The Burial Read Free Page B

the ground. They were gone or she could not see them.
    Her thoughts turned to Fitz. They were not thoughts motivated by concern for him but more the mounting concern she had for herself and for me inside her. At this hour, every minute that he was not there was a minute he was growing drunker. And no matter how far gone he was, when he returned to the house he may yet have saved a parcel of fury for her.
    She went inside and rocked from foot to foot by the stove. The light from the fire did not reach the edges of the room and she thought that was a good thing. There was only more dust there and bad feeling. In front of her was the same scene she had looked at for four years or more and it did not please her. It had never pleased her. A rough-hewn table with a bench seat on either side and two wooden chairs at each end, and the ominous opening to the cellar, into which Fitz had thrown her too many times to remember. There was nothing else in the room but another fireplace she had only seen lit half a dozen times and two raggedy armchairs.
    The armchairs were dead weights and they faced each other. One was narrower than the other and Fitz had designated this one to be hers. It had always looked like a trap to her: so low to the ground, so tall at the sides, and it tilted back in such a way that you could not get out of it easily. The fabric was brown and gold, a pattern of leaves twisting around flowers and flowers twisting around vines, and she could still recall the uneasy feeling of when she first sat in it.
    Jessie had just turned twenty-three when, in October 1917, she met Fitz. She was to be his apprentice, breaking in horses for the war and occasionally serving as his domestic. She knew nothing about housekeeping. Every woman vying to leave prison listed housekeeping in her file, regardless of whether she had ever kept a clean house or lived in one. But my mother insisted on listing horse-breaker instead of domestic because it was the work she knew how to do . Although it was a coveted skill—and one Fitz was looking for—she was discouraged from listing her other significant talent, horse-stealing , as it was the thing that had landed her in gaol in the first place.
    As a condition of her release she had to accept an offer of employment, and Fitz’s offer, as it was outlined to her, seemed to be the best by far. It was the only offer that would not have seen her working for salt in some inner-city terrace, lace upon her head, cleaning up another family’s mess or running after another woman’s children. She thought she had escaped some terrible fate.
    On the day of her release, she waited for Fitz with a warden on the sunny side of the sandstone wall of the prison. She clutched her small bag of belongings. It contained a clean shirt, two pairs of socks, a pair of men’s trousers and a dozen soaps that made the canvas bag weigh much more than it otherwise would have. The soaps were the colour of candle wax and they were carved into birds and angels and wrapped in tissue, each one a gift from the other women in prison.
    She leant on the wall and swapped the bag from arm to arm and the warden said, Nervous, Jessie? and she replied, Never!
    There was heat in the wall and more heat in the day. Her thoughts were on the soaps in her bag, the carved angels and birds, hoping that they would not melt like wax before she could get them safely to wherever she was going.
    What is the name of the place? she asked the warden. And exactly how far is it?
    The Widden Valley, he calls it , said the warden. It’s west or north-west of here. You should ask him along the way. Show your interest, Jessie. It will be a good topic of conversation.
    In the days before her release my mother had begun to look forward to the distinct seasons of life in the country. In her two years in gaol, eight seasons had apparently passed, though in her cell it just seemed like one unwavering twilight. The only things that marked a