Alias Grace (30 page)

Then I began to think I’d been wrong to show such an interest in his story; as he had mistaken this for an interest in his person. Having had several glasses of beer, he now began to make sheep’s eyes at me, and asked if I had a sweetheart, as a pretty girl like me might be expected to have one. I should have replied that my sweetheart was six feet tall and an expert at boxing; but I was too young to know any better, so instead I told the truth. I said I did not have a sweetheart, and furthermore I had no inclinations that way.

He said that was a pity, but there was a first time for everything, and I only needed breaking in, like a colt, and then I would go as good as the rest of them, and he was the man for the job. I was very annoyed by this, and got up at once and began to clear the dishes with a great clattering, and said I would thank him to keep such offensive remarks to himself, as I was not a mare. Then he said he didn’t mean it, and it was all in fun, and he’d just wanted to see what sort of a girl I might be. I said that what sort of a girl I might be was not any business of his, at which he became quite sulky, as if I was the one who had insulted him, and went out into the courtyard, and began to chop the firewood.

After I’d washed up the dishes, which had to be done carefully because of all the flies about, which would walk on the clean dishes if not covered up by a cloth, and leave their dirty flyspecks; and after I’d been outside to see how my laundry was drying, and had sprinkled the pocket-handkerchiefs and table napkins with water, to make them bleach out better; then it was time to skim the cream off the milk, and to make the butter.

I did this outside, in the shade cast by the house, to get some air; and as the churn was the kind that was worked by a foot pedal, I was able to sit in a chair while doing it, and attend to some of the mending at the same time. Some people have churns that are worked by a dog, which is penned up in a cage and made to run on a treadmill with a hot coal under its tail; but I consider this to be cruel. While I was sitting there waiting for the butter to come, and sewing a button onto one of Mr. Kinnear’s shirts, Mr. Kinnear himself came past me on his way to the stable. I made to get up, but he told me to remain where I was, as he would rather have good butter than a curtsy.

Always busy I see, Grace, he said. Yes Sir, I said, the Devil finds work for idle hands to do. He laughed, and said, I trust you do not mean me, as my hands are idle enough, but not nearly devilish enough for my liking; and I was confused, and said Oh no Sir, I did not mean you. And he smiled, and said it was becoming for a young woman to blush.

There was no reply to that, so I said nothing; and he went on past; and shortly he came by on Charley, and rode down the drive. Nancy had come out to see how I was getting on with the butter, and I asked where Mr. Kinnear was going. To Toronto, she said; he goes there every Thursday, and stays overnight, to do some business at the bank and also some errands; but first he will go to Colonel Bridgeford’s, whose wife is away from home, and the two daughters as well, so he can visit safely, but when she is there he is not received.

I was surprised at this, and asked why; and Nancy said that Mr. Kinnear was considered a bad influence by Mrs. Bridgeford, who thought she was the Queen of France, and that nobody else was fit to lick her shoes; and she laughed. But she did not sound very amused.

Why, what has he done? I asked. But just then I could feel the butter coming — there is a thick feel to it

— so I did not pursue it.

Nancy helped me with the butter, and we salted the most of it, covered it in cold water to store, and pressed some fresh into the moulds; two had a thistle design, and the third had the Kinnear crest, with the motto
I Live In Hope.
Nancy said that if Mr. Kinnear’s elder brother in Scotland was to die, who was really only a half-brother, then Mr. Kinnear would come into a big house and lands there; but she said he was not expecting it, and claimed to be happy enough as he was, or that is what he said when feeling in good health. But there was no love lost between him and the half-brother, which is usual in such cases; and I guessed that Mr. Kinnear had been packed off to the Colonies, to get him out of the way.

When we had the butter done, we carried it down the cellar stairs into the dairy; but we left some of the buttermilk above, to make into biscuits later. Nancy said she didn’t much like the cellar, as it always smelled of earth, and of mice and old vegetables; and I said that perhaps it could be given a good airing-out someday, if we could get the window open. And we went back upstairs, and after I’d gathered in my washing we sat outside on the verandah, mending away together like the best friends in the world.

Later I came to notice that she was always affability itself when Mr. Kinnear was not present, but jumpy as a cat when he was, and when I was in the same room with him; but I was not aware of it then.

As we sat there, along came McDermott, running along the top of the snake fence, agile as a squirrel, and zigging and zagging. I was amazed, and said, What on earth is he doing, and Nancy said, Oh, he does that sometimes, he says it is for the exercise but really he just wants to be admired, you should not pay any attention. And so I pretended not to; but secretly I watched, as he was in reality very nimble; and after he had run back and forth, he jumped down, and then leapt entirely over the fence, using only one hand on it to steady himself.

So there I was, pretending not to watch, and there he was, pretending not to be watched; and you may see the very same thing, Sir, at any polite gathering of society ladies and gentlemen. There is a good deal that can be seen slantwise, especially by the ladies, who do not wish to be caught staring. They can also see through veils, and window curtains, and over the tops of fans; and it is a good thing they can see in this way, or they would never see much of anything. But those of us who do not have to be bothered with all the veils and fans manage to see a good deal more.

In a little time Jamie Walsh appeared; he’d come through the fields, and had brought his flute with him as requested. Nancy greeted him warmly, and thanked him for coming. She sent me to fetch Jamie a mug of beer; and while I was drawing it, McDermott came in, and said he would have one too. Then I could not resist, and said, I did not know you had monkey blood in you, you was leaping about like one. And he did not know whether to be pleased that I had seen him, or angry at being called a monkey.

He said that when the cat was away the mice would play, and when Kinnear was in town, then Nancy always liked her little parties, and he supposed the Walsh boy would now be screeching on his tin whistle; and I said that was quite right, and I would give myself the pleasure of hearing it; and he said that to his mind it was no pleasure; and I said he could suit himself. At that he caught hold of my arm, and looked at me very earnestly, and said he hadn’t meant to offend me, before; but having been so long among rough men, whose manners were not of the best, he was inclined to forget himself, and did not know how to speak; and he hoped I would forgive him, and that we could be friends. I said I was always ready to be friends, with any who were sincere; and as for forgiveness, was it not ordained in the Bible?

And I certainly hoped that I could forgive, as I myself hoped to be forgiven in future. Which I said very calm.

After that I took the beer to the front verandah, and some bread and cheese for our supper to have with it, and I sat out there with Nancy and Jamie Walsh while the sun declined, and it became too dark to sew. It was a lovely and windless evening, and the birds were twittering, and the trees in the orchard near the road were golden in the late sunlight, and the purple milkweed flowers that grew beside the drive smelled very sweetly; and also the last few peonies beside the verandah, and the climbing roses; and the coolness came down out of the air, while Jamie sat and played on his flute, so plaintively it did your heart good. After a while McDermott came skulking around the side of the house like a tamed wolf, and leant against the side of the house, and listened also. And there we were, in a kind of harmony; and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell whether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we could stay that way forever.

But the sun cannot be stopped in its path, except by God, and he has done that only once, and will not do it again until the end of the world; and on this night it went down as usual, leaving behind it a deep-red sunset; and for a few moments the front of the house was all pink with it. Then in the dusk the fireflies came out, for it was their time of year; and they shone in the low bushes and grasses, on and then off, like stars glimpsed through cloud. Jamie Walsh caught one in a glass tumbler, and held his hand over the top, so I could see it up close; it flashed slowly, with a cool greenish fire; and I thought, if I could have two fireflies on my ears, for earrings, I would not care at all about Nancy‘s gold ones.

Then the darkness deepened, and came out from behind the trees and bushes, and up through the fields, and the shadows lengthened and joined together; and I thought it looked like water, coming up through the ground, and rising slowly up like the sea; and I fell into a reverie, and was remembering back to the time I crossed the great ocean, and how at that time of day the sea and the sky were the same indigo, so you could not tell where the one left off and the other one began. And into my memory there floated an iceberg, as white as white could be; and despite the warmth of the evening I felt a chill.

But then Jamie Walsh said he must be getting home, as his father would be looking for him; and I remembered I had not milked the cow or shut up the hens for the night, and hurried to do both by last light. When I came back into the kitchen, Nancy was still there, and had lighted a candle. I asked why she hadn’t gone to bed, and she said she was afraid to sleep alone when Mr. Kinnear was not at home, and would I sleep upstairs with her.

I said I would, but asked what she was afraid of. Was it robbers? Or perhaps, I said, she was afraid of James McDermott? But I meant it as a joke.

She said archly that from what she could make out from the look in his eyes, I had more cause to be afraid of him than she did, unless I was in need of a new beau. And I said I was more afraid of the old rooster in the henyard, than I was of him; and as for beaus, I had no more use for them than the man in the moon.

And so she laughed, and the two of us went up to bed in a very companionable fashion; but I made sure that all was locked up first.

Eight - Fox and Geese

Chapter 27

Today when I woke up there was a beautiful pink sunrise, with the mist lying over the fields like a white soft cloud of muslin, and the sun shining through the layers of it all blurred and rosy like a peach gently on fire.

In fact I have no idea of what kind of a sunrise there was. In prison they make the windows high up, so you cannot climb out of them I suppose, but also so you cannot see out of them either, or at least not onto the outside world. They do not want you looking out, they do not want you thinking the word
out,
they do not want you looking at the horizon and thinking you might someday drop below it yourself, like the sail of a ship departing or a horse and rider vanishing down a far hillside. And so this morning I saw only the usual form of light, a light without shape, coming in through the high-up and dirty grey windows, as if cast by no sun and no moon and no lamp or candle. Just a swathe of daylight the same all the way through, like lard.

I took off my prison nightdress, which was coarse-woven and of a yellowed colour; I should not say it was mine, because we own nothing here and share all in common, like the early Christians, and the nightdress you wear one week, next to your skin while you sleep, may two weeks previous have been lying close to the heart of your worst enemy, and washed and mended by others who do not wish you well.

As I dressed myself and tidied back my hair there was a tune going through my head, a little song that Jamie Walsh used to play sometimes upon his flute:

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,

Stole a pig and away he run,

And all the tune that he could play

Was over the hills and far away.

I knew I’d remembered it wrong, and the real song said the pig was eat and Tom was beat, and then went howling down the street; but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t make it come out in a better way; and as long as I told no one of what was in my mind, there was no one to hold me to account, or correct me, just as there was no one to say that the real sunrise was nothing like the one I’d invented for myself, but was instead only a soiled yellowish white, like a dead fish floating in the harbour.

At least in the Lunatic Asylum you could see out better. When you were not muffled up in a darkened room.

Before breakfast there was a whipping, out in the courtyard; they do it before breakfast, as if those being whipped have eaten first, they are likely to spew up their food, and that makes a mess, as well as being a waste of good nourishment; and the keepers and guards say they like the exercise at that time of day, as it gives them an appetite. It was only a routine whipping, and nothing unusual, so we were not summoned to watch it; two or three only, and all of them men; the women do not get whipped so frequently. The first was young, by the tenor of his screaming; I can tell these things, having had a good deal of practice. I tried not to listen, and thought instead about the pig that was stolen by Tom the thief, and how it got eaten; but the song did not say who ate it, whether it was Tom himself or those who caught him. Set a thief to catch a thief, as Mary Whitney used to say. I wondered, was it a dead pig to begin with? Most likely not; most likely it had a rope around its neck or a ring through its nose, and was forced to run away with Tom. That would make the most sense, as it would save the carrying of it. In the whole song, the poor pig was the only one who did no wrong, but it was also the only one who died. Many songs, I have noticed, are unfair in this way.