Steven’s question stayed in my head. How did it get there? Is that what Magnus Tulloch wondered during the sober hours? Is that why the sober hours had become so few? Part of it must have been, and that part was bound by ropes I couldn’t see to all the other parts he would never show me.

~

The bleeding never did stop completely, and when Kathryn was born in the winter, early but not so early as to be unsafe, it was a cutting birth, caesarean. I woke groggy and sick and desperate to know: Was the baby all right? Was there a baby at all, after all those months of blood? But against the odds, those towering odds, I had a daughter, a beautiful strong girl. Wondrous. That I was still in pain seemed a fair price for safe delivery, and I didn’t want to complain. I ran my fingers along the stitching line on the curve below my belly, cupped it with both hands when I retched so much that I feared the stiff threads would break.

To be expected, my dear, you’ve had major surgery, the nurse told me when finally I asked. I thought she meant the birth, and she thought I knew the rest. And when the doctor came he assumed I had been told. So it wasn’t until the next day that I found out they had taken more from me than my baby. That Kathryn would be the last.

It made it all harder when I went home. Weak, I was, unable to lift and carry, with a newborn to lift and carry for, and a two-year-old who clung to me like wet weed. Clementina was impatient—not with me but with Magnus. Incapable of dragging himself out of the fog to pick up Kathryn from her cradle and hand her to me, or walk to the corner for milk, or any little thing that Clementina asked of him.

Best he stay away anyways, she grumbled. Best he takes himself to the public bars like he’s goin’ to do anyways an’ keeps out from my sight. I’ve bairns enough to see to an’ no time to coddle another one.

All of this I watched, wrapped in a blanket, from the little secondhand couch Paulie Garrioch had ‘found’ and wheeled to our house in a barrow. I am sorry, I told her so many times that she got impatient with me, too. But sorry I was. Sorry to be a burden when she had already so much to do that was because of me. And sorry about Magnus. My sorrow was about him and for him and on his behalf and was too big to be contained by words. It flowed from me into all and everything and never would it end.

October 1974

October 1974