Molly Whuppie 2

Morning crept up on the cabin from the forest that spread around it like the sea. The land was so flat, and the forest so wide, that the light seemed to leak from the trees to fill the world. At first it coloured the sky a cold grey, pinching out the stars, and then it lapped at the edge of the dark clearing that Molly’s father had hacked out of the woods in those first days of building the cabin. Slowly it poured on in, filling up the space between the living tree-trunks and the dead wood of the cabin’s walls, and, as it came, it revealed the hiding places of the shadows in their deep corners and their little ditches, and it brought the shadows with it, even through the window into the cabin itself.

Inside, Molly’s mother moved about busily. She stacked five used bowls at the end of the table; she laid out thread and a long needle; she fussed over the tiny glow in the embers of last night’s fire. She pulled back the curtain that hung between her and her daughters’ empty bed and paused to take in what little of their warmth and sleepy scent remained. It would soon fade, and later, much later, she would be able to begin to forget them. 

But for now, she would clean the five bowls that were stacked at the end of the table, and then pick up the needle and thread, and see which clothes needed mending, and all the while she would coax and care for the small flames struggling in the hearth, feeding them with continual gifts of tear-damp wood.

In the slowly brightening forest, the three girls followed their father’s tall, spare figure as he trod a path for them. The night had laid a crust on top of the snow and so, as he walked, he would raise one foot high, balancing for a second before the crust cracked under his weight and sent him plunging up to his knees in the freezing powder underneath. Lift, crack, plunge, lift, crack, plunge, he ploughed forward. Behind him, the girls had to stretch out their legs to follow in his footsteps. 

Their route was not a familiar one, but they had worked in the forest often with their father, and this morning they had eaten an unusually good breakfast – there had been hot porridge as well as a little coffee - and so the two older girls laughed, and pushed at one another when they fell occasionally in the deep snow. But Molly was quiet, and thought, “I wonder how it’s going to happen?” 

Molly Whuppie: Part 1.

At first she hadn’t been able to hear 

words, for it was only the swish and sigh of their talk that crept into her sleep like a breeze and, slowly, teased her awake. The speakers were clearly sitting together, close to the still-warm hearth on the other side of the one room that the whole family shared but, even though only a curtain screened off her bed, it was not easy for Molly to make out anything of what her father and mother were saying to one another. Lying with her eyes open to the darkness, she held her breath and listened hard.

There were mumbles and pauses, sounds and silences, but she couldn’t make sense of them. She strained her ears and thought she’d caught some words but then, quite suddenly, those words turned into weeping. It was her mother, but her father’s voice was there, too, making quiet sounds, trying to give comfort, to stop the crying.  Molly couldn’t bear that sound, but it happened more and more often these days. The unusually long, cold winter had made it hard to stretch out food and firewood, the snow blocked paths, ice walled off the streams and birds and animals had fled, or buried themselves deep inside the drifts. Molly knew herself that there hadn’t been enough to eat for weeks, and they were never warm, inside the cabin or outside. But what was this latest calamity? She would have to find out, and so she sat up and folded back the blanket quietly. She was about to swing her feet out into the cold when she clearly heard her father say,

“Tomorrow, then; I’ll take all three out to the forest. I’ll come back alone. It will be for the best.” Molly stopped dead and bit her lip hard to stop herself from calling out. She sat very still, and gripped the rough edge of the blanket hard. Her clenched fingers ached and her heart pounded, but she forced herself to carry on listening.

The talking had stopped, though, and now only the familiar sounds of night in the small house were left. She heard her mother and father undressing, and then climbing into their creaking bed. Silence fell, punctuated by quiet sobs that died away into deep uneasy breathing. Later still, Molly heard the twitching of their small cabin as it cooled in the frosty night, and the small, urgent  sounds of mice in the shingles. And all the time, and all around her, she was wrapped in the long, slow, regular breathing of her two sleeping sisters in the bed beside her. She lay back between them and she wondered what to do, but sleep found her before she had managed to find an answer.