A Place Called Bliss (5 page)

“Poor Angus,” Hugh said feelingly, glancing again at the contented scene just a few feet away where Sophia was crooning words of love to the child snuggled against her breast.

“He has Molly and Cammie,” Kezzie answered quickly. “Dinna forget that. And that’s all and more he’ll be able to manage.”

“Kezzie, I release you to go with him to the frontier. You’ll be needed there even more than with us.”

“Never, Mr. Hugh!” Kezzie said with such passion that Hugh blinked. “My place is here—with Mrs. Hugh and the bairn.”

“Think about it,” Hugh urged kindly. “Now, what will we do about this little man?” And he indicated the dead babe.

“It’s . . . it’s a girl, sir.”

“A girl, Kezzie?”

“My Mary,” Kezzie said steadily, “gave birth to a girl.”

“Ah, yes, and Angus helped deliver it.” And Mr. Hugh turned from the small body, adding, with a sigh, “You take care of it, won’t you? Take him . . . her into your room, perhaps, and prepare it for burial.”

“With Mary.”

“Yes, with Mary. That way,” Hugh finished with a broken note in the usually brisk voice, “it won’t have the journey alone.”

Sophia was dozing, and Hugh was wondering if he could escape the cramped quarters when Kezzie returned, the dead child sweet and clean in some of the Galloway selection of infant clothes and wrapped in a white blanket.

“You feel free to go, Mr. Hugh,” she said, interpreting Hugh’s indecision and knowing him well. “Mrs. Hugh will be fine for a while. I think,” her eyes dropped to the waxy face in
her arms, “this wee bairn should be in its mother’s arms. I’ll go now and prepare my Mary for . . . for burial.” The wrinkled face sagged suddenly, and the eyes, blue beyond believing and no whit faded by age, filled with tears. Kezzie’s last few incredible hours told on her at last.

“I’ll go with you, Kezzie,” Hugh said. “Let me carry the bairn. I need to have a few minutes with Angus, puir mon.”

The transfer was made; Hugh and Kezzie closed the door behind them and turned toward the tragedy below, expecting to double it by the addition of the dead infant.

The Morrison bunk had been shut from public view by kindly loaned and hung blankets. Pulling them aside, Hugh and Kezzie were unprepared for the face Angus lifted to them from the bedside. It was ablaze with hope.

Angus on one side and an elderly woman on the other, Mary’s wasted limbs were being massaged. Though her eyes were closed, there was a faint tinge of color in the sunken cheeks.

“Mary—” Kezzie stammered. “But I thought—”

“We all did,” Angus almost sang. “I know the doctor thought her gone. It was while I was clasping her in my arms . . . speaking her name. . . .” Angus broke down. The strong face, ravaged by the last few days’ despair, was run with rivulets of tears, which he let flow freely, unashamed of his sorrow or his blessed relief.

He turned momentarily from his ministrations, which were apparently meant to stimulate blood flow and were possibly all he knew to do.

“Mrs. Simms,” and Angus indicated the woman still working over the prostrate form, “cleaned her up, and we’ve changed the blankets—”

“We know she’s no’ dead,” the old midwife said. “An’ that’s a’ we need to keep us workin’. More warm oil, Libby.”

“The bleeding has stopped, all thanks to God. And none to the doctor,” Angus said, and who could blame him for sounding bitter, even outraged.

Cameron and Molly crept from the shadows where they had been restrained by kind hands, and Angus gathered them into his arms.

Peering at his mother, Cameron asked, “What’s wrong, Da? Why is Mum so still?”

“She’s tired, Cammie, very tired. Just be patient; be a good boy a little longer. She’ll be fine; you’ll see.”

Angus spoke with an assurance he could not have felt, but it satisfied the children. Holding them over Mary, Angus allowed them each a kiss to the white cheeks.

“That’ll be just the medicine she needs,” he said and set them on their feet and sent them off into the shadows again to the caring family who tended them.

“We’re going up, Da,” Cameron called back, excitement in his voice. It had been a nightmare, in the ship’s bowels, that none of them would forget, even the young. A breath of fresh air on deck was a rare and treasured happening.

All this while Kezzie seemed as one in a daze, standing beside Hugh with the baby in his arms.

“Kezzie,” Angus said now, with concern. “You look ill . . . very ill. But,” his voice lifted, “isn’t it marvelous? Our Mary—” His voice broke.

“It’s wonderful!” Kezzie whispered through trembling lips. “If I’d only known! Oh, Angus,” Kezzie’s eyes were tragic in her white face, “her baby . . . oh, Angus—”

“What about the baby, Kezzie?” Angus turned eyes clouding with apprehension on Hugh and the blanket in his arms.

“The baby . . . oh, Angus, the baby is dead!”

A
t the brief committal that consigned the Morrison baby to the ocean depths, Hugh stood shoulder to shoulder with Angus, longtime friend and faithful retainer. Heatherstone, Scotland, would be the poorer without Angus’s services; Heatherstone, Canada, would be the poorer for never having had them.

Here, in this inbetween place aboard ship, in the middle of the ocean, between countries, Hugh fancied he had already glimpsed the equality that was to mark their relationship from this time on. Angus continued his polite deference to his former master, but his innate politeness and good manners would dictate that. There was no obsequiousness, but then, there had never been the rank-and-file lick-spittle service from Angus as from others of his rank; from the beginning Angus had been different. It was that difference that Hugh’s father had noticed, and being a kindly man as well as a wise one, had turned it to the advantage of Heatherstone, as well as to Angus himself.

Angus was an educated man. In him was the mix of the master and the menial, the liege lord and the laborer. And in him the one would not have to be sacrificed to the other. Angus would suffer hardship and hard work, but in it he would be in control and maintain a quiet air of confidence. As a first-generation Canadian Angus would be the perfect model, for in him would be the blend of the gentle, fine ways of culture and the daring, grit, and stamina of the pioneer.

In a way, Hugh envied Angus. But Hugh knew his place, and it was not on the frontier of the northwest. Even so, the new land and the new ways gave him the liberty he needed, and he was, in his own way, as liberated as Angus.

Kezzie, standing with her arms around Cameron and Molly, was straight-backed and dry-eyed. Hugh watched her and felt an admiration for his old nurse. Whatever grieving she had done, she had put it behind her. Nevertheless, to Hugh she appeared shrunken, and her eyes, though dry, were full of pain. The children, huddled against her side, were swept up in the final stages of a drama that left them uneasy and wondering.

Angus, having faced his loss and found it not as heavy as thought at first, was comforted by the fact that, with care and patience, his wife would survive. In her bunk below, Mary hardly understood the day’s significance and dozed fitfully under the laudanum Hugh had insisted the doctor make available to her.

Sophia, of course, was bedfast, murmuring over her little Margaret Lorena, a name she had promptly produced and which Hugh surmised she had chosen long, long ago, perhaps in dreams of just such a time as this. Her joy, as well as her recovery, could not be compromised by a trip out on deck, with its accompanying heartrending sight of the canvas bundle slid so mercilessly into the sea. As a star is lost in the endless expanse of the sky, so the tiny body was swallowed up in the vast reaches of the sea. But the One who counted the stars and called them each by name was the One who also measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and He knew the resting place of the small
nameless one and would call her forth on that great reunion morning.

This Hugh understood only dimly from his stiff, limited, formal religious training. But now it served to comfort him. That it might comfort Angus, who had always been what was called a “God-fearing” man, he was quite sure.

When the rites were completed, Angus stepped to the side of his wife’s mother and murmured, “You’ve overdone yourself. Come, Mam, leave the bairns to these good ladies, and ge’ yoursel’ back to your bed and hae a guid rest.” Angus’s tender words, spoken in the old familiar fashion, turned Kezzie from her study of the empty waves. For once Kezzie listened and followed her Mr. Hugh without argument.

Someone had Molly by the hand, and Angus put his hand on Cameron’s shoulder, turning toward the companionway that led to their quarters below.

Cameron, an outdoor boy and losing color from the molelike existence of the past weeks, momentarily resisted Angus’s urging away from the sunshine and fresh air to the dismal hole. Angus, though preoccupied with Mary’s need of him, recognized the brief hesitation in the boy’s stride.

Lifting the boy in his arms, Angus turned to the rail, and together they watched the waves rise and fall, noting the white wake that indicated that they were, at last, making time toward land, and sanity.

Finally, with the child’s arms around his neck and the soft cheek pressing his own rough one, Angus hugged Cameron and turned to the ladderlike stairway where Sophia had fallen and which was still just as sticky and hazardous.

Cameron’s brief resistance had ended. Young as he was he seemed to know the uselessness of it. Angus recognized the submission that marked the oppressed—those who had few if any rights and were considered inferior in all ways to their “betters”—and ground his teeth, hating the subservience in the boy even as he had always hated and fought against the same trait in himself.

Downtrodden people the world around were catching a glimpse of a better way and, no matter the cost, were following that glimpse. If there was a gleam, for Angus, it was no other than northern lights. To some, their eerie display was equated with the supernatural, somehow, and was unsettling in their strange beauty. To Angus they served as a beacon which, never having seen, he followed.

“Just a little longer, laddie,” he murmured into Cameron’s ear as, carefully, he made his descent. Fiercely, silently, he promised the boy that he should grow up free. Free to be an equal, to lift his head and look all men in the eye; to say “no” when “yes, sir” was expected; to arrive at his destination in life, be it success or failure, by his own choice. He, Angus, would suffer the present indignities gladly, to pass this on to his children. Angus could see the light, and it was sweet. For himself, and for Cameron, he would do what was necessary. It was enough to keep him putting one foot ahead of the other, down, down . . .

From the dark depths he looked up, up to the patch of blue sky, the light, and breathed out his promise and his prayer.

“Tomorrow, please, God—Bliss!”

Canada—1878

E
arly reports hadn’t been favorable to the settling of the Canadian northwest. The “Emigrant’s Guide” featured a sketch of Jack Frost bundled in furs and wearing snowshoes, nipping the nose of a nattily dressed man wearing a top hat and bearing a backpack marked “silk stockings, kid gloves.” A bird flew overhead quacking “Who’s a goose now?” while a wolf snapped at the man’s slipper-clad heels. Stuck in heaped snowbanks were signs reading “Travelers taken and done for,” “Fine land for turnips if you can plough it,” and “Fine grassland 3000 feet below the surface of the snow.”

No matter. Men, whether fools or heroes, persisted in daring the elements and the unknown and made their way west. From them word trickled out and around the world. The sound of their footsteps—whispering through prairie grasses and muted by dense forests—would swell, over time, to the tramp of hundreds of thousands of determined homesteaders who would
tune their ears, and eventually their hearts, and rise up and follow.

And, for those with the listening ear and the brave heart, there was excitement and music and breathtaking beauty.

One’s blood stirred at the pounding thunder of buffalo hoofs; wild geese calling in a vast blue sky was music set to beauty; a lark’s song, high and piercing at dawn, was the sweetest of sounds. Endless vistas of prairie grass bending in the wind was an awesome sight. One could grow heady with breathing deeply of the unique fragrances of a land untainted by anything more than the smoke of a campfire. Sunsets were glorious beyond capturing on canvas.