Grey Dog, page 3
“My goodness,” I murmured. There is something curiously attractive about bones, and bird bones have a particular charm, being so light and little. “What a pretty thing.”
Florrie would have loved it. I could just see her eyes lighting upon it, her pencil flying to produce a carefully rendered sketch of its shadows and recesses.
I stood, reaching into my satchel for a jar; and that was when I heard the noise. Crack. Crack. Crack. It sounded like a series of brittle twigs snapping in half under the pressure of a foot.
Slowly, slowly I turned, making sure to tuck the owlet skull safely inside my palm. Squinting through the greenish dim of the trees, I looked for any sign of moving, breathing life. There was nothing — just spruce after fir after maple after pine. The road, I realized, was nowhere to be seen. All around me was untouched forest, unbroken scrub. Even the trail I had left behind me seemed to have been swallowed in the thick of the woods, as though I had been picked up and dropped there by some unseen hand. How, I wondered, had such a thing occurred?
“Hello?” I whispered, my voice unnaturally small in the quiet beneath the trees. It occurred to me that the sound could have come from a bear, wandering through the woods in search of an evening meal, and I had to swallow several times in succession against the rising panic in my throat. Were there bears in Lowry Bridge? “Is anyone there?”
Nothing, just green and brown and grey as far as the eye could see. But . . . was there something rustling in the bracken? Could I hear the sly, slow movement of limbs somewhere beyond the edge of my field of vision?
No sudden movements, I reminded myself, no gestures that could give any wild creature cause for alarm.
Crack. Crack. Crack. I whirled and stared wildly about, all my care abandoned. Trees, trees, nothing but trees and ferns and thick layers of rotting mast, and no sign of any thing that could create the noise I had just heard. And then it came a third time, closer, louder: crack, crack, crack.
And then I felt it: something behind me. Breath upon my neck, coaxing up the little hairs until they stood on end. Eyes burning into the back of my head.
If I turned, I knew I would see it, but I could not make myself do it, could not force my body out of the fearful stupor that held my feet in place as though roots had burst from them to tether me to the dirt.
The birds were no longer singing. Every creature in the woods seemed to be holding its breath, watching, waiting.
It was going to touch me.
“Who are you?”
The voice came not from behind me, but to my right. It startled me so terribly that I couldn’t help but shriek a little as I spun around.
Standing only a few feet away from me was a girl — a most unusual-looking girl. She had the long, coltish look of a child on the verge of adolescence, with thick, coarse hair that was probably gold in sunlight, but in the shadow of the woods was the murky brown of river water. Her jaw was sharp, her chin roundly stubborn, her mouth marked by a deep dip above the upper lip. The calico dress she wore was neatly patched, and short enough that her skinny legs looked longer beneath it than they otherwise might; her feet were bare and exceedingly dirty, as were her face and hands. Her eyes met mine boldly, with no sign of the reticence so common to girls of that age. They were no particular colour.
“You frightened me,” I gasped, pressing a hand to my chest. My heart galloped merrily along beneath the skin. I felt foolish, the way I’d always felt as a girl when Florrie would creep up behind me and spook me with a loud noise or a tug on my hair. Nervous, nervous, she would say, and then pat my cheek to show she meant no harm. “I thought I was alone.”
The girl seemed unimpressed by this statement. Her head tilted slightly to the side as she regarded me. “You’re never alone out here. Are you lost?”
I was tempted to deny it in hopes of preserving some semblance of dignity but knew that would be foolish. “I’m afraid so,” I replied. “I was looking for things to put in my specimen jars and wandered away from the road. Quite far away, it seems.”
The girl made a dismissive little noise in the back of her throat. “As soon as I saw you wandering around,” she said, “I knew you probably didn’t know where you was. What’s that in your hand?”
I opened my fingers and showed her the skull. A part of me feared that the girl would find it as enchanting as I had and try to take it, but I needn’t have worried; she looked at it with blank disinterest.
“It’s just a bit of old bone,” she said. “What did you want that for?”
“So I can show it to my students,” I replied, closing my fist. Her lack of enthusiasm was rather galling. “I’m the new teacher — your teacher, if you are as young as you look. Miss Byrd.”
I extended my empty hand for her to shake, but the girl did not take it. Instead, she looked up at me through a thick fringe of dark lashes and said:
“It’s this way to the school. You can get back to the road from there.”
And with that she started walking, going at a clipping pace that soon left me breathless with the effort to keep up. Chest heaving, shirtwaist soaked through with perspiration, I scrambled after her up a steep embankment, wading through thick underbrush and weaving through stands of spruce and fir. I felt the whispery tickle of spiders racing across my neck but could not stop to brush them off. The girl did not bother to look over her shoulder and check that I was still behind her, and I found myself resenting the quick patter of her feet in the dirt, the ease with which she dodged outstretched branches and hopped over fallen logs, nimble as a goat.
“Could you please slow down?” I gasped at one point, but she spared me only a single disdainful glance over her shoulder; if anything, her pace quickened. There was no breath left in me to protest or insist. All I could do was stumble after her, panting like a she-dog.
The woods ended so suddenly that I scarcely realized the girl had stopped until I nearly ran into her. She darted out of my way with a curious kind of ducking grace.
“This is it,” she told me, and nodded at the land before us. A clearing, thick with weeds and wild grasses, and there, at the heart of it, the school.
It was the smallest I’d ever seen, a squat little building whose siding and shingles had faded to a mossy grey. The windows were soft with dust, the roof spotted with swallows’ nests. As I drew closer, I saw that the stovepipe poking its way toward the sky was blackened with soot, so dirty I was sure it had not been swept out for months. The only lick of colour on the whole thing was the door, which was blue — or had been, before time and weather had peeled off the paint in irregular patches, leaving bare wood in its wake.
The sight of it ought to have dismayed me — surely would have dismayed any other teacher, used to posts well-kept and -ordered — but I found myself charmed instead. The schoolhouse did not look as though it had been built at all. Instead, it looked natural, a sprout that had matured not into a fern or a tree but a building. The wildflowers and long grasses growing up around it, nearly obscuring the wooden steps, only added to this impression. It was difficult to tell where the woods and meadow ended, where the walls and doors began. It was like the girl herself, a wild thing.
“I love it.” I hadn’t intended to say it aloud but did not regret the words when they left my mouth. I did love it — or at least the sight of it, nested comfortably in flora, drowsy and warm in the afternoon sunshine. Clearing my throat, I turned back to the girl. “Thank you for your help. I can’t imagine how I became so turned around.”
The girl shrugged. “It’s a good thing I found you,” she replied. A strange way to say “you’re welcome!”
“I’ve given you my name,” I said, stung by her dismissive tone. Though I am not of that class of teachers that thinks children must grovel before any adult they meet, it rankled to be spoken to with such evident disdain. “It would be good manners for you to give me yours. I would like to know what to call my rescuer.”
A wry little smile twisted the girl’s mouth. The smile had a curious effect on the rest of her face: while most children’s smiles make them appear younger, hers made her strangely adult, a woman sewn into the skin of a girl.
“Muriel,” she said. “Muriel Melville. I live just up there.” She pointed down the path that led away from the schoolhouse, and I saw a rough little trail branching off it and winding away into the trees. “At the end of the Melville Road.”
“Road” was something of an exaggeration. The trail looked like it would not fit two men walking abreast.
“Hello, Muriel.” I extended my hand again. This time the girl took it, though without enthusiasm. I felt the scratch of a hangnail on her thumb. “I hope I shall see you again soon. You do go to school, don’t you?”
“Sometimes,” she replied, with another of those insolent shrugs. “When my old dad don’t need me at home. Sometimes he wants me in the house, taking care of him, not wasting time in school.”
“Your father doesn’t want you to be uneducated, surely?”
The girl did not respond to this question, but that wry smile returned, and I was suddenly certain that I was being mocked. Why or how I did not know — even as I write this, I do not know — but the feeling was so strong that I found my hands clenching defensively into fists. Surprised by the force of my reaction, I deliberately relaxed my fingers, one by one, before I crushed the owlet skull.
“Maybe,” Muriel said finally, with the air of someone making a great concession. “I’ll see if he’ll let me come, anyhow.” And with that she turned and started running toward the path she had called Melville Road, moving with the same wild grace as she had in the woods, until she disappeared into the trees.
Mrs. Grier exclaimed over the mud on my skirt and the bits of moss in my hair when I returned. Nothing would do but that I would submit to a bath after supper and scrub every last particle of dirt from my body, and so I did, folding myself awkwardly into the little tin tub in the kitchen and soaking in lukewarm water for the better part of an hour. I found a spider floating in the water afterwards, its spindly legs curled tight against its body. I wonder if it fell from the ceiling while I bathed, or if it had the misfortune to attach itself to me in the woods. Cat remained on her mat by the stove through the ordeal, looking askance at this foolish creature voluntarily entering the water.
The owlet skull I placed safely in a specimen jar on my walk home from the schoolhouse. It is on my washstand now, gleaming in the candlelight, little shadows dancing underneath its empty eyes. No painted shepherdess or silver jewel box could please me more.
August 28, 1901
Mrs. Grier and I went up to the schoolhouse this morning to give it a good cleaning before class comes in again. I had meant to go alone, but Mrs. Grier would not hear of it.
“More hands make less work,” she said, in her brisk little bird-voice. “That school has been empty since April, and I imagine the dust is inches thick on everything.”
Perhaps the dust was not inches thick, but it was enough to make me sneeze heartily when I opened the door! The two of us set to our work with a will, sweeping out cobwebs from the ceiling corners and blacking the stove until it shined. Together we scrubbed the two rows of desks until only the most stubborn epithets remained, cleared the empty swallows’ nests from the roof, pulled the weeds that choked the path and wiped both the schoolhouse windows clean with vinegar. I brought my map of the world to hang upon the wall, which Mrs. Grier regarded with interest, and my specimen jars to arrange at the edge of my desk, which she regarded with confusion (and, in the case of the owlet skull, not a little horror). When I tried to explain their purpose, her confusion only deepened.
“But why do you want to teach them those things?” she asked finally, after I had regaled her with tales of introducing my former students to the wonders of the natural world. “What use is it?”
The question is one that has recurred time and time again since the first time I picked up a pinecone on a walk as a tot. Pleased by its sturdy symmetry, I brought it home to examine it better, only to be soundly chastised by Father for filling his house with rubbish.
“But I wanted to look at it, Father,” I had protested. I was very young indeed then; in a few more years, I would learn that protesting my father’s will led only to a sound thrashing.
He had looked down his nose at me and replied: “To look at it! What on Earth is there to see?”
His voice rang in my ears as I said, “There is no end to the lessons that children may learn from the world around them, Mrs. Grier, and while those lessons may not be as immediately useful as arithmetic or spelling, they are beneficial nonetheless. A flower or a singing bird may teach them as much about the universe as a history book.”
Mrs. Grier nodded at that, but uncertainly, as though she did not find my answer altogether satisfactory. I could scarcely blame her; I do not find it satisfactory myself, although it is the answer I always give when asked. The shameful truth of the matter is that my pedagogical habits are purely selfish. I teach natural history because I find it fascinating, and if I did not have something interesting to teach, I would go mad.
While we worked, I asked her about the Melville family, taking care not to mention my encounter with Muriel the day before.
“The Melvilles?” Mrs. Grier sounded greatly surprised. She was scrubbing the teacher’s desk at that point, her hands with their rags moving so fast they nearly blurred. “Why, yes, they’ve been out there in the woods for years. A big clan in a little yellow house. Too little, really, for the number of ’em. Old Ed Melville rules the roost out there. He’s got one bairn still young enough for schooling, Muriel. You’ll see her when you start teaching — sometimes, anyway. They aren’t much for education, that family.”
I gathered from her tone that she did not quite approve of the Melvilles. They were, of course, from “the other side” of the bridge — the side where, her husband had said, people “ain’t quite like us.”
“How many of them are there?” I asked.
“Oh, heaven knows. Ed Melville’s been married three times now, had children with each wife: the big boys by the first two, and poor Muriel by the last. His boys are almost all gone now. Gone West to chase gold, or else to sea.”
I wondered what it was about the child that earned her the moniker “poor Muriel.” Perhaps being the only girl in a sea of boys was enough to do it. “You said he had three wives,” I said. “What happened to them?”
On bright days, there are times when a cloud passes so quickly across the sun that you can register it only as a blink of darkness, a momentary pause of light. Something like that happened to Mrs. Grier in that moment, her little bird’s face crossed by a shadow so brief I could almost think it imaginary. “Died,” she said. “They were young things, and pretty — Ed Melville has an eye for a pretty girl. But he can’t seem to make them last.”
And before me, between one breath and the next, was Florrie, laid out in her best dress, her pale hands folded on top of each other, a bruise visible at her temple beneath a whorl of hair. Her husband stood over her, one white-knuckled hand gripping the edge of her casket. I looked away, blinking furiously, and applied myself to wiping the very real, very solid blackboard in front of me.
I cannot think about her too much. I cannot think about any of it too much.
In lieu of thought, I let myself be carried away by the mindless drudgery of women’s work. The familiar motions of setting a school in order distracted me, and by the time Mrs. Grier and I crossed back over the bridge, I was, if not actually soothed, at least too sore and tired to think. I wanted nothing more than a meal, a cup of tea, and a good, sound sleep.
I have not yet described the bridge that gives this little town its name. One comes upon it suddenly, after a sharp bend in the path suddenly opens onto the wide stretch of the Slade River. It is a beam bridge of greying cedar, bordered on either side by cross rails. Underfoot, its timbers feel strangely fragile, as though any moment the wood will splinter and give way. I have been assured that the bridge has stood without incident for nearly a century, though that is hardly a comfort. All I can imagine is the rot creeping into the beams, year after year.
As Mrs. Grier and I crossed the bridge, I paused by the rails, looking from one side to the next. To my left, the river curved broadly away from the spruce woods into lush green farmland. I could see a hint of rolling fields, neat orchards, the barest gleam of a little white house in the distance. To my right, the spruces clustered close and thick, their shadows darkening the surface of the water. Just visible as the river bent again was an old grey watermill, lurking behind the trees. In the distance, the wooded hills rose to kiss the sky, the green of their leaves almost black in the fading light.
I gazed at the trees that bordered the northeast end of the bridge, the deep, greenish gloom of the woods beyond that seemed to swallow the road. For a moment I thought I saw something there: some flicker, some movement, something staring from the shadow of the trees. It tugged at the corner of my eye, needy as a child, but when I turned to look properly, there was nothing. Perhaps it was a deer, come to drink at the river, or a hare.
September 2, 1901
I woke early this morning, as I always do on the first day of school—as many of my pupils must do, too, come to think of it. The dawn had barely begun to break, and the sky outside my window was that hazy, delicate grey so particular to early autumn mornings. I lay in bed for as long as I could stomach it, watching the colour change to the faintest blushing periwinkle. It wasn’t until I heard Mrs. Grier stirring in the bedroom across the hall that I finally forced myself to rise.
