by Janet Lunn
Gradually Mary unclenched her fists, her jaws, the muscles in her neck, and then her whole body. She listened for the sounds of the forest as she had once listened for the sounds of a fairy hill. And she heard the silence.
After a long time, she sat down on the soft pine needles with her back against a tree and let the silence settle into her. In time she heard little sounds—the fluttering and cheeping of small birds in the lower branches of the evergreens, a woodpecker tap-tapping against a dead trunk near the edge of the woods, small animals scurrying round the roots, scampering up into knot-holes. She lifted her eyes towards the treetops, where a glint of sun had shot through an opening like a diamond sparkling in a dark mine.
“I feel no spirits of people gone,” she thought, and remembered Luke telling her that no people had lived in these forests ever. Even the Indians had never settled here, they had merely traded and travelled the lakes and along the shores of the island. There had always been only the trees.
“And the water—and the ice.” Mary thought about the heartbeat in the bay’s sudden freezing. She thought about the forest. She ran her hand along the smooth pine needles and knew that this new land had reached out to her. She leaned back against the tree, smiling.
Luke
Mary emerged from the woods half an hour later feeling she had been blessed. All the world seemed to reflect her feelings. The stones in the road sparkled under the bright mid-morning sun, the exposed tree roots had taken on a honeyed sheen. The wind no longer seemed to moan or cry. It sounded to Mary like a hymn.
At that moment, Luke appeared from around the corner of her house. His head was down and he did not see her.
“Luke,” Mary called.
He started, looked up, and ran towards her. She ran forward to meet him. He clutched her shoulders. “You … you didn’t. You’re all right.” His voice was strained and his face was grey. “Oh, Mary.” His fingers tightened on her arms.
“Luke, what is it?”
“I thought.… Mary, I.…”
“Luke!” Mary knew. “I did not. I meant to, but I could not. Och, mo gràdach!” She threw her arms around him and they hugged each other until Luke stopped shaking.
Disentangling himself, he drew his sleeve across his face and looked at her, fear still dark in his eyes but the colour beginning to return to his cheeks.
“Mary, I didn’t mean to say all those miserable things. I was mad, I was so mad. I only got cooled down a little while back. I got to thinking what I’d said about you being crazy—I don’t think that! Then I got to thinking what happened to Duncan Cameron and—and I was so scared! But you’re all right. And I don’t want you to go away. But I will give you the money I’ve got saved if it will make you happy.”
“Luke, you have no need to give me anything. I have been so unkind to you.”
“No, you haven’t. You’ve been powerful kind. It’s us who wasn’t. You would have gone home lickerty-split when you found out Duncan was dead only I fetched you to care for the baby, then you stayed to tend Henry, then I brung him to you after when all you wanted was to be by yourself. Then Sim … well, Henry got scared. He got to thinking you could make him disappear and he didn’t want to.”
“And I will do it if ever I find him acting like Sim!”
“I never met anybody like you before.” Luke stared fixedly at a spot somewhere just above Mary’s head. “It’s what I told you—I never give a thought to marrying before you come,” he said slowly and this time he did look at her. “But I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t like they say about getting sweet on someone, it was like looking at someone I was supposed to be with, and I wasn’t even all that surprised. It just felt natural and I guess I figured you’d be bound to feel the same sooner or later. I guess I been pestering. I’m no better than Sim when it comes right down to it.”
“Luke! You are not like Sim, not the smallest mote of dust like Sim. Luke, if you still want I will marry you now. I will, really.”
“No,” said Luke, “you don’t have to say that. I’m just glad you’re all right. You are all right, aren’t you?” He paused. “Mary, something’s changed in you. Mary! You been in the woods!”
“I have.” Mary was suddenly very tired. “Luke, I will tell you. I will tell you about going into the forest and … and other things, but I think I must go to bed now. Please go home. Go home and tell Henry that if he is good I will not make him disappear.”
Luke grinned. “I will tell him what I should have told him in the first place, that Sim run off because he said too many bad things and was ashamed for ’em.”
“God would smite you for such a lie, Luke Anderson,” Mary said severely, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
Luke insisted on walking with her to her front door, said good morning, and started off. He hadn’t taken more than a few steps when he came back.
“There’s something changed about this place, too.” His face was puzzled.
“There is.”
Luke waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he looked around once more, said goodbye again, and left.
Mary didn’t sleep and she was still not hungry. She ate a corncake, drank a cup of root coffee, and swept out her house, letting the knowledge of what had happened—to Duncan, to herself—settle deep into her. At noon she went to the Collivers’ to see to the lambs.
Charity Hazen was looking out for her as she came up the road. “Hey, Mary Urkit, there’s mail for you. Feller named Macleod on his way to the Crossing left it for you, said he’d be back in a week and a half to look you up.” She handed Mary a small parcel.
“Sandy Macleod from home,” Mary breathed. “Sandy Macleod, cousin to Johnny Fraser.” She looked at the small parcel wrapped in blue linen. She held it against her cheek for a moment and inhaled the scent of the cloth. She swallowed hard. “Thank you,” she told Mrs. Hazen and tucked the parcel away in the pocket she wore inside her skirt. She wanted to wait to open it when she was in her own house alone.
All afternoon, as she worked in the barn with Zeke and Arn Colliver feeding and comforting a pair of orphaned lambs, she reached now and then into her pocket to touch the parcel. When at last she was back by her own hearth, she took it out. Trembling, she cut the stitches that held it fast. Inside was a letter folded around another parcel, this one wrapped in white linen. She put the letter with the scrap of blue cloth and unwound the white linen to reveal a further wrapping, and another, until at last, shining up at her from its nest of cloth, lay the Urquhart cairngorm brooch.
Through the tears that would come, the peaty-brown colour of the cairngorm glistened like a Highland burn in the spring sun, under the dappled shade of rowans and alders. Mary could almost hear Duncan’s impatient, little-boy voice calling, “Mairi, Mairi, come quick! There’s a fish, a fish for us.” She blinked. The image was gone and the cairngorm lay there in her lap.
The letter was from her father. He told her that in the year that she had been gone, Uncle Davie and Aunt Jean and the boys had arrived home safely. He also said that her sister Jeannie and Johnny Fraser had married, but that the baby that had been going to come soon after had been lost, and that Jeannie could have no more.
“I will have no descendants unless they be yours,” he wrote. “If you do not marry, you must do with the brooch what you feel is best.” He closed by telling her that both he and her mother were well. The letter was not long nor was it obviously a loving letter. It was not James Urquhart’s way to write such a letter. His gift and his few spare words told Mary poignantly that he loved her and that he wanted either for her to have children to leave the brooch to, or for her to sell it and come home. She sat for another long night by the fire, dozing only now and again, moving to stir the fire and, once, to make herself tea.
She was not grieving. She was thinking—and remembering; remembering home, the fragrance of the golden whin and broom, the roses and the purple heather. She was remembering that she had once told Duncan when they were children, “When I
am old, I will lie myself down on the hill and my roots will push themselves into the earth and I will sleep.” And Duncan had said, “And I will be there, too.” And she had agreed, for they were not to be parted.
“But you lie here,” she murmured, “beside the dark forest, and though the black shade of you called me, I would not go that far with you. Your shade is at rest now, too. I can go home, if I wish.” The picture of Luke came to mind, his eyes dark with fear. “Someone I was supposed to be with,” he had said.
She went to bed, her head full of thoughts of Luke, and when she woke in the morning she knew what she was going to do. She bathed herself in the creek, scolding her shivering body—“I could all but drown myself in the icy water without a groan or a sigh—now I surely can bathe in it.” She put on her clean shift, her good red-and-blue-checked skirt, her clean white linen blouse, her stockings, and her shoes. She combed her hair down smooth and straight, put her warm plaid around her shoulders, pinned the cairngorm at her shoulder, and took from the cupboard shelf the neatly folded length of creamy white cloth she had woven as the first instalment on her passage home.
Journeying through the woods was a great deal faster than by the road. Mary reached the Anderson homestead in less than an hour. The day was warmer than days had been for weeks and Luke, his father, and Henry were out planting pumpkins in a last effort to battle the wintry summer. Mary stood at the edge of the field watching them make neat rows with their hoes until Henry looked up and saw her. He started to smile, then an expression of shame and self-consciousness crossed his face. He looked away.
“Henry,” Mary called, “Henry, you cannot for ever not speak to me because you have been foolish. Come you here.”
Henry stood up, and slowly, as though each step were painful, crossed the small field. Mary knelt down so that she could talk to him at his own level.
“Well then,” she said, “if I were to touch you, would you disappear, do you think?”
Henry was looking at his feet. “No,” he whispered.
“What then do you think might happen to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid to look at me?”
“Yes.”
“Henry, I am afraid about something I mean to do. If I have the courage to do this thing I fear, will you look at me then?”
Henry raised his eyes in surprise. “Not yet, laddie, for I have not done it yet.” She stood up. She drew a deep breath.
“Luke,” she called. “Luke Anderson. I have come courting and I have brought you a gift.” She held out the folded length of cloth.
Luke gaped at her from the other side of the field. He did not move.
Mary was trembling. Her hands had broken out in a sweat. She took a few steps.
“It is in my mind,” she said, “that it would make a fine wedding shirt. It is not perfect but I have woven it myself. If you refuse my courting, Luke, I can do no less than you and tell you the gift is yours, all the same.”
Still Luke stood motionless on his side of the field. Mary stood on hers, fearing that her knees would fail her. Then Luke let out a whoop, bounded across the field, and swept her into a hug that lifted her right off her feet.
“This ain’t no wrestling match, son,” shouted his father, laughing, and Patty, standing in the doorway, teased, “Luke, you’ll ruin the beautiful cloth!”
“But what’s the thing you’re afraid of?” demanded Henry.
“It was not really a thing.” Mary moved a small space away from Luke. “It was Luke. Will you look at me, now?”
“You’re afeard of Luke?” Henry was incredulous.
“Sometimes I am afraid of you.”
“Of me? I’m not afraid of you … oh.” Henry’s face reddened.
Later when they were walking hand in hand back through the woods, Mary told Luke about seeing Duncan in the water and about her time in the forest. “Then you came,” she said.
“Were you really afraid of me?” asked Luke.
“I was. It was my pride, Luke.” She sighed ruefully. “I think now I should not have been. I have remembered Mrs. Grant’s prophecy.”
“Mary, see here—”
Firmly Mary reached up and put her hand over his mouth. “It is time for you to see here. Listen. ‘Twice will you refuse your destiny, twice will you seek it before you embrace it as your own.’ Mrs. Grant, who has the two sights, told me that the night I left home. I thought she meant that it was my destiny to be a seer and a healer and that I had refused it twice—once when I did not tell you about seeing you carrying Henry before he fell and once when I did not warn of the Pritchetts’ fire the day I hid in the privy. Then, when I was coming through the woods for you, I knew you were the destiny she meant. But when I saw you in the field, you looked so far away and so stern all I could think was that you had said, more than once, you would not marry me after all—and I was afraid.”
“But I am going to marry you.” Luke’s eyes were shining. “Mary, I been thinking. You told me to watch out for Ma in the snow—and I got to tell you I did try—just in case you wasn’t as loony as I figured. And it did give me a turn that you ran all the way from the Collivers’ in time to save Henry from drowning. Now you tell me how it was you near drowned yourself—” His hand tightened on hers. “And how you seen Duncan in the water. I seen for myself how peaceful it was there afterwards when you went home from being in the woods. Well, I’ve been thinking there must be something to what you say about all that. We just ain’t raised to think that way. I see the birds and the trees and the lake—and the land to be cleared and ploughed. I guess you see all sorts of things I don’t. Mebbe I wish I could, too, but I don’t think so. I wonder if sometimes you ain’t just so caught up in looking for your ghosts and fairies and strange critters that you miss some of what I see.”
Mary looked solemnly at his open face. “It is no easy thing to understand. But I do understand this. I came to this place when Duncan called and now I know you were the one here waiting for me. I cannot go home without you.
“And there is something else. Here where I have been so afraid and so sure I did not belong—teaching, working with Julia Colliver, living with Henry, being with you—I am more a part of your neighbourhood than I ever was of my own in my own hills. My heart can never truly leave those hills, Luke. I know I must live with that sadness but I know that I do not have to live as though burdened by a heavy cloak soaked in rain. I can wear the burden lightly because I chose both the sadness and the joy.”
Shyly, self-consciously, Mary and Luke put their arms around each other and kissed in the privacy of the deep woods.
They agreed to be married in August, with John and Patty and four other couples, when the preacher came again to the district. They decided to live at Hawthorn Bay. Henry was going to live with them. Sarah Pritchett gave them the house, the lot, and twenty acres across the road for a wedding present. “Part of the land Dan owns is mine as my Loyalist grant from the King, and I want you to have this piece of it. I think you’re a brave young woman, Mary Urquhart, to hold strong with your own ways when all were against you.” She twisted the sash of her dress until it was like a spring as she talked, but she persevered, and when she had finished she handed Mary the deed to the property. Mary and Luke thanked her together and promised to “hold strong” with both their ways.
Owena brought Mary a handsome deerskin dress. “It is for walking among the trees,” she said. She had a pair of moccasins for Luke.
Word had come from pedlars from New York and New England that there was no summer anywhere that year—“eighteen-hundred-and-freeze-to-death”, they were calling it back in Vermont. Whichever of Mary’s neighbours had harboured the notion that she might have caused the bad weather sheepishly relinquished it.
Few people mentioned that Mary had predicted the weather. And it was suddenly remembered that Simeon Anderson had always been a “wild one, too fond of his whisky, too loose with his words”.
Dan gave a small
parcel of land for a school, and the community elders—Dan, Sam Colliver, Jim Morrissay, Hiram Openshaw, and Liam Hennessy—asked Mary to teach the children. Gravely she accepted.
The wedding was to be by the creek near the mill. The wedding feast was to be at the Collivers’. Mrs. Colliver would listen to no refusals. “Luke brung you here in the first place for me to take care of, and seeing you safely married’s my job.” Luke gave Mrs. Colliver his mother’s rose-coloured silk wedding dress to be made over for Mary. He and his father bought cloth from the pedlar and made a special trip to Soames, to Micah Lambert, the tailor. Luke took with him Mary’s hand-weaving for his shirt.
Mary insisted on spending the night before the wedding in her own house, making the room clean and bright, finding a few hardy leaves and a bit of blue chicory to put on her table, smooring the fire so that it would be set to come home to, and saying the words in Gaelic for good fortune in marriage. When all was done, before she put on the rose silk dress to wait for Luke to come for her in the horse and cart, she went across the road to Duncan’s grave. She put a bouquet of dried rowan berries on it and said a small prayer. Then she knelt down to talk to him.
“It is well, Duncan,” she said. “And it will be well, for it is meant to be. It is not the same here for me as it was at home—as it was not the same for you. The burns that rush so swiftly down our hillsides are not the creeks that wander through these deep woods. The high hills are not these low lands and the spirits of our rocks and hills and burns, the old ones who dwell in the unseen world, are not here.
“But we are not to grieve. The old ones came to our hills in the ancient times. It began somewhere. It began there long ago as it begins here now. We are the old ones here.”
Mary fell silent. She stood up. Then she said again, very softly, “It is so, we are the old ones here.” She went back to her house to dress for her wedding.
ALSO BY JANET LUNN
