"The Woman"

[rfmcdonald]

She hobbled down the hard-packed dirt path, and leaned upon her wooden cane. It was a plain, solid cane, carved out of the heartwood of a great pine by her husband, eight years dead this past winter. When it rained, the stony ground and dense sod didn’t absorb the rain, but rather released it, letting it run in rivulets down the path, down the hill, into the salt water that entirely surrounded this place.

She had walked down this path to the cliff and the jagged rocks before thousands of times before, and she knew how to do it without risking a fall and a broken hip like the one that had taken Inez away to the manor on the mainland. There she languished for two years on hard beds, recooked food, and the half-hearted monthly visits of her grandchildren until poor, sweet Inez finally passed on. She hobbled forward a step, and then tried to wedge the bottom of the cane firmly in the ground, in the loose moist earth or pushed into the gravel stones. She paused and leaned heavily on her cane for a moment, and then carefully pushed herself off and took another careful step closer to her destination.

She measured her world out in these steps. Ten steps to cross from her bed to her bedroom door, another ten to cross the parlour-cum-kitchen, another ten to find herself through the door, at the end of the cobblestones running to the road. She never bothered to take a more accurate count than that, but it took her perhaps three hundred steps to get to the church on the one in four Sundays that the priest came to the island on his roundabout tour to the greater and lesser islands. Another three hundred steps took her to her neighbours Georgina and Ewan, and a couple of hundred steps further took her to the Frenchman’s shack, and to the wharf where the island ferry docked twice a month. Those were the only stops on her modest daily itinerary, and she was quite content with them. Her children on the mainland thought that she should go out more, or better yet, come and live on the mainland (not with them, of course, but rather in a manor like poor Inez’). They only said that whenever they came visiting, though, and those visits cam more rarely now than ever before.

Her children had all been born on the island, as had their father, as had herself, and as had her children’s grandparents and their grandparents before them. Her memories of her parents were treasured, just as carefully preserved as the old black-and-white photograph than a travelling cameraman had taken of them and developed in the old cellar. She only had vague memories of her grandparents, elderly and decrepit relics whom she remembered seeing in their Sunday dress in a large room, looking sad. Years later she’d asked her father about that, and he told her after a moment that they’d been at her brother’s memorial service -- not a funeral, since his body was buried somewhere in the soldiers’ cemeteries in Europe, or left to rot in the trenches. Another child left the womb to die far from the embraces of his loved ones by his coffin.

Her grandparents were the second generation to be born on the Rock, as her children called their birthplaces whenever they came over on their visits. Their grandparents had come to the island not because they particularly wanted to build a house weathered by salt spray, but simply because they had nowhere else to go. They didn’t have enough money to buy tickets to any other Atlantic seaport -- Quebec, Montreal, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Liverpool, even someplace in America -- and they could hardly stay for longer, not with the desperate mobs fleeing the famine just outside the city. So they arrived beached on this foreign shore, and looked about with disbelieving eyes at the rocks of this island, and managed to build themselves a family and a life taking the fishing boats out to scour the seas.

As she took another step towards Georgina’s, she remembered how five different generations had done that, one after the other. It was a hard life, but it had its joys, like the tea and cards that she was going to enjoy all afternoon long in the warmth of Georgina’s home. Her children all thought that she was crazy to live there, and that it verged on child abuse to raise them up there. On the island, each said in their different ways, they had the radio to let them know of all of the things that they’d been deprived -- schools with more than one room, televisions, modern hospitals, masses of people.

They had left when they had come of age, as had the rest of their generation. Their parents followed them to the mainland or the other, larger islands, and those that didn’t began dying off. She was left one of the last few not to have crossed over to either realm, and to stay here on the island.

Once, she might have been concerned about the fate of the island and its people. Now, though, she took comfort in the fact -- as she did now, inching her way up the stone slabs of steps to Georgina’s screen door -- that there was still time aplenty, door, for cards and tea.