The Stone Angel (6 page)

“Stay,” he said.

Perhaps it was only the momentary pain made me do it. I jerked my hand away as though I had accidentally
set it on a hot stove. He didn’t say a word. He turned and went outside, where Matt was telling the drayman what to do with the black trunk inscribed
Miss H. Currie
.

I felt I must pursue him, say it was a passing thing and not meant. But I didn’t. I only stood at the stairs’ ending, looking at the big brown-framed picture, a steel engraving of cattle, bearing the legend
The towing herd winds slowly o’er the lea
.

I did not go out teaching. I stayed and kept my father’s accounts, played hostess for him, chatted diplomatically to guests, did all he expected of me, for I felt (sometimes with rancor, sometimes with despair) that I would reimburse him for what he’d spent, whatever it cost me. But when he brought home young men, to introduce to me, I snubbed the lot of them.

I’d been back in Manawaka three years when I met Brampton Shipley, quite by chance, for normally I would not have found myself in his company. Chaperoned by Auntie Doll, I was allowed to go to a dance at the school one evening, because the proceeds were to go to the fund for building a hospital in town. Auntie Doll was gabbling away with Floss Drieser, so when Bram asked me to dance, I went with him. The Shipleys all danced well, I’ll give them that. Heavy as Bram was, he was light on his feet.

We spun around the chalky floor, and I reveled in his fingernails with crescents of ingrown earth that never met a file. I fancied I heard in his laughter the bravery of battalions. I thought he looked a bearded Indian, so brown and beaked a face. The black hair thrusting from his chin was rough as thistles. The next instant, though, I imagined him rigged out in a suit of gray soft as a dove’s breast-feathers.

Oh, I was the one, all right, tossing my black mane contemptuously, yet never certain the young men had really noticed. I knew my mind, no doubt, but the mind changed every minute, one instant feeling pleased with what I knew and who I was and where I lived, the next instant consigning the brick house to perdition and seeing the plain board town and the shack dwellings beyond our pale as though they’d been the beckoning illustrations in the book of Slavic fairy tales given me by an aunt, the enchanted houses with eyes, walking on their own splayed hen’s feet, the czar’s sons playing at peasants in coarse embroidered tunics, bloused and belted, the ashen girls drowning attractively in meres, crowned always with lilies, never with pigweed or slime.

Brampton Shipley was fourteen years older than I. He’d come out from the East with his wife Clara some years before, and taken a homestead in the valley just outside town. It was river land, and should have been good, but it hadn’t flourished for him.

“Lazy as a pet pig,” my father said of him. “No get-up-and-go.”

I’d seen him sometimes in the store. He was always laughing. God knows why he had cause to laugh, left to bring up two girls alone. His wife had died of a burst spleen, nothing to do with children. I’d spoken no more than hello to her occasionally in the store. A vat of a woman she had been, something moistly fat about her, and around her there always clung a sour yeasty smell as though she spent her life in cleaning churns. She was inarticulate as a stabled beast, and when she mustered voice it had been gruff as a man’s, pebbled with impermissibles, I
seen
and
ain’t
, even worse coming from the woman than from the man, the Lord knows why.

“Hagar,” Bram Shipley said. “You’re a good dancer, Hagar.”

As we went spinning like tumbleweed in a Viennese waltz, disguised and hidden by the whirling crowd, quite suddenly he pulled me to him and pressed his outheld groin against my thigh. Not by accident. There was no mistaking it. No one had ever dared in this way before. Outraged, I pushed at his shoulders, and he grinned. I, mortified beyond words, couldn’t look at him except dartingly. But when he asked me for another dance, I danced with him.

“I’d like to show you my place sometime,” he said. “I’ve had some bad luck, but we’re coming on now. I’m getting another team in the fall. Percherons. Reuben Pearl’s selling them to me. It’ll be worth looking at, someday, that place of mine.”

As Auntie Doll and I were getting our wraps that night, I chanced to see Lottie Drieser, still light and tiny, her yellow hair puffed up and arranged so carefully.

“I saw you dancing with Bram Shipley,” she said, and snickered.

Lottie herself was keeping company with Telford Simmons, who’d gone to work in the bank.

I was furious. I still am, thinking of it, and cannot even wish her soul rest, although God knows that’s the last thing Lottie would want, and I can imagine her in heaven this very minute, slyly whispering to the Mother of God that Michael with the flaming sword spoke subtle ill of Her.

“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.

“Common as dirt, as everyone knows,” she breathed, “and he’s been seen with half-breed girls.”

How clearly her words come to mind. If she’d not
said them, would I have done as I did? Hard to say. How silly the words seem now. She was a silly girl. Many girls were silly in those days. I was not. Foolish I may have been, but never silly.

The evening I told Father I was bound on marrying Bram Shipley, he was working late in the store, I recall, and he leaned across the counter and smiled.

“I’m busy. No time for your jokes now.”

“It’s not a joke. He’s asked me to marry him, and I mean to.”

He gaped at me for a moment. Then he went about his work. Suddenly, he turned on me.

“Has he touched you?”

I was too startled to reply.

“Has he?” Father demanded. “Has he?”

The look on his face was somehow familiar. I had seen it before, but I could not recollect when. It was this kind of look—as though destruction were a two-edged sword, striking inward and outward simultaneously.

“No,” I said hotly, but fearful, too, for Bram had kissed me.

Father looked at me, scrutinizing my face. Then he turned back to the shelves and went on arranging the tins and bottles.

“You’ll marry no one,” he said at last, as though he hadn’t meant a thing by the pliable boys of good family whom he’d trotted home for my inspection. “Not at the moment, anyway. You’re only twenty-four. And you’ll not marry that fellow ever, I can vow to that much. He’s common as dirt.”

“That’s what Lottie Drieser said.”

“She’s no whit different,” my father snapped. “She’s common as dirt herself.”

I almost had to laugh, but that was the one thing he could never bear. Instead, I looked at him just as hard as he was looking at me.

I’ve worked for you for three years.”

“There’s not a decent girl in this town would wed without her family’s consent,” he said. “It’s not done.”

“It’ll be done by me,” I said, drunk with exhilaration at my daring.

“I’m only thinking of you,” Father said. “Of what’s best for you. If you weren’t so pig-headed, maybe you could see that.”

Then, without warning, he reached out a hand like a lariat, caught my arm, held and bruised it, not even knowing he was doing so.

“Hagar—” he said. “You’ll not go, Hagar.”

The only time he ever called me by my name. To this day I couldn’t say if it was a question or a command. I didn’t argue with him. There never was any use in that. But I went, when I was good and ready, all the same.

Never a bell rang out when I was wed. Not even my brother set foot in the church that day. Matt had married Mavis McVitie the year before, and Father and Luke McVitie had gone halves on building them a house. Mavis was inclined to simper, but she was a nice enough girl. She sent me a pair of embroidered pillowcases. Matt sent nothing. But Auntie Doll (who came to my wedding, bless her, despite everything) told me he’d almost sent a wedding gift to me.

“He gave it to me to bring you, Hagar. It wasn’t much of a gift, for Matt’s as tight with his money as he ever was. It was that plaid shawl that Dan couldn’t be parted from when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The Lord knows where Matt had dug it up from, or what
use he thought you’d have for it. But he came to me not an hour afterward and took it back. Said he’d decided he didn’t want to send it after all. Just as well.”

It was the night before my wedding, and I was staying at Charlotte Tappen’s house. I wanted to go and talk with Matt, but I was not sure enough. He’d intended to send it as a reproach, a mockery, then found he cared something about me after all—that was my first thought. Then it struck me—what if he’d actually meant the gift to convey some gentleness, but changed his mind? If that was the case, I’d not have walked across the road to speak with him. I decided to wait and see if he’d turn up the following day, to give me away in place of Father. But, of course, he did not.

What did I care? For the moment I was unencumbered. Charlotte’s mother gave a small reception, and I shimmered and flitted around like a newborn gnat, free, yet certain also that Father would soften and yield, when he saw how Brampton Shipley prospered, gentled, learned cravats and grammar.

It was spring that day, a different spring from this one. The poplar bluffs had budded with sticky leaves, and the frogs had come back to the sloughs and sang like choruses of angels with sore throats, and the marsh marigolds were opening like shavings of sun on the brown river where the tadpoles danced and the bloodsuckers lay slimy and low, waiting for the boys’ feet. And I rode in the black-topped buggy beside the man who was now my mate.

The Shipley house was square and frame, two-storied, the furniture shoddy and second-hand, the kitchen reeking and stale, for no one had scoured there properly since Clara died. Yet, seeing it, I wasn’t troubled
in the slightest, still thinking of myself as chatelaine. I wonder who I imagined would do the work? I thought of Polacks and Galicians from the mountain, half-breeds from the river valley of the Wachakwa, or the daughters and spinster aunts of the poor, forgetting that Bram’s own daughters had hired out whenever they could be spared, until they married very young and gained a permanent employment.

All the things in the musty, whey-smelling house were to be mine, such as they were, but when we entered, Bram handed me a cut-glass decanter with a silver top.

“This here’s for you, Hagar.”

I took it so casually, and laid it aside, and thought no more about it. He picked it up in his hands and turned it around. For a moment I thought he meant to break it, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why. Then he laughed and set it down and came close to me.

“Let’s see what you look like under all that rig-out, Hagar.”

I looked at him not so much in fear as in an iron incomprehension.

“Downstairs—” he said. “Is that what bothers you? Or daylight? Don’t fret—there’s no one around for five miles.”

“It seems to me that Lottie Drieser was right about you,” I said, “although I certainly hate to say it.”

“What did they say of me?” Bram asked.
They—
knowing more than one had spoken.

I only shrugged and would not say, for I had manners.

“Never mind that now,” he said. “I don’t give a good goddamn. Hagar—you’re my wife.”

It hurt and hurt, and afterward he stroked my forehead with his hand.

“Didn’t you know that’s what’s done?”

I said not a word, because I had not known, and when he’d bent, enormous and giant, I could not believe there could be within me a room to house such magnitude. When I found there was, I felt as one might feel discovering a second head, an unsuspected area. Pleasure or pain were one to me, meaningless. I only thought—well, thank the Lord now I know, and at least it’s possible, without the massacre it looked like being. I was a very practical girl in many ways.

The next day I got to work and scrubbed the house out. I planned to get a hired girl in the fall, when we had the cash. But in the meantime I had no intention of living in squalor. I had never scrubbed a floor in my life, but I worked that day as though I’d been driven by a whip.

    “It’s all long past,” I say to Mr. Troy to smooth him and myself.

“Quite so.”

He nods and looks admiring, and I see that I am a wonder to him, talking, as parents will gaze awe-struck at a learning child, astonished that human speech should issue from its mouth.

He sighs, blinks, swallows as though a clot of phlegm had stuck in his gullet.

“Have you many friends here, Mrs. Shipley?”

“Most of them are dead.”

I’ve been caught off-guard, or I would never have said that. He nods again, as though in satisfaction. What is he up to? I cannot tell. I perceive now that I am
fingering a fold of the flowered dress, twisting and creasing it in my hands.

“A person needs contemporaries,” he says, “to talk with, and remember.”

He says no more. He speaks of prayer and comfort, all in a breath, as though God were a kind of feather bed or spring-filled mattress. I nod and nod and nod. Easier to agree, now, hoping he will soon go. He prays a little prayer, and I bow my head, a feather in his cap or in the eiderdown of God. Then, mercifully, he leaves.

I am left with an intangible doubt, an apprehension. What was he trying to say? What did Doris ask him to say? Something about the house? This seems the most likely, and yet his words didn’t point to it. I grow perturbed, a fenced cow meeting only the barbed wire whichever way she turns. What is it? What is it? But I cannot tell, and, baffled, can only turn and turn again.

I walk back into the house. Painted railing, then step and step, the small back porch, and finally the kitchen. Doris is at the front door, bidding her pastor a caroling farewell. Dimly, through halls, I hear her outpoured thanks for his emerald time, his diamond words.
So very good of you
. Et cetera. Silly fool.

It is then that I see the newspaper and the dreadful words. Spread out on the kitchen table, it has been left open at the classified ads. Someone’s hand has marked a place in pen. I bend, and peer, and read.