Ossified Mrs Grundy

Edith Munro had been the moral conscience of the village of Cape Whittle for forty-one years. She did not drink. She did not dance. She had not been seen to laugh aloud in public since the second Coolidge administration. She wrote letters to the parish paper, in a clean upright hand, about the conduct of other people — about the Petersen girl who had been seen smoking on the breakwater, about the new schoolmaster who kept a phonograph, about the fishermen who unloaded on Sundays. The editor printed her letters because she paid for the printing and because nobody else wrote any. The village read them and folded them and used them to start the morning fires.

Her husband, Angus, had been dead nine years. He had been a quiet man, a cooper by trade, and he had kept bottles. He had kept them in the cellar in a long row along the north wall, behind a curtain of sacking, where the cold of the rock came through and held them at the temperature of a deep well. He had laid them down one a year for thirty-three years of marriage, and Edith had never touched them, and after he died she had not touched them either. She had not gone down the cellar steps. She had paid a boy to bring up the potatoes.

On the eve of her seventy-second birthday a gale came in off the Banks. The wind worked at the shingles and the rain came at the windows sideways and the lamp on her kitchen table guttered and stood up and guttered again. She sat with her hands folded and listened to the house, which she had lived in for fifty years, complain in voices she had never heard it use. Somewhere out past the cape a bell was ringing, a ship’s bell, the wrong rhythm, and then it stopped. She thought of Angus. She thought of her mother. She thought of a song her mother had sung to her in the kitchen of a house in Lunenburg when she was four years old, in a language her mother had learned from her mother, who had come over from somewhere with a name that no one in Cape Whittle could pronounce. She got up. She took the lamp. She went down the cellar steps.

The first bottle she opened was a small one, the colour of a bruised tomato, with a paper label in Angus’s handwriting. It tasted of fruit grown in heat and of a slow burn behind the heat, like a pepper laid on the tongue and forgotten. She drank it sitting on the bottom step with the lamp beside her on the stone. She drank another. There was something fermented in the third, sharp and living, that caught at the back of her throat and made her cough, and the cough turned into a laugh, and the laugh was the first sound of its kind she had made in the cellar or anywhere else for as long as she could remember.

When the village awoke the wind had dropped and the sky was washed clean and Edith Munro was in the square in front of the post office, barefoot, in her nightdress, with her grey hair down past her waist. She was singing. The song had the slow pull of a hymn and the words were not English and were not French and were not anything anyone in Cape Whittle had heard for a generation, possibly two. She sang it for an hour. The postmaster came out and stood on his step. The Petersen girl came out and stood by the rail. The new schoolmaster came out and took off his hat, although he did not know why.

When she had finished she walked home, on her bare feet, over the wet stones, and she made herself a breakfast of bread and butter and cold tea, and she ate it at her kitchen table with the door open to the morning. She did not write to the parish paper that week. She did not write to it the week after. She did not write to it again. She lived another eleven years and was buried beside Angus, and the boy who had brought up her potatoes, who was by then a man with a boat of his own, was one of the four who carried her.