Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (9 page)

“This here’s Mary.” Luke took Mary’s arm and drew her into the room. “Miz Colliver’s off nursing Miz Heaton.”

“Can’t be helped, I expect.” The woman sighed plaintively. “Git the jug for the girl, Sim.”

“Good morning to you, Henry,” said Mary.

Henry dipped his head shyly but made no sound. His brother poured from a large jug into a battered pewter cup. He lumbered across the room.

“Here y’are, have a good swig. Helps the bugs.” He laughed.

It was whisky. Mary had only ever had whisky in small measures. Her mother and father had brought it out at the feast of Beltane, at New Year, at births, funerals, or for chills. She was tempted, all the same, to gulp down the entire contents of the cup.

“Sim, Mary don’t want no—” Luke began.

“You shut your mouth!” Sim glared.

Just then a big, red-haired man burst through the door. “Which one a you young apes left the white-faced cow on the other side of the road untethered?” he bellowed. “She’s calved in the swamp and I can’t find the goddamn calf nowheres.”

“Please, John, don’t swear,” Mrs. Anderson whimpered.

John Anderson let loose a stream of words only a few of which Mary had ever heard before, and those only by chance. Mrs. Anderson sniffed. Sim roared with laughter. “I don’t need no lip outta you, Simeon Anderson. Git yourself—and you others too—out there and find that calf.” His father reached across the table, lifted the whisky jug to his mouth, gulped from it as though it held spring water, turned on his heel, and left the house. Simeon, Luke, and Henry followed.

Still holding the whisky Sim had given her, Mary stared, mesmerized, at Mrs. Anderson drooping in her chair. From the corner the cat mewed again.

“Would you mind fetching me a drop from the jug, honey? I been feeling poorly since the baby come.”

Mary took the woman the pewter cup. The mewing in the corner grew louder.

“Oh, do see to baby.” Mrs. Anderson lifted her hand to push back the lank, fair hair from
her face, then sank back into her chair. Mary realized, with shock, that what she had thought was a cat was the baby.

He was in a box in the corner behind Mrs. Anderson’s chair. As she looked at him Mary saw the grey mist of death around him. She sighed. He was thin and as blue-white as skimmed milk. He was wet and dirty and wrapped only in an old matted shawl. Flies clustered around his face.

“Och, the poor wee
uan,”
murmured Mary as she lifted the baby from the box. “Come, come,” she crooned. She rocked him until he had stopped his wailing, too weak, too ill to go on—too weak, too ill to raise his fist more than halfway to his mouth.

“He must be hungry,” she told Mrs. Anderson indignantly, “and he needs a clean cloth. Because he is dying is no reason to leave him like this.”

“Don’t talk like that, honey. I don’t know what’s to be done. We allus gets Miz Whitcomb to come. She knows. She knows what.…”Mrs. Anderson closed her eyes, her voice trailed off into a thin snore, and her head fell back against the chair.

Rocking the baby on her arm, Mary searched the cabin in vain for a clean cloth. “Nor is she likely to have a drop of milk in her to give the poor wee mite,” she muttered
angrily, “and had she one it would surely be all whisky.” She opened all the crocks and jugs in the cupboard, hoping to find milk. “For,” she reasoned, “they have a cow.”

“Please, miss.”

Mary jumped, whirled around, and all but dropped the baby. It was Henry. He looked scared but he stood his ground.

“Would you send us all into the arms of Auld Clutie before he has made ready for us in hell?” she cried.

“Please, miss,” he repeated, “Emily’s freshened if you wants milk fer baby.”

“I do.” Mary nodded and Henry ran off. He was back in a few minutes with a small crockery bowl full of warm milk. Mary dipped her finger into it then put the finger in the baby’s mouth. He sucked it feebly. She did it two or three times more, then he turned his face, too tired to suck.

“Henry, the bairnie is needing water and a nappie. Is there a scrap of cloth we might get?”

Without a word Henry went to a box under a bed in a corner of the room and brought out a rag. He ran outside and came back with it dripping wet.

“Is there not a wee dishie?”

He looked puzzled.

“A dishie like this with the milk in it.”

He went to the cupboard, brought out a
wooden trencher, was off again, and brought it back full of water. Mary took the baby closer to the fire where there were fewer bugs. She took off his dirty rags and sponged him off as best she could. He scarcely made a sound.

Henry brought another rag which Mary wrapped around the baby for a diaper. She did not want to put him back into the same dirty shawl in which she had found him but she could find no other clean cloth in the entire cabin. Tight-jawed, she crossed the room, grabbed her bundle from beside the door, hauled out her clean shift, and tore it in half. Back she went and folded it tenderly around the baby.

“What name has he?” she asked Henry.

“He don’t got a name.”

“No name?”

“Nobody got to it yet, I guess.”

“Well, the poor, wee thing, to have no name at all.”

“Will he die?”

“He will.”

Henry said no more. Under Mary’s instructions he put the box by the fire and while she cradled the baby in her arms, walking slowly around and around as she had walked with so many sick lambs, she sang him a lullaby in her own language.

After a time John Anderson came in with the older boys close behind him. “You young
scoundrel!” He cuffed Henry sharply on the back of his head. “You—” He noticed Mary. “Who the hell are you?” he growled.

The baby let out a shrill cry. Mrs. Anderson started up in her chair.

“I am Mairi Urquhart, come from Collivers’ Corner to—”

“Speak up, gal, speak up. I guess you come to help. Ain’t much to be done for the kid. Ain’t much to be done about anything.” He went to the cupboard, brushed the flies from a chunk of cold cooked pork, cut himself a thick slice, picked up a boiled potato, and went back outside.

“Crazy old man,” muttered Sim.

“Did you find it, Lukey?” whispered Henry.

“Yeah, we found it,” Luke answered tiredly.

“Is it dead?”

“Naw,” Luke grinned, “nice little white heifer. It’s outside by its ma.”

Henry went outside. Luke looked at the baby asleep in Mary’s arms. “Ain’t you good!” he said. “Have you et?”

Involuntarily Mary’s eyes darted towards the fly-covered meat on the cupboard. “I am not hungry,” she replied quickly. Luke flushed and went back outside. Simeon grabbed some meat and followed.

Wishing she hadn’t hurt Luke’s feelings, Mary resumed her rocking and walking. The
baby whimpered and she began to hum, thinking again, as she had done when nursing Kirsty Mackay’s baby on board ship, that babies were not so different from lambs. “I will call you Uan Beg, which means, in your language, tiny lamb.”

The baby clung to life all through the day. But that night he died.

Fire

M
ary stayed at the Andersons’ for the burying. It was not the custom in the Highlands for women to attend burials but this was in a little square of ground at the edge of the clearing just behind the house. John Anderson did not bring the neighbours in to help or to mourn. He put together a tiny cedar box. Mary washed the baby, chanted a song for the dead over him, wrapped him in the two pieces of her linen shift, and put him in the box.

Mrs. Anderson kept back by the house. Mary stood by the grave with Henry’s hand held tightly in hers. There was no preacher to come as there was none in the district. John Anderson, such a different man than he had seemed the night before, read the Twenty-third Psalm from the family Bible in a deep, quiet voice and they all recited the Lord’s Prayer. Carefully Luke and Simeon put the box in the
hole they had dug, covered it with earth, and left the baby beside the five other Anderson infants who had not survived their first year.

Mr. Anderson had just closed the Bible when a small, grey-haired woman came tramping briskly up the road with a basket on her arm. She took in the scene with one sweeping glance, crossed the yard, and stood for a moment beside the new grave with her head bowed. She took Mr. Anderson’s hand. “It’s hard losing a baby,” she said quietly, “as we all know well, but you and Lydia have lost too many.” She clasped the boys’ hands one by one, nodded towards Mary, and went at once to where Mrs. Anderson leaned against the back of the house.

“Come, Lydia,” she said gently. “We’ll find some coffee and fix things up a mite for you.” Like a lost child, Mrs. Anderson gave the woman her hand and went with her into the house.

“Miz Whitcomb will likely get you something to eat, boys,” Mr. Anderson said wearily and he went across the road, picked up his axe, and began to swing it fiercely at the base of the nearest tree.

Mary sat down on a big stump near the door of the cabin. Suddenly she began to weep.

“What are you bawling about? Miz Whitcomb’ll put out a good feed. Come on.”
Sim had already recovered from the awe and sadness of the burial.

His words made her tears come faster. She could not stop them. She wept noisily, in great sobs.

Luke knelt beside her. He put his hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “The little mite hadn’t no more than just opened his eyes.”

“I know. And I did know he would die.” Mary could not tell him that it was not only the baby, it was also Kirsty Mackay and it was Duncan.

Luke got up and went into the house. He was back promptly with a mug in one hand and a slice of bread and some cheese in the other.

“Here’s coffee. Dandelion root. Miz Whitcomb brung it. And I got some grub, too. Eat it, you’ll feel better. You ain’t et a thing since you come here yesterday.”

Sniffing and gulping back her sobs, Mary drank some of the coffee. It was bitter but it was hot and comforting. She took a bite of the bread and cheese, realizing with surprise that she was very hungry. She did not look up until she had finished. “Is there more?” she asked.

Henry, who had been watching her every bite, ran to get it. Luke grinned, obviously relieved. Mary saw that he had been afraid she would retreat into herself as she had done when he had told her Duncan was dead. She smiled
weakly. Henry returned with another slice of bread and cheese for her while Luke went to get his own breakfast. Henry sat down on the ground near Mary.

“Will you stay here with us?”

“Och! I cannot do that, but I will not go while you eat your meal.”

Watching her from the corner of his eye, Henry went into the house. She was not there when he came back out. It wasn’t more than two minutes after he had gone that Mary had a clear premonition of a barn on fire. With it came a compulsion to warn someone, a compulsion that always accompanied such visions. She didn’t know whose barn it was, but she knew that if she started out, her feet would take her there.

She forced herself, against the pull of every nerve in her body, to sit still. “It is not my country. I will not go. These people do not know I have the two sights. I do not need to let them know.” But the compulsion to run and warn set her on her feet even as she pronounced the words. She looked around, frantic for some means of keeping herself from racing off. Her eyes fell on the privy off behind the cabin.

“Nobody will quiz me about that!” She ran towards it as though all the devils in hell were after her, slammed the door shut, and shoved the wooden bolt across it.

“What a dreadful place.” She shuddered. The privy stank, the flies were buzzing noisily, a large grass snake wriggled off between the floorboards. The only fresh air came from a slot above the door. Her feet not quite touching the floor, Mary sat on the edge of the seat, clinging to it with both hands, willing herself not to touch the bolt. From a distance she heard Henry call. She heard Luke and Simeon come out of the house, heard Simeon say, “Shut up, Henry. The gal’s run off. Didn’t like our company, I guess.” And Luke: “I expect she had enough sadness. Come on, Henry, she ain’t left the face of the earth, she’s only took off for the Collivers’. We’ll go see her after supper if you want.”

Henry made no reply. Before long the ringing sound of John’s axe against the tree was joined by the chorus of Luke’s and Simeon’s axes. Closer by, there was the scritch, scritch of a hoe. Mary was sure it was Henry working among the pumpkins and squash.

After five more minutes the stink, combined with the stuffy heat in the privy and her overpowering urge to warn of the fire, were too much. Mary slid back the bolt and pushed against the door. It did not open. She pushed again. Still it did not open. She leaned against it with all her strength. It did not budge. She climbed on the seat, stood on tiptoe, and put her hand through the opening over the door in
order to reach down to whatever was holding the door shut. She could not get her arm down far enough.

She shouted for help but the sound of the axes was too loud. Finally she gave up and slumped down on the seat. “I need not worry about the fire, then,” she thought, and after a time, exhausted from her efforts and the wakeful night, she fell asleep.