I sank onto the pallet before the fire, weaker than I had known since the smallpox, and rustled betwixt the blankets. As I lay staring into the pulsing red coals, I thought, not one time had Birgitta threatened me with a stick. She was naught but tender kindness. What had changed? As hideous as it was to cut off my hair, I knew of that done for sickness, especially yellow fever. I felt puzzled at Birgitta’s caring to have done it, for all I might have expected was that they’d throw me out in the snow to die. I watched her stir the copper pot and lapsed into dreamy sleep.
At length I awoke wrapped in a blanket in Birgitta’s lap! Her head was leaned back at a sharp angle and she snored through an open mouth. I dared not move. I looked into her mouth and pondered the teeth, some of them still good, but a few looked black and there was a smell of old sourness coming from her. I felt embarrassed that I had peered at someone I barely knew and without her knowledge.
“Birgitta?” I whispered.
She mumbled. “What? What, Mary?”
This was the oddest predicament I had yet encountered, odder than being called “Mary” or milking goats. “I thought you hated me.”
“Hated you, Mary? Why would you think that?”
I raised my face to hers again, and said, “You beat me all the time.”
Her face bore confusion. “Bible says to spare not the rod of correction. You was given me to raise and train and care for. Beating is good for children. And gentler than my dada rolling me in a sack and kicking me across the floor. You’re too big to sack.”
“Sack?” I asked. I had never heard of anything so wretched. “I am not as foolish as a goat. I am clever. You could teach me without beating me.” Care for? Train? I doubt that I hid my own confusion. “If I tried very hard to do what you wish, might you just explain it, rather than hit me with a stick?”
Birgitta wept. After some time she said, “I never had no child of mine. I always wanted a little girl named Mary. All ’as I ever knew is how to run goats. I’m old and these misses are not mine to guide and care for. I’m not allowed to correct them at all. Mary, if you’d behave without a stick, well, why didn’t you say so? You was so mean and naughty. I wanted them to get me a nice girl, not a hard one.”
Mean? How could I be anything but angry at her treatment? Overcome with emotion, I patted Birgitta’s arm. “You were never a mother? Likewise, I was never a slave.” I pulled up my feet to hide the stockings.
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back, speaking toward the gloomy ceiling. “Too late, now. Too, too late to be a mother. You see them girls. Addled, every one. We was brother and sisters, Master and Mistress and me, Haskens all. With no others in our town, they married. But I was older and I would have another, though he would not have me, so my sister was allowed a husband of our faith. A brother and sister should not marry lest they beget some defect as you see here. A brother and sister marrying is a shame, but for me to marry him also would be a sin.” She stared at the shadows overhead.
I followed her eye’s direction and grimaced at the shreds of spiderwebs clotted with dust and grease, hanging like fringe from the beams. Real silk fringe used to hang on my bedroom windows to keep out bugs and let in the breeze. “You are their auntie.”
“Not the same. I am the old shoe they can’t throw down the well and must feed. So I mind the goats. They said I wast ever lazy so no man would marry me. I shall train you to be not lazy, to work as the righteous ought. That way you will not be an old auntie to a passel of misbegotten brats. You will marry and keep house.”
Was this training meant as good for my future? Birgitta fell asleep. Her face was pale, red dots of fever on each cheek, the skin had grown fiery. As she slept, I crept from her lap. My shoes lay by the fire and I pulled them on, thinking with curiosity at the change in my treatment. My hair had not magically regrown, but still, in my own heart things were different between Birgitta and me. I clenched my jaw, remembering that I was a gift, a toy for an old, childless spinster to play with, a game of false motherhood.
In the corner of the room, a bedstead where Birgitta usually slept was tossed and unkempt. I pulled the blankets back, curling my lips at the grimy bed, and I turned my gaze to the window. Like a plant under a rock, I felt I would die for want of the sun. A thin, gray light washed across the pillow. It was dirty in the center and worn through on the corners, stuffed with what looked like wads of goat hair. I pulled Birgitta’s hand. “Come, lie down,” I coaxed.