Grist

by Linda Little

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  EWAN

  ALL EWAN’S CHILDREN WERE DEAD. First the death of young Daisy when he was working in King’s Cove. That job was a beautiful puzzle, complicated by twin shafts and a head of water just barely adequate to power them. The site had not been well chosen in the first place but the constraints of geography sharpened the challenge. He extended the flume and built up the dam, redesigned the power train and added a labour-saving cup elevator. He had just begun fitting a new shaft the day the letter arrived. They had all been called up to dinner and Ewan was stewing over the order due from the smith. He remembered drawing a knife full of butter across his potatoes—six gudgeons, hackle screws, bridging box. When the miller’s wife set the envelope with his name on it by his plate he assumed there must be some bother with the order. Ewan’s forehead creased. Was the world populated only by idiots? The order was perfectly straightforward. Would he have to go himself and fashion the ironwork? Ewan cut several bites of beef. He piled a bit of potato on each forkful before eating it, already impatient to be back at work. He licked his knife and slid it under the envelope flap. The letter was edged in black and written in a woman’s hand. A death at the foundry interfered with them filling his bill? To my husband, Ewan MacLaughlin—. Husband. The letter was addressed in error. Someone else’s husband. No, it had his name on it. What was his wife doing at the foundry in King’s Cove? Ever so slowly Ewan’s mind climbed out of his project, gathered one by one abandoned truths about the world beyond this job. The woman’s hand was his wife’s, attending to business at his Gunn Brook mill. Why was she bothering him? His wife should be able to mind affairs without disturbing his work here. To my husband, Ewan MacLaughlin—. He reread the note several times until the information sifted from the paper to settle on his heart. The wee girl. The bevel gear. Angels. He set down his fork and refolded the letter, flattening the crease with his thumbnail. He folded it in half again and then once more before he pushed his plate away, stood and crossed to the stove where he dropped the tiny bundle into the flame. All eyes followed his steady, even strides towards the door. Missus jumped to her feet at the bang of the screen door. She dashed to the firebox, jabbing frantically with the poker for the knot of paper, trying to retrieve it, but it disintegrated into feathery wisps at a touch. At the mill, Ewan took up his task just as he had left it before dinner. For three days and two nights he worked without pause and without a word of explanation. He would not stop to eat or sleep although he took a mug of tea or drank from a dipper of water when it was handed to him. He worked until exhaustion collided with the Sabbath whereupon he slept from Saturday midnight through to first light on Monday morning. The child was dead and buried. For four more weeks he worked like a madman, afraid to loosen his grip on his tools. When the job was complete what could he do but to pack up and head for home?

  As Ewan followed the road up along the Gunn Brook he met no one. His mill sat closed up and silent. No one met Ewan in the yard. The kitchen sat warm and still. The little broom he had made for her propped in the corner by the pantry, her little boots by the door. He did not know what to do. He did not know what was true. God had set a formula, devised an equation, designed a theorem that he could not crack. This was the worst of all, to be left mired in ignorance, immobilized by doubt. And so, in frustration and uncertainty and impatience, Ewan had forsaken his post. He had promised his wife all she wanted. He granted her leisure and luxury that was not his prerogative to give. He had been punished for this with two infant sons conceived, born, died, buried.

  Fifty-three years old with no heir to his trade and saddled with a lazy, useless, barren wife. This could not be the Will of God. The terror that he had been thrust outside the Divine Plan plagued him. At first he could not pray. But neither could he turn from God. During the enforced idleness of Sundays he read the story of Moses. He tried to remember how, when he had been banished from his father’s mill, God had led him out of Breton Crag, across the water to the land of milk and honey. Merton’s millstone on the riverbank had been a sign and a promise. He read the story of Jacob and Rachel. He had worked for seven years in servitude to Merton before God laid his due before him—diligence rewarded, and indolence and drunkenness punished. He had been without a wife and God had looked down and set one before him. But she must be worthy of the gifts given. He read the story of Job. He read the story of Abraham and Sarah. He read the promises made to men. When he could stand no more he calculated the angle of the sun, estimated the volume of the maple tree by the millpond, recited the laws of hydraulics, calculated ratios of velocities and power. And still the Lord’s Day pressed down on him. There was never such longing as Ewan’s hunger for Monday and the cool, sweet respite of work.

  Since the loss of his sons there was nowhere Ewan would not go to work. He travelled to Tignish, Yarmouth, Bathurst, Harrington Harbour, Orono, Pittsfield, Flat Bay, Stephenville. Up any one of the hundreds of rivers that drained the expanse of the great northeast. It was a lonely river indeed that had not met with the industry of a man willing to set a dam and pluck the free-running power. His reputation preceded him. “Ewan MacLaughlin. He can power a factory from a rain barrel.” Some of his jobs were nothing more than sticks and stones—the simplest constructions for the most basic of mills—and some were renovations or refits of ill-considered old dusters or log-hackers—making the best of a bad lot—but occasionally, after he had travelled for days, slaved and sweat, after he had suffered fools and slack-jaws and sinners, he would find himself up some stony river and wrapped in a project that drew him through the eye of the needle. When all he knew and all he had done transported him above an elusive problem and set him free in the land of absolutes. Matter must follow where the laws of the Clockmaker dictated. There amidst the dictums of gravity and propulsion Ewan could, if all factors converged, float a moment with God. Solutions were set before him. These moments were sweet and rare but occurred often enough to reassure him that despite the failures of his wife, he had not been forsaken. Ewan would yet be favoured.

  In the year 1888 he came into a commission to build a series of mills: carding, tanning, grist, and a bakery. Never mind the new steam mill by the railroad tracks, the Canaan Falls mills up the St. John River would reassert the benefits of waterpower. This was precisely the sort of project where God might speak through him. And so it was that Ewan was prepared to recognize the sign that God sent him when he finished off his summer duties at home and set off south, over the hill toward the Bay of Fundy where he crossed to New Brunswick and rode his weary horse into the courtyard of a handy Saint John inn. He did not see the sign at first. The little boys had been in the courtyard when he rode in—the oldest lad hauling water to a washtub although he was barely tall enough to lift the pail off the ground, his younger brother dashing out across the lane eliciting curses from the hostler whose cart missed him by inches, another toddling after a long-suffering mutt with a feathery tail and yet another by a pile of kindling flailing a stick in his little fist and delighting in its contact with anything. As he crossed the courtyard Ewan’s eyes were directed to the young woman who appeared out the back door of the inn. Instantly all the little boys abandoned their pursuits and flocked to her. With the slanting sun illuminating her golden hair and youthful skin, the Madonna stood transfigured in a tight circle of sons. Above her head she held a loaf. The boys lifted their arms to her, their faces radiant with love and gratitude. Sons, sons and more sons. She began to break the loaf apart with her fingers, handing out the staff of life to the eager, uplifted hands. Like God raining manna down upon Moses and His children. Like Jesus with the loaves and fishes. Ewan stood, riveted, his skin tingling, breathless and lightheaded. All around the air hummed with a kind of ecstasy that surrounded and buoyed him. He felt a stirring in his loins.

  Am I who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my handmaid. Go in unto her that I may have children by her. He watched her feed her children and as the light le
aked from the courtyard, watched her gather her sons as sheep into the fold. She and the little ones disappeared into one of the ramshackle cottages that backed onto the inn’s yard. Through his supper, his tea, through his ablutions before bed, the image of the Madonna and all her infant sons clung to him. When sleep finally swallowed him, his dreams rose up vivid and shocking with open moors and distant trumpets and light that floated up from the ground like mist. There she stands accepting his presence without acknowledging it, her four sons become eight, then legions around her. She strokes the hair of one, a sandy-haired lad, caressing him, kissing his cheek. She draws her hand across his young chest. Ewan understands this boy is his son as well as hers. She looks straight at Ewan then and sends the boy wordlessly to him.

  Other dreams follow, bulging with breasts and buttocks and soft young flesh.

  In the morning, with the sun already well above the horizon, Ewan found his sheets splotched with dampness. For once he did not rush to the siren of daylight. He rose slowly, lingered over breakfast and drank a pot of tea sitting on the courtyard bench by the inn’s back door. The Madonna of his dreams was a washerwoman. He watched her arrive with one parcel of linens and carry off another. Her countenance fixed, serious but lit from within. Pious, he thought. She passed so close by the bench Ewan could have reached out and caught her apron. He watched her come and go, with her hips and breasts and hands, her pretty waist and errant hairs that ringed her cap in a halo.

  He made enquiries in the stable. A rough-looking character staring down a shovel turned to Ewan, happy with the excuse to extend his lounging.

  “That’s Lizzy Wainwright,” the coarse fellow said. “Her man took the quick way down off a scaffold at the shipyard couple o’ months back. Tough bugger—it never killed ’im. Might’ve been best if it had.” The coarse fellow tried to look wise and sympathetic but managed neither. “There’s somethin’ broke in there inside him—sure as a dog shits. I seen him the odd time hobbling over the yard. Them’s the good days though. More likely he’s lying useless on the bed howling for rum or a go at the laudanum. No better than a babe.”

  Ewan asked if Mrs. Wainwright was a woman of good character. “I s’pose,” the stableman said, then added a remark about her physical abundance that Ewan found distasteful. He glowered at the groom who snickered and picked up his shovel.

  After the accident there had been a pittance from the shipyard. And the yard workers had taken up a collection as was usual in such circumstances. There was concern and sympathy and all the rest, but these attentions necessarily wane over time. Sure, a couple of his old mates came by with a tot of rum from time to time, but new concerns replaced the old. Charity ran thin. Lizzy Wainwright with her little cottage backing onto the courtyard of the inn went to work scrubbing linens, her hands red and raw from lye. Once her clotheslines were filled she crossed the courtyard to scrub pots or floors or windows or anything else that brought a penny or a loaf for her four little boys or a dram for her suffering shell of a husband.

  Ewan approached her washtub and introduced himself. He half expected her to be waiting for him, to know his mission, to have been prepared for his arrival through a dream or a vision of her own. But she was not. He laid out his proposition as clearly as his India ink plans of millrace and spur wheel. A becomes B which moves to C. She could not have failed to understand his intent. Even so, she stood dumb for a moment or two.

  Then she slapped his face. She grabbed the poker by the fire and pointed it at his chest. Her eyes wild, she leaned an inch or two towards him so he could hear her fiercely muted hissing. “You take your filthy mouth and go on! I’m an honest workingwoman. What are you doing speaking to me like that and with my little ones all around me? Have you no shame? I ought to report you to the magistrate!”

  Ewan stood his ground. “Speak to God,” he said with quiet earnestness. “God has sent me to you.”

  She gaped at the man standing there, sober as a moose, calling on God and talking filthy in the same breath.

  “I’ll be back this way in the fall,” he said.

  “You’ll be on your way, mister!”

  “I’ll leave you to your work and your considering. You’ll have forty days then forty more.” He bowed slightly, turned and headed back to the stable. Shortly afterwards she saw him ride out the lane.

  Men—always after one thing. For all her outrage, he wasn’t the first to come to her. It took no time at all for men to spot the vulnerable and to start circling for the kill. The first proposition, not three weeks after the accident, had sent her fleeing to the outhouse to sob out her indignation. The second time she swung a cast iron pan and had the bastard scurrying like the rat he was. Since then she had passed many a saucy-tongued lecher in the yard or the halls of the inn. Men were cowards, always preying on the weak and quivering in the face of anyone stronger than them. Why don’t they fight the shipyard bosses? Why not take on the bastards who treat them like animals? No. They hide from the brave union men who ask them to do their duty and make the bosses pay for the men they ruin. The cowards turn on helpless women instead. Well, she had her youngsters to think of. She called out to her oldest son to run after his brother and keep him away from the well.

  SUMMER PASSED AND FALL HOVERED. By summer’s end it was all too clear that Lizzy could not keep four youngsters fed and one man drunk on a washerwoman’s pittance. Already she had put the boys to bed whimpering from hunger, and this amid the plenty of the harvest and with the sun warming the world. This before the hearth began begging for fuel and bare feet started howling to be shod and before the inn’s brisk summer traffic gave way to winter’s few stalwarts. She knew now that she would lose her children. One way or another they would be taken from her: by cold or hunger or charity. Her husband would never work again. She did not mean to be cruel in her heart or her thoughts but the knowledge that her husband’s death would release her to find a fit provider for her boys revisted her shockingly often. But her husband’s death was not imminent. He suffered and he would go on suffering, perhaps for years. He cried out whenever she chose bread for the boys over the rum that dulled his pain. She turned herself around and around, inside out and upside down trying to figure out how to avoid the inevitable. She could not lose her sons. Yet who knew better than her how little pity graced the world. Soon there would be no solutions she would not consider.

  Lizzy Wainwright found herself increasingly drawn into an unlikely fantasy. Imagine if she could scrape up the money to rent a little house where she could rent out a couple of rooms. Suppose she could put two or three shipbuilders or dockyard workers in each room. The board could feed them all and buy the coal and she could keep her boys and nurse her husband. There were other women, widows mostly, who did this—she could name off half a dozen she had heard of in this town. But those women were not so poor. They had been left proper homes and she had only a cobbled-together cottage. Between the youngsters’ howling and her husband’s wailing for rum there wasn’t a decent man in the province who would board in such a pitiful cupboard even if she did have the space of a bed to spare. And so she was tossed back into fear and terrible contemplations.

  Ewan MacLaughlin, he had said. “My name is Ewan MacLaughlin.” For all the drunken gropes and coarse remarks she received from louts and oafs she never had a man give his name. Or use hers. More and more often she found herself puzzling over the odd, clear-eyed man with the indecent proposal. “You have forty days then forty more.” He was old but handsome in a dark, unusual way. He was odd, there was no doubt, but odd enough to be believed. He did not try to get around her, trap her, trick her, seduce her, insult her. He spoke to her almost like she was a man. Well, obviously not a man because of his intent, but as though she were as capable as a man. The insult was so intertwined with this confusing flattery that she could not lump him with the others and be done with it. And of course she could not speak about the incident to anyone.

  Ewan MacLaughlin spent the rest of the summer at Canaan Falls
, fifty miles upriver. A beautiful project. He would install a windmill for auxiliary power. He devised a system to pump water back up into a reservoir for use on low-water days. Grain ripened, water rose, autumn imperatives called him back to his duties at his own mill. After eighty days he packed up, set out at first light and rode all the way back to the Saint John inn.

  Lizzy Wainwright was annoyed with everyone on that day: her nerves as raw as her hands. What annoyed her most was that she must have, at some point, counted out the dates—forty plus forty. What annoyed her most was that she could not stop looking over her shoulder to the laneway, jumping at the sound of every hoof beat. She had enough problems without foolishness building nests in her head. She whipped her oldest boy for losing a cake of soap somewhere between the cottage and the washtub and tore a strip off the Irish girl in the inn’s scullery for dropping the geranium by the back window and smashing the pot, although what was the inn’s loss of a flowerpot to her? As the sun approached the horizon Lizzy twisted with a confusing mixture of relief and disappointment, dread and hope. After she wrestled all the boys into their bed she took herself outside to sit for a moment on her upturned washtub and gulp a few breaths of evening air. She leaned over to rub her poor tired legs. A tear of exhaustion rolled down her cheek and she swatted it away. A moment of rest always invited desperation to slink out from some black corner to find her. “Go away,” she ordered it. She held her sagging head in her hands.

  When she looked up, there he was. Even in the fading light she recognized the compact solidity of his outline, his clean, efficient movements. He emerged into the courtyard from the lane, dismounted, slung his saddlebags over his shoulder, handed his horse over to the groom and headed directly across the yard towards her washtub. Although she could not remember rising, she was on her feet as he approached. He took off his mud-spattered overcoat and handed it to her.