I make soap when we need it by combining water with lye and adding oil, then pouring the mixture into molds and letting it dry for several days before turning the bars onto wax paper and putting them in the pantry to cure for a month. I scrub the floors with bleach and well water until my knees and knuckles are red, splotching my dress with white. With my shaky balance, even these ordinary tasks are fraught with peril. My arms and legs are marred and scarred from run-ins with boiling water, toxic bleach, poisonous lye.
When I mutter about these minor injuries, or that too much is expected of me, Al says, “We have a roof over our heads. Some people don’t have that much.” It helps to remember this, I guess. But it’s hard to shake my sadness at having been taken out of school.
Only Mamey understands. “You inherited my curiosity, child,” she says. “More’s the pity.”
As time goes on I find ways to make it bearable. I save three unwanted kittens and choose a runt from a neighbor’s cocker spaniel litter and name him Topsy. I order seed packets and plant a flower garden like the one Emily Dickinson kept, with nasturtiums and pansies and daffodils and marigolds. A butterfly utopia, she called it. When my flowers bloom, they lure yellow-and-black monarchs, cabbage whites, teal blue swallowtails.
I find a poem I copied in my notebook:
Two butterflies went out at Noon
And waltzed above a Stream,
Then stepped straight through the Firmament
And rested on a Beam . . .
And then together bore away
Upon a shining Sea . . .
I imagine these butterflies traveling the world, alighting in my garden for a short time before heading off again. Dream that someday I might grow wings and follow, fluttering behind them down the field and across the water.
I try not to think about what I’d be doing if I weren’t tied to the farm. Anne and Mary Connors are both continuing their studies, I hear. Anne wants to be a nurse and Mary a teacher. There’s talk about her taking over from Mrs. Crowley. When I’m doing errands in Cushing and see one of them from afar, at the hardware store or the post office, I cross to the other side of the road.
WHEN I WAS a child, Mamey would whisper, “You’re like me, Christina. Someday you’ll explore distant lands.” But she has stopped talking like this. Now she just wants me to get out of the house. Unlike my parents, who don’t speak of such things, Mamey is always trying to convince me to “mingle,” as she calls it. “Pity’s sake, you need to be with people your own age!” she says. “Isn’t there a social or a picnic you could go to?”
Al has no interest in the dances that are held on Friday evenings at the Acorn Grange Hall in Cushing, so I go with my friend Sadie Hamm. We walk along the rutted path in the semidarkness, linking arms with several other girls. Sadie always breaks the chain when I fall behind, as I often do, stumbling in the ruts. She pretends she wants to gossip, but really she’s providing ballast.
Sadie wears dresses with lace-trimmed sleeves and pearl buttons, hand-me-downs from her sisters, she says, but fancier than anything I own. I wear navy blue skirts and white muslin shirt-blouses with buttons at the front. A long dark skirt is forgiving; my misshapen legs aren’t as obvious behind its folds. On the way to the dance Sadie sings silly songs and makes a fool of herself, turning cartwheels in her dress. She wears pink lip stain and powder that her sisters bring home from the drugstore in little containers. I envy her free and easy laugh, the way she skips along without fear of stumbling. I wish I dared to speak to the boys at the Grange Hall and get out on the dance floor instead of swaying to the music on the sidelines.
Later, when I’m at home in bed, I conjure entire conversations I might’ve had with a boy named Robert Allan, whose brown eyes and wavy hair I found so appealing that I could hardly bear to look at him directly, even from across the room.
And then, in my imagining, the music starts. “May I have this dance, Christina?” Robert asks.
“Why, yes,” I say.
He extends his hand, and when I take it, he pulls me close, his chest warm against mine. Through my blouse I feel his other hand on the small of my back, guiding me gently, firmly, as he moves forward on his left foot and I step backward with my right: two slow steps, three quick ones, hold. Forward, forward, side to side . . .
I drift to sleep, hearing the music in my head, moving my toes to the rhythm. Two slow steps, three quick ones, hold. Two slow steps, three quick ones, hold.
AT EIGHTY, MAMEY seems to float more than ever on the aquamarine oceans of her past, where the sand is as pale and fine as sugar and the smell of tropical flowers lingers on the air. Her eyelids flutter as she dips in and out of dreams, sinking deeper into herself. She can’t get warm, no matter how many feather ticks and blankets I pile on. I heat a stone in the oven, her old trick, and slide it under the covers to the foot of her bed.
One day I bring her a conch from the Shell Room, its innards as pink and glistening as an inner lip. Gripping the bony conch, she tells me how she found it on a deserted beach on an expedition to Cape Horn with Captain Sam. Sand under their toes and leafy palm fronds overhead, shielding them from the sun. Siesta on a porch and grilled fish and vegetables for supper.
“Next time I’ll take you with me,” she says softly.
“I would like that,” I say.
MAMEY’S HAIR IS thin and yellowed, her skin as freckled and translucent as a meadowlark egg, her eyes searching, unfocused. Her bones are as delicate as a bird’s. Mother comes into her room every day and flits around for half an hour or so, fussing over the bedsheets and picking up soiled linens. “It pains me to look at her,” she tells me. Perching on the edge of Mamey’s bed, gazing up at the ceiling, Mother sings one of her own favorite songs, an old gospel tune she learned in church as a child:
Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown
When at evening the sun goeth down
When I wake with the blest in those
Mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?
I wonder what those stars are meant to represent. They must be proof that you are especially worthy, that you shine a little brighter than everyone else. But if you wake with the blessed in heaven, isn’t that enough? Haven’t you achieved the most you could’ve hoped for? The words seem at odds with Mother’s personality, her negligible ambitions, her lack of interest in anything beyond the point. Maybe she believes that the way she lives is the height of righteousness. Or maybe, as she’s said before, she just likes the melody.
My father comes upstairs now and then and lingers in the doorway. My brothers drift in and out, rendered speechless in the presence of such profound dissolution. But I can’t really blame them. Mamey always called my brothers “those boys” and kept a wide berth from them, while pulling me close. “Mamey, I’m here,” I murmur, stroking her arm and holding it to my cheek. Her breath on my face smells like scum on a shallow pond.
When she finally dies, it is after days of not eating and barely drinking, her skin tightening across sunken cheeks, her breathing becoming raspy and labored. I think of that poem: the Eyes around—had wrung them dry . . .
The day we bury her is dreary: a colorless sky, gray-boned trees, old sooty snow. Winter, I think, must be tired of itself. Reverend Cohen of the Cushing Baptist Church, in a eulogy at Mamey’s grave in the family cemetery, talks about how she will rejoin the ones she loved who are gone. But as I watch her pine casket descend slowly into the dirt, I try to envision the reunion of a frail eighty-year-old woman with her decades-younger husband and their three sons and am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.
WAITING TO BE FOUND
1942-1943
As the war heats up we see transport ships far out at sea. Soldiers sent down from Belfast roam our property in green jeeps, patrolling the coastline, scanning the horizon with binoculars.
Al is amused. “What do they think is g
oing to happen here?”
When one of the soldiers knocks on the door and asks if I’m aware of any “suspicious activity,” I ask him what on earth he means.
“Reports of enemy ships in the area,” he says darkly. “The Cushing waterfront has been declared unsafe.”
I think of the villainous pirates in Treasure Island and their telltale black flag with skull and crossbones. Our enemy—if one is lurking around—probably doesn’t announce itself so plainly. “Well, I’ve seen a lot of activity out there lately. More than usual. But I wouldn’t know if it’s friend or foe.”
“Just keep your eyes open, ma’am.”
Soon enough Cushing is subjected to intermittent blackouts and rationing. “This is worse than the Depression,” Fred’s wife, Lora, exclaims. “There’s barely enough gasoline to do my errands.”
“Cottage cheese is a sorry substitute for ground beef. I can’t for the life of me get Sam to eat it,” says my other sister-in-law, Mary.
None of it affects Al and me much. A poster on the wall in the post office instructs citizens to “Use it up—wear it out—make it do!” But that’s the way we’ve always lived. We’ve never had electricity, so blackouts are nothing new. (They happen every night when we extinguish the oil lamps.) And though we’ve come to rely on the Fales store for milk and flour and butter, most of what we eat comes from the fields and the orchard and the chicken coops. We still store root vegetables and apples in the cellar and perishables in an icebox under the floorboards in the pantry. Al does his butchering. I boil and crank the laundry as I’ve always done and hang it in the wind to dry.
It’s a cool September day when my nephew John, the oldest son of Sam and Mary, pulls up a chair in my kitchen. A lanky, mild-mannered boy with a lopsided grin, John has been my favorite nephew since he was born in this house twenty years ago.
“I have something to tell you, Aunt Christina.” He clasps my hand. “I hitched a ride to Portland yesterday and enlisted in the navy.”
“Oh.” I feel stricken. “Do you have to? Aren’t you needed on the farm?”
“I knew I’d be called up sooner or later. If I’d waited any longer, I’d’ve been drafted by the army into the infantry. I’d rather do it on my own terms.”
“What do your parents have to say about it?”
“They knew it was only a matter of time.”
I pause for a moment, absorbing this. “When do you leave?”
“In a week.”
“A week!”
He squeezes my hand. “Once you sign on the dotted line, Aunt Christina, you’re as good as gone.”
For the first time, the war feels starkly real. I put my other hand over his. “Promise you’ll write.”
“You know I will.”
True to his word, every ten days or so a postcard or a pale blue onionskin letter from John arrives at the post office in Cushing. After six long weeks of basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, he is assigned to the USS Nelson, a destroyer that escorts aircraft carriers and patrols for enemy ships and submarines. After that the postmarks become larger and more colorful: Hawaii, Casablanca, Trinidad, Dakar, France . . .
Our seafaring ancestors! Mamey would be pleased.
Sam and Mary erect a flagpole in their yard and hang a crisp new American flag for all to see. They are proud of John for serving his country. Mary coordinates scrap-iron drives to collect copper and brass for use in artillery shells and organizes get-togethers with other wives and mothers of servicemen to knit socks and scarves to send to the troops. “Our boy will come back a man,” Sam says.
I join Lora’s knitting circle and go around the house and barn gathering bits and pieces of metal to send to the war effort. But with John overseas, I sleep fitfully. All I want is for him to come home.
I READ ONCE that the act of observing changes the nature of what is observed. This is certainly true for Al and me. We are more attuned to the beauty of this old house, with its familiar corners, when Andy is here. More appreciative of the view down the yellow fields to the water, constant and yet ever changing, the black crows on the barn roof, the hawk circling overhead. A grain bag, a dented pail, a rope hanging from a rafter: these ordinary objects and implements are transformed by Andy’s brush into something timeless and otherworldly.
Sitting at the kitchen window early one morning, I notice that the sweet peas I planted years ago have flourished beyond all reason in their sunny spot beside the back door. Taking a paring knife from the utility drawer and a straw basket from the counter, I make my way to the vine and clip the fragrant blossoms, cream and pink and salmon, letting them tumble into the basket. In the pantry I take Mother’s tiny dust-covered crystal vases from a high shelf and wash them in the sink, then fill them with sprigs. I find spots for the vases all over the ground floor: on the kitchen counter, the mantel in the Shell Room, a windowsill in the dining room, even in the four-hole privy in the shed. I set the last vase at the foot of the stairs for Andy to take upstairs.
When he shows up several hours later, I hold my breath as he steps into the hall.
“What’s this?” he exclaims. “How glorious!” As he trudges up the stairs, he calls, “It’s going to be a good day, Christina, a very good day indeed.”
ONE HOT AFTERNOON I hear Andy pad down the stairs and out the front door. From the window in the kitchen I watch him pacing around barefoot in the grass. Hands on hips, he stares out at the sea. Then he walks slowly back to the house and materializes in the kitchen.
“I just can’t see it,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck.
“See what?”
He sits heavily on a stool.
“Lemonade?” I offer.
“Sure.”
I rise from my chair and grope along the wall to the narrow pantry, using the table, Andy’s rocker, and the wall for balance. Normally I’d feel self-conscious, but Andy is so lost in thought he doesn’t even notice.
Betsy—seven months pregnant and grumpy in the heat—left a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade on the counter before returning home for a nap. When I lift the glass pitcher with both hands, it wobbles and I splash the liquid all over my arm. Annoyed at myself, I dab at it with a damp dishrag before carefully carrying the glass to Andy.
“Thanks.” Absentmindedly he licks the side of his hand where it’s sticky from the glass. As I settle back into my chair, he says, “You know, I spend entire days up there just . . . dreaming. It feels like so much wasted time. But I can’t seem to do it any other way.” He takes a long swig of lemonade and sets the empty glass on the floor. “Christ, I don’t know.”
I’m no artist, but I think I understand what he means. “Some things take the time they take. You can’t make the hens lay before they’re ready.” He nods, and I feel emboldened. “Sometimes I want the bread to rise quicker, but if I try to rush it, I ruin it.”
Breaking into a grin, he says, “That’s true.”
I feel a small glow in the pit of my stomach.
“You have an artist’s soul, Christina.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“We have more in common than you think,” he says.
Later I reflect on the things we have in common and the things we don’t. Our stubbornness and our infirmities. Our circumscribed childhoods. His father kept him out of school; we’re alike in that way. But N. C. trained him to be a painter and Papa trained me to take care of the house, and there’s a world of difference in that.
SOME OF ANDY’S sketches are hurried outlines, a map of the painting to come—a hint of a figure, grasses growing this way and that, geometric slashes of house and barn. Others are precisely shaded and detailed—every strand of hair and fold of fabric, the wood grain on the pantry door. His watercolors are inky greens and browns, the sky merely the white of the paper. Al in his flat-visored cap with his pipe, raking blueberries in the field, sitting on the front doorstep, gathering hay; the fine figure of our dun-colored mare, Tessie, in profile. Andy sketches the scarr
ed wooden table, the white teapot, egg scales, grain bags in the barn, seed corn hanging to dry in a third-floor bedroom. On his canvases these objects look the same, but different. They have a burnished glow.
Andy’s father paints in oil, he tells me. But he prefers egg tempera, he says, the method of European masters like Giotto and Botticelli in the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. It dries quickly, leaving a muted effect. I watch as he cracks an egg, separates the yolk from the white, and rolls the plump sac gently between his hands to remove the albumen. He pokes the yolk with the tip of a knife, pours the orange liquid into a cup of distilled water, stirs it around with his finger. Adds a chalky powdered pigment to make a paste.
After dipping a small brush into the tempera, he presses out the wetness and color with his fingers and splays the tip to make dry spiky strokes. He layers it over a pale wash of color or pencil and ink on a Masonite fiberboard coated with gesso, a smooth mix of rabbit-skin glue and chalk. Though he works fast, the brushstrokes are painstaking and meticulous, each one distinct. Cross-hatched grass, a dense, dark row of plantings. When wet, the colors are as red as Indian paintbrush, russet as clay, blue as the bay on a summer afternoon, green as a holly leaf. These bright wet colors fade as they dry, leaving a ghostly glow. “Intensity—painting emotions into objects—is the only thing I care about,” he says.
Over time Andy’s paintings become starker, drained of color, austere. Mostly white and brown and gray and black. “Damn it to hell,” Andy murmurs, cocking his head to look at a newly finished watercolor: Al’s shadowy figure walking down the rows in his visored cap, the white house and gray barn stark on the horizon. “This is better. Betsy was right.”
WHEN HE ISN’T upstairs painting, Andy hovers near me like a bee around honeycomb. He is fascinated with our habits and routines. How are the hens laying, how do you make a perfect loaf of bread without measuring, how do you keep the slugs from the dahlias? What kinds of trees does Al cut for firewood, what type of sail do lobstermen around here use on their boats? How do you collect the water in the cistern? Why are so many things in the house painted the same shade of blue? Why is a dory marooned in the rafters of the shed? Why is that long ladder propped against the house?