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And Walter was able to take a trip back to Scotland, where he had himself photographed wearing a plaid and holding on to a bouquet of thistles.
On the stone commemorating Andrew and Agnes (and Old James and Helen) there appears also the name of their daughter Isabel, who like her mother Agnes died an old woman. She has a married name, but there is no further sign of her husband.
Born at Sea.
And here also is the name of Andrew and Agnes’s firstborn child, Isabel’s elder brother. His dates as well.
Young James was dead within a month of the family’s landing at Quebec. His name is here but surely he ca
Illinois
A letter from his brothers reached William Laidlaw in the Highlands sometime early in the eighteen-thirties. They complained of not hearing from him for three years, and told him that his father was dead. It did not take him very long, once he was sure of that, to start making his plans to go to America. He asked for and was given a letter of reference from his employer, Colonel Munro (perhaps one of the many Highland landowners who had made sure of profitable sheep-rearing by hiring Borders men as their factors). He waited until Mary’s fourth baby boy was born-this was my great-grandfather Thomas-and then he bundled up his family and set out. His father and his brothers had spoken of going to America, but when they said that, it was really Canada they meant. William spoke accurately. He had discarded the Ettrick Valley for the Highlands without the least regret, and now he was ready to get out from under the British flag altogether-he was bound for Illinois.
They settled in Joliet, near Chicago.
There in Joliet, on the 5th of January, in either 1839 or 1840, William died of cholera, and Mary gave birth to a girl. All on the one day.
She wrote to the brothers in Ontario-what else could she do?-and in the late spring when the roads were dry and the crops were planted Andrew arrived with a team of oxen and a cart, to carry her and her children and their goods back to Esquesing.
“Where is the tin box?” said Mary. “I saw it last thing before I went to bed. Is it in the cart already?”
Andrew said that it was not. He had just come back from loading the two rolls of bedding, wrapped up in canvas.
“Becky?” said Mary sharply. Becky Johnson was right there, rocking back and forth on a wooden stool with the baby in her arms, so surely she might have spoken if she knew the whereabouts of the box. But she was in a sulky mood, she had said barely a word that morning. And now she did nothing but shake her head slightly, as if the box and the packing and loading and the departure, which was close at hand, meant nothing to her.
“Does she understand?” said Andrew. Becky was half Indian and he had taken her for a servant, till Mary explained that she was a neighbor.
“We’ve got them too,” he said, speaking as if Becky had no ears in her head. “But we don’t have them coming in and sitting down in the house like that.”
“She has been more help to me than anybody,” Mary said, trying to shush him. “Her father was a white man.”
“Well,” said Andrew, as if to say there were two ways of looking at that.
Mary said, “I can’t think how it would disappear from in front of my eyes.”
She turned away from her brother-in-law to the son who was her chief comfort.
“Joh
Joh
Joh
“Jamie’s setting on it. Out in the yard.”
Not only sitting on it, Mary saw when she hurried out, but he had covered it with his father’s coat, the coat Will had been married in. He must have got that out of the clothes trunk that was already in the cart.
“What are you doing?” cried Mary, as if she couldn’t see. “You’re not supposed to touch that box. What are you doing with your father’s coat after I packed it up? I ought to smack you.”
She was aware that Andrew was watching, and likely thinking that was a poor enough reprimand. He had asked Jamie to help him load the trunk and Jamie had done so, reluctantly, but then he had slipped away, instead of hanging around to see what more he could help with. And yesterday, when Andrew first arrived, the boy had pretended not to know who he was. “There’s a man out in the road with a cart and an ox team,” he had said to his mother, as if no such thing was expected and was of no concern to him.
Andrew had asked her if the lad was all right. All right in the head, was what he meant.
“His father’s dying was a hard matter for him,” she said.
Andrew said, “Aye,” but added that there’d been time to get over it, by now.
The box was locked. Mary had the key to it around her neck. She wondered if Jamie had meant to get into it, not knowing that. She was ready to weep.
“Put the coat back in the trunk,” was all she could say.
In the box were Will’s pistol and such papers as Andrew needed concerning the house and land, and the letter Colonel Munro had written before they left Scotland, and another letter, that Mary herself had sent to Will, before they were married. It was in reply to one from him-the first word she’d had since he left Ettrick, years before. He said in it that he remembered her well and had thought that by now he would have heard of her wedding. She had replied that in such case she would have sent him an invitation.
“Soon I will be like the old almanacks left on the shelf, that no person will buy,” she wrote. (But to her shame, when he showed her this letter long afterwards, she saw that she had spelled “buy” by. Living with him, having books and journals around, had done a power of good for her spelling.)
It was true that she was in her twenty-fifth year when she wrote that, but she was still confident of her looks. No woman who thought herself lacking in that way would have dared such a comparison. And she had finished off by inviting him, as plain as any words could do it. If you should come courting me, she had said, if you should come courting me some moonlight night, I think that you should be preferred before any.
What a chance to take, she said when he showed her that. Did I have no pride?
Nor I, he said.
Before they left she took the children to Will’s grave to say good-bye. Even the baby Jane, who would not remember but could be told later that she had been there.
“She don’t know,” said Becky, trying to hang onto the child for a few moments longer. But Mary took the baby out of her arms and Becky went away then. She went out of the house without ever saying good-bye. She had been there when the baby was born and had taken care of them both when Mary was beside herself, but now she didn’t wait to say good-bye.