it’s nothing for the motion of the wheel to break the ice that forms at the bearings but as the cold thickens, the ice grabs at the waterwheel itself, slowing it even as the water tries to push it forward. At last, I roused the wheel. Inside I heard the spur wheel rumble in victory and was glad to retreat inside, out of the wind. I found Daisy playing hide and seek with her dolly by the oat bin on the meal floor. I engaged the flour bolt and the French stone. On the main floor I checked my stones, inspected the fresh flour, spreading it across my palm and holding it up to the light of the window. Satisfied, I retired to the chair by the desk. I sank, exhausted but pleased that I would, with today’s work a
nd tomorrow’s, complete the order of wheat flour I had committed for sale. I closed my eyes, listening to the buhrstone’s growl. I remember the peace of this moment, the soft drowsiness that settled over me like a quilt. Had I known this moment was to be my last moment of true peace I would not have let sleep steal it from me.

  The rhythm of the mill jumped a beat, stuck, tugged, jolted. It was the mill that woke me, I know, because I was already on my feet as the scream hit my ear.

  Her arm was caught, swallowed to the shoulder in the bevel gear. My daughter being consumed before my eyes. The blood was terrifying. The gears strained to meet each other, clawed towards each other, the mill strove, pushed on by the spur, the wheel, by the river. I do not remember running to her or throwing the clutch, although I know I did. I remember grabbing her, snatching her. In one moment she was helpless in the teeth of the beast, in the next I held my bleeding and mangled daughter in my arms.

  I wrapped the arm, hanging like a red mitten from a string, in close to her body. I bound her with my apron, wrapped her in my coat. I ran up the hill with her in my arms, the blood soaking us both. But how could I leave her to fetch the doctor? I flung the saddle onto Billy and clinging to Daisy, galloped to Cunninghams’. We laid her out by the stove and young William was sent to fetch the doctor. My beautiful daughter soaked layer after layer of rags with crimson.

  We did the best we could to staunch the bleeding while we waited that impossible forever for the doctor. But he came at last. Of course he could not save her arm. But perhaps he might save her life. Once he had done all he could for her he bowed to my pleading and carried us home in his buggy. I sent him upstairs to fetch down Daisy’s own little bed which I set up by the stove in the kitchen. She slept and woke and slept again. Abby came and went, how many times a day? I remember her touch and her voice in my ear. I watched and prayed and plied Daisy with sips of broth and rum. I stroked her hair. She slept. I sat on the floor with my head resting on her mattress where I could touch her always.

  Mrs. Cunningham clattered the kettle when she boiled root tea. She scraped the chairs across the floor, stomped back and forth from the shed to the wood box, woke Daisy with her thumping and clanging. I had asked her leave us be but she assured me she could not shirk her Christian duty and I had no strength to fight.

  Sometimes I found tears on my cheeks. Once, Mrs. Cunningham caught me wiping them away. “There’s no point crying now. You’ve got the damage done—raising a girl in a mill. It’s unnatural.”

  Where had Abby come from? I often lost track of when she came and when she left. What I remember is how she rose like fiery spirit, like a gryphon, a dragon, on powerful silent wings and collected Mrs. Cunningham, her coat and boots and muffler all in a single swoop, and dumped them outside together in a heap on the snow bank beyond the door. I remember her standing guarding the door, holding the poker. I remember watching her and feeling the weight of that poker as if it were in my own hand. Abby stayed while I slept.

  Daisy woke and tried to speak. Her eyes sought the corners of the room, trying to knit facts together.

  “Mama’s here. There was an accident but now you’re going to get better.” That spark of life filled me with hope—more than that, a desperate certainty. Then a fever overtook her and no amount of ice or snow would douse it. My Daisy died. She was lowered into a winter grave and lies in the churchyard.

  The bloodstains on the gear teeth, the brown patch on the mill floor where her body was torn in two, were so much smaller than I could have imagined. The colour soaked through the wood, faded, an indelible stain of so very little consequence.

  I uncapped the bottle of India ink and dipped my quaking pen into the same inkwell that Ewan had used for his initial drawings of his mill eight years ago. The thread of ink staining loops and dips across the paper seemed impossibly distant. How could so little represent so much?

  To my husband, Ewan MacLaughlin—

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  PENELOPE

  LYING IN BED AND FORCING BREATH IN AND OUT OF MY BODY seemed more work than I could manage. Yet I could not let the animals starve or leave the milking cow to suffer. From my little stool I leaned into the Shorthorn every morning and buried my face in her flank. Then I tossed the milk onto the snow where it melted a shadow into the pristine surface. What would Ewan think of that—too lazy to even skim the cream? But where was Ewan? Not here. I no longer expected him to come. I did not expect anything. Abby came by as often as she could, easing and cajoling, comforting and prodding. I could see she was beside herself that Ewan had not returned, had not sent a letter even, but I did not have the strength to reach out to anger. Abby sent Harriet down with her schoolbooks to do her lessons at my table. “For company,” she said. Abby always sent a little soup or bread for me which prompted me, eventually, to at least clean up the milk pail and send the milk up the road where it could be of use.

  Harriet would set a place at the table for me to eat no matter how I pleaded poor appetite.

  “Momma always presses me to know are you up, how’s your fire, what’s in the wood box, have you et? It makes her cranky when you haven’t done a thing and so joyful if I can say you had bowl of soup and swept the floor. Sometimes I’ve wanted to tell just a little fib and say oh yes you were at your mending or making a cheese or some such, but then I can’t. I’d catch the dickens for sure if she found out it was a lie. And Momma always finds out. Here now, Mrs. MacLaughlin, just take this broom here and sweep a bit. Give a good start and I’ll finish up for you if you can’t manage it all.”

  Eventually it took less energy to concede than to resist. By and by the sight of the girl at her studies by the lamplight, chewing on her pencil, worked itself behind the web of grief that had grown over me. I managed to part the veil enough to feel the warmth of her young life. Enough to force my hands to clean the lamp chimneys, then to make up a few oatcakes for her to have over her books. I hefted my sadness onto my shoulders, fixed it to my bones, and began to walk with it. One afternoon Harriet begged me to come and look at the crocuses that had bloomed purple and white and yellow among the stones by the door. I had never seen them in such profusion, in such dogged brilliance. They leaned into each other ever so slightly, a crush of ladies all got up for a dance with their delicate dresses covering souls hardy as leather. When the next day I sent Harriet home with fresh pound cake, she fairly danced with anticipation of her mother’s approbation. As though she, herself, had brought the change, which of course she had.

  Early in April Ewan returned. He did not speak of Daisy’s death. I told him where she was buried and he fixed his eyes on some imaginary point on the wall across the room and sat as though I had not said a word. I did not know I had been harbouring such rage. I lashed out with a vehemence I had never known before, demanding that he look at me, that he see his part in her destruction, the consequences of his foolish, stubborn notions.

  “A woman in a mill! With you off minding other people’s business. Never mind what people say, the shame of it, the load of heavy labour on a woman’s body—look what your preposterous ideas have done! My place is in the kitchen keeping my children safe, not chasing them around rolling gears and flapping belts and whirring pulleys. That damnable mill chewed up my daughter and spit her out.”

  He let out a choking sound; perhaps he was crying. I could not see through my tears and my fury.

  “In two pieces, Ewan MacLaughlin! We wrapped her arm and tucked it in beside the rest of her little body in her coffin. Did you know that? Sell the cursed mill if you won’t stay home to run it. Leave me to my own business while you run your millwright affairs.”

  He stood utterly still. I recall how our helpless silence over-filled the room, pushed against the walls and the windowpanes.

  “As you wish,” he said, finally. His voice was reedy with emotion, hesitant. I barely recognized it, tinged with uncertainty. What had he said?

  “Have it your own way next time.” Was he was crying?
“Do as you like. While you carry my child or care for my child you will not mill.”

  He stepped away then and the air riffled around me. I strained to hold the words, to make certain.

  “Have you promised me this?”

  “Yes.”

  He was gone then. The wonder of it blinked over my grief, interrupted my anguish for a moment. While you carry my child or care for my child … Have it your own way. I did not forgive my husband. How could I do that when I could not forgive myself? Now that he had acknowledged some part of the blame, as much as Ewan ever could, my anger churned stupidly then lay still. I found my way to the kitchen table where I sank into a chair and rested my head in my hands and waited for grief to carry me back to familiar shores.

  The following Sunday Ewan sat alone in the room off the kitchen with his bible. After several hours he bundled himself up against the sharp spring breeze and tramped off towards the woods. I remembered with such clarity how the kitchen had come alive with the aroma of the spruce gum he used to fetch home for Daisy on his Sunday tramps. When he returned he found me in the parlour where I often retreated on Sundays, huddled by the parlour stove. He looked so incongruous there, so ill at ease, I struggled to remember if I had ever seen him in this room before. Even now he could hardly be said to be inside the room. He stood, perfectly framed, in the doorway, neither in nor out. He was older now. I don’t know if I had not noticed his aging or if it had come suddenly with the tragedy. He was such a solid man it was startling to see him small, to see him without his forearms out in front of him, his hands tight around some tool. Here with his arms hanging lonely by his sides, his eyes roaming without purpose, he was no bigger than an ordinary man—an inch or two shorter, a tad deeper in the chest, a shade leaner, that was all.

  “The Lord is forgiving,” he said. “There will be blessings yet.”

  I ruminated on the possibility that he meant to comfort me. I believe he meant to comfort himself. How comforting to imagine that he could to give me instruction—but what did he know about anything except murderous machines?