Legend of the Seventh Virgin Read Online Free

made us more despairing than ever when we woke up.
    I saw desperation in my father’s eyes. I saw him looking at Joe and me; it was as though he came to a decision.
    He said to me: “Your mother used to talk to you a lot about your Granny.”
    I nodded. I had always loved — and never forgotten — the stories of Granny Bee who lived in a place called St. Larnston.
    “I reckon she’d like to have a look at ’ee — you and little Joe.”
    I did not realize the significance of those words until he took out the boat. He, having lived his life on the sea, was well aware of what was threatening. I remember his coming into the cottage and shouting to me. “They’m back!” he said. “It’ll be pilchards for breakfast. Take care of Joe till I come back.” I watched him go. I saw the others on the beach; they were talking to him and I knew what they were saying, but he didn’t listen.
    I hate the southwest wind. Whenever it blows I hear it as it blew that night. I put Joe to bed but I didn’t go myself. I just sat up, saying “Pilchards for breakfast,” and listening to the wind.
    He never came back, and we were alone. I didn’t know what to do but I still had to pretend for Joe’s sake. Whenever I tried to think of what I could do, I kept hearing my mother’s voice telling me to look after my brother; and then my father’s saying: “Take care of Joe till I come back.”
    Neighbors helped us for a while, but those were bad times, and there was talk of putting us into the workhouse. Then I remember what my father had said about our Granny and I told Joe we were going to find her. So Joe and I set out for St. Larnston, and, in time and after some hardship, we came to Granny Bee.
    Another thing I shall never forget was the first night in Granny Bee’s cottage. Joe was wrapped in a blanket and given hot milk to drink; and Granny Bee made me lie down while she bathed my feet and put ointment on the sore places. Afterwards I believed that my wounds were miraculously healed by the morning, but that couldn’t have been true. The feeling of deep satisfaction and content comes back to me now. I felt I had come home and that Granny Bee was dearer to me than anyone I had ever known. I loved Joe, of course, but never in my life had I known anyone so wonderful as Granny Bee. I remember lying on the bed while she took down her marvelous black hair and combed it and rubbed it — for even the unexpected arrival of two grandchildren could not interfere with that ritual.
    Granny Bee healed me, fed me, clothed me — and she gave me my dignity and my pride. The girl I was at the time when I stood in the hollow wall was not the same one who had come exhausted to her door.
    She knew this, because she knew everything.
    We adjusted ourselves to the new life quickly, as children do. Our home was now in a mining community instead of a fishing one; for although the St. Larnston mine was closed, the Fedder mine provided work for many of the St. Larnston people who walked the two miles or so each day to and from their work. I discovered that miners were as superstitious as the fishermen had been, for each calling was dangerous enough for those who followed it to wish to please the gods of chance.
    Granny Bee would sit for hours telling me stories of the mines. My grandfather had been a miner. She told me how a didjan had to be left to placate the evil spirits, and that meant a good part of a hungry man’s lunch; she spoke angrily of the system of paying tribute instead of wages which meant that if a man had a bad day and his output was small, his pay was correspondingly so; she was equally indignant about those mines which had their own tommy shops at which a miner must buy all his goods, sometimes at high prices. When I listened to Granny I could imagine myself descending the mine shaft; I could see the men in their red-stained ragged clothes and their tin helmets to which a candle was stuck with sticky clay; I was conscious of dropping