Grist Read online

  Just beyond the washstand was a door and I had no idea where it led. How odd it was to be standing in a house—my own home—which I had yet to see. One small lamp had lit our way through the house last night but even had it been daylight I would have seen little. With the excitements of the day, the jostling three-hour trek by starlight had left me exhausted. Now my mysterious new home lay waiting for my explorations. I stepped through the door into a bright nursery with a protected nook for a crib. The room was barren but its emptiness spoke of hope and promise and I was delighted with the clever little space. Across the hall I found two more bedrooms both similarly vacant. I walked around each room and inspected the view from each window, admired the painted floorboards, the smooth sills, the well-planed wall boards ready for paper. The front bedroom seemed the slightly bigger of the two and had a dormer as well as a gable window. This will be the girls’ room, I thought, and imagined creamy wallpaper with patterns of pink roses dancing along it. I smiled at my own foolishness and addressed myself aloud in my most serious schoolmarm voice. “Mrs. MacLaughlin, perhaps you would do better to attend to today and leave tomorrow to God.” I suddenly became aware of my ravenous hunger. I would investigate the kitchen next.

  I made my way downstairs to find a large and sunny kitchen with three windows where I could monitor both the barnyard and the road while I worked. On the kitchen table lay brief note: Northwest field. E.M. I turned it over and back, looking for what? Some sort of embellishment? Smiling, I folded the note—the first from my new husband—and tucked it into my sleeve. The smartest cook stove you could ever hope to see dominated the kitchen. I ran my fingers along the chrome, explored the warming oven, the firebox and the reservoir. There was a pot of porridge on the back of the stove. The stovetop was warm but the flame had long since been reduced to embers. Ewan must have breakfasted hours ago. The wood box was piled high and the basket next to it brimmed over with kindling. I built up the fire and set the kettle on for tea. Off the kitchen I found an excellent pantry lined with shelves and cupboards and drawers. Each door I opened offered me the fresh smell of newly milled lumber. There was a built-in bread box, a handy pullout flour bin mouse-proofed with a tin lining, and many other novelties in the nooks and crannies—even an icebox awaiting summertime! All that was left to be desired was a stock of food. A few sparse staples were crowded into a corner of the pantry as though they were afraid to intrude. There was flour and meal from the mill of course, and a small jug of molasses, a string of onions, two smoked trout and a small bucket of salt beef. I was immediately grateful for the fresh meat and the few spices and other basic supplies I had brought out from town. A basket with half a cabbage and a few potatoes led me to think I might check the cellar for vegetable bins. I ate my porridge with a spoonful of molasses then set to roast several pounds of the beef I had put on Ewan’s account at Corrigans’. I poured myself a fat mug of tea and set off to further my explorations.

  I found I was mistress of a parlour, large and bright with a moulded tin ceiling and elegant wooden panels crowned with a chair rail. I perched on the beautifully upholstered sofa and gazed at the matching chairs I knew had come from Sutherland’s factory. The delicate tea table had been burnished to a fine luster and in the corner sat a glass-door bookcase with a little key poised in the lock. A good many trees had been felled and sawn in the mill, a good many hundredweight of grist ground, to pay for these furnishings I wouldn’t doubt. This room, perhaps more than the others, pleaded to be completed with a woman’s touch—a rug, draperies, a vase of flowers and a watercolour or two to warm the walls. That I would have the rest of my life to make this room my own filled me with a sense of joyous adventure.

  By the back door I discovered a small room just big enough for a monk to hole up in. A narrow bed, one tiny table with a candle, a razor and shaving mug, and beneath the bed a sort of wooden locker with Ewan’s clothing and a few personal effects: a pen and a box of nibs, a pot of ink, a book, two handkerchiefs, a tin of boot black, a bit of sealing wax. Propped in the corner I recognized the roll of Ewan’s construction diagrams. This was where Ewan had tucked himself away in his bachelor days—like a little mouse in the skirting boards! I realized now that I had seen nothing of Ewan’s in any of the other rooms. Except for the building and finishing of the house I don’t believe he had set foot beyond the stove in the run of his daily life.

  Out the back door was a little vestibule area with a bench, a mat for boots and pegs for coats. Beyond this, the woodshed and Ewan’s workshop. Then the granary. Across from the house sat the barn of rough, old-fashioned construction. It looked as though it may have been Ewan’s first home. I made a note to ask him about it. As I explored the yard, I found Ewan’s little garden plot and saw immediately how I could expand it to take advantage of the south slope for early planting. Behind the house I looked out over the pasture and the fields. The silence of the countryside, after my decade in town, startled me with its breadth and depth. I revelled in it; I basked in it. On the rise behind the back field I could make out Ewan and the horses pulling stumps. I must check the cellar at once and take stock of provisions for his dinner.

  I had never been in full command of a farm kitchen. The domestic sphere had not been my primary preoccupation for many years. But I could certainly manage to rustle up a decent meal to feed my new husband. As I suspected I found a store of winter vegetables in the cellar along with several heaping baskets of apples. And so I set to work. At noon I snugged everything—meat and gravy, potatoes and turnip, and biscuits and apple pie and a can of hot tea—carefully down into a basket I found hanging in the pantry. Picking my way along the ploughed field I felt myself back in the happy days of my childhood, carrying the dinner basket to my father in the fields. Once, in the early days of her marriage my mother must have delivered this workaday picnic to her new husband and sat with him, smiling, in the field. In later years I imagine she must have watched from her kitchen window as her children took on the loving task. Just as some day I would watch my own little ones set out on the journey—the bearer of rest and refreshment. As I approached, I watched Ewan work—steady, sure and unrelenting. As I drew close enough to hail him he looked up from a stump, the sweat glistening on his brow, the brief smile turning his features momentarily boyish. Ewan’s smiles, always fleeting as though accompanied by some small pain, were all the more rewarding for their sparseness. Throughout the day I would keep the memory of his smile with me. I brought a blanket to keep the dampness at bay and while I spread it out on the ground he tended to the horses. I handed him a mug of tea and unpacked his dinner. As we sat together he watched the stumps beside us as though gauging how best to liberate them.

  That afternoon, shortly after I returned from the field and was busy unpacking my kitchen crate and organizing my new pantry, Mrs. Delilah Cunningham arrived with a pail of milk. The Cunningham farm was a quarter mile downstream and our closest neighbour, she informed me. Mrs. Cunningham scanned the kitchen in a way that put me in mind of a hawk on a limb. She had an unfortunate hooked nose and piercing eyes. She seemed to be about ten years my senior and was plainly dressed but clean and neat and appeared to be holding back great reserves of power beneath a patina of exhaustion.

  “I thought I’d come to say welcome, ya know. In the general run of things I send one of the youngsters up with the milk, but where you’re new and all … here I brought this bit of cheese for your supper. As a present, ya understand. I always sent milk up here, for Merton, ya know. And then the miller. My boys are always happy for a bit of work at the mill. Harry too.” She spoke pointedly, either stopping abruptly at the close of each sentence or somewhere in the middle. “You’ll see me when it’s time for the babies ’cause I’m the one you call to tend—to cut the cord and all. I’ve seen just about every baby on the Scotch River Road into this world.” Once she had said her piece she looked around, apparently stumped for further conversation. She accepted my offer of tea but fidgeted in her seat.

  “So y
ou have several children, do you, Mrs. Cunningham?”

  “I have six children. And since God’s blessings cannot be stopped I may yet have that many more. My oldest, Donny, is good to work, now. So is William. I know he’s small yet but he can work, Lord yes, like a wonder. And Sarah, she was down to Sutherland’s, helping to feed the men, ya know, and she was the best they ever had. They couldn’t believe how young she was, working like that, ya know. Mr. MacLaughlin never wanted help with his cooking and cleaning. I don’t know why. How can a man do without cooking and cleaning? It ain’t right. Any road, you’re here now. So that’s all right, I suppose.”

  She ground to a halt at this point. When I quizzed her about the neighbours she was happy enough to lay out who kept a bull, who bred piglets, who maintained beehives for honey. “There’s not much traffic up here. There’s nobody further up the road except the Browns. The soil gets too thin beyond that far hill. Everybody else is on the Scotch River Road below. I sends up the milk here every other day—and a bit of butter too. I sends one of the young ones up with it. The miller’s got a bowl of nickels somewheres—in the pantry I believe…” She turned her head to stare at the pantry door.

  “Oh, I see. Perhaps I can take a look.” Indeed Ewan did keep a small jar with a few coins in it in a little cupboard behind the door. When I produced the nickel Mrs. Cunningham smiled and nodded her head as though I had passed some rigorous test of domestic suitability. Indeed she immediately popped up out of her chair and put on her coat.

  Next came Abby Brown, the only neighbour farther up the road. I heard hooves and the clatter of wheels in the dooryard and poked my head out to investigate. I found a woman in an alarmingly advanced state of pregnancy struggling down from a buggy and balancing packages around her swollen belly. I rushed out to greet her and help her down but she waved me aside with a merry laugh.

  “If I can’t manage around one of these by now there’s no help for me,” she sang, cradling her mound of unborn child. “I dismayed of Mr. MacLaughlin ever finding the wit to marry and here look at the prize he’s hauled home. Welcome, welcome you are, dear.”

  I laughed at the sheer energy of the woman foisting a pound cake and a pot of jam towards me.

  Abby paused a moment gazing across at the stable. “It still looks odd to see poor Merton’s house dragged over and made a horse barn.” But she turned away in half a beat. “I must bring you some lavender! There’s a perfect place right by your door there. I’ll send little Frankie down with it as soon as the weather’s fit. And I’ve got lily of the valley too, if that’s your fancy. Oh, I can see this place now with a woman’s touch.” She squeezed my shoulder. “High time for it too!”

  Once inside I put on the kettle as Abby lowered herself onto a kitchen chair. “Ah, what a lovely stout house you’ve got here. Just grand! You’ll have it ringing with bairns in no time. My poor old place—the youngsters have it tore up like an old woodshed. That lot of mine would have Job swilling rum with the devil within a week. The little hoodlums!

  “Now tell me what’s true and what’s a lie and what’s yet to be said. Honestly, you could set a turnip on a stump and get more news out of it than you could pry from Ewan MacLaughlin with a crowbar! If it wasn’t for Elsie Murdock’s sister living in DesBarres and hearing of the banns there’s not a soul here would ever have heard of Ewan’s marriage or wife or any of it and…” she leaned in with a conspiratorial whisper, “there’d be no pound cake today! Now, I understand you’re from the graded school in town? Are you lonely for all the little ones you left?”

  “Yes I am, a little,” I said. I had not realized until that moment that I was. “If I can be lonely for them and happy to be here at the same time.” Abby listened with the same bright intensity she brought to her speech. She admired the gingham I had spread out on the table for my kitchen curtains. She peered this way and that and asked what plans I had for the rest of the house. I prepared the tea and sliced the cake and suggested we take our tea into the parlour.

  “Oh heavens, there’s no need of … or perhaps just for a peek.”

  I led the way. Abby stopped at the parlour door, her easy flow of words suddenly dammed. She proceeded gingerly into the room. She eased herself into the upholstered chair and let her head sink back onto the fabric, her eyes closed. “Listen to that. Nothing but the sound of the buds popping.”

  “Yes, it is lovely and quiet here.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a day or two of this before the new bawlin’ begins.” She winked and rubbed her belly lovingly. “That Peter of mine what a racket he makes! So help me God, he only leaves off throwing things long enough to find something to kick. Smashed a pane right out of the kitchen window with a stone last week! Well, I sent him off to find a windowpane bush since he’s so convinced that glass grows on trees. ‘And don’t come back ’til you’ve got a nice one,’ I said to him.” She laughed. “Oh, but we’ve all got our time for quiet and our time for fun, don’t we?”

  Abby had a wonderfully kind face with eyes that snapped with brightness and good humour. She had fine wrists and high cheekbones and hair that gleamed in the light with a reddish tinge too bright to be called auburn. There was music in her voice.

  “It’s a wonderful time, isn’t it? Spring? My Frank is just itching to get at the fields. A day or two of fine weather will do it, he says. Have you got your garden plot picked out? You say what you need now, because I’ve got sage and savory and horseradish to fill a ditch.”

  We chatted away, her giving me the lay of the land, as she called it.

  “I’ll just freshen up the pot,” I said when we’d drained our cups.

  “No, no, my dear, I mustn’t linger.” Abby leaned forward and lowered her voice in mock conspiracy. “I’m on a spree today because my sister’s here to help with the new baby—this little monkey was to have been here last week! So I’ve slipped off to see you properly welcomed and left her at the mercy of the mob. Do you know what my Nancy Ann got up to last week while I’m hauling water and Harriet is busy tipping my fresh laundry in the dirt by the line? Grabbed a hold of Frankie’s school pencil and got a wondrous work of art all over the wall! Now even supposing they leave the four walls standing, by the time I get back they’ll be one of them either bleeding or busting the furniture—likely it’ll be my sister!”

  Abby hauled herself up adjusting her belly and toddled back to the kitchen. “Awful nice to meet you,” she said. “Come and see us real soon—meet the brood. I mean it. Come to see the new baby. I’ll be mad if you don’t. I’ll send the youngsters down with news. We need to get you set up properly here. You find yourself short of anything, you just give us a holler. Don’t you be a stranger now.”

  She climbed back up onto the rig and clicked the pony into a trot. I watched her from the dooryard and returned her wave as she set off up the road.

  EWAN HAD LITTLE TO SAY OVER SUPPER THAT NIGHT. A habit of his lonely life, I supposed. I tried to draw him out but he only grunted. It was understandably difficult for him to elaborate on a day of stump-pulling. He intended to devote the next month to fieldwork, he said when I asked. He had been sawing lumber in the mill before we married but he had had his fill of the yakking and yawning from the canter and deal piler.

  “Those idlers are sorry tools. There’ll be no more lumber sawn once I’m done with the Old Nag.”

  “The Old Nag? Is that the mill you have now?”

  “Yes. The old make-do pile of jury-rigging.”

  “You won’t keep the old mill for sawing after the new grist mill is built? Where will people saw their lumber?”

  “They can build themselves a pit saw. It’s no affair of mine. I mill flour and meal. That’s enough about that.”

  I left this topic alone and tried another tack. “Abby Brown was by to welcome me. She’s a wonderful lady.”

  Ewan chewed as though dinner were yet another task in the day’s routine.

  “Do you know Frank Brown at all?” I persisted.

  “Fa
rmer. Of sorts.”

  “Mrs. Cunningham was by with a pail of milk. I gave her the nickel she said was due. I hope I did right.”

  “You’ll have a cow of your own. That Sutherland from over the brook ought to have brought it by now. Still in bed, I suppose. We don’t need the Cunninghams traipsing through here now.”

  “A cow! Why, that’s a happy surprise, Ewan. Thank you. I’m anxious to see her. What’s she like?”

  “A cow.”

  I tried again. “Abby said the old barn used to be Merton’s house?”

  “No talk of Merton!” He punctuated his point by thumping his near-empty tea mug on the table, and was out the door and into his workshop in what seemed to me one fluid movement.

  “Ewan?”

  A doubt, soft and silent as a single falling leaf, fluttered through me. For the first time since our engagement I felt the whole of my decision. The breadth and weight of marriage, the irrevocable vows, my reliance on a man I knew so superficially, filled me. I set my hands flat upon the table in front of me and steadied my breathing. You have done well, I told myself. You have followed your heart. You will have friends—you have one already! You will have neighbours to visit and work and socialize with. You will have a family, a full and happy life. Marriage is as new to Ewan as it is to you. I talked myself back to confidence. “You will walk with purpose,” I said aloud with mock sternness. And I strode from one beautiful room of my new house to another coming to light finally in the little nursery off our bedroom. Yes, I had done well. I would be a good wife and I would transform Ewan into a good husband.

  THE PHYSICAL INTIMACY OF MARRIAGE SURPRISED US BOTH I think. At times I wondered if I would be swallowed by the strange intensity of it all and I believe he felt the same. That night, after he had spent himself, he rested his head on my breast. I ran my fingers through his hair and felt a renewed certainty in my new life.