Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (10 page)

Hours later, when the sun no longer streamed through the slot above the privy door, she woke. Outside there wasn’t a sound. She climbed up on the seat and peered out. The axes stood against a fresh stump. A tiny, sleek, squirrel-like animal with stripes along its back was sitting on the stump, washing itself. There wasn’t a person in sight. She began to shout. No one answered.

“It is nothing but a wooden door, surely I can get out through it,” she thought crossly. She put her hand through the slot and reached down until her arm was on the outside up to her shoulder with the rest of her on tiptoe inside.

From somewhere near there was a cry. Mary pulled her arm in and began to shout loudly for help. At first there was no response. Then she heard Simeon: “Don’t be a simpleton, Henry. There’s no one in there. No one but Ma uses it in summer.”

“You gotta come and look, Sim. I seen an arm sticking out of it. Honest.”

“Henry, you’re a—” The door was flung open. “Well, I’ll be dang-blasted!”

“Thank you,” said Mary. She hopped down from the seat and shoved past him into the bright afternoon sun.

“I told you I was not going away while you ate your meal, Henry,” she snapped.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Henry. He shot off across the front yard before Mary could say another word.

By this time Simeon had recovered from his surprise and was hooting with laughter. “In the honey box,” he shouted, pointing his finger at Mary. “In the honey box. All afternoon. You’d a been there all night, too, if I hadn’t got you out. What am I gonna get for my pains, Miss Uppity? Come on, let’s have a kiss.” He leaned over her. She drew back.

“May you grow garlic in your chin whiskers,” Simeon Anderson, “and an onion on your ugly red nose!”

Simeon’s hand flew to his nose. “Ha!” He laughed, embarrassed by his action. “What did you say that for? What a queer skinny little gal you are. You talk funny, you act funny, but I want my kiss anyways.”

Mary thrust his arm from her and started off across the yard. At that moment, Luke
rounded the corner of the house with Henry in his arms.

“It was Henry. Dear Lord, it was Henry,” Mary cried. “I saw! It was when we were walking through the woods. I saw you but I did not see it was Henry. I did not realize.…”

“He’s fell out of a tree.” Luke’s usually cheerful face was grim.

Henry was unconscious. Luke and Simeon laid him on his bed. Mary took charge. While they looked on she felt all his bones carefully. He had broken a bone in one leg, and probably sprained one wrist. He had also had a severe knock on his head. But everything else seemed all right.

Simeon left. Mrs. Anderson had gone to bed. Mrs. Whitcomb had gone home. Frantically Mary searched her memory for what to do. How she wished now that she had been willing to learn all Mrs. Grant had wanted to teach her about healing. There were a few things she could bring to mind and, with Luke to fetch what she needed, she made a poultice of egg whites and cornmeal for Henry’s head, muttering all the while that it should have been barley. For a splint for the break Luke found two straight sticks and wound lengths torn from Henry’s own shirt around them.

“Are there eels to be had in this country?” Mary remembered Mrs. Grant wrapping eel
skins around her own ankle when she had sprained it falling down a badger hole.

“Eels?”

“Fishes—long, thin, snaky fishes.”

“I know what eels are.”

“Then will you please catch me two as fast as you can.”

“It’s gonna take a bit of time. I gotta get to the lake and.…”

“Luke, two eels, I must have two eels.”

“All right.” Still eyeing her uneasily, Luke went off to do her bidding.

Mary straightened up at last, noticing for the first time that Mrs. Whitcomb had washed all the dishes, swept the dirt floor, laundered the clothes, and put some kind of order into the house. The table was set with plates, mugs, and inviting-looking humps hidden under cloths to keep the flies off. Under the cloths were a bowl of cold potatoes, a platter of freshly boiled sliced pork, a loaf of bread, and a bowl of butter.

“So much meat in this country,” breathed Mary, “even for plain folk.” She hesitated a second, then hunger got the better of her. She snatched a piece of pork from the platter and stuffed it into her mouth.

At that moment John Anderson and Simeon came through the door. Mary started guiltily and quickly turned her back.

“Ha,” Simeon jeered. “I wouldn’t think a dainty little gal like you would want to eat anything when you spent the whole afternoon in the shit house.”

“What’s wrong with Henry?” There was panic in John Anderson’s deep voice.

Mary told him and showed him what she and Luke had done. By the time she was through explaining, Luke was back with two long, black eels.

“Zeke Bother gave’ em to me. He was out fishing this morning with Jim Morrissay.”

Under Mary’s instructions, Luke peeled off the eels’ skins and wrapped them tightly around Henry’s sprains.

“Put the eels in a pot to cook,” Mary commanded. “The broth will be good for Henry.”

“You’re a right smart little gal,” said Mr. Anderson gratefully and went to wash himself at the well.

By the time Henry came around half an hour later he was bound and poulticed like a grafted tree. He looked up at Mary’s anxious face leaning over him, smiled, and closed his eyes. “I was after a honeycomb for you,” he murmured, and would have gone to sleep but Mary insisted on his having a bit of thin gruel first.

“Shall I fetch Miz Whitcomb?” Luke asked his father.

“I guess you’re gonna have to.”

“I will not be leaving Henry until he is well,” Mary declared firmly.

She pulled the rocking-chair over beside Henry’s bed and chanted a healing charm for him in Gaelic:

Henry woke. “What’s them words, miss?”

“Healing words, Henry, and I will tell them to you in English, my wee lamb, if you will say my name to me. It is Mairi.”

“Mary,” mumbled Henry shyly.

She put her hand on his good arm and recited softly:

She got up quietly and brought another dish of cornmeal gruel from the fire and insisted, despite his protests, that Henry eat.

“Good night, Henry.”

“Good night, miss—Mary,” he whispered. “I like your singing.”

All the next day Mary stayed close to him. She would not let him get out of bed. She made him eat more gruel and the eel broth she had cooked for him and she kept everyone else away. His father came once to stand by the foot of the bed, his tall frame sending a shadow along the full length of it.

“You gave us all a bad scare, son,” was all he said but it was not difficult to see how relieved he felt—or how tired he was.

Simeon, as much to torment Mary as Henry, shouted at him every time he came into the room, “You all right, Hank?”

“I hate that name,” Henry whispered to Mary, but Mary said nothing to Simeon. She knew well the teasing ways of people from her own childhood. How Callum Grant and Johnny Fraser had teased!

Late in the afternoon, exasperated by Mary’s protectiveness, Luke pulled her from her chair and propelled her towards the door. “Out!” he thundered, deepening his voice to a low baritone. “You’re like a mama cat. I ain’t no owl after your kitten. I just want to sit a spell with Henry!”

Mary twisted away from his hand. “You …” she began, but stopped at the smile on his face and went outside. She scrubbed her hands and face at the well, braided her hair and straightened her clothes, then walked across the
road to where the cow was browsing by the verge, its calf close beside it. She stroked the cow, knelt by the calf and hugged it. She listened to a pair of goldfinches singing in a willow tree and looked long at the chicory blooming at the edge of the Andersons’ dooryard. The comfortable feel of the cow and the calf, the familiar birdsong in the willow, and the blue of the field-flower brought a kind of warmth she had not felt since leaving her own glen. One of the small squirrel-like animals Luke called chipmunks scooted along a fallen tree, a groundhog dove into its hole beside the road. Mary wondered for the first time since she had come to Upper Canada where the unseen creatures dwelt, where the fairy hills were. She went back to her nursing with a lighter heart.

The days settled into a routine. Lydia Anderson stayed in bed. Mary got meals, recalling, if somewhat imperfectly, her days at the Gillespies at Tigh-na-Suidh, and did her best to keep the cabin as neat as Mrs. Whitcomb had left it. She thought about Mrs. Whitcomb’s kindness, about the Collivers’ kindness, remembered the mean-spiritedness of the man and woman on the road from Cornwall. “They are not all inhospitable, the folk in Upper Canada,” she decided. She did not love the work but she had come to care for Henry. She thought he was
like a solemn old
bodach
with his big grey eyes in his thin face and his wispy fair hair, and she told him stories and made funny faces to make him laugh. She slept on a blanket on the floor by his bed. She woke nights from troubled dreams, but she never found herself out on the road. She was glad, all the same, that she was not alone.

Luke went to tell Julia Colliver that Mary would be staying for a while and Mrs. Colliver sent her, along with a great deal of advice, a change of clothes and the message that she would be expected back at the Collivers’ as soon as Henry was recovered. Mary caught Luke’s eye as he was delivering all these messages and saw that he was as amused as she by Mrs. Colliver’s overbearing ways.

After a couple of days, Mary allowed Henry to get out of bed, and with her arm and a chair to support him he hopped on his good leg to the table for meals and to the front porch. There he sat, his thin face aglow from the cossetting and the leisure, watching his father and brothers work.

Mrs. Anderson got out of bed when Mrs. Whitcomb came to see how the family was managing. “You need to be firm with Lydia,” Mrs. Whitcomb told Mary.

They were sitting with Henry on the porch. His mother was dressing herself in the house. “I
can see you’re taking good care of everything else.” Mrs. Whitcomb smiled. “And I don’t even know who you are. I’m Jane Whitcomb and I live down the road a piece, two homesteads on through the bush.”

“I am Mary Urquhart, niece to Davie and Jean Cameron who were staying nearby. But they have gone home.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Whitcomb’s voice held sympathy. “I knew they had gone but I didn’t know you had come. We were so sorry about their son. How that boy could play that wooden flute of his! We used to go up to the head of the bay some summer’s evenings just in the hope of hearing him. Jim Morrissay was making him a really fine flute when he … well, I guess he must have been pretty unhappy though you wouldn’t have known it from that music. He wasn’t around much with the other boys. Kept to himself.”

“He was not happy here,” Mary said stiffly.

“Alas, there have been many not happy here. These are difficult times for us all. We are refugees and that’s not easy for anybody.”

“Refugees?”

“When we were children we came up here from the old Thirteen Colonies with our parents—those colonies that are called the United States now. We came up through the woods with little more than the clothes on our backs. Our parents wouldn’t fight against the King in
the rebellion in ’75, so we all had to flee to Canada. We didn’t think we had to go to war to let the English government know we didn’t like a few laws. The rebels called us traitors—dirty Tories—but we called ourselves Loyalists. We were the ones to stay loyal to the King. We left good, settled homes—my father was a school-teacher in New York, my husband’s father was a preacher in Albany—but that didn’t make any difference. Dan Pritchett who’s my neighbour now, he came from Staten Island. He was a wheelwright. Like the rest of us, he wasn’t for revolution. He went to jail, his wife was left destitute. She died, four of his nine children, too. Dan finally got out of jail. He left New York City with five sons and his sister Sarah. We all came together in the refugee camps at Yamaska near Montreal. We were pretty badly beaten down. Some had been tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on rails by our own neighbours, some had been strung up—hanged like common criminals. My cousin David was and he was only fourteen years old.” Mrs. Whitcomb looked down at her hands clenched in her lap. “Then, when we hadn’t more than just gotten ourselves settled into these backwoods—not quite thirty years later—didn’t those old Yankee neighbours come along and start another war! They thought they’d kick us out of here too. Well, I guess they got a
surprise! That war’s over now, too—over a year ago and it didn’t bother us much down here on the island—though it came close enough. After all, the Americans are just across the lake. Joey Bother was killed at the battle of Chrysler’s Farm and we lost Billy Ansel at Sackets Harbour, but we were luckier than many and we had no battles here on the island.”

“Mr. Openshaw took some prisoners,” Henry said proudly.

“So he did.” Mrs. Whitcomb chuckled. “He held them smartly, too, and managed to free a dozen or so of our own boys on account of them. And those Yankees had come ashore—from over at the fort in Oswego, New York, I guess—thinking they were going to take some of us prisoner. Well, all that’s finished, now.” She took Mary’s hand and patted it. “You have come to live among us and I hope you will be happy. It is not such a bad life, in spite of the hardships. We’re good enough neighbours. Oh, there you are, Lydia.” Mrs. Whitcomb stood up. “There now, I’ll make some coffee.”

Mrs. Anderson sat down on the step beside Henry. She was shaking, as pale as paper, but she had washed and she had smoothed her hair into a loose knot at the back of her head. She took Henry’s hand and, without looking up, she said, “Thank you for taking care of us.”

“It was naught but Henry.”

“It was baby, too.” Mrs. Anderson’s voice was barely audible.

“The poor wee thing.” Mary couldn’t help showing some of the indignation she felt. Mrs. Anderson said no more. Henry wriggled uncomfortably. Mrs. Whitcomb reappeared and they drank their coffee and talked about the harvest to come. Suddenly Simeon came crashing out of the woods from down the road.