(1993) The Stone Diaries Read Online Free Page A

at the sides of Mercy’s young face, and a blinking prettiness that shows itself in certain lights, in the curve of her upper lip or the tender spilt panic of her hazel eyes. When she looks into Mercy’s calf eyes she does not think "childish," but "child." Poor thing, poor lost thing. Never a mother to call her own, and now, from the looks of it—though who could tell such things, who can read the future?—no little ones of her own to rock and sing to.
    Mrs. Flett—her Christian name is Clarentine—has three grown sons, Simon, Andrew, and Barker, but no daughter. The eldest of these sons, Barker, has gone to Winnipeg to study at the College, and the other two work at the quarry alongside her husband Magnus, a master stonecutter, a cold, lean Orkneyman who immigrated to Canada at the age of nineteen. His Orkney ways have stayed with him. He prefers simple things. A plainly furnished house. A carefully tended garden. Ordinary food on the table, a supper of porridge or smoked fish or even a plate of bread and butter washed down by tea. The sight of a Malvern pudding unmolded on a glass plate and covered with cream would distress him deeply, particularly a pudding set out on what is, after all, an ordinary Monday evening in high summer in the year 1905 (the year of my birth, the day of my birth).
    Mrs. Flett, Clarentine, a neat-bodied woman whose skin is the color of mushrooms and whose memory of her sons’ infancy has been washed clear by disappointment, dreams of taking Mercy’s large dry hand in hers and saying, "A woman’s life isn’t worth a plateful of cabbage if she hasn’t felt life stir under her heart. Taking a little one to nurse, watching him grow to manhood, that’s what love is. We say we love our husbands, we stand up in church saying as how we’ll love them forever and ever, till death do we part, but it’s our own blood and sinew we really love."
    She likes giving Mercy things. Only last spring, while cleaning house, she came across an old tinware jelly mold, and this is the vessel Mercy uses today to provide shape for her Malvern pudding.
    She gives Mercy flowers from her garden, sweet peas, nicotiana, dianthus, candytuft, snapdragons. Also lettuce when it’s in season, new radishes, carrots, broad beans. Also pots of berry jam or rhubarb pickle. Once a set of tea towels with embroidered corners, another time an appliqued sham with an open-work centre. Why, she’s even given Mercy the cookery book the girl’s so everlasting fond of and has nearly worn out with use. At Christmas she gave her a bar of heliotrope soap fresh in its paper wrapper, and once, out of the blue, a hairpin glass trimmed with ribbon. These objects, passing out of her hands into Mercy’s, seem momentarily ringed with light, though the phrases she employs along with her gift-giving are calculated to diminish her generosity. "I’ve no earthly use for this myself." Or "I’ve more here than would feed an army" or "Too fancy for us, but it’ll suit you" or "Mr. Flett don’t hold with sweet-smelling stuff, and I do hate to throw a thing away what’s perfectly good and useful."
    Mercy’s softly focused gratitude, her slow-forming smile with its hint of bewilderment and her look of being unspotted by the world make Mrs. Flett long to take her in her arms. She can imagine Mercy’s compacted fullness pressing up against her own tidy dress front, heaving with emotion and surrender. "My dear," she would like to murmur into the pale bulk of Mercy’s neck, into Mercy’s soft shoulders and curling brown hair.
    The moment lies in the future, it will come. This is what she thinks as she stands under the blazing sun, pegging her clean wash to the line—the linens first, then her aprons and shirt waists, then the men’s summer overalls. There is so little breeze that the clothes will dry stiff and hard—in two hours they’ll be dry, it’s that hot. She’s late with the wash today, and there’s still the garden to weed, and