Grist

by Linda Little

  THE BLIZZARD CAME UPON US AS BLIZZARDS OFTEN DO. The promise of snow can sit for hours in the air, as it had since that morning, then all of a sudden the world is engulfed. The growl of the mill buffered the sound of the rising gale at first and down on the meal floor we remained snug and unaware. When the spur caught and slowed again Mr. Lacey picked up the axe once more. When he opened the door a gust swirled in with a lash of sleet behind it. Icy pellets stung our faces before he forced the door shut again against the wind.

  “I’d say we are done with our grinding for today,” I said, and doused the kiln fire. “Come, Mr. Lacey. You’ll need proper shelter. The Cunninghams are just half a mile down the road and into the woods a short piece. They’re not the epitome of hospitality, but grudging shelter is better than none in weather like this.”

  But even at the top of the hill it was clear we had left it too long. A gust whipped snow around us in a blanket and I could see nothing but white. The mill completely disappeared although it sat only a hundred feet behind. I turned and blinked into the whiteout, ice clinging to my eyelashes, turned again and brittle fear gripped me. Three steps and already unsure of my direction. Then a glimpse of the trees by the road on the left. Straight ahead. I would not have been able to find Cunningham’s laneway myself in this. Drifts built up in waves across the road, snow inches deep and then suddenly a foot or more. “Walk in my footsteps, Mr. Lacey. You’ll have to come with me.” I knew the situation was untenable of course. A woman alone taking in a man for the night. But there was no remedy. My whole life was the same: untenable yet unavoidable. I bent into the wind and started up the hill. A swirl would rise up and obliterate everything but then the storm would inhale and for a moment, shapes appeared, enough to re-establish bearings. There was daylight yet. My confidence returned. I spotted the maple tree by the porch, then the laneway, then the house. Finally the doorstep. We stamped our feet and brushed off what snow we could before entering the cold kitchen.

  “I’ll build up this fire in a jiffy, Mr. Lacey. And scare up some supper. I’ll just fetch a few potatoes. And there’s meat in the shed.” I had no fresh bread or cakes to offer. Without Ewan to feed I lived like an old prospector, often spooning porridge or soup from a tin plate.

  “Let me see if I can’t coax a spark or two,” he said, and took the poker from my hand. I scrambled down to the cellar, rooting through bins collecting an armload of vegetables, balancing potatoes and carrots, dropping a turnip trying to pick up an onion. By the time I re-emerged Mr. Lacey had the fire crackling away and I could hear him in the shed splitting more kindling. The sound of it cheered me. Splitting kindling is a job I detest. This most domestic of the men’s chores reminded me, more than any other, how much I lived alone. I would fetch up some apples and take advantage of my company to bake a pie.

  Outside the blizzard mounted in savagery but its howls only seemed to make the kitchen cozier and more cut off from the world, a calm island in the chaos. Once Mr. Lacey had produced a tottering stack of kindling he set out for the stable despite my protestations. I was leery about my little Shorthorn’s willingness to accept him.

  “Mrs. MacLaughlin, there is not a cow in all of Christendom that can resist my wiles. If I can’t bring you a brimming pail I promise I will throw myself upon the storm in penance.”

  How startling to hear banter, to see playfulness in a grown man. He brought me home my children in the kindest, warmest way. As I worked with my hands in flour I felt them near me, held close in sweet domesticity. I could have spoken their names aloud except for my fear of breaking the spell. But my heart relayed the messages—lay the table, Daisy, and fetch us some fresh butter from the pantry. Then a little boy’s voice, Momma’s made a pie. As clear as though it had been spoken, Hughie to Alex, as they filled the wood box two sticks at a time, their little arms embracing the chore. They would be six years old now and dreaming of great strength. Perhaps I would have little trousers to mend that evening—I fingered the cotton of my apron—buttons on little blue trousers with a pocket for treasures. I sprinkled a pinch of cinnamon over the sweetened apples and folded pastry over the top. Baking in the oven next to the supper, the aromas blended, transporting me. Abby touched my shoulder. We laughed together, her children intermingled with mine, laughing too. There was the stamp of boots outside the door, the latch, a puff of chill consumed by the stove’s heat. A frothy pail of milk and a warm voice.

  “We’re well acquainted now and friendly as fleas,” he said about the cow. He pulled three brown eggs out of his coat pocket and winked as I stretched out my hands to receive them. They were warm still, thanks to the broody hen with the torn comb. “Everyone’s snug as Jesus in the manger out there—winter’s singing them to sleep.”

  His presence did not shatter my reverie, merely lapped over it. I set bread for the morning while the meat roasted. Mr. Lacey laid the table. Over dinner we spoke while the storm spun around us like a cocoon. I learned what little I know about Horace Lacey.

  An Irishman. A Roman, but large-minded. The wonder he drew from the world around him was not the wonder of the new immigrant to an unfamiliar world but more that of a pilgrim on a journey. His survey crew had finished their work two months ago and he was happy enough to be keeping his own company for a while.

  “I left the rest of them snug and drunk in a pub at the end of the route and I dare hazard a guess there may be a few of them there yet,” he said. “I wanted to come back once more before I move on. It’s one thing to see a country in her summer green but I wanted to see her teeth as well. So I’ve been on the tramp. Not a great show of ambition for a man, I suppose. But it’s a wondrous thing—a body could go days without seeing another soul if he had mind to. With the quiet of it and the vastness I get to feeling like the great thinkers and the great poets, how they must have felt, you know, before they bloomed into all those lovely words. The painters too, like Michelangelo and them—it’s a feeling like you just swallowed God—everything empty and full at the same time.”

  I set down my fork to listen to him.

  “But I sound foolish. You’ll be wondering what you’ve taken in.”

  “Not at all. Now tell me the truth, have you hidden a notebook or two and a fistful of pencils at the bottom of that pack of yours? Have you sequestered a poem or two there?”

  A blush of red crept up his neck. “You’re a woman of uncanny sensibility, Mrs. MacLaughlin.” For a moment we both sat listening to the blizzard, the warmth of the fire and the comfort of a hearty supper subsuming us.

  “Now tell me how a fine woman like you passes these long winter nights. I’ve a hunch you have a little library tucked away somewhere.”

  Now it was my turn to blush, not because he had hit accurately upon a past joy of mine but in embarrassment that I had deserted my old friends so completely over the years. Gradually Ewan’s judgements had chipped away at my old self until even though I had the house to myself I had not taken full advantage of my freedom. Ewan’s constraints had settled into my bones in ways I had not even noticed.

  “A modest one.”

  “Perhaps we can compare our resources.”

  “Certainly. But first, won’t you have a slice of apple pie with your tea?”

  “Delighted, Mrs. MacLaughlin.”

  “Please, call me Penelope.”

  After supper he pulled several books from his rucksack and I tugged open the glass door of the parlour bookcase, the hinges sticky from lack of use. We sat together in the kitchen lamplight while he read to me from Blake and Wordsworth and young Canadian poets I had never heard of before—how would I have heard of them? He finally consented to share a few lines of his own “jottings,” as he described them. He surprised me with the richness of his images, the depth of feeling he displayed for the land he walked over. To hear feelings expressed at all set me off kilter, made me a little lightheaded, a stranger in my own house.

  Later, we read, turnabout, from my copy of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Lacey presented the
most brilliant and thoroughly convincing Mr. Bennet. And when we came to Mr. Darcy, I laughed until I cried at his portrayal of the character. I, or Miss Lizzy rather, declared I would never have him, not for ten thousand pounds and soon we had left Miss Austen behind and had transfigured her characters to our own backwoods heroes. While my girlish titters often disintegrated into helpless laughter Mr. Lacey never broke stride. He arched his eyebrow at me and flipped the tails of his imaginary coat.

  I did not unearth the character of Lizzy Bennet so much as Horace Lacey unearthed a Penelope faded with neglect and disappointments. He called her up with a slow, kind incanting of her name. How long had it been since I had last heard my name spoken, and spoken with such gentle kindness? His kindness was my undoing. When the warmth of his hand touched my cheek he opened a longing, as deep as the earth itself, to share tender breath with another human being. Suddenly I did not feel old and ugly and clumsy. I did not feel like myself at all, yet at the same time felt more profoundly myself than I ever had.

  Nearly fifteen years married and there were secrets I did not know. Beneath the skin that is old and illused and ugly, beneath the plain face and too-wide shoulders, beneath layers of failure and inadequacy, there is another skin that shimmers to the touch. It opens through a thousand mouths, hungry as babies. Breath and fingertips and the softness of lips dance there as lightly as the wing beats of butterflies. Beneath the secret skin is a cavern that grasps at love so greedily it pulls it in until it bursts like a freshet and overflows, wave after wave over everything.

  The blizzard lasted the night and all the next day. The following morning the sun rose over calm fields of perfect white, spotless and sparkling. No one moved except to shovel dooryards and paths, find the woodpile and the well. Then late in the morning I spied the old fellow who had taken over Browns’ old farm prodding his unlucky horse through the drifts, breaking a trail. The old bugger was always first out, looking for an excuse to poke his nose in, gather fresh news. Instantly I flew into a tizzy of grabbing and stashing all evidence of Horace. Suddenly practical as a thief, I thrust Horace’s rucksack at him and ordered him upstairs in a flurry.

  “You be Jane and I shall be Mrs. Rochester!” he called, laughing over his shoulder as he mounted the stairs two at a time.

  Once the old fellow had passed on the road, mercifully bypassing my door in favour of juicier news prospects elsewhere, Horace returned, laughing and shaking his head. I was not laughing, however. He came to me and held me and kissed my neck, rocked me in his arms. Tomorrow morning the roads would be full of people restless for outdoor air and company and news.

  He was heading west, he said, trading what was left of his surveying wages for a train ticket. He meant to see the Rocky Mountains and the ocean on the other side of them. He meant to see San Francisco.

  “I hope to write a poem about a storm,” he said. “No, the opposite. About a calm? About the worlds we carry inside.”

  For a foolish hour I swirled around ridiculous notions of escape, of tromping over frozen streams on Indian rackets, leaving the beasts to their fates in the barn, I suppose. Leaving the graves of my children. Leaving the Mrs. MacLaughlin I had become behind like a shed skin while some imaginary Penelope-girl wandered like a gypsy and camped in the snow. But of course I knew the truth. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t have flown into panic at the sight of a neighbour. I knew, of course, that although Horace had not said so, he had no intention of packing a wife on his back, certainly not someone else’s, and not a woman ten years his senior who had been no beauty even as a girl. This I knew but tucked it away in case I ever needed a rational ray to shine on my situation.

  I packed as many provisions as it was convenient for him to carry: cheese, sausage, butter, bread and tea. Perhaps there was a final kiss and a lingering embrace as in books. I do not recall. What I remember is that the world gleamed still and white and he was gone.

  I prepared a prayer, a litany, an incantation to keep him with me, to keep him with the young woman he had coaxed from her dim neglected corner. I listed all he was to me. His wonder, his playfulness, his simple eloquence, his strength and company and helpfulness. His hands, his handsome solidity, the blue of his eyes. His speech—the poetry of it, his profligate tumble of words for no practical purpose but to see further, probe deeper, laugh. His gentle kindness. In the evening I conjured him in my bed, in the daytime in the mill, in the mornings at the table. Often I placed him just beyond the door, around the corner, busy at some small task, just about to join me. My children were not afraid to come out when he was there.

  And I would keep more than this. I knew almost at once that I was carrying a child. I was not afraid. I felt only a warm hopeful happiness, the lingering pleasure of a dream after waking. I did not think of Ewan at all. The woman who carried this child seemed a different woman altogether, one who had never heard the name Ewan MacLaughlin.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  ALTHOUGH HE NEVER ABANDONED HOPE, EWAN HAD GIVEN up monitoring the machinery of my aging body. My sags and swells went unnoticed. He had been home two weeks in April when the baby quickened. As I bent over the oven door to pull out the biscuits for supper I puffed out a surprised “oh!” and stiffened upright, clutching my womb in that unmistakable posture, belly forward with hands protective around new life. Instantly self-aware, I felt heat rise in my cheeks, smoothed my apron and resumed my work. When I dared a glance at Ewan I found him staring. He looked away, looked back, opened his mouth to speak then closed it and cocked his head. All these weeks, these three months and more past, and I had prepared nothing to say. As incredible as it sounds, it’s true. Had I imagined the moment would never come that I would stand in front of my husband with a bulging belly? Did I imagine the child would be born secretly into some imaginary chapter of some imaginary novel and live in the bookcase? In all my imaginings of Horace Lacey, I had failed to imagine at all. The Horace I had kept with me for the last months dissolved into the delusion I had created for him. I stood alone here, carrying a child who would never know his father. The Rockies? San Francisco? Then what—the jungles of Brazil? Or had I imagined he would appear in a puff of smoke at this very instant and carry me off?

  “That child’s too small. It can’t live.”

  I said nothing, thinking what? That perhaps Ewan would tire of the question? Everything in his world was counted and measured and calculated: demonstrably true, mathematically provable.

  “How many weeks have you been carrying the seed?” he asked.

  I would give birth to a child born eleven months from his leaving and six from his return. I turned away eyes lowered, then gathered my courage and turned back to face him. “Fourteen weeks,” I said.

  His eyes widened and his head pushed back as though trying to expand the distance between us. Not a word exchanged for what might have been the six days of creation. In the interminable silence the wall I had constructed between what I knew in my heart and what I knew in my head crumbled. It dissolved into nothing and there I stood, a stranger to myself in the face of the naked truth. My guilt, the shame it would bring to us, to the house and business, the magnitude of my sin, I saw reflected in my husband’s face.

  “That child…” Ewan indicated my womb with a flicker of his eye. He could not even incline his head towards me.

  I could hardly believe, any more than Ewan could, the implications of the situation. I owned nothing that did not come to me on the condition of my being Ewan’s wife. Without Ewan I was nothing but a disgraced woman with a bastard child. Not even a foolish girl who could be redeemed in time and perhaps forgiven in a purse-lipped sort of way, but an ugly old woman, once a schoolteacher, once a mistress of a prosperous farm and business: cast out with no shelter for my child or myself. Nausea rose through me, drenching me.

  Eventually Ewan found his tongue.

  “I turn my back and you are cavorting with the Devil.”

  “No … a man.” I could hardly believe my own inane sputteri
ng.

  “You are my wife. Before God.”

  I could scarcely find breath to fill my lungs.

  “Who?” he demanded. “A customer of mine? In my own mill? Everyone has been laughing at me. Men have been laughing behind my back for years. Everyone knows. Or are people guessing the father’s name? Placing bets?”

  “No.”

  “For years?”

  “No. I swear. This was the only time. In all the years of loneliness. There was only this once.”

  “Loneliness.” He staggered back a step as though I had called up Satan’s name. “Loneliness…?” He shook with the fury of humiliation. We were both so unaccustomed even to ordinary conversation that this interchange was unbearable. I made my way a few tottering steps to a chair and sat, afraid I would collapse.

  “So help me God if you don’t tell me the absolute truth right now, if you deceive me a second time…” He stopped and struggled for breath. “I swear that if you lie to me now and the truth is revealed later, as it will be—make no mistake—I will set you and your bastard on the road. Do you understand?”

  I understood. We were trading truth for truth.

  “Who is this man?”

  “He’s not from here. He has come and gone. No one knows him. No one saw him.”

  “Do you think I’m a fool? How can a man appear from nowhere and disappear? How? How!”

  “The railroad. The new Short Line will be passing just north of here … you know this … you remember they surveyed the line last fall.”

  “So help me God…”

  “I didn’t see the surveyors then—only the cook. You know this is true—you were here at harvest and you remember. You know I sold the cook that lamb. And flour. But one of the surveyors came back in the winter, just to see the land in the snow and ice. Just to look…” The story sounded ridiculous now. “He was caught in the big New Year’s storm. You know there was a storm. It was such a huge storm. You would have seen it too, even in New Brunswick. He came through, helped me at the mill. Storm stayed—for the two days of the blizzard and a day to dig out.”