Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  Grand Dan’s house, Grand Dan’s rules. That was 1932, shortly after Phil and Mr. Holmes moved us two miles out of the town of Wilna Creek and into Phil’s childhood home, the Danforth house. From that day forward, Ally and I had three adults to obey instead of two.

  ELEVEN

  The reason my parents moved our family was because Grand Dan had decided she no longer wanted to live alone—seventeen years since my grandfather had left for war was seventeen years too many—so we obliged her by moving in. We were closest; therefore, Grand Dan was our responsibility. I was six years old and Ally was eight.

  Our Aunt and Uncle Fred lived a hundred and sixty miles west along what was known as the King’s Highway. Uncle Fred, who had been born in Austria-Hungary before the Great War, emigrated from the new Austria when he was fifteen. He always told us he had a charmed life: too young to fight in the Great War, he’d survived the upheaval afterwards. He ended up in our little Ontario town, wooed my Aunt Fred, and then followed a railroad job after they married. Enough years had passed that it was deemed inconvenient for them to move back to Wilna Creek to help out. They were part of their own community now; they were raising four sons. Uncle Fred had become an inspector and wore a white shirt to work.

  Ally and I loved our Uncle Fred. He was a storyteller, a bawdy-joke man, a believer in ghosts. But we also knew that when his sons misbehaved, he held their heads under the outdoor pump. I saw him do this to the eldest when I was visiting their family one summer. He pumped until a great sucking sound pulled a sob out of the earth, and cold water gushed over my cousin’s neck. Because of this and even though I loved him, I was glad Uncle Fred was not our father. We had our own set of problems with Mr. Holmes. Our father was a ranter and a shouter—but only at night, in his sleep.

  No one thought it strange that our grandmother did not move to town to live with us. I suppose our parents thought she had lost enough. She should not be required to lose husband and home in one lifetime.

  Grand Dan’s house in the country was not huge but had a high-ceilinged library, an enclosed veranda, a small parlour, large kitchen with a windowed pantry, and summer kitchen, which was closed off in winter. Upstairs, there were three bedrooms with slanted ceilings. Ally and I shared a room and slept together in a big double bed. The house whispered and breathed like bellows. It had the scent of stored apples, the sound of ancestral spirits walking corridors and rapping walls. Downstairs, in the parlour, there was a huge floor-model radio that had walnut latticework across its front, as well as an extra dial for short-wave. Ally and I listened to dots and dashes, imagined ships stranded at sea.

  Apart from the house, Grand Dan owned a large field, leased as a hayfield to Mott, a neighbouring farmer who raised cows and pigs. The wide shed into which Grandfather had driven his Model T had a severe tilt. The car had aged but was still running and, for a few years, our father drove it back and forth to the dry goods store in town. He sold the car—with Grand Dan’s approval—and bought another, second-hand, after learning that the barber on Main Street had been overheard to say, one morning, “Here comes one-eyed Holmes in his flivver.”

  There was another outbuilding on the country property, a small chicken coop, and for a time, Grand Dan raised hens and chicks. One of the few photos taken at the time shows Mott standing beside Grand Dan and holding two plucked, upside-down hens, their necks wrung. Grand Dan was wearing a bloody white apron—she made her aprons from flour bags—though Mott would have been called to do the neck-wringing. Our grandmother could not bring herself to end a life, even though she had to cook the hens to feed the family.

  Twice a week, Wednesday and Saturday, Mott delivered milk and cream in graniteware cans to our back door, part of the bargain concerning the lease of the field. In 1937, he purchased a narrow strip of that same field. He would have bought more, but Grand Dan kept the larger portion against needier times. For the moment, the sale provided enough cash to stretch out over a few more years. She was cordial at the time of the sale, but never fully approved of Mott because he’d once lit a fire under his horse, Dandy, who’d balked and refused to move.

  Outside, Grand Dan planted yellow roses inside the spokes of an enormous wagon wheel that had been rolled to the backyard and laid on its side over rocky soil, which she had nurtured and fertilized since the turn of the century. The rest of the yard was a vegetable garden that reached as far as the low stone wall. Grand Dan had been a June baby, and every year on her birthday the first yellow rose bloomed. How these events managed to coincide was a mystery to Ally and me.

  Grandfather had left little money in the bank, but there was a small pension, and the house was free of mortgage. After our family moved in, the women worked to keep the place up. My father occupied himself with the store in town and, until sales began to falter badly during the last years of the Great Depression, the five of us had enough to live on.

  Not only did Grandfather leave a Model T, a wife and two daughters behind, he also left his medical books. The day we moved to the country house, I discovered them in the Danforth library, exactly as they had been abandoned. Grand Dan had kept the room more or less intact, except for a sewing table, which took up the centre. A pedal-operated Singer was squeezed against one wall and challenged the examining table for space. Shelved along another wall were medical texts and the remainder of Grandfather’s library: Dickens in fifteen volumes, Count Leo Tolstoy, The Poems of Archibald Lampman, six volumes of Conan Doyle, The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by H. B. Stowe. Presiding over the entire room was a framed portrait of Queen Victoria, a sideways view.

  My fascination with human anatomy began the day I let myself into this room and shut the door behind me. I scanned the shelves, lifted down the thickest book, plopped it on the sun-warmed leather of the examining table and opened the cover to inspect the diagrams. I was six years old, and that was the day my obsession with learning truly began. As it turned out, my favourite of all the books was Gray’s Anatomy, 1901, the one I returned to most frequently and the first I had pulled from the shelf. You might say a kind of imprinting took place. It was also there that I encountered Grandfather’s cramped handwriting, words written in tight squiggles on the inside cover. I did my best to decipher his writings—he had also jotted in the margins—and throughout my childhood, I pondered what I considered to be his three grand thoughts.

  The first principle of healing is rest.

  Structure determines function.

  The third must have been written at a later time; it was in a slightly different hand and a darker ink.

  Learning is changed behaviour.

  This was still my grandfather’s handwriting, but the writing had become expansive and hurried. I suppose he had a lot on his mind. Or maybe he’d learned to change his behaviour. Young as I was, I recognized that the three grand thoughts were direct messages from him to me, messages that partially satisfied my prying mind.

  For years, the text portion was gibberish to me, even though I knew how to read in rudimentary fashion. Ally, who had started school before me, had taught me most of what she had learned. But what most captivated me about Gray’s were the illustrations. I was fascinated by the contents of the abdominal cavity laid bare, by the musculature of the chest with protective layers peeled back, by shaded arteries in the shoulder stretched like tendrils of a branching tree, by a grinning, noseless side view of a skull.

  This is what we are inside, I told myself. This is what resists when we press against our skin. I thought of my relatives who lived alongside me in the white house. Grand Dan’s kidneys were safely boxed in behind her apron strings. My unsuspecting parents, Phil and Mr. Holmes, even my sister, Ally, walked around with trickily camouflaged coils of intestine looped behind their abdominal walls. I contemplated the word splayed. I believed from my private studies that the frontier between inside and out was narrow indeed, that there was little to keep my own organs tucked neatly inside: liver, pancreas, stomach, spleen. In my opinio
n, the heart took too much space and crowded the lungs. The windpipe, cut open, resembled a slashed hose. Fat cells, disguised by the name adipose, were shaped like Aunt Fred’s diamond ring, the one she took off when she washed and rinsed the plates in the enamel dishpan.

  On the pages of Gray’s, exposed tendons of the face and throat were ghoulish. The upturned chin and bared muscles of the head were frightening enough to make me think of Miss Grinfeld, who refused to die and mercilessly taught eight grades for decades in our one-room school, with no inclination to retire or to be replaced by a younger, kinder version of herself. She had taught our mother and our aunt, and she lay in wait for Ally and me as we marched into her classroom on the first day of school, September 1932. Ally was in third year because she had already attended school in town, but I was in first. Having discovered Grandfather’s anatomy book, I at once transferred my memory-image of the ghoulish throat to the profile of my teacher.

  Grand Dan approved of my obsession with anatomy and although she no longer practised midwifery, she might have hoped that I would someday involve myself in the care of the human body as she and my grandfather had done. She was fond of saying, “Be not ignorant of any thing in matters great or small,” a theme often heard while Ally and I were growing up. Even so, there were matters great and small that were not discussed. About the matter of sex, the adults around us were vague or silent. Mr. Holmes avoided all reference to the topic and, perhaps because of him, our mother followed suit. I learned more from Grandfather’s medical texts than I ever did from my parents.

  Diagrams of the reproductive organs were vivid and graphic on the pages of Gray’s and I had a desire to discuss their perplexing detail with someone. Ovaries, uterus, a frightening-looking vagina, testes, prostate, penis. Because these were called “the organs of generation,” I believed, for a time, that only one generation in each family was endowed. I finally asked Grand Dan about this one morning while she was wrapping her legs, and she sat back in her chair with an expression I hadn’t seen before. It was an unexpected and momentary glimpse inside her, which I caught before it disappeared again. Her voice was softer than usual when she replied.

  “Georgie,” she said, “women are made one way and men another, but their parts are meant to be complementary.” This confused me, but I kept quiet while I thought of body parts paying compliments to one another. “As it happens,” she went on, “men and women come in different shapes and sizes. And when God designed the human body, he ensured that our women’s parts were different from men’s.”

  I liked the word design, which was enough to satisfy me. I also liked knowing that I was included in “our women’s parts.” But Grand Dan had taken the question so seriously, I was put off and didn’t ask for more.

  I went back to Gray’s, slowly progressing from diagrams to labels, sounding out names of body parts like a mantra, trying to figure things out. I was not exactly certain what the organs of generation did but I knew instinctively that I’d be better off keeping further questions to myself.

  My favourite of all the diagrams was the upright skeleton itself. All bone and no flesh, missing part of its head, this erect Homo sapiens was ready to rattle its bones and strut out the side of the page. I named him Hubley, having decided it was a he.

  “Structure determines function, Hubley,” I said. “Be mindful of how you behave.”

  Between September and June, behave was something we were forced to do by the ever-looming Miss Grinfeld, who kept strict order in our country school. She was responsible for instruction in every subject because she was the only teacher—all eight grades being captive in one room. We listened to one another’s recitations. Younger children read blackboard work written for older children. It was easy to skip grades just by paying attention. Still, Miss Grinfeld managed to celebrate learning. She had ways of persuading us to memorize grammar, spelling and math. She used song, rhythm and a wooden pointer banging against the floorboards to “make the learning stick.” She was a purveyor of words and never once did she stab her own foot.

  “One and one are two,” we chanted as we stood beside our desks. “Two and two are four.” Our voices rose robotically, righteously. “Eight and eight are sixteen. Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two.”

  She taught the names of the Great Lakes by having us repeat: “Every Man Has Socks On—Erie, Michigan, Huron, Superior, Ontario.” She reasoned that there was one s in desert because we’d want to cross a desert only once, but a double s in dessert because we would want two portions of dessert. She loved the way the English language glued itself together from many eras, many tongues. She spoke with reverence when she discussed prepositions. She wrote them on the blackboard and had us sing them alphabetically, in verses, to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell.” One more song to belt out, though we had to twist our tongues around the rhythm.

  About above across after

  Against along among

  Around as at before behind

  Below beside besides

  Between beyond but

  By down dur—ing

  Except for, from in into

  Like near—next of off

  On onto out over past round

  Than through throughout till

  To toward under unlike

  Until unto up upon with

  And without

  The last line was anticlimactic but, in a perverse way, we waited, shouting out the two words like grand punctuation marks we’d that moment discovered in the farmer’s dell. I didn’t know what a dell was, and had to look it up in Grandfather’s dictionary at home, but that did not affect the learning of the song.

  Memory has not failed me.

  My ribs are stiff, but I don’t think they’re broken. If they were, surely it would be difficult to breathe. My bottom feels the way it felt in winter when I was a child, when Grand Dan and our mother sat Ally and me on a frozen quarter of beef purchased from Mott. The weight of our bodies was supposed to steady the beef while they sawed off steaks with the crosscut saw. Not wanting to wait until Mr. Holmes returned from the store in town—they knew they were capable of doing anything he could—the two women dragged the side of beef from the summer kitchen, which was used for cold storage from December to March. They laid it on newspapers on the table, covered it with sheets of waxed brown paper, and spread an old coat overtop. While they sawed, Ally and I bounced up and down, on and off the carcass, and yelled, “Are you finished yet? Will you hurry up? Our bums are freezing!”

  Which is the way I feel at this moment. Bum is numb and I need to shift position.

  Sitting on a frozen side of beef provided one good reason for Ally to hate winter, but even before that she dreamed of living in a warmer climate. Perhaps it was something she had read, or something she’d heard at school. She was convinced that “south” would be an improvement over Ontario winters. “We could move south, Georgie,” she said, as we climbed down off the carcass. “The whole family. We could start by renting a villa and work our way up. Do odd jobs. Anything. We could pool our money and buy a place.”

  “Then what?”

  “We’ll rent rooms at one end of the villa and live at the other end. Everyone will have something to do. That’s how it works in life—haven’t you figured it out? Every person in life gets a function. Mother will keep the books because she’s used to stretching the money. Mr. Holmes can look after security and shout away intruders. He can also barricade the villa against storms. Grand Dan will cook. If it’s too hot to light the stove, we’ll buy her a hot plate. And she can deliver any babies that come along. Our four cousins can join us if they want to. They’ll be in charge of maintenance. Uncle Fred will inspect their work—and hold their heads under the pump if they don’t do a good job.” We laughed uproariously. “And he can tell ghost stories after dark.

  “Aunt Fred will wash dishes, and sing country-and-western to entertain us. She can also start a fight ‘when we get bored. You can be peacemaker. And set the table,” she added, as if
the additional assignment of practical ‘work ‘would convince me. “You can also tend any bones that get broken. Put on splints. Grand Dan can wrap them with her cottons.”

  “What will you do?” I was surprised that she had everyone’s functions figured out.

  “I’ll lie in the sun and get warm. I’ll read aloud to everyone—and be in charge of good cheer. I’ll draw, and maybe sell my art.” She looked away. Despite her dislike of winter, Ally had a drawer filled with pencil-crayoned drawings of snow: our stone fence, its outline buried but distinct beneath waves of white; the tilting shed with white drifts sliding into its angle of leaning; the swollen surface of the creek with a spring skin of ice.

  “Every household needs a lady,” our mother piped up. She was on her knees in front of the coal stove, shaking down the ashes before the steaks were cooked. She stood, and hung the shaker on its hook.

  Ally was not deterred. She laid her plans, adding, deleting, adjusting. But I was in no hurry to go anywhere. Nor was anyone else. And no one was more shocked than I when, sixty years later, my beloved sister and her husband, Wade Trick, packed their bags and moved south to Florida.

  SCAPULA

  TWELVE

  Whoever is in charge of this rescue, please hurry up! I’m not an eighth of the way to the car, which is what I’m aiming for. Car as refuge. Car as haven. Car has a horn. Horn could save my life.

  Courage, Georgie. Don’t be morbid. It’s only a matter of time.

  I’m losing track. I’m old and stiff. An old stiff. Come on, bones, don’t let me down!

  It wasn’t so long ago that I read about a woman who lived alone in the country and fell backwards into her own garbage barrel and couldn’t get out. Her head and arms stuck out, her feet stuck out, but the rest of her was tucked down inside. She was rescued after several days—alive. The humiliation must have been unthinkable.