Yonnondio: From the Thirties (5 page)

She did not know what to say. A fear hovered. Outside the window there was still a
faint light low in the west, like vanishing wings of birds. She fastened her eyes
there. He kept on talking.

“Tell her to come see me, your mother. You remember what you thought the stars were,
Mazie, before I told you?”

She nodded.

“Splinters of the moon, you said. Or maybe flowers in the night. Keep that wondering,
Mazie, but try to know. Build on the knowing with the wondering. Mazie …”

She had to turn her eyes to him. His head was moving from side to side as if something
were caught choking in his throat.

“Mazie. Live, don’t exist. Learn from your mother, who has had everything to grind
out life and yet has kept life. Alive, felt what’s real, known what’s real. People
can live their whole life not knowing.”

The words were incomprehensible. They parched the fear, but thirstily she still watched
his eyes.

“You don’t know how few… ‘Better,’ your mother says, ‘to be a cripple and alive than
dead, not able to feel anything.’ But there is more—to rebel against
what will not let life be. Your mother thought to move from the mine to the farm would
be enough, but …”

The hand was suddenly heavy on her shoulder. He raised himself.

His voice goes on. “Whatever happens, remember, everything, the nourishment, the roots
you need, are where you are now.”

The voice falters, dies;
no, none of it can be said when I myself do … not… know
.

Mazie sits with a sense of non-being over her—of it being someone other than she sitting
there timeless, suspended in a dusky room, feeling a voice gathering around her, kind
still hands of sound flaring into words meaningless and strange, meaningless when
one tries to understand, but meaningful for a fleeting second. And she creeps her
hand over the hand that lies on her shoulder. He laughs. A musical grieving sound.
Calling, “Bess, see she gets some of the books. Those fairy tales, Wilde’s, and the
Dickens and Blake, and that book of Greek myths. Someday she will read them.

“Goodbye, my wonder-gazer companion.”

Whimpering, running down the road, each step pain, the shadows were long and clutched
at her, the corn by the wayside, some fallen, some shorn, was desolate and terrible,
a flesh of her flesh.

Coming to the kitchen, she heard her father’s angry voice: “They’re taking all of
it, every damn thing. The whole year slaved to nothing. I owe them—some joke if it
wasnt so bloody—I owin
them
after workin like a team of mules for a year. They’re wantin the cow and Nellie …
takin Fred Benson’s farm and Eldridge’s. Batten on us like hogs. The bastards. A whole
year—now I’m owin them.”

The wind started a laughter in the fallen dried leaves, stirred them round and round
senselessly in a mocking mimicry of being alive, rose in mocking laughter through
the trees and beat it up over the sky.

Caldwell died a week later. Mazie never got the books—Jim sold them for half a dollar
when he got to town, though Anna cursed him for it. As for Mazie’s slashed feet, it
was weeks before she could do without rag bandages, could bear the wearing of shoes.

Overnight in late October, the ground grew hard and unyielding. Mazie and Will, trudging
to school, felt their blood draw into little lumps under their skin and congeal under
the touch of the wind. Tears would be frozen down their faces by the time they reached
the schoolhouse, and Willie’s feet, in their torn shoes, insensible. The snow came
and fastened itself upon the earth. Finally it lay in too high waves of white over
the fields, so that Mazie and Will had to stay home. Then the school itself closed.

Days were dim and short. Snow lay on the earth continually—blinding white at noon,
yellow and old at dusk, ghost white at night. Life ceased beyond the kitchen. In the
circle of warmth around the stove,
everything moved and revolved. Distance was enormously magnified by the cold. Far
and far it seemed to the woodpile; to the henhouse, where the hens gathered in drooping
ovals of dejection, their cheeps coming out in little frozen spears; to the stable,
where the sweet rotting smell of hay and the great cloud of warm breath from the cow
stained the air. They scarcely moved from the stove. All day they sat around, Will’s
staccato cough mingling with Baby Jim’s ceaseless sniffling. Anna was pregnant again—caught
in the drowse of it, drugged by the warmth, she let things be. In the yellow kerosene
light at night, she sewed or thumbed over the pages of a catalogue. But the other
work she left. Dirty clothes gathered into a waiting pile, bacon drippings coiled
greasy in the bottom of the pans, bread went unmade, and the smell of drying diapers
layered over the room. Meals were quick, slapped together, half burned. It drove Jim
crazy. The untidiness, the closeness, the inaction. The querulous children, half sick,
always hungry—thinning, while Anna grew monstrous fat as if she were feeding on them.

“A woman’s goddam life,” he would shout, “sittin around huggin a stove.” Then contrite,
jerk out long fiery stories to the kids, sometimes stopping abruptly in the middle
to brood. He whittled toys for them—blocks, dolls, animals, and gentle with Anna,
straightened
up for her, kneaded the bread. But when it was time for the chores, for the first
time he would be eager, alert.

Quarrels flared up. Sometimes he beat up on the kids. Anna, the dream paralysis on
her, unlike her old self, scarcely seemed to hear or care. “Snowed in like this leaves
a man too much with himself,” Jim would explain. “He starts askin why, and what for,
like a kid.”

One day through the sad sifting sound of snow came the high cheep of newborn chicks.
Jim ran out. “Some fool hen hiding her eggs and settin. Wonder she didn’t pick out
the ice on the crick to set on. C’mon, Mazie.” He piled them into her apron. Very
alive and vital she felt in all the frozen world, but inside the house again, with
a tiny oval of fluff against her cheek, barely moving, a shadow of sorrow fell on
her heart. They put the chicks in the oven to warm, and Jim disappeared—probably to
plow through the snow to a neighbor’s for drink and talk.

The afternoon was a short gray blur; whirring of white against the windows, and stillness,
except for the crackling of icicles and the short quick
spfft
of wood in the stove. Nobody noticed when the cheep became hysterical and finally
ceased. Mazie and Ben peopled a city with things cut out of a catalogue, while Will
watched them, his head a tangle of fever,
remembering how the snow had soaked through his shoddy shoes and he could not be out
till spring. Anna sat unmoving by the stove, her hands over her belly, a half smile
of wisdom on her mouth, coming out of her dream to say, “Wipe Jim’s nose, Mazie. I
see the grease didn’t do no good to drive that cough out, Will.” And then sinking
back into the dream again.

Jim came in. He stood at the door a moment, blind. For the first time, they noticed
the smell of burning. “Crissake.” He swung to the oven in one step and opened it.
“The chicks, sure enough. Roasted to death. Have I got a bunch of dummies in here
that can’t even smell?”

No one answered. With shocked eyes, they stared. “Dumb, too? Your mouths stuffed up
like your noses with crap? But you’ll smell ’em.” He grabbed Anna and forced her down
by the open oven. “You’ll fill your eyes with ’em.”

She flung herself free. “Don’t you touch me.”

“Don’t touch ya, huh. You don’t always talk like that. No wonder I never got anywhere.
No wonder nothing ever comes right. Lots of help I get from my woman.”

“You get plenty. Kitchen help, farm help, milkin help, washwoman help. And motherin
too.”

“Who asked for your goddam brats?”

“Who? I’ll never have another, to starve to death with you.”

“No wonder we’re starvin. Look at the woman I got.”

“Poppa, stop, Momma, don’t,” Ben was screaming. Mazie held Jim scooped in her arms,
her head buried in his baby body to stifle the sounds. Only Will moved. He was pulling
on his father’s pants leg, shouting, “Don’t, don’t, don’t.”

“Oh, fine bargains you make, fine bargains,” Anna taunted. “Anybody can cheat you
out of anything. Can’t even make a livin. Fine bargains—how to starve your wife and
kids quickest.”

“Shut up.”

“Oh sure, it was all goin to be fine. A new life, and you made one all right. A new
way to keep us cold and wantin.”

“Shut up
.” His fist crashed against her shoulder; she sagged under it. For a moment he stared
at her, at the crying children, at Will beating him with small fists, at the diapers
flapping over the stove, then he went out the door, closing it behind him, dark.

The worst storm in years arose that night. Over the torn and scattered sky, a wild
hungry darkness came, then snow, driving in the wind like steel whips. The window
in the bedroom shattered on the floor before
it, and neither the chair bottom pounded over, or the quilts stuffed around, kept
the bitterness out. For three nights they all slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor,
Mazie and Anna venturing out only once a day with a bucket of hot coals to warm their
hands over when they milked the cow or fed the horse and hog. The chickens they brought
to the cellar and bedded in straw.

Outside, the charred bodies of the chicks lay where Anna had thrown them. That night,
the snow covered them. Four days later, the sun rose at last over a vast white world,
pure and unmoving.

It was ten days before Jim returned. Where he went or what he did, he never told.

Early in March, Mazie and Will wandered to a high wood where hidden wild violets with
tears in their eyes carpeted the ground. Restless, Mazie pressed herself into the
earth, but the soft dankness brought a faint remembrance of a face like jelly pushed
against hers. Shuddering, she got up again. “Butterflies live behind your eyes, Will,
butterflies. Their wings all colored. You dont believe me? Go ahead and try it—push
your finger in your eye and you’ll see ’em, butterfly wings.”

Ugly and ugly the earth. Patches of soiled snow oozing away, leaving the ground like
great dirty sores between, scabs of old leaves that like a bruise
hid the violets underneath. Trees, fat with oily buds, and the swollen breasts of
prairie. Ugly. She turned her eyes to the sky for oblivion, but it was bellies, swollen
bellies, black and corpse gray, puffing out baggier and baggier, cloud belly on cloud
belly till at the zenith they pushed vast and swollen. Her mother. Night, sweating
bodies. The blood and pain of birth. Nausea groveled. “Think I’m lyin, just push your
finger in your eyes and you’ll see. Butterflies.” She could feel words swollen big
within her, words coming out with pain, bloody, all clothed in red. She began to hit
Will, hard, ferocious. Then a weakness of tears—“Wouldja live in a room all breath,
all winter breath?” He was raining small futile blows on her, blows unfelt. “Oh Will,
Oh were I a Lum Ti Turn Turn.” Ugly. Swollen like bellies.

She wakened that night to a nightmare of Jim’s savage hand on her shoulder. “Wake
up now. Your mother’s goin to have a baby, and you’ve got to help her. I’m drivin
over to Ellis’s and takin Will and Ben. You put on water for me, now, right away.”

The nausea came again. In the kitchen her mother was sitting, on her face a look of
not seeing, although the black gates of her eyes opened on something too far to see
to.

“Momma,” Mazie cried, frightened, pressing her head in her mother’s knees. “Momma.”

For a moment Anna turned her eyes to her, with
a look compassionate and troubled. “It’s all right, Mazie. I’m beginnin to have the
baby. It’s my time. I told Jim not to leave you.” Then her face masked into a stranger’s
again, and her body stiffened, her hand clutching the chair back. Spacing her words,
she said, “Better fire up the stove. Then come in the bedroom and help me fix up the
bed.”

The blackened fire leaped under her touch to embers and later to flame. Cheerlessly
the water fled into the bucket and teakettle. But there was still the bedroom to be
faced. She found her mother quietly kneeling before a drawer, holding a sheet. “Here,”
she said in a remote voice, “we’ll put this one on. Then get out those newspapers.”

“Yes, Momma.” A nausea was gathering into her breast, clotting there. “Yes.”

They came at last so that she could flee into the night. But the clatter of their
voices came after. Uneven words. She clutched herself and sank into the soft dust.
A forlorn wind fingered her hair and went gently over her body. But the nausea contested
there, unmoving. Yes, Momma. The face set like a mask, purified, austere. To fix her
mind to a time of dancing when laughter rose like froth; but the face curtained over
everything. Yes, Momma. Miss Burgum was saying something about a dry birth, the waters
broke. She crept into the henhouse, not to
hear. Full and quiet in the darkness the house lay and the fields beyond.

Then, strangely, hunger came. Trickles of it in her mouth, battling under the nausea.
Food—the smell of it yearned in her nostrils. She found an egg, warm. It slipped down
her throat, then it was washing up again, spurting over the ground. Yes, Momma. I’m
sick, Momma. Butterflies live behind your eyes. Perhaps there were stars above, known
stars. Light, weightless, she walked out to the yard, the earth under her feet like
air, and turned her face to the heavens. Pale, half drowned, blurred like through
tears, the stars. Where was the belted man Caldwell had told her of, lifting his shield
against a horn of stars? Where was the bright one she had run after into the sunset?
A strange face, the sky grieved above her, gone suddenly strange like her mother’s.