Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace

Well, I don’t know where he expects a potato to grow, I have never seen them dangling about on the bushes. I say nothing, and he says, What else is underground, Grace?

There would be the beets, I say. And the carrots are the same way, Sir, I say. It is their nature. He seems disappointed in this answer, and does not write it down. He looks at me and thinks. Then he says, Have you had any dreams, Grace?

And I say, What do you mean, Sir?

I think he means do I dream of the future, do I have any plans for what I may do in my life, and I think it is a cruel question; seeing as I am in here until I die, I do not have many bright prospects to think about. Or perhaps he means do I daydream, do I have fancies about some man or other, like a young girl, and that notion is just as cruel if not more so; and I say, a little angry and reproachful, What would I be doing with dreams, it is not very kind of you to ask.

And he says, No, I see you mistake my meaning. What I am asking is, do you have dreams when you are asleep at night?

I say, a little tartly because it is more of his gentleman’s nonsense and also I am still angry, Everybody does, Sir, or I suppose they do.

Yes, Grace, but do you? he says. He has not noticed my tone or else he has chosen not to notice it. I can say anything to him and he would not be put out or shocked, or even very surprised, he would only write it down. I suppose he is interested in my dreams because a dream can mean something, or so it says in the Bible, such as Pharaoh and the fat kine and the lean kine, and Jacob with the angels going up and down the ladder. There is a quilt called after that, it is the Jacob’s Ladder. I do, Sir, I say.

He says, What did you dream last night?

I dreamt that I was standing at the door of the kitchen at Mr. Kinnear’s. It was the summer kitchen; I had just been scrubbing the floor, I know that because my skirts were still tucked up and my feet were bare and wet, and I had not yet put my clogs back on. A man was there, just outside on the step, he was a peddler of some sort, like Jeremiah the peddler who I once bought the buttons from, for my new dress, and McDermott bought the four shirts.

But this was not Jeremiah, it was a different man. He had his pack open and the things spread out on the ground, the ribbons and buttons and combs and pieces of cloth, very bright they were in the dream, silks and cashmere shawls and cotton prints gleaming in the sun, because it was broad daylight and full summer.

I felt he was someone I had once known, but he kept his face turned away so I could not see who it was. I could sense that he was looking down, looking at my bare legs, bare from the knee and none too clean from scrubbing the floor, but a leg is a leg, dirty or clean, and I did not pull down my skirts. I thought, Let him look, poor man, there’s nothing like that where he’s come from. He must have been a foreigner of some sort, he’d walked a long way, and he had a darkish and a starved look to him, or so I thought in the dream.

But then he wasn’t looking any more, he was trying to sell me something. He had a thing of mine and I needed it back, but I had no money so I could not buy it from him. We will trade then, he said, we will bargain. Come, what will you give me, he said in a teasing way.

What he had was one of my hands. I could see it now, it was white and shrivelled up, he was dangling it by its wrist like a glove. But then I looked down at my own hands, and I saw that there were two of them, on their wrists, coming out of the sleeves as usual, and I knew that this third hand must belong to some other woman. She was bound to come around looking for it, and if I had it in my possession she would say I had stolen it; but I did not want it any more, because it must have been cut off. And sure enough, there was the blood now, dripping and thick like syrup; but I was not horrified by it at all, as I would have been by real blood if awake; instead I was anxious about something else. Behind me I could hear the music of a flute, and this made me very nervous.

Go away, I said to the peddler man, you must go away right now. But he kept his head turned aside and would not move, and I suspected he might be laughing at me.

And what I thought was: It will get on the clean floor.

I say, I can’t remember, Sir. I can’t remember what I dreamt last night. It was something confusing. And he writes that down.

I have little enough of my own, no belongings, no possessions, no privacy to speak of, and I need to keep something for myself; and in any case, what use would he have for my dreams, after all?

Then he says, Well, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

I find that an odd choice of words, and I say, I am not a cat, Sir.

And he says, Oh I remember, nor are you a dog, and he smiles. He says, The question is, Grace, what are you? Fish or flesh or good red herring?

And I say, I beg your pardon, Sir?

I do not take well to being called a fish, I would leave the room except that I don’t dare to. And he says, Let us begin at the beginning.

And I say, The beginning of what, Sir?

And he says, The beginning of your life.

I was born, Sir, like anyone else, I say, still annoyed with him.

I have your Confession here, he says, let me read you what you said in it. That is not really my Confession, I say, it was only what the lawyer told me to say, and things made up by the men from the newspapers, you might as well believe the rubbishy broadsheet they were peddling about, as that. The first time I set eyes on a newspaper man I thought, Well then, does your mother know you’re out? He was almost as young as I was, he had no business writing for the papers as he was barely old enough to shave. They were all like that, wet behind the ears, and would not know the truth if they fell over it. They said I was eighteen or nineteen or not more than twenty, when I was only just turned sixteen, and they couldn’t even get the names right, they spelled Jamie Walsh’s name three different ways, Walsh, Welch, Walch, and McDermott’s too, with a Mc and a Mac, and one’t and two, and they wrote down Nancy’s name as Ann, she was never called that in her life, so how could you expect them to get anything else right? They will make up any old thing to suit themselves. Grace, he says then, who is Mary Whitney?

I give him a quick look. Mary Whitney, Sir? Now where would you get such a name as that? I say. It is written underneath your portrait, he says. At the front of your Confession. Grace Marks, Alias Mary Whitney.

Oh yes, I say. It is not a good likeness of me.

And Mary Whitney? he says.

Oh, that was just the name I gave, Sir, at the tavern in Lewiston when James McDermott was running away with me. He said I should not give my own name, in case they came looking for us. He was gripping my arm very tight at the time, as I recall. To make sure I would do as he told me. And did you give any name that came into your head? he says.

Oh no, Sir, I say. Mary Whitney was once a particular friend of mine. She was dead by that time, Sir, and I did not think she would mind it if I used her name. She sometimes lent me her clothing, too. I stop for a minute, thinking of the right way to explain it.

She was always kind to me, I say; and without her, it would have been a different story entirely.

Chapter 13

There is a little verse I remember from a child:

Needles and pins, needles and pins,

When a man marries his trouble begins.

It doesn’t say when a woman’s trouble begins. Perhaps mine began when I was born, for as they say, Sir, you cannot choose your own parents, and of my own free will I would not have chosen the ones God gave me.

What it says at the beginning of my Confession is true enough. I did indeed come from the North of Ireland; though I thought it very unjust when they wrote down that both of the accused were from Ireland by their own admission. That made it sound like a crime, and I don’t know that being from Ireland is a crime; although I have often seen it treated as such. But of course our family were Protestants, and that is different.