by Ami McKay
Mrs. Ketch moaned. “It’s too soon.”
“Your pains is too far gone and I can’t turn you back. If you don’t birth this child today, all your other babies don’t gonna have a mama.”
“I don’t want it.”
Iris Rose knelt by the bed and pleaded with her mother. “Please, Mama, do what she says.”
The girl’s much younger than me, twelve at the most, but she’s as much mother as she is child. From time to time she’ll show up at the schoolhouse, dragging as many of her brothers and sisters behind her as she can. She barks at the boys to take off their hats, scolds the girls as she tugs on their braids, making her voice as big and rough as an old granny’s. For all her trying, it always turns out the same. By the time the snow flies, the desks of the Ketch children are empty again.
Mrs. Ketch needs them home, I guess. I’ve heard that each of the older ones is assigned a little one to bathe, dress, feed and look after, so they don’t get lost in the clutter of a house filled with dirty dishes and barn cats. With six brothers of my own, I think I can say there’s such a thing as too many.
When Mrs. Ketch’s wailing went on, Tom and the older boys disappeared out to the barn. With Iris Rose’s help, I tucked the rest of the children into an upstairs room. She stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. “Now don’t you make another sound, or Daddy’ll come running through the hollow and up these stairs with an alder switch!” The room went quiet. Six small greasy heads went to the floor, six bellies breathed shallow and scared.
“Can I watch?” Iris Rose asked.
“If you promise not to say anything.”
“I’ll be silent. I swear.”
I left her on the stairs, peeking through the broken, crooked pickets of the banister.
Miss B. and I turned back the straw mattress and tied sheets to the bedposts. She tugged hard at them. “See now, Mrs. Ketch, you know what’s to do…when the time comes, you gots to hold on for dear life and push that baby out.” Miss B. motioned for me to steady Mrs. Ketch’s shaking knees. “And it’s comin’ fast and hard as high tide on a full moon. Pousser!”
Mrs. Ketch bent her chin to her chest, the veins on her neck throbbing. “Let me die, dear Lord. Please let me die.”
Miss B. laughed. “How many times you been through this, thirteen, fourteen? You should know by now, the Lord ain’t like most men, He ain’t gonna just take you home when you ask for it…”
Just last Sunday Reverend Norton went on and on about the trespasses of Eve, pounding his fist on the pulpit, his face all red and puffed up as he spit to the side between the words original and sin. While he talked at good length about the evils of temptation and the curse Eve had brought upon all women, he never mentioned the stink of it. I never imagined that “the woman’s tithe for the civilized world” would smell so rusted, so bitter.
I kept the fire in the stove going, unpacked clean sheets from Miss B.’s bag, did whatever she told me to do, but no matter how busy I made myself, my stomach ached and my hands felt heavy and useless. I don’t think my nervousness came from it being my first birth, or even from seeing such pain and struggle in a woman, but more from hearing the sadness, the wanting, in Mrs. Ketch’s cries. Nothing we did seemed to help. She sobbed and cursed, her wailing and Miss B.’s coaxing going on for an hour or more, I’d guess, or at least long enough for Mrs. Ketch to give up on a miracle and have a baby boy.
He was a sad, tiny thing. His flesh was like onion skin; the blue of his veins showed right through. If I had looked any harder at his weak little body, I think I might have seen his heart. Miss B. bundled him up in flannel sheets and handed him to Mrs. Ketch. “Hold him, now, put your chest to his so he knows what it’s like to be alive.” But Experience Ketch didn’t want her baby. She didn’t want to hold him or look at him or have him anywhere near. “Get that thing away from me. I got twelve more than I can handle anyways.”
I couldn’t stand it. I took him from Miss B. and pulled him close. I whispered in his ear, “I’ll take you home with me. I’ll take you for my own.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw Iris Rose run up the stairs. I turned to Miss B. “He’s looking so blue, his arms, his legs, his chest. His breath is barely there.”
“He’s born too soon.” She made the sign of the cross on his wrinkled brow. “If he’d been born three, four weeks later, I could spoon alder tea with brandy in his mouth, make a bed for him in the warmin’ box of the cookstove and hope he pinked up, but as it is…”
I stopped her from going on. “Tell me what to do. I have to try.”
Miss B. shook her head. “If you can’t see him through to the other side, then you should just go on home. Mary and the angels will soon take care of him. I have to see to his mama.”
I sat in the corner and held tight to the dying child.
Miss B. wrapped a blanket around us. “Some babies ain’t meant for this world. All you can do is keep him safe until his angel comes.”
“There’s nothing else I can do?”
She leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Pray for him, and pray for this house too.”
2
BETWEEN MY PRAYERS and Miss B.’s spooning porridge into Mrs. Ketch’s mouth, the baby died. It was almost dawn when Brady Ketch came home. He stomped through the house, drunk and demanding to be fed. “Experience Ketch, get outta that bed and get me some food.” The poor woman tried to get up, as if nothing had troubled her at all, but Miss B. held her down. “You need rest. Lobelia tea and rest, then more tea and more rest. At least three days to get your strength, but a week would be best. If you don’t, you gonna bleed ’til you’re dead.”
Mr. Ketch staggered, reaching for the bundle of blankets I was holding in my arms. “Let me have a look-see there, girl. What’d we get this time, wife? Another boy, I hope. Girls don’t eat as much, but they take their toll every-ways else. I don’t trust nothin’ that can’t piss standin’ up.” He pinned me against the wall, his dark mouth leaving the skunky smell of his breath in my face. “Ain’t you pretty…you Judah Rare’s girl, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your daddy’s got the right idea. How’d he manage to get all boys and just one pretty little thing like you? Bet you come in handy when your mama gets tired. He’s one lucky son of a bitch, I’d say.”
Mrs. Ketch hissed at her husband. “Leave her be, Brady.”
He pulled back the blankets to look at the child. “I’m just lookin’ at what’s mine.”
I stood still while he pinched at the baby’s thin, blue cheeks. “Hey there, little critter, ain’t you gonna say ‘hello’ to your—” He stopped and pulled his hand away, his curiosity giving way to confusion and then to anger. He turned and stared at Miss B. “What’d you do to it?” Before she could answer, he grabbed her by her shoulders. “Looks to me like you killed my child and put my wife half-dead on her back.” Brady Ketch slid his hands around Miss B.’s throat, slipping his fingers through her rosary beads. “What’s to keep me from taking you back in the glen and snappin’ your wattled old witch’s neck?”
An iron skillet lay on the floor by the cookstove. A doorstop shaped like a dog sat in the corner, one ear and the snout of its nose chipped away. I could’ve killed Brady Ketch and not felt a minute’s worth of guilt. “God sees what you do, Mr. Ketch.”
He let go of Miss B. and made his way back to me, smiling, leaning into my body and stroking my hair. “Now, don’t you worry, little girl, Miss Babineau knows I’d never mean her any real harm. It’s just sometimes a woman needs a man to set her right. Says so in the Bible.”
Miss B. started packing up her bag. “See that she gets her rest. Three days off her feet, no less.” She moved towards the door. “Come on, Dora.”
“That won’t do.” Mr. Ketch stood in front of the door. “She can’t just take to bed for days whenever she feels like it. There’s things that need to get done around here. You gotta fix her. Now.”
Miss B. stared at him. “I told you,
she needs bedrest. Three days and she’ll be good as new.”
He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “That Dr. Thomas, down Canning way, he’d know how to make her right. When Tommy snapped his wrist, the doc fixed it up so he could use it right away. Tied it up nice and clean, give him a few pills, and Tom was chopping wood that afternoon.”
“And you can afford a fancy doctor always runnin’ up the mountain to fix your family?”
Brady pretended to hold a rifle in his arms, pointing his finger past Miss B. and out the window. He clucked his tongue in his mouth and moved his hands as if to cock the gun. “Let’s just say the doc and I…we have a gentleman’s agreement when it comes to that sweet white doe everyone’s always lookin’ to bag.” He grinned as he slowly changed position, now pointing at Miss B.’s heart, squinting one eye to take aim. “And don’t think I don’t know where to find her.”
Miss B. pushed his arm away and started again for the door. “Well, ain’t that fine.”
Brady opened the door and shoved Miss B. onto the stoop. As I started to hand the child’s body to him, Miss B. called out to Mrs. Ketch.
“You send Tom to get me if the bleeding gets any worse.”
Mrs. Ketch rolled over, her voice sounding tired and sad. “I can take care of myself…Just get out now, and take the baby with you. I don’t want that ugly thing in my house.”
Miss B. sang little French prayers to the dead baby boy and wrapped him in one of the lace kerchiefs she’s always tatting on her lap. We laid him in a butter box, tucked October’s last blossoms from the pot marigolds and asters all around him and nailed the tiny coffin shut. She vanished between the alders in back of her cabin. I walked behind, following the sound of her voice, cradling the box in my arms, trying to make up for his mother not loving him. If only my love had been able to raise him from the dead.
Miss B. whispered. “Shhhh. Le jardin des morts, the garden of the dead, the garden of lost souls.” In the centre of a mossy grove of spruce was a tall tree stump. The likeness of a woman had been carved into it…the Virgin Mary, standing on a crescent moon, her face, her breasts, her hands, all delicate and sweet. All around her, strings of hollowed-out whelks and moon shells hung with tattered bits of lace from the branches, like the wings of angels.
Grandmothers and old fishermen have long said that the woods of Scots Bay have cold, secret spots, places of foxfire and spirits. “Never chase a shadow in the trees. You can’t be sure it’s not your own.” Charlie must have chased me a thousand times down the old logging road in back of our land, both of us running into the woods behind Miss B.’s place, shouting, witched away, witched away, today’s the day we’ll be witched away. We’d spent hours weaving crowns from alder twigs, feathers, porcupine quills and curled bits of birch bark. We’d imagined faerie houses and gnome caves in the tangled roots of a spruce that had been brought down by the wind. We’d come home, tired and hungry, declaring we’d found the hidden treasure of Amethyst Cove but had lost it (yet again) to a wicked band of thieves. In all our time spent in the forest we never found or imagined anything like this.
Miss B. took off her shoes. “Can’t let no outside world touch Mary’s ground.”
She began to make her way around the grove, tracing crosses in the air, circling closer and closer to the Mary tree. I slipped off my boots and followed. When Miss B. was finished, she knelt at the base of the tree and began to dig at the moss. Beneath the dirt and stones was a thick handle of braided rope. Together we pulled up a heavy wooden door that was covering a deep hole in the ground. “Our Lady will watch over him now.” She took the tiny coffin, tied a length of rope around it and lowered it into the dark grave. “Holy Mother, Star of the Sea, take this little soul with thee.” She let go of the rope and took my hands. “You gots to give him a name. Just say it once, so he knows he’s been born.”
I closed my eyes and whispered “Darcy,” after Elizabeth Bennett’s sweetheart in Pride and Prejudice. Because he should have lived; he should have been loved.
I’ve seen the runt of a litter die. When there are too many kittens or too many piglets, the mother can’t keep up with them all. The runt gets shoved out by the others and the mother acts as if she doesn’t even know it’s there. Maybe Mrs. Ketch knew Darcy wouldn’t live from the start, maybe she pushed him away so she wouldn’t love him, so she wouldn’t hurt.
It’s a disgusting mess we come through to be born, the sticky-wet of blood and afterbirth, mother wailing, child crying…the helpless soft spot at the top of its head pulsing, waiting to be kissed. Our parents and teachers say it’s a miracle, but it’s not. It’s going to happen no matter what, there’s no choice in the matter. To my mind, a miracle is something that could go one way or another. The fact that something happens, when by all rights it shouldn’t, is what makes us take notice, it’s what saints are made of, it takes the breath away. How a mother comes to love her child, her caring at all for this thing that’s made her heavy, lopsided and slow, this thing that made her wish she were dead…that’s the miracle.
3
LATE IN NOVEMBER we bank the house, always on a Saturday. Even with all nine of us stuffing baskets of eelgrass around the house’s foundation, it still takes a good part of the day to get it done.
Just after high tide, I went down to the marsh with Father and my two older brothers, Albert and Borden, to pitch the tangled heaps of grass onto the wagon. Mother stayed behind with the rest of the boys to pound stakes and build a short stay fence that would hold the grass in tight to the stones. By December, when most families have finished the job, it looks like all the houses in the Bay have settled in giant bird’s nests, ready to roost for the winter. Uncle Irwin and Aunt Fran pay to have neat, tight bales stacked around their house. Others swear by spruce bows all heaped up on the west side, facing the water. Father says he’s too smart to waste good hay and that the porcupines’ll clean the needles off the spruce in one meal, so we’re stuck doing things the hard way.
At least the twins, Forest and Gord, are big enough to help this year. Even though they’ve turned eight, they still act like whimpering puppies, forever tugging at my sleeves, following me, calling my name. Every day we walk the Three Brooks Road, the same round loop. Past Laird Jessup’s place, then down along the pastures and the deep little spot where the brooks all meet, then on around to school. Sometimes we go down to the beach to play, or out to the wharf to fetch Father, who always takes us back on the other side, the Sunday side of the loop. Up to the church, then on past Aunt Fran’s place, up to Spider Hill and home again. Boys ahead and boys behind. I’m the only girl stuck in the middle of six boys who spend most of their days poking, laughing and wrestling together as they trip and drag their muddy boots through my life.
Mother says I shouldn’t complain. She’s got her own rounds to make. Up before dawn, down to the kitchen, out to the barn, back to the kitchen, down to Aunt Fran’s, over to the church, back to her kitchen. She holds the boys close to her every chance she gets. They wiggle and roll their eyes as she kisses the tops of their messy heads. She sighs as she lets them go, watching them run off to play. “Things aren’t as certain as they used to be.” She’s not talking about their age or the fact that they’re always outgrowing their shoes. It’s the war, she means to say, but won’t. It’s the war that she’s afraid of, that’s got her wondering how long she can keep her boys at home, that has us listening to gossip and reading headlines and moving in circles, as if we might cast a spell of sameness to keep the rest of the world away.
Banking the house took so long that I was late getting to Miss B.’s. I have been visiting her every Saturday since we buried dear little Darcy. It’s a relief to get to her door, to sit at her kitchen table, to be able to breathe and sigh and even weep over my small, blue memory of him. I’ve told the tale only once, to Mother. When I came to the part where Mrs. Ketch refused the child, it was all she could do not to shake and cry all over me. Instead, she held her breath, closed her eyes and w
hispered, “God forgive, God bless.” Although I can still feel the weight of his body in the crook of my arm, I won’t put her through hearing of it again. She wasn’t there; she doesn’t need to know how much it still comes to my mind. And now there’s no one else to tell. Father wouldn’t know what to say. He’d be angry with me for bringing it up at all. My dear cousin, Precious, though she hangs on every word of a good story, is still Aunt Fran’s child…any news that’s ugly or sad is not allowed in their house: words of sensation and death leave a sinful mark on the walls of a good Christian home. (Aunt Fran prefers to carry her gossip under her hat and deliver it to everyone else’s door.)
I’m Miss B.’s only guest on Saturdays, or any other day of the week. I’m the only person in all of Scots Bay who dares make a friendly call to the old midwife. As a child, I was always happy when Mother had reason to send me to Miss B.’s cabin, happy to walk down the old logging road, away from Three Brooks Road and our house full of boys, happy just to sit with her in her garden, or in her kitchen filled with, as she says, “things to make you wonder.” A tarnished, round looking-glass hangs by the door. Jars and bottles of herbs, salves and tinctures line her cupboards. Feathered wings are tacked up over the door and every window. Crow, sparrow, dove, hawk, owl. One large, dark wooden crucifix hangs over her bed, while the rest of the two-room log cabin—every wall, shelf or tabletop—is covered with tallow candles and a thousand Marys. I did my best not to ask questions, but if she spotted me staring at something, she’d be quick to recite a verse or sing a song about whatever it was. (Although sometimes she’d just smile and say, “Never mind that just now, Dora. If I told you, you’d never believe.”)
