by Alice Munro
Mary holds Young James up so that he may always remember this first sight of the continent that will forever be his home. She tells him the name of this land—Nova Scotia.
“It means New Scotland,” she says.
Agnes hears her. “Then why doesn’t it say so?”
Mary says, “It’s Latin, I think.”
Agnes snorts with impatience. The baby has been waked up early by all the hubbub and celebration, and now she is miserable, wanting to be on the breast all the time, wailing whenever Agnes tries to take her off. Young James, observing all this closely, makes an attempt to get on the other breast, and Agnes bats him off so hard that he staggers.
“Suckie-laddie,” Agnes calls him. He yelps a bit, then crawls around behind her and pinches the baby’s toes.
Another whack.
“You’re a rotten egg, you are,” his mother says. “Somebody’s been spoiling you till you think you’re the Laird’s arse.”
Agnes’s roused voice always makes Mary feel as if she is about to catch a blow herself.
Old James is sitting with them on the deck, but pays no attention to this domestic unrest.
“Will you come and look at the country, Father?” says Mary uncertainly. “You can have a better view from the rail.”
“I can see it well enough,” Old James says. Nothing in his voice suggests that the revelations around them are pleasing to him.
“Ettrick was covered with trees in the old days,” he says. “The monks had it first and after that it was the royal forest. It was the King’s forest. Beech trees, oak trees, rowan trees.”
“As many trees as this?” says Mary, made bolder than usual by the novel splendors of the day.
“Better trees. Older. It was famous all over Scotland. The Royal Forest of Ettrick.”
“And Nova Scotia is where our brother James is,” Mary continues.
“He may be or he may not. It would be easy to die here and nobody know you were dead. Wild animals could have eaten him.”
“Come near this baby again and I’ll skin you alive,” says Agnes to Young James who is circling her and the baby, pretending that they hold no interest for him.
Agnes is thinking it would serve him right, the fellow who never even took his leave of her. But she has to hope he will show up sometime and see her married to his brother. So that he will wonder. Also he will understand that in the end he did not get the better of her.
Mary wonders how her father can talk in that way, about how wild animals could have eaten his own son. Is that how the sorrows of the years take hold on you, to turn your heart of flesh to a heart of stone, as it says in the old song? And if it is so, how carelessly and disdainfully might he talk about her, who never meant to him a fraction of what the boys did?
—
SOMEBODY HAS BROUGHT A FIDDLE onto the deck and is tuning up to play. People who have been hanging on to the rail and pointing out to each other what any one of them could see on their own—likewise repeating the name that by now everyone knows, Nova Scotia—are distracted by these sounds and begin to call for dancing. They call out the names of the reels and dances they want the fiddler to play. Space is cleared and couples line up in some sort of order and after a lot of uneasy fiddle-scraping and impatient shouts of encouragement, the music comes through and gathers its authority and the dancing begins.
Dancing, at seven o’clock in the morning.
Andrew comes up from below, bearing their supply of water. He stands and watches for a little, then surprises Mary by asking, would she dance?
“Who will look after the boy?” says Agnes immediately. “I am not going to get up and chase him.” She is fond of dancing, but is prevented now, not only by the nursing baby but by the soreness of the parts of her body that were so battered in the birth.
Mary is already refusing, saying she cannot go, but Andrew says, “We will put him on the tether.”
“No, no,” says Mary. “I’ve no need to dance.” She believes that Andrew has taken pity on her, remembering how she used to be left on the sidelines in school games and at the dancing, though she can actually run and dance perfectly well. Andrew is the only one of her brothers capable of such consideration, but she would almost rather he behaved like the others, and left her ignored as she has always been. Pity does gall her.
Young James begins to complain loudly, having recognized the word tether.
“You be still,” says his father. “Be still or I’ll clout you.”
Then Old James surprises them all by turning his attention to his grandson.
“You. Young lad. You sit by me.”
“Oh, he will not sit,” says Mary. “He will run off and then you cannot chase him, Father. I will stay.”
“He will sit,” says Old James.
“Well, settle it,” says Agnes to Mary. “Go or stay.”
Young James looks from one to the other, cautiously snuffling.
“Does he not know even the simplest word?” says his grandfather. “Sit. Lad. Here.”
“He knows all kinds of words,” says Mary. “He knows the name of the gib-boom.”
Young James repeats, “Gib-boom.”
“Hold your tongue and sit down,” says Old James. Young James lowers himself, reluctantly, to the spot indicated.
“Now go,” says Old James to Mary. And all in confusion, on the verge of tears, she is led away.
“What a suckie-laddie she’s made of him,” says Agnes, not exactly to her father-in-law but into the air. She speaks almost indifferently, teasing the baby’s cheek with her nipple.
—
PEOPLE ARE DANCING, not just in the figure of the reel but quite outside of it, all over the deck. They are grabbing anyone at all and twirling around. They are even grabbing some of the sailors if they can get hold of them. Men dance with women, men dance with men, women dance with women, children dance with each other or all alone and without any idea of the steps, getting in the way—but everybody is in everybody’s way already and it is no matter. Some children dance in one spot, whirling around with their arms in the air till they get so dizzy they fall down. Two seconds later they are on their feet, recovered, and ready to begin the same thing all over again.
Mary has caught hands with Andrew, and is swung around by him, then passed on to others, who bend to her and fling her undersized body about. She has lost sight of Young James and cannot know if he has remained with his grandfather. She dances down at the level of the children, though she is less bold and carefree. In the thick of so many bodies she is helpless, she cannot pause—she has to stamp and wheel to the music or be knocked down.
—
“NOW YOU LISTEN AND I WILL TELL YOU,” says Old James. “This old man, Will O’Phaup, my grandfather—he was my grandfather as I am yours—Will O’Phaup was sitting outside his house in the evening, resting himself, it was mild summer weather. All alone, he was.
“And there was three little lads hardly bigger than you are yourself, they came around the corner of Will’s house. They told him good evening. Good evening to you, Will O’Phaup, they says.
“Well good evening to you, lads, what can I do for you?
“Can you give us a bed for the night or a place to lay down, they says. And Aye, he says, Aye, I’m thinking three bits of lads like yourselves should not be so hard to find the room for. And he goes into the house with them following and they says, And by the by could you give us the key, too, the big silver key that you had of us? Well, Will looks around, and he looks for the key, till he thinks to himself, what key was that? And turns around to ask them. What key was that? For he knew he never had such a thing in his life. Big key or silver key, he never had it. What key are you talking to me about? And turns himself round and they are not there. Goes out of the house, all round the house, looks to the road. No trace of them. Looks to the hills. No trace.
“Then Will knew it. They was no lads at all. Ah, no. They was no lads at all.”
Young James has not made an
y sound. At his back is the thick and noisy wall of dancers, to the side his mother, with the small clawing beast that bites into her body. And in front of him is the old man with his rumbling voice, insistent but remote, and his blast of bitter breath, his sense of grievance and importance absolute as the child’s own. His nature hungry, crafty, and oppressive. It is Young James’s first conscious encounter with someone as perfectly self-centered as himself.
He is barely able to focus his intelligence, to show himself not quite defeated.
“Key,” he says. “Key?”
—
AGNES, WATCHING THE DANCING, catches sight of Andrew, red in the face and heavy on his feet, linked arm to arm with various jovial women. They are doing the “Strip the Willow” now. There is not one girl whose looks or dancing gives Agnes any worries. Andrew never gives her any worries anyway. She sees Mary tossed around, with even a flush of color in her cheeks—though she is too shy, and too short, to look anybody in the face. She sees the nearly toothless witch of a woman who birthed a child a week after her own, dancing with her hollow-cheeked man. No sore parts for her. She must have dropped the child as slick as if it was a rat, then given it over to one or the other of her weedy-looking daughters to mind.
She sees Mr. Suter, the surgeon, out of breath, pulling away from a woman who would grab him, ducking through the dance and coming to greet her.
She wishes he would not. Now he will see who her father-in-law is, he may have to listen to the old fool’s gabble. He will get a look at their drab, and now not even clean, country clothes. He will see her for what she is.
“So here you are,” he says. “Here you are with your treasure.”
That is not a word that Agnes has ever heard used to refer to a child. It seems as if he is talking to her in the way he might talk to a person of his own acquaintance, some sort of a lady, not as a doctor talks to a patient. Such behavior embarrasses her and she does not know how to answer.
“Your baby is well?” he says, taking a more down-to-earth tack. He is still catching his breath from the dancing, and his face, though not flushed, is covered with a fine sweat.
“Aye.”
“And you yourself? You have your strength again?”
She shrugs very slightly, so as not to shake the child off the nipple.
“You have a fine color, anyway, that is a good sign.”
She thinks that he sighs as he says this, and wonders if that may be because his own color, seen in the morning light, is sickly as whey.
He asks then if she will permit him to sit and talk to her for a few moments, and once more she is confused by his formality, but says he may do as he likes.
Her father-in-law gives the surgeon—and her as well—a despising glance, but Mr. Suter does not notice it, perhaps does not even understand that the old man, and the fair-haired boy who sits straight-backed and facing this old man, have anything to do with her.
“The dancing is very lively,” he says. “And you are not given a chance to decide who you would dance with. You get pulled about by all and sundry.” And then he asks, “What will you do in Canada West?”
It seems to her the silliest question. She shakes her head—what can she say? She will wash and sew and cook and almost certainly suckle more children. Where that will be does not much matter. It will be in a house, and not a fine one.
She knows now that this man likes her, and in what way. She remembers his fingers on her skin. What harm can happen, though, to a woman with a baby at her breast?
She feels stirred to show him a bit of friendliness.
“What will you do?” she says.
He smiles and says that he supposes he will go on doing what he has been trained to do, and that the people in America—so he has heard—are in need of doctors and surgeons just like other people in the world.
“But I do not intend to get walled up in some city. I’d like to get as far as the Mississippi River, at least. Everything beyond the Mississippi used to belong to France, you know, but now it belongs to America and it is wide open, anybody can go there, except that you may run into the Indians. I would not mind that either. Where there is fighting with the Indians, there’ll be all the more need for a surgeon.”
She does not know anything about this Mississippi River, but she knows that he does not look like a fighting man himself—he does not look as if he could stand up in a quarrel with the brawling lads of Hawick, let alone red Indians.
Two dancers swing so close to them as to put a wind into their faces. It is a young girl, a child really, whose skirts fly out—and who should she be dancing with but Agnes’s brother-in-law, Walter. Walter makes some sort of silly bow to Agnes and the surgeon and his father, and the girl pushes him and turns him around and he laughs at her. She is all dressed up like a young lady, with bows in her hair. Her face is lit with enjoyment, her cheeks are glowing like lanterns, and she treats Walter with great familiarity, as if she had got hold of a large toy.
“That lad is your friend?” says Mr. Suter.
“No. He is my husband’s brother.”
The girl is laughing quite helplessly, as she and Walter—through her heedlessness—have almost knocked down another couple in the dance. She is not able to stand up for laughing, and Walter has to support her. Then it appears that she is not laughing but in a fit of coughing and every time the fit seems ready to stop she laughs and gets it started again. Walter is holding her against himself, half-carrying her to the rail.
“There is one lass that will never have a child to her breast,” says Mr. Suter, his eyes flitting to the sucking child before resting again on the girl. “I doubt if she will live long enough to see much of America. Does she not have anyone to look after her? She should not have been allowed to dance.”
He stands up so that he can keep the girl in view as Walter holds her by the rail.
“There, she has got stopped,” he says. “No hemorrhaging. At least not this time.”
Agnes does not pay attention to most people, but she can sense things about any man who is interested in her, and she can see now that he takes a satisfaction in the verdict he has passed on this young girl. And she understands that this must be because of some condition of his own—that he must be thinking that he is not so badly off, by comparison.
There is a cry at the rail, nothing to do with the girl and Walter. Another cry, and many people break off dancing, hurrying to look at the water. Mr. Suter rises and goes a few steps in that direction, following the crowd, then turns back.
“A whale,” he says. “They are saying there is a whale to be seen off the side.”
“You stay here,” cries Agnes in an angry voice, and he turns to her in surprise. But he sees that her words are meant for Young James, who is on his feet.
“This is your lad then?” says Mr. Suter as if he has made a remarkable discovery. “May I carry him over to have a look?”
—
AND THAT IS HOW MARY—happening to raise her face in the crush of passengers—beholds Young James, much amazed, being carried across the deck in the arms of a hurrying stranger, a pale and determined though slyly courteous-looking dark-haired man who is surely a foreigner. A child-stealer, or child-murderer, heading for the rail.
She gives so wild a shriek that anybody would think she was in the Devil’s clutches herself, and people make way for her as they would do for a mad dog.
“Stop thief, stop thief,” she is crying. “Take the boy from him. Catch him. James. James. Jump down!”
She flings herself forward and grabs the child’s ankles, yanking him so that he howls in fear and outrage. The man bearing him nearly topples over but doesn’t give him up. He holds on and pushes at Mary with his foot.
“Take her arms,” he shouts, to those around them. He is short of breath. “She is in a fit.”
Andrew has pushed his way in, among people who are still dancing and people who have stopped to watch the drama. He manages somehow to get hold of Mary and Young James and to
make clear that the one is his son and the other his sister and that it is not a question of fits. Young James throws himself from his father to Mary and then begins kicking to be let down.
All is shortly explained with courtesies and apologies from Mr. Suter—through which Young James, quite recovered to himself, cries out over and over again that he must see the whale. He insists upon this just as if he knew perfectly well what a whale was.
Andrew tells him what will happen if he does not stop his racket.
“I had just stopped for a few minutes’ talk with your wife, to ask her if she was well,” the surgeon says. “I did not take time to bid her good-bye, so you must do it for me.”
—
THERE ARE WHALES for Young James to see all day and for everybody to see who can be bothered. People grow tired of looking at them.
“Is there anybody but a fine type of rascal would sit down to talk with a woman that had her bosoms bared,” says Old James, addressing the sky.
Then he quotes from the Bible regarding whales.
“There go the ships and there is that leviathan whom thou hast made to play therein. That crooked serpent, the dragon that is in the sea.”
But he will not stir himself to go and have a look.
Mary remains unconvinced by the surgeon’s story. Of course he would have to say to Agnes that he was taking the child to look at the whale. But that does not make it the truth. Whenever the picture of that devilish man carrying Young James flashes through her mind, and she feels in her chest the power of her own cry, she is astonished and happy. It is still her own belief that she has saved him.
—
NETTIE’S FATHER’S NAME IS MR. CARBERT. Sometimes he sits and listens to Nettie read or talks to Walter. The day after all the celebration and the dancing, when many people are in a bad humor from exhaustion and some from drinking whiskey, and hardly anybody looks at the shore, he seeks Walter out to talk to him.
“Nettie is so taken with you,” he says, “that she has got the idea that you must come along with us to Montreal.”
