Christiane had cherished a dream ever since she was a little girl in Maine. She had run out down to the privy at the back of the cabin and sat with her legs dangling and the door ajar in case of bears, and hugged herself while she summoned up her dream. She was going to ride off with a handsome man with a red mouth and a black beard (just like papa) who would build a new cabin for her and let her sit in it all day near to the fire (when she wasn’t making pies in the kitchen or rocking herself on the porch outside). She would have babies (not lots, not as many as her mama) and they would smile all the time and coo and never smell dirty or try to wriggle their fat little way out of her loving hands.
Christiane had to dream her dream down there by the trees on account of it was the only place she could get far enough away. Nights there were five of them piled under the patchwork quilt, the lumpy straw mattress almost no protection against the hard boards of the floor. Then most of the day she was jostled and chased and called from one errand to another, one of her spiteful brothers tripping her as she ran with a mixing bowl, one of her sisters poking out her tongue while she struggled to milk the goat with little success. But she clung to her dream and as she grew it grew with her, until that red-mouthed, black-bearded man was who she looked for whenever there was the sound of a horse or wagon upon the track that led to the farm. She looked for him so blatantly when they made their monthly expedition to the town store that her mother threatened to leave her home next time if she didn’t stop gawping so.
Christiane tried to force the dream deeper inside her. She was proficient now with the goats, the cows; the hens came to her call and her father said he knew when she hadn’t been the one feeding them on account of they didn’t lay so many eggs.
While her sisters sewed and knitted and made samplers that were hung with pride on the wall, Christiane worked in the barn or toiled in their failure of a garden, one eye always over her shoulder, looking for a husband, certain she would recognize him when he came.
It was her mother who told her, the two of them bottling fruit in the sun at the kitchen table. She explained how Hank Grice had talked with her father in town and said as how he was finding it difficult to manage his place now that the fever had taken off his wife and the hired hand he’d taken on had run off with his best mule. Mr Grice would see she got enough to eat and had a place of her own to sleep out over the barn. He took her father’s word that she was a good worker and honest and he’d treat her fair and square.
Christiane didn’t believe what her mother was saying. The words like shackles, cold and hard and uncaring. If she was living with Hank Grice as his slave and skivvy how was the man she’d dreamed about going to find her?
But she knew there was nothing she could say; knew her folks were finding it impossible to make ends meet, to find enough food for them all to eat. One of the boys had gone and Lisa had been married to a farm boy who had a place out by Moose Head. She was next oldest and it was her turn. She understood; even as she cried and packed her few miserable belongings she understood.
Her father was waiting by the barn with the team hitched and he turned away as she came towards him so that she couldn’t see his red-mouthed, black-bearded face.
Hank Grice was forty and short, not even as tall as Christiane herself. He had a bald head save for a few wisps of soft grey hair that dusted up from behind his ears and fell loose across his head. His nose had been broken and never set properly. He had red blotches down one side of his face and around his neck and when Christiane had to pour water over him for his weekly bath she saw they continued all the way down his chest and back.
He didn’t seem to like her, didn’t trust her. Whenever she came into the house, he looked up sharply, ready to accuse.
He made her work from dawn till gone dusk. She did the milking and made the butter, baked and stewed and there had to be meals on the table whenever he came in from the fields. At sewing and harvest she was out there with him and she learned to plough a straighter furrow than he could himself.
At first she visited her folks every month but after a while it only hurt her inside so she stopped.
In the second year, Grice seemed to withdraw his resentment from her. He encouraged her to wear the hand-me-down dress of her mother’s when they ate supper at weekends. He lent her his Bible to read and, even though she understood no more than half a dozen words, she took it gratefully as a sign of his mellowing.
She still stirred at the sound of horses along the road.
In spite of herself she began to take pride in the small farm and in the work she did. She looked at her calloused hands and felt good that she was using them to make things grow. In the dusk she stood alone amongst the corn and closed her eyes tight and heard it grow.
He came for her that night.
It was late and she knew from the dim light through the window of the house that he’d been sitting up long past his usual time. She’d fallen asleep and the banging of the barn door had broken her awake, his feet heavy and impatient on the ladder. She saw the shadow of his face, a glimpse of his eyes in the moonlight that came through the slats of the roof; his breath stank of too much bad liquor. His hands were clumsy and he used his knees to force her legs apart.
She struggled and fought and when he hit her, the blood seeped back into her mouth. He burned and stabbed into her and jammed his wrist inside her open mouth to stop her screams. Within a pitiful few minutes he cried out himself and finished and fell across her. Christiane thought she should be crying but her eyes and her mind were dry as crumbled stone. She thought about the animals in the field and the barn and how she had watched them and wondered that this had been so little different.
So little joy.
Grice was drunk and asleep and snoring harshly.
She rolled him onto his back and saw his thing, curled and flaccid and stupid and felt something that was almost pity.
Down below she gathered her belongings together and saddled up one of the horses. She prised open the box where he kept his money and took precisely one half of the contents. She left him his rifle and took his Colt pistol and a box of ammunition. From the kitchen she took the sharpest knife. It never occurred to her to go home; they had got rid of her as a burden and she wasn’t about to impose herself upon them again.
Christiane tucked her skirts into her drawers and climbed into the saddle; she had ridden astride before when no one had been there to watch and that was how she rode now. The moon was silvery thin between the tops of the trees and the tops of the corn glistened silvery white. East was the ocean and she turned west, knowing that she would feel the warmth of the sun on her back and knowing that it would be good.