by Janet Lunn
Mrs. Colliver paused. Mary said nothing.
“It ain’t just Indians. A young girl like you alone with no husband—it ain’t to be considered. What’s more, young woman, do you know how cold it gets around here in winter? I heard your Aunt Jean say, more than once, if she’d a knew how cold it was going to be in Canada she might not have come here.” Mrs. Colliver paused for breath.
“Dan Pritchett will be giving me firewood for the winter.”
“Is that so?” Mrs. Colliver was a bit taken aback.
“I will be teaching the school with Sarah Pritchett.”
“Can you read?”
“I can.”
“Hmph. Well, you sure have it all set up, haven’t you?”
Mary said softly, “I hope so. Surely I hope so.”
It was agreed that she would work for Mrs. Colliver every afternoon in exchange for a small wage, a hank of spun wool to begin weaving with, and a share of the autumn shearing. Anxious to settle herself, Mary hurried to get her things from the Andersons’.
Lydia Anderson wrung her hands. “Oh dear. I thought you might stay here with us. Henry’s leg and … the cooking … Luke … I need you.” She looked helplessly at Mary.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Anderson.” In spite of herself, Mary had become, if not actually fond, protective of Lydia Anderson. “The sweetest, gentlest, prettiest girl in the Midland district, she was,” Mrs. Colliver had said. “John was besotted over her.” The shadow of the pretty girl was there yet in the drawn, lined face, and although the gentleness had degenerated into unhappy complaint the sweetness was still evident in her childlike concern about Henry, and the wistful way she sometimes looked at her older sons.
Mary was tempted for a moment to change her mind but she did not. “Henry is truly mending, Mrs. Anderson. He does not need me and.…” She looked up to see Luke standing in the doorway. She leapt from her chair as though stung, acutely self-conscious.
“And I will come to see you … and to see Henry. Please tell Mr. Anderson and Simeon goodbye for me.”
“Oh, dear.” Lydia Anderson wrung her hands again, her brow furrowed, and Mary knew that as soon as she had gone through the door she would sit down in the rocking-chair and begin to drink from the jug. She had a fleeting vision of Lydia Anderson struggling against wild wind and snow. “I could not save her from it did I stay,” she thought defensively, but remembering her vow she put her hand on Mrs. Anderson’s arm and looked at her intently. “Please, Mrs. Anderson, when winter comes do not you go out into the snow.” She turned to leave, glancing at Luke and away again.
“Goodbye, Mary.…” Luke did not seem in the least ill at ease. “Henry and me’ll come by to see you when he can get that far on his leg.”
“Goodbye.” She hurried past him.
Outside she sat beside Henry and told him she was leaving. “I will come to see you,” she promised.
Henry’s lower lip quivered. His eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want you to go.” He sniffed.
“Tell Simeon that if he is hard on you I will put a fine spell on him,” she whispered, “and he will wither and die as did the poor lad the witch hated in the tale I told you. Remember?”
Henry nodded vigorously, but he did not smile. Mary wished she could take him with her.
By the time she reached her house it was evening and the sun, an enormous glowing scarlet ball, was setting over the woods, casting a wide pink reflection over the bay. The crickets were cricking and the frogs were garumphing in the marsh and the great blue herons were gronking hoarsely as they settled for the night in the branches of the oak and elm trees. A raccoon and her young were washing fish at the mouth of the creek; out on the bay the loons swimming along the surface of the water made ripples and small splashes, calling to one another in their high, hollow tremolos.
Hugging her bundle of belongings tightly to her, Mary surveyed her small kingdom joyfully. Before she entered the house she asked God’s blessing. Inside, she found that someone had put a badly darned but serviceable mattress ticking filled with fresh bedstraw in the bed in the corner. There was a loaf of bread on the table. In the cupboard, besides the five wooden trenchers the Cameron family had left behind, were a tin cup and a blue crockery bowl with only a small chunk chipped out of it. The fire was laid and over it hung a much-mended iron open kettle still sound enough to hold water.
Mary was stupefied. The bundle of clothes fell to the floor as she gazed about her.
“It is the sitheachean,” she whispered. “The fairies wish me well. The old ones are looking after me. If Luke and Mrs. Colliver do not understand those of us with the two sights, they cannot gainsay the old ones! I will be well in Duncan’s house with the fairies looking after me.” She hung her two shawls, her spare skirt, and a petticoat Mrs. Colliver had given her on the pine-wood pegs by the door and placed her shoes on the floor beneath. She took Mrs. Grant’s much-smudged, folded, worn letter from the pocket of her skirt and put it on the top shelf of the dresser. She held the spindle whorl for a moment in her hand.
“You are my good fortune. I know it now. It is right what I am doing.” She set the spindle whorl beside the letter. Then she picked up the blue crockery dish, carried it outside to the stream, and filled it with water. She walked three times around the house clockwise—very slowly—sprinkling the water and chanting the house-blessing that had always been used in the glen. She filled the little bowl once more and set it by the door.
“I have no milk for you, bodach,” she addressed the house spirit, although she could not see him, “but I will get you bread and soon I will find milk.” She got up and went to stand again in the middle of her meadow. She felt the cool evening breeze and sniffed the sweet milkweed and the cinnamon scent of the rose hips. Then, unmindful of the tall grass, she lifted her skirts to her knees, held her elbows wide, and began to dance. Around and around she danced, faster and faster, her small white feet leaping high, her long black hair flying wild.
Suddenly she stopped. She froze with one foot on the big grey rock at the edge of the water. After a moment her arms fell to her sides. She stared into the bog-black water lapping against the shore. A chill ran through her and she fled to the house. Her elation was gone. In its place was an uneasiness she could not identify.
That night she woke again from the nightmare of Duncan calling her. She found herself crouched half-way across the room, wakened because she had stumbled on something. It was the spindle whorl. She sat down in Aunt Jean’s rocking chair by the smouldering fire, twisting the spindle whorl around and around in her hands, wondering how it had come there, wondering where she had been going when she had stumbled over it.
The Old Ones Are Looking After Me
“An evil spirit is sending me the dream. It has taken Duncan. It has taken Duncan’s voice and now it comes for me.” Mary had been badly frightened in the night. “But the old ones are looking after me—I will come to no harm.”
All the same, she took a red thread from her petticoat and tied it around her wrist, and she went every morning to Duncan’s grave to say a prayer for the return of his spirit so that it might rest. Feeling secure with these protections against the evil, she began life in her new home.
She asked for a bit of paper from Julia as her first week’s wages, and wrote to her mother and father. She told them, in as many words as the small paper would allow, what she had been doing, that she was well and that, God willing, she would return to them in the spring—although the mere thought of facing the trip home made her shudder and her stomach contract. She signed the letter “your loving daughter” and took it to Mrs. Hazen at the store to send to Soames to go out on the next ship down the lake.
Next she took stock of what she had and what she had to do. She was determined to prove to Julia Colliver that she could manage by herself. Housekeeping was not as unpleasant as Mary had once thought it would be. Water for cooking and washing flowed in the stream that meandered through her yard. True to his word, Dan Pritche
tt had seen to it there was wood piled against the side of her house, and she soon learned how to manage a wood fire. Cooking, she had discovered while at the Andersons’, was not something she liked doing, but food was plentiful—Dan had brought her a peck of potatoes, there were the squash and pumpkins in what had been Aunt Jean’s garden. There were wild greens and the bay was full of fish. Now and then Julia gave her a pitcher of milk or a bowl of butter. Patty Openshaw came up the road one afternoon with a crockery pot, steam rising from under a crust that covered it, and an old blue-and-white checked blanket. “I got to run,” she said breathlessly, “Ma’s in a tizzy over Aaron on account of he et a grasshopper—here’s a pigeon pie and Ma says you can have the coverlet. If she’ll let me out by myself for five minutes, I’ll come along and we’ll have a chin-wag. I only live a mile and a half up the road.” Patty deposited the pot into Mary’s hands, the blanket on the table, and ran off. “You can keep the pot,” she shouted as she went. “Ma says it’s for welcome.” Once in a while there was a pigeon’s breast, a fish, a grouse, or a partridge, plucked and cleaned, sitting on her table when she came in from work in the evening. She knew she was being cared for. “Where, in such low, tree-covered country, do the old ones stay?” she would ask herself.
She loved her meadow and the bay. Often she rose early, wakened by the loons’ cries, to watch them play together, diving down into the water, gliding along the surface, disappearing into the mist. She would walk slowly around the entire acre of land, startling the birds and the orange-and-black monarch butterflies into sudden flight, surprising the squirrels and chipmunks so that they scurried up into the trees where they flicked their tails and scolded volubly. They made her laugh.
She never went near the big grey rock down where the meadow pointed into the bay. Sometimes, as she washed her clothes in the stream, gathered mint and tansy for her tea, or collected other herbs for her lessons with Owena, she would look towards it. “There is something evil in that place,” and she would think gratefully of her protectors.
Owena had come again the day after Mary moved into her house. “I will teach you,” she said. “You have the healing hands. I, too.” Mary already knew that. Owena had brought plants from the forest. Together she and Mary collected herbs from along the road and the bay, from Mary’s own meadow, and from around the edge of the clearing across the road behind the little barn.
“This one, thistle, is no good for anything.” Owena threw it out. “Basil will discourage flies from the house.” She hung it over the fireplace. “Feverfew is good for toothache and for fever. Garlic, too. Yarrow has good smell and makes tea for chills. Rose hips are for tea to keep off scurvy. Wild yam is for seizure, sumac for gargling. Be careful of what you call Indian turnip when it is fresh—it burns. Cook it, then it is good for babies with the belly-ache. It is good, too, for the coughing sickness.”
Mary found that she remembered more names, more cures from Mrs. Grant’s teaching than she had any idea she had ever learned. Some plants were new to her: yams, sumac, crowfoot—not to drink or eat, good for bad rash on the skin, Owena said. Others—hyssop, tansy, rose, sage, mint—were so familiar she could imagine that she was back in Mrs. Grant’s garden under the brow of Drum Eildean. She was sure Mrs. Grant would like Owena. Owena spoke in few and quiet words. She was a good teacher, endlessly patient and thorough.
Sometimes Owena came just to visit, alone or with friends and relatives, Mohawks who had been used to visiting Aunt Jean and Uncle Davie. Mary liked them. She liked the silent, companionable way they came and went, although it sometimes startled her. She liked the deep, guttural sound of their speech, even though she couldn’t understand the words, and she loved to hear them sing. Their singing was not so different from some she knew from home. In other ways, too, she sometimes felt easier with the Indians than she did with her white neighbours. They read the wind and respected the spirits and creatures of the other world and the ghosts of the dead. But they were also forest people, who would leave her house and disappear into the trees, a barrier too great for Mary to breach.
When Patty Openshaw could steal the time from home she would come galloping up the road through the woods, bonnet strings flapping, to share a five-minute visit in the sun.
Neighbours invited her to “come along to supper.” Some weeks, on Saturday or Sunday, Dan Pritchett had prayers and Bible readings in his front room, as there was no church in the community yet and the preacher did not reach them more than once or twice a year.
Mary went every afternoon to her job at the Collivers’. She did not like scrubbing floors or washing dishes, or labouring at all the household chores she had refused to give her life to, at the age of eleven, for Mr. and Mrs. Gillespie.
“Could I have but known,” she lamented bitterly as she pared potatoes, or wept as she sliced onions. “Duncan dubh, for your sake I came to this wilderness to spend my days as a scullerymaid!”
The outside work was good. When it was shearing time, Mary sang shearing songs to the sheep and taught the words to Matthew and Deborah and Nancy Colliver.
“I declare”—Mrs. Colliver was astonished—“I never in my life saw sheep come like that to nobody. A body could almost believe in magic.”
“It is not magic. I know how to talk to beasts,” said Mary simply.
Some evenings she stayed on to help with supper so that she could weave with Mrs. Colliver afterwards. The work was frustratingly slow; Mary had no patience for it and she could hardly bear Mrs. Colliver’s unceasing talk, cheerful as it was. “It is awful work to have to do for an awful journey to have to make,” she thought grimly as she wove—and then unwove all her mistakes. But she did not give up. She needed the money her weaving would bring. The hired work she did for the Collivers did little more than pay for her needs.
The spinning at home was no easier. Mary worked on old Mrs. Grant’s spindle whorl, slowly and painfully pulling the thread through the hole. Many an evening she balled the split, broken, or tangled wool and almost pitched it into the fire. Then Mrs. Grant’s face would appear to her and she would hear again her gently reproving words, “Mairi, Mairi, the good Lord gave patience to us all. Yours is like the wild honey, sweeter and more precious for being long to seek and tormenting to secure.”
“Tormenting it is! Tormenting! Tormenting! I shall never make a fine, smooth thread, never!” She would hurl the spindle whorl across the room—but after a while she would retrieve it and begin again. And in time she had threads she felt her mother might not scorn.
But what made it so much harder was that, awake or asleep, she would suddenly hear Duncan cajoling, pleading with her to come to him. She felt the evil spirit was mocking her with Duncan’s voice, and then she would cling to Mrs. Grant’s spindle whorl for her salvation.
Autumn came and school began. Mary was to teach the reading, Sarah Pritchett the arithmetic. Dan Pritchett had sent a round-up of his grandsons with three long benches to fill up Mary’s house. Sarah came in a neat gown and old-fashioned hat, apologizing for taking up all Mary’s room, bearing an assortment of hornbooks and primers. Hornbooks Mary had not seen before—they were small, oblong, wooden paddles with an alphabet and a few biblical verses on paper covered by a thin sheet of horn tacked to one side. The primers, tattered as they were, many with pages missing, were more useful. “But they are so old,” sighed Sarah. “Mere remnants of the books and hornbooks the children’s parents and grandparents learned from in grammar schools back home in the Thirteen Colonies before the rebellion. Well, we must do the best we can.” She sighed again.
The children—eleven of them—ranged in age from six to nine. And sometimes Polly Pritchett came too because she put up such a howl of rage at being refused. They came shyly at first, but before long the boys of eight and nine were doing their best to reduce their new reading teacher to the tears to which Sarah Pritchett so easily succumbed.
Mary had not spent fifteen years fighting off foxes, wolves, and the troublesome spirits of the hill
s to keep her sheep and cattle safe, just to be destroyed by a handful of mischievous boys. When Ben Bother began to croak like a bullfrog while Abe Morrissay was stumbling through his lesson, Mary interrupted Abe. Without raising her voice, she told the tale of the unfortunate Highland boy who had once baa-ed like a sheep in school to confuse the dominie and had had to spend the rest of his eighty-seven years as a sheep.
“Folk took to going out into the meadow just to keep the poor lad company but he would only look skintwise at them with his great, sad eyes, then turn away his head, so ashamed was he of the shape he had taken.”
There were a few sniggers and the children all looked at each other disbelievingly, but Ben stopped the bullfrog sounds. Whatever trick the boys were up to, although she might long to fling their precious books at them, Mary would reprimand in even tones or tell a wicked story. And she had a way of narrowing her black eyes and intoning low, slow rhymes in Gaelic that sometimes amused them but as often froze a culprit in his seat to the delight of the others.
Sarah was grateful for the discipline but worried about the effect of the rhymes. She taxed Mary with them one day after school was out.
“I would not repeat real spells!” Mary was indignant. “I only tell them silly rhymes.”
“What do you mean, Mary, real spells?”
“Iùilas, runes, charms. Spells.”
“But you don’t really believe in spells? I mean, only the superstitious believe in spells. Oh dear, I.…” Sarah fidgeted with the sash of her dress.
Mary didn’t know what to say. Here it was again: Mrs. Colliver saying talk of ghosts was nonsense, Luke carefully ignoring what she said about having the two sights, now Sarah Pritchett’s “But you don’t really believe in spells?” What was wrong with the folk in this country? She opened her mouth to ask Sarah what made them all so foolish but Sarah looked so small—although she was taller than Mary herself—and she was twisting her good silk sash so nervously that Mary could only repeat lamely, “Och, it is but silly rhymes I am giving them.” She promised not to frighten the children any more.