Читать книгу Clearing in the West. My Own Story - Nellie Letitia McClung - Страница 3

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Snow comes early and often in Grey County, Ontario. In 1873 it fell heavily on October the twentieth, in thick wet blobs that sent the cattle into the straw stacks to escape the driving storm. The horse-power threshing machine at Robert Lowery’s farm, near Chatsworth, was forced to give in to the storm at four o’clock in the afternoon, and let the hands go home, because the sheaves were too wet to go through the separator.

When young Will Mooney, who, though only fifteen was as good as a man, and had been cutting bands all day, reached his home, on the Garafraxa road, he was wet and cold and hungry, but the sight of the doctor’s cutter at the front door drove out every sensation but one of extreme anxiety and quickened his steps into a run. He opened the back door softly, met by a rush of hot air, in which there was a trace of carbolic acid and warming flannels and fresh bread.

Two of the neighbor women, Mrs. Edward Lowery and Mrs. Charlton were in the kitchen, talking excitedly though in subdued tones; the matter of the doctor was under discussion. “We did not need him,” said Mrs. Lowery, “and Mrs. Mooney did not want him. What is there for a doctor to do in a perfectly natural birth? We brought her through before, and could have done it again, a doctor is all right in case of a broken arm or maybe scarlet fever, but an increase in the population is a natural thing surely.”

Her companion spoke up. “I gave him a look when he asked me if I had scrubbed my hands in carbolic, I said, young man, we use soft soap here, and we’ve found it very good, and I may say, women have helped each other here for a long time, and we have not lost a case yet. I hope your record will be as good when you’ve been here as long.’” Then they noticed that Will had come in, and motioned to him to be quiet.

“Is mother sick?” he asked anxiously.

“She’ll be worse before she is better,” Mrs. Lowery replied mysteriously. “Dr. Dumball is here now, your father brought him and it will soon be over. Everything is all right. You are going to have a little brother or sister, Willie. . . . Come over here to the stove, and get off your wet shoe-packs. Tish will get you dry clothes, you’re soaked to the skin, I know.”

Tish, a fine young woman of twenty-one, who had been helping in the kitchen for the last two months, produced a pair of dry socks from a basket of clean clothes under the long table, and taking his overcoat shook the snow off it, at the back door, and hung it in the passage.

Then she went back to her bread, which was just ready for the oven. In birth or death, or any other human upheaval, a batch of good light bread never comes amiss.

“Is mother very sick, Tish?” Will asked again.

“Bad enough, I guess,” Tish said, shoving a pan of bread into the high oven, “but you know she never lets on. I was talking to her half an hour ago; she said she thought you’d be home soon and to be sure and get you to change your shirt too.”

She felt his grey flannel shoulders.

“It’s just a little damp—but slip upstairs and put on a dry one, she’ll be asking.”

“I hope it is a boy,” Will said thoughtfully, when he came downstairs. “We’ve girls enough.”

Hannah, three years old, was sitting quietly in her high chair, playing with a counter of colored beads, and took no notice of this bit of brotherly candor.

“If it is as nice a little girl as Hannah, she’ll be welcome,” Tish remarked. “She’s the best child I ever saw. She has been sitting there for an hour; you’d think she knew.”

When the news broke with the shrill cry of the infant, uttering the age-old protest, Will was somewhat taken back, and disappointed. It was a girl!

He ran out to tell his father who was in the big barn flailing peas.

An hour later, Will was let in to see his mother, who lay in a high four-poster bed, in the bedroom off the parlor.

He kissed her affectionately and asked her how she was feeling. She told him to look behind her, and there in a new white shawl he saw a wrinkled little face framed in jet black hair, with two small pink fists doubled up beside its cheeks.

He was sorry for his mother; she must be disappointed too, and it wasn’t her fault, so he kissed her again, and told her it was all right. The Irelands had three girls too, and the Charltons had four, and maybe the next one would be a boy.

My first memory is of a snowy afternoon too, one that seemed likely to last forever. I had stationed myself on a stool in front of a window and inside the lace curtain to watch for Lizzie, and Hannah and George and Jack coming home from school. At first it was pleasant to watch the snow making a pattern against the dark bulk of the barn, and putting big white knobs on the fence posts, but my heart was too burdened to see much beauty in anything.

I had heard a bit of bad news! One of the neighbor girls, named Hattie—I forget her last name—came over to borrow something, and I hid behind the curtain when the dog barked a warning and I saw her coming. I did not like Hattie, or any one of her unpalatable family, and for the same reason. They kissed me every time they came in. Not only kissed me but tried to make me bite my tongue by chucking me under the chin. So I went into hiding when any of the tribe drew near.

Hattie and mother talked without knowing I was in the room, and Hattie said they were not going to have a Christmas tree this year, for Zebbie had found out there was no Santa Claus and it was no fun now, when there was no one who believed. These were her very words.

I thought mother would surely contradict her, but she didn’t. Then I made up my mind that I would wait right there to see what Lizzie, and George and Jack and Hannah would say. I was afraid to ask mother—afraid it was true—I knew she would not withhold the truth, if I asked her. . . .

I must have begun my vigil in the forenoon, for it seemed fully two weeks before I saw the four welcome figures turning in at the gate, and snow balling each other as they came down the lane. Little they knew of what awaited them!

I got a hearing with my brother George first, and he cautioned me about speaking to anyone else, for he said he knew exactly what to do. He could show me that Hattie was wrong. And he did.

The night before Christmas he took me out, and showed me the hay and oats he had placed in an old water-trough for Santa Claus’ reindeers, charging me to look well at it, and to observe that the roof leading to the chimney had no tracks. I observed these things. On Christmas morning, I was taken out again for observation, and found the hay and oats gone, and tracks plainly visible on the snowy roof. There were other proofs too, that thrilled me to my heart’s core. In my stocking, hung beside the fire, were, carefully wrapped in red tissue paper, a dappled gray tin horse, and a blue glass mug, with “Love the Giver,” on it in white letters.

I wondered what Hattie would say to this!

That was a glorious Christmas. The whole house was full of surprises. There were paper balls hung at the windows, and spruce boughs glittering with diamonds over the doors, and a new scarf for me, dark brown, “to match your eyes,” Elizabeth said. It looked very much like the pale blue one Hannah used to have, and the color made me think of the butternut dye that mother used for carpet rags, but I am glad to record I was too much of a lady to say so. The tin horse, all so nicely dappled, with a red saddle painted on his back, was the high spot of that Christmas and though he divided in two before the day was over, I set one before the other, and had a team. The smell of the paint on the horse was delicious to me, and still is the real aroma of Christmas—that tin toy smell.

I remember that Christmas, because it was the last year that I was a true believer.

We lived a mile from Chatsworth, on the Garafraxa road, in a stony part of the county of Grey. The stones lay over our farm like flocks of sheep. But one can grow accustomed to stones. They were merely a part of the landscape to me. Our barn was a fine big one painted red, with great doors in the loft that swung outward to receive the winter’s hay. The hay-loft could be reached from the inside by a ladder on the wall. Once we found a tramp had slept in the hay-loft and “it was a mercy he had not set fire to it.” Instead he called at the door the next morning and thanked us for letting him stay, and was asked in for breakfast.

The house was of dressed timbers, cut from our own logs, and the outside was white-washed, and looked very well under the hard maples.

There was a spring of cold water coming out of a bank behind the house, and over this little stream the milk house was built, a small white-washed building with a flagged floor, the centre of which was a tiny pond edged with stones, where the milk-pans stood cool and sweet. That perpetual stream of crystal water that ran in and ran out, losing itself in a green meadow below the house was a fragrant memory to all of us and even after we moved to Manitoba and were comfortably established there, my mother still mourned for that living well of water that bubbled out of the hill and failed not in winter or in summer. It was a “drink from the spring,” that she craved more than anything else, when the tides of life ran low.

Being the youngest of the six children, I received much of my early education from my brothers and sisters. Will, my eldest brother, who was fifteen when I was born, was my devoted friend and champion, always. He was a tall boy for his age; had curly brown hair, fine brown eyes, creamy skin and red cheeks, and I think he was my mother’s favorite child. In the winter of the deep snow, seven years before I was born, my father had bronchitis and it was Willie who helped mother to care for the cattle and horses. He was only eight years old, hardly able to swing an axe, but he chopped wood until his nose bled. The snow was so deep that for three weeks no sleigh could get through, and she was there alone, with a sick man, and three small children, one a baby a month old, and ten head of stock to feed and water. My mother was not given to tears, but her eyes were always wet, when she talked of that hard time, and how Will’s brave young spirit had never faltered.

My second brother, George, two years younger than Will, was a natural trader and a successful one. George always had interesting things in his pockets—alleys, and knives and pretty stones, and once a knife that in addition to two blades, had a pair of scissors which shut up like a blade. I remember hearing George closely questioned on the subject of “steel knuckles,” which, in some mysterious manner were being put in circulation in our neighborhood, and every possible avenue of distribution was being canvassed. But George was not guilty of any connection with this form of armaments though he did say that he thought “steel knuckles,” plenty of “steel knuckles,” enough for everyone, would prevent all fights, for everyone would be afraid to start an argument. George’s best line was jewelry, the costume jewelry of the late seventies, and in return for a used horse-collar, honorably earned by pulling weeds in a turnip patch, he received a gorgeous stock of rings and tie-pins from a band of gypsies camped on the commons. The rings and pins were kept under a stone in the potato patch, and George might have carried on his business free from discovery but that his kind heart betrayed him, as it has many another good man.

I burned my arm one evening by falling on the stove from my high chair, and to stay my screams George brought me from his treasure chest, a solitaire ruby ring, the ruby being, as I remember it, quite large enough for the parking light on a car. When the uproar had been calmed and my arm was resting in a cold starch pack, Mother had time to go into the matter of the ring, now tightly clutched in my good hand. George told the truth—he was never known to depart from it—and that enterprise came to an end. But the ring, which I with an invalid’s privilege was allowed to keep, helped more than the starch to heal my arm.

My eldest sister, Elizabeth, deserves a whole book. She was everybody’s friend. She could comb hair and make curls without hurting. She could find things that had been lost for days. She knew where everything was. She could think of games to play and even make up games. She could take thorns from fingers, and understand how dresses got dirty. Her hair was bright brown and her skin clear and white; so clear and soft, that one of the neighbor girls, (Hattie’s sister) circulated the report that Lizzie Mooney washed her face every night in buttermilk, which my mother indignantly denied. But Elizabeth, with that fine philosophy which has helped her over many rough places in life, said nothing, but began to do this very thing to see if it had any virtue, and today, though she has faced hot winds in summer and cold winds in winter, she has never lost her apple-blossom complexion.

Hannah, who had the reputation of being the best child Tish ever saw, was a round-faced little girl with large, dark blue eyes and auburn hair, like mother’s mother, Margaret Fullerton McCurdy. Hannah spoke only when she had something to say and was always listened to with respect. She could read when she was seven, and read stories to me—on conditions. I did not go to school until I was ten, so Hannah had several good productive years when she measured out to me a dole of fiction in return for sundry little chores. When she was reading, and I was sweeping the floor, and listening in a trance of delight to “Davy and the Goblin,” or “Children of the New Forest,” sometimes in my rapture I would forget to sweep and leaning on the broom-handle gaze open-mouthed through the golden door she had opened for me . . . . until the silence of the room made me remember my bargain.

Hannah had rather a hard deal in the matter of her name. Mother had intended to call her “Margaret Alice,” but a friend of hers came back to Chatsworth to visit, and everyone was doing things for the visitor and mother named the baby for her, “Hannah Maria Conger.” I thought it a very beautiful name, but the owner of it has not thought so, although she carries it gracefully and without complaint.

My youngest brother, Jack, five years my senior was a sturdy, square little chap, given to fighting, and walking the ridgepole of the barn. He was only five years older than I, but I never seemed to catch up to him. There was a selection in the readers of that day beginning:

“The rocky John Thomas,

The hedger and ditcher,

Although he was poor

Never cared to be richer,”

which never failed to draw fire from my youngest brother, who hated it violently. Perhaps he was repelled by the lowly occupation of his namesake, or his lack of ambition, but anyway it registered. I used it myself against him, but only when I was at a safe distance. Jack had a great distaste for anything sentimental and always went out, when a story was being read to us, which had anything in it of love or courtship. He said he “would never get married: he would live with a man and keep dogs.”