Grist Read online

  GRIST

  GRIST

  Linda Little

  ROSEWAY PUBLISHING

  AN IMPRINT OF FERNWOOD PUBLISHING

  HALIFAX & WINNIPEG

  Copyright © 2014 Linda Little

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher,

  except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Excerpts from “The Young MillWright & Miller’s Guide”

  reprinted with permission from Algrove Publishing Limited.

  Editing: Kate Kennedy

  Design: John van der Woude

  eBook development: WildElement.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Published by Roseway Publishing

  an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

  32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

  and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

  www.fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway

  Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund,

  the Canada Council for the Arts, the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Culture and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Little, Linda, 1959-, author

  Grist / Linda Little.

  ISBN 978-1-55266-599-2 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS8573.I852G75 2014 C813’.6 C2013-908695-1

  My temptation is quiet.

  Here at life’s end

  Neither loose imagination,

  Nor the mill of the mind

  Consuming its rag and bone,

  Can make the truth known.

  —Wm. Butler Yeats

  To the women who worked

  and the women who work.

  Contents

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  CHAPTER

  EIGHT

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  PENELOPE

  MY PARENTS WERE HARD-WORKING PEOPLE. Labour was a virtue. I say this only to paint the backdrop. They worked hard and died young. They were humble, happy people and I took our happiness for granted. I thought happiness grew naturally like ivy along the walls, or dandelions in low grass, or hedgerows ringing the fields and pastures. My father was a kind man, awkward and quiet. Before he got ill I remember him behind the plough, sweat off man and horse alike winking in the sunlight. I remember a day in spring my brother and I followed him to the field to pick stones before seeding. He left us by the stone boat to pick and toss while he wandered farther off searching for larger rocks beyond our strength. He could pry up rocks the size of loaves of bread and, cradling several in his arms, carry them to the stone boat where he let them roll onto the pile with authoritative thuds. My brother and I amused ourselves through the long day with bickering and bantering but my father worked in silence. When my brother complained of the futility of the task my father only gave a slight smile. “Stones are the first crop of the year,” he said, never pausing.

  He was most at home in the fields alone with his work. My mother prodded him out to the regular seasonal social gatherings and did her best to get him installed in a group of men where a bottle might make furtive rounds. A nip or two might help you feel more at home. Listen to what they’re talking about and add something of your own, she instructed him. Perhaps on that one day at the picnic he had a swallow or two more than he could manage with grace.

  I was a large, square-jawed girl—graceless but strong. My ears were too big and once I entered puberty my eyebrows grew too thick and obdurate hairs would sprout where they shouldn’t. There was nothing delicate about me and nothing pretty. One year at a picnic I won some small competition, a race of some sort, I don’t remember what, but there at the moment of greatest attention my father’s voice boomed out: “That’s my girl! A great horse of a girl!” My face burned red as girls tittered and boys guffawed. Everyone looking. He had meant it innocently, blurted it in a burst of pride, as a compliment. Even in my mortification I loved my father so powerfully then for his awkwardness, his embarrassment, his best intentions. “A great horse of a girl.” So apt. A portrait bundled up in so few words, sharp and crisp as a poem. For years afterwards I heard “Whoa, Nelly” called after me from around corners and behind hands. Clip-clopping noises as I passed. But who among us hasn’t suffered some childish cruelty? It teaches us kindness and compassion, endurance and understanding. I was not crushed by the slings and arrows of childhood taunts—not at all. As I grew I prided myself on my neatness and bearing and native intelligence. Jane Eyre was a plain girl, intelligent and determined, and wasn’t she the hero of her own life? All the heroines I loved advanced by dint of their wits; indeed the vanity of beauty could easily turn a girl shallow and silly and lead her astray. I prided myself on my common sense. And I kept my personal expectations well in hand. But vanity wears many guises. It is wily and in the end it entrapped me.

  I married Ewan MacLaughlin of my own free will. He, like my father, was quiet and awkward. But I construed far too much from this surface similarity. As time would tell, Ewan was not a kind man.

  I FIRST MET EWAN MACLAUGHLIN ON A WINTER EVENING. I had begun the evening in my room as usual, arranging my students’ lessons for the following day. Shortly after nine o’clock I descended to the kitchen to warm a cup of milk. I had stirred in a dollop of honey and was on my way back up, but as my foot met the bottom step my landlord, Reverend Robert MacLaughlin, called to me from the parlour, a note of pleading evident in his invitation.

  “Penelope!”

  I poked my head around the corner.

  “Penelope, do you know my brother, Ewan?”

  “Yes, of course.” For the past few years I had boarded with the Reverend MacLaughlin, his wife Alice, and their little ones, Jessie and Robbie. I knew the Reverend’s sullen older brother operated a mill way up the Gunn Brook. Very occasionally he would arrive on business, eat a swift and laconic lunch, and leave. I don’t know if I had ever heard him speak.

  “We’ve seldom seen you alight for so long in one place, Mr. MacLaughlin. How fortunate you could spare the time to visit.”

  “Ewan, you’ll remember our beloved schoolteacher, Miss Penelope McCabe?”

  The miller bobbed his head. His eyes sought the corners of the room. “I had business appointments. For the new mill. There were delays.” He frowned at this, ran his fingers lightly along the edge of the table where he had a series of diagrams spread out. “I’ve calculated the volumes of the garners and the hoppers,” he said, perhaps continuing an earlier conversation.

  The Reverend had placed himself between me and the doorway, silently encouraging me farther into the room. “My brother is planning to build a new mill up the Gunn Brook.”

  Ewan MacLaughlin was not tall, b
arely an inch or two taller than me, but solid, sturdy, in a compact package. He had wide cheekbones and a stalwart jaw; the kind of man one might well expect to find chiselling stone. His sandy hair, with its thrifty little waves, appeared guiltily playful matched with such a serious countenance. His eyes were a dark blue. I placed him at perhaps forty years of age. I stepped towards the drawings spread across the table, reached out and touched the image of a waterwheel. It was a work of art, precise in its depiction but also capturing a sense of the wheel’s movement and momentum. Above it were others I did not fully understand but supposed depicted the various stages of the wheel’s construction. Each was the product of great care and craftsmanship. “Mr. MacLaughlin, am I to understand you drew these with your own hand?”

  “My hand, yes. Guided by the Lord.”

  I looked at him in earnest, amazed first by his handiwork and secondly by his pious response.

  “And you intend to construct this mill? With all these workings?”

  “This is my plan.”

  “I believe you have impressed our schoolteacher, Ewan.”

  “Yes, indeed you have, Mr. MacLaughlin. I don’t believe I have ever seen such strength in intricate drawings.”

  “Construction notes. Miss McCabe.”

  “Is this…? I’m afraid I don’t…What is this section here?”

  When the miller spoke about his proposed mill, his awkwardness fell away. His voice became sure and clear, his focus on the task at hand. He worked his way through the drawings from the dam to the grinding stones, referring to each illustration in its turn, explaining it with clarity and confidence. With each step his eyes lit up afresh then turned serious. When the parlour clock struck ten we simultaneously turned to it in surprise. The Reverend had long ago abandoned the scene.

  “Oh my, I’m afraid I’ve taken up all your evening with your brother. I’m so sorry. You so seldom get time together.”

  He said nothing and we stood there in silence as the mantle clock ticked off the seconds. Then, in a move both sudden and slow, his face brightened in a diffident smile. “The evening was not wasted,” he said.

  Such eyes he had—clear and sharp. I felt suddenly uneasy as though I had forgotten something important, and my skin grew uncomfortably warm. Tongue-tied, I searched the corners of the room for something to say. When I looked back, the miller was examining the palms of his hands. Then he jerked his head towards the window although there was nothing to see but the reflection of the room looking back at us.

  “Thank you so much for your explanations. It was an honour to see your work, Mr. MacLaughlin.”

  I curtseyed. For some reason I could not begin to fathom, I actually curtseyed—as though the miller were the Duke of York. Befuddled and embarrassed I fled. Had I said goodnight? Had he? I don’t know.

  Combing out my hair for bed I twice dropped my hairbrush and I caught my nightdress on the bedpost from clumsiness. A rare and stabbing awareness of my female body overtook me. But for what reason? There was no reason. In the dark, in my bed, I ran my hands along my body under the covers, smoothing my nightdress, pausing to feel the weight of my own hands, smoothing again. Oh heavens. Had I actually bobbed in a little girl’s curtsey? He had looked towards the window, perhaps he hadn’t seen. My mind’s eye snagged on his drawings and there it rested, safe. He captured perfection in ink lines, used words like vector, velocity, logs bottled and dovetailed. Beautiful words, familiar but exotic. Not for a moment had he doubted that I could follow his explanations. Pride riffled over me like a breeze.

  The next morning I woke to the first light in the east and the rhythmic thunk and crack of firewood being split in the yard below my window. The looming duties of the day chased away any idle foolishness. I dressed and began my preparations. At the back door, on my way to the privy, there was Mr. Ewan MacLaughlin—cleaving his brother’s stove wood! I touched my hair and smoothed my dress. He immediately set down the axe and stepped into my path.

  “Miss McCabe.”

  “Mr. MacLaughlin.”

  “Miss McCabe, may I write to you?”

  “I beg your…? Oh. Write … well yes, certainly, Mr. MacLaughlin. We’re always happy to have news from up the hillside I’m sure.”

  He nodded and gave a curt bow and strode off. I sputtered something about his wanting breakfast but he had already climbed up into his waiting wagon. He snapped the reins and rolled off out of the yard, leaving me gawking.

  At the end of the afternoon with the children dismissed and the fire died down, I sat in my cooling schoolroom. No reason to linger, but there I sat. May I write to you, Miss McCabe? He had smiled at me for one brief moment in the parlour, one small splendid, startled smile and now here I was poking at foolish thoughts that felt as though they had been tossed into my head by some woman I did not know. It humiliated me to find myself distracted by so little. The man would have forgotten he had spoken to me by the time he passed the north falls.

  I was not a complete innocent. Shortly after I had begun teaching up the shore a lame and tongue-tied cooper with breath like a rotting fish barrel asked me for a picnic and because I couldn’t think of how to refuse him without rudeness I conceded. No sooner were we settled than we were beset by hornets and he ran off to the stream leaving me to manage as best I could. Luckily, he did not bother me again. Anyway, with my father as sick as he had been then I could not have thought of giving up my teaching post for anyone. I had little enough to send home but without my help I hate to think how my parents would have suffered. After I had left there and come to the DesBarres school, droopy old Eli Pettigrew came knocking on the schoolhouse door. He was nearly as deaf as the door itself and I had to holler out my rejections at the top of my voice, much to my humiliation and the neighbours’ amusement. The following year Tom Hart had asked to take me walking. He was a widower with five children and was desperate for help. He said as much. Perhaps to explain why he might be interested in me. He was a handsome fellow with a quick wit, but the tavern was his first love and he often smelled of drink. In any case, before I could gather a thought he married a girl from upriver—half Indian and barely Christian from what I heard. I received no further attentions. I had not resigned myself to a life as a single woman because I preferred not to consider the subject at all. But there were many girls who had passed under my tutelage at school who were now married with broods. Who could fail to notice it? I have many children, I told myself. A whole schoolroom full of adorable children.

  The week after Ewan MacLaughlin’s visit a letter arrived for me. I received occasional letters from my brother, who had gone to sea after our mother passed on. They were sent from far-flung ports, the most recent from Kingston, Jamaica. However, this letter had not come off the coach with the official mail but had been delivered by a traveller to Corrigans’. My landlady, Alice, raised an eyebrow but was too polite to inquire directly.

  “A note from a past student, I suppose,” I said, giving it a carefree glance. I tucked it away to read at my leisure.

  Dear Miss McCabe,

  I am busy at my stone as well as at the saw. There is cash money in the toll wheat, which I am at some now. Also, I have oats of my own from my north field. Corrigan is after me for oatmeal as he cannot get better anywhere else. I am sawing pine for Sutherland’s. In return they are making the windows for my new mill for which you saw the plans. The base of the shelling spindle is heating terribly. The bearing must be redone and so I will look to it tomorrow. Since it is Sunday and I cannot do anything too useful I am writing to you. This past week the plasterer came to crave his $27.40 for his work on this new house that I built for the wife I hope to have soon. I paid him although he was a sorry tool for the job. Today I have set bread. This is no breach of the Sabbath as it is no work to me as it would be to a woman; rather it is a kind of rest. I will put a drawing here since you like to look at them. This is the front aspect of the house, now complete.

  Please tell me how old you are. Also do you come from a
good family and do you attend my brother’s church?

  Yours truly, Mr. Ewan MacLaughlin

  An odd letter, certainly, but I was touched by its obvious groping for topics and its social blundering. I had a teacher’s urge to slide in next to the writer and praise his stronger sentences then isolate the worst faux pas and work them into something finer. The lines and margins were perfectly straight and his penmanship was excellent, his letters small, controlled and even. The space at the bottom of the page was given over to a precise line drawing of a house with its porch and two dormer windows, everything in perfect scale and symmetry. Then to balance the look of the letter as a whole he had added a trim design (of same gingerbread pattern from the porch!) in each of the upper corners. One could not help but appreciate the artistry of the work as a whole although the text itself was far from poetic. I touched the straight ink lines, unsettled and afraid.

  What did I know about this man? The Reverend’s family stories were always happy ones, idyllic even: adventures at school and summertime outings. He spoke of his brother Charles who was one year his senior, and often of their mother, but little else outside their education. Charles and Robert were the youngest, the babies of the family, and their mother had been adamant about their schooling. Their father had been a miller in Breton Crag village, Cape Breton, but the two of them, Robert and Charles, were to rise above the milling life. The only story the Reverend had to tell about his brother Ewan was their reintroduction as adult men. The Reverend had spent several years after his ordination in a parish in York County, New Brunswick, before settling into life in DesBarres. His wife’s family came from Fredericton and he did not discourage the assumption that he did as well. Perhaps because of this, nearly a year passed before the merchant Henry Corrigan thought to ask the Reverend if he were any relation to the new miller, Ewan MacLaughlin, up on the Gunn Brook. The Reverend admitted that he had a brother by this name who was a miller, but in Cape Breton. Nonetheless, he asked the merchant to send word the next time the miller visited the store. Of course he recognized his brother on sight. Despite Robert’s dramatic and near-Biblical re-telling of the story of the long-lost brother, he included nothing of Ewan’s past, how he came to be on the Gunn Brook, how they had lost touch in the first place, or anything about his brother at all. In fact, they rarely saw each other and barely exchanged more than greetings when they did.