by Linda Little
Rachel wanted her mother intensely at that moment. She knew that she should not run outside at night but Mama would be happy to see her. Mama would be so happy she would forget about it being nighttime and she would bend down and fold Rachel into her arms. Now that she wasn’t sick anymore she would lift her up into her arms and they would cuddle like bears.
Rachel slipped out into the hall and then, leaning into the wall, descended the stairs one step at a time, in the darkness of the stairwell. She scooted across the familiar painted boards of the kitchen floor, through the entry and out into the October wind. The wind whipped her nightdress out in front of her.
The moon lit one shallow layer of everything. Her mother was not here in the dooryard, not in front of her, not to either side. She did not know which way to go. Her eyes watered in the cold. She called out but the wind grabbed her words and ran off with them. She ran across to the barn but the barn door was too big and heavy to open and it was so dark and lonely here her mother could not possibly be inside. Should she go back to the house? No, she’d seen her mother and wanted her mother. She turned back towards the road. Her bare feet felt stiff and square as blocks of wood, almost clattering over the ridges frozen into the laneway. Downhill felt better than up. Down along the road. Where was her mother? Off to her left moonlight polished the mill windows to perfect ebony rectangles. Something was wrong with the mill door. The wind had blown it open. It rocked closed on its hinges with a creak and bump each time the wind stopped to take a breath, then flew open again with each new gust. Rachel’s feet found the path. Stones skittered out of her way as she bumbled, rush and stop and skid, down the steep slope. Rachel stepped up and crossed the threshold of the mill, slipped in out of the wind and felt the physical relief of shelter.
“Mama?”
Moonlight caught the whiteness, nothing but the white bundle swaying from the end of the rope beneath the trap door, swaying ever so gently in the wind, limp and cold and white and swaying.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
PENELOPE
I WOKE TO FIND MYSELF ALONE, TO FIND FIRST CHARITY, THEN Rachel, missing. Panic ignited my heart and exploded outward, taking everything. Thought could not survive the blast. I remember only action, only running, only searching, only finding. Rachel, in the first rays of dawn, huddled by the dam where the mill offered her some small protection from the wind, where roaring water swallowed cries. She had curled herself into a ball no bigger than a milk pail. When I touched her skin it was cold as death. But then she lifted her head, turned to me with eyes wide. She opened her mouth to speak but no sound emerged.
And Charity. I cannot speak about this. The doctor signed the death certificate. Scarlet fever. We buried her in the churchyard.
I BUNDLED THE CHILDREN AGAINST THE COLD. Rachel clung to me like a wide-eyed monkey while we lowered her mother into the earth. She had not uttered a word since I found her by the mill. The three boys crowded in beside me. Without them I could not have remained upright. We stood silent while the minister’s voice rose and dissipated into the air, watched the dirt hit the lid of her casket.
Now I had seen all four of my children into this world and out of it. Were it not for the young one on my hip and her three growing brothers I would gladly have lain beside Charity and welcomed the earth over me. But here I remained, seventy-five years old with four grandchildren and this monster who had terrorized my daughter into her grave. And a promise. I owned only my miller’s trade, my legal right to live in the house, and a jar of egg money. I could not take the children away and I certainly could not leave them. What was there to do but climb into the waiting wagon and be carried, rocking and queasy, back to the mill?
As Charity had instructed, I kept Rachel by my side day and night, always within sight. Like Charity, she would learn her letters at the mill desk and her numbers from the ledgers. Every night when she woke me with her night terrors I cradled her in my arms, rocking her in the dark. She rarely spoke. There were days we wandered aimlessly through a field or along the brook while the mill sat idle. On one such day I came across Laughlin, drunk as a lord, by the brook below the dam. Of course I abhorred the sight of him but more than that it sickened me to find us bound together in secrecy and shame. I scooted Rachel up the hill, directed her to wait for me up on the road. I knew she would not venture that far from me but she pulled back into the woods at least where she could peer at me from behind a tree. There lay her father, sprawled on the rock ledge above the pool from which the boys had pulled countless trout over the years. Merton’s Pool. Where Merton died of the drink, of the struggle, subject to the law of all falling bodies. Not a soul around.
Laughlin struggled to his hands and knees, barely sensate. He raised his head and looked at me through his drunken haze. At first revulsion clouded my vision. My beautiful daughter being eaten by worms and my grandchildren at his mercy. I saw only cowardly pleading in his eyes. When I stepped towards him the pleading seeped out of him, turning a steely calm. I advanced and stopped a number of times before I understood. He was not begging me to spare him but to help him through a door he didn’t have the courage to pry open on his own. In my grief and dislocation I had not been prepared to see anything beyond his wickedness. But he knew as well as I what a scourge he was. Crawling about here wrapped in dirt and drunkenness and whatever horrors the war had plagued him with. He did not attempt speech; like a dog too old to live, he watched me approach and pause, approach again.
I thought a crime of passion built its own world. I had experience, after all with the crime of love. On that magical blizzard island with Charity’s father the world had pulled away, dividing like the double yoke in an egg. The known world was set apart while a new world, without time or consequence, bubbled into existence. But this division of worlds did not happen as I stood over my son-in-law. Should Laughlin die, the mill would pass to his sons and we would all live safely and quietly here until the boys were grown. Industry and thrift had brought us this far and could carry us onward. The children would not have to suffer their father’s example, would never know the depth of his cruelty. Perhaps time would dim the memory of this past year and the absent wartime hero would re-emerge as the father they would carry with them. And Laughlin himself would be free of whatever horrors beset him and had turned him from a callow, pampered youth into this beast. If he drowned drunk in a pool I would be freed from seeing his hideous face each day. My daughter’s death would be avenged. The world would be well rid of him.
I imagined Laughlin could see, too, where our common interest lay. When he tried to stand he toppled backwards, landing mere feet from the rocky bank. We locked eyes and then, trussed up with drunkenness, his head lolled to the side. He tried to speak but most of his words were aborted before they reached his tongue. One garbled syllable rolled sideways onto the rock. Please? Perhaps he said please. Perhaps. In any case I understood with utter clarity that he was not pleading for his wretched life but for his death. A single crow cawed from a branch somewhere overhead. For a long while I remained motionless staring down at him. Finally I turned my back on him, picked up my granddaughter from where she hid huddled behind a tree, and set off back up to the house.
If I was set a moral test that day I do not know whether I passed or failed. The fates did not claim him and he did not hand himself over. He did not tip himself into the brook. He did not drown. He did not freeze. I know that sometime during the night he returned to the house, because as I stood at the stove making the porridge the next morning, his snores from the room off the kitchen polluted the dawn.
From that day forward I lived with a singular focus. I must prepare the boys to leave. I could not be distracted by grief. My three score and ten had been granted and more besides. Every day I worked to build the boys’ wherewithal to pull themselves into adulthood and take themselves away from here. I thought if I could bind the three slender branches together tightly enough, perhaps they would find the collective strength to survive. Ther
e was no room, no time, for anything that did not contribute to their departure. I lashed them to their tasks, built strength and endurance, brooked no indolence, certainly no rivalries. I treated them as a unit. When I rewarded Yoo-hoo’s pluck or Samuel’s acumen or Alec’s pure scientific intelligence, I rewarded all three boys together. When one was punished for some misdemeanour or oversight, all three suffered. No one rested until everyone’s chores were done. Each was responsible for the others. We lived around Laughlin. Some days he was stock to be tended, some days a bout of nasty weather to be contended with. I had no time to waste on rage or recrimination; the time for that had come and gone. Each morning that I opened my eyes, each morning that I set my aching feet on the floor, each morning that I watched the dawn brighten the millpond, was a victory that brought the boys twenty-four hours more to prepare for their independence. With every season that passed I grew more confident that with their labour and their combined strengths they could save themselves.
But the girl? A woman can work her life away for nothing but dependence and scorn. For Rachel there was only thin Christian pity. Our story, at least, I could give her—truth, for its own paltry sake. I held Rachel close and poured our story into her. I told her all about where she came from, about her mother, and me, and about that wretched mill that ground us all to dust. I held nothing back. I began with the evening in Reverend MacLaughlin’s parlour when I first set eyes on Ewan MacLaughlin’s plans for his mill. I told her all about my life, my children, her mother, herself and all that happened. Soon the story flowed so easily I could leave off the telling when my attention was drawn elsewhere and pick it up again without losing a sentence. I told her all, and then I began again. And again. What more could I do? I loved her. I poured all we were and all we had been into her until the story filled every crook and corner of her heart and limbs and mind. “This is the story of how you were loved.” Rachel said nothing but I saw her listening, even when she looked away. At least this is what I chose to believe.
THE LORD ALLOWED ME THREE MORE YEARS. And with this gift He turned me grateful, left me humbled. In the fall of 1922 we had been at the late summer oats for a while but this bright September day brought the first early wheat of the season. This I remember—the wheat. The novelty of its fresh aroma transcended the hardier scent of oats. It was mid-morning and the two younger boys had just begun their school year. Yoo-hoo was downstairs on the meal floor checking a belt. Rachel hovered by my side as always. As I lifted a small sack of wheat into the hopper a dreadful tightness gripped my chest. The weight grew suddenly oppressive and I staggered backwards against the wall, the pain squeezing my heart and lungs. Grain spilled out across the floor, and I cried out in surprise. Yoo-hoo came running but I banished his questions and sent him out to lower the sluice gate. Overcome by a great weariness I sank back, flat on the floor where the boards carried the mill’s growling vibrations directly to my flesh. An odd sense of knowing tingled along my limbs, numbing my fingers and toes. When the waterwheel creaked and heaved to a halt I knew the boy had reached the sluice. Beneath me, through the floorboards, I felt the giant spur wheel slow. I felt the space between its rotations stretch, felt the power ebb. Even as my mind grew sleepy, I checked off the parts of the power train: the main shaft, the drive pulley, the spur wheel, the stone nuts, the grinding stone. Slow, slow, stop. Rachel patted my cheek. As the mill slipped into silence the roar of the waterfall rose up in a mist of white noise.
*
SHE LAY STILL, THE FAMILIAR SCENT OF HER LINENS, THE PUCKERED stitching of the quilt beneath her fingers. Thoughts came to her and perched, then flew off again in their own time like crows resting on a signpost. Odd, she thought. And calming. Free. So much of life can be spent in fear of death only to arrive at life’s back door to be greeted by the relief of inevitability. Control relinquished. She slept and woke. The boys stood by the bed. Were all three there? It crossed her mind that she could count them and name them. Over the past three years she had prepared these boys with precise instructions. They knew where to find her casket in the barn, her gravesite beside her children’s in the churchyard, her accumulated wealth, such as it was, in the small wooden box with the mother-of-pearl inlay at the bottom of the flour bin in the pantry. In her account at MacKinnon’s. One of the boys was telling her about the harvest train. Yes. This was one of the many scenarios she had practised with them. If the time was right—the harvest train, the great open West. Go with the other Maritime men and boys. Work hard. After the harvest move towards a town where there will be work. With all that grain there must be mills. Or other work—it doesn’t matter at first. Be watchful. Be careful what you trust to others. Move away from greedy people and towards the compassionate. Find work together, find a room to rent. It will need to be adequately heated and have a strong lock. Above all, stay together. All this the boys knew as well as they knew their names.
Time folded over before her like the turn of a great stone, as though the stone were inside her, or she inside the stone—as though she had turned upside down, then inside out. But she was not afraid. She felt the boys grown to men. For an instant there they were, strong and complete with their Western wives and children. And she beside them. Yoo-hoo smiling and alert, prosperous from business, his burly frame beginning to run to fat, his family large and boisterous. Samuel the teacher with a pretty wife and two kind, quiet daughters. Alec the engineer, practical and intense. Good men, all. So powerful was the feeling of recognition that Penelope could no longer focus her eyes on the boys by her bedside. She felt suffused with pure happiness and must have smiled because she could hear the boys speaking to her. They had taken her smile as a sign. Good. This was the truth she had to share with them. Go. Keep your promises. All will be well.
When she woke the next time Rachel was nestled in like a cat beside her under the quilt. Perhaps she had been there all along. Yes, the warmth, the occasional squirm, the fragile weight.
Maggie Heighton would take Rachel. This had been arranged. But such sadness surrounded the little girl. She worked her leaden arms around the child as best she could and Rachel burrowed deeper. Again the tilting of the stone—but this time she could not see so well. The boys had appeared so clearly but the girl’s future lurked, murky and stringy and so intertwined with her own she could not pull them apart. Perhaps it was the proximity of the child or her tender age. There was a lost daughter and a terrible pain. Then a flash of clarity with Rachel—elderly now—with a granddaughter of her own. Both curled around a sadness as great as her own. Fortunes turned and turned back again, season after season, along the generations. Elderly Rachel and her granddaughter huddled in a crocheted blanket made of hundreds of little orange and brown and yellow stars. The child wiggled her fingers through the crocheted loops, pressed her head into her grandmother’s bosom. Rachel held her granddaughter and stroked her silky little-girl hair. This is the story of how you were loved.
“Nana.” A whisper absorbed through her skin and into her blood. A tide of warmth rose through her weary flesh. Could she manage a few words?
“Rachel.”
She drew what breath she could. The child raised her head and set a soft cheek on hers, ear to lips and lips to ear. She whispered into the ear. “This is the story of how you were loved,” she managed.
A thin voice came back to her, barely audible at first, then clearer. Rachel’s voice in the flat rote of a reciting child. “This is the story of how you were loved. I first met Ewan MacLaughlin on a winter evening. I had begun the evening in my room as usual, arranging my students’ lessons…”
She smiled.
Maggie Heighton stood guard over the bedroom. She did not give way to the older women who pursed their lips when she declared the child could remain curled up in bed beside her dying grandmother. She did not give way to their scandalized faces when she let the child rest a while embracing her grandmother’s lifeless body. Rachel knew her grandmother was gone. She had felt her leave, felt her hand let go, felt the b
ody alter. An aroma of flowers kissed the air as though her grandmother had left her a bouquet she could breathe in and carry with her. When finally Maggie Heighton picked her up and carried her out to the waiting buggy that would take her to her new home at the Crossing, she gave no more resistance than a sack of flour. This is the story of how you were loved.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I WOULD LIKE TO MENTION A FEW OF THE SOURCES THAT WERE PARticularly helpful to me in writing this book. First is the archival material left by Pictou County miller James Barry, which includes account books, day books and, most importantly, a daily diary covering the second half of the nineteenth century. The character of Ewan MacLaughlin is entirely fictional and in no way representative of Barry. Next is The Young MillWright and Miller’s Guide by Oliver Evans, which was the standard millers’ reference throughout the nineteenth century. The passages Ewan quotes are lifted from the text. Although I originally accessed this book from the Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia, conveniently for me the book was reissued by Algrove Publishing for Lee Valley in 2004. Another work I found both fascinating and useful was Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (University of Toronto Press, 2003) by Jean Barman. It offers glimpses into the lives and perceptions of two young Nova Scotian women in the late nineteenth century.