by Janet Lunn
“Mr. Openshaw took some prisoners,” Henry said proudly.
“So he did.” Mrs. Whitcomb chuckled. “He held them smartly, too, and managed to free a dozen or so of our own boys on account of them. And those Yankees had come ashore—from over at the fort in Oswego, New York, I guess—thinking they were going to take some of us prisoner. Well, all that’s finished, now.” She took Mary’s hand and patted it. “You have come to live among us and I hope you will be happy. It is not such a bad life, in spite of the hardships. We’re good enough neighbours. Oh, there you are, Lydia.” Mrs. Whitcomb stood up. “There now, I’ll make some coffee.”
Mrs. Anderson sat down on the step beside Henry. She was shaking, as pale as paper, but she had washed and she had smoothed her hair into a loose knot at the back of her head. She took Henry’s hand and, without looking up, she said, “Thank you for taking care of us.”
“It was naught but Henry.”
“It was baby, too.” Mrs. Anderson’s voice was barely audible.
“The poor wee thing.” Mary couldn’t help showing some of the indignation she felt. Mrs. Anderson said no more. Henry wriggled uncomfortably. Mrs. Whitcomb reappeared and they drank their coffee and talked about the harvest to come. Suddenly Simeon came crashing out of the woods from down the road.
“Pritchetts’ barn’s on fire,” he shouted. “Pa and Luke has gone and I’m getting our bucket.” He grabbed the bucket from the ledge of the well and charged off down the road.
“Oh, dear.” Jane Whitcomb got to her feet. “They’ll be needing the women to cook. Do pray the house doesn’t catch!” She was off across the yard and down the road after Simeon.
Mary sat glued to the porch. Hot sweat rose from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. “I should have warned them,” she thought, “I should have told them.”
“Oh, I don’t care what Jane Whitcomb says, it’s a terrible life.” Mrs. Anderson had no thought for the fire. “We lived in a nice town down in the Jerseys. We had a house, a proper house on a proper street with other houses. There were a lot of streets in that town and a square in the middle with a real church on one side where there was a regular preacher. And there was a school with a schoolmaster, and shops—my father kept a store. All he ever wanted was to make a decent living and have peace and quiet and this is what he got—a backwoods full of bears and moose and wolves. I remember us coming up that cussed river and down along the lake on barges like slaves. Well, it killed him and it will kill the rest of us.” Shakily she got up and went into the house.
Mary could stand it no longer. She took Henry’s hand and peered intently into his startled grey eyes. “Don’t you go hirpling off anywhere, Henry Anderson, or I will put a fine and wicked spell on you,” she threatened. She jumped to her feet and tore down the road after Jane Whitcomb and Simeon.
“Oh goodness, Mary, you didn’t need to come.” Jane Whitcomb was startled when Mary came running up beside her.
“I do.” Mary fell into step beside her and together they hurried along the forest road.
“I’m sure we can use another hand. Fires are a terrible threat to us all. Places go up like tinderboxes in the backwoods. Oh dear, I do hope Dan and Martha are all right.”
Mary said nothing but silently she prayed fervently that everybody would be all right.
The sun sent a shaft of light glinting on the swamp here, illuminating a patch of road there, but the huge trees cast so much shade that it seemed more like late evening than early afternoon. The road led in the opposite direction from the one Luke had taken from the Collivers’ to the Anderson homestead so Mary was not prepared for the sight of open water.
They came to a log bridge that spanned a creek leading into a large bay.
“How beautiful!” Mary could not contain her wonder.
“It’s Hawthorn Bay,” Mrs. Whitcomb told her.
The bay looked to be about three miles long and a quarter of a mile or so wide. It was like a broad neck to a bottle, with the bottle being Lake Ontario at the other end. Mary looked out over the water. She thought she heard music from the reeds along the bay. She wanted desperately to kneel by the creek and put her face in the water, to wade out into it, to walk along its shore out into bright open space. But from where she stood she could see smoke and great orange flames rising above the forest just north of the bay. She began to run.
“We don’t need to run,” Mrs. Whitcomb called after her.
“I must,” Mary cried over her shoulder and raced on—around the end of the bay, along the narrow road, through the deep woods, to the Pritchetts’. She saw flames leaping from the barn, smoke, scurrying figures trying to corral a confusion of screaming horses, squealing pigs, bawling cows and sheep. A double chain of men had formed from the burning building across the yard and down through the trees to the bay. One line was heaving buckets full of water from the bay to the barn, the other was passing the empty buckets back for more water. Several women were herding children towards the bay, away from the fire.
Someone screamed, “Polly! Where’s Polly?”
“Oh, my God, she’s in the barn! I seen her go in after her kitten and I never seen her.…”
Mary did not wait to hear the rest. Flames were pouring out a window on one side of the building, flames were shooting out of the roof at the back, the front doors were open. She dashed into the barn. In the loft a kitten was screaming.
“Polly,” she called. “Polly, is you there?”
“Here.” It was a small, frightened-sounding voice.
“Where is here, lassie?”
“I’m up in the hayloft—I’m scared,” wailed the child.
“Is there a ladder, then?”
“I don’t know!”
A sheet of flame raced along the wall beside Mary.
“How did you get up there?”
“I clum up in the back where there’s steps but the fire’s took them away.” Polly began to wail.
“Can you jump?”
“I’m scared.”
The fire was coming closer. Polly began to howl, Mary began to cough. She had an inspiration.
“The cat’s not scared, Polly. It wants to come down. If you hold tight to the cat, it will see you safe down.”
A small blonde head appeared at the edge of the hayloft.
“Come, Polly,” said Mary softly. “Puss will help you.” She held out her arms. Polly did not move. Her eyes were huge with fear. She leaned farther over the rim of the loft. In her arms she clutched the screaming, wriggling kitten.
The fire crackled. The barn was filling with smoke. There was the odour of burning flesh from somewhere.
“Come, Polly,” Mary crooned.
Fire leapt up the side of the loft. Polly backed away from the rim, from the fire. She looked down at Mary. She jumped.
Mary caught her. The cat, with one wild yowl, hurled itself from Polly’s arms and out the door. Mary sprinted after it through the door. And collided with Luke. Luke threw his arms around Mary and child, lifted them both, and raced from the barn. There was a crash behind them. The barn roof caved in and the whole structure sank to the ground in a massive bonfire.
Luke did not stop until he was almost at the shore. Almost reluctantly he set them down.
“I thought you’d die in there.” His voice was hoarse.
“It was my doing the child was caught. I had to. I.…”
“Down,” said Polly.
“Och,” Mary laughed shakily. She hugged Polly tightly and put her on her feet.
“Polly! Polly! Oh, Polly!” A wild-eyed woman, her hair in disarray, her clothes smudged and torn, was running towards them. Her arms were outstretched.
“Mama!” Mother and child embraced frantically. Mary turned to thank Luke but he had disappeared. She was glad. She did not want to talk to him—or to anybody.
“I did what I came to do,” she thought. She looked towards the bay only a few feet away. Swiftly, before anyone could see her leave, she moved up to the
shore and along it until she was out of sight of the Pritchett homestead.
Meadow on the Bay
When she was sure no one had followed, Mary stopped. She breathed in the aroma of fish and waterplants. She felt the breeze. She listened to an oriole singing in a maple tree just back from the marsh. She looked out at the open water, blue and still as glass except for the occasional ripple made by a trout or a pike, a family of ducks, and a pair of black-and-white water-birds diving out in the bay. She gazed until her eyes smarted. Carefully she began to pick her way along the shore.
In some places it was rocky, in some marshy, in some the willow and poplar trees were right at the water’s edge and she had to hitch up her skirt, take off her shoes, and wade around them. She came to the end of the trees, to a small meadow, not more than an acre of ground reaching into the bay like a pointing hand. A doe and her fawn were drinking on the far side. At the sound of her, they raised their heads and bounded off.
A few birches, willows, poplars, a number of the hawthorns that had given the bay its name, and a tall tamarack fringed the south-eastern border of the meadow. Otherwise there were no trees, only bushes, tall grass, and wild-flowers—milkweed, yarrow, tansy, wild roses—their soft pink and white and yellow colours making a bright pattern, their sweet scents rich on the afternoon air. A creek flowed through the meadow about thirty feet from a log cabin that stood up near the road. A rowan sapling grew by the cabin door.
To ward off evil, Mary knew—and knew too, in that moment, that this had been Uncle Davie’s and Aunt Jean’s—and Duncan’s—house.
“I had not thought to care for a single clod of earth from this dark country, but this.…” She revolved slowly on one heel, filling her senses with everything around her. “This is a different place. This is like home.” She did not want to go into the cabin—not yet. She went instead to sit on a large, flat, grey rock that reached out over the water where the tip of the meadow touched the bay.
Here she could not see the pebbles or plants through the water’s surface as she could along most of the shore and in the creek. It was as though there were a shadow in the water at that spot. “Black water is not good fortune,” she murmured. She leaned closer. She heard whistling from along the shore. She looked around. Luke was jumping across the little stream.
For half a second Mary looked blankly at him.
“Hello, Mary.”
She stood up, remembering, as though it had happened a long time before, that Luke had run with her and Polly away from the collapsing barn. “Luke Anderson, you saved my life. It was a fine deed and I am grateful to you.” The words sounded wrong and stiff in her ears but there did not seem to be any right ones. And, although she had begun to think of Luke as her friend, now she felt awkward and uncomfortable with him, remembering how she had clung to him.
“You saved Polly Pritchett’s life.” Luke shook his head. “It was a strange wonder, Mary, you running straight into that barn after Polly like that. It seemed almost as if you knew she’d gone in there.”
“I did know. I knew it when I got to the wee bridge over the stream. I knew there was to be the fire, too. I knew it the day I locked myself in the privy, the day Henry fell. And I knew he was to fall. You may as well know, Luke,” Mary confessed, “I have the two sights.”
“What do you mean?”
“The two sights, the an dà shelladh. What do you say for the seeing into the future and.…” Mary stopped. She had suddenly remembered Julia Colliver saying “that nonsense” when she had told her about hearing Duncan call. Now here was Luke facing her with that same uncomprehending gaze.
“It is just the way of it, Luke Anderson,” she blurted. “Some folk see into the hind of the world and some do not. And do not you gawp at me so—like a great owl.” She stamped her foot in frustration.
“Oh,” said Luke. His eyebrows went up but he made no other comment. At last, ignoring her tirade, he said, “I figured I’d find you here.”
“This was where Duncan lived.” Mary did not have to ask. She could not go on now to say that she had come to Upper Canada because he had called to her. She felt abandoned, forlorn. Duncan was dead, his family had gone home, and there was no one who could understand why she had come to this country.
“I figured maybe he had something to do with it.” Luke sounded a bit downhearted.
“Were you friends with Duncan?”
“I don’t know as you could say that.” Luke hesitated. “He was two or three years younger than me and—and he kept to himself a lot. And he was an up-and-down sort of feller—one day he’d come around laughing and joking and playing on that wooden whistle of his so’s it was awful hard not to jump and dance, the next day he was as like to be blacker than all night. He got so there was a sight more black days to him than bright ones. And he was—he had—” Luke hesitated again. “Well, he had a kind of wicked tongue onto him.”
“I know that wicked tongue!” Involuntarily the corner of Mary’s mouth went up. “He was ever a one to turn that tongue on us at home.”
“I guess he wasn’t too happy living here.”
“He was not. Och, Luke, I can see it now, how he felt suffocated by all these trees!”
“Ain’t you got trees in Scotland?”
“There are trees, indeed there are. But all is not forest like this. It is open country—and there are the hills.” Mary’s face glowed as she described to Luke what it was like at home. “It is very different from here,” she finished abruptly. “I must go now to see to Henry.”
“I expect everybody to Pritchetts’ would like to see you back there. Fire’s out. The barn’s gone and they lost four pigs and a cow but Polly’s fine. Dan and Martha was looking for you to tell you their thanks. I guess they’d like to have you come to the supper that’s being fixed.”
“I cannot—Henry—I must go.”
“You don’t need to be shy of Dan or Martha or any of the neighbours. They’re kindly enough folk.”
It was not shyness that kept Mary back, although she did feel a bit reluctant to face so many strangers. It was that so much had happened—the fire, Polly, Luke, finding the meadow and the Camerons’ house.
“It’s all right.” Luke smiled. “I’ll walk along home with you.”
Together they waded along the shore past the Pritchetts’ to the bridge across the creek. Luke told Mary that the black-and-white birds she saw playing hide-and-seek out in the bay were loons.
“I have never heard such a sound as the sound of them!” It was a high, hollow, laughing sound and Mary felt sure there was magic in it.
“Them little yellow-and-green birds is called grassy birds on account of they make their nests in the grass.” Luke seemed pleased to be showing Mary the wonders of his neighbourhood. He showed her where the red-winged blackbirds rested in the reeds in spring, and where the wild rice grew thick. He showed her the bright orange jewelweeds that grew in the marsh. “They’ll fix you right up if you’ve broke out with the poison ivy,” he said. Then he helped her gather flowers to take home to Henry.
That night, before she went to bed, Mary stood out in the clearing.
“It was wrong of me not to tell what I knew. Though Julia Colliver might say nonsense, the bairn might have died—and her not more than three years old. They had no need to lose the pigs and the cow.” She shivered, remembering the odour of burning flesh in the barn. “It might have been Polly and it might have been me. It is true what Mrs. Grant said, I must be what I am, do what I must do. Here is twice, now, I have refused to give warning. First to Luke, then to Dan Pritchett.… Twice? It is twice!”
“Twice will you refuse your destiny, twice will you seek it, before you embrace it as your own.” She could hear the words in her head as clearly as when Mrs. Grant had pronounced them, standing on the path leading down from the glen. She looked around her at the stump-filled clearing in the forest. She looked up into the night sky. “And the moon is the same moon that watched me leave home that very same nigh
t. Och, Mrs. Grant, I will seek my destiny now, once, twice, as many times as I must.”
The next day Martha Pritchett came with Polly to see Mary.
“I declare, girl—nothing I can ever do for you can repay you for what you did.” She shook Mary’s hand. “I’ve had plenty of occasions to say that child would be the death of me before I’ve turned forty but I never thought.… Oh, Lord!” Her voice shook and she squeezed Polly so tightly that Polly stopped undoing the buttons on her mother’s dress to cry out.
