by Linda Little
Silence.
“He was kind,” I said.
“And so you were kind to him.”
“Forgive me.”
“In the eyes of God … you…” He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels. His hands kept opening and closing as though gasping for air, as through grasping for tools.
“Forgive me.”
Again the silence of judgement. It stole the air from the room.
“This man. This man surveyed for the Short Line in the fall?”
“Yes.”
“He has a name?”
“Yes.” A man living pristine on a shelf beside Jane Austen, free from selfishness, malicious motives, fault, blame. I was not trying to protect him (he was not here after all), rather I wanted to protect the memory of my past self that he evoked. But there was no doubt that if I had to provide his name to save my child’s future, I would.
“If I wrote to the master surveyor in Oxford, if I wrote to say this man left his watch behind and where could I find him to return it, could he point to the name in his ledger book? Or is this a fiction thrown at a lame-fool husband to cover the tracks of a neighbour or a neighbour’s son or some message boy sent out from town? Or what? Some passing peddler? Some gypsy? Some bible salesman?”
“The name is in the ledger,” I whispered.
“Are you taking him his child? Will I come home in the fall to find my mill abandoned to the mice?”
“No.” Was he prepared to keep me then?
“Maybe he has a wife? Maybe other children besides this cuckoo’s egg?”
“No.” I acknowledged to myself, now, how little I knew of him, how even the surveyor story I had taken at face value. Even the name. “I don’t know.”
“So you think you will live here with his child? Under the roof I built? While people laugh at me? A September child?”
“No one will ever know. Say you were home for the new year—arrived just as the storm began. That will work well enough. Say nothing at all. No one will ever question you. People know how you travel, Ewan. You’ve passed through here between jobs before. Half the time I don’t know where you are—how could anyone else guess? I’ll say you came in with the snow, left at sun-up after the storm cleared.”
We both needed a moment to absorb this plan dropped on the floor between us, messy and pitiful, like a stillborn calf. It embarrassed me to see how naturally, how apparently effortlessly, I could craft such a deceit. This facility was evident enough to Ewan as well. Silently he stepped towards the door. But I couldn’t have him leave without giving some sort of answer.
“I beg your forgiveness. You’ll never have cause to doubt me again. I promise.”
He turned in anger. “You promised that long ago in the presence of God. What became of that promise?”
I had so little to offer in exchange for mercy. “All of our children have been taken. Perhaps the child won’t live to see the world.”
“I will not have this man’s name spoken. Ever. You will write it down and give it to me. I will read it and burn it. It is my surety against future treachery. Never forget that I can test your story at any time. Do this now.”
Although my legs trembled they carried me to my desk in the parlour. I willed my hand steady enough to form the letters legibly. I felt like Judas but unsure of exactly who I was betraying. My fear swelled with my uncertainly. Was this a trap? I could not think beyond my instructions so I followed them. When I returned to the kitchen Ewan did exactly as he had promised. He read the name and fed the slip of paper to the fire, stood there with the lid to the firebox open and watched it burn. I waited for him to speak.
“I visited on the new year. I came overland from the south, stayed only a short time, only the two days of the big storm. Then I set off to the west.”
“Yes.”
Ewan did not raise his voice or a hand to me that day, but I had never laid axe to ice as bitter cold as the words he tossed at my feet. “If a different truth is ever known. If anyone ever sneers at me for a cuckold—ever—I will find a lawyer and get rid of you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“It is my right under the law.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“We’ll see what comes of this in September. We shall see what the harvest brings.” He turned on his heel and left.
EWAN COULD NOT HAVE BEEN BETTER PLACED TO TURN ME OUT AND marry a young woman who could bear him a son. This truth tumbled over me endlessly. Whenever I scrambled to regain some semblance of normalcy or composure, some confidence in my position, this immutable fact washed over me again.
However, fretting or no fretting, life continued. I carried my butter, eggs and cheese to Nettle as usual and stood outside her door with my basket. I noted how her cabin had suffered the ravages of time. Rot advanced along the lowest boards of the shack. I could have kicked my foot through in a few places, I’m sure. Where a pane of glass had been broken she had covered the hole with a scrap of canvas. The door had to be jimmied and fought with and even so it left a crack big enough for a June bug to crawl through. The roof, a jumble of make-do, could not possibly have been tight. She bundled a hodgepodge of clothes onto her body like a tramp and more of the same around the cask of beer she kept brewing in the corner until the two of them were nearly indistinguishable in the gloom. It was clear the cask was not only to keep her custom brisk but to dull her own desperation. The beer on her breath mixed with the horrid odour of teeth as rotten as the boards. She took my basket and handed me the sugar and the tea I had ordered. She sought my gaze and held it long and hard, constricting my windpipe. Then her eyes drifted down my body, stalled on my womb and I felt myself colour. I made my exchange of goods, nearly grabbing my tea from her hand, and I fled.
Ewan did not set me out. He never again referred to the child’s father. In fact, a sense of calm or perhaps resignation seemed to have settled over him. He seldom worked through the night anymore. He still worked away for the greater half of the year and when at home he still worked hard and long, but he retired after dark like his neighbours. He still knelt at his bedside every night and asked the Lord to forgive his wife. He asked for mercy. “And forgive us our trespasses,” he prayed, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” With the exception of his prayers he never again alluded to the wayward conception.
MY PREGNANCY PROGRESSED WITH RELATIVE EASE. I did not lose my child to early pains or incompetence or inadequacy or indolence or overwork or sin or virtue. She was born on the last day of September 1890. I called her Charity. Ewan looked down at her with an even gaze as though he were judging a calf or foal, then looked back at me and asked when I would be out of bed and back to work.
Ewan seldom acknowledged her except when she would burst forth in some high-spirited excess in his presence. “Stop up that noise,” he might say to me as though a kettle were whistling. What might have looked cold from the outside I understood at the time as charity, generosity even, and this was an overwhelming relief to me. I took great pains to keep her out of his way, to minimize her childish noise or any disruption she might cause. I set her chewing on honey or molasses bread when Ewan came in for his dinner. As she grew I scolded and bribed and cajoled her into restraining her energetic behaviour during those few hours of the day when Ewan occupied the house. Sit quiet now with the jam pot while Father has his breakfast. Off you go while Father has his supper. Off and take Dolly upstairs for a nap or I’ll give her to the gypsies. Hush now and don’t fidget and we’ll visit the new kittens when Father goes back to work. He imposed strictures, yes. He did not want her running all over the countryside, he said. There was no need for us to be flouncing off to church, and of course Scotch River village remained out of bounds. But I had circumscribed my own movements so tightly in the past years this was hardly an imposition when she was so young.
Still, Charity was not an easy child to contain. She was a clever girl but high strung, adventurous but moody. She lived close to the surface as thoug
h her feelings were pushed up right under her skin and could at any moment bubble over. The yellow in a buttercup or a snowflake on her tongue brought tears to her eyes, a fallen robin’s nest devastated her, and at the sight of a newborn calf she would run to hug its neck and bounce with joy, unable to let go.
On the day Ewan declared that Charity would not go to school I was more startled by the fact of his intervention than the content of it. “You are a teacher,” he said, “so teach.” It seemed small penance to have her barred from school. Not even a penance. I had never been farther than the barn without her and our separation would have wrenched us both. And anyway, the trek to the schoolhouse would have been onerous for a small girl so used to staying home. She’d never miss what she’d never known. I pried open my crate of schoolbooks, wiped off the volumes, felt the soft crack of their spines in my hands, a flutter of lightness in my heart.
OUR LIVES, CHARITY’S AND MINE, BREATHED IN AND OUT AROUND the seasons. The summer and winter were ours. With Ewan safely gone I took possession of our lives. True that in the winter I traded my worry over her disturbing Ewan to suffering the terrors of keeping her in that snarling mill. I often imagined Ewan repeating his promise to me, word by icy word—“as long as you carry or care for a child of mine…” I kept one eye and one ear on my grind, one eye and one ear always on my little girl. Charity despised the mill, afraid of its dark corners and looming shadows, terrified that she would be grabbed and yanked into the hungry teeth of the gears as she knew her long-ago sister had been. Certainly my stories had had the desired effect there. While I milled she would sit at the mill desk or draw up a stool to the kiln fire with her books and her dolly.
Quite without my notice my milling expertise had grown; I developed confidence in my judgement. I learned to manage multiple stones and the kiln with ease. I became practised at cooking at the kiln hearth and as Charity grew I had her to fetch and carry between the kitchen and the mill. She was always happy for the diversion of errands. All in all we managed the work tolerably well.
During the long winter evenings, once I’d shut down the mill, we spread our books out across the kitchen table and explored the world beyond. I squandered my egg and cheese and butter money on paints and inks and stacks of copybooks, enough to spoil a family of children. Storybooks filled the shelf in her room. She learned to read in a trice, it seemed, and before she turned ten her penmanship put shame to mine. She sang and danced and drew and could entertain us both for hours reciting poetry or presenting plays, wrapped in a shawl as Helen of Troy, then in battle dress as Brutus and Cassius both, then in frills as a spring daffodil. She conscripted her little dog into various roles, all of which required costumes and fawning. I wiped away tears of laughter as she carried on, which only encouraged her to greater heights of drama. She delighted in history and literature as long as she could learn about people or animals or living things. She would not attend to mathematics lessons and it was all I could do to foist basic arithmetic on her. Beyond stories about the natural world she would have nothing to do with the sciences.
“I do not care for parts of things,” she declared in her romantic heroine voice. “Gears and rock and two thirds of a dozen—what of it!” And she would twirl away and pout. Her progress in sewing, food preservation and housekeeping left much to be desired.
In the summers I pushed the boundaries back farther, took more liberties. The days stretched and the sun warmed, the river ran shallow and the pond dropped. Water slowed until only a trickle found its way over the dam and the wheel rested. Free of the mill, we were turned out into the fresh green world like colts on a spring pasture. Often Charity and I would wander down the road hand in hand to attend church on a Sunday so she could meet other children. Although I curtailed her visiting, I did not outright forbid it. There were three or four farmhouses down on the Scotch River road where she struck up friendships with other girls. I never disobeyed Ewan’s dictum against buying or selling in Scotch River but occasionally in the summer we visited the village for an outing and ate a picnic lunch by the water. I dreamed up all sorts of little adventures for us including long walks along the railway tracks, along the very path her secret father had helped survey. We ate strawberries, then raspberries and blueberries, then blackberries with thick fresh cream. I boiled jam and strained jellies. I pickled cucumbers and dried herbs and tomatoes. I filled my lovely new Mason jars with beans and peas and cherries and pears. I skimmed pound after pound of sweet cream from the abundant milk of summer pasture and churned it to butter. Once a week I heated curd and pressed a cheese. We were busy, yes, but the days stretched out in the sunshine. My daughter played and laughed and we lived free and happy. I indulged her with toys and clothes and attention. In light of what was to come I thank the fates I allowed her these joyous days of childhood.
ONE EARLY SPRING DAY BEFORE EWAN HAD RETURNED FROM HIS winter jobs, Charity and I visited Nettle to pick up and order supplies. Nettle hooked her crooked eye into me then let her gaze fall on Charity where rested it until I stepped between them to break the spell. Nettle tucked a newspaper into my basket with my order of calico, buttons and raisins.
“You’re a clever reader lady, ain’t ya? I come by this paper here you’ll like—and only a penny. It’ll start your fire once you’re done. I saved it special.”
Newspapers were not uncommon on Nettle’s counter, short stacks of them heading up or down the road. Occasionally I would take a copy she was trying to peddle. I smiled the best I could, nodded, and handed over the extra penny she was after.
Later that evening with the mill closed and supper over and Charity busy with her books, I opened the newspaper for a peek at the wider world. On the back pages my eye was drawn to an obituary marked with the sooty smear of a thumbprint:
Feb. 23, 1899-Mr. Horace Lacey-DIED age 46 in San Francisco. Mr. Lacey, a native of Limerick, Ireland, spent many years in the Maritimes before embarking on a journey to the west. He met with a terrible accident when a team of horses bolted on the crowded streets of San Francisco.
My hands shook as I read the notice. If some small storybook part of me had imagined … imagined what? I couldn’t say. If he had come from nowhere once perhaps he could materialize again? In another storm? For another chapter in the story—he plays with his daughter, makes love to her mother? I peered over the paper at Charity, her eyes lively with concentration over her book, her father’s name in ink by my hand. The notice confirmed his name, at least, and a few details he had told me. I had not constructed him. He lived in this world and he died in this world. Like it or not, I had shared him with the world.
More real to me, I’m ashamed to admit, was the sinister implication of Nettle’s leading me to the notice. She could not know? Of course she could not. And yet, could her selling me this very paper be a coincidence? The dirty smudge beside the note? Of course it was coincidence—she had peddled newspapers to me before. This time was no different. Who was Nettle to me anyway and what business was it of hers? I would not be cowed. “…if a different truth is ever known I will set you and your bastard on the road.” My obvious course was to do nothing, say nothing, admit nothing. Guilt or innocence aside, I would simply act as though I had never seen the notice at all. Why would I have seen it? I ripped it out and tossed it in the fire. Instantly the guilty hole in the page grinned up at me. I balled up the page and tossed it in after the notice. Then the newspaper itself, with the missing page, taunted me and found the same fate.
EVERY YEAR AS SPRING APPROACHED CHARITY AND I TOOK UP OUR guard. We moved the bulk of Charity’s playthings upstairs to her room, took her drawings down from the walls, stashed away her dress-up scarves and ribbons. Her pen and ink and a single primer and copybook were tucked neatly out of sight on her shelf in the pantry and her doll sat politely atop them. With Ewan’s return imminent I became aware of everything left out of place, every chore left incomplete, every imperfection. And I would resolve anew to inspire practicality in Charity.
One
mid-April evening as the light thickened to murky, as Charity read aloud, performing some new adventure for me, as I prepared our supper, the dog sat up in his nest by the stove and cocked his head. We quieted and strained our ears into the silence around us. Charity ran to the parlour window where she could see across the yard and out to the road. “It’s him!” The slap of hastily shut and stowed books, the clatter of hurried supper preparations signalled to both of us that one season had ended and another begun. I grabbed Charity’s coat from the peg behind the stove. “Quick, quick,” waving it at her like a matador. “Get your father’s horse. And make sure it has oats and water and hay. And tie a blanket on it. Don’t forget the blanket!” She ran out into the water-heavy snow of spring, her coat flapping. I watched them from the window, riveted, could not turn away: the girl runs towards the man in the laneway then slows suddenly, approaches with caution, holds out her hands to take the horse’s reins while the man unties bundles from behind the saddle. The man hoists the burden to his shoulder and strides towards the house with the deliberate steps of one who has been too many hours in the saddle. The girl leads the horse into the stable.
The door to the entry banged then the kitchen door opened. Ewan pulled the door snug behind him, set his bundles on the bench by the door and removed his outdoor clothes. He was warmly and sensibly dressed as always. He was never a man who needed a wife to clothe him. Then he lowered himself onto his chair at the kitchen table. I had not considered this chair to be anyone’s or anything in particular for the past four and a half months but as he sat down it became his chair again as it always had been.
“Ewan,” I said. “I’ll fetch your tea.”
And so all our winters ended and our springs began. At first light the following morning Ewan strode down the hill towards the mill. In the house he carried himself as though he were a familiar guest. Yet in any legal way of thinking Charity and I lived on his forbearance. In the mill his foot fell heavy. He thrust open the door as though not a soul had trod there since he last closed it behind him four or five months ago. He simply took up his work as though he had left it yesterday. His first job was to dress the stones and so he strode directly to the French buhr. He pried the vat, the wooden housing that enclosed the stones, up with a lever and rolled it out of the way exposing the naked stones. He swung the wooden gallows into position above the stone and before I knew it the runner stone was lifted off its mate, both stones lying pattern-side up waiting for his chisels. Unaccountably, my heart lurched as Ewan manhandled his way through the mill. I had no claim on it. I certainly did not love it or want it. It was not my place. And yet something flinched inside me, a jolt as violent as it was mysterious, when he reclaimed his domain.