Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (18 page)

There was a moment of silence, surprised laughter, then the talk resumed. In the kitchen Julia scolded her. “Don’t you make such a fool of yourself, my girl. Do you want the entire neighbourhood to think you’re not right in the head?” Mary said nothing.

Luke found her alone in the scullery not long afterwards.

“You’re kind of quiet.” He did not wait for a response. Self-consciously he brought something out of his pocket. “You look nice in that red ribbon,” he said. “Here, I got something for
you.” He held out a tiny, carved wooden loon. It was not finely done but there was life in the set of it and in its round black dots of eyes.

Mary looked at it in Luke’s outstretched hand and did not take it from him at once.

“Don’t you like it?” His voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

“I do,” she breathed. “Luke, it looks like the bird himself. But …” she blurted, “I am ashamed.”

“Ashamed?”

“I have no gifts. I did not know it was meant. We do not do so at Christmas at home. Mrs. Morrissay across the bay has given me a packet of tea. Mrs. Colliver gave me this ribbon and made for me a warm bonnet and Patty brought me a dish filled to the brim with maple sugar and Sarah Pritchett gave me a bit of slate and a fine embroidered handkerchief.” She looked helplessly at Luke.

“It don’t signify, Mary.”

“It do, Luke.” She had to laugh.

“Are you going to say you won’t take it?”

“I am not.” She held out her hand, and Luke placed the little carving in it. She stroked the tiny wings, and closed her fingers around it.

When it was time to go home the Pritchetts found room to tuck Mary and Henry into their sleigh. “It was a fine gift to us all, your singing,” Sarah whispered to Mary as they rode
along behind the jingling sleigh bells and the sleepy voices of Dan and Martha talking.

“I will never forget this day, if there come to be three thousand and more in my life,” declared Mary passionately. Impulsively she put her arms around Sarah and kissed her cheek.

“Well,” said Sarah, and nothing more, but Mary knew she was pleased.

“So Cold”

T
he year ended with no special mark. Mary sat down and wrote a letter home, thinking wistfully all day of the Hogmanay celebrations in the glen. Carefully she put it aside with the others she was saving to send when the ice broke and ships came up the lake again.

But one evening, not long after, Mary was having a lesson with Luke and Henry when she had a second, clear vision of Lydia Anderson struggling through blinding snow.

“Luke.” Mary put the book down. “Maybe tomorrow would do for Henry to see his mother.”

“Why so sudden?”

“It is a fair bit of time since he has been home, I am thinking.”

“I figured on going off hunting tomorrow. I thought mebbe I’d take him along with me.”

“I have seen your mother in the snow again, Luke,” Mary said.

“Aw, Mary. I don’t want you get all riled, honest to God I don’t, but I wish you wouldn’t go around saying things like that. People will think you got bats in your belfry.…”

Mary jumped up, her eyes bright with anger. “Do you think I like the pictures? Do you think I am happy to see what will be when others do not? Do folk care for me the more? They do not. You think I am daft, I can see you do, but I see what I see, I have promised myself and all the powers that be that I will not flinch from telling it, and I have seen your mother in dire need, and do you not take Henry to see her this very day I will take him myself.”

“Now, Mary—”

“I will take him myself, Luke.”

“Henry,” he said, “I guess mebbe we’ll go see Ma. We might as well go tonight. If we don’t your Miss Mary’s going to set out and cause no end of mischief.”

Henry unglued himself from his chair.

“I ain’t going.”

“Git,” said Luke.

While Mary watched unhappily, Luke bundled Henry up and they left. Henry returned the next day to tell Mary that Sim had teased him because he was cleaned up. “He called me a pretty little girl. I hate Sim!” He said nothing about his mother.

Three weeks later, in a wild blizzard, Lydia Anderson wandered out into the woods and froze to death. Mary took Henry to the brief ceremony, watching sadly as the pine box was carried into the woods to be put into the hut until spring, when the ground would be thawed for the burial.

His arm across Henry’s shoulder, John Anderson thanked Mary for having Henry to stay with her. “Things was pretty bad around here for the little feller,” he admitted. “I guess we don’t always pull together so well.” He asked if she would mind keeping him with her a little while longer. “He seems to be getting along all right and his ma sure admired to have him get the schooling.”

“He can stay.” Mary was unable to tell John how much it meant to her to have Henry with her.

“She’s not coming back no more never, is she?” Henry asked afterwards, when they were back in the Hawthorn Bay house.

“No,” said Luke. He had walked them home and they were having tea by the fire—Henry on his low stool, Mary in her rocking-chair, Luke on the bench he had drawn up to the hearth. “She wasn’t happy in this world, Henry, maybe God will look after her better in the next.”

“Will she be with them folks that’s got all them silver bells?”

“What’s them?”

“You know. Them folks you can’t see that Mary tells about with their green clothes and silver bells and magic horses.”

Luke glanced at Mary. He frowned. “I don’t know. I ain’t never been dead.”

“Will she haunt me?”

“No, she won’t.”

Luke stayed until after Henry had gone to bed. “Mary—” He was clearly upset. “Mary, I know how you care about all them stories about fairies and magic and ghosts, but I’m feared for Henry. Especially right now when Ma’s only just died. He scares awful easy, Henry does.”

Mary drew a sharp breath. There it was again, stories. Luke meant nonsense as Julia Colliver had meant nonsense, as Sarah Pritchett had meant nonsense. She thrust her chin forward defensively but she said nothing.

“I don’t want to make you feel bad, honest I don’t.” Luke’s face was puckered into a worried frown and his brown eyes were troubled. “But I can’t just go along with some of what you say. I’d like to.”

“I do not mind.” Mary’s back was stiff, her voice controlled.

“I don’t know! Dang blast it! I know you figured you was seeing into the future when you said Ma was going to die but I can’t rightly say that’s strange. We could all see it was bound to happen.”

“Luke, it was not only your mother, it was Henry drowning in the bay, it was him falling from the tree, it was the Pritchetts’ barn burning, it was Polly in the barn. Do not all those things tell you something?”

“Well.…” Luke hesitated. “Well, mebbe they was happen-chance and mebbe.…”

“And maybe I was spinning a tale for you.” Mary’s voice was tart. She glowered at him.

He glowered back. “I guess mebbe I’d better be getting along home.”

“I guess mebbe you’d better,” she mimicked.

After he had left, Mary felt a pang of remorse that she had lost her temper. “Him with his mother just dead,” she thought. She almost ran after him to say she was sorry; but it was very dark that night, and cold, and she knew how fast his long, strong legs would take him—and through the woods, too.

Henry came in the night to Mary’s bed. “I don’t want her ghostus to haunt me,” he cried. “She’s gonna come after me.”

“Henry,” Mary asked gently, “did your mother ever come after you in your life?”

“No.”

“Why did she not?”

“She just didn’t.”

“It maybe was because she was a sweet and gentle person who did not go chasing after folk.”

“Mebbe,” sniffed Henry.

“Then, Henry, why do you think she will come after you now she has died?”

“Not her—her ghostus.”

“Why would the ghost of a gentle person like your mother be so hateful?”

“Ghostuses ain’t nice.”

“Some are. If the ghost of your mother walks abroad, it might be she wants to see that her boys are cared for.”

Reluctantly Henry agreed that it might be, but for weeks he woke in the middle of the night and came scuttling down the ladder to make a dive for the safety of Mary’s bed.

Winter retreated slowly. March brought the worst storms of the season, blizzards with winds that threw roof-high drifts against the sides of the little houses and across the roads and paths, and made miniature drifts inside the houses in all the corners. For almost two weeks Mary and Henry could get no farther than the hole they had cut in the ice on the creek for their water. They were growing tired of eating soft, sprouting potatoes and cornmeal mush. They were frantic from being cooped up. Finally they amused each other by digging tunnels through the drifts with their hands.

Then one day there was the welcome sound of water dripping from the roof and the trees. There was another freeze and a thaw, the crows
and jays came out of the swamp to call and screech, the sap began to run in the trees, and it was sugaring-time. Everyone in the community was off into the woods where the sugar huts had been built. Every sugar-maple tree in the forest had been tapped. Mary longed to see how the sap was boiled, to join in the fun of pouring the hot syrup onto the snow to eat. She could hear the laughter cascading like birdsong out of the woods. But she could not go into the forest. Every time she tried, terror gripped her heart, her breath choked in her throat, and her feet froze.

Luke shook his head disbelievingly. Julia Colliver was cross. Henry came running one day with sugar-taffy sticky in his bare hands to where Mary sat, ashamed and unhappy, on the big grey rock, watching the water move under the ice.

“Henry,” she said, “you are a kind boy.”

“Luke sent some, too.” He took a lump covered with lint and dirt from his pocket.

“I will save Luke’s,” Mary told him, “and eat yours.”

The ice broke up in April. The children from across the bay came again in row-boats, wrapped in shawls, their fur hats covering their heads against the chill winds that still blew constantly down the bay. The wild geese and ducks came back to their summer nesting-grounds in
the swamps and marshes. The great blue herons were right behind them. Their harsh gronk-gronk-gronk sounded to Mary, as it mingled with the higher tones of the ducks and geese, like fiddlers tuning up for the dance—discordant, exciting, inviting summer to come.

There were buds on all the trees, as soft and pale green as they had always been at home. Mary sang as she washed her clothes in the creek and helped the Collivers’ ewes give birth to their lambs—but she thought often of the time only a year past when she had been doing the same in the pasture at home.

The last ice to break up was the ice around the point by the big grey rock. The dark water emerged from its ice prison to slap menacingly against the rock.

Owena returned that day. She said nothing about the black water. She said only, “We are not far,” and Mary took comfort from her words.

Late that night the beseeching voice called again, “Come, Mairi, come!”

She was determined not to hear it. She concentrated on her spinning, which had progressed from bits of thin-thick knobs and strings not much longer than her forearm to skeins of yarn as even and fine as silk—and she had woven a length of cloth on Julia Colliver’s loom that was smooth enough to offer for sale. But it was hard not to rise from her chair and
follow wherever that voice so like Duncan’s might lead.

Henry heard only the wind and, blissfully unaware of Mary’s anguish, he chattered in the evenings about the tadpoles he had found in the swamp, the pussywillows that blossomed along the shore, and old Jake Armstrong who had almost disappeared in the mud “right out in front of Miz Hazen’s store”.

The mud was terrible. Neither sledges nor carts could navigate the road and most people travelled through the woods. Mary kept to the road’s edge, hopping from one root to the next, one stone to another, as though she were fording a stream. The children sang happily, “Mud time, mud time, six weeks to bare feet.” The only benefit the soft ground brought was that when the Methodist circuit preacher arrived in the neighbourhood the winter’s dead could be buried. Lydia Anderson’s body was put to rest beside the bodies of her babies. Henry cried for his mother then. After that, he stopped having bad dreams.

People began talking of planting and Mary saw once more the blighted fields and vegetable patches, the frost-blackened trees and frozen fledgeling birds. She told Luke. She told Mrs. Colliver. She told Dan Pritchett. Luke was kinder than the others—he said nothing. Dan laughed and patted her on the head, which
made her furious. “Keep such thoughts in your head,” Mrs. Colliver told her sharply.

As the days wore into weeks it grew colder. Mary’s head began to ache again, and her voice took on a sharp edge. In her state of anxiety she forgot the promise she had made to Sarah Pritchett, and, more and more, the stories she told the children had to do with witches and spells and terrible accidents. One day, after the children had gone home, Sarah spoke to her about it and Mary burst into tears.