Winter Shadows by Margaret Buffie Page B

portrait, pressed between pieces of heavy card, with brown paper. It was of my friend Penelope – I’d finished it from memory after I came home. Once I’d completed my task, I turned to the girls and hastened them along. I’d tried to have them emphasize the birth of Jesus in their cards as Miss Cameron is a deeply religious woman. The resulting manger scenes and starry grass plains filled with long-legged lambs – looking more like white-tailed deer – were finally ready. I gathered them up, along with my own package, and put them aside to give to Mr. McQuaker, who would take them north with the dog teams while the
weather held. I waited for the red-haired girl to return, but she did not appear
.
    As Tupper pulled me home in the waning light, I gazed across the river, striped with lengthening blue shadows. We passed a group of men and two massive workhorses draped in chains, pulling titanic slabs of ice from the river onto a sharply angled dock. I was certain that one of the men was Duncan Kilgour by his height and bulk. There was loud laughing when one of the men slipped and fell
.
    On my long journey home from Upper Canada, I’d worked hard at fighting the suffocating thought of another winter in St. Cuthbert’s. The bishop’s wife, a former housemaid from England, had for years used her narrow ignorance of the world to ban anything that smacked of higher education or a social nature in our parish. There had rarely been musical, poetry, or dramatic evenings to look forward to
.
    Mrs. Gaskell had suffered the nearest thing to an apoplectic seizure when I once had the temerity to suggest we start a literary society. I may as well have murdered one of my students in front of her, the way she went on about it! When she heard of an evening poetry-reading at one of our neighbor’s, her husband’s reproachful sermon blew over the congregation the next Sunday like the cold wind of doom
.
    Thinking of the long days ahead and the strange girl, I suddenly found it hard to breathe. Tupper, sensing my tension through the reins, slowed and stopped. I closed my eyes. Like a swift phantom, a yellow vehicle rose behind my eyelids. As it flew toward my mind’s eye, I saw once again the flash of red hair and the small startled face. I have had this
same vision three times since returning from Upper Canada
.
    Was the girl in the yellow carriage the same one I saw in my classroom today? It was, I’m sure of it. Did she recognize me? Was it really my journal she held in her hands? Did she read it? I realize how
kakêpâtis
I must sound as I write this. Papa might say I was having a nervous breakdown. Am I? I am sure Grandmother would say that these visions have a purpose
.
    Grandmother told me once how she was visited by a spirit woman. It was the last time she and her family faced starvation. Her younger sister had just died, and Aggathas was breathing her last, when the spirit appeared to her. It told nôhkom to be strong, for there were still many things to do in her life and her family would need her. She recovered to marry John Alexander and give birth to my papa
.
    But, unlike me, nôhkom is spiritually strong and filled with an inner calmness that radiates off her. I feel no such tranquility, for I must constantly battle my black
cakâstêsimowina.
    This afternoon, as I sat in the carriole, Tupper’s breath puffing small clouds from his nostrils, I wondered if the girl had been sent as a warning to me … if my diary had somehow been left out and been found by Ivy. I clicked my tongue, and Tupper moved forward. In the distance, smoke rose from Old Maples’s chimney like a coiled gray snake. As we turned into the barnyard, I wondered how long it would be before I saw the spirit girl again…
.
    The only good thing (and yet one that keeps me wondering) about this frightening day was that I found my diary still in its hiding place
.

8

CASS
    I sneezed hard and the book dissolved in my hands. The old woman was gone. My room