I was furious. I still am, thinking of it, and cannot even wish her soul rest, although God knows that’s the last thing Lottie would want, and I can imagine her in heaven this very minute, slyly whispering to the Mother of God that Michael with the flaming sword spoke subtle ill of Her.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I said.
“Common as dirt, as everyone knows,” she breathed, “and he’s been seen with half-breed girls.”
How clearly her words come to mind. If she’d not said them, would I have done as I did? Hard to say. How silly the words seem now. She was a silly girl. Many girls were silly in those days. I was not. Foolish I may have been, but never silly.
The evening I told Father I was bound on marrying Bram Shipley, he was working late in the store, I recall, and he leaned across the counter and smiled.
“I’m busy. No time for your jokes now.”
“It’s not a joke. He’s asked me to marry him, and I mean to.”
He gaped at me for a moment. Then he went about his work. Suddenly, he turned on me.
“Has he touched you?”
I was too startled to reply.
“Has he?” Father demanded. “Has he?”
The look on his face was somehow familiar. I had seen it before, but I could not recollect when. It was this kind of look—as though destruction were a two-edged sword, striking inward and outward simultaneously.
“No,” I said hotly, but fearful, too, for Bram had kissed me.
Father looked at me, scrutinizing my face. Then he turned back to the shelves and went on arranging the tins and bottles.
“You’ll marry no one,” he said at last, as though he hadn’t meant a thing by the pliable boys of good family whom he’d trotted home for my inspection. “Not at the moment, anyway. You’re only twenty-four. And you’ll not marry that fellow ever, I can vow to that much. He’s common as dirt.”
“That’s what Lottie Drieser said.”
“She’s no whit different,” my father snapped. “She’s common as dirt herself.”
I almost had to laugh, but that was the one thing he could never bear. Instead, I looked at him just as hard as he was looking at me.
I’ve worked for you for three years.”
“There’s not a decent girl in this town would wed without her family’s consent,” he said. “It’s not done.”
“It’ll be done by me,” I said, drunk with exhilaration at my daring.
“I’m only thinking of you,” Father said. “Of what’s best for you. If you weren’t so pig-headed, maybe you could see that.”
Then, without warning, he reached out a hand like a lariat, caught my arm, held and bruised it, not even knowing he was doing so.
“Hagar—” he said. “You’ll not go, Hagar.”
The only time he ever called me by my name. To this day I couldn’t say if it was a question or a command. I didn’t argue with him. There never was any use in that. But I went, when I was good and ready, all the same.
Never a bell rang out when I was wed. Not even my brother set foot in the church that day. Matt had married Mavis McVitie the year before, and Father and Luke McVitie had gone halves on building them a house. Mavis was inclined to simper, but she was a nice enough girl. She sent me a pair of embroidered pillowcases. Matt sent nothing. But Auntie Doll (who came to my wedding, bless her, despite everything) told me he’d almost sent a wedding gift to me.
“He gave it to me to bring you, Hagar. It wasn’t much of a gift, for Matt’s as tight with his money as he ever was. It was that plaid shawl that Dan couldn’t be parted from when he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The Lord knows where Matt had dug it up from, or what use he thought you’d have for it. But he came to me not an hour afterward and took it back. Said he’d decided he didn’t want to send it after all. Just as well.”
It was the night before my wedding, and I was staying at Charlotte Tappen’s house. I wanted to go and talk with Matt, but I was not sure enough. He’d intended to send it as a reproach, a mockery, then found he cared something about me after all—that was my first thought. Then it struck me—what if he’d actually meant the gift to convey some gentleness, but changed his mind? If that was the case, I’d not have walked across the road to speak with him. I decided to wait and see if he’d turn up the following day, to give me away in place of Father. But, of course, he did not.
What did I care? For the moment I was unencumbered. Charlotte’s mother gave a small reception, and I shimmered and flitted around like a newborn gnat, free, yet certain also that Father would soften and yield, when he saw how Brampton Shipley prospered, gentled, learned cravats and grammar.
It was spring that day, a different spring from this one. The poplar bluffs had budded with sticky leaves, and the frogs had come back to the sloughs and sang like choruses of angels with sore throats, and the marsh marigolds were opening like shavings of sun on the brown river where the tadpoles danced and the bloodsuckers lay slimy and low, waiting for the boys’ feet. And I rode in the black-topped buggy beside the man who was now my mate.
The Shipley house was square and frame, two-storied, the furniture shoddy and second-hand, the kitchen reeking and stale, for no one had scoured there properly since Clara died. Yet, seeing it, I wasn’t troubled in the slightest, still thinking of myself as chatelaine. I wonder who I imagined would do the work? I thought of Polacks and Galicians from the mountain, half-breeds from the river valley of the Wachakwa, or the daughters and spinster aunts of the poor, forgetting that Bram’s own daughters had hired out whenever they could be spared, until they married very young and gained a permanent employment.
All the things in the musty, whey-smelling house were to be mine, such as they were, but when we entered, Bram handed me a cut-glass decanter with a silver top.
“This here’s for you, Hagar.”
I took it so casually, and laid it aside, and thought no more about it. He picked it up in his hands and turned it around. For a moment I thought he meant to break it, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why. Then he laughed and set it down and came close to me.
“Let’s see what you look like under all that rig-out, Hagar.”
I looked at him not so much in fear as in an iron incomprehension.
“Downstairs—” he said. “Is that what bothers you? Or daylight? Don’t fret—there’s no one around for five miles.”
“It seems to me that Lottie Drieser was right about you,” I said, “although I certainly hate to say it.”
“What did they say of me?” Bram asked. They—knowing more than one had spoken.
I only shrugged and would not say, for I had manners.
“Never mind that now,” he said. “I don’t give a good goddamn. Hagar—you’re my wife.”
It hurt and hurt, and afterward he stroked my forehead with his hand.
“Didn’t you know that’s what’s done?”
I said not a word, because I had not known, and when he’d bent, enormous and giant, I could not believe there could be within me a room to house such magnitude. When I found there was, I felt as one might feel discovering a second head, an unsuspected area. Pleasure or pain were one to me, meaningless. I only thought—well, thank the Lord now I know, and at least it’s possible, without the massacre it looked like being. I was a very practical girl in many ways.
The next day I got to work and scrubbed the house out. I planned to get a hired girl in the fall, when we had the cash. But in the meantime I had no intention of living in squalor. I had never scrubbed a floor in my life, but I worked that day as though I’d been driven by a whip.
“It’s all long past,” I say to Mr. Troy to smooth him and myself.
“Quite so.”
He nods and looks admiring, and I see that I am a wonder to him, talking, as parents will gaze awe-struck at a learning child, astonished that human speech should issue from its mouth.
He sighs, blinks, swallows as though a clot of phlegm had stuck in his gullet.
“Have y
ou many friends here, Mrs. Shipley?”
“Most of them are dead.”
I’ve been caught off-guard, or I would never have said that. He nods again, as though in satisfaction. What is he up to? I cannot tell. I perceive now that I am fingering a fold of the flowered dress, twisting and creasing it in my hands.
“A person needs contemporaries,” he says, “to talk with, and remember.”
He says no more. He speaks of prayer and comfort, all in a breath, as though God were a kind of feather bed or spring-filled mattress. I nod and nod and nod. Easier to agree, now, hoping he will soon go. He prays a little prayer, and I bow my head, a feather in his cap or in the eiderdown of God. Then, mercifully, he leaves.
I am left with an intangible doubt, an apprehension. What was he trying to say? What did Doris ask him to say? Something about the house? This seems the most likely, and yet his words didn’t point to it. I grow perturbed, a fenced cow meeting only the barbed wire whichever way she turns. What is it? What is it? But I cannot tell, and, baffled, can only turn and turn again.
I walk back into the house. Painted railing, then step and step, the small back porch, and finally the kitchen. Doris is at the front door, bidding her pastor a caroling farewell. Dimly, through halls, I hear her outpoured thanks for his emerald time, his diamond words. So very good of you. Et cetera. Silly fool.
It is then that I see the newspaper and the dreadful words. Spread out on the kitchen table, it has been left open at the classified ads. Someone’s hand has marked a place in pen. I bend, and peer, and read.
Only the Best Will Do
for
MOTHER
Do you find it impossible to give Mother the specialized care she needs in her declining years? silver-threads Nursing Home provides skilled care for Senior Citizens. Here in the pleasant cozy atmosphere of our Lodge, Mother will find the companionship of those her age, plus every comfort and convenience. Qualified medical staff. Reasonable terms Why wait until it is Too Late? Remember the Loving Care she lavished upon you, and give Mother the care she deserves, NOW.
Then an address and a phone number. Quietly I lay the paper down, my hands dry and quiet on its dry pages. My throat, too, is dry, and my mouth. As I brush my fingers over my own wrist, the skin seems too white after the sunburned years, and too dry, powdery as blown dust when the rains failed, flaking with dryness as an old bone will flake and chalk, left out in a sun that grinds bone and flesh and earth to dust as though in a mortar of fire with a pestle of crushing light.
Up flames the pain now, and I am speared once more, the blade driving under my ribs, the heavy larded flesh no shield against it, for it attacks craftily, from the inside. Breath goes. I cannot breathe. I am held, fixed and fluttering, like an earthworm impaled by children on the ferociously unsharp hook of a safety pin. I am unable to draw breath at all, and my quick panic is apart from me and almost seen, like the masks that leer out of the dark on Hallowe’en, stopping the young in their tracks and freezing their mouths in the “O” of a soundless wail. Can a body hold to this life more than an instant with empty lungs? It passes through my mind the way that John in his second year used to hold his tantrum breath, and how I pleaded and prayed to him as though he were some infant and relentless Jesus, until Bram, angry at us both, slapped him and made him draw breath in a yell. If his small frame could live unfed by air for that seeming eternity, so can my bulk. I will not fall. I will not. I grip the table edge, and when I cease to strain for air, of itself it comes. My constricted heart releases me and the pain subsides, drawing away and out of me so slowly and tenderly I almost expect my blood to follow it, as though the blade were visible.
Now I have forgotten why it came upon me. My fingers straighten the newspapers, folding each section tidily, the habit of a lifetime, nothing strewn around the house. Then I see the ink mark, and the word in heavy print. MOTHER.
Here is Doris, plumply sleek in her brown rayon, puffing and sighing like a sow in labor. I push the papers away, but she has seen. She knows I know. What will she say? She will not be at a loss. Not her. Not Doris. She has enough gall for ten. If she tries warbling sweet and gentle, I will not spare her.
She stares scaredly at me, her face flushed and perspiring. She has an unpleasant mannerism. She breathes noisily and adenoidally when agitated. She rasps now like a coping saw. Then she tried to turn the moment as though it could be flicked like an uninteresting page.
“Gracious, Mr. Troy stayed longer than I thought. I got to hustle with the dinner. Thank goodness, the roast’s in, at least. Did you have a nice visit with him?”
“Rather a stupid man, I thought. He should get a plate. His teeth are so bad. I didn’t catch his breath—just as well, I wouldn’t wonder.”
Doris takes offense, purses mauve lips, flings on an apron, scrapes carrots with ferocity.
“He’s a busy man, Mother. The number of parishioners he’s got—you’d scarcely believe it. It was nice of him to spare the time.”
She turns a narrowed glance on me, wily as a baby now, knowingly twining its parent.
“Your flowered dress looked nice.”
I will not be appeased. Yet I glance down at myself all the same, thinking she may be right, and see with surprise and unfamiliarity the great swathed hips. My waist was twenty inches when I wed.
It was not work that did it, nor even the food, although potatoes grew so well on the river bottom land of the Shipley place, especially during times when they fetched no price to speak of in the town. It was not the children, either, only the two and ten years apart. No. I will maintain until my dying day it was the lack of a foundation garment. What did Bram know of it? We had catalogues—I could have ordered corselettes. The illustrations, considered daring then, pictured swan-necked ladies, shown only from the hips up, of course, encased in lace, boned to a nicety, indrawn waists slender as a wrist, faces aloof but confident, as though they were unaware they faced the world clad only in their underclothes. I used to leaf and ponder, but never did I buy. He would only laugh or scowl.
“The girls don’t go in for them things, do they, Hagar?”
Of course his girls did not. Jess and Gladys were like heifers, like lumps of unrendered fat. We had precious little money—better, he thought, to spend it on his schemes. Honey, it was once. We would surely make our fortunes. Didn’t the white and yellow clover teem all around? It did, but something else grew as well, some poisonous flower we never saw, hidden perhaps from the daylight, shielded by foxtails that waved their barbed furry brushes in his pastures, or concealed by the reeds around the yellow-scummed slough, some blossom of burdock or nightshade, siren-scented to bees, no doubt, and deadly. His damned bees sickened and for the most part died, looking like scattered handfuls of shriveled raisins in the hives. A few survived, and Bram kept them for years, knowing full well they frightened me. He could plunge his hairy arms among them, even when they swarmed, and they never stung. I don’t know why, except he felt no fear.
“Mother—are you all right? Didn’t you hear what I said?”
Doris’s voice. How long have I been standing here with lowered head, twiddling with the silken stuff that covers me? Now I am mortified, apologetic, and cannot for a moment recollect what it was I held against her. The house, of course. They mean to sell my house. What will become of all my things?
“I don’t want Marvin to sell the house, Doris.”
She frowns, perplexed. Then I remember. It was more than the house. The newspaper remains on the kitchen table. Silverthreads. Only the best. Remember the loving care she lavished.
“Doris—I won’t go there. That place. Oh, you know all right. You know what I mean, my girl. No use to shake your head. Well, I won’t. The two of you can move out. Go ahead and move right out. Yes, you do that. I’ll stay here in my house. Do you hear me? Eh?”
“Now, Mother, don’t go and get yourself all upset. How could you manage here alone? It’s out of the question. Now, please. You go and sit down in the livin
g-room. We’ll say no more about it just yet. If you get all worked up, you’re certain to fall, and Marv won’t be home for half an hour.”
“I’m not worked up a bit!” Is it my voice, raucous and deep, shouting? “I only want to tell you—”
“I can’t lift you if you fall,” she says. “I simply cannot do it any more.”
I turn and walk away, wishing to be haughty, but hideously hitting the edge of the dining-room table, joggling the cut-glass rose bowl she uses now, although it is mine. She runs, rejoicing in her ill fortune, catches the bowl and my elbow, guides me as though I were stone blind. We gain the living-room, and as I lower myself to the chesterfield, the windy prison of my bowels belches air, sulphurous and groaning. I am to be spared nothing, it appears. I cannot speak, for anger. Doris is solicitous.
“The laxative didn’t work?”
“I’m all right. I’m all right. Stop fussing over me, Doris, for pity’s sake.”
Back she goes to the kitchen, and I’m alone. My things are all around me. Marvin and Doris think of them as theirs, theirs to keep or sell, as they choose, just as they regard the house as theirs, squatters’ rights after these years of occupation. With Doris it is greed. She never had much as a child, I know, and when they first came here, to be with me, she eyed the furniture and bric-à-brac like a pouch-faced gopher eyeing acorns, eager to nibble. But it is not greed, I think, with Marvin. Such a stolid soul. His dreams are not of gold and silver, if he dreams at all. Or is it the reverse—does he ever waken? He lives in a dreamless sleep. He sees my things as his only through long acquaintance.
But they are mine. How could I leave them? They support and comfort me. On the mantelpiece is the knobbled jug of blue and milky glass that was my mother’s, and beside it, in a small oval frame of gilt, backed with black velvet, a daguerreotype of her, a spindly and anxious girl, rather plain, ringleted stiffly. She looks so worried that she will not know what to do, although she came of good family and ought not to have had a moment’s hesitation about the propriety of her ways. But still she peers perplexed out of her little frame, wondering how on earth to please. Father gave me the jug and picture when I was a child, and even then it seemed so puzzling to me that she’d not died when either of the boys was born, but saved her death for me. When he said “your poor mother,” the moisture would squeeze out from the shaggy eyelid, and I marveled that he could achieve it at will, so suitable and infinitely touching to the matrons of the town, who found a tear for the female dead a reassuring tribute to thankless motherhood. Even should they die in childbed, some male soul would weep years after. Wonderful consolation. I used to wonder what she’d been like, that docile woman, and wonder at her weakness and my awful strength. Father didn’t hold it against me that it had happened so. I know, because he told me. Perhaps he thought it was a fair exchange, her life for mine.