The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay (30 page)

I worried more about that damn couch. Jessie watched over her things like she was a scarecrow come to life, patrolling. Anything in that living room was not supposed to be touched for fear it’d get soiled and people would say bad things about her—that she wasn’t a good housekeeper or something. I mean, she really worried about useless things like that.

So I was glad to get that old couch out of the house.

Well, you’d of thought I’d offered her a bag of gold. So happy she was to get it. That old worn-out thing. Away it went.

A while after we give them the couch, we went up there, me and Eddie, to get eggs. Their car was broken down, and she couldn’t deliver. So I said, “Oh, don’t worry, Lilly”—Lilly! That was her name! Just come to me out of the air. I said, “Don’t worry, Lilly, we’ll drive up and get them eggs.” So Edward agreed—it was only up the hill, for God’s sake.

What a run-down excuse for a place that was! Old cars all over, of course. Every manner of junk was strewn all about the yard. “Holy Jesus,” Eddie said when he pulled in. Then a couple of dogs started barking. Black, ratty creatures. We didn’t dare get out. We sat there observing from inside the car—and, by God, I spy our old couch that we’d given them sitting out in front of the chicken house with chickens all over it!

I wasn’t sure if Eddie’d seen it. I didn’t say anything. But he saw. It took him a while, but he saw. It come over his face like a brushfire. He started making that hissing sound he made when he was mad, clenching his teeth and breathing through them—
sssssss
—and I knew the jig was up. “That’s my mother’s couch,” he hissed. “Goddamn if that isn’t my mother’s couch!” Now, we had our new couch, and it was no earthly good to him—even before the chickens let loose all over it. You can imagine. It was a sight.

But Edward held his tongue, even though he was almost at a full boil—that anyone would do anything bad to something that was his, that had been his mother’s. Lilly come out and called off the dogs, and we got the eggs. She was so sweet and grateful. I’m sure it was Jimmy Forrest that put the couch there. He never got it into the house proper—or was too drunk to—and put it down, and there it stayed.

Well, we got the egg boxes lined up across the back seat of the car. Then Eddie, so afraid that he’d get cheated, see, had to open each box and check every egg. He was mad, see, and he was taking it out.

When all the eggs had been checked, I paid her, and away we went. Then Edward started to fume. When he got behind the wheel, if anything was bothering him, that’s how he got rid of it. So he come tearing out of their yard, and I’m saying, “Slow down, Edward! Calm down!” That made him madder, which made me mad then, and he starts on about his couch, his mother’s couch, how could they let the damn chickens shit all over the goddamned couch. You’d think it was the throne of England they were sitting on!

And he never liked that couch. His mother had always been so careful about it that we were afraid to sit on it. So it was ironic that it would meet that end—but it wasn’t tragic. It sort of tickled me, actually, to see it. Jessie must have been spinning in her grave.

Meanwhile, Edward and me were doing some spinning of our own. He took the corner too sharp pulling out onto Longfellow Street. And there was George, ambling up the road, and Eddie was headed right for him. Well, George jumped over that ditch like a stag, I tell you, and Eddie jerked the car the other way. But the wheels on my side of the car went in the ditch. We bumped along jerking down the ditch, Edward cursing, me squealing, George laughing. When the car finally stopped, we were all lopped over into the ditch. And we were stuck. And of course those eggs in the back seat . . . The cartons weren’t closed proper by the last one handling them, if you get my meaning.

I put my head to my hands and closed my eyes before I had the strength to turn around and look. First thing I see is yellow. Yolk yellow. You know what that’s like. Egg was oozing into every possible place—on the inside roof, in the ashtray, and down in the crevices there behind the seat. In the carpet. And some of them yolks hadn’t broke yet. I tried to capture them whole with pieces of shell.

Now, Eddie always wore a straw hat with a brim in summer—he was very careful about his appearance—and he’d taken it off and set it down when he was farting around back checking eggs. Well, he was so mad when the car stopped that he charged around and opened the back door and saw his hat sitting there, and he grabbed it and put it on. Then he continued charging around and opening doors and making things ten times worse. I was doing what I could to scrape things up, but I only had a few Kleenexes in my purse. We were in a panic, you see, ’cause Eddie sold cars. This was a dealer car!

So me and George were scooched in the ditch with the back door open as far as it would go, scraping eggs out as best we could, and Eddie is roaring, and cars are stopping now and slowing down—I was so embarrassed I felt sick—and Eddie comes around to the back—and me and George looked up at him—and there was Edward, standing over us fuming, and all the while there was broken yolk all over the front crown of his hat. Bright yellow. Oozing down and dripping. And he had no earthly idea. He was oblivious. He looked like a tropical bird. It was such bright yellow. My God in heaven.

And George, who usually didn’t have much to say, looked up at Eddie and said, smooth as you please, “The yolk’s on you, Eddie.”

He traded that car in for another as soon as he could.

And it was all my fault, see, for giving them the couch in the first place. It was always my fault.

I thought it would be no trouble driving the eggs down the hill and over to the store. It was a two-minute ride. I wasn’t counting on Edward being so Edward, which of course he always was.

The first cow we had, I guess, was the one Dad gave to Aunt Beth and Uncle Paul when he sent Emma with them. Emma still says she feels bad about that—taking our cow. I know it’s not fair, but for the longest time I resented Emma—I was mean to her. I thought if she’d never been born, I’d still have my mother. I never said it out loud to her, but I thought about it plenty. It wasn’t till years later, when she had TB and I used to go see her in the sanatorium before she got cured, that I got to like her.

Anyhow, that was the first cow I can remember, and after her we got Tater and some others, and then Bossy. But I never knew where calves came from. This is what education we had. I mean, there was no one to tell us the facts of life. What Dad always did if there was a calf born or a lamb or something else, he’d say he found something out in the straw. So we’d go out and look in the barn, and there it’d be in a heap of straw. That’s what he always did.

Well, I had this little heifer, Bossy. It was a cute thing—slender legs, just like a deer. After I’d had her for a year or so, Dad said she was going to have a baby. So this one morning when Dad left, he told me to watch Bossy—and if she left the other cows, to bring her home and go get him.

I put the cows in the pasture and turned my back to put up the bars, so that she wouldn’t get out into somebody’s garden, and I turned around and that cow was gone. Just like that. I looked over, and there was a clump of alders, and they were quivering. She had hidden herself among them. So I got her out of there, and I brought her home.

Well, I went all around the sides of that cow looking to see where that calf would come out. Because I knew that calf was inside the cow. I looked all around to see where there was an opening. And I never found it. I was thirteen years old! I didn’t know anything.

And then I saw. Here was two little toes coming out the back of her. Two toes. Her two front. I ran like hell up the road and got Dad. After that, of course, I didn’t go out to the barn. We weren’t supposed to. We weren’t supposed to know anything about anything like that. But I saw those toes! It gave me something to chew on.

We none of us got too good an introduction to things of that nature. No one told us a damned thing. We had no mother. We used to lie there in the bed, me and Idella, and try to put the pieces together. We came up with the damnedest theories about making babies. There was a spell when we kept away from each other at night, each rolled off to a side, ’cause we knew that whatever happened, it was supposed to happen in a bed. Poor little ninnies we were.

Hell, when I got my period for the first time, I didn’t know what it was. I woke up with red spots all over my nightie, and I snuck down the stairs and got a pair of scissors, and I cut the spots out so Idella wouldn’t see them. I thought I’d done something wrong.

Men took advantage every chance they got. We come to know later it could happen anywhere. In the barn. In the woods. Goddamned men that Dad would get to work on the farm. One tried to grab Idella in the outhouse. They were scraped from off the bottom of the barrel.

It happened to poor Aunt May on the milking table. Aunt May was my mother’s sister. She was tongue-tied. Sweet a thing as you could ask for, but kind of simple.

I wasn’t any more than seven. I was poking around the farm, and I wandered into the barn. Well, right there on the milking table, up on top of it, is this big lout of a farmhand wriggling around—and under him, I can just see her shoes sticking out, is Aunt May! I didn’t know what was going on.

I ran out screaming like a banshee. Grampa Smythe went running in. Aunt May was still on the table—and that poor sucker was running out like his pants were on fire. He comes across a bicycle, and it’s got little wheels, see, so he starts peddling, peddling, peddling. And Grampa Smythe, who’s chasing him, and Uncle John—he come running out of the woodwork—they grabbed tall-wheelers, with big, long spokes. And they start going like the wind. I remember watching them going down the road, and Grampa and Uncle John gradually gaining on him. Well, they caught up with him, and knocked him down, and beat the shit out of him.

Aunt May ended up with two children. No one knew who the fathers were or if they were the same. I think them boys of hers ended up being real good to her—a sort of blessing. No matter how they got started.

Now, Idella latched on to Eddie and settled. But I went through quite a shitload of men. And I found more shit than I ever bargained for. I had a nose for it. One of the first was Jamie. That was while I was in Boston. Poor son of a bitch. James O’Hagan. He lived with his mother—one of my regular bluehairs at the shop—and she asked me if I’d like to meet him. I had my doubts, but he had a nice car and no fleas anywhere that I could see.

Well, we went out for a couple of months, but he started to irritate me. He’d pick at every tooth after every meal with a toothpick, even in restaurants. And he was jealous. I got a prickly feeling whenever I was with him. I hated being watched. Owned. We came up to Maine one time—he wanted to meet my family—and we all went out to Old Orchard Beach. Well, Eddie had this goddamned plastic lobster, which he kept putting up my skirt. You can be sure Jamie took notice and started sulking. So I gave him what he was looking for. The more he sulked, the more I let Eddie have his fun.

All the way back to Boston, I’m hearing about Eddie and his plastic lobster. And how he was putting the claws all over, and where else did he put his claws, and how could I do that to my own sister, and on and on and on all down the road. Finally I said if he mentioned Eddie Jensen one more time, I’d never see him again—which is what I had decided was the best thing anyway.

He got all quiet after that. Stopped cold. About a week after, he asks me to go on a picnic, to celebrate my birthday. I thought he had a surprise for me, a present, so I agreed to go. Christ, I even made my special peach pie. We set out on a Sunday morning. We heard church bells ringing out there in the country, and we’re going along—I had my flask, and I was drinking from it on the sly—and he turns down a dirt road. I’m thinking he’s found a lake or some nice spot for our picnic. Only it’s not much of a place. No lake in sight. Just scrubby trees on each side. He stopped the car. Said he had to check something in the trunk. I thought he must be getting my present. He was always buying me nice things, and I liked getting them. I was sitting there putting on lipstick, and I see out the corner of my eye that he’d walked around to the front of the car. I looked up to say where is the big surprise, and I was just in time to see him blow his brains out the back of his head with a gun he’d stuck in his mouth.

I never looked at him. No question he was dead. I sat there staring into my little mirror. Holy Christ, I was scared. My mind was going faster than my heart, which was plenty. I got out of the car and went around back, and the trunk was closed, but there was the picnic basket on the ground. He’d taken it out to get the gun, I guess. And there was my pie. I took the knife, and I’m shaking by then, and I cut a piece of the pie, and I started in eating it. I was scared shitless I’d have whiskey on my breath on a Sunday morning. I smeared peaches all over my teeth, threw down the knife, and set out to look for help. I left the pie sitting in the dirt. I followed the sound of those church bells. At one point I knelt by the road and threw up all the pie. So I had another kind of breath, but it wasn’t the whiskey.

It must have been two miles I walked to that church. Cars were just pulling out, and along I come straggling in. I was barefooted by then, and I had peach-pie puke all over myself. Oh, I was pretty.

The police found everything just like I’d said. They believed me. Because Jamie had a history when they checked into him. He’d been in more than one institution. He was crazy, poor bastard.

So I kept looking for something that I never found in men. I don’t even know what—excitement? love? money? Some of them were pretty tough customers. My first husband, Tommy, had me in trouble up to my armpits from day one. Handsome bugger. Flashy dresser and as smooth as a baby’s ass. I’d never seen the likes of him on the farm. I met him in a rainstorm. We were in a doorway during a downpour in Boston, and I had a newspaper over my head to keep my hair dry—I was a hairdresser—and he was trying to read the sports news that I had there on top of my head, and we struck up a conversation—about statistics.