The Serial: Far From the Rowan Tree Day35

Like Betty Jacobs and other Canadians we had met, they seemed curiously uninterested in anything of my life that had gone before

How very kind people are, I thought. Somehow this was everyone’s baby – everyone had helped. Lunch was nearly over when we heard a gentle tap at the screen door and a voice saying: “May I come in?” It was Betty Jacobs. Instinctively I knew she wanted to see the baby and I wanted more than anything else to show her off. I wheeled Mahri-Louise through from the bedroom. She had just wakened up.

I lifted her out of the pram, putting her into the waiting arms of Betty Jacobs, who lovingly cradled her.

“She sure has changed in those four days and my, isn’t she a pretty little girl. You sure wouldn’t mistake her for a boy.” She held her for some time before handing her back and then told me the other reason for her visit.

“I’m giving tea this afternoon to the girls from Sandyhills WA. Would you like to come, bringing the baby with you, of course?” Reservations My reply was without hesitation. I wouldn’t, for the world, have refused and risked hurting her feelings. She had been so kind to us.

Also, always at the back of my mind was the thought that we had to get to know more people and here was a chance. I had reservations just the same.

On this first day home with a new baby I felt weak and weepy. As with my other confinements, there was this dividing line of hospital and home, protection and a you-are-on- your-own-now feeling, responsible for a new being.

It wasn’t until the births of my sixth and seventh babies that this problem was solved. They were born at home, in our own bedroom.

Afternoon tea in the Jacobs’ prairie house with the rural ladies of Sandyhills and district, was very like afternoon tea with the rural ladies of the WRI back home.

Women the world over will always have things in common to talk about. My new baby and I brought a brightness to the occasion – something new to talk about, give advice on (they were all experts), tell their husbands about when they got back home in the evening.

I didn’t say a great deal. I listened and learned. They asked me what I thought of Sandyhills and the new hospital and how I liked the almost-new supermarket on the outskirts of town.

However, like Betty Jacobs and other Canadians we had met, they seemed curiously uninterested in anything of my life that had gone before.

They weren’t interested in where I had come from or why. I suppose, to many, Scotland was just an uninteresting dot on the map. As far as they were concerned, here and now was all there was or ever would be.

That evening I was very tired and burst into tears for no reason. Ronald was accustomed to this newbaby syndrome by now and knew what to do. He put the boys to bed and saw that I went also.

In the summer days that followed Mahri-Louise spent a lot of the daylight hours outside. She lay in the shade of the cottonwood trees with a net over her pram to keep off the flies. Unwelcome I also spent as much time as I could outside. Each morning I took my washing out, in the galvanised tub, to wash on the wooden platform at the door, with squirrels at my feet and birds at my head.

There were, of course, also the unwelcome visitors – the flies, mosquitoes and wasps. The latter were attracted to the water and sometimes I had to beat a hasty retreat into the cabin to escape their potential barbed attacks.

The flies and mosquitoes, as far as I could gather, held no serious threat to health and were not quite so numerous as I had been led to expect they might be.

I asked Betty Jacobs about this one day. “They’re sure bad out in ‘the sticks’ proper,” she said, “but Tom puts insect-repellent bombs into all the sloughs (waterholes) around. This destroys their breeding grounds, I guess.”

I also asked her the names of the graceful butterflies that fluttered around my wash tub. Mostly she wasn’t sure but she did know the name of my most uncommon common visitor.

This butterfly was unmistakable and easy to describe – a Parisienne lady arrayed elegantly in black – a contrast to the brilliance of the sun, the brightness of the air. “Mourning Cloak,” she told me. How appropriate. The boys spent most of the day outside that summer, often coming in only for meals. Tom Jacobs had dumped a load of sand near to our house for their benefit. A lot of the day was spent there, building and knocking down again. Quickly, their young limbs grew brown and their hair bleached in the sun. They were happy.

They didn’t talk much about the country they had left behind, although from time to time they blurted out things that had happened at home.

It seemed as if they weren’t aware of how far away their old home was. Of the three boys, Michael missed it most of all.

He was a child of few words so one couldn’t be exactly sure what he was thinking but there had been a close bond between him and his grandmother and I knew he was missing her. Naturally sad I told the boys from time to time that one day Granny and Grandad would come in an aeroplane to visit them.

Once, while crossing the yard to hang washing on the line, passing the sandpile, I came upon Michael standing all by himself looking up into the sky.

He was so totally absorbed that he hadn’t noticed me approaching.

The other two boys had beetled off on hearing that loneliest of all sounds, the whistle of a prairie train, to stand at the picket fence and watch its long snake body trundle by.

Michael, his attention for once otherwise diverted, hadn’t moved. He stood, barefooted in the sand. His blue eyes overhung by slightly drooping lids, looked naturally sad.

He gazed straight upward into a vast dome where, unmistakably, a plane, like a small silver ball, flew over us. I heard words from the child that seemed to echo the haunting sound of the Prairie Schooner.

“Is that you up there, Granny?” he said. (More tomorrow.)