The Feather
“Moor to shore, I don’t know when!
Pa is a rooster, Ma is a hen!
By Tre, Pol and Pen,
Ye shall know your Cornishmen!”
Millie repeated the nonsense couplet, the only poem she knew, ever more loudly as she skipped rope in the side yard,
“Moor to shore, I don’t know when!
Pa is a rooster, Ma is a hen!
By Tre, Pol and Pen,
Ye shall know your Cornishmen!”
each time saying the ditty in her best, nine-year-old effort to drown out the screams while Mama gave birth to a baby brother. The skipping went on until the screaming stopped, and Millie ran to look through the bedroom door. When Millie saw the blood, the dead baby, and her father sobbing over her mother’s spent body she went back to skipping in order not to scream herself, unril her legs wore out from skipping and anguish and unspent tears. Mrs. Polcraft cleaned up the mess, put Papa to bed and took Millie along with her to her bungalow at the bottom of the hill, but the next day she sent Millie back home to look after her Papa.
“Millicent Trenethan, your Mama has entrusted the care of her husband to you. You have to look after him now, Millie,” she said, her mouth set in a Cornish stance of determination and fortitude. “Your Mama isn’t coming back. Don’t you worry about her, now, that baby boy will keep her company and the two of them will be fine together. Stop those tears, now, a big girl doesn’t feel sorry for herself. Your Papa will have to go back to the mine tomorrow and it’ll be up to you to keep the house and make sure he’s fed.”
Every night Papa came home with his clothes, his hair, his fingernails, his lungs and his soul brimming over with grime and dust from the tin mine down the moor. Millie knew how to milk their only cow and Mama had shown her how to make the savory meat and vegetable pasties the miners took with them into the ground to keep their stomachs full from morning ‘til night. It was harder to know what to fix for him at suppertime, but every once in a while Mrs. Polcraft would stop in and show her something new in the kitchen, or a stitch she hadn’t yet learned with the needles.
Doing Mama’s work was bone-wearying, but Millie managed a bit of daylight to herself every afternoon. She often gazed with longing to the north, where the sea met the coast, and on the days when there wasn’t too much fog she could just make out the change of color from horizon of land to sea. Unless the rains were pelting she walked the moor, talking to the grass with her eyes fixed downward, tracking the progression of shrubs and flowers from one season to the next. When the sun didn’t shine or it was too wet to play Millie listened over the clickety-clack of her knitting needles for the sounds of the ocean she so longed to visit, or the cries of the birds she’d heard lived only over the sea, never, ever coming to land. One day while straightening up Papa’s room she tripped over a warped floorboard, only to find underneath the board a feather. With so few trees on the moor there were few birds in Millie’s life other than the chickens the family had eaten for holidays when Mama was still alive, but she knew what a feather was. She hid the feather in her clothing and replaced the floorboard.
Eight years went by before Millie finally made it to the coast line she’d been watching, from a distance, since childhood. Holding the feather high up over her head, she was picked up by the wind and lifted out to sea.
Cover photo by Jenelle on Unsplash
