The following morning Cassie took Mary down to the brook to fetch water. They balanced on stones over dark shallow pools and before they dipped the buckets Mary pointed to her likeness on the surface. She smiled across at Cassie. “Mary,” she said, still pointing. Every time they came for water she repeated this ritual of recognition and naming, as if to reassure herself of her identity in the Peyton household. It had been months since it had given Cassie a moment’s pause. She looked at the woman beside her. Mary has a child, she thought.
They pushed the rim of each bucket into their reflected faces and lifted them clear when they dragged full. They carried two buckets apiece by rough hemp-rope handles and they walked in the centre of chime hoops salvaged from pickling barrels, the buckets resting against the circumference of birch to keep the slop of water clear of their dresses. Mary’s bundle of leather clothing was tied to her back in a sling of linen. The last mosquitoes of the summer swarmed their defenceless heads and the Indian woman chanted a song that seemed to Cassie to be as tuneless as the lilt of the insects. She’d asked once what the song was about and Mary had set the buckets down to mime tipping a glass to her mouth. “Wa-ter,” she said.
When Mary first arrived at the winter house with the Peytons in March, Cassie looked at her as she might have if John Peyton had carted in a half-wild animal — as something that might be tamed, taught a few manners. She boiled kettles of water on the crane and filled the tiny wooden tub while the two men sat about the kitchen in their winter gear. Mary was sitting on the floor near John Peyton and as John Senior talked she looked surreptitiously about the room. “I don’t suggest you being alone in her company,” John Senior said, but Cassie sent the men outside into the cold to cut and split wood and look to the animals and then she stood Mary up and stripped her naked on the kitchen floor. Mary averted her head as if she was avoiding the sight of an ugly wound.
There was a stench beneath her clothes, Cassie remembered, something sour. She didn’t know then that Mary had been nursing a child, that her milk would have leaked and stained her cassock and spoiled. She’d assumed it was simply the smell of an Indian and something that might be scalded away in time. The leggings were tied at the waist with a string of leather that Cassie couldn’t unknot and Mary reached to do it for her, her head still turned sharply to the side. Her entire torso was oiled with red ochre and when Cassie sat her in the tub the water curdled the colour of blood. There was a bar of lye soap and a brush used to scrub the wood floors and Cassie scoured with the same resolute thoroughness, paying particular attention to the corners and crevices where the ochre was most resistant — in the hollows above the clavicles, the line beneath the slight sag of her breasts. She worked until the water went cold and Mary began shivering. She poured more hot water into the filthy tub and went back to scrubbing.
The Indian woman spoke then, a single guttural syllable, and Cassie looked at her, their eyes meeting for the first time. She was kneeling beside the tub, her dress soaked in the water and suds and red oil that had spilled on the floor. Their faces only inches apart. Cassie could smell her breath, surprisingly sweet, untainted, with an undertone of something sharp and clear, like spruce gum.
“What is it?” she said, speaking softly because their faces were so close together.
Mary repeated the sound and tipped her cupped hand to her mouth.
“Water,” Cassie said.
Mary nodded.
“Wa-ter,” Cassie said again, in distinct syllables, and Mary repeated them back to her. After she had given her the cup, Cassie considered she should have taught her to say “please,” as well.
Cassie set the empty cup aside and pointed to herself with a wet index finger. “Cassandra,” she said. A tiny circular stain of water marking her dress at the breastbone. “Cassie,” she said. “Ca-ssie.” After they had worked on the pronunciation a moment, she pointed to the woman in the tub. “What is your name?” she asked. “Your. Name.”
Without hesitation the Indian woman said, “Mary.”
“We had to call her something,” John Peyton explained later. “We couldn’t make head nor tail of whatever she called herself.” In all her time in the Peyton household, she would never refer to herself as anything but Mary, the English name like a protective talisman she carried close to her skin.