Little Bird Lands

by Karen McCombie

  “And everyone supposes there’s a curse on the mine. What do you think to that, Bridie?”

  “A curse?” I say, pushing myself up a little on the bed and grinning back at my brother. “I think it sounds like nonsense, but please tell me more – it sounds most entertaining.”

  “Well, folk think the ghost of a Chippewa maiden haunts Hawk’s Point,” Lachlan says, his eyes wide at the telling of this tall tale. “They say she walks through the town at night in a great long, hooded cape made of black feathers!”

  With that, my brother grabs my shawl from the end of the bed, puts it over his head and strides around the small parlour in a solemn fashion, failing miserably to mimic some scary spirit.

  “What?” I laugh, making my chest burn a little with pain again. “Why would some poor, departed Indian woman waste her time wandering about in this little town?”

  “They say that she has placed the curse on Hawk’s Point because the mining company dares to dig up her ancestral lands,” says Lachlan in a most theatrical tone. “They say the Chippewa Curse is the reason they can only find poor, thin seams of copper to mine.”

  I break into a smile, remembering some of the superstitions many Highlanders believed – our sister Effie included. Witches that would steal milk from the cows, elf-bolts that would be shot at cattle to make them skittish, water bulls that live in lochs and shape-shifting, mischievous kelpies…

  “You know my friend Henni?” Lachlan continues, flopping down beside me again, the shawl still gripped tight under his chin.

  I nod in reply to his question, though I only heard the girl’s name a few minutes ago.

  “Well, her brother Oskar says he’s seen the spirit. He came across her one night up near the mine head. He’s a grown lad of sixteen, but ever since, he won’t go out after dark!”

  “And the people here choose to believe him?” I ask in surprise.

  “Oh, he’s not the only one. There’s quite a few folk that claim to have seen her, floating around near the mine head, disappearing and reappearing in amongst the trees…”

  As a small child, I might have been deliciously chilled at the description of the eerie Indian spirit. But now the idea of a ghostly figure sounds like pure fancy that I simply can’t—

  “Oh!” I murmur in surprise, suddenly catching sight of my own reflection in the little mirror on the shelf by the china dogs.

  Lachlan mistakes what has caught my eye. He hurries over to the shelf and picks up a small pot that holds several glossy black feathers, like a miniature bunch of dark blooms.

  “These are not from the spirit’s cloak, Bridie,” he assures me. “They’re only crow feathers I’ve been collecting. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “Yes,” I agree, as my brother swivels the pot in his fingers and the black of the feathers reveals shifting sheens of emerald green and deep sapphire blue. “But I was actually looking at the mirror…”

  “Ha!” Lachlan chuckles, putting the pot down and grabbing the mirror instead. He brings it over to me, holding it up to my face.

  “Well,” I say, turning my head this way and that, the better to see the tangles of long, black hair that hang either side of my face and the dark hollows in my cheeks and below my eyes. “Looking the way I do, I think that if I wandered the town here after dark tonight, I could quite easily be mistaken for the ghost of the Indian maiden, don’t you?”

  Father and Dr Spicer both return from their separate errands and must wonder if they are in the right room. Because a few minutes ago they left a frail invalid and her worried brother, and now they have come back to two fools – one with a shawl over his head – laughing till the rafters shake…

  “HELLOOO!” shouts Lachlan.

  “HELLOOO … hellooo … hellooooo!” comes the booming echo from the great, yawning hole in the side of the tree-covered hill, its sides and roof held up with walls of roughly planed timber.

  “Oi! Get away from there, boy!” shouts one of the men working near the muddy, slushy mouth of the mine. His voice has a cheery, Irish lilt to it. “You’re bothering the men at work below. They’ll be wondering what all the shouting’s about!”

  “Sorry, Seamus,” Lachlan says with a grin. “I was just showing my sister the pit.”

  “Fancy a job as a miner, do you, my dear?” The man winks at me as he sets off pushing a wheeled cart along a track towards some outbuildings.

  Smiling, I shake my head in reply. I have been in the dark pit of illness recently, and it has taken me some time to clamber out of it, so I can think of nothing more awful than scrambling down endless ladders into candle-lit tunnels, only to spend the day hammering at rocks or setting those ground-rumbling explosions in the hope of finding pockets of precious copper.

  “Guten tag, Lachlan!” an older boy’s voice calls out, and I see a lanky lad in a cap hurry by us, ruffling my brother’s hair as he goes.

  “Guten tag, Oskar!” Lachlan replies cheerily, repeating the German word for hello.

  “He said your name very well,” I comment.

  Since we came to America, my brother has found it funny and frustrating that folk can’t make the rolling, back-of-the-throat, Scottish “ch” sound and mostly call him “Lacklan”. But of course German folk use the “ch” sound in their own language.

  “That’s Oskar, my friend Henni’s brother. He’s just started to work in the mine alongside his father, though he wishes to enlist as a soldier in the Union Army in the spring when he can leave here,” Lachlan chatters as the older lad walks away. “And he’s taught me some card games.”

  “Not for money, I hope!” I say quickly, thinking of the bad lot he found for friends back in Glasgow. “You’re not gambling, are you?”

  “No! We only play for matchsticks or pebbles,” he assures me, a little offended I think. “Oskar has no money – he gives whatever he earns to his mother. But anyway, come on – I’ll take you to see the stables and then the mine canteen next.”

  My eleven-year-old brother has become quite at home here the last few weeks, while I’ve been convalescing in the living quarters at the back of the Gillespie carpentry store, watched over by Dr Spicer when she isn’t poring over her piles of medical books behind the hung sheet that splits the small, back bedroom she and I share.

  This morning – the first in a while with no blinding blizzard – Lachlan has shown me that there is not much to Hawk’s Point at all. To walk from the harbour, along the main street, past the miners’ lodging house and cabins, to the wooden buildings of the mine and the shaft itself … it must take little more than a few minutes or so. And, more’s the pity, there are no twinkling pebbles of pure copper to be seen in the snow-free pockets of frost-hardened earth we have come across…With nothing better to do, I go to follow my brother when I hear someone else call out to him.

  “Grüß dich, Lachlan!”

  I turn and there are two giggling young girls, wrapped tight in their shawls.

  “Hello to you too,” my brother calls back, pink creeping across his cheeks.

  “So these are your new friends?” I say with a smile, watching my brother blush.

  “Yes! The one with the darker hair is Henni; the other is Matilde.”

  “They look like nice girls,” I tell him.

  “They are! They’re both teaching me German and I’m helping them with their English,” Lachlan replies. “I’m teaching them some Gaelic too!”

  It is quite obvious that my brother would like to give up being my guide and be with his friends right now. And truth be told, I would quite like to feel as if I am not an invalid any more.

  “Stay awhile, Lachlan. I am happy to go back home now…”

  I would also like to be away from the awful stamp mill. If the endless clanging of it drove me mad in my sickbed, it is a hundred times worse this close up.

  “Are you sure, Bridie?” Lachlan asks me hopefully.

  “I’m sure,” I say and take my leave of him, heading along the rubbled road that leads back u
p through the cabins where the men with families live.

  A little way behind the jumbled cabin roofs, the forest begins, clawing its way up the snowy banks at the bottom of the cliffs. No children play there; Father says the snow is so deep it would quickly engulf those that do not know their way into its puffy, suffocating bosom. The only creatures confident enough to prowl there are the wolves we hear howling at night, the prey they stalk, and the hunters who try and catch both wolves and prey with guns or metal-fanged traps.

  There are smaller woods on the other side of the road. Beyond them is the shore where, at this time of year, I have heard that careless children try stepping out on the ice of the great lake, till older, wiser folk urge them to return to welcoming arms and slaps for their recklessness.

  But in amongst the trees here, I notice a larger wooden building standing in a clearing. It has to be the mine manager’s house; it is better built than the plain and rough stores and cabins, or the long lodging house for the single men. For a start, it has two floors and a porch, not to mention fine-looking curtains at all the windows, when every other building in this town seems to have no cloth at its windows at all, including ours. It’s not fancy by any means – nothing like the huge and ornate stone and brick-built houses in New York or Glasgow, or Mrs Lennox’s grand villa where my sister Effie is a maid. (Or at least she was, last I knew.)

  But this place must be, what, large enough for a decent parlour and kitchen? Two bedrooms upstairs, perhaps?

  “It’s Mr and Mrs Eriksson’s place.”

  I jump a little, as if I’ve been caught spying.

  “You look well, Miss Bridie,” says the girl, who I recognise from that first day at the general store. The girl whose wrist was grabbed by the shopkeeper. The girl who brought chicken soup for me when I was in my fevered sleep.

  “Please just call me Bridie,” I say. “And yes, I am feeling well, thank you. And you are Easter, I think?”

  Easter’s eyes seem quite fixed on mine, as if she is trying to peer inside and read my mind, perhaps to see if I truly am better or not.

  “It’s my first time outside,” I tell her. “I have just been to look at the mine.”

  “And I have just been to Nat’s Store,” says Easter, holding up her heavy wicker basket as proof.

  “My, what a pleasure that must have been.”

  The mocking words are out of my mouth before I think better of it, but they are met with a broad smile, dimples appearing in Easter’s dark, round cheeks. I expect Easter is not at all fond of the storekeeper. And she is not alone; Lachlan says he is despised by every one of the miners and their families. Yet come Saturday night, the menfolk of Hawk’s Point somehow manage to swallow their dislike for the man and hand him their wages in exchange for beer or whiskey, perching on the bench inside his store or on the stoop outside to drink it. We easily hear the carousing, arguing and fighting, since the general store is directly across the main street from our building.

  “Pity there’s not a church built here yet,” adds Easter, with a knowing lift of one eyebrow. “Mr Nathaniel could sure do with repenting his sins, I reckon.”

  We both smile broadly now, till a shy silence trickles upon us.

  “I should probably thank your … I mean, Mr and Mrs Eriksson, for sending the chicken soup,” I say, for something to say.

  “Oh, they … they don’t really know,” says Easter with a shake of her head. “Mrs Eriksson is an invalid; she leaves all the running of the house to me. And as for Mr Eriksson…”

  “He is a busy man, I suppose?”

  As I talk, I think to myself that Easter doesn’t look old enough to be in charge of a whole house. She must only be a little younger than me, I suppose. I glance back at the house and wonder where she rests her head at night. Smart as it is, there’s not space for a separate servant’s room. I dare say Easter has a foldaway cot bed tucked in a nook in the kitchen.

  “Yes, he’s a busy man,” Easter says, nodding thoughtfully. “So busy he often prefers to pass the time of day with Mr Nathaniel, instead of being at the mine or at his desk. And so busy he has not remembered my name since he employed me in Chicago six months ago. He still calls me Hester!”

  I cannot help laughing at a supposedly clever man’s stupidity. Easter laughs too, till she seems to remember herself, glancing down towards the house in the trees.

  “I’d better go,” she says.

  “Your mistress, she is strict?” I ask her.

  “No – well, she tried to be at the beginning, but not any more. We rub along well enough,” Easter says with an easy shrug. “Anyway, she’ll be asleep for hours yet. It’s just that Mr Eriksson might come along this way and he won’t like to see me idling.”

  I give Easter a nod as she takes her leave of me and set off too, towards the main street. All the while, curiosity is flitting around in my mind, making me feel more alert than I have in weeks.

  What illness might Mrs Eriksson have that makes her a housebound invalid? As for Easter; I have heard of Chicago – it’s a good way south of here, south of the Great Lakes in fact. Is all her family still there? There are times when I feel sad at how small my family has become. Yet how must Easter bear it, being, what, thirteen or fourteen, here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, so far from anywhere with no kin at all? I cannot imagine how it must feel to be so alone.

  “Ah, just the girl!”

  I turn at the sound of Father’s voice and see him standing at the skeleton of a building, which is to be a school from the spring, when a teacher should arrive on the first ship of the year. Father wields a saw in one hand as he continues the carpentry work that Iain Gillespie started. From our evening talks in the warmth of the parlour, I know that Father has postponed the work on the dispensary for Dr Spicer, as there is no place in town to buy a stove for it. So Dr Spicer is to set to stay with us till spring, even though a lone woman living under Father’s roof has caused some raising of eyebrows from those who think it slightly scandalous.

  “So, what do you make of Hawk’s Point, then, Bridie?” Father asks with a smile. “It quite rivals New York in its splendour, does it not?”

  “Indeed, Father!” I reply to his merrymaking. “Once the miners hit a great seam of copper, the town will become very wealthy and fashionable, I’m sure. Perhaps Mr Barnum will seek to open another of his museums here!”

  “Now wouldn’t that be something,” Father says jovially, though there is a flicker of a frown at the mention of that place and the memory of the event that happened there. “But until the town has museums and promenades and all manner of entertainments, there is a way you can help pass the time for some of the townsfolk, Bridie.”

  “Me?” I say with a frown of my own.

  “Dr Spicer has had an idea… She’s back at the store – go see her. She’ll explain everything.”

  I must look confused, or wary – or a mixture of both. Father shoots me a questioning look.

  “It’s just that … well, I am a little unsure of Dr Spicer,” I tell him, feeling foolish as soon as the words leave my mouth. But it’s true; during this time of my recovery I have barely had a conversation with her, beyond basic pleasantries and questions and instructions to do with my health. I’m certainly awkward when she bandages the nightly warmed poultice of mustard and potassium nitrate around my bare chest…

  A shadow passes over Father’s face.

  “Dr Spicer has devoted herself to her studies the last few years,” he says. “She may not indulge in idle chit-chat like many others, but she cares deeply about science and medicine, and the difference it can make to people’s lives…”

  It may be that she has, but so far, Dr Spicer has had not one patient seek her out. Not because folk are remarkably healthy in Hawk’s Point, but because – as Mr Nathaniel said that first day – none of them will trust a woman to do a man’s job. Even Mr Eriksson has rebuffed her enquiries about the well-being of his never-seen wife.

  “And Dr Spicer is brave, learning
a profession people think not suitable for her sex,” Father continues, as if he has read my thoughts. “She is brave too because she is recently widowed and has decided to come to a place like this, on her own. She is brave because she doesn’t care what people think is possible or right for a woman to do. She just does it.”

  Now I feel thoughtless as well as foolish.

  “Sorry, Father,” I tell him. “I’ll go to her straightaway.”

  “Good lass,” Father replies, with warmth returning to his face.

  Lifting my skirts from the mire of the slush and dampened earth, I hurry back to Gillespie’s store, wondering what Dr Spicer has in mind for me – and readying myself to be polite and enthusiastic whatever she bids me do, for Father’s sake.

  As I approach the building, I notice that the front door of the place is wedged open. Earlier, Lachlan and I left by the side door, as that leads straight to the back half of the building where our living quarters are. This larger space, the shop-front of the building, is full of the tools and planed timber and suchlike that Mr Gillespie will sell here when he returns in the spring.

  “Hello!” I say shyly, knocking at the open door.

  “Bridie! How has your first outing been?” asks Dr Spicer. She has the sleeves of her shirt rolled up. The waistcoat she wears, like her coat, is mannish, but it looks loose and comfortable, unlike the nipped-in, tight clothing most well-to-do women wear. For the first time, I try to guess what her age might be. About thirty years, perhaps?

  “Fine, thank you,” I answer her, nodding and gazing around the large square room. It seems bigger. The wood and tools Mr Gillespie stored here are being shifted to one side, it seems. But to what purpose?

  “Good, good,” Dr Spicer says briskly, blowing a strand of loosened, dark brown hair away from her face. “Now, Bridie, I’ve heard that you taught basic letters and numbers to a small child back in New York. Is that correct?”

  My polite smile fades as I think sorrowfully of my little companion, Marthy-Jane. “Yes, I did.”