Authors: Margaret Atwood
Then he sat down on the side of the bed, and said now it was time for me to keep my promise; and I said what promise, and he said I knew very well, for I had promised him myself in exchange for the killing of Nancy.
I could not remember having said any such thing; but as I was now convinced he was a madman, I thought he had twisted around something I had indeed said, some thing that was innocent enough, or only what anyone would say; such as I wished she was dead, and
that I would give anything for it. And Nancy had been very harsh with me, from time to time. But that is only what servants are always saying, out of their masters’ hearing; for when you can’t answer back to their faces, you must give vent to your feelings in some other way.
But McDermott had turned this around to mean what I never intended, and now he wished to hold me to a bargain I hadn’t made. And he was in earnest, as he put a hand on my shoulder, and was pushing me backwards onto the bed. And with the other hand he was pulling up my skirt; and I could tell by the smell of him that he’d been into Mr. Kinnear’s whisky, and heavily too.
I knew that the only way was to humour him. Oh no, I said, laughing, not in this bed, it is too narrow and not at all comfortable for two people. Let us go to some other bed.
To my surprise he thought that was a fine idea, and said it would give him great pleasure to sleep in Mr. Kinnear’s bed, where Nancy had so often played the whore; and I reflected that once I’d given in to him, he would consider me a whore as well, and would hold my life very cheap indeed, and would most likely kill me with the axe and throw me into the cellar, as he had often said a whore was good for nothing but to wipe your dirty boots on, by giving them a good kicking all over their filthy bodies. So I planned to delay, and to put him off as long as I could.
He pulled me to my feet, and we lit the candle that was in the kitchen, and climbed the stairs; and then we went into Mr. Kinnear’s room, that was all tidy and with the bed neatly made up, as I had done it myself that very morning; and he threw back the covers, and pulled me down beside him. And he said, No straw for the gentry, nothing but goose feathers for them, no wonder Nancy liked to spend so much time in this bed; and for a moment he seemed overawed, not by what he’d done, but by the grandeur of the bed he was in. But then he fell to kissing me, and said, Now my girl, it’s time,
and began unbuttoning my dress; and I remembered that the wages of sin is death, and I felt faint. But I knew that if I fainted I was as good as dead, with him in the state he was in.
I burst into tears, and I said, No, I can’t, not here, in a dead man’s bed, it isn’t right, with him in the cellar stark and stiff; and I began to sob and cry.
He was very annoyed, and said I must stop at once, or he would slap my face for me; but he did not. What I had said had cooled his ardour, as they say in books; or as Mary Whitney would say, he’d mislaid the poker. For at that moment Mr. Kinnear, dead as he was, was the stiffer man of the two of them.
He pulled me up off the bed, and yanked me down the hallway by one arm, and I was still wailing and howling for all I was worth. If you don’t like that bed, said he, I shall do it in Nancy’s, for you are as great a slut as she was. And I could see which way the wind was blowing, and I thought my last hour had come; and I expected at any moment to be thrown down, and dragged along by the hair.
He flung open the door, and hauled me into the room, which was in disarray, just as Nancy had left it, for I hadn’t tidied the room, there being no need and indeed no time to do so. But when he pulled back the coverlet, the sheet was all spattered with dark blood, and there was a book lying there in the bed, covered with blood also. At which I let out a scream of terror; but McDermott stopped, and looked at it, and said, I’d forgot about that.
I asked him what in Heaven’s name it was, and what it was doing there. He said it was the magazine that Mr. Kinnear had been reading, and he’d carried it with him out to the kitchen, where he was shot; and in falling he’d clapped his hands to his breast, still holding the book; and it therefore received the first spurts of blood. And McDermott had thrown it into Nancy’s bed, to get it out of sight, and also because it belonged there, having been brought from town for her, and also because Kinnear’s blood was on Nancy’s head,
for if she had not been such a bloody great whore and shrew, all would have been different, and Mr. Kinnear needn’t have died. So it was a sign. And at that he crossed himself, which was the only time I ever saw him do anything so Papist.
Well, I thought him as mad as a moose in heat, as Mary Whitney used to say; but the sight of the book had sobered him up, and all notions of what he’d been about to do had gone right out of his head. And I held the candle down close, and turned the book over with my thumb and finger, and it was indeed the Godey’s Ladies’ Book which Mr. Kinnear had so enjoyed reading, earlier in the day. And at this memory I nearly burst into tears in earnest.
But there was no telling how long McDermott’s present mood would hold. So I said, That will confuse them; when they find it, they will not be able to guess at all how it came here. And he said yes, it would give them something to puzzle their brains over; and he laughed in a hollow sort of way.
Then I said, We had better hurry, or someone may come while we are here; we must make haste, and pack up the things. For we will have to travel by night, or someone will see us on the road, with Mr. Kinnear’s rig, and will know something is wrong. It will take us a long time to reach Toronto, I said, in the dark; and also Charley Horse will be tired, having made the trip once today already.
And McDermott agreed, as one half asleep; and we commenced searching through the house, and packing up the things. I did not want to take very much, only the lightest and most valuable items, such as Mr. Kinnear’s gold snuffbox, and his telescope and pocket-compass, and his gold pen-knife, and any money we could find; but McDermott said, in for a penny, in for a pound, and he might as well be hanged for a goat as for a sheep; and in the end we ransacked the house, and took the silver plate and candlesticks, and the spoons and forks and all, even the ones with the family crest on; for McDermott said they could always be melted.
I looked into Nancy’s box, and at her dresses; and I thought, There is no need for them to go to waste, poor Nancy has no further use for them. So I took the box and all in it, and her winter things too; but I left the dress that she’d been sewing, because it seemed too close to her altogether, as it was not finished; and I’d heard that the dead would come back to complete what they had left undone, and I didn’t want her missing it, and following after me. For by this time I was almost certain she was dead.
Before leaving, I tidied up the house, and washed the dishes, the plates from supper and all; and I put Mr. Kinnear’s bed in order, and pulled the coverlet up over Nancy’s bed, although I left the book in it, not wanting to get Mr. Kinnear’s blood on my hands; and I emptied her chamber pot, as I did not think it a nice thing to leave, as being somehow disrespectful. And meanwhile McDermott was harnessing Charley, and loading the boxes and the carpetbag into the wagon; though one time I found him sitting outside on the step, and staring vacantly in front of him. So I told him to pull himself together, and be a man. For the last thing I wanted was to be stuck there in that house with him, especially if he’d gone completely out of his mind. And when I told him to be a man, it had an effect, for he shook himself, and got up, and said I was right.
The last thing I did was to take off the clothes I’d been wearing that day; and I put on one of Nancy’s dresses, the pale one with the white ground and the small floral print, which was the same one she had on the first day I came to Mr. Kinnear’s. And I put on her petticoat with the lace edging, and my own spare clean petticoat, and Nancy’s summer shoes of light-coloured leather, which I had so often admired, although they did not fit very well. And also her good straw bonnet; and I took her light cashmere shawl, although I did not think I would need to wear it, as the night was warm. And I put some rosewater behind my ears and on my wrists, from the bottle of it on her dresser; and the smell of it was a comfort of sorts.
Then I put on a clean apron, and stirred up the fire in the summer kitchen stove, which still had some embers left in it, and burnt my own clothes; I didn’t like the thought of wearing them ever again, as they would remind me of things I wished to forget. It may have been my fancy, but a smell went up from them like scorching meat; and it was like my own dirtied and cast-off skin that I was burning.
While I was doing this, McDermott came in, and said he was ready, and why was I wasting time. I told him I could not find my large white kerchief, the one with the blue flowers on it, and that I needed it to keep the sun off my neck, while we would be crossing the Lake on the ferry the following day. At that he laughed in an astonished way, and said it was downstairs in the cellar, keeping the sun off Nancy’s neck; as I ought to remember, seeing as how I myself had pulled it tight and tied the knot. At this I was very shocked; but did not wish to contradict him, as it is dangerous to contradict mad people. So I said I had forgot.
It was about eleven o’clock at night when we set out; a beautiful night, with enough of a breeze to be cooling, and not too many mosquitoes. There was half a moon, and I couldn’t remember whether it was waxing or waning; and as we went down the driveway between the rows of maples and past the orchard, I looked behind me, and saw the house standing there all peaceful and lighted up by the moonlight, as if it was gently glowing. And I thought, who would guess from looking at it what lies within. And then I sighed, and readied myself for the long drive.
We went quite slowly, even though Charley knew the road; but he knew also that this was not his true driver, and that there was something amiss; for several times he stopped, and would not go forward until urged with the whip. But when we’d gone several miles along the road, and were past the places that he knew best, he settled into it; and along we went, past the fields all silent and silvery, and the
snake fences like darker braid alongside, with the bats flickering overhead, and the dense patches where there was woodland; and once an owl crossed our path, as pale and soft as a moth.
At first I was afraid we would meet someone we knew, and they would ask where we were going on such a furtive errand; but there was not a living soul. And James became bolder and more cheerful, and started talking about what we would do when we reached the States, and how he would sell the things, and buy a small farm, and then we would be independent; and if we did not have enough money at first, we would hire ourselves out as servants, and save up our pay. And I said neither yes nor no, as I did not intend to stay with him any more than a minute, once we were safe across the Lake and among people.
But after a time he fell silent, and there was only the sound of Charley’s hooves on the road, and the rustling of the slight wind. I thought I might jump down from the wagon, and run off into the woods; but knew I would not get far, and even if I did, I would then be eaten by the bears and wolves. And I thought, I am riding through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, as it says in the Psalm; and I attempted to fear no evil, but it was very hard, for there was evil in the wagon with me, like a sort of mist. So I tried to think about something else. And I looked up at the sky, which did not have a cloud in it, and was filled with stars; and it seemed so close I could touch it, and so delicate I could put my hand right through it, like a spiderweb spangled with dewdrops.
But then as I looked, a part of it began to wrinkle up, like the skin on scalding milk; but harder and more brittle, and pebbled, like a dark beach, or like black silk crêpe; and then the sky was only a thin surface, like paper, and it was being singed away. And behind it was a cold blackness; and it was not Heaven or even Hell that I was looking at, but only emptiness. This was more frightening than
anything I could think of, and I prayed silently to God to forgive my sins; but what if there was no God to forgive me? And then I reflected that perhaps it was the outer darkness, with the wailing and the gnashing of teeth, where God was not. And as soon as I had this thought, the sky closed over again, like water after you have thrown a stone; and was again smooth and unbroken, and filled with stars.
But all the time the moon was descending, and the wagon was moving along. And gradually I became drowsy, and the night air was cool, so I drew the cashmere shawl around myself; and I must have nodded off asleep, and let my head fall against McDermott; for the last I remembered was the feel of him settling the shawl tenderly around my shoulders.
The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the ground, in the weeds at the side of the road, with a heavy weight on top of me holding me down, and there was a hand feeling up under my petticoats; and I began to struggle, and to scream. Then a hand came over my mouth, and the voice of James said angrily, what did I mean, causing such an uproar, did I want us to be discovered? I became quiet, and he took away his hand, and I told him to get off, and to let me up at once.
Then he was very angry; for he claimed I had asked him to stop the wagon, so I could get down and relieve myself by the roadside; and having done so, that I had spread out my own shawl, not two minutes before, and had invited him to join me on it like the hot bitch I was, at the same time saying I would now fulfil my promise.
I knew I had done no such thing, having been sound asleep, and I said so. And he said he would not be made a fool of, and I was a damned slut and a demon, and Hell was too good for me, as I had led him on, and enticed him, and caused him to damn his own soul into the bargain; and I began to cry, not feeling I deserved such hard
words. And he said crocodile tears would not avail this time, as he’d had a bellyful of them; and he proceeded to wrench at my skirts, holding my head down by the hair. So I bit him hard on the ear.