Alias Grace (13 page)

A Log Cabin quilt is a thing every young woman should have before marriage, as it means the home; and there is always a red square at the centre, which means the hearth fire. Mary Whitney told me that. But I don’t say this, as I don’t think it will interest him, being too common. Though no more common than a potato.

And he says, What will you sew after this? And I say, I don’t know, I suppose I will be told, they don’t use me for the quilting, only for the blocks because it is such fine work, and the Governor’s wife said I was thrown away on the plain sewing such as they do at the Penitentiary, the postbags and uniforms and so forth; but in any case the quilting is in the evening, and it is a party, and I am not invited to parties.

And he says, If you could make a quilt all for yourself, which pattern would you make?

Well there is no doubt about that, I know the answer. It would be a Tree of Paradise like the one in the quilt chest at Mrs. Alderman Parkinson’s, I used to get it out on the pretence of seeing if it needed mending, just to admire it, it was a lovely thing, made all of triangles,
dark for the leaves and light for the apples, the work very fine, the stitches almost as small as I can do myself, only on mine I would make the border different. Hers is a Wild Goose Chase border, but mine would be an intertwined border, one light colour, one dark, the vine border they call it, vines twisted together like the vines on the mirror in the parlour. It would be a great deal of work and would take a long time, but if it were mine and just for me to have, I would be willing to do it.

But what I say to him is different. I say, I don’t know, Sir. Perhaps it would be a Job’s Tears, or a Tree of Paradise, or a Snake Fence; or else an Old Maid’s Puzzle, because I am an old maid, wouldn’t you say, Sir, and I have certainly been very puzzled. I said this last thing to be mischievous. I did not give him a straight answer, because saying what you really want out loud brings bad luck, and then the good thing will never happen. It might not happen anyway, but just to make sure, you should be careful about saying what you want or even wanting anything, as you may be punished for it. This is what happened to Mary Whitney.

He writes down the names of the quilts. He says, Trees of Paradise, or Tree?

Tree, Sir, I say. You can have a quilt with more than one of them on it, I have seen four with their tops pointed into the middle, but it is still called Tree.

Why is that, do you suppose, Grace? he says. Sometimes he is like a child, he is always asking why.

Because that is the name of the pattern, Sir, I say. There is also the Tree of Life, but that is a different pattern. You can also have a Tree of Temptation, and there is the Pine Tree, that is very nice as well.

He writes that down. Then he picks up the potato and looks at it. He says, Is it not wonderful that such a thing grows under the ground, you might say it is growing in its sleep, out of sight in the darkness, hidden from view.

Well, I don’t know where he expects a potato to grow, I have never seen them dangling about on the bushes. I say nothing, and he says, What else is underground, Grace?

There would be the beets, I say. And the carrots are the same way, Sir, I say. It is their nature.

He seems disappointed in this answer, and does not write it down. He looks at me and thinks. Then he says, Have you had any dreams, Grace?

And I say, What do you mean, Sir?

I think he means do I dream of the future, do I have any plans for what I may do in my life, and I think it is a cruel question; seeing as I am in here until I die, I do not have many bright prospects to think about. Or perhaps he means do I daydream, do I have fancies about some man or other, like a young girl, and that notion is just as cruel if not more so; and I say, a little angry and reproachful, What would I be doing with dreams, it is not very kind of you to ask.

And he says, No, I see you mistake my meaning. What I am asking is, do you have dreams when you are asleep at night?

I say, a little tartly because it is more of his gentleman’s nonsense and also I am still angry, Everybody does, Sir, or I suppose they do.

Yes, Grace, but do you? he says. He has not noticed my tone or else he has chosen not to notice it. I can say anything to him and he would not be put out or shocked, or even very surprised, he would only write it down. I suppose he is interested in my dreams because a dream can mean something, or so it says in the Bible, such as Pharaoh and the fat kine and the lean kine, and Jacob with the angels going up and down the ladder. There is a quilt called after that, it is the Jacob’s Ladder.

I do, Sir, I say.

He says, What did you dream last night?

I dreamt that I was standing at the door of the kitchen at Mr. Kinnear’s. It was the summer kitchen; I had just been scrubbing the floor, I know that because my skirts were still tucked up and my feet were bare and wet, and I had not yet put my clogs back on. A man was there, just outside on the step, he was a peddler of some sort, like Jeremiah the peddler who I once bought the buttons from, for my new dress, and McDermott bought the four shirts.

But this was not Jeremiah, it was a different man. He had his pack open and the things spread out on the ground, the ribbons and buttons and combs and pieces of cloth, very bright they were in the dream, silks and cashmere shawls and cotton prints gleaming in the sun, because it was broad daylight and full summer.

I felt he was someone I had once known, but he kept his face turned away so I could not see who it was. I could sense that he was looking down, looking at my bare legs, bare from the knee and none too clean from scrubbing the floor, but a leg is a leg, dirty or clean, and I did not pull down my skirts. I thought, Let him look, poor man, there’s nothing like that where he’s come from. He must have been a foreigner of some sort, he’d walked a long way, and he had a darkish and a starved look to him, or so I thought in the dream.

But then he wasn’t looking any more, he was trying to sell me something. He had a thing of mine and I needed it back, but I had no money so I could not buy it from him. We will trade then, he said, we will bargain. Come, what will you give me, he said in a teasing way.

What he had was one of my hands. I could see it now, it was white and shrivelled up, he was dangling it by its wrist like a glove. But then I looked down at my own hands, and I saw that there were two of them, on their wrists, coming out of the sleeves as usual, and I knew that this third hand must belong to some other woman. She was bound to come around looking for it, and if I had it in my possession she would say I had stolen it; but I did not want it any more,
because it must have been cut off. And sure enough, there was the blood now, dripping and thick like syrup; but I was not horrified by it at all, as I would have been by real blood if awake; instead I was anxious about something else. Behind me I could hear the music of a flute, and this made me very nervous.

Go away, I said to the peddler man, you must go away right now. But he kept his head turned aside and would not move, and I suspected he might be laughing at me.

And what I thought was: It will get on the clean floor.

I say, I can’t remember, Sir. I can’t remember what I dreamt last night. It was something confusing. And he writes that down.

I have little enough of my own, no belongings, no possessions, no privacy to speak of, and I need to keep something for myself; and in any case, what use would he have for my dreams, after all?

Then he says, Well, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

I find that an odd choice of words, and I say, I am not a cat, Sir.

And he says, Oh I remember, nor are you a dog, and he smiles. He says, The question is, Grace, what are you? Fish or flesh or good red herring?

And I say, I beg your pardon, Sir?

I do not take well to being called a fish, I would leave the room except that I don’t dare to.

And he says, Let us begin at the beginning.

And I say, The beginning of what, Sir?

And he says, The beginning of your life.

I was born, Sir, like anyone else, I say, still annoyed with him.

I have your Confession here, he says, let me read you what you said in it.

That is not really my Confession, I say, it was only what the lawyer told me to say, and things made up by the men from the newspapers, you might as well believe the rubbishy broadsheet they were
peddling about, as that. The first time I set eyes on a newspaper man I thought, Well then, does your mother know you’re out? He was almost as young as I was, he had no business writing for the papers as he was barely old enough to shave. They were all like that, wet behind the ears, and would not know the truth if they fell over it. They said I was eighteen or nineteen or not more than twenty, when I was only just turned sixteen, and they couldn’t even get the names right, they spelled Jamie Walsh’s name three different ways, Walsh, Welch, Walch, and McDermott’s too, with a Mc and a Mac, and one t and two, and they wrote down Nancy’s name as Ann, she was never called that in her life, so how could you expect them to get anything else right? They will make up any old thing to suit themselves.

Grace, he says then, who is Mary Whitney?

I give him a quick look. Mary Whitney, Sir? Now where would you get such a name as that? I say.

It is written underneath your portrait, he says. At the front of your Confession.
Grace Marks, Alias Mary Whitney
.

Oh yes, I say. It is not a good likeness of me.

And Mary Whitney? he says.

Oh, that was just the name I gave, Sir, at the tavern in Lewiston when James McDermott was running away with me. He said I should not give my own name, in case they came looking for us. He was gripping my arm very tight at the time, as I recall. To make sure I would do as he told me.

And did you give any name that came into your head? he says.

Oh no, Sir, I say. Mary Whitney was once a particular friend of mine. She was dead by that time, Sir, and I did not think she would mind it if I used her name. She sometimes lent me her clothing, too.

I stop for a minute, thinking of the right way to explain it.

She was always kind to me, I say; and without her, it would have been a different story entirely.

T
here is a little verse I remember from a child:

It doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins. Perhaps mine began when I was born, for as they say, Sir, you cannot choose your own parents, and of my own free will I would not have chosen the ones God gave me.

What it says at the beginning of my Confession is true enough. I did indeed come from the North of Ireland; though I thought it very unjust when they wrote down that
both of the accused were from Ireland by their own admission
. That made it sound like a crime, and I don’t know that being from Ireland is a crime; although I have often seen it treated as such. But of course our family were Protestants, and that is different.

What I remember is a small rocky harbour by the sea, the land green and grey in colour, with not much in the way of trees; and for
that reason I was quite frightened when I first saw large trees of the kind they have here, as I did not see how any tree could be that tall. I don’t recall the place very well, as I was a child when I left it; only in scraps, like a plate that’s been broken. There are always some pieces that would seem to belong to another plate altogether; and then there are the empty spaces, where you cannot fit anything in.

We lived in a cottage with a leaky roof and two small rooms, on the edge of a village near a town that I did not name for the newspapers, as my Aunt Pauline might still be living and I would not wish to bring disgrace upon her. She always thought well of me, although I heard her telling my mother what could be expected of me really, with so few prospects and with a father like that. She thought my mother had married beneath her; she said it was the way in our family, and she supposed I would end up the same; but to me she said that I should strive against it, and set a high price on myself, and not take up with the first Hail-fellow-well-met that should happen along, the way my mother had, without looking into his family or background, and that I should be wary of strangers. At the age of eight I did not have much idea of what she was talking about, although it was good advice all the same. My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.

Aunt Pauline and her husband, who was my Uncle Roy, a slope-shouldered and outspoken man, kept a shop in the nearby town; along with general goods they sold dress materials and pieces of lace, and some linens from Belfast, and they did well enough. My mother was Aunt Pauline’s younger sister, and prettier than Aunt Pauline, who had a complexion like sandpaper and was all bone, with knuckles on her as big as chickens’ knees; but my mother had long auburn hair, it was her I got it from, and round blue eyes like a doll, and before her marriage she had lived with Aunt Pauline and Uncle Roy and helped them with the shop.

My mother and Aunt Pauline were a dead clergyman’s daughters – a Methodist, he was – and it was said their father had done something unexpected with the church money, and after that could not get a position; and when he died they were penniless, and were turned out to fend for themselves. But both had an education, and could embroider and play the piano; so that Aunt Pauline felt she too had married beneath her, as keeping a shop was not how a lady should live; but Uncle Roy was a well-meaning man although unpolished, and respected her, and that counted for something; and every time she looked into her linen closet, or counted over her two sets of dishes, one for everyday and one real china for best, she blessed her lucky stars and was thankful, because a woman could do worse; and what she meant was that my mother had.

I don’t think she said such things to hurt my mother’s feelings, although it had that effect, and she would cry afterwards. She’d begun life under Aunt Pauline’s thumb and continued the same way, only my father’s thumb was added to it. Aunt Pauline was always telling her to stand up to my father, and my father would tell her to stand up to Aunt Pauline, and between the two of them they squashed her flat. She was a timid creature, hesitating and weak and delicate, which used to anger me. I wanted her to be stronger, so I would not have to be so strong myself.