by Alice Munro
He watches, for a moment, the child sucking.
“All’s well with you now,” he says, with a sigh. “You have a fine daughter and she can say all her life that she was born at sea.”
—
ANDREW ARRIVES LATER and stands at the foot of the bed. He has never looked on her in such a bed as this (a regular bed even though bolted to the wall). He is red with shame in front of the ladies, who have brought in the basin to wash her.
“That’s it, is it?” he says, with a nod—not a glance—at the bundle beside her.
She laughs in a vexed way and asks, what did he think it was? That is all it takes to knock him off his unsteady perch, puncture his pretense of being at ease. Now he stiffens up, even redder, doused with fire. It isn’t just what she has said, it is the whole scene, the smell of the infant and milk and blood, most of all the basin, the cloths, the women standing by, with their proper looks that can seem to a man both admonishing and full of derision.
He can’t think of another word to say, so she has to tell him, with rough mercy, to get on his way, there’s work to do here.
Some of the girls used to say that when you finally gave in and lay down with a man—even granting he was not the man of your first choice—it gave you a helpless but calm and even sweet feeling. Agnes does not recall that she felt that with Andrew. All she felt was that he was an honest lad and the one that she needed in her circumstances, and that it would never occur to him to run off and leave her.
—
WALTER HAS CONTINUED to go to the same private place to write in his book and nobody has caught him there. Except the girl, of course. But things are even now with her. One day he arrived at the place and she was there before him, skipping with a red-tasselled rope. When she saw him she stopped, out of breath. And no sooner did she catch her breath but she began to cough, so that it was several minutes before she could speak. She sank down against the pile of canvas that concealed the spot, flushed and her eyes full of bright tears from the coughing. He simply stood and watched her, alarmed at this fit but not knowing what to do.
“Do you want me to fetch one of the ladies?”
He is on speaking terms with the Edinburgh women now, on account of Agnes. They take a kind interest in the mother and baby and Mary and Young James, and think that the old father is comical. They are also amused by Andrew and Walter, who seem to them so bashful. Walter is actually not so tongue-tied as Andrew is, but this business of humans giving birth (though he is used to it with sheep) fills him with dismay or outright disgust. Agnes has lost a great part of her sullen allure because of it. (As happened before, when she gave birth to Young James. But then, gradually, her offending powers returned. He thinks that unlikely to happen again. He has seen more of the world now, and on board this ship he has seen more of women.)
The coughing girl is shaking her curly head violently.
“I don’t want them,” she says, when she can gasp the words out. “I have never told anybody you come here. So you mustn’t tell anybody about me.”
“Well you are here by rights.”
She shakes her head again and gestures for him to wait till she can speak more easily.
“I mean that you saw me skipping. My father hid my skipping rope but I found where he hid it—but he doesn’t know that.”
“It isn’t the Sabbath,” Walter says reasonably. “So what is wrong with you skipping?”
“How do I know?” she says, regaining her saucy tone. “Perhaps he thinks I am too old for it. Will you swear not to tell anyone?” She holds up her forefingers to make a cross. The gesture is innocent, he knows, but nevertheless he is shocked, knowing how some people might look at it.
But he says that he is willing to swear.
“I swear too,” she says. “I won’t tell anyone you come here.”
After saying this quite solemnly, she makes a face.
“Though I was not going to tell about you anyway.”
What a queer self-important little thing she is. She speaks only of her father, so he thinks it must be she has no brothers or sisters and—like himself—no mother. That condition has probably made her both spoiled and lonely.
—
FOLLOWING THIS SWEARING, the girl—her name is Nettie—becomes a frequent visitor when Walter intends to write in his book. She always says that she does not want to disturb him but after keeping ostentatiously quiet for about five minutes she will interrupt him with some question about his life or bit of information about hers. It is true that she is motherless and an only child and she has never even been to school. She talks most about her pets—those dead and those living at her house in Edinburgh—and a woman named Miss Anderson who used to travel with her and teach her. It seems she was glad to see the back of this woman, and surely Miss Anderson would be glad to depart, after all the tricks that were played on her—the live frog in her boot and the woolen but lifelike mouse in her bed. Also Nettie’s stomping on books that were not in favor and her pretense of being struck deaf and dumb when she got sick of reciting her spelling exercises.
She has been back and forth to America three times. Her father is a wine merchant whose business takes him to Montreal.
She wants to know all about how Walter and his people live. Her questions are by country standards quite impertinent. But Walter does not really mind—in his own family he has never been in a position that allowed him to instruct or teach or tease anybody younger than himself, and in a way it gives him pleasure.
It is certainly true, though, that in his own world, nobody would ever have got away with being so pert and forward and inquisitive as this Nettie. What does Walter’s family have for supper when they are at home, how do they sleep? Are there animals kept in the house? Do the sheep have names, and what are the sheepdogs’ names, and can you make pets of them? Why not? What is the arrangement of the scholars in the schoolroom, what do they write on, are the teachers cruel? What do some of his words mean that she does not understand, and do all the people where he is talk like him?
“Oh, aye,” says Walter. “Even His Majesty the Duke does. The Duke of Buccleugh.”
She laughs and freely pounds her little fist on his shoulder.
“Now you are teasing me. I know it. I know that dukes are not called Your Majesty. They are not.”
One day she arrives with paper and drawing pencils. She says she has brought them to keep her busy so she will not be a nuisance to him. She says that she will teach him to draw if he wants to learn. But his attempts make her laugh, and he deliberately does worse and worse, till she laughs so hard she has one of her coughing fits. (These don’t bother him so much anymore because he has seen how she always manages to survive them.) Then she says she will do some drawings in the back of his notebook, so that he will have them to remember the voyage. She does a drawing of the sails up above and of a hen that has escaped its cage somehow and is trying to travel like a seabird over the water. She sketches from memory her dog that died. Pirate. At first she claims his name was Walter but relents and admits later that she was not telling the truth. And she makes a picture of the icebergs she has seen, higher than houses, on one of her past voyages with her father. The setting sun shone through these icebergs and made them look—she says—like castles of gold. Rose-colored and gold.
“I wish I had my paint box. Then I could show you. But I do not know where it is packed. And my painting is not very good anyway, I am better at drawing.”
Everything that she has drawn, including the icebergs, has a look that is both guileless and mocking, peculiarly expressive of herself.
—
“THE OTHER DAY I was telling you about that Will O’Phaup that was my grandfather but there was more to him than I told you. I did not tell you that he was the last man in Scotland to speak to the fairies. It is certain that I have never heard of any other, in his time or later.”
Walter has been trapped into hearing this story—which he has, of course, heard often before, though not by
his father’s telling. He is sitting around a corner where some sailors are mending the torn sails. They talk among themselves from time to time—in English, maybe, but not any English that Walt can well make out—and occasionally they seem to listen to a bit of what Old James is telling. By the sounds that are made throughout the story Walter can guess that the out-of-sight audience is made up mostly of women.
But there is one tall well-dressed man—a cabin passenger, certainly—who has paused to listen within Walter’s view. There is a figure close to this man’s other side, and at one moment in the tale this figure peeps around to look at Walter and he sees that it is Nettie. She seems about to laugh but she puts a finger to her lips as if warning herself—and Walter—to keep silent.
The man must of course be her father. The two of them stand there listening quietly till the tale is over.
Then the man turns and speaks directly, in a familiar yet courteous way, to Walter.
“There is no telling what happened to the fellow’s sheep. I hope the fairies did not get them.”
Walter is alarmed, not knowing what to say. But Nettie looks at him with calming reassurance and the slightest smile, then drops her eyes and waits beside her father as a demure little miss should.
“Are you writing down what you can make of this?” the man asks, nodding at Walter’s notebook.
“I am writing a journal of the voyage,” Walter says stiffly.
“Now that is interesting. That is an interesting fact because I too am keeping a journal of this voyage. I wonder if we find the same things worth writing of.”
“I only write what happens,” Walter says, wanting to make clear that this is a job for him and not any idle pleasure. Still he feels that some further justification is called for. “I am writing to keep track of every day so that at the end of the voyage I can send a letter home.”
The man’s voice is smoother and his manner gentler than any address Walter is used to. He wonders if he is being made sport of in some way. Or if Nettie’s father is the sort of person who strikes up an acquaintance with you in the hope of getting hold of your money for some worthless investment.
Not that Walter’s looks or dress would mark him out as any likely prospect.
“So you do not describe what you see? Only what—as you say—is happening?”
Walter is about to say no, and then yes. For he has just thought, if he writes that there is a rough wind, is that not describing? You do not know where you are with this kind of person.
“You are not writing about what we have just heard?”
“No.”
“It might be worth it. There are people who go around now prying into every part of Scotland and writing down whatever these old country folk have to say. They think that the old songs and stories are disappearing and that they are worth recording. I don’t know about that, it isn’t my business. But I would not be surprised if the people who have written it all down will find that it was worth their trouble—I mean to say, there will be money in it.”
Nettie speaks up unexpectedly.
“Oh, hush, Father. The old fellow is going to start again.”
This is not what any daughter would say to her father in Walter’s experience, but the man seems ready to laugh, looking down at her fondly.
“Just one more thing I have to ask,” he says. “What do you think of this about the fairies?”
“I think it is all nonsense,” says Walter.
“He has started again,” says Nettie crossly.
And indeed, Old James’s voice has been going this little while, breaking in determinedly and reproachfully on those of his audience who might have thought it was time for their own conversations.
“…and still another time, but in the long days in the summer, out on the hills late in the day but before it was well dark…”
The tall man nods but looks as if he had something still to inquire of Walter. Nettie reaches up and claps her hand over his mouth.
“And I will tell you and swear my life upon it that Will could not tell a lie, him that in his young days went to church to the preacher Thomas Boston, and Thomas Boston put the fear of the Lord like a knife into every man and woman, till their dying day. No, never. He would not lie.”
—
“SO THAT WAS ALL NONSENSE?” says the tall man quietly, when he is sure that the story has ended. “Well I am inclined to agree. You have a modern turn of mind?”
Walter says yes, he has, and he speaks more stoutly than he did before. He has heard these stories his father is spouting, and others like them, for the whole of his life, but the odd thing is that until they came on board this ship he never heard them from his father. The father he has known up till a short while ago would, he is certain, have had no use for them.
“This is a terrible place we live in,” his father used to say. “The people is all full of nonsense and bad habits and even our sheep’s wool is so coarse you cannot sell it. The roads are so bad a horse cannot go more than four miles in an hour. And for ploughing here they use the spade or the old Scotch plough though there has been a better plough in other places for fifty years. Oh, aye, aye, they say when you ask them, oh aye but it’s too steep hereabouts, the land is too heavy.
“To be born in the Ettrick is to be born in a backward place,” he would say. “Where the people is all believing in old stories and seeing ghosts and I tell you it is a curse to be born in the Ettrick.”
And very likely that would lead him on to the subject of America, where all the blessings of modern invention were put to eager use and the people could never stop improving the world around them.
But harken at him now.
“I don’t believe those were fairies,” Nettie says.
“So do you think they were his neighbors all the time?” says her father. “Do you think they were playing a trick on him?”
Never has Walter heard a father speak to a child so indulgently. And fond as he has grown of Nettie he cannot approve of it. It can only make her believe that there are no opinions on the face of the earth that are more worthy of being listened to than hers.
“No I do not,” she says.
“What then?” says her father.
“I think they were dead people.”
“What do you know about dead people?” her father asks her, finally speaking with some sternness. “Dead people won’t rise up till the Day of Judgment. I don’t care to hear you making light about things of that sort.”
“I was not making light,” says Nettie carelessly.
The sailors are scrambling loose from their sails and pointing at the sky, far to the west. They must see there something that excites them. Walter makes bold to ask, “Are they English? I cannot tell what they say.”
“Some of them are English, but from parts that sound foreign to us. Some are Portuguese. I cannot make them out either but I think that they are saying they see the rotches. They all have very keen eyes.”
Walter believes that he too has very keen eyes, but it takes him a moment or two before he can see these birds, the ones that must be called rotches. Flocks and flocks of seabirds flashing and rising overhead, mere bright speckles on the air.
“You must make sure to mention those in your journal,” Nettie’s father says. “I have seen them when I made this voyage before. They feed on fish and here is the great place for them. Soon you’ll see the fishermen as well. But the rotches filling the sky are the very first sign that we must be on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
“You must come up and talk to us on the deck above,” he says, in bidding good-bye to Walter. “I have business to think about and I am not much company for my daughter. She is forbidden to run around because she is not quite recovered from the cold she had in the winter but she is fond of sitting and talking.”
“I don’t believe it is the rule for me to go there,” says Walter, in some confusion.
“No, no, that is no matter. My girl is lonely. She likes to read and draw but she likes
company too. She could show you how to draw, if you like. That would add to your journal.”
If Walter flushes it is not noticed. Nettie remains quite composed.
—
SO THEY SIT OUT IN THE OPEN and draw and write. Or she reads aloud to him from her favorite book, which is The Scottish Chiefs. He already knows much about what happens in the story—who does not know about William Wallace?—but she reads smoothly and at just the proper speed and makes some things solemn and others terrifying and something else comical, so that he is as much in thrall to the book as she is herself. Even though, as she says, she has read it twelve times already.
He understands a little better now why she has all those questions to ask him. He and his folk remind her of some people in her book. Such people as there were out on the hills and valleys in the olden times. What would she think if she knew that the old fellow, the old tale-spinner spouting all over the boat and penning people up to listen as if they were the sheep and he was the sheepdog—if she knew that he was Walter’s father?
She would be delighted, probably, more curious about Walter’s family than ever. She would not look down on them, except in a way she could not help or know about.
We came on the fishing banks of Newfoundland on the 12th of July and on the 19th we saw land and it was a joyful sight to us. It was a part of Newfoundland. We sailed between Newfoundland and St. Paul’s Island and having a fair wind both the 18th and the 19th we found ourselves in the river on the morning of the 20th and within sight of the mainland of North America. We were awakened at about 1 o’clock in the morning and I think every passenger was out of bed at 4 o’clock gazing at the land, it being wholly covered with wood and quite a new sight to us. It was a part of Nova Scotia and a beautiful hilly country. We saw several whales this day such creatures as I never saw in my life.
This is the day of wonders. The land is covered with trees like a head with hair and behind the ship the sun rises tipping the top trees with light. The sky is clear and shining as a china plate and the water just playfully ruffled with wind. Every wisp of fog has gone and the air is full of the resinous smell of the trees. Seabirds are flashing above the sails all golden like creatures of Heaven, but the sailors raise a few shots to keep them from the rigging.
