Lives of Girls and Women (6 page)

“He was an Austrian. He came in off the road looking for work and Father hired him. Mother never got over being afraid of him, she didn't trust foreigners.”

“Well no wonder.”

“She made him sleep in the granary.”

“He was always yelling and cursing in Austrian, remember when we jumped across his cabbages? The flood of foreign cursing, it would freeze your blood.”

“Till I made up my mind I'd show him.”

“What was he burning that time, he was down the orchard burning a lot of branches—”

“Tent caterpillars.”

“That's it, he was burning up the tent caterpillars and you got yourself into a pair of Craig's overalls and a shirt and stuffed yourself with pillows and put your hair up under a felt hat of Father's, and you blacked your hands and your face to look like a darky—”

“And I took the butcher-knife, that same long wicked knife we've got still—”

“And crept down through the orchard, hid behind the trees, Craig and me watching all the time from the upstairs window—”

“Mother and Father couldn't have been here.”

“No, no, they'd gone to Town! They'd gone to Jubilee in the horse and buggy!”

“I got to about five yards of him and I slipped out from behind a treetrunk and—O my saints, didn't he let out a yell! He yelled and lit for the barn. He was a coward through and through!”

“Then you were into the house and out of those clothes and scrubbed yourself clean before Father and Mother got back from Town. There we were, all sitting round the supper-table, waiting on him. We were hoping secretly he'd run off.”

“Not me. I wasn't. I wanted to see the effect.”

“He came in pale as a sheet and gloomy as Satan and sat down and never said a word. We expected him at least to mention there was some crazy darky loose in the county. He never did.”

“Didn't want to let on what a coward he'd been, no!”

They laughed till fruit spilled out of their laps.

“It wasn't always me, I wasn't the only one could think up tricks! You were the one thought of tying the tin cans over the front door the time I'd been out to a dance! Don't let's forget about that.”

“You were out with Maitland Kerr. (Poor Maitland, he's dead.) You were out at a dance at Jericho—”

“Jericho! It was a dance in the Stone School!”

“All right, whatever it was you were bringing him into the front hall to say good-night, oh, you were sneaking him in, quiet as a pair of lambs—”

“And
down
they came—”

“It sounded just like an avalanche had hit. Father jumped out of bed and grabbed his shotgun. Remember the shotgun in their room, it was always behind the door? What a confusion! And me under the bedclothes with the pillow stuffed in my mouth so's nobody could hear me laughing!”

They had not given up playing jokes yet. Auntie Grace and I entered the bedroom where Aunt Elspeth was having her nap, flat on her back, snoring regally, and we lifted the quilt with great care and tied her ankles together with a red ribbon. On a Sunday afternoon when Uncle Craig was asleep in his office, on the leather sofa, I was sent in to wake him up and tell there was a young couple outside who had come to apply for a marriage licence. He got up grumpily, went out to the back kitchen and washed in the sink, wetted and combed his hair, put on his tie and waistcoat and jacket—he could never have given out a marriage licence without his proper clothes on—and went to the front door. There was an old lady in a long checked skirt, a shawl over her head, bent away over, leaning on a stick, and an old man bent likewise, wearing a shiny suit and an ancient fedora. Uncle Craig was still dazed from sleep; he said dubiously, “Well, how do you do—” before he burst out in a jovial fury, “Elspeth! Grace! You pair of she-devils!”

At milking time they tied kerchiefs over their hair, with the ends flopping out like little wings, and put on all sorts of ragged patchwork garments and went wandering along the cowpaths, taking up a stick somewhere along the way. Their cows had heavy, clinking bells hung on their necks. Once Aunt Elspeth and I followed the sporadic, lazy sound of these bells to the edge of the bush and there we saw a deer, standing still, among the stumps and heavy ferns. Aunt Elspeth did not say a word, but held her stick out like a monarch ordering me to be still, and we got to look at it for a moment before it saw us, and leapt up so that its body seemed to turn a half-circle in the air, as a
dancer would, and bounded away, its rump heaving, into the deep bush. It was a hot and perfectly still evening, light lying in bands on the tree-trunks, gold as the skin of apricots. “It used to be you'd see them regularly,” Aunt Elspeth said. “When we were young, oh, you used to see them on the way to school. But not now. That's the first I've seen in I don't know how many years.”

In the stable they showed me how to milk, which is not so easy as it looks. They took turns squirting milk into the mouth of a barn cat which rose on its hind legs a few feet away. It was a dirty looking striped tom, called Robber. Uncle Craig came down, still wearing his starched shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, his shiny-backed vest with pen and pencil clipped in the pocket. He presided at the cream separator. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace liked to sing while they milked. They sang, “Meet me in St. Louis (Louis), meet me at the Fair!” and, “I've got sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence,” and “She'll be comin' around the mountain when she comes—” They would sing different songs at the same time, each trying to drown the other out, and complaining, “I don't know where that woman gets the idea she can sing!” Milking time made them bold and jubilant. Auntie Grace who was afraid to go into the storage-room of the house because there might be a bat, ran through the barnyard hitting the big longhorned cows on their rumps, chasing them out the gate and back to pasture. Aunt Elspeth lifted the cream cans with a strong and easy, almost contemptuous, movement like a young man's.

Yet these were the same women who in my mother's house turned sulky, sly, elderly, eager to take offense. Out of my mother's hearing they were apt to say to me, “Is that the hairbrush you use on your hair? Oh, we thought it was for the dog!” Or, “Is that what you dry your dishes with?” They would bend over the pans, scraping, scraping off every last bit of black that had accumulated since the last time they visited here. They greeted what my mother had to say usually with little stunned smiles; her directness, her outrageousness, paralyzed them for the moment, and they could only blink at her rapidly and helplessly, as if faced with a cruel light.

The kindest things she said were the most wrong. Aunt Elspeth could play the piano by ear; she would sit down and play the few
pieces she knew—“My Bonny Lies over the Ocean” and “Road to the Isles.” My mother offered to teach her to read music.

“Then you can play really good things.”

Aunt Elspeth refused, with a delicate, unnatural laugh, as if somebody had offered to teach her to play pool. She went out and found a neglected flowerbed and knelt in the dirt, in the hot midday sun, pulling up weeds. “That flowerbed I just don't care about any more. I've given up on it,” called my mother airly, warningly, from the kitchen door. “There's nothing planted in it but that old London Pride, and I'd just as soon yank that up anyway!” Aunt Elspeth went on weeding as if she never heard. My mother made an exasperated, finally dismissing face and actually sat down in her canvas chair, leaned back and closed her eyes and remained doing nothing, smiling angrily, for about ten minutes. My mother went along straight lines. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace wove in and out around her, retreating and disappearing and coming back, slippery and soft-voiced and indestructible. She pushed them out of her way as if they were cobwebs; I knew better than that.

Back home at Jenkin's Bend—bearing me with them for the long summer visit—they were refreshed, plumped out as if they had been put in water. I could see the change happening. I too with some slight pangs of disloyalty exchanged my mother's world of serious skeptical questions, endless but somehow disregarded housework, lumps in the mashed potatoes, and unsettling ideas, for theirs of work and gaiety, comfort and order, intricate formality. There was a whole new language to learn in their house. Conversations there had many levels, nothing could be stated directly, every joke might be a thrust turned inside out. My mother's disapproval was open and unmistakable, like heavy weather; theirs came like tiny razor-cuts, bewilderingly, in the middle of kindness. They had the Irish gift for rampaging mockery, embroidered with deference.

The daughter of the family on the next farm had married a lawyer, a city man, of whom her family were very proud. They brought him over to be introduced. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace had baked, and polished silver, and got out their hand-painted plates and little pearl-handled knives, for this visit. They fed him cakes, shortbread,
nut loaf, tarts. He was a greedy or perhaps desperately bewildered young man, eating out of nervousness. He picked up whole cakes and they crumbled as he was getting them into his mouth; icing was smeared on his moustache. At supper Auntie Grace without saying a word began to do an imitation of his way of eating, exaggerating gradually, making gobbling noises and grabbing imaginary things from her plate. “Oh, the
law
-yer!” cried Aunt Elspeth elegantly, and leaning across the table inquired, “Have you always—been interested—in
country life
?” After their marvellous courtesy to him I found this faintly chilling; it was a warning.
Didn't he think he was somebody!
That was their final condemnation, lightly said.
He thinks he's somebody. Don't they think they're somebody
. Pretensions were everywhere.

Not that they were against ability. They acknowledged it in their own family, our family. But it seemed the thing to do was to keep it more or less a secret. Ambition was what they were alarmed by, for to be ambitious was to court failure and to risk making a fool of oneself. The worst thing, I gathered, the worse thing that could happen in this life was to have people laughing at you.

“Your Uncle Craig,” said Aunt Elspeth to me, “your Uncle Craig is one of the smartest, and the best-liked, and the most respected men in Wawanash county. He could have been elected to the legislature. He could have been in the Cabinet, if he'd wanted.”

“Didn't he get elected? Uncle Craig?”

“Don't be silly, he never ran. He wouldn't let his name stand. He preferred not.”

There it was, the mysterious and to me novel suggestion that choosing not to do things showed, in the end, more wisdom and self-respect than choosing to do them. They liked people turning down things that were offered, marriage, positions, opportunities, money. My cousin Ruth McQueen who lived in Tupperton, had won a scholarship to go to college, for she was very clever, but she thought it over and turned it down, she decided to stay home.

“She preferred not.”

Why was this such an admirable thing to have done? Like certain subtle harmonies of music or colour, the beauties of the negative
were beyond me. Yet I was not ready, like my mother, to deny that they were there.

“Afraid to stick her head out of her own burrow,” was what my mother had to say about Ruth McQueen.

Aunt Moira was married to Uncle Bob Oliphant. They lived in Porterfield, and had one daughter, Mary Agnes, born rather far along in their married life. During the summer Aunt Moira would sometimes drive the thirteen miles from Porterfield to Jenkin's Bend, for an afternoon's visit, bringing Mary Agnes with her. Aunt Moira could drive a car. Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace thought this very brave of her (my mother was learning to drive our car, and they thought that reckless and unnecessary). They would watch for her old-fashioned, square-topped car to cross the bridge and come up the road from the river, and go out to greet her with encouraging, admiring, welcoming cries, as if she had just found her way across the Sahara, instead of over the hot dusty roads from Porterfield.

That nimble malice that danced under their courtesies to the rest of the world was entirely lacking in their attentions to each other, to brother and sister. For each other they had only tenderness and pride. And for Mary Agnes Oliphant. I could not help thinking they preferred her to me. I was welcomed and enjoyed, yes, but I was tainted by other influences and by half my heredity; my upbringing was riddled with heresies, that could never all be put straight. Mary Agnes, it seemed to me, was received with a more unmixed, and shining, confident, affection.

At Jenkin's Bend it would never be mentioned that there was anything the matter with Mary Agnes. And in fact there was not much the matter; she was almost like other people. Except that you could not imagine her going into a store by herself, and buying something, going anywhere by herself; she had to be with her mother. She was not an idiot, she was nothing like Irene Pollox and Frankie Hall on the Flats Road, she was certainly not idiotic enough to be allowed to ride free all day on the merry-go-round at the Kinsmen's Fair, as they were—even provided Aunt Moira would have let her make such a spectacle of herself, which she would not. Her skin was dusty-looking, as if there was a thin, stained sheet of glass over it, or a light oiled paper.

“She was deprived of oxygen,” my mother said, taking some satisfaction as always in explanations. “She was deprived of oxygen in the birth canal. Uncle Bob Oliphant held Aunt Moira's legs together on the way to the hospital because the doctor had told them she might hemorrhage.”

I did not want to hear any more. In the first place I shied away from the implication that this was something that could happen to anyone, that I myself might have been blunted, all by lack of some namable, measurable, ordinary thing, like oxygen. And the words birth canal made me think of a straight-banked river of blood. I thought of Uncle Bob Oliphant holding Aunt Moira's heavy, vein-riddled legs together while she heaved and tried to deliver; I never could see him afterwards without thinking of that. Whenever we did see him in his own house he was sitting by the radio, sucking his pipe, listening to Boston Blackie or Police Patrol, tires shrieking and guns cracking while he seriously nodded his nutbald head. Would he have his pipe in his mouth while he held Aunt Moira's legs, would he give businesslike assent to her commotion, just as he did to Boston Blackie's?