Grist

by Linda Little

  Nearly every night, Sabbath excepted, he planted his seed deep into me, thrusting with all his might. Even on nights when he worked through without sleep, he left the mill sometime near midnight to visit our bed. I would waken to his crouching between my legs, startle awake as he pushed himself into me. Despite my loneliness and grief my body prayed a physical chant for another child: a child a child a child to the rhythm of my husband labouring above me.

  BY HARVEST TIME I KNEW I WOULD HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE. I WAS pregnant again. I would not be bullied into overexertion this time and I would not humour any superstitions or cockeyed beliefs. This time I would brook no interference. Daisy would have a brother or sister to help keep her alive for me.

  I held my growing child in my womb with exquisite care, like an egg on an outstretched palm. I knew the Landrys out by the foundry had a daughter who was simple but who could work well enough at rough chores if you were patient enough and stern enough and had five dollars a month for her parents. So Myrtle came to milk and churn and scrub, to heft and carry, while I stirred my curd or boiled a pudding or sat with knitting. With Myrtle’s hands at my disposal I set three squares a day on the table but did little else. In the afternoons I rested, in the evenings I retired early, in the mornings I lay in bed a little while. Ewan frowned and fidgeted but held his tongue and worked as though he could hide my laziness from God with his own sweat. Many nights he napped in the mill and did not come to the house at all except for breakfast.

  At six months I asked to see the doctor. Mrs. Cunningham was the closest we had to a midwife and I had no intention of bearing her pokings and proddings and listening to her bitter tales, at least until the last possible instant. The doctor placed a tube on my belly and listened, frowned and listened again moving the tube here and there over the hummock of my womb. Two heartbeats, he said. Twins. My belly had barely swollen enough for one child and I could see the doubt in the doctor’s eyes that accompanied the evidence of the second. Bed rest, he said. I’ll have a word with your husband. Honey, he claimed, was an excellent anti-toxin, and milk excellent to encourage fetal growth. And liver and dandelion tea. Avoid chills and draughts. Beef broth is an aid to the blood, with a teaspoon of this powder mixed in. Bed rest, he repeated.

  When I first felt the pains I knew it was too early. Seven months by my count. I held on to my little ones with all my might. But my might was like that of an industrious ant—impressive considering the size of the body but of little account beyond the anthill. I could not stop a force of nature. The pain was wrong, the doctor’s voice far away, too much blood soaked the sheets. The struggle seemed to go on without me then to call me back with a ferocity that left me exhausted. Mumbling filled the corners, grave voices. Often I did not know who was in the room with me and then Abby would have my hand in hers and I would feel her determination flow into me. I would see these babies into this world.

  My first son was named Ewan Laughlin MacLaughlin. I called him Hughie. I called him Hughie for the six and a half blesséd hours he lived between my breasts warmed by my body and stove-heated towels. I stroked his tiny head with my thumb and poured a lifetime’s love into the weak little vessel. Ewan built a casket so tiny it would not have held a man’s boot.

  My second son was Alexander Isaac. Young Alex, a warrior from his first laboured breath, fought off the angel’s outstretched hand for three weeks and five days. I lived on the scent of him for twenty-six days, on his blue feather skin, the delicate pulse at his temple, the pretty oh of his lips. I held him every moment I could. I held him as he drew his last rattled breath, waited for the next, waited and waited, coaxed and massaged and pleaded. Even then, as the heat seeped out of him, I held him tight through the night. In the morning I surrendered the tiny corpse. Myrtle was sent home. Ewan slumped on the cot in the room off the kitchen and wept unceasingly for his dead sons.

  To me, Ewan spat out words like mouldy meat. “Now that’s what comes of rest and servants and lounging around and doctors and vanity and everything fit for a queen.” Rage turned his face vermilion and his eyes dark as damnation. All his body rose up before me. Perhaps he raised his hand to me, perhaps I only felt it raised because of the violence of his anger. Even buffered by my sea of grief I cringed before him, stiffened for the blow, closed my eyes but nothing happened. I waited in vain as I had for the next breath of my son. When I looked up Ewan had stepped back in silent defeat, his eyes dead cold. I could only bury my face and weep.

  TWO YEARS PASSED. ONCE MORE A SEED WAS PLANTED IN MY WOMB but it washed away before the promise could even take shape. Ewan’s drive to work reached ludicrous proportions. Summer and winter he travelled wherever he was called, designing and building mills, refurbishing old dusters, integrating improvements in established mills. By now he was gone more than he was home. Stories trickled back. Wherever he worked he left behind seeds of a legend. I heard it said he worked without sleep. It was said he would work all week without pause, tumble into a coma at exactly midnight on Saturday and be roused by the cockcrow on Monday morning. To “work like the Gunn Brook miller” was to work as though possessed. Nonsensical stories accompanied the probable and the exaggerated. It was said that he tossed handfuls of bread onto the millpond to assuage the gods. It was said that he could do mathematics in his sleep—that he could doze off with a sheet of figures before him and wake with perfect calculations done. His gruff, laconic manner was offered as proof of his unworldly gifts.

  I was milking five cows now and making butter and cheese for sale, tending to the pigs and horses and hens as well as my growing flock of sheep. I had fleeces to wash and card. I had my house to keep, of course, and my garden with all the provisions to put up for the winter. And when Ewan left I had the added burden of the mill to run. He no longer arranged for a boy to work with me, not Angus MacCarron or anyone else. But once Ewan was out of sight I had no compunction about inviting Abby’s boys to help out, or more to the point, to keep me company for a few hours a day. Frankie was a young man now and Peter so close to manhood he could feel it in his fingertips. Abby had had her seventh child but with Harriet now finished school Abby’s load was lightened. She often wandered down to the mill with a pot of warm dinner or she sent Harriet over to the house to churn my butter. On Sundays I would make the trek to the churchyard to visit with my three children who lay under the stone Ewan had carved for them.

  Slowly but steadily I plodded on. Another blow waited for me however. In the spring of ’86 Abby and Frank, finally fed up with fighting the stones for soil, accepted Frank’s brother’s entreaty to join him in the West. The brother had settled his family onto promising farmland outside Winnipeg. There was land, opportunity, prospects for their growing family, a better life. Anyone could see that while Abby was sorry to leave she could barely contain her excitement for the adventure. She was a woman made for adventure. I did my best to wish my dearest (and if I were to be honest, my only) friend well. Abby was soon lost to frenzied preparations. When I sat with her on Sunday afternoons we struggled as valiantly as parting lovers—I strove to enter her optimism and she struggled to curb her buoyancy. She felt the loss too; I know she did. I believed her when she said our parting was by far the highest price she would pay for leaving Gunn Brook. As I lay alone in bed at night, numbed, I would count off the advantages of the move for her and Frank and especially for her children. What kind of a friend could expect to be considered above a woman’s children?

  The day Abby left I closed the mill and ran up to the road to see the family off as they passed. Abby jumped down from the wagon and ran to me. We shared a final rocking embrace through our tears before she turned and hiked up her skirts to trot after the wagon. She and Frank were both laughing as he reached down to haul her aboard without interrupting their progress. I watched until the wagon, laden with kids and trunks and baskets and carpetbags, disappeared around the bend. Then I watched the empty road.

  My life slipped into lonely routine. The mill seemed to catch me, pick me up a
nd carry me around my daily cycle of chores with the same inextricable force it laboured under itself. I seldom ventured beyond the property now. I had no interest in sewing circles or frolics or teas. I spoke to few people and even then, only as necessary to carry out my business. When I required kerosene or molasses or some other trifle I visited Nettle and would be startled to hear my own voice in halting conversation, sluggish from disuse, my wits dull and my speech plodding. Whenever I managed to venture as far as the Coach Road I would carry on a little farther to visit the churchyard. I passed my Sundays in the privacy of my parlour in accordance with Ewan’s council, but certainly not because of it. For all intents and purposes Ewan visited spring and fall to cut firewood, sow grain and harvest grist, and to plant his own seed inside me, but he did not, in any real sense, live here. I had been abandoned to the mill.

  The waterwheel was my heartbeat. Every morning I climbed out over the wooden sluice, often slick with wet, and lifted the gate to send the water forward over the resting wheel, weighing down first one bucket, then the next and the next. The weight of the water inched the wheel forward, creaking, until it shrugged, shuddered and rolled to life. I stood there, astride the sluice, the water rushing beneath my skirts. As the wheel found its rhythm it nudged the sluice with each rotation, pulsing its life up the soles of my feet, through my body. Beside me a wall of water rolled over the dam so close that when I stretched out my arm the spray settled on my sleeve darkening patches of brown wool, the mist enveloping my hand. Here above the rocky riverbed, between the desperately treed slopes of the steep banks, my only connection to the world was the throb and rumble of this mill-beast that surrounded me. Oats were dried, shelled, ground, buckwheat cracked and separated, wheat crushed to flour and sifted. Like the cogs, I drew my power from the imperative of movement, passed on only and exactly what I had been given.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1889-90 I HAD BEEN MARRIED FOR FOURTEEN years. I was forty-four years old, had conceived four lives, birthed three babes and had no living children. I had a husband to whom I was less than a servant (because a servant at least can be dismissed if she proves inadequate). It had been six years since I heard the laughter of a child of mine, five since I felt the warmth of one at my breast. When Ewan was home he worked like a galley slave under the lash. I worked like the wheel, no beginning and no end, and always felt the sluggard. I listened to my husband praying for God’s forgiveness for my indolent ways, promising my reformation, praying I be made worthy. Often I tried to call up my dead children to keep me company but it was such an effort and they did not stay long. The house was too cold and too quiet. What child would not be frightened off by the loneliness of the place?

  One season dragged its load to the doorstep of the next, year followed upon year. I had once told Daisy a story about sailors lost in the horse latitudes. She had laughed at the name, horse latitudes, then cried at the story. A vessel freighted with horses for the West Indies was becalmed. No wind, no current, not a ripple in sea or sky. Day after day the ship sat motionless as the crew watched their water barrels empty, one by one. The captain cut their rations in half, then in half again. One by one the animals in the hold perished from lack of water. Each day the sailors would hoist new horse carcasses up to the deck and drop them into the sea. Sailors peered overboard as sharks swarmed to the meat. In desperation one day a sailor, mad with hopelessness and thirst, jumped overboard with the carcasses and was lost in a shout of red. That night a parched young sailor prayed and fell asleep on his watch and dreamt of a wonderful bird—body as small as a sparrow but gold and royal blue with a scarlet tail as long as a man’s arm. The bird flew over and discovered the unlucky ship and taking the towline in her beak pulled the ship out of the doldrums. The sailor awoke from the dream to the flap of a sail, saw the seas parting at the bow of the ship and felt her begin to move through the water. He shouted to his shipmates. Overhead he spied a flash of colour then nothing. Had he dreamed the bird into existence?

  It was on the cusp of 1890 that I dreamed my lovely bird. That day the air was heavy with the omen of weather to come. Both cold and cloudy, the wind was icy enough to bind the waterwheel’s axle to immobility within an hour. When the ice locked up the wheel it had to be chipped clear, then the heat from the wheel’s motion would carry it a while until ice gradually crept in and built up again.

  I was hacking away at the ice for the second time that morning when I looked up at the squeak of a boot sole on snow and there on the dam stood a man regarding me like a curiosity in a travelling show.

  “Missus,” he called down, as though the word were a statement, a question and an answer all at once. “Missus.” He set down his pack, climbed down the slope and took the axe from my hand. “That’s no job for a lady, surely. I’ll set this loose in no time.”

  I stood for a moment, uncertain.

  “Let me have a go at it.”

  I relinquished the axe but held my thanks until I saw results without disaster. He appeared handy enough with the tool so I left him to it and returned to the mill out of the wind. Soon afterwards the wheel huffed into action. When I finished engaging the French stone I found him standing in the doorway, his mittened hands shoved into his armpits, laughing. “All clear, missus!” His cheeks glowed chilly pink and his eyes sparkled with an enthusiasm that transformed his vaguely horsy face into a handsome one.

  “Come in out of the cold, at least.” The surliness of my voice surprised and shamed me. In it I heard echoes of Nettle’s cold suspicion, her hard greetings. When he proffered his hand I took it and prodded a thin smile onto my face.

  “Horace Lacey, at your service, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lacey,” and there I stood, conversation exhausted.

  “Tell me though, missus, how a lady such as yourself comes to be mistress of all of this?” He spread his arms as though intimating an estate of a thousand acres. And when I peered over to search his face for irony, for censure or doubt or mockery I found only curiosity. He took in my curt explanation, stood quietly, his fingers running along the edge of the oat bin, looking at me then away into the soft gloom of the mill. He had eyes of the most astonishing blue. A young man of perhaps thirty-five years.

  “And you? How do you happen to be tramping across my dam just ahead of a winter squall?”

  “I was through here a few months ago, just as the leaves began to turn. With the railroad survey crew.”

  I nodded. Yes, a gang of surveyors had travelled through in the fall with their gear, their camp, their scrawny and determined-looking little cook. I hadn’t seen any of the surveyors themselves as they were as busy with their work as I was with mine, but the cook had come knocking at the kitchen door once with a pony cart and a purse full of coins. He had an awful stutter and it was all I could do not to reach out and try to shake the stalled words from his mouth. I had sold the man a lamb, a pail of fresh milk, ten pounds of barley and a sack of flour and he had gone away contented.

  The survey gang renewed local talk of the railroad, enormous possibilities, false promises, money to be made or lost, and grumblings about Upper Canadian politicians. The likelihood of a camp of men breeding bottles of rum was a notion much whispered about, and no doubt explored, by many of the local men. Mrs. MacCarron swore the strangers had stolen her best carrots and onions from her garden and complained loud and long that they’d stripped her apple trees. I’d be more inclined to believe she took the opportunity to ship a bushel or two of produce through Nettle and pocket a dollar or two that her husband didn’t know about.

  “Why did the railway people send you back? In mid-winter?”

  “They didn’t. I came on my own. To see this land again. How can there be a country so vast? How can there be so much in the world below heaven?” He lifted his arm above his head to touch the hemlock beam above him. “Such trees,” he said. “How can there be so many trees?”

  How could I answer this peculiar talk? “I must check my grind,” I said. “Go down and warm your hand
s by the fire.”

  A few minutes later he appeared at the top of the stairs. “Do you like the rumble of it?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The rumble of the gears and all. It comes right up through the soles of your boots. I was trying to figure how a body would feel about it after a while, day in and day out. Does it say hello to you in the morning? Or is it like some complaining old fool always moaning and groaning from the daybed?” He leaned against the stairs then, like an old man leaning in for support and put on a blocky old voice that plodded forth in a sing-song imitation of the mill’s rhythm. “Bring me the jam pot. I don’t like this cup. The weather’s too sunny. Now make my bed up.”

  It was such a thing to see a person carry on just for the pleasure of it. My face contorted into a smile, muscles roused from sleep and pressed into service after such dormancy. How long had it been since I had laughed?

  “How does the rumbling feel?” he pressed.

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Lacey. I can’t say I take a great deal of time pondering how I feel about rumblings.” When I looked up again he remained waiting patiently, expectant.

  “I suppose that however I feel on any day, well, it simply makes me feel more so.”

  “And what would it be that you feel today?”

  “Heavens, Mr. Lacey.” There was nothing of the coarseness in his tone that normally accompanied a personal question from a man hanging around the mill. There was nothing that suggested more than the interest he showed in all his surroundings.

  “Cold. Cold is what I feel today.”

  “Well I’d best get that teakettle up to the fire then.”

  He had just poured out a cup of tea for me when the spur began to drag again then stopped. He scurried off with the axe to hack away.