CHAPTER IX—MARY GUILFOYLE
The sun had come out bright after a rain, and every leaf was shining, the June day when we drove over to Ridgefield to fetch Mary Guilfoyle. We started early in the morning, but it was already like noon in that midsummer season. Daisies were powdering the fields, as white as snow, and yellow and orange hawkweeds were growing in among them, so that whole fields showed yellow, orange, and white. The orange hawkweed is very fragrant, and its sweetness mixed with the spicy bitterness of the daisies. Then, on a knoll as the road rose above the river, we found patches of bright blue lupins in the yellow and orange and white, making such a blaze of color as I have never seen before in our northern fields.
There were streaks of crimson sorrel in the fields where there were no daisies, among the ripening June-grass and red-top; all the grasses, and the fields of grain, were beginning to turn a little tawny, and quick waves chased each other across them with the light summer wind.
Mary lives in a scrap of a new house, in a thick wood of young firs and spruces. The last mile of our road led through these sweet-smelling trees, which were set all over with light green jewels of new growth. Grass grew in the ruts, and the moist earth of the wood road was thronged with yellow butterflies; and tiny “blues,” like bits of the sky come to life, fluttered among the ferns. Breath after breath of sweetness came from the warm woods in the sunshine.
Mary was waiting for us at the door, with her knitting in her hand, and her cat at her skirts. Her small rough fields across the road were ploughed and planted, and she was ready to come to us. She is a strongly built old woman with bright blue eyes and yellowish gray hair, sturdy as a weather-beaten piece of white-oak timber. Many is the time that she has left our house of an afternoon (in our impossible spring going, too, with the frost coming out of the ground and the mud a foot deep); walked out to her farm, six full miles, seen to some detail of farm-work that worried her, and walked back, arriving before seven the next morning, to cook our breakfast.
She works on her farm all summer, planting and hoeing her corn and beans and potatoes. She has help from the men of the neighborhood when she can get it, but I believe she follows the plough herself when she is put to it. In winter she comes into town, and works for households in difficulties. If the cook deserts us, or we have a sudden influx of guests or everyone has grippe, we send for Mary Guilfoyle and she sees us through. She comes into a house like a blast of clear air. Nothing ruffles her, and her mere presence seems to return its right proportions and gayety to life. She knows how to work as few people do nowadays, and she is so sound-hearted and unafraid that there is something royal and powerful about her.
Mary’s mother was French, and it is from her she gets her gestures. Her hands move finely, with a dignity and control a duchess might envy, and they say more than mere words could. And then, her funny expressions! She is a Roman Catholic, but so far from being a church-goer that I was surprised, last Easter morning, at seeing her ready for church; and my surprise was rebuked with,
PLOUGHING MARY’S FIELD
“Child, the heretic and the hangman go to church on this morning!”
Her speech is unlike anybody else’s. Every sentence is vivid, but they lose their quaint flavor in telling. She is delighted (she is a fine cook), but excited, too, at getting a “company meal,” and loses her appetite.
“The cook cannot eat, not if she were at the gates of heaven, at these times,” she puts it.
She was telling one day of an unfortunate young farm neighbor—
“He knelt on a nail, and took lock-jaw. They hoisted him to Portland, but it warn’t of no use. He died in four days. He was a beautiful young man. Warn’t it terrible?”
Somehow I never fail to see the poor youth caught up in a sheet and swung through the air the whole journey.
Mary was born and brought up in the Catholic community at Ridgefield; but she has spent little time there. Fifty-five years ago, when she was sixteen, she learned fine sewing and clear-starching at the Great House of our neighborhood, and then nothing would do but she must seek her fortune in Boston, where she already had two sisters in service. She made the voyage in a sailing vessel, a small brig laden with hay. She found out the name of a first-rate dressmaker, in Temple Place; next she bought a piece of fine gray cashmere, and cut and made herself a jacket and dress. Then she presented herself.
“How do I know you are a seamstress at all?” the dressmaker asked.
“I cut and made every stitch I have on me.”
“You may go right upstairs, at seven dollars a week, with the others.”
A sweep of the hand illustrated the triumph; seven dollars was fine pay in those days.
One of her sisters was cook for many years for Oliver Wendell Holmes.
(“A little man, the face wrinkled”—and Mary’s eloquent hands made me see the Doctor again in person.) He took care of her money for her; and Mary has often told me how one day, after many years, he said,
“Now, Anna, you are a rich woman; you need never work again, and can do what you like.”
She bought a nice little house in one of the suburbs.
“But a year was all she could stand of it. She couldn’t make out to live, away from the Holmeses, and back she goes to them.”
Mary married at twenty, and lived quietly in Chelsea for five and twenty years. Then her husband died, and instead of going home to the farm, or staying on where she was, to take boarders, this born adventurer was off to see the world.
“I hadn’t seen, not one thing, cooped up there in Chelsea. I wanted to find out about new things, and new places, whilst I was strong.”
She took a part of her savings, sewed up in the front of her gown, to fall back on, but her capable hands were the real funds on which she depended. She traveled to Denver, and there went out to service, and afterwards worked in a restaurant. She found light work in plenty, and in between jobs took her heart’s fill of sight-seeing. She saw Pike’s Peak and the Grand Canyon. By the end of the winter she had earned enough to take her to San Francisco. Here she had a sister- and brother-in-law who ran a good restaurant, and Mary joined forces with them. A year brim-full of life followed, but after this her two own sisters, her only surviving near relations, fell ill, and she came home to nurse them. It was then that she bought her farm, near her old home in Ridgefield, planning that the three should spend their old age together. Both sisters, though, died; but my indomitable Mary keeps the farm almost as well as a man could, and her strong nature, tremendously intent on the present moment, never feels loneliness.
As I said, she is not much of a church-goer, but she is devout in her own way, and plans to go back to San Francisco, to the convent where a cousin of hers is now Abbess, and there
“Get ready to die; and a good thing to do, too, first-rate!”
I never knew anyone so indifferent about dress as Mary; she is quite pretty in her way, and must always have been so, but she puts on whatever is nearest at hand, and will hamper her least. It is a fact that I saw her out in the rain the other day, taking in clothes from the line, with a length of brown oil-cloth tied about her stout person, by way of an apron, with marline, and an empty shredded-wheat box, split up on one side, on her head for a hat.
The lower meadows were still yellow with the gold of buttercups as we drove home, and where the swales ran lower and richer we saw tall Canada Lilies, Loose-strife, and purple and white fringed orchids, in among the Meadow-rue, and light green ferns and ripening grasses. There was Blue-eyed Grass, too, and Iris. It was all rich and fragrant, and butterflies were hovering about the lilies; and as if this were not enough, a breath of woodsy sweetness, much like the fragrance of Lady’s Slippers, met us from a mixed meadow and cranberry bog, and there were flocks of rose-pink Arethusas all delicately poised among the grasses.
Meadow-larks were rising all about, singing their piercingly sweet notes. The children were picking wild strawberries, and the blackberries flung out long springing sprays down the perfected June roadways. Their blossoms are very like small single sweet-briar roses.
ON TRESUMPSCOTT POND