Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (15 page)

One day Patty was stirring dye in the big iron pot that had been brought out to hang over the tripod in the back yard while Mary draped the freshly dyed hanks of wool and flax over the fence.

“Say, Mary, don’t you get awful lonely living in your auntie’s house by yourself? Don’t you wish you was back to Andersons’? I mean, there’s Luke.”

“I do not.”

“Ain’t you a funny one? You come all this way alone and now you’re setting up by yourself in that house. Don’t you
really
want to get married? You’ll be an old woman and still be there by yourself. You’re little but I’ll bet you’re
as old as me—I’m fifteen and I figure if I wait much longer I’ll be an old maid.”

Temper flared in Mary, hot and sudden. “Am I so very funny?” she cried. “Am I more funny than Julia Colliver or Sarah Pritchett or you who bounce around like a great, blue hen shouting out every word that comes into your head, telling all the world that is not like yourself that it is funny? I am not funny! I came here by myself because … because I had good reason. But I will not stay. And I do not mean to marry. Go you yourself to work for Lydia Anderson—the dear Lord knows she needs help—and marry Luke. Go now, this very afternoon, this very moment.” She picked up a dripping hank of red wool and began to wring it savagely.

“Oh!” Patty dropped the stir stick, spattering sumac juice far and wide. “Oh, Mary, I didn’t mean to say you was funny
that
way. I just meant … oh, it’s true, I never know when to shut my mouth. Oh, what can I say, I feel so bad!” Patty’s face was nearly as crimson as the sumac in the pot, her bright blonde hair had come undone from its knot and fell untidily down her back, the dye had spotted her face even more liberally than her cap or apron. As the blush faded she looked like someone with measles. In spite of herself, Mary began to laugh.

Patty’s face brightened. She skipped across the yard and threw her arms around her.

Uncomfortably Mary pulled away. She straightened her clothes.

“I like you,” said Patty. “I like the way you laugh sort of like one of them woodbirds, up and down, up and down. I never heard you laugh before but, landsakes, you do have a sharp tongue!”

“Girls!” Mrs. Colliver’s voice was sharp. “It’s growing late. You’re both gonna be here in the cold and dark stirring sumac juice and wringing out yarn if you don’t busy yourselves.”

“Yes ma’am!” Patty began to stir vigorously. Mary picked the dripping wool from the ground and put it over the fence. She didn’t know how to react to such affection, nor why she had so lost her temper. She was ashamed of herself.

Later the two walked home together. When Mary stopped at her own home, she put out her hand. She knew she had been unfriendly.

“I am not so very lonely, Patty,” she said, “but I should like you to come for a wee visit of an evening.” In a burst of confidence, she added, “I am well in my house, I am protected against the evil by the fairies. They brought me gifts of a fine mattress cover and a loaf of bread and a bit of crockery when I came here.” She stopped. “Why do you look at me in that way?”

Patty shrugged. She looked embarrassed. “I don’t know about fairies, but I know who brought all that stuff. Luke Anderson was by our house after a mattress cover. I think he got one across to Morrissays’, and maybe they had a crock too. He was mighty keen, I figure, on getting you made comfortable.”

Mary turned cold. She stared at Patty a moment, then ran down the slope to her house. She heard Patty call after her but she did not answer. She ran inside the cabin and slammed the door after her. Leaning against it, her heart beating as though she had run for miles, she stared at the benches, the table, the embers in the fireplace, as though she had never seen them there before. Everything looked strange, unprotected.

“It was not the fairies at all. It was Luke. It was Luke.” It was all she could think. Luke had brought the mattress, the crockery, the bread. Luke had been bringing the fish and the birds. “How can I have been so daft?” she thought. “Fairy gifts are not like this. Fairy gifts are not ordinary things like these. How
could
I have been so daft?”

Then she had another—worse—thought. “What if there are no fairies in this place? What if there is nothing protecting me at all from the evil spirit that comes for me? Dear Lord, what am I to do?”

Henry

A
ll the next afternoon, while she peeled and strung apples and helped to hang them from the rafters in Julia Colliver’s kitchen, Mary chattered so feverishly that Mrs. Colliver asked her suspiciously if she had been “at the whisky”. Patty told her she was “jumpier than a toad”. Mary said, “It is surely the fine day,” but in truth she was convinced that if she stopped talking for a single moment she would scream. The words, “It was Luke, it was Luke, all the time it was Luke, not old ones,” churned around and around in her head. It was as though the earth had shifted, leaving her clinging by a thin vine to the edge of a cliff that had, only seconds before, been a wide pasture.

Evening came. Mary milked the cow but there was less milk than usual because her song was so poor. The sheep backed away from her. The geese seemed to be jeering at her, the
rooster laughing. She stayed to weave with Mrs. Colliver and the weaving had to be all undone. When the work was done at last she sped home, pursued by the night wind.

When she reached her own door she picked up the bowl she had kept filled with milk for the house
bodach
. She held it for an instant in her two hands, then in a single, rageful gesture she lifted it over her head and hurled it at the moon. In a lull between gusts of wind she heard it splash into the bay.

“There is no
bodach
here,” she said. “There is no kelpie riding these sluggish burns—creeks,” she corrected herself scornfully. “How could a kelpie live in a
creek?”
She looked towards the big rock down at the point. “There are no fairies here.” Shivering, she hurried into the house.

She stirred up her fire, longing for its high orange flame to be, just once, the soft red of a peat fire. She brought out her spindle whorl and her wool but before long they had dropped unnoticed into her lap. The fire crackled and spat, the wind wailed through the chinks in the logs. She hardly heard it. Her thoughts were too loud, too confused. “What kind of a country is it?” she demanded. “Is there none among them who has the two sights? Is it only the Indians who have the gift of healing?—who speak the charms against ill-wishing here? Och, how could there be fairies in this flat, tree-covered place?”

“Not here. Not here,” mocked the wind.

There was a knock at the door. Mary froze. The knock came again, louder. She stood up. The spindle whorl rolled across the floor. The knock came again, louder, more insistent. She put her hand to the back of the chair to steady herself.

“Mary, it’s me, Luke—and Henry. Mary, are you there?”

Slowly, step by step, she crossed the room, put back the latch, and pulled open the door. There, in a swirl of dry leaves, stood Luke holding Henry by the hand.

“Luke!” Mary had a powerful urge to throw her arms around him. Hastily she stepped back and tripped on the hem of her skirt.

“Steady.” Luke grabbed her arm. She jerked away. “Not so glad to see me, I guess,” he said wryly.

Mary uttered the first words that came to her. “It is you have been leaving the pigeons and partridges on my table.”

“Now, Mary, they wasn’t for courting.” Luke looked uncomfortable. “I just figured I could be neighbourly without you getting all riled, seeing as how you was so good to us. Henry and me sort of wanted to say thank you.”

Mary had forgotten Henry. Huddled under Luke’s arm, he looked cold and pinched.

“Come away in, laddie.” She took Henry’s hand and pulled him into the house. “Here … 
why Henry,
mo gràdach!”
Even in the dim light she could see that his face was as grey as stone and one eye was swollen and black. “Luke? How …?”

“Him and Sim had a fight.”

“But Sim is sixteen years old, Luke, and Henry is only.…”

“Seven,” Luke finished for her. “That’s what we come for. Mary, could Henry come here with you for a time? You and him get along pretty good so I thought mebbe you mightn’t mind.” Luke’s shoulders slumped and his face looked very tired. Mary hated seeing him look like that.

“Put the kettle over,” she ordered him. “Henry, you sit by the fire.” She led him to her rocking-chair, sat him down, took the shawl from her shoulders, and wrapped it around him. When the water in the kettle had begun to boil she got up and made him a tansy poultice for his eye and a brew of the same herb to soothe him. By the time she had it ready, he was asleep.

All the while she did this, she was wishing Luke away. She did not want to talk to him. She did not even want to look at him. She knew it wasn’t fair, knew it wasn’t his fault she had thought the old ones had brought all those gifts, but she was angry at him all the same. Furthermore, she couldn’t help remembering how
she had almost thrown her arms around him just a few minutes earlier, and she was mortified.

But Luke had settled himself at the table. He was watching her. When she had finished putting the poultice on Henry’s eye, he said, “I’d have that tea Henry’s gone to sleep over, if you don’t mind.”

After she had given it to him she sat down across the table. He turned the cup round and round in his hands. He peered into it. His hair was rumpled and standing in tufts all over his head, and he would have been comical but for the deep furrow in his brow, and the despondent downturn of his usually upturned mouth.

“You might as well know,” he said. “Ma’s not so good. Pa gets himself into a right proper lather when she’s like this, and when he seen Henry bawling in the corner on account of Sim hit him, he give him another clout and told him to take his snivelling face out of the way and not to bother coming back.”

“He cannot mean that!”

“Naw. Pa’s not so bad. He just gets so he can’t stand how things are, then he gets himself full of whisky and starts laying for somebody—no matter who. If it wasn’t for Sim being such a … anyways, I figure it would be easier for Pa
and
for Henry if he was to come here for a spell.”

“Luke, you are good!” The words came, unbidden. Mary rose hastily from the table,
picked up the long stick by the fireplace, and began to stir the fire.

“I guess I was too shy to tell you about
that.”
He grinned.

“Luke.” Mary bit her lip. “It was not that I thought you had come courting. It was.… Och, why do you
have
to be so good?” she cried angrily. She threw the stick into the flames.

Luke set his unfinished tea on the table with a bang. “I’ll bring Henry’s duds around,” he said, and left the house.

Not two minutes later the door burst open again and Luke’s scruffy brown head appeared around it. “Would you rather I was mean?” he bellowed, and slammed the door.

“I do not know! I do not know!” Mary cried. Henry stirred.

She flew across the room. He was fast asleep, his swollen eye dark against the pallor of his face, his face dirty and streaked with tears. “There now,” she crooned, “there now.” She took off his boots, not much more than uppers connected by a few threads to soles so full of holes there wasn’t enough shoe leather between them to make one good boot.

“And how you do need a bath,” thought Mary as she struggled to carry him to her bed.

She sat up until very late mending Henry’s boots with left-over bits of the old blanket she had got from Julia to stuff the chinks in her wall.
She didn’t make a very good job of it—she had only a small, dull knife and she was not adept at either cutting or fitting. Furthermore, she could not get her needle through even the thin bit of leather that was left on the boot. Cursing the pedlar who had sold her both knife and needle in exchange for a week’s wages, she satisfied herself by cutting the cloth and stuffing it into the boots so that at least Henry would not have to walk in the cold in his bare feet. And all the while she worked, Luke’s tired, unhappy face got between her and the boots. “I was so unkind,” she thought, and did not feel good about it.

Before the sun was up next morning Mary had Henry out in the creek. Over his cries and howls she scrubbed him up and down with the last bit of Julia’s old blanket and sluiced as many lice out of his hair as she could manage. Back inside she told him, as she spooned porridge into her wooden dish for him, “We will wash your clothes after school.”

Henry said nothing but his face was not only clean—despite the yellow-and-purple swollen eye it was bright as the morning. His hair was soft and, to Mary’s surprise, a bit curly. His feet in their blanket-warm boots swung back and forth against the rungs of the chair and he left nothing in the dish.

It was soon apparent that Henry with two good legs and a full belly, and without the threat
of Simeon’s blows and his father’s quick temper, was a different Henry from the waif Mary had met on the dark road, or the worried little boy she had cared for after his fall. Bolstered by the companionship of Moses Openshaw, Benny Bother, and Matthew Colliver, he would giggle and make rude noises. At supper he became so bold he told her he would rather eat “rotted fish than corn mush”. When Mary told him it was porridge, he said it was the same as his mother’s samp and he wasn’t going to eat it for supper. “Then fish for your supper,” Mary retorted. He would run off when it was time to prepare for school or clean up afterwards, and hide from Mary at bedtime. It was the running and hiding that bothered Mary. She was afraid for him. It wasn’t that she had had an actual premonition but she felt uneasy. She did not want to let him out of her sight.