Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (7 page)

Luke Anderson left. Sam Colliver came in from the mill. The children came and whispered around her. She did not hear them. Mrs. Colliver led her to a bed. She went without protest.

She lay there for three days and nights. In the middle of the fourth night she started, terrified, from a dream in which Duncan was calling. She did not know where she was or how she had got there.

She could see that she was in a bed and that there was a window opposite. She got up, tripped over the voluminous night-gown she was wearing, and tiptoed to the window. The moon was nearly full and after a moment or two she could make out a clearing, an outbuilding of some sort, a road, and beyond it the huge oaks, maples, elms, and evergreens of the forest. The familiar hollow sound of an owl’s hoot and the fragrance of mint and roses comforted her.

She shifted her gaze back to the room. It was small with a floor of wide boards scrubbed white, plastered walls, and a low, beamed ceiling. A door in the wall adjacent to the window led into the next room. She pulled the nightdress to her knees and went through the door.

She was in the kitchen. There was a fireplace and a bake oven along one wall, windows opposite, and at the back another window and two doors. There was a large dresser full of plates beside the window, and in the middle of the room was a long table with benches along either side, and a chair at either end. Behind the kitchen was a scullery. Beyond the kitchen at the front of the house was another room; beside that, the front door and a hall and the stairs to a second storey. Across the hall was another room.

Mary crept around the front room and back into the kitchen as carefully as a cat. She peered through the back window, then the side window. From there she could see the road that went past the front of the house. At once she remembered Luke Anderson. She remembered the village. She remembered all that Julia Colliver had told her. A wave of dizziness swept over her, and she clutched the low window-sill to steady herself. She slumped to the floor and put her head on the sill.

“I came here as fast as I could,
mo gràdach
. On wings I would have flown but I had none.
Och, Duncan, however will I live my whole lifetime without you?”

The dizziness passed leaving such anguish that Mary could not move or think or even weep. Slowly the Gaelic mourning words began inside her,
“och-on, och-on,”
chanting themselves over and over until she grew calm.

Outside a rooster began to crow. Not long afterwards daylight came and she heard the Colliver family beginning to get up. Stiffly she stood as one by one they came into the kitchen. She answered politely that she was feeling better and took her turn in the outside privy and at the well in the back yard with the seven children. Ignoring their stares and whispers, she went back to the room where she had slept. Both her shawls had been hung up on pegs by the door. Everything else had been laundered, smoothed with a smoothing iron, folded, and placed neatly on the small ladder-backed chair that stood just inside the door—not only the clothes Mrs. Babbington had given her but her old threadbare ones. The spindle whorl and Mrs. Grant’s letter had been laid on top of the pile. Without hesitating she put on her old shift and skirt. Then she combed her hair, pulled the bright coverlet over the bedclothes, and sat down on top, unsure what she should do next.

Through the open door she could see Julia Colliver bustling about, hear her giving orders
to the children. Julia Colliver was definitely a large woman. She was large-bodied with large hands and feet and a large head distinguished by a mass of grey-brown hair wound into a neat knot at her neck. Her brown eyes were large too, and round, and so was her face. Her nose was broad and her mouth was full. Not only her proportions but her way of moving in sure, wide movements bespoke an authoritative but generous nature. If the house had been a simple cottage or Julia a trifle less imposing Mary would have gone to offer help, but the only other house she had been in with more than one room in it had been Tigh na shuidh, where she had been a kitchen maid so briefly.

“This is not so grand as that,” she decided, “but it is grand indeed, and so clean!” She slid her bare foot back and forth along the smooth boards and wondered if Aunt Jean and Uncle Davie had had such a fine house.

One of the small girls called shyly through the door, “Ma says it’s breakfast time.”

Breakfast was an orderly affair in the Colliver household. Before the children sat down in two rows at the table, their hands, faces, and ears had to pass their mother’s inspection. Their crockery bowls and plates were placed before them, their father, a small, neat man, said grace, and only then were they permitted to dip their spoons into their porridge and maple sugar.

Mary, seated beside the biggest girl, watched carefully to see how she managed and was relieved to discover that eating was the same in Upper Canada as it was in the north of Scotland, even though the porridge was made of ground Indian corn. During a lull in the noisy talk, she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Colliver, it is very good to me you have been and I thank you for it. I will not ever forget.”

“Oh, dearie, don’t you think on it any more.” Mrs. Colliver’s large, round face radiated kindness. “We was awful worried these last few days. You was lying there all pale and you so little and skinny. Why, the whole neighbourhood’s been in to see how you was doing. Luke Anderson’s been around every day. We could all see it was a terrible shock learning the bad news, and then to find out the others had up and left.… Why, I just can’t fancy Jean and Davie Cameron going off like that when you was coming to stay.”

“They did not know.”

“Oh, then you just come from somewhere in the province? You ain’t come all the way from Scotland.”

“I have.”

“All that way? Without them knowing you was coming?”

“I have.” Mary replied stiffly. She was somewhat taken aback by the questioning.

“All that way! Have you … are you … are your folks all right?”

“They are well. I came because—because I heard Duncan call. I had to come.”

“You heard him call? But you was in Scotland.” Mrs. Colliver stared uncomprehendingly at Mary.

Reluctantly, Mary admitted, “I heard because I have the two sights.”

Still Mrs. Colliver looked blank.

Mary was puzzled. “It was because I have the two sights. Do you have a different word for that? Sometimes I see the past, sometimes the future. Sometimes I see the distance—it is the unseen world. We say it is the two sights.”

“Can you see ghosts?” Seven-year-old Nancy, shyness overcome, tugged excitedly at Mary’s sleeve. The other children stopped eating and turned to her in awe.

“Is that what you mean? Ghosts?” Mrs. Colliver was incredulous.

“I do not—och, those too.” Mary began to twist a strand of her hair nervously around her finger, something she had not done for years.

“We don’t hold with ghosts or any of that nonsense,” Mrs. Colliver said firmly. “Seems to me God’s got plenty on his hands taking care of us living, without sending us the dead to deal with. And you might be better off, young woman, seeing how strange you was
took, if you didn’t think like that neither.”

It was Mary’s turn to stare. What could Mrs. Colliver mean? “Don’t hold with ghosts”? Ghosts were ghosts as the living were the living. It hadn’t anything to do with how you felt about them or how you thought God felt about them. Was Mrs. Colliver playing a joke? No, Mrs. Colliver was clearly not that kind of a woman. Why would she say such things then?

“There now, don’t you fret, my girl, you’ll be all right.” Mrs. Colliver reached over and patted Mary’s arm.

Sam got up from the table. “Listen to Julia.” He smiled broadly at Mary. “You’ll be all right with us. Don’t you fret,” and he was off out the door. Later Mary realized that those were the only words, other than the saying of the grace, she had heard Sam Colliver utter. She wondered, fleetingly, if Sam ever got much chance to talk.

The children began to gabble noisily. Now and then Nancy or Matthew or Robert, the smaller ones, looked sideways at Mary but none of them approached her. Their mother and one of the older girls got up to clear the table and the young ones went outside. Mary followed them.

Although it was only seven in the morning the day was already hot and muggy, the air thick with insects. Otherwise the village seemed a
cheerful place. The Collivers’ house was as pleasant outside as in. It was made of boards stained a rich, soft, red and seemed to Mary quite elegant. There were one or two other houses made of frame and one of stone. The rest were the log cabins she had become used to seeing.

Behind the Collivers’ house was a yard, mostly cleared of stumps and planted with some kind of enormous-leafed vines.

“Them’s squashes and pumpkins,” Nancy, the smallest, told her. “We eats the miserable things all winter.”

Beyond the yard and to the east was a log outbuilding. The byre, Mary figured. The children called it the barn. There was a path from the house to the barn and from there to the road. Around it, on all sides, were small fields still full of stumps. Not more than a hundred yards behind them the woods began. About as far to the east were another log barn and a house. “Miz Hazen’s store,” Matthew told her. Immediately to the west were the stream and the mill.

In front of the house was a small patch of garden. Mary recognized turnips, beans, potatoes, and onions. There were also a few flowers, herbs, and more vegetables she did not know all growing in neat, well-cultivated rows. Along one edge of the garden, uprooted stumps made a strange-looking fence. The other three sides were surrounded by dark red, crudely woven withies.

“Ma says they make dandy fences, them dogwoods. Cows can’t get over and pigs can’t get through, but they ain’t as lasty as the stumps,” Matthew told her importantly.

Chickens and ducks and geese had no trouble making their way into the garden. They were clucking and quacking and scrabbling busily among the plants. Perched on the ridgepole of the barn, the rooster proclaimed his unceasing cru-curu-curu to the world, the sharp sound of it echoed by other roosters on other ridge-poles up and down the road.

Across the way, in the woods, a few unfamiliar songbirds chirped listlessly in the heat. The big passenger pigeons purretted from low branches and now and again a crow caw-cawed.

Above it all Mary could feel, almost more than she heard, the steady soughing of the wind through the high branches of the great trees. For a long time she stood by the dogwood fence looking across at the forest. Finally she whispered a word of prayer, encircled the spindle whorl in her pocket with her hand, crossed the road, and stepped purposefully into the woods. A series of deep, uncontrollable shudders pulsed through her. She fell back as though she had been struck and fled towards the house.

Mrs. Colliver was coming from the back yard. “Whoa! You’re safe now, girl. There, there.” She put her arms around Mary’s trembling
body. “It ain’t too smart to just charge into the woods alone without knowing where you’re going. Was it a bear?”

Mary’s eyes were wide with fright and her breath still came in ragged gasps. She pulled away from Mrs. Colliver and sat down on the front step of the house. “I cannot stay here! I cannot!” The words burst from her. “I must go home. I will go now, this very day.”

“Steady, girl. You can’t just up and go home without money to get you there. You stay here with us a while. You can help with the chores for your room and board and, if you want, you can weave and spin along with me to earn the money to get you home. Now, I earned us a whole parcel of land by my weaving and—”

“I will go as I came, trusting in God to find the means.”

“Oh!” Mrs. Colliver’s eyebrows shot towards her hairline. She put her hands on her hips. “Well, mebbe God will give you a hand, my girl, but it’s a sight more likely you’ll run afoul of the Devil.”

Matthew sniggered.

“That’ll do, Matthew. Now, no matter how hot it is we got to get the hoeing done and you might as well give a hand, Mary. Here, I brung you out a sunbonnet—now don’t argue with me. I remember Jean Cameron when she first come here with her neat little white bonnet. She
wasn’t going to wear nothing like this but it wasn’t long before she had one on her head same as the rest of us. I reckon you don’t get a particular amount of sun back where you come from. Here now, children, come along—Matthew, Solomon, Deborah, Nancy, Susan!”

Reduced to silence—and obedience—by the deluge of words and the force of Julia Colliver’s personality, Mary took the sunbonnet and meekly followed the parade to the barn for hoes. As she worked the rows with the strange, straight-handled hoe, she brooded over what Julia had said. She felt rebuked by the words “work for your room and board”. The Colliver family had been so good to her. They had taken her in without a word and treated her so kindly that she felt a great obligation to repay them. But when she thought of staying in this dark, flat land, this place that held only grief for her, she felt cold and scared. When she thought of the long, dangerous trip home, she felt almost worse.

“Mother! Mrs. Grant! What shall I do?” her heart cried out as she worked, and more than one potato and turnip plant were slashed by the heavy blows of her hoe.

The gardening hadn’t more than begun when a big, fair-haired girl came bounding up the road, braids bouncing, arms waving wildly. Her sunbonnet swung precariously from one
hand, in the other a half-grown chicken huddled against the reckless motion.

“I brung you the pullet Ma promised on account of Mose stepping on yours,” she shouted as she pushed through the gate. “I—oh, I thought you was Sally. Oh, I guess you’re Mary who Luke brought from Scotland—I don’t mean he brought you all the way from there, I mean—oh, well, I’m Patty Openshaw from over by Hawthorn Bay and I’m right sorry how things landed out for you.”

Patty had a pretty pink face and bright blue eyes but what was most instantly noticeable about her was that she was dressed in bright blue from her bonnet to her boots and that she seemed to be always in motion, bouncing, bounding, and jumping around as she talked. As well she seemed bold to Mary—bold in what she said, bold in what she asked. But then, the Canadians all seemed bold to Mary in the direct way they spoke and quizzed each other.