Fiction: Katherine Lally
Katherine Lally
By: oflittleuse
Word Count: 604
Rated: PG
Summary: A little piece of unfinished writing about Katherine Lally - a young woman at the turn of the century and her desire for more.
The dirt laneway had large craters and mud puddles along it, saplings at the side of the road where nature was once again trying to claim it. Behind the saplings stood fields which dipped and rolled so softly it almost looked flat. The fields were numerous but small. A forest on the other side reminding the human aliens that it had been there first and they hadn’t conquered everything.
Those humans who now hulled the rocks their ploughs dug up and cursed the outcropping of bedrock which taunted them. It was an hour’s horse ride into the nearest town. It was an hour if the roads were in decent condition, and they never were. There would sometimes be weeks before they would even see their neighbours.
Katherine Lally hated those weeks. Sometimes it would be because of rain, other times because of the harvest season. Her hands would cramp from sitting beside her mother trying to can what they could and salt the meat. Their homestead was small and cramped with twelve children; including herself. The wood logs were a favourite place for snakes to rest and mice to nest. Sometimes Katherine felt that the house held more animals then people, as she would sweep the wood floors and help her mother replace the isinglass windows. They would sit with their thin films of mica and make sure they had the right size before fitting it into their window.
She hated the house. It was always too hot or too cold or leaking water into the room she shared with her three younger sisters. The outside was little better. It was either winter with its dreadful cold and snow banks which would isolate them for weeks at a time. Or it would summer and the mosquitoes, horseflies, deerflies and black flies would bite and create itchy swells that seemed to cover her body. The field was also against the family, Katherine believed, it was uninhabitable. There was little farming that could be done on it. Their ten cows had a hard enough time surviving, and they had the largest herd of cattle around. Planting was useless, there was barely enough soil for anything to grow.
The only bit of the land Katherine liked was the forest. She never understood how land which seemed to reject the growth of plants could hold such a wild and dense forest. When her parents had first settled the area, the forest had been everywhere. Tree that you could not even wrap your arms around even with five people had stood challenging the newcomers. Those trees were gone now. Only stories were left.
Still, there was one tree that Katherine loved. It stood proud and mystical. She remembered as a small child one of her brothers, Leo, had told her it came from another reality. At the time, she had believed that. The twisted, vine-like trunk and awkward branches which seemed to curl and reach looked otherworldly. There was something about it, something special, which kept drawing Katherine to that location again and again. She wanted to leave this horrible place and perhaps, if this tree truly was from another world, it could take her away.
It was silly now; Katherine admitted looking up at the tree above her. Her long skirt spread around her like a blanket. It was the soft moss underneath her that cushioned Katherine from the pointy roots and twisted vines of the tree that she sat on. There was no escaping this world. At nineteen she would marry one of the boys from town and be stuck here for the rest of her life.