The Book of Secrets

by Fiona Kidman

  The night before I met Branco I had seen my grandmother in a dream. She was propped up in bed with her long white hair straggling against the pillows, both so white you could hardly tell one from the other, just the way she had been in the last days of her life. Only in those days her eyes had been half shut, a slit of colour in the seams of skin that covered the place where her eyes should have been, and her voice was a half whisper. She made little sense, only some days she would take my hand and raise it to the window and then I would know that I must open it when there was no one around, and let the wind touch her face. She would lift her face, her once beautiful, fine-boned profile, matted with thick flesh now like a giant pale curd, covered in whiskers, to feel the brush of the air. In the dim light that was kept on in the room I would see only the outline of her face, but the breeze would take away the fetid odours of her dying body, and I would touch her hand, still cool and dry, and remember her as she had been. Her hand would return my pressure and then I would quickly close the window so that we were not discovered. It was the nearest to rebellion, and a communication, that I had experienced with her in a long time, and I would often think that the next day she would speak to me, say something special that she had saved for me and only me, but the days passed and what she had to say never came, and then she died and I was alone with my widow mother who was strict and harsh in her views of the world and observed the Sabbath with the intensity of the old people.

  No one can know, who has not experienced it, how strict and fierce the Sabbath was. Back in Cape Breton, come Saturday nights, the sap trays which caught the maple syrup were overturned so that no syrup could collect on Sunday, no pleasure was observed and if accidental pleasure was taken in performing the Lord’s work, like skating across the ice to church, the Man would take the skates and hurl them in the waters beneath the ice. There was no preparation of food allowed, no exchanging of money no matter how great the need for goods, no admiration of the handiwork of children, no singing, no whistling, no dancing, no playing of musical instruments, nothing at all. There was, though, a great deal of praying and reading of Scriptures and sitting around with a face like a green raspberry, oh yes.

  I’m not saying it was quite as bad as that when we came out here but it wasn’t much better. My mother, who took very much to heart her responsibilities to her fatherless child and unluckier even than most with the cross of a witch in the house, made sure it was as much like the old days as possible.

  Except that in my grandmother’s time, if she were around she managed to cast me a mocking smile that stopped it from being so bad, and I think my mother must have known. Yes, I think that among other things, she did not like my grandmother for not being as attentive to the Sabbath as she might have been, and this stemmed from somewhere back in time, to the place whence they both had come, and beyond that to my grandmother’s homeland. She was afraid I would be corrupted; directly, you might say, as if the bad blood which ran in my veins was not enough. Not that she was untouched herself, of course, but the way my mother acted you would think she had put a cleansing rinse through her own veins.

  I speak harshly of my mother. Yet in truth, she loved me. That remains my dilemma. I did not, could not, hate her. I did not like her much, but surely that is a different matter.

  In the end it was a life for a life. That is not easy to accept. But she chose to live her life in the mould of the old people. I did not choose that my life should be the same, however she tried to make it as hers. She paid with her life, but she left the old people to nest in my dreams.

  And it has gone on for so long. So long, I tell you, whoever can hear me, whoever is listening.

  This night, the one that I spoke of, when I was young and before it had all come to pass, I had seen my grandmother in my dream and her hair hung and her breath laboured and her flesh stank; her skin was the colour of scone dough but her eyes were wide open. Yes, that is what I am coming to, those wide shining eyes. They were twinkling and shining in the gloom of that deathbed room. They were as big as saucers and dark as the centre of a Black-eyed Susan. I leaned towards her and I knew that she was about to tell me the secret I had been waiting to hear and then I woke.

  Standing outside in the morning light, I hurled the tablecloth at the sky to blot out the sun. I would have called out aloud in my frustration, except that I was afraid my mother would hear me and come running.

  I tried to recapture my grandmother’s face. I would have called if I could, ‘Isabella, oh, Isabella,’ her lovely name like an ornament on the bright winter air.

  Such a clear morning with only a hint of frost, and that would probably be the extent of the winter here in the north, in this climate of honey bees in winter and spring flowers on the vine even before the season has turned. We do not suffer cold or hardships as did our forebears, there are none of the frozen waters of the northern hemisphere, we do not get bays closed in by ice, nor the long and dangerous spring when the thaw begins and the drift ice moves and churns against the land. No, the sea warms us, we are cosseted by the Pacific. For those who come from the south by Brynderwyn Hill and look down to the flat plains of the Braigh, they will see the shining blue floor of the world, the bay that stretches from Bream Tail to Bream Head, and the small islands they call the Hen and Chickens perched on the sea, and near to the ocean there is the village where my people live.

  Isabella.

  I listened to her name on the air, over oceans.

  Isabella.

  I dared only whisper it.

  And then, as the cloth settled and I drew its corners together, I saw Branco walking towards me.

  He was a swarthy man not more than five feet six inches measured roughly by my own height, and muscular. I remember particularly his eyes which were narrow and deep-set. His hair was crinkly At first sight I would have said that it was wiry although later I found that it was not. It was just the tightness of the curls which gave it this appearance. A closed brooding face, I thought, as he advanced towards me. I stepped back, afraid.

  He saw my fear and hesitated. In his hand he carried a tin pitcher. He stood quite still as my own hand sprang to my mouth to cover a scream. He held the pitcher out and then he smiled.

  I never saw such white teeth in a human face. They were large and glowing and strong. His eyes narrowed even more as he smiled, so that I could hardly see them at all. He looked as if he had worn his clothes for a long time without changing them, for they were rumpled and his boots were muddy. I could not take my eyes off this twinkling rough gypsy. For that is what I thought, that this man was a gypsy.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said, and I heard my voice like a little wisp in the air.

  He inclined his head, still smiling. His shoulders lifted in a little self-deprecating gesture, yet at the same time I knew he was mocking me. I could not speak his language and he didn’t care. He would get what he wanted with or without language.

  ‘Water? Milk?’ I said foolishly.

  It could not be water for there was a clear stream nearby. I held out my hands, opening and shutting them as if I was squeezing a cow’s teats. He watched this performance with tolerant amusement, seeming about to laugh out loud.

  ‘Milk, iff you pleez.’

  I guessed that he had known the right words all along, and I was ashamed that he had made me go through the silly charade I had just done for him.

  ‘I’ll ask my mother. Wait here on the step,’ I said, making my voice as haughty as I could as I swept inside.

  Oh I make it sound as if I was a grand lady in a crinoline but I wasn’t anything like that. My dress was a plain woollen cloth of a dark colour. It was narrower than I would have liked, for my mother would have thought a full skirt to be an extravagance. There should never be too much of anything, only enough, she would always say. In this I knew she was echoing the sentiments of McLeod. One of his favourite ploys to humiliate the women of the parish had been to upbraid them on Sundays from the pulpit about their unseemly dress and in particular
about their bonnets. Not a feather, even one they had gathered from the hedgerows themselves, or a tiny bow or a piece of lace, would be tolerated on their headgear. He would make such dreadful fools of them. He even did this to his wife, a poor tender creature who had borne him ten children in not so very many years and spent most of her life seemingly half off her head. Her apparent feebleness of mind and body had kept her more out of the church than in it. But at least she missed his ranting and I wondered if she might not have been a truly canny woman in spite of what they said.

  My grandmother thought very well of Mary McLeod. She was a kind woman of Christian charity, she told me, not like some of the mealy-mouthed fools who believed they ran the world with their own brand of fine moral superiority. It was talk like that that upset my mother.

  ‘Don’t you know, the Man had our best interests at heart?’ she would cry. ‘Have you no idea how he suffered? Would you have us all pickled in rum, and selling our bodies on the harbour front at Pictou? That’s what happened to women who went against him, you know. Death and destruction, death and destruction.’ Then my grandmother’s face would close with some secret private thought, some agony, some conflict, and she would fall silent before my mother’s reproaches. Sometimes it was as if my mother had acquired a tough upper hand which she enjoyed as my grandmother got older. But as they had both thought well of Mary McLeod on this subject quarrels between mother and daughter quickly ran out.

  No, it was the matter of dress that held sway. Certainly the way we dressed was dictated from the old days; you would have been hard put to find fancy clothing in my wardrobe. Though I did have little ways of getting round the problem. I was one of the best knitters in the district, a gift that was highly prized. By the time I was fifteen I could knit a sleeve while walking to and from the store for supplies with my bag slung over my shoulder. I could do diamond rope, the shape of fishing net mesh (for our patterns have names and are often called after the objects of the sea), worked in plain, purl, moss, and double moss rows, and net masks, and print o’ the hoof, and ups and downs, or marriage lines as my mother called them, and oh, pretty well any you could name. It was a sinful exhibition of course, for there was no doubt that I was proud and enjoyed the attention I drew to myself, but it was one of those things about which my mother was strangely silent.

  No. Wait.

  That is a lie.

  Silent, maybe, but not so strange, for in my secret heart of hearts I knew the truth of which I have already hinted. Though she might not exhibit her pride, and though she exhorted me to modest thoughts, I was the darling of her whole life; when others praised me, she glowed as if it was she who had received approval.

  In short, my mother idolised the ground that I walked on. When the sleeves of my pullovers were a little fancier than she might have expected, when there was a touch of tantalising colour where all should have been grey and drab, she would manage to turn a blind eye. By devious ways I could do a little primping. I relished these vanities. I have to say that it was not least because they represented a victory of sorts.

  For the most part, though, my sensible dresses swept to the floor and covered my ankles, suggesting all modesty and propriety, and when I turned that morning and stepped high into my mother’s kitchen, I cannot imagine that Branco would have thrilled greatly to what he saw.

  And yet he came again.

  Branco, the Dalmatian. Like his countrymen, he had come to the kauri gumfields and dug and dug, turning up mountains of gum. I try to imagine the stuff in my dreams as it coagulates from a gleaming lava-like flow into hard bright shapes.

  When the men arrived off the boats and were despatched north they had nothing except the clothes they stood up in. At the trading posts the storekeepers equipped them with a billy and some tea, a spade and some boots, and a rough kind of tent for shelter. Then they made their own way. With the first of their gum they paid off their debt for the gear. After that, they made profit.

  Branco dug in the mud and the rain, he dug when the sun was beating down like fire on his back and the earth was like bricks. Sometimes he dug alone, but he also dug with the Maori. A few of the Dalmatians got rich. Often their health failed. That was what happened to Branco. Come the last winter he had had first a cold then pleurisy. He nearly died out there on the gumfields.

  The Maori nursed him and healed him with their medicines.

  He worked on in the gumfields through the summer, over at Dargaville on the west coast where the weather was not so hot, but his breathing had been affected. After a couple of hours doubled over he would begin gasping and his lungs would labour and then he would have to rest for an hour before he could go on. As the winter closed in again the Maori told him he would die if he kept going. So he took to the roads, building new ones and mending old ones. That was hard too but at least he wasn’t doubled over in the pits like an animal.

  I didn’t know any of these things the morning he came to my mother’s house. And it is hard to explain how I came to know them later, for our language never did bridge as many gaps as it might, and yet there were things we learned about each other.

  When he went away I did not think much of him. I sat in the kitchen of this house and I knitted and I sewed, and I milked the cow in the morning and set the cream and made the butter. My mother and I grew a small garden at the side of the house and late in the mild winter we planted a row of beans and one of peas, and another of carrots, and a line of tomatoes against the house.

  The winter turned to early spring. The apple tree and the plum trees which had been planted by my parents when the house was built were illuminated with blossom. Flowers enchanted me, and because I had been low in spirits — still thinking of Isabella each spring, though it was the third year since her passing — my mother capitulated and let me sow a line of marigolds down the edge of the path and a handful of sunflowers next to the tomatoes. She considered flowers to be a decoration that required labour better spent on other things, but then I reminded her that we could provide flowers for the church and she agreed to me planting night stock as well, for the rich perfume. It was to the glory of God, I told her, but I did not go too far for fear she should think of incense. Still, the flowers grew and were plentiful.

  In those days our kitchen shone, the stove was like dark obsidian where I polished it, there was a simple dresser in the corner and on it stood a row of blue and white plates and another of hard white bone china dishes, tureens and the like, which had been carried with great care from Nova Scotia. There was little that had been brought in the migration because the ships were full to bursting with people, but some things were too precious to leave behind; items which had been laboured for and skimped over as the people, once crofters from mean huts, had erected their proud solid houses. The reminders of their first prosperity could not easily be abandoned.

  There were some things in my mothers house even finer than the china. These were household items that Isabella had brought to the family as part of her dowry; Isabella, the London girl who married a crofter and finished up fleeing the persecutions with him. The goods were few but they were precious. Here and there in the kitchen, then, a hint of shining brass, and two silver candle-sticks, and some very fine white linen, so old now that it looked as if it would break after it had been starched and pressed, but simon-pure in its whiteness.

  As well there were old heavy iron pots and the tripod where a great stew pot could hang across the open fire, and rough furniture which had been fashioned from planks by my father. I did try to remember my father, and in the work of those seats arranged around the long kauri table, and in the house which he had built with his own hands, I could almost see a picture of him, a plain, decent, sober hard-working man who had nonetheless been prepared to take a risk and follow the Man.

  Of course I know now that family pictures can lie.

  My father had not done so well by his wife, although later no one would speak of that for it would have been, as they said, to speak ill of the dead. But w
hen I think of my mother now, I wonder if her pictures had already dimmed before the hour of my birth, or even by the time I was conceived. I think she may have gained a kind of strength from excluding the truth while acknowledging that it existed. The tragedy is not so much what is, but what we believe. Or exhibit as belief. Myself, I do not believe there is any truth which can be avoided.

  Look at me. Look at my life. What sort of recommendation am I for the truth? I do not blame my mother now. Ah, not now. But then.

  So I felt my father was a vague presence who had provided for us and then vanished to his rest before his time was due. Now and then he was conjured up as a force to be reckoned with, when other measures of restraint had failed. When I was wilful or unkind, I was asked, ‘What would your father have said?’ To which I had no answer. I did not know. I did know that he had built the cradle in which I slept. That might have been rich information had I not also known that I was not the boy intended for the cradle.

  My mother had been waiting and hoping for a child for the better part of thirty years. She was growing old, in terms of the years of child bearing, for Isabella was nearly forty when mother was born, only she had other living children before her. Still, she knew what it was to have hard labour and old bones parting for the onslaught of childbirth.

  My mother, whose name was Ann, had also given birth to other children but they had not lived. There had been one which came to half term and she had taken his tiny body still curled in foetal form and planted him in Cape Breton soil without a burial service, and another one which the midwife had looked at and said that God was good in taking his life; that was in Australia, and then there had been here in New Zealand a child who survived and gave mother the consolation of a funeral service. They were all boys. Then there was me. McLeod had foretold my birth to my mother from his deathbed, and she had never given up believing it would happen although twelve years were to pass before it did. And of course she was sure I would be another son, that was what she waited for, a son who would survive and whom she would call Ishmael. Then I came, a girl who lived, even though in the beginning I was a pitiful ragged piece of flesh that cried and moaned night after night.