Read Online The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Emma Donoghue
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stands still in his shock.
Silence; the chants have all died away. The sun is up, but clouds have slid in from the north, and it looks like a gray day. The Bucnanites avoid each other's eyes; some weep into their hands. Below them on the slope, the people of Nithsdale are laughing like crows.
Friend Mother lurches to her feet. "Christ has been pleased to afflict us with disappointment," she says hoarsely. "And do ye know why? Because ye are not yet worthy," she shrieks, putting out her finger, pointing at each of her followers in turn. "Ye are lukewarm, unfit for translation. Ye have faltered in faith. Ye have failed me."
Hugh waits for her gaze to reach him; waits to be singled out as the one follower who has loved Friend Mother truly, who has offered his whole life in her service. He needs to know that he will be with her in heaven. But her eye skims over him as if she does not recognise his face.
She stumbles down the hill. A little later, he follows her.
Note
Elspeth "Luckie" Buchan, née Simpson (c. 1738–91), a potter's wife from Glasgow, was one of several women prophets in the late eighteenth century who founded personal cults based on the Book of Revelations. My sources for "Revelations" include Robbie Burns's letter to James Burness of 3 August 1784; Anon,
The Western Delusion
(1784); Els pet h Buchan and Hugh White,
The Divine Dictionary
(1785) and
Eight Letters (
1785); Joseph Train,
The Buchanites, From First to Last (
1846); and John Cameron,
History of the Buchanite Delusion (
1904).
After the Great Fast, the community was thrown out of Nithsdale by legal means, and settled in Kirkcudbrightshire, where Luckie Buchan died in 1791, promising to rise again in six days, or ten years, or fifty. Hugh White led the remnants of the group to America.
Night Vision
The other day in the woods I wandered away from the others and kept walking. The ground was soft as porridge. I held one hand out in front of my face and whenever I stubbed my fingers on a tree I felt my way around it. Whenever I stood on an acorn I picked it up for our pigs. I stood still, and there was no sound at all but the wind shuddering in the branches.
I don't think I have ever been alone in my life before, and I am nine years old.
It was Ned and John who found me; I heard them thudding along from a long way off, calling "Franny! Franny!" Did I not know that I might have caught my foot in a weasel trap, John said, or dashed out my brains against a branch? Ned said our father would have strapped them if I'd come to harm.
My brothers and sisters are mostly good to me. A blind child is a burden, no matter how you look at it.
They're all asleep around me now: John and Ned and Samuel and Dickie in the big bed under the window, Eliza and Mary and Nelly in the one behind the door, and vision Catherine and Martha and myself in this one, with Billy tucked in at the bottom and Tabby under my arm with her nose digging into my ribs. It's hottest here in the middle of all the arms and legs. The air smells of cheese.
When I can't sleep, I make a blank page in my mind, and shapes start filling it. I know about the stars; Father told me. I imagine them flaring through holes in the sky like candles in a draught; the edges must get singed. I wonder about the colour of furze, a bit like strong tea, Father says. (I think colour is when you can taste something with your eyes.) And the mountains around Stranorlar, big as giants blocking the path of the sun. I try to decide how each bird feels to the touch, according to its song. The clinking blackbird would feel like the back of a spoon, but the wood pigeon must be soft as the underbelly of a rabbit.
Our mother is behind the wall, in the kitchen; I can hear her poke the turf. She was so angry, that time I put my hand in the fire, when I was small. But I had to find out what it felt like. She cried while she was wrapping a bit of butter onto the burn. She held her breath so I wouldn't hear her, but I did.
I
Silence; the chants have all died away. The sun is up, but clouds have slid in from the north, and it looks like a gray day. The Bucnanites avoid each other's eyes; some weep into their hands. Below them on the slope, the people of Nithsdale are laughing like crows.
Friend Mother lurches to her feet. "Christ has been pleased to afflict us with disappointment," she says hoarsely. "And do ye know why? Because ye are not yet worthy," she shrieks, putting out her finger, pointing at each of her followers in turn. "Ye are lukewarm, unfit for translation. Ye have faltered in faith. Ye have failed me."
Hugh waits for her gaze to reach him; waits to be singled out as the one follower who has loved Friend Mother truly, who has offered his whole life in her service. He needs to know that he will be with her in heaven. But her eye skims over him as if she does not recognise his face.
She stumbles down the hill. A little later, he follows her.
Note
Elspeth "Luckie" Buchan, née Simpson (c. 1738–91), a potter's wife from Glasgow, was one of several women prophets in the late eighteenth century who founded personal cults based on the Book of Revelations. My sources for "Revelations" include Robbie Burns's letter to James Burness of 3 August 1784; Anon,
The Western Delusion
(1784); Els pet h Buchan and Hugh White,
The Divine Dictionary
(1785) and
Eight Letters (
1785); Joseph Train,
The Buchanites, From First to Last (
1846); and John Cameron,
History of the Buchanite Delusion (
1904).
After the Great Fast, the community was thrown out of Nithsdale by legal means, and settled in Kirkcudbrightshire, where Luckie Buchan died in 1791, promising to rise again in six days, or ten years, or fifty. Hugh White led the remnants of the group to America.
Night Vision
The other day in the woods I wandered away from the others and kept walking. The ground was soft as porridge. I held one hand out in front of my face and whenever I stubbed my fingers on a tree I felt my way around it. Whenever I stood on an acorn I picked it up for our pigs. I stood still, and there was no sound at all but the wind shuddering in the branches.
I don't think I have ever been alone in my life before, and I am nine years old.
It was Ned and John who found me; I heard them thudding along from a long way off, calling "Franny! Franny!" Did I not know that I might have caught my foot in a weasel trap, John said, or dashed out my brains against a branch? Ned said our father would have strapped them if I'd come to harm.
My brothers and sisters are mostly good to me. A blind child is a burden, no matter how you look at it.
They're all asleep around me now: John and Ned and Samuel and Dickie in the big bed under the window, Eliza and Mary and Nelly in the one behind the door, and vision Catherine and Martha and myself in this one, with Billy tucked in at the bottom and Tabby under my arm with her nose digging into my ribs. It's hottest here in the middle of all the arms and legs. The air smells of cheese.
When I can't sleep, I make a blank page in my mind, and shapes start filling it. I know about the stars; Father told me. I imagine them flaring through holes in the sky like candles in a draught; the edges must get singed. I wonder about the colour of furze, a bit like strong tea, Father says. (I think colour is when you can taste something with your eyes.) And the mountains around Stranorlar, big as giants blocking the path of the sun. I try to decide how each bird feels to the touch, according to its song. The clinking blackbird would feel like the back of a spoon, but the wood pigeon must be soft as the underbelly of a rabbit.
Our mother is behind the wall, in the kitchen; I can hear her poke the turf. She was so angry, that time I put my hand in the fire, when I was small. But I had to find out what it felt like. She cried while she was wrapping a bit of butter onto the burn. She held her breath so I wouldn't hear her, but I did.
I
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