Nelly tenses and starts walking faster, making over to the right. Every morning and evening we go through this. We are approaching Miss Spencer’s house. Miss Spencer is the milliner the way Miss Gurley is the dressmaker. She has a very small white house with the doorstep right on the sidewalk. One front window has lace curtains with a pale-yellow window shade pulled all the way down, inside them; the other one has a shelf across it on which are displayed four summer hats. Out of the corner of my eye I can see that there is a yellow chip straw with little wads of flamingo-colored feathers around the crown, but again there is no time to examine anything.
On each side of Miss Spencer’s door is a large old lilac bush. Every time we go by Nelly determines to brush off all her flies on these bushes — brush them off forever, in one fell swoop. Then Miss Spencer is apt to come to the door and stand there, shaking with anger, between the two bushes still shaking from Nelly’s careening passage, and yell at me, sometimes waving a hat in my direction as well.
Nelly leaning to the right, breaks into a cow trot. I run up with my stick.
Whack!
“Nelly!”
Whack!
Just this once she gives in and we rush safely by.
Then begins a long, pleasant stretch beneath the elms. The Presbyterian manse has a black iron fence with openwork four-sided pillars, like tall, thin bird cages, bird cages for storks. Dr. Gillespie, the minister, appears just as we come along, and rides slowly toward us on his bicycle.
“Good day.” He even tips his hat.
“Good day.”
He wears the most interesting hat in the village: a man’s regular stiff straw sailor, only it is black. Is there a possibility that he paints it at home, with something like stove polish? Because once I had seen one of my aunts painting a straw-colored hat navy blue.
Nelly, oblivious, makes cow flops. Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.
It is fascinating. I cannot take my eyes off her. Then I step around them: fine dark-green and lacy and watery at the edges.
We pass the McLeans’, whom I know very well. Mr. McLean is just coming out of his new barn with the tin hip roof and with him is Jock, their old shepherd dog, long-haired, black and white and yellow. He runs up barking deep, cracked, soft barks in the quiet morning. I hesitate.
Mr. McLean bellows, “Jock! You! Come back here! Are you trying to frighten her?”
To me he says, “He’s twice as old as you are.”
Finally I pat the big round warm head.
We talk a little. I ask the exact number of Jock’s years but Mr. McLean has forgotten.
“He hasn’t hardly a tooth in his head and he’s got rheumatism. I hope we’ll get him through next winter. He still wants to go to the woods with me and it’s hard for him in the snow. We’ll be lost without him.”
Mr. McLean speaks to me behind one hand, not to hurt Jock’s feelings: “Deaf as a post.”
Like anybody deaf, Jock puts his head to one side.
“He used to be the best dog at finding cows for miles around. People used to come from away down the shore to borrow him to find their cows for them. And he’d always find them. The first year we had to leave him behind when we went up to the mountain to get the cows I thought it would kill him. Well, when his teeth started going he couldn’t do much with the cows any more. Effie used to say, ‘I don’t know how we’d run the farm without him.’”
Loaded down with too much black and yellow and white fur, Jock smiles, showing how few teeth he has. He has yellow caterpillars for eyebrows.
Nelly has gone on ahead. She is almost up the hill to Chisolm’s when I catch up with her. We turn in to their steep, long drive, through a steep, bare yard crowded with unhappy apple trees. From the top, though, from the Chisolms’ back yard, one always stops to look at the view.
There are the tops of all the elm trees in the village and there, beyond them, the long green marshes, so fresh, so salt. Then the Minas Basin, with the tide halfway in or out, the wet red mud glazed with sky blue until it meets the creeping lavender-red water. In the middle of the view, like one hand of a clock pointing straight up, is the steeple of the Presbyterian church. We are in the “Maritimes” but all that means is that we live by the sea.
Mrs. Chisolm’s pale frantic face is watching me out the kitchen window as she washes the breakfast dishes. We wave, but I hurry by because she may come out and ask questions. But her questions are not as bad perhaps as those of her husband, Mr. Chisolm, who wears a beard. One evening he had met me in the pasture and asked me how my soul was. Then he held me firmly by both hands while he said a prayer, with his head bowed, Nelly right beside us chewing her cud all the time. I had felt a soul, heavy in my chest, all the way home.
I let Nelly through the set of bars to the pasture where the brook is, to get the mint. We both take drinks and I pick a big bunch of mint, eating a little, scratchy and powerful. Nelly looks over her shoulder and comes back to try it, thinking, as cows do, it might be something especially for her. Her face is close to mine and I hold her by one horn to admire her eyes again. Her nose is blue and as shiny as something in the rain. At such close quarters my feelings for her are mixed. She gives my bare arm a lick, scratchy and powerful, too, almost upsetting me into the brook; then she goes off to join a black-and-white friend she has here, mooing to her to wait until she catches up.
For a while I entertain the idea of not going home today at all, of staying safely here in the pasture all day, playing in the brook and climbing on the squishy, moss-covered hummocks in the swampy part. But an immense, sibilant, glistening loneliness suddenly faces me, and the cows are moving off to the shade of the fir trees, their bells chiming softly, individually.
On the way home there are the four hats in Miss Spencer’s window to study, and the summer shoes in Hills’. There is the same shoe in white, in black patent leather, and in the chalky, sugary, unearthly pinks and blues. It has straps that button around the ankle and above, four of them, about an inch wide and an inch apart, reaching away up.
In those unlovely gilded red and green books, filled with illustrations of the Bible stories, the Roman centurions wear them, too, or something very like them.
Surely they are my size. Surely, this summer, pink or blue, my grandmother will buy me a pair!
Miss Ruth Hill gives me a Moirs’ chocolate out of the glass case. She talks to me: “How is she? We’ve always been friends. We played together from the time we were babies. We sat together in school. Right from primer class on. After she went away, she always wrote to me — even after she got sick the first time.”
Then she tells a funny story about when they were little.
* * *
That afternoon, Miss Gurley comes and we go upstairs to watch the purple dress being fitted again. My grandmother holds me against her knees. My younger aunt is helping Miss Gurley, handing her the scissors when she asks. Miss Gurley is cheerful and talkative today.
The dress is smaller now; there are narrow, even folds down the skirt; the sleeves fit tightly, with little wrinkles over the thin white hands. Everyone is very pleased with it; everyone talks and laughs.
“There. You see? It’s so becoming.”
“I’ve never seen you in anything more becoming.”
“And it’s so nice to see you in color for a change.”
And the purple is real, like a flower against the gold-and-white wallpaper.
On the bureau is a present that has just come, from an uncle in Boston whom I do not remember. It is a gleaming little bundle of flat, triangular satin pillows — sachets, tied together with a white satin ribbon, with an imitation rosebud on top of the bow. Each is a different faint color; if you take them apart, each has a different faint scent. But tied together the way they came, they make one confused, powdery one.