She refused to go back but that wasn’t the end of it. When the schoolmaster came to her home, no doubt fearing the loss of a family’s share in his annual stipend, she hid on the mountain. Her father dragged her to school, but she ran away as soon as he was out of sight. Not even his beatings could persuade her to return to the greater humiliation of the school.
One morning as she went about her chores, her father pointed at her without looking at her at all. “If that girl will stay home she will work.’’
Work, there was no end to that: feeding, milking, churning, sowing, weeding, reaping, cooking, canning, cleaning, weaving . . . . And there were two boys to care for. Her mother was suffering the sickness too, as Johanna still thought of it, making no connection with the calm annual births of calves and lambs. She did realize this time it would result in the arrival of another child.
Perhaps she thought this was her fate, if she thought of it at all, but her parents were worried they would never find her a useful niche in their limited world.
It was a long time till they thought to ask her what she’d like.
No one would take a girl for anything but a servant. No one would take a girl with a club foot. But Father found a tailor in Baddeck who agreed to take Johanna as an apprentice. She was nine when she left to walk the twenty miles to that village. Her mother cried. Johanna had said, “I want to be a tailor.” Her father asked why, and she’d replied, “Because they have all the good stories.’’ He had roared with laughter. It was an old saying about the tailors; she had no notion of the work they did.
Father and mother had crossed the whole wide ocean from Lewis to Cape Breton in a ship like a thimble, tossing about on mountain-sized waves. Oh, so many sick, so many who died, Mary Sandy had told her a hundred times. And the people had later built great ships of their own, there on the near shore, in which many of them sailed on toward far wider oceans, to a place called New Zealand. There were always stories told of great journeys in the world or among the fairy folk, but Johanna had never been beyond the near shore, the dark forested mountainside, and the glen where the schoolhouse and church stood. She paused on the brow of a hill where the road could be seen twisting down into the forest that spread as far as the horizon with no indication of any opening, and she looked back to the scattered clearings, the glimpses of rooftops and the sparkling blue bowl of the bay. Ahead the unbroken mass of the stirring treetops was a darker ocean into which she plunged.
When she was a grown woman she’d made a journey to Boston, but the marvels of the great city stirred her no more deeply than her first sight of the village of Baddeck where there lived more people than she’d known in the whole of her nine years. She’d left home at sunrise but didn’t reach the end of her road till long past sunset. She gasped when the village came in sight: hundreds of windows filled with lamplight floating along the length of the lake’s blackness. She headed for a cluster of light that seemed to indicate the centre of the place, gulping the cool night air to calm the trembling that seized her limbs.
The first person she encountered was a man reeking of drink and filth, who’d tottered past taking no notice of her, so she asked directions from the second, a well-dressed, grey-haired woman sitting alone in the flower-filled yard of an enormous house, which glowed, to Johanna’s amazement, with the whiteness of bone.
“You must be Johanna MacLeod,” the woman said.
The shock of finding herself known to a person who was neither family nor neighbour was as great as any Johanna had known in the short life that had brought her to this place of wonders. She was speechless.
“Thank you,” she managed to say once the woman had pointed out the shop behind which the tailor lived. She stood motionless with her eyes downcast until the woman said, “It’s late, you’d best go along.”
Johanna turned and walked slowly across the roadway, trying not to betray her limp, but the woman said in a friendly way from the darkness where she could be heard rocking gently, “Of course, you’re footsore after so long a walk.”
Johanna felt her face flushing, but she lifted up her skirts enough so the heavy boot was visible to anyone who cared to look. They’d know soon enough.
The tailor’s wife looked her up and down as if she were eyeing a doubtful horse at the prospect of a long hard journey. “You’ll be tired,” she said finally, leading the way to the loft where Johanna would stay for the next ten years.
In the morning she was dressed and waiting for the woman to come and wake her up. “Stand up,’’ the tailor’s wife said and Johanna slowly did so. The woman wasn’t much taller than Johanna but her long yellowish face inspired awe in the child.
The woman smiled. It was as brief as the twitch of a cow’s arse at a flybite but it was a smile. “I won’t eat you,” she said. She lifted the girl’ s heavy skirt to reveal the deformed leg. Already that morning she’d heard gossip on the matter.
“Your father made no mention of the leg.”
“I’ll go if you want.” Johanna looked her in the eye.
“No need,” she said, likely thinking they could raise the apprentice fee. “It won’t affect your work here. Come and meet Mr. MacDonald, he’s an old friend of your father.”
The tailor was a gaunt, bitter man with no stories in him at all. At times it seemed he barely had the power of speech.
She heard nothing of her family for a year. Twice she wrote, giving the letter to travelers headed to the bay, but there’d been no reply. She missed her mother, though she no longer cried for her in bed at night; she missed the animals, the garden and the outdoor air which she tasted rarely from the narrow workshop where she spent her days.
At the end of a year Mrs. MacDonald said, “You may go home now.”
Johanna gathered her few belongings, only daring to ask Mrs. MacDonald when her husband left the shop: “Must I return here?”
“Of course,” the woman laughed. “You’re no tailor yet. Come back at the end of the week. Or don’t go at all if it suits you.”
Johanna was already through the door and stepping down to the road.
At the outskirts of the village she saw the drunken man she’d seen on the night of her arrival a year before, and not since. He came up from the wooded shore to the rutted mud track that was the only road. He seemed to take no notice of her, whistling raggedly as he stumbled along. As he passed by she recognized the tune of “Calum Crùbach” and blushed as the words came to mind. S’iomadh ceum crùbach a chum air deireadh mi . . . . (It was my lame foot that kept me behind the rest . . . .) She whirled about, expecting to see him leering after her, but he was still moving crab-like toward the village, oblivious of her embarrassment.
She had grown, and her long uneven stride carried her much more quickly along the road than a year before. It was early evening when she reached the hilltop from which she could first glimpse her home. She looked back the way she’d come. New green treetops were still a vast sea-like expanse, but she knew something of what lay beyond and looked undaunted now at the few receding hills that had so recently encompassed her whole world.
She started down toward the glen, soon losing sight of the roof of her parents’ cabin where it sat between the bay and the mountain. At that hour she saw no one, but lamps were being lit and the smoke of fires, stoked to heat the evening meal, rose thinly on the cooling air. There had been no smoke from her home. She felt a flutter of panic, without knowing why, and swung into an awkward run.
Her fear deepened when she approached and saw the garden was unturned, the milking stool and buckets were tossed carelessly to one side of the doorway, and the ground was littered with scraps and shavings.
Her father and the three young brothers sat sullenly in the deepening gloom of the cabin. Her arrival seemed to shock them. They glanced up like creatures surprised in an underground burrow. Only the baby made any move to welcome her, banging the table with a candlestick,
and whining when his father held him fast. Sandy wouldn’t look her in the eye when he finally spoke to her unvoiced question: “The harvest was poor. We’d to borrow from Murdock across the bay . . . . It was how herself went across the ice with a tub of butter as payment. The debt is owed yet. Do you understand, girl? She went through the ice. Your mother is dead. Come in, girl, come in.”
Johanna turned and walked back up the path. He’d be glad of a girl, crippled or no, to turn her hand to the house and the raising of the boys. Her heart was closed to him.
Five years after her mother’s death a gangling boy stepped into the tailor’s shop. He displayed the nervousness which is manifested as abrupt rudeness. He kept his cap on and gawked first at Mrs. MacDonald and then at Johanna. He appeared to be making a decision, turning at last to speak to Johanna. “Your father is dying,” he said, and turned to hurry from the shop before Johanna had realized this was the oldest of her brothers, Ian, her father’s favourite and first-born in any sense that mattered.
Her father was dead when she reached his home. He’d been crushed by a windfall in the mountain forest he’d loved to wander. He’d asked for her before he’d become delirious, the neighbours said, and Ian was sent to tell her.
Seeing his body laid out, Johanna felt only the overwhelming loss of her mother, the feelings she’d held suspended within her for the past five years, and she cried inconsolably. The neighbours were gratified at this proper display of respect for the dead man. It was their pious condolences that stopped her tears as abruptly as they’d begun. She stood gazing at her father, who looked to be resting, the face thinner than she remembered, the hard bitter lines softened, trailing spidery webbing from the axe-sharp wedge of nose. With a sense of surprise and dismay, she saw it was a worn copy of her own face. Of the four children, only Johanna resembled her father.
She left and did not return to the bay until she was eighty years of age. There was a highway then, cutting across her remembered mountains, and the houses and farms were all gone, returned to the forest. Only the church remained, reflected in the flat calm water on the day she came back, an old woman searching for the graves of her family.
She’d become a tailor. The old tailor had taught her well enough and had the worth of the teaching and more in her labour.
When his wife died he took to the bottle and, in his drunkenness, one night made rough advances to Johanna, who laid him out with a single blow of her fist. She ran away for fear of murdering him if he touched her again. She walked aimlessly, stumbling in the dark on the rutted road, with no idea where she’d go. She came to a hilltop from which she saw the horizon against a bright pink glow like a feeble sunrise. She took this as a sign to turn in that direction. She knew vaguely that Sydney lay that way. It was many years later, when driving by this place, that she saw the glow again and was told it was from the steel plant’s blast furnaces. But the plant hadn’t been built the first time she saw the light.
She used her savings to open a tailor shop in town. She was in awe now of her long-ago self, but then, in the brashness and ignorance of youth, it had seemed the only thing she could do, and simple enough for that. If her youth and sex seemed an invitation to take advantage, her height and two forbidding fists dissuaded most with such ideas. She recalled once chasing a man who’d noticed her limp, laughed as he grabbed the suit she’d made him and bolted out the door to escape paying. He was not a Gael but he could have guessed at the meaning of the imprecations she hurled after him down the crowded lane. Fearing the notice people were naturally taking of this scene, the man stopped and threw down the suit, hoping only to escape the fury in black thrashing along behind him. Not content with this, Johanna took a clump of clay from the edge of a wagon rut, hurling it to catch the man squarely across the forehead, and knocking him flat out in the mud. She stood over him, sickened at the pale coward’s face gaping up at her. She held out her hand for her money, tossing the muddied suit to him. “It is well made,” she said, “but anyway there’s more than your lifetime of wear in it if you go on in this fashion.”
The crowd laughed and added the event to the history of this minor legend.
She went along in this way. She made her living once people grew accustomed to a woman in a man’s trade. She refused all seamstress work, making only her own plain, simple dresses, one a year on the day of her birth. When she recounted this in later years, people would sympathetically shake their heads and recall some hardship of theirs. But Johanna had liked that time and those days when she would go to the shop only for herself, to lay out the cloth, marking it with chalk, cutting and sewing, adding the minor touches of lace or the buttons that distinguished the invariably black dresses.
Once, after reminiscing about those days for her granddaughter, Mary, she was embraced by the girl, who said tearfully, “ Oh, Gram, your life then was such an unhappy one.” Johanna had been amazed at the idea. Had her life been unhappier than most? Certainly it had been longer. She’d been alone then but not lonely. She would sing as she worked whether the shop was empty or not. Everyone had Gaelic songs and stories then as an inseparable part of their language, and almost everyone who heard her would join in or offer their own songs. Casual gatherings of singers and fiddlers began to occur more frequently, and her shop came to be known all over the island.
It was on one of these occasions she met Bill.
She was twenty-nine then, he was nearly forty.
It was not at all a promising beginning. He came into the shop, a stranger with a group of men she knew, and sat in a corner where he was silent except for a few words of greeting to those nearest him. He was a small man made smaller by the way he folded himself into the dark corner. Johanna took no more notice of him till someone asked him to sing. He seemed to draw further into himself, but at the insistence of the crowd finally stood up straight and in a fine tenor began to sing “Calum Crùbach.” There was an embarrassed stirring and averting of eyes. Bill faltered after a few verses, looking about in confusion. A young man tugged his sleeve and whispered something close in his ear. Johanna expected him to shrink once more into his corner but he stepped across to the counter behind which she sat.
“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. I’d heard of your hospitality and your singing, but I knew nothing about . . . that you were crippled. Forgive me.” He’d turned away to the door, and after what Johanna remembers as a long moment of silence, she spoke. “What is your name?”
As he turned around, the left side of his face, disfigured in an accident at the forge, was livid in the lamplight.
“Uilleam MacKinnon, called Bill,” he said and smiled in the gentle way she came to love.
“Well, Bill, if you came to hear my singing you’re leaving too quickly.” Johanna stepped around the counter and began singing “Calum Crùbach,” gazing steadily at Bill until he joined his voice to hers and everyone in the shop cheerfully joined in on the chorus. They were married five months later.
All so long ago.
He was a fine, gentle man, shy and quiet, it was said, even before his disfiguring accident. It may have been that his scarred face and partially crippled hand were the source of his sympathy for Johanna’s condition, but she knew certainly they were the reason she accepted his courtship, never once thinking he was making of it the cruel jokes she feared in the friendly approaches of other men. So, they were married.
They had two children: the precious little girl, Katy Margaret (Good Lord, she’d be in her sixties now), who’d died at the age of three after the pain of rheumatic fever; and William Alexander, the quiet little boy, a pale wraith who’d grown to be an earnest, colourless man, fathering two daughters, abandoned by his wife, whining constantly of his burden until the morning when, turning away from a neighbour to whom he’d been making his hundredth, his thousandth complaint, he’d stepped onto the pavement and was struck dead by a milk truck.
But all that, of course, was long afte
r the time of Bill’s courting and their marriage, in the time when one century was ending, that which held all her sorrows till then — her cursed birth and crippled leg and the death of her dear mother — and a new century was beginning, a fresh minted date containing two 0’s like the joyous opening of their lives. Such youthful foolishness! Her new century had no more promise than the crippled infant she’d been in her own dim past. There were a few happy years, and then the baby’s death. Before the grass was grown upon the pathetic little grave mound, Bill was killed in an accident at the plant.
Her hurt was so great she wished her father’s gun had gone off against her child’s eggshell skull. She embraced that ancient childish fear, yearned for it, for all that was before . . . before . . . . Oh God, for a moment she’d even forgotten dear Bill’s name. When he died her life was over. Yet she’d lived on another fifty, no sixty years. Why? To remember. There was nothing else . . . .
Ninety-nine years old and her story is not ended, but slowed in the telling, in the remembering, until events past seem to lie ahead, to be relived as they are imperfectly encountered on journeys that begin in the gentle motion of her rocking chair, facing a crone’s reflection in the glass of a standing clock, and end in the cessation of movement and the dry snoring of an old woman’s fitful sleep. The memories had been there, building up a palpable residue of her lifetime; at first they were unimportant, had merely been formed in her forming, then eventually they came to sustain her as she came to believe the future was born out of the past. But now there was no more future but the past. A yawning gap was opening between herself and her memories. They were no longer receding in time but had been left in a place that was far removed in space, that was almost out of sight, and it came to Johanna in a moment of clear and simple insight — her life was over.
About the Writers
“Snapshot: The Third Drunk” appeared in Sterling Silver: Rants, Raves & Revelations, Breton Books (1994). As a radio drama, it was twice an ACTRA Award finalist. Silver Donald Cameron has published short fiction in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, Queen’s Quarterly, Fiddlehead, Canadian Forum, Intercourse, Floorboards, Weekend, Mysterious East, Saturday Night, The Literary Half-Yearly, and CBC Radio.
Great Cape Breton Storytelling Page 22