Mercy in her last hours must have spoken to him about their granddaughter, and told him to take comfort in her and give her comfort in return, and this he tried to do. He read the Bible with her in the evenings, and sometimes noticed if she seemed tired and told her to rest. And around Christmas, when all the children of the townspeople were given toys, he whittled a tiny horse and cart for her to set upon the mantel-shelf. By day he worked as he always had to see that the two of them were warm and fed, fetching in the stacked logs for the stove, and bringing in more from the frozen woods to make next season’s stack, and digging turnips and other roots from the mounds where they were stored, and fetching out grain from the bins and salted meat from the barrels, and mending the tools he would need for next summer’s toil, while Pitiable cooked and stitched and cleaned as best she could, the way Mercy had shown her. She was young for such work, and he did not often scold her for her mistakes. So the neighbours, who at first had felt that in Christian duty they must keep an eye upon the pair, decided that all was well and left them alone.
Spring came with the usual mud and mess, followed by the urgent seed-time when the ground dried to a fine soft tilth and had not yet begun to parch. It was then that Probity, after brooding for a while, went to the Elders of the People and asked for their permission to bring his daughter’s body up from the town cemetery and bury it beside Mercy’s in the graveyard of the People. The Elders did not debate the question long. They were all of one grim mind. Obedience Hooke had cut herself off from the People by marrying the out-warder, Simon Nasmith. When the Lord came again in Glory, he would raise the bodies of His faithful People from their graveyard to eternal life, but Obedience Hooke had by her own act cast herself into damnation and would not be among them.
Probity sowed his crops as usual, but then, as June hardened into its steady, dreary heat, he seemed to lose heart. The leafy summer crops came quick and easy, and there was always a glut of them, but the slow-grown roots and pulses that would be harvested later, and then dried or salted or earthed into clamps, were another matter. He did not hoe them enough, and watered irregularly, so that the plants had no root-depth and half of them wilted or wasted. He neglected, too, to do the rounds of his fences, so that the sheep broke out and he had to search the hills for them, and lost three good ewes.
Pitiable was aware that the stores were barely half-filled, but said nothing. Probity was her grandfather, her only protector, and absolute master in his own house. He did what he chose, and the choice was right because it was his.
September brought a great crop of apples from the two old trees. Mercy had always bottled them into sealed jars, but that was a skill that had to be done just right, and Pitiable did not know how. Probity could well have asked a neighbour to teach her, but he was too proud, so he told her to let them fall and he would make cider of them. Most of the People made a little cider, keeping it for special days, but this year Probity made a lot, using casks he would not now need for storage as he had less to store. He shook himself out of his dull mood and took trouble so that the cider brewed strong and clear. He took to drinking a tankard of it with his supper, and became more cheerful in the evenings.
Winter came, with its iron frosts, and Probity started to drink cider with his dinner, to keep the cold out, he said. And then with his breakfast, to get the blood moving on the icy mornings. By the time the sunrise turned back along the horizon, he was seldom without a tankard nearby, from the hour he rose until the hour at which he fell snorting, and still in his day clothes, onto his bed.
He began to beat Pitiable, using his belt, finding some fault and punishing her for it, though both of them knew that that was not the cause. He was hurt to the heart, and sick with his own hurt, and all he could think of was to hurt someone or something else, and doing so himself to hurt himself worse, dulling the pain with new pain. One night Pitiable watched as he took the horse and cart he had made her and broke them into splinters with his strong hands and dropped them into the fire.
Pitiable did not complain or ask anyone for help. She knew that anything that happened to her was a just punishment for her having been born. Her mother and father should never have wed. By doing so they had broken God’s law. And then Obedience, Probity’s lovely lost daughter, had died giving birth to Pitiable. So Pitiable was both the fruit of her parents’ sin and the cause of her mother’s death, and of Probity’s dreadful hurt. Nothing that was done to her could be undeserved.
On Sunday mornings Probity did not drink. He shaved and dressed with care and took Pitiable to church. They made an impressive pair, the big, gaunt man and the pale and silent child. Neighbours remarked how much they meant to each other, now Mercy was gone. Once a woman asked Pitiable why she wept in church, and Pitiable replied that it was because of her grandmother dying. The woman clucked and said that she was a good little girl—how could she have known that Pitiable had been weeping with the pain of having to sit still on the hard bench after last night’s beating?
They came through the winter, barely, scraping out the old and mouldy stores from the year before. Probity butchered and salted one of his ewes, saying she was too old for bearing, which was not true. So they did not quite starve.
The mush of spring dried to the blaze of summer, and Probity pulled himself together and drank less and worked in his fields and brought home food and kept his belt around his waist, but he did almost nothing to provide for the coming winter. One noon in the late summer heat wave, Pitiable went out to tell him that his dinner was on the table and found him at the door of his store shed, staring into its emptiness, as if lost in a dream. He started when she spoke and swung on her, and snarled, “The Lord will provide.” That evening he undid his belt and beat her for no reason at all.
From then on he was as harsh as he had been last winter, but at the same time strangely possessive. He seemed unable to bear to let her out of his sight. Having no harvest to gather, he took to wandering along the shore, in the manner of the truly poor and shiftless townspeople, looking for scraps of the sea’s leavings, driftwood and such, which he might use or sell. Almost at once he was lucky, finding a cask of good sweet raisins, unspoilt, which he sold well in the town. After that he would go almost every day, taking Pitiable with him to help search and carry, but the quiet days of the heat wave brought little to land.
That dense stillness broke, as usual, with a week of storm. There was a proverb in the town, “The hotter burns the sun, the wilder blows the wind,” and so it proved that year, with gales that brought down trees and chimneys and stripped roofs and scattered haystacks, while day and night huge rollers thundered against the shore. On the ninth night the storm blew itself out and was followed by a dawn of pearly calm.
Probity was up before sunrise and gulped his breakfast and pulled on his boots and told Pitiable to leave the dishes unwashed and the hearth unlaid.
“The Lord spoke to me in the night,” he said. “We must be first down on the shore, for this is the day on which He will provide.”
The town was barely stirring as they hurried towards the harbour, and left up Northgate to the beaches. On Home Beach there were men about, seeing to their boats, many of which, though drawn well up above the tide-lines, had been tossed about by the storm, overturned, piled together or washed inland. Probity hurried past, and on over Shag Point to Huxholme Bay, which was steep small shingle. Here they stopped to search. The waves had brought in a mass of new stuff, piles of wrack and driftwood, tangles of half-rotted cording, torn nets, broken casks and crates, as well as sea-things, shells and jellyfish and small squid and so on. Probity had a piece of chalk with which to mark anything he wanted to collect on his way back, but he was not looking for timber or firewood to-day and marked nothing.