Remembering the Bones

by Frances Itani

  One day in early spring, Ally and I found a dead kitten beside the banks of the swollen creek that ran along the edge of Mott’s property. The temperature had dropped dramatically the previous night, and the day was one of dry, blue cold. We held our breath, took tentative steps on the surface crust of snow. It was a heady feeling and I recall the satisfaction of knowing that my boots would not punch through. We both saw the kitten at the same moment and leaped down the bank towards it. We could tell it had been in water because of its clumped and frozen fur, and we told each other that someone had tried to drown it and had tossed it in the water farther up the creek. It had managed to drag itself out and up the bank but despite the effort, or because of it, the sad creature did not survive. It died with one eye open. “Like Lazarus,” we said, as we carried it home between our mittens and dug through a layer of snow in an attempt to give it a burial. Lazarus had risen from the dead and maybe the kitten would, too. We used a pick from the shed, but the pick sprang off the frozen earth and made our arms shudder as we took turns digging. We buried the kitten more on top of the ground than below, and packed tight snow around its corpse.

  Ally complained while she swung the pick, her scarf ends swaying. “I’m getting out of here,” she said. “I hate winter and I’m moving south, to warmer climes.” I knew the word climes had come from Miss Grinfeld. She was the only person who would use such a word in ordinary speech, and I admired Ally for making it her own. Later that week, I watched across the table as Ally made a drawing of the dead kitten, half in and half out of the creek, its open eye unseeing. The unbroken snow upon which we’d walked had a lustrous, rippled sheen, as if providing a background of glory to the site of the cat’s demise.

  The following Sunday, Ally and I read to each other in the kitchen. We were required to read aloud from the Bible every Sunday afternoon for twenty minutes—Grand Dan’s rule—and we took turns handing it back and forth, doing our best to search out interesting passages, loving the sound of biblical language.

  Thinking of the kitten’s shallow grave, I read, “They found no more of her than the skull, and feet, and the palms of her hands.” I quickly altered hands to paws.

  When it suited our purpose, we made certain we were overheard. Another Sunday, while trying to convince our parents that we needed new shoes for school, Ally read in a loud voice, “How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter.” But there were no new shoes. Not during the years of the Depression.

  When it was my turn to read, I thought of Sog, a chubby boy in Ally’s grade who’d earned his nickname by bringing soggy tomato sandwiches to school for lunch. Even the paper bag that held them had wet patches. At recess, Sog told Ally he loved her, and on the following Sunday I read, cryptically, “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down.” We laughed as if we were possessed. Neither of us was interested in love. Not then.

  “Lazarus did stinketh,” Ally read aloud.

  We marvelled, not only at the miracle, but at the word stinketh, which we incorporated into our private lexicon. When we carried garbage out to the refuse pit at the back of the property, Ally held her nose and shouted, “This is disgusting! The whole place doth stinketh!” When a squirrel got into the root cellar and died, we were told to carry its rotting body outside on a shovel. “Truly,” we complained, “this bringeth no amusement.”

  At night we lay on our backs in our double bed and invented sentences for thither and nay and doeth and smite and belongeth. “Shew us the door,” we mock-read one Sunday. “We wisheth to play, and desireth fresh air.”

  A firm response came from the next room. “It behooveth thee to read until thy time is up. Then shall thee be shewn the door.”

  But Lazarus did stinketh—or so the Bible said.

  What did Lazarus learn the second time around? That’s what I wanted to know.

  Grand Dan’s Bible readings were from Ecclesiastes, which she freely quoted and which I learned, by listening. “You’re the one with the memory,” she told me, as I followed her around and recited: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”

  Ally and I read other books besides the Bible, any books we could find. I was making slow progress through Grandfather’s fifteen volumes of Dickens, my favourite being Great Expectations. Another of my favourites was The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book, which Ally—not I—had received for her birthday from Aunt and Uncle Fred. I resented this because I was the one who’d been born the same day as the Princess of York. But no one else recognized the slight. A book was to be shared no matter whose it was. This book came into the house not long before the abdication, after which Lilibet found herself in direct line for the throne.

  Every adult we knew had something to say about the abdication of King Edward VIII, one of the great-grandsons of Queen Victoria. It was a tragedy. It was treason. It was an honourable act because he had the backbone to stand up and claim his lady love. He didn’t want to be King anyway. He didn’t have it in him.

  The town, busy preparing for Christmas, was quick to pledge allegiance to His Majesty, George VI, the new king. “We shall rally round and give him our support,” the mayor declared.

  In our one-room school, Miss Grinfeld stood at the front of the classroom beneath a sagging bell of green crêpe paper, which the tallest of the grade eight boys had strung from the ceiling the week before. She bowed her head and wept. At recess, I heard her mutter, “Oh Eddie, Oh Eddie.” She had had a glimpse of him when he was still the Prince of Wales, during his two-month tour across Canada after the First Great War. In January, when we were back at school again after Christmas holidays, she read the “Message of Abdication” aloud, in its entirety, and wept again.

  The women of the town were bereft. They came into the store and spread even the tiniest bit of news, which our father sometimes brought home. The customers had believed in the Prince. They’d loved him. But he had chosen Mrs. Simpson of Baltimore with her cool, cameo profile. He sailed from Portsmouth on board a destroyer and left the mother country behind. He landed at Boulogne and entrained for Vienna and went on to the castle of Baron de Rothschild in Austria. Later, after Mrs. Simpson’s divorce, they married. But she was no princess, said the women of the town. She wore a long narrow dress with a plain skirt, and a hat with no veil that could be seen. She was so thin, she resembled a rib that had been straightened at both ends.

  Ally and I had never heard such a fuss. But long before the Prince made his public declaration, I was enamoured of The Princess Elizabeth Gift Book, with its plethora of princesses. The illustrations were of girls entirely unlike Ally and me, and this might have been the attraction. They wore cream-coloured dresses with flowing skirts, their laps strewn with pink roses. There were drawings of bears and dolls and giant puddings. Both Ally and I read and reread the stories and poems, and silently studied the illustrations. Each time Ally closed the book, she returned to her drawings of snow. When I closed the book, I felt as if I had travelled to other lands.

  Come and change, come and change

  Into anything you will

  I recited the lines when we were outside. I loved make-believe, to a point, until it interfered with my practical side. Genes which I believe Case has inherited. Ally told me, long after we’d grown up, that she still experiences a physical sensation when she thinks about our days reading the Gift Book, a deep sense of dreaminess and longing.

  SIXTEEN

  I’ve slept again. I dreamed of Lazarus, of water dripping from a tap. Has an hour passed? A minute? My body is tightening, shrinking from the cold. Clouds lie on their backs like sullen bears. How do they stay aloft? Grand Dan sat in her chair on Sundays with her Bible on her lap and read, “He that observeth the wind shall not sow, and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.”

  But what is this? Tears?

  Rain on my face. Soft, and oh how welcome. A gift from the sky. It must not be wasted, not a drop. I’ve tried not to allow myself to dwell on thirst but now I c
an admit how little hope I’ve had, how parched I’ve been. Hold out my good palm, suck my fingers, scrabble for a dry, downed leaf, a blade of last year’s grass, suck the edge of my sweater. A crazy woman I am. When I grope and scrape with my hand, bits of shale loosen around me like handfuls of pennies. But my fingers are wet, my sleeve holds moisture. And I am thankful.

  Little drops of water, little grains of sand.

  How things fly into my muddled brain. I’d heard this recited by Grand Dan at home, and one morning at school I tried to convince Miss Grinfeld that the line was a sentence. She was teaching nouns, banging her pointer and chanting “Person Place or Thing!” and making the class repeat after her, “Person Place or Thing!” She did this for three consecutive days, telling us that the chant would never leave our heads. For the rest of our lives, we would always be able to identify a noun.

  But my words, she argued, after asking me to construct a sentence, did not make a sentence at all. My words had no predicate. She stood over my desk.

  I resisted. Nothing she said could persuade me to understand the meaning of the word predicate. She gave up and turned to the other students. I looked at her back and silently rolled off my tongue, Little drops of water, little grains of sand. I loved the sound, loved the line. Sadly, it did not have a predicate and therefore was not a sentence. I did not like Miss Grinfeld that day. I gave up the soothing sound and went home after school and opened Gray’s Anatomy and stared at the ghoulish throat that resembled my teacher.

  Miss Grinfeld had every country child in her grip for eight years. She filled us with warnings about stepping on rusty nails and the threat of lockjaw. I lived through a mercifully brief period of being terrified that my jaw would clamp shut through no fault of my own and that no one would be able to pry it open, not even to give me water. She did spot checks of our health habits, made us confess what we had eaten for breakfast and admit whether or not we’d brushed our teeth before we walked to school. While we were eating lunch at our desks, she wandered between rows and peered into lunch buckets and honey pails into which were tucked roast-beef-and-radish sandwiches, or scrambled eggs on four slices of bread. In late spring, when we ran out of jam at home, Ally and I watched in dismay on the days Grand Dan prepared our lunches. We exchanged glances that meant “Sugar-sandwich day” and looked on glumly while she dampened her homemade bread with milk and sprinkled brown sugar between the slices. By the time lunch hour came around, the sugar had dried, and it scattered in every direction as we lifted our sandwiches to our mouths. Miss Grinfeld walked past, her chin defining a circle that followed the pattern of brown dots. It was humiliation of the worst sort; our dresses were speckled from neck to waist. We never spoke of this to Grand Dan.

  During health class, I did not let on to Miss Grinfeld that our mother could faint at will, because I was certain she would call this a family peculiarity, like being born with lumpy cheeks. Our teacher sat erect in her straight-backed chair and described generations of chinless families, implying some sort of bad behaviour. She told us not to let our bottom jaw hang open because doing this made a person look stunned, as if gorilla laughter would spew forth. We were quick to pull up our chins in class, but when we were out of earshot in the schoolyard we drooped our jaws and forced chortles from our throats.

  Every spring, Miss Grinfeld stood behind her desk and declared that this was the day the bees began to swarm. She taught us to be suspicious of adults who cooled their tea in their saucer before drinking—something Uncle Fred did every time he visited, though I did not betray him. I also said nothing about him wearing a freshly pressed shirt to bed every night, one that he had to iron himself.

  Before we arrived at school each winter morning, Miss Grinfeld had already placed a cod liver oil capsule in the pencil groove beside the hole in our desk that held the inkwell. We were required to swallow the fishy-tasting capsule before the day began, and she stood in front of the big boys and made them open their mouths in case they’d stored it in their cheeks to spit out when her back was turned.

  In our last year, before she sent us off to the town high school in Wilna Creek, she insisted that during the month of May we memorize an entire Shakespearean play, even though this was not on the senior curriculum. She alternated year by year between Julius Caesar and Macbeth. In my final year, it was Macbeth’s turn, even though I had learned Julius Caesar by paying attention to the seniors’ recitations the year before. In fact, for one month of the school year, every child in our one-room school could recite at least some roles, line for line. That we often did not know what we were learning was of no consequence. The truth is, most of us loved the sound of the parts we memorized and, for a few short weeks, these were shouted out in the schoolyard at recess.

  But Little drops of water, little grains of sand did not have a predicate and was not eligible to be a sentence.

  Part of me is dry; the branches link to protect. I’m familiar now with their pattern, a soft and purposeful webbing. That small bit of water has revived my spirits. Even so, my tongue is stuck to itself, my gums and lips cracking. I’ll raise my sleeve again and suck its dampness. I must collect more drops. The sweater will absorb more if I pull back the coat. But I don’t want to freeze. The temperature could fall and I might not be rescued before nightfall. My face is in the open, but I still have a way to go.

  I hear a car on the road above and realize I’ve been listening to the sound of tires on wet pavement. Fellow humans, so close, what comfort. Maybe it’s Pete from the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, or maybe Pete’s wife. Pete walks in the ravine, but it’s still early, only April. I have no way of attracting attention. I’m out of sight. Invisible. Too far down. The flesh will fall from my bones and I’ll become a female version of Hubley the skeleton. I’ll be here all summer and fall. Snow will cover me, and Ally will draw a long bony digit pointing through a crust of white. No, she won’t. Because I’ll be out of here by then.

  Cover your head and neck.

  If only I had a blanket to pull over my head. I’ve nothing to cover myself with. It’s the cold that needles away at my flesh, a slow, steady stitch. I’m lying out in the rain. I don’t deserve this. And I’m crying, a wasted effort, I know.

  Where’s your backbone? You’ve sucked your bit of water. Keep your mind alert. Follow a thread. Move your body again.

  If I could listen to music, I’d feel better. When Django played, he was always hurrying. Plinky-fast, a reassuring beat. He played at out-of-control speed, as if his music accompanied not body, but spirit. It was as if he knew he had to move quickly if he was to squeeze in everything there was to do.

  Never mind Django. Drink. Take in every drop you find.

  WISHBONE

  SEVENTEEN

  I’m seizing, involuntarily. I have to clench and unclench my fingers, painful or not. I have fought off arthritis for years, even though I’m frequently reminded that muscles and bones have tricks of their own. After Harry died, while I listened to jazz in the evenings, I pulled at my fingers, opened and closed my fists, tried to keep my hands from tightening.

  Metacarpus. Carpus. Pisiform—in the wrist—named for its likeness to a pea. When I found this in Gray’s and showed it to Ally, the name made her blurt with laughter. We weren’t allowed to say pisiform in the house; it was deemed to be an indecent bone. That’s the kind of family we had. Our bones supported us, but some were not to be mentioned.

  Until my car dropped off a cliff, my bones gave me wondrous support. Like the rubber jar rings that held up the brown-ribbed stockings we wore to school. Did we really wear those around our thighs? It’s hard to believe. It’s a wonder our legs weren’t gangrenous by the time we were ten. Phil and Grand Dan pulled at the flat red rings, softening them up until they could be stretched into garters. Ally and I rolled them over our feet and worked them up our legs, and walked around all day with lumpy circles beneath our skirts. Did we have toothpick legs?

  Because of falling sales during the Depression, P
hil had begun to work at the store in town, three days a week, alongside Mr. Holmes. She was worried about the long hours he was putting in and did her best to absorb some of the workload. She darted around the store, moving quickly between counters stacked with neat bolts of cloth. She had always liked to sew and, when business was slow, she slipped easily into the duties of filling order sheets for flannels and unbleached cottons, drapery material, millinery felt, mourning veils, hat wire and trimming. Mr. Holmes sold sundries, too: ribbons and threads, needles and pins, hooks and eyes, buttons and cotton tape measures. After Phil began to help out at the store, she ordered garter elastic and that put an end to rubber jar rings around our thighs.

  Phil was enjoying her days in town, and occasionally stopped in at bazaars or rummage sales when she took a break from the store. One day she brought home a slightly tattered book called Queen of Home. For a time this rested on the lower shelf of the oak table in the parlour, the one that held the glass-leafed tree. Tree on top, book on the bottom. Grand Dan laughed when she saw the wine-coloured cover with gold embossing—she had known the book in her youth. It had been published in the 1880s, which Ally and I believed to be the dark ages. We had no idea what was still to come in our own century.

  The book was intended for women who reigned over their households, and I suppose that described the combination of Grand Dan and Phil in one house. I came home from school one day to find thick curtains hung across every open doorway. Phil had read a chapter that said all doorways leading to a hall should be curtained with double velour. Velour had not sold well at the store, so she’d tucked bolts of it into the car and brought it home and hemmed it and hung it up. Grand Dan agreed to the change because she did not want icy drafts in winter causing us to become ill with “the shivering fits.” She kept her own supply of turpentine and goose grease in the pantry for those occasions.