Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [48]
So that’s who I’m supposed to be, thought Nell. I’m the governess.
At the end of March, when the snow was mostly gone except in the shadows, and the buds were swelling, Nell finished her bedspread and arranged it on the single bed in her study. She was pleased with the way it had turned out. She called Tig in to admire it.
“Does this mean you’re here to stay?” asked Tig, folding his long arms around her from behind. Nell didn’t say anything, but she smiled. He wasn’t so obtuse after all.
In April, the boys brought up one of their cats because a farm needed a cat: they’d seen some mice, or possibly rats, in the barn. The cat was a city cat. Not being used to travel, it growled and threw up in the car, and when they’d reached the farm it leapt out before anyone could grab it and ran off into the bushes and wasn’t seen for days. When it came back it was thinner and had burrs stuck all over its fur. It scooted under the bed in Nell’s study and wouldn’t come out. Evidently, however, it must have emerged at night and rolled around on Nell’s knitted bedspread, to which it transferred most of the burrs. Nell picked away at them, but she could never get out all the little hooks and prickles.
Moral Disorder
There’s never been such a lovely spring, Nell thought. Frogs – or were they toads? – trilled from the pond, and there were pussy willows and catkins – what was the difference? – and then the hawthorn bushes and the wild plums and the neglected apple trees came into bloom, and an uneven row of daffodils planted by some long-vanished farmer’s wife thrust up through the weeds and dead grasses beside the drive. Birds sang. Mud dried.
In the evenings, Nell and Tig sat outside their rented farmhouse on two aluminium-framed lawn chairs they’d found in the back shed, holding hands, slapping away the occasional mosquito, and watching a barred owl teach her two young to hunt. For practise they were using the twelve ducklings Tig had bought and installed on the pond. He’d made a shelter for the ducklings – like a little house without walls, set on a floating raft. They could have gone in under the roof and been safe, but they didn’t seem to know enough to do that.
The owl swooped down in silence down over the surface of the pond where the ducklings ignorantly paddled, snatching a duckling a night, carrying each one up to the cavity in the dead tree where she had her nest, then rending the duckling apart and sharing it out to the young to be gobbled down, until all twelve ducklings were gone.
“Look at that,” said Tig. “Such grace.”
At the beginning of May the businessman who owned the farm said he was selling it. He gave them a month to move out. Since there wasn’t any lease, they had to go. But they couldn’t move back to the city, they were agreed on that. It was just too beautiful up here.
They drove a half hour farther north, where the prices would be cheaper, and scouted around on back roads, searching out the For Sale signs. Up near Garrett they managed to find something in their price range: a house, a barn, and a hundred acres. It had been on the market for more than a year. Vacant possession, said the owner, who was showing them around himself. He lived on another farm; he’d been using this barn to store hay. But now he was selling both properties, cashing in. “I want to see a bit of the world before it’s time for me to be putting on the wooden overcoat,” he said.
There was a pond on this farm as well, and a number of gnarled apple trees set around the house, and a drive shed with an old tractor in it. That came with, said the owner. The house was white clapboard, built in the mid-1830s, with a cement-floored addition on the back – a summer kitchen. The cellar was unfinished; its beams were trees with some of the bark still on them. The steps down to it were steep and hazardous. The dirt floor was damp, and had a hard-to-place odour. Not dry rot, not dead mouse, not sewage, exactly.
“It needs a lot of work,” said Nell. The farmer cheerfully admitted it, and knocked five thousand dollars off the price. Then there