Shadow in Hawthorn Bay

by Janet Lunn

  Owena walked around the snow-covered meadow examining the shoreline carefully. She stopped to peer into the ice by the big rock. She came back to where Mary stood just outside the door. “It sleeps like the bear,” she said, “that’s good.”

  The neighbourhood, however, was wide awake. Snow covered the stony, rutted, rough roads, smoothing them so that sledges, cutters, and horse- or ox-drawn sleighs could move easily. Ice covered all the waterways so that feet and sleighs and even wagons could cross them, although there were weak spots and drivers needed to be very careful. The settlers had learned from the Indians to make and use snowshoes for travelling readily over the snow.

  Winter evenings were visiting times. Luke came frequently to Mary’s house, “to help Henry with his lessons,” he insisted, but one time when Mary asked him to read over what Henry was trying aloud, Luke confessed, flushing with embarrassment, “I can’t read. I was kind of hoping I could learn it alongside Henry.”

  Mary was astonished. It was not in Upper Canada as it was in the Highlands, Luke told her—schools were not commonplace: Dan Pritchett was an exceptional man and the children in his neighbourhood were very lucky. She was not sure about having Luke for a pupil, though at the same time she was rather pleased that she knew something he wanted to learn. “You ain’t to thump me if I get it wrong,” Luke told her and his face was so solemn when he said it, Mary was sure he was serious. “I would need to ask you to get to your knees to manage it.” She saw the grin on his face, and made a face back at him. “I will teach you,” she said.

  Many evenings Patty Openshaw came up the road with a pile of family mending to do by Mary’s fire, and once in a while Simeon came, interrupting the lessons with his loud, derisive laughter, demanding supper, demanding attention. Then Patty would sit herself between Simeon and Luke and jolly them along until Simeon either left or settled down to listen to the story-telling or take part in the conversation. Mercifully he did not come often, finding such quiet company not much to his liking, and so the four of them—Patty, Mary, Luke and Henry—developed a warm, almost family-like kind of companionship.

  Even those evenings when the little house held only Mary and Henry were pleasant. She would spin while he read close to the fire that warmed such a small radius of space, leaving the edges of the room almost as cold as outdoors. On snowy, windy nights, the snow blew in through the cracks, but the wind that whistled and sang and sometimes moaned did not call Mary away.

  Christmas came. There were festive gatherings in all the households, culminating in a feast on Christmas Day at Sam and Julia Colliver’s. Early Christmas morning Mary took Henry to the Pritchetts’ where Dan was having prayers and a Bible reading. All the Hawthorn Bay families were there and Mary offered a private prayer of thanks for the kindness of neighbours. Afterwards she and Henry went early to the Collivers’ to help—although Henry’s help amounted to bringing in large piles of wood with Matthew for the fireplaces, then racing off outside to slide and run in the snow.

  Mrs. Colliver had been very angry about her smashed teapot. But when Mary explained about Henry’s accident she had said only, “Hmph,” and looked at Mary from under a frown. She had said no more and she had not dismissed Mary from her job. On Christmas morning she was organizing and ordering Mary, Patty, and her own children about with the skill and authority of a regimental sergeant-major. As they passed one another bearing platters, silverware, and dishes of condiments, Patty and Mary smiled happily at one another, rolling their eyes towards the ceiling as each new order was barked.

  The party was wonderful. Bothers and Heatons and Morrissays came from the south shore of Hawthorn Bay; Openshaws, Pritchetts and Yardleys from the north shore; Whitcombs, Schneiders, and Andersons from Pigeon Creek Road; Mrs. Hazen and her daughters; Obadiah Clark, who lived alone; and Hennessys, Bartons, and Armstrongs from the village. There were others whose names Mary could not remember—children of all ages, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and a few great-grandparents—and they all sat down to eat at the long trestle tables stretched from the back wall of the kitchen to the front wall of the front room, and angled out across the hall and into the front bedroom.

  Julia was wearing her best plum-coloured silk gown, with a fine lawn kerchief at her neck and a pinafore to protect the gown. It had become a bit small over the years, and strained mightily at the seams. This only accentuated the amplitude of her figure, and with the addition of a large rose-satin bow on her head, its streamers floating down her back, she was like a goddess of plenty presiding over the celebration. Sam, as splendid in his worn rust-velvet waistcoat and bottle-green coat, was less imposing but every bit as hospitable.

  The guests were dressed in a motley assortment of pre-1775 finery and homespun, valiantly embellished with a ribbon, a treasured lace fichu here, a sprig of evergreen or a nosegay of dried flowers there.

  The house was decorated with garlands of cedar and pine, lighted by more than fifty candles, the tables covered with an assortment of linen cloths belonging to several families. There were wild turkeys and dooryard geese, roasted; there were boiled and roasted potatoes. There were pumpkins and squash, baked and glazed with maple sugar; there was fine white bread; and there were the fruit preserves which Patty and Mary had laboured over, baked into cakes, puddings, and pies; and with them whisky, cider, and a bit of carefully saved real tea and coffee to drink. Mary had never dreamed of such food.

  “In this country,” she thought as she looked along the enormous table, “there is food in plenty for all, there is clean water to drink, and there is so much space no one need ever think of having to leave just to keep body and soul together.” The wish that her whole family could be seated at that table brought a lump to her throat. She swallowed it back and, resolutely, did not think about Duncan. She looked at Henry seated across from her beside his mother, making faces at Moses Openshaw and Matthew Colliver sitting at the foot of the table. She smiled. “It is no bad place,” she thought, and glanced involuntarily towards Luke sitting on the other side of his mother, talking to Zeke Colliver. Luke, no doubt feeling her eyes on him, turned his head and caught her glance. Despite herself, she was glad of the scarlet ribbon Mrs. Colliver had given her to tie around her black hair.

  Afterwards there were games, riddles, stories, and songs. In his uneven tenor voice Luke led the singing of a round, Dan Pritchett sang “Barbara Allen” in his beautiful baritone voice, and Mary, loosed from her reticence by the friendliness of her neighbours and the excitement of the occasion, sang “The Rowan Tree” and “Lovely Molly”. Abe Morrissay’s father, Jim, picked out the melody on his fiddle. After that the tables were cleared and carried away and everyone danced to Jim’s fiddling. Mary danced every dance and didn’t mind when the young men teased her about being small, because she was so nimble they had a hard time keeping up with her.

  The party settled at last. Those bent on carousing the night away went off up the road to one house or another for their party. The children went to sleep—in nests in corners, or on the beds behind the kitchen, or upstairs. The women began to wash the dishes. The men sat over their whisky and their coffee. When they began to talk of spring planting and next year’s harvest, Mary, coming from the scullery with a handful of silverware, saw an image of the gardens blighted and black from frost. “There will be no summer next year,” she said.

  There was a moment of silence, surprised laughter, then the talk resumed. In the kitchen Julia scolded her. “Don’t you make such a fool of yourself, my girl. Do you want the entire neighbourhood to think you’re not right in the head?” Mary said nothing.

  Luke found her alone in the scullery not long afterwards.

  “You’re kind of quiet.” He did not wait for a response. Self-consciously he brought something out of his pocket. “You look nice in that red ribbon,” he said. “Here, I got something for you.” He held out a tiny, carved wooden loon. It was not finely done but there was life in the set of it and in its round black dots of eyes
.

  Mary looked at it in Luke’s outstretched hand and did not take it from him at once.

  “Don’t you like it?” His voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  “I do,” she breathed. “Luke, it looks like the bird himself. But …” she blurted, “I am ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “I have no gifts. I did not know it was meant. We do not do so at Christmas at home. Mrs. Morrissay across the bay has given me a packet of tea. Mrs. Colliver gave me this ribbon and made for me a warm bonnet and Patty brought me a dish filled to the brim with maple sugar and Sarah Pritchett gave me a bit of slate and a fine embroidered handkerchief.” She looked helplessly at Luke.

  “It don’t signify, Mary.”

  “It do, Luke.” She had to laugh.

  “Are you going to say you won’t take it?”

  “I am not.” She held out her hand, and Luke placed the little carving in it. She stroked the tiny wings, and closed her fingers around it.

  When it was time to go home the Pritchetts found room to tuck Mary and Henry into their sleigh. “It was a fine gift to us all, your singing,” Sarah whispered to Mary as they rode along behind the jingling sleigh bells and the sleepy voices of Dan and Martha talking.

  “I will never forget this day, if there come to be three thousand and more in my life,” declared Mary passionately. Impulsively she put her arms around Sarah and kissed her cheek.

  “Well,” said Sarah, and nothing more, but Mary knew she was pleased.

  “So Cold”

  The year ended with no special mark. Mary sat down and wrote a letter home, thinking wistfully all day of the Hogmanay celebrations in the glen. Carefully she put it aside with the others she was saving to send when the ice broke and ships came up the lake again.

  But one evening, not long after, Mary was having a lesson with Luke and Henry when she had a second, clear vision of Lydia Anderson struggling through blinding snow.

  “Luke.” Mary put the book down. “Maybe tomorrow would do for Henry to see his mother.”

  “Why so sudden?”

  “It is a fair bit of time since he has been home, I am thinking.”

  “I figured on going off hunting tomorrow. I thought mebbe I’d take him along with me.”

  “I have seen your mother in the snow again, Luke,” Mary said.

  “Aw, Mary. I don’t want you get all riled, honest to God I don’t, but I wish you wouldn’t go around saying things like that. People will think you got bats in your belfry.…”

  Mary jumped up, her eyes bright with anger. “Do you think I like the pictures? Do you think I am happy to see what will be when others do not? Do folk care for me the more? They do not. You think I am daft, I can see you do, but I see what I see, I have promised myself and all the powers that be that I will not flinch from telling it, and I have seen your mother in dire need, and do you not take Henry to see her this very day I will take him myself.”

  “Now, Mary—”

  “I will take him myself, Luke.”

  “Henry,” he said, “I guess mebbe we’ll go see Ma. We might as well go tonight. If we don’t your Miss Mary’s going to set out and cause no end of mischief.”

  Henry unglued himself from his chair.

  “I ain’t going.”

  “Git,” said Luke.

  While Mary watched unhappily, Luke bundled Henry up and they left. Henry returned the next day to tell Mary that Sim had teased him because he was cleaned up. “He called me a pretty little girl. I hate Sim!” He said nothing about his mother.

  Three weeks later, in a wild blizzard, Lydia Anderson wandered out into the woods and froze to death. Mary took Henry to the brief ceremony, watching sadly as the pine box was carried into the woods to be put into the hut until spring, when the ground would be thawed for the burial.

  His arm across Henry’s shoulder, John Anderson thanked Mary for having Henry to stay with her. “Things was pretty bad around here for the little feller,” he admitted. “I guess we don’t always pull together so well.” He asked if she would mind keeping him with her a little while longer. “He seems to be getting along all right and his ma sure admired to have him get the schooling.”

  “He can stay.” Mary was unable to tell John how much it meant to her to have Henry with her.

  “She’s not coming back no more never, is she?” Henry asked afterwards, when they were back in the Hawthorn Bay house.

  “No,” said Luke. He had walked them home and they were having tea by the fire—Henry on his low stool, Mary in her rocking-chair, Luke on the bench he had drawn up to the hearth. “She wasn’t happy in this world, Henry, maybe God will look after her better in the next.”

  “Will she be with them folks that’s got all them silver bells?”

  “What’s them?”

  “You know. Them folks you can’t see that Mary tells about with their green clothes and silver bells and magic horses.”

  Luke glanced at Mary. He frowned. “I don’t know. I ain’t never been dead.”

  “Will she haunt me?”

  “No, she won’t.”

  Luke stayed until after Henry had gone to bed. “Mary—” He was clearly upset. “Mary, I know how you care about all them stories about fairies and magic and ghosts, but I’m feared for Henry. Especially right now when Ma’s only just died. He scares awful easy, Henry does.”

  Mary drew a sharp breath. There it was again, stories. Luke meant nonsense as Julia Colliver had meant nonsense, as Sarah Pritchett had meant nonsense. She thrust her chin forward defensively but she said nothing.

  “I don’t want to make you feel bad, honest I don’t.” Luke’s face was puckered into a worried frown and his brown eyes were troubled. “But I can’t just go along with some of what you say. I’d like to.”

  “I do not mind.” Mary’s back was stiff, her voice controlled.

  “I don’t know! Dang blast it! I know you figured you was seeing into the future when you said Ma was going to die but I can’t rightly say that’s strange. We could all see it was bound to happen.”

  “Luke, it was not only your mother, it was Henry drowning in the bay, it was him falling from the tree, it was the Pritchetts’ barn burning, it was Polly in the barn. Do not all those things tell you something?”

  “Well.…” Luke hesitated. “Well, mebbe they was happen-chance and mebbe.…”

  “And maybe I was spinning a tale for you.” Mary’s voice was tart. She glowered at him.

  He glowered back. “I guess mebbe I’d better be getting along home.”

  “I guess mebbe you’d better,” she mimicked.

  After he had left, Mary felt a pang of remorse that she had lost her temper. “Him with his mother just dead,” she thought. She almost ran after him to say she was sorry; but it was very dark that night, and cold, and she knew how fast his long, strong legs would take him—and through the woods, too.

  Henry came in the night to Mary’s bed. “I don’t want her ghostus to haunt me,” he cried. “She’s gonna come after me.”

  “Henry,” Mary asked gently, “did your mother ever come after you in your life?”

  “No.”

  “Why did she not?”

  “She just didn’t.”

  “It maybe was because she was a sweet and gentle person who did not go chasing after folk.”

  “Mebbe,” sniffed Henry.

  “Then, Henry, why do you think she will come after you now she has died?”

  “Not her—her ghostus.”

  “Why would the ghost of a gentle person like your mother be so hateful?”

  “Ghostuses ain’t nice.”

  “Some are. If the ghost of your mother walks abroad, it might be she wants to see that her boys are cared for.”

  Reluctantly Henry agreed that it might be, but for weeks he woke in the middle of the night and came scuttling down the ladder to make a dive for the safety of Mary’s bed.

  Winter retreated slowly. March brought the worst storms o
f the season, blizzards with winds that threw roof-high drifts against the sides of the little houses and across the roads and paths, and made miniature drifts inside the houses in all the corners. For almost two weeks Mary and Henry could get no farther than the hole they had cut in the ice on the creek for their water. They were growing tired of eating soft, sprouting potatoes and cornmeal mush. They were frantic from being cooped up. Finally they amused each other by digging tunnels through the drifts with their hands.

  Then one day there was the welcome sound of water dripping from the roof and the trees. There was another freeze and a thaw, the crows and jays came out of the swamp to call and screech, the sap began to run in the trees, and it was sugaring-time. Everyone in the community was off into the woods where the sugar huts had been built. Every sugar-maple tree in the forest had been tapped. Mary longed to see how the sap was boiled, to join in the fun of pouring the hot syrup onto the snow to eat. She could hear the laughter cascading like birdsong out of the woods. But she could not go into the forest. Every time she tried, terror gripped her heart, her breath choked in her throat, and her feet froze.

  Luke shook his head disbelievingly. Julia Colliver was cross. Henry came running one day with sugar-taffy sticky in his bare hands to where Mary sat, ashamed and unhappy, on the big grey rock, watching the water move under the ice.

  “Henry,” she said, “you are a kind boy.”

  “Luke sent some, too.” He took a lump covered with lint and dirt from his pocket.

  “I will save Luke’s,” Mary told him, “and eat yours.”

  The ice broke up in April. The children from across the bay came again in row-boats, wrapped in shawls, their fur hats covering their heads against the chill winds that still blew constantly down the bay. The wild geese and ducks came back to their summer nesting-grounds in the swamps and marshes. The great blue herons were right behind them. Their harsh gronk-gronk-gronk sounded to Mary, as it mingled with the higher tones of the ducks and geese, like fiddlers tuning up for the dance—discordant, exciting, inviting summer to come.