World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  The grief came within her like a possession. It overwhelmed her, stifled her breath, almost wrenched her muscles from off her bones as she leaned forward and buried her face in that dearest, most loving little body. No cry would rise in her throat. Her eyes were too clenched for tears. The agony that seized and bound her spirit was like a premonition of her own death; indeed, at that moment, if she could have exchanged states with what had been Tommy, death for his life, all the persuasion of heaven would not have stopped her.

  But that was the very nadir of her anguish. Within, some unmoved caretaker of her own survival was already fighting to master that sacrificial urge to death, forcing her at least to breathe. And when it triumphed, her grateful lungs gulped hugely at the air. And Tommy, who for that long-held moment had stayed so close, while her answering soul had hovered on the borders of his death, now vanished from her faster even than the speed of prayer. And only then did she begin to feel his loss as something quite distinct from her grief at his going.

  That grief was now a mercy, racking her body into sobbing convulsion, aching at her throat, shrivelling every joint, filling all the corners of her with sensation to efface the world and bring a kind of waking oblivion. Of the scene around—the milling feet, the hushed throng, the women weeping into shawls and aprons, the whole dumbfounded universe—she was unaware. Until strong hands reached down to lift her. To turn her. To fold her into a giant's body, all strength and all tenderness in one huge frame. A well of dark and warmth and comfort. "Come away now," John said. His voice seemed to arise within the channels of her ear. "Let your grief go. Stint nothing in it." He was not far from weeping, too.

  Of the walk back to Rough Stones she knew little. The griping in her stomach seemed just one more part of the whole agonized world. But a half-hour later, when she lay in her darkened room, sobbed out and void of grief, she knew the stirring there was more physical in its cause; and she crawled across the room, enduring one long paroxysm, hoping she might reach the commode in time.

  Sweat sprang from every pore and she thought for a moment that this pain—a real, wrenching, physical pain—would burst her skull apart. It had never been so bad those other times. She sat, and strained, and waited.

  And though it had come so insidiously upon her, its lifting was as sudden and as blessed as a fanfare. Something left her womb. It passed, hot and piercing down her birth canal, seeming to cut her as it went—but to cut like a knife so sharp that its severing was kindly, without pain. She heard it fall, wet and limp, into the porcelain. She felt the blood that seeped out after it. That too was warm. All warmth seemed eager to pass from her.

  When the shivering was over and a great coldness fell about the room, she stirred again, reaching a rag from the store in the commode—unneeded these months long past. Months dead beyond recall.

  Automatically, obeying long memory, her fingers folded the clout and held it to her groin as she prepared to rise and put on its more permanent fastening. The first movement carried her to the floor beside the commode and she could not avoid seeing the thing within.

  But it was not a thing. It was a baby, perfect down to its last detail, though it was no bigger than a kitten and only its right arm had yet formed. The other was just a little bud still—though it had perfect hands and fingers, and its feet had toes. His feet. He would have been a boy.

  She was amazed at herself for looking at him so dispassionately. Was there no sadness left to share for her own…flesh and blood? She looked again at the dead boy in his porcelain sarcophagus. Flesh and blood were the words for it.

  And then a terrible doubt eased itself into her thoughts: Was it perhaps… Thornton's begetting? One, two, three, four…four and a half…nearly five months. Is that what a baby looked like then? They said—Mrs. Hampton had said—that sweet basil tea dried up your monthlies, too. So you couldn't tell. Surely it was too small to have been begot last August? Perhaps it was best never to know.

  Aching at every joint she roused herself and secured the menstrual rag more permanently. She covered the aborted fetus with soil and paper, as if it had been an everyday evacuation, and put it, for the moment, back in its cupboard. Then she rang for Bess.

  "Mistress!" the girl cried out the moment she entered the door. She ran to her, thinking she would fall at any moment.

  "Help me dress," Nora said, her intention firm if not her voice.

  "But…t'master says ye've to rest. 'E's seein' to everythin…"

  Nora shook her head. "There's too much to do. We must not succumb to grief but rise above it."

  Bess, though filled with doubt, knew better than to argue.

  "Lace me in tight," Nora said. "I need its support."

  "'Ave a drop o' brandy," Bess said. "It'll dill't pain an' race thy blood for thee."

  And later, when Bess saw her carrying out the commode pot and remonstrated with her, Nora said: "I need work into me 'ands, see tha." Which so astonished the girl that she thought her mistress was mocking her or—even worse—making a joke.

  Ten minutes later, Nora, wearing bonnet, shawl, and cape against a cold that had struck to the very core of her, stood at the front door of Rough Stones, let it close behind her, rested against it, and dared, for the first time to think of Tommy. Instantly hot tears flooded her eyes and her body succumbed to a relief of sobbing. The salt ran, cooling, down her cheeks, cold upon her chin, and chill at the pit of her neck. She shivered. It would not do. There were so many things to arrange. Mourning. She'd have to get some weeds.

  Arabella was at the gate; suddenly there was no telling reality from what might be.

  Arabella was real. And this hot misery.

  "My dear!" Arabella said, coming up the path. "Oh my dear!"

  "I must get some mourning," Nora said. "What must I do about it?"

  It was a general cry for help, but Arabella, her sense undermined by the emotion of the moment, yet having come to Rough Stones prepared to be practical, to do practical things, slipped unthinkingly into the role she had so gladly filled for many weeks past. And to her own shocked dismay she heard herself saying:

  "Oh you need only get an armband, as it's not family. And it need last no more than a week…"

  Nora's look of horror checked her at last, and she stood dumbfounded as the anguished girl rolled herself off the door and on to the stone wall of the house, which she then beat repeatedly with her forehead and her hands, crying, again and again, a formless, grieving cry.

  Arabella stood helpless behind her, biting her lip until the pain became intense. If biting her tongue off would call back those thoughtless words, she would have bitten it through at once. But the words were out; their utterance was irretrievable. "I did not mean that," she cried in an agony of shame. "It was your question…you said…" But what could explain her words? What would make Nora even stop and listen?

  No. To the contrary, Nora's departure into this furious agony was a deserved rebuke; at such unguarded moments, the thoughts that escape us are a true window into our souls. Let her now search into her own. Her words had been no mere slip, but were as a sign from Providence; it was a cue for prayerful self-examination.

  Nora's passion was somewhat more governed now. Arabella reached out a hesitant arm and grasped her shoulder. "Nora?" she said.

  The other became quieter still, indeed, almost calm again, though still she did not turn.

  "Nora, that was the most callous and…unfeeling and unthinking, thoughtless, stupid thing to have said. Please…I…Nora?" Her voice tailed off as Nora, now quite subdued, continued to lean against the wall. Arabella was almost on the point of leaving when Nora at last turned to her again and smiled wanly.

  "I'm sorry," Arabella said. "Truly."

  Nora sniffed the brine from her nose and shook her head, almost as if she were angry. "My fault," she said huskily. "My senseless question."

  Arabella took her arm then. "You surely weren't going out?" she asked. "I came here to sit with you."

  Nora drew hersel
f up, squared her shoulders, and smiled once more, bravely this time. "I must," she said. "Life must go on…our life, at least. There's so much to be arranged. I should never have come up here."

  "All is being taken care of," Arabella said, still trying to prevent her from leaving.

  "I've no doubt." Nora pushed by her and set off, walking tenderly, for the gate. "John'd do everything if I let him. But that's not my way."

  When they reached the turnpike some force drew her, against all her rational judgement, to the place where it had happened. Arabella followed, watching Nora guardedly all the way.

  The road surface was a confusion of hoof marks and the ruts gouged by the iron tyres as they skidded. There was no sign of hearse feather and tin whistle.

  "He must have had the brakes hard on," Arabella said. "Except for that one stretch there."

  Nora kept silent. She knew why there were no skid marks on "that one stretch there." No other sign of the accident remained.

  And John, she found, had indeed done it all. Immediately after the accident, Walter had gone with the coach to Todmorden, where the stable master— "Without prejudice, mind; I want that firmly understood"—readied a horse and car while Arabella was sent for. Together they had collected Mrs. Metcalfe and Tommy's sister, Beth, and he was now seeing them home to The Acorn.

  "How was she affected?" Nora asked.

  "As you might expect," Arabella told her, but did not elaborate.

  The doctor was now making his examination for the coroner. The carpenters were putting together a regal coffin of oak, beech, ash, lime, and walnut. The lads had opened up a subscription to pay for the funeral and the tea, and to leave some over for the family. When the doctor had finished, two of the carpenters' wives would lay him out. The coffin would be ready against Thursday and then he would be taken in it over to The Acorn ready for the funeral on Saturday.

  "He's to have a proper hearse and four black horses and a full set of hearse feathers," Nora said.

  But John shook his head. "I doubt the subscription'll run to that."

  "If I have to pop my wedding ring to pay for it, he's to have hearse feathers," Nora insisted. "We can well afford it."

  The argument was so uncharacteristic of her that he knew at once how deeply she meant it, and he agreed without demur.

  "Tell the carpenters to draw up a list of the coffin furniture they need," she said before she left. "I can get it in Manchester tomorrow."

  He frowned. "You'll surely not go to Manchester tomorrow?"

  "Life goes on," she said. "Work is sovereign."

  Her truculent bravado, which jarred so strangely with her evident grief, worried him deeply. So did her insistence that Tommy should lie shrouded in the best parlour at Rough Stones until Thursday. "He'd be too lonely down here," she said. But he wanted to do nothing that might hinder the scope of her grief.

  She ate little that silent evening and he was glad when, once they were in bed and darkness was all around them, she threw herself upon him and wept an ocean from her eyes. But he did not stir from his sleep, when, much later, she slipped from between the sheets and, pulling her shawl and cloak about her, crept down through the silent house to the parlour where Tommy lay. There she renewed the single candle that burned, thrusting the darkness from him to the farthest nooks and corners of the room. When its flame had settled, she turned down the shrouds to uncover his face. The warmth of that steady light banished the pallor of death and it seemed he lay in breathless sleep. The movement of the sheet dislodged a curl, which lay across his forehead as it had in life.

  In a curious way, it was a joy to see him there, so calm, after that most violent and outrageous ending on the turnpike down below. She thought again of all the merry chatter, the unending stream of odd thoughts and sayings, of the faultless recitation of abstruse passages from his father's books…all that had poured through those lips, now forever stilled—of his shrewd, challenging eyes, so eloquent in laughter, so downcast in rebuke or shame, now forever lost to the light…dead lips, dead eyes, in a dead face. No Tommy lurked behind them now, ready to ambush her delight and wonder.

  No Tommy.

  There was no Tommy anymore. Never more.

  The world would never know him as she had.

  Her hand brushed something soft in the shadows on the table. The plume. The broken plume all battered and gray. She lifted it. The toy whistle rolled gently toward her. She picked it up. The women who had laid him out had not known what to do with them. She rolled the shrouds lower, exposing his two hands, crossed piously upon his chest. That was not like Tommy. She loosened them, one upon another, and between them gently inserted the two toys. Curling his fingers around them.

  She meant it as an act of love, but there was no Tommy there to be loved now. Instead, it was an act of parting, a numb leavetaking between one body and another; one body dead beyond all fancy it might live; and another that mourned…mourned…mourned too deep for tears, mourned too deep even for understanding.

  She pulled the shrouds back then and left the room. Outside the house, barefoot on the path Tommy had freed from its weeds, she felt the cold night seep into her bones. A glacial moon shone through ragged clouds in a burnished impasto of light. But no answering light burned in the valley below. No glimmer showed from up the Vale. The whole world lay stricken with sleep. Here alone, cold in the icy moonlight, she felt closer to Tommy than she had felt in there beside what had been him. Or housed him. For he was in spirit now; liberated; free to soar. Yes! His had been a soaring kind of spirit.

  She looked skyward. If he was anywhere, he was there, filling the sky from horizon to horizon. Beyond pain. Beyond the rage of life.

  As she went back upstairs, to the bed she thought would never warm again, she was astounded to find her cheek wet with tears. It must have been the wind, she thought, for she had felt no especial cause for grief. Indeed, the understanding that Tommy was now beyond the reach of pain was the balm that brought her sleep.

  By grim coincidence Mrs. Metcalfe called on her way to the mill next morning with a similar thought to impart. She opened the top half of the kitchen door before she knocked and waited to be bade indoors. There was only one person in the world who regularly opened the door in that way and at that hour, and Nora rushed to the kitchen, hoping for one unthinking moment, to see him—but learning only that the body's habits and memories are beyond the rational order.

  "I'm sorry to ope th'door afore I knock, missis," Mrs. Metcalfe said. "It's me hearin'. It's bin that bad since I started at th'mill."

  Nora had no resources left to enable her to respond to an opening at this level of banality. "Come in, Mrs. Metcalfe," she said. "What a grief it is, to be sure. And you should know how deep we share it."

  Mrs. Metcalfe came just within the door, and Beth, her eyes as red as coals, shuffled in beside her.

  "Ye'll want to see him," Nora said.

  "Aye," Mrs. Metcalfe agreed. "And the lass. She should see, too."

  Nora showed them in and left them.

  "What did you think that was, then?" John asked.

  Nora stared back, unwilling to answer.

  "And all that blood on the cloth in the commode cupboard?" he continued.

  That was easier to bluff through. "I've got the cardinal for a visit," she said. "Very normal."

  "Looks a lot to me," he said.

  "It often is, they say. With being on sweet basil."

  He smiled. "I think it's time we gave that gentleman no more houseroom."

  She reached over the table then and squeezed his hand, as happy as the times allowed. From the next room they could hear the sobbing of the mother and daughter.

  The pair still wept as they left by the front door, but just before they reached the gate, Mrs. Metcalfe turned and said: "'Appen the lad 'ad the best on it. That brightness in 'im would've been a scourge in later days. Like for 'is dad, see. It's nobbut a pain to 'im. To understand what's best left be by the likes of us."

  "'Appe
n," Nora agreed. There was no ground where her mind and the mind that nurtured such cold comfort could meet. And as she turned from them and went back indoors, her body once again forgot and prepared itself to welcome the Tommy they had not left today. She had to fight back her tears. How long before that eager corner of her heart was choked; what could launder out that stain of him?

  "How may I help thee?" John asked when she sat again beside him and the house was still.

  "Oh my love," she said. "Just be! Just be. Without thee in this house I'd not have come through this dark day. I've known since that hour we met—I've but one single cause to live. But it's taken this grief to show it's as true of the dark in life as of the light." He squeezed her hand. "If tha'rt there," she went on, now feeling a desperate urge to talk, "there's all the world may come at us. It'll not signify—not so long as tha'rt there." She sighed. There was so much more to say—but no words to say it in.