Tending to Grace (3 page)

18

I fill an old metal pail with water and scrub my room, top to bottom. I wash the floor, paying particular attention to the space under the bed, and I wipe down the window frame, flinging the cobwebs outside. I mop out the dresser and put my books in the top drawer. Then I unpack my clothes. Two pairs of overalls from the Salvation Army tag sale, my black dress, pocket T-shirts in assorted colors, and my most prized collection other than my books: my socks. Most were purchased at thrift stores: Christmas socks, purple socks, wool socks, socks with lace. Church thrift shops were especially good for hand-knit socks, and sometimes after paying a dollar or two for a pair, I would wander upstairs and sit in a pew and wonder what all the fuss was about.

The smell I liked a lot. Incense, heavy and thick, hung like blankets all around me. Me and the statues, surrounded by silence. I liked that the best.

“What the hell you want with church?” my mother said once after I'd told her where I'd been. “You really are a ninny sometimes, Corns. There ain't no one who goes to church but hypocrites and fools. Don't you know that?”

Well, I didn't want to be a hypocrite or a fool, so I shut the door to that part of my life and didn't go back.

19

Agatha and I climb the rise behind her house to where the fields begin. The grass under my feet grows brown and dry and uncut. I crunch through one pasture, then another, each one rising higher than the last.

Agatha searches for mushrooms, but not me—I won't have anything to do with them. I just want to get closer to the mountain that reaches high in the distance. I tell myself I'm getting closer to my mother with each step.

We turn a bend and there's a brook ahead. She takes a metal cup off a nail on a tree and climbs down a bank and scoops up some water. She takes a long, slurping gulp.

“Come taste some of this water. It's the best you'll ever drink.”

I'm not so sure. She eyes me carefully. “This is the real thing. You've been planted in the city too long.”

I sip the water at first, but it fills my mouth with so much life that I gulp more.

“Where'd you be gettin' that stutter?” she asks as I hand the cup back to her.

Why does everyone always ask that? I don't know when. In first grade,
I already hated talking, that's all I know.

I shrug, but I don't know if she sees me, because I'm drinking more water.

We watch two squirrels scream at each other in a pine tree and then we climb over a stone wall and down a short slope and then up another rise. I brace myself for the advice everyone gives, especially my mother:
Try harder, Corns, for goodness' sake. I know you could talk
regular if you pull yourself together. Just pick easier words.

Or the fifth-grade teacher, helpful as hail:
Take a breath, Cornelia.
Slow down, relax, think about what you want to say before you say it. You
just need more backbone, that's all.

They made it sound so easy. Try harder, stutter less. But when I try harder, I stutter more. When I pick easier words, I stutter on easier words. And I can't pick an easier word when someone asks me my name.

So I quit talking most of the time. Always better to keep stuff inside. Squish the shame down to your toes if you have to. Keep it hidden there. No one gets it anyway.

20

I feel Agatha behind me as I pour suds into her kitchen sink and pile my socks beneath the running water. A rusted washing machine sits unused in the corner of the kitchen, its top spread with clay pots of apple mint and rosemary and sage.

Agatha wears the same overalls day after day and switches from a flannel shirt to a T-shirt, depending on the weather. The only exception she makes to her laundry system is her underclothes. She wears cotton things she calls underdrawers edged in lace and she washes these by hand with soap flakes. Then she hangs them on the branches of an oak near the house, a spot anyone could see from the road.

I fix all this, of course. I hang a clothesline out back, first of all, and get her underwear out of sight.

There isn't much I can do about ironing because she threw her iron away when it broke years ago. “Ironin' makes no sense at all,” she tells me one day as I try to press a pair of my overalls with my hands. And of course she keeps no starch and no fabric softener. My clothes smell wonderful when I bring them in from the line, all warm from the sun, but soon they pick up the odor of the house, sort of the way a cupboard smells when it hasn't been opened in a while.

“E-e-e-everything around here s-smells old and d-d-dried out.” I am folding clothes into neat piles on the table, my nose buried in one of my shirts.

“You want your clothes to smell good?” my aunt says, looking up from the peas she is shelling. “Then go roll around in the hay.”

21

“Yoo-hoo!” Agatha yells to me through my window one morning. I am reading again. There are no books in this house other than what I brought, and I've read everything so many times I'd read a dictionary at this point.

“Cornelia, I need help getting to the dump.” Agatha presses her nose against the screen to see into my room. I sink further into my book. “Get out of that bed and come help me.”

I roll over, pretending she is a puff of smoke, gone in an instant. “You read too damn much, Cornelia. You're hiding in those books. Now get your butt out here and give me a hand.”

When I don't move, she pulls the screen out of the window. “If you don't get out here, I'm coming in there and dragging you out.”

22

Agatha hands me a straw hat and then walks quickly to the barn. “What's this for?”

“You'll see,” she yells over her shoulder.

As soon as she pushes open the wooden doors, the dry smell of crushed hay and the sweet thickness of old manure soar up my nose. The stalls are empty; the floor lumps with wear. A big pile of trash bags heap in one corner. A broken rake, chipped canning jars, and a coil of old rope lie on top.

When I take a couple of steps forward, I notice a thick netting of spiderwebs strung across the beams over my head. Big fawn-colored spiders crawl through the heavy maze. I stop, unable to move, and pull my hat against my head.
Oh my God
.

“That's why we wear hats,” Agatha says, chuckling. “I'll back Bertha up, you start piling stuff on.”

I don't move. I want to go home.

“What's the matter with you?” Agatha asks. “Barns have spiders. That's the way it is round here.”

I am sure I feel something crawling up my leg. “Why d-don't you vacuum or something?” I scratch the back of my knee with one hand and use the other to hold the hat on my head.

“A barn? Are you kiddin'?” She laughs and walks off to get the truck. She's still chuckling after she backs up the truck and comes around and grabs a garbage bag.

“You don't know much about barns, do you? You need the spiders to get rid of the flies. Maybe your ma made a mistake bringin' you here.”

I am sure of it.

23

“Time you met my truck, anyway,” Agatha says as we load the first of the bags onto the back. “Bertha, this is Cornelia.” She laughs, picks up another bag, and throws it on the back.“I got her in 1975 from Eldin up the road, and she's still the best thing I ever bought. She can haul anything: pumpkins, tires, trash. I use her to pull stumps and to haul manure for the garden. Once I used her to help me hoist Esther up a bit, she was slumping so.”

I keep one eye on the spiders and think that Esther could use some more hoisting. “Do you n-n-n-name everything around here?”

“When you live alone, you learn who your friends are. And you treat them fine if you want them to stick around.”

Bertha is the same faded green as the unripe tomatoes in the garden. The passenger door is tied shut with clothesline. The tailgate has been repaired with wooden rails. Everything on the inside, I see as soon as I open the door, is patched with duct tape.

“No g-g-garbage trucks?” I ask as we roar out of her driveway and onto Route 1.

She laughs. “You don't think anyone would want to pay for something like that around here, do you?”

It isn't really a question, because Agatha snorts after she says it. I turn and look out the window. We pass a dozen fields, empty, bordered by stone walls. The road turns to gravel as we head south; a deer jumps out in front of us. “Whoa, Bertha, don't you hit that doe,” Agatha yells as we bounce over deep ruts in the road. I hold on to the seat.

Agatha pulls onto a dirt road with a sign that says TOWN DUMP. HARRISVILLE RESIDENTS ONLY. The road is littered with old washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners, and dishwashers. Agatha stops in front of a pile of garbage the size of a small mountain.

“Now comes the fun part.” She climbs out of the truck and begins heaving the bags out into the sea of trash. “See who can throw the farthest.”

All I can think about is how much everything stinks. Seagulls soar over us, squawking and fighting over our bags as they land. I wonder what's in them.

“Well, look at that,” she says, pointing out beyond the gulls.

“L-look at what?”

“That pot! I been needin' one that size for a good while now. It's perfect!”

I try and figure out where her finger is pointing. In front of me, alongside hundreds of bags of garbage, sit a cracked plastic lawn table, a blue croquet ball, a baby's high chair, a rug, rolled and tied, and, just a bit to the back, a pot rusted to the color of an orange marigold.

“Cornelia, go get that pot for me.”

I look at the pot, then at Agatha. I'd have to walk up and over several dozen garbage bags to get it. “I'm not p-p-p-picking up trash.”

“It's a perfectly fine pot. Just walk right over.”

“Why don't you just b-b-buy one at the store?”

“And waste this perfectly good one?”

“It's not perfectly good. It's r-r-r-rusted.”

“A little cleanin' and it will shine up good as new.”

“Well, I'm n-not picking up a dirty old pot that somebody else used. Plus I'm not walking way out there.”

Agatha pulls a sugar cube from her pocket and pops it into her mouth. “You don't want anyone to see you picking up trash, is that it?”

“It's st-st-stupid.” I feel something crawling on my arm—an ant. I brush it off and swear under my breath.

Agatha stomps over and pulls a ski hat from under the seat. “Here, pull it down low and pretend you're someone you're not.”

I look at her, not quite believing. “Oh, shit.” I storm out to the trash and begin walking up and over the bags. My foot sinks into one bag and I smell coffee grounds. I reach for the pot, grab it, and sink farther into the garbage. The pot must weigh ten pounds.

“Good,” she says, laughing, as I heave it onto the back of the truck. I kick the coffee grounds off my foot and climb inside and wipe my hands on the duct tape. She pulls the shift into gear and we roar off. “Now I have a pot big enough for my mushrooms.”

24

Agatha's house sits on a hill, surrounded by pines, and a wind blows constant. As the weeks pass and the summer nights heat up, I learn that all that wind means few bugs fly here; mosquitoes haunt more restful spaces.

But then comes the week of no wind, and the heat grows steadily and the humidity spreads out so thick the wet hangs all around me like a morning fog. That's when the mosquitoes fly in the cracks between the stones in the basement and up between the cracks in the floor and down the chimney and through the beetle-sized spaces surrounding the windows. I toss in bed and dream about mosquitoes and hear their shrill hum and I wake in the morning with red welts that make me look like a plucked chicken.

“Why d-d-don't you f-f-f-fix this house?” I scratch at the bites that cross my arms. Agatha fries a batch of mushrooms in her new pot.

“What's the matter with it?” She opens a canning jar of some sort of green goo and dumps it into another pan on the stove. Three flies buzz around her hand as she stirs.

“H-h-haven't you noticed? The s-s-s-screens have holes. Look at all these bugs.”

“Then fix them.” She ladles mushrooms onto her plate and spoons some of the green mixture beside them. “Fishin' line in the barn. Rug needles in the sewin' box back of that cupboard there. Make a spiderweb kind of thing. The time you spend readin', you could be fixin' those screens.” She puts her plate on the table and sits down.

I look at her plate more closely.
I live with a woman who eats little
green snails.

“They're fiddleheads,” she says after a few bites. “Ferns. Want some?”

I shake my head and walk out to the front step to wait for my mother.

25

The boyfriend doesn't know about frozen waffles. He doesn't know that when you stack them five high and dust them with cinnamon and powdered sugar, they will get my mother out of bed on a cold afternoon. The boyfriend doesn't know that a cigarette and a cup of coffee calm her when she starts to shake, and he doesn't know that watching
I Love Lucy
reruns gets her to laugh and improves the day immensely.

My mother is
my
fix-up project, not his. My life is predictable, constant, when it is bookended by one fix-up and then another. I buy carrots and cabbage and peas and puree them into soup so she'll eat something other than Ring Dings. I turn off the gas on the stove after she has fallen asleep with the teapot boiling itself empty. And I feel strong in the fixing. That's the thing. I feel strong in the fixing.

26

“Carrots got to be thinned to three inches apart,” Agatha tells me one morning. “You got to pull the ones that are too close. Like this.” She kneels in the middle of the garden, picking tiny seedlings out of the dirt and tossing them into a ragged pile on the side.

I look doubtful. “Why d-d-d-don't we leave them where they are? They l-l-look like babies.”

“If we don't thin them out, they won't grow any bigger around than my little finger.” Each wispy plant she pulls has a thin thread of orange at the bottom. I look at her throwaways and see myself.

I flop onto the ground. Of all the chores I can think of, gardening is worst. I hate the dirt; I hate the smell of the dirt. I want to go inside and read. I want to read something where the mother gets the love part right.

“What's takin' you so long?” Agatha looks up at me. She's got a smudge of dirt across her forehead and another along the length of her nose. Her braid hangs loose.

I turn my back to her and pull a seedling, then another. I put them into my pocket. When I fill my pocket, I dig a tiny new garden between the rows and replant all the seedlings she's made me pull.

The sun scorches my shoulders red and as the humidity hurries in, the horseflies follow. Relentless bits of wing and sting, three of them circle my head without stopping. Over and over, they dive at my neck, my back, my face.

“This is n-n-n-nuts,” I say, standing and shielding my face from the flies. “I quit.”

“You can't quit, not if you want to eat.”

“I don't w-w-want to eat carrots. I hate carrots. I hate this. All of it.”

I stand there glaring at her while a horsefly lands on my shoulder. She gets up off her knees.

“You're just like your mother,” she says. “Temper like a tornado. I didn't ask you to come here, you know.” An inch of dirt cakes the knees of her overalls. She doesn't bother to brush it off.

“I didn't ask to c-c-c-come here either,” I scream.

“Well, we see eye to eye on one thing, anyway. Now pull those carrots.”

“I'm d-done.” I stand up and wipe my hands on my pants.

“No, you got to finish this row. I'm goin' to clean the henhouse. If you want to eat, you damn well better work.”

“H-h-h-horseshit!”

She laughs at me low and hard. “You goin' to cuss, you got to make your voice like you mean it. And it's hen shit I'm cleanin', not horseshit.”

Is this the reason I was born? I wonder as Agatha walks off across the yard. To be dumped off and brought here to this old woman who drinks tea made of tree roots? Let her just think I'm staying here one second past the moment my mother arrives.

“I'm leaving soon as my m-m-m-mother gets here,” I yell at her back.

She turns. “I don't see her comin', do you?”