It was Mom who spoilt us. Any extra money my father had he spent on himself. “It’s too bad he isn’t rich,” my mother said. “He’d have made a good playboy.” He was never too broke to buy a case of beer or to up the ante in a poker game at Shorty Turnbull’s farm. Sometimes that meant Mom couldn’t buy the things my brother and I thought we needed. Skates, for instance. Second-hand and ill-fitting, mine pinched my toes and made my feet cold. My brother’s skates, also hand-me-downs, fit better because he got replacements every year. I didn’t feel envious about that, because no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be a good skater. My ankles wobbled. And instead of stopping by flashing my blades to the side as Barry did, I had to fall down before I hit the boards.
My brother excelled at any physical activity, but his best sport was hockey. From the time he was a little kid, people called him a natural. When he joined his first real team, he went to practise in his jeans with nothing to protect his lower legs. The other players, boys from around our neighbourhood, had hockey pants and shin pads. He asked Mom to buy a set of pads for him, but she said we couldn’t afford it. She flushed and fidgeted when the coach of the team knocked on our door and spoke to her in the kitchen about her son’s talents and the likelihood of injuries if he wasn’t properly equipped. My brother never knew how she got the money out of our father or what it cost her, but before his next game at the rink he strapped shin pads over his jeans.
My father would fix a leaking tap, or chop firewood, or repair what was broken, but like most men of his time, he never helped with cooking or any household tasks. When my mom’s whole family, all fifteen of them, came in from their farms for Christmas dinner—an event she hosted until her mother died—it was she alone who got up early to stuff the turkey, peel potatoes and turnips and make the pumpkin pies. To get us out from under her feet after we’d opened our presents, she sent Barry and me to the outdoor rink a block away. We’d trudge up the alley, our skates drooped by the laces over one shoulder, snow falling through the early morning darkness, as if we were still in bed and had sunk inside our feather pillows. At the rink, we’d sit on an outdoor bench to pull on our skates. Barry would help me tie mine tight. It was too early for the skating shack, with its pot-bellied stove and its wide-planked floor cut by blades, to be open.
Sometimes my brother would have to clear a path with the big iron snow shovel stuck in a drift by the boards. Then we’d glide onto the bare ice, the only ones there, everything else still and sleepy, one or two houses in the neighbourhood lit. Stars shone bright and cold above us, as if bits of ice had shot from our blades and pierced the blackness. In the soft snow-quiet of early morning, we’d race, he backwards and me forwards. My brother would always win. But I loved the speed when he’d grab my arm, twirl me around like a spinning top and then let me go.
After our Christmas dinner, which we ate around four o’clock, Mom and my aunts cleaned up. My brother, cousins and I and all the men were free to do what we wanted. We kids played with our new toys in the hallway or in my parents’ bedroom. Mom had set up the kitchen table in the living room for the turkey dinner. Now that it was done, the men hunched around two card tables, where the youngest kids had sat to eat half an hour before, and played whist. The women joined in only when the last plates sat clean in the cupboard and they had made turkey sandwiches with Mom’s homemade buns for a late-night lunch. One aunt sliced dill pickles, and Mom spooned cranberries into the mustard dish her older brother had sent from England before he died in the war. His ship had collided with an Allied boat in the cold Atlantic night, and he and all of his crew went down.
Like Ona’s mother, Mom set Saturday morning aside to clean the house. And every Monday—no matter what happened in the family, the town or the world outside—was washday. Monday mornings my mother woke up and took note of the weather, though not even a heavy rain or the temperature falling to thirty below could stop the washing from getting done. As she pulled on her housecoat, she hoped it would be sunny and there’d be a wind. But not too much of one, because then the clothes could be yanked from the line.
For hours in the cellar, she’d run one load after another through the wringer of the washer with its two laundry tubs, then trudge up the narrow wooden stairs with a basket of wet laundry and out the back door to the clothesline. Some days it was so cold she had to wear a parka with a hood. She never asked me to help, and like a princess from a storybook, I felt put out when I had to walk across the cellar to get a jar of preserves from the shelf, the floor slippery with soapy water from the draining tub. On washdays, though, I knew better than to complain about anything, even an upset stomach or a cold coming on. My mother had a don’t-you-dare-bother-me look about her, and if she spoke at all, her voice was taut and barbed, like a wire fence meant to keep you out.
After taking Dad’s frozen shirts from the line, my mother would prop them on the couch to dry. At first, stiff from the cold, they held the shape of a body, the torso of a soldier with his legs blown off. When the bloodless arms, chests and shoulders began to thaw, the shirts collapsed, the breath gone out of them. No matter what the temperature, when my brother and his friends came home from school for lunch, they’d play war in the yard in trenches they’d dug out of snow. They built guns out of kindling and lobbed spruce cones that exploded when they hit the ground. Banished from the game because I was a girl and so much younger, I’d watch them from the window.
After a while, bored with the battles in the yard, I’d cut ladies from last year’s summer catalogue, trying to find a whole one I could use as a paper doll. These ladies didn’t wear housedresses, like my mother and the other women on our block, but fancy suits or dressing gowns. When you could see their feet, they were elegant in high heels or slippers with puffs of pink fur over the toes. In the snow, my brother and his friends staggered, died, then got up again. To the side of the house, my mother hung the next load on the line, sheet after sheet and then the towels, her hands red, one clothespin, then another, clenched between her teeth.
familiar
as salt
OUT OF our big front window I could see the ghost of the moon, sunlight still smouldering low in the sky. I balanced a red potato in the palm of my hand. It was just before supper, and the smell of roasting chicken wafting from the kitchen made me ravenous. When I held the potato between my fingers and up to the window, it eclipsed the moon’s milky light. I could hear the snicks of a knife and thud after thud as Mom sliced the seed potatoes and dropped them into a bucket by the kitchen sink. She made sure each piece had an eye.
At the table we filled our plates with mashed potatoes and creamed corn from a can. Dad always took my special piece of chicken, the smallest piece of white meat with the wishing bone inside, but I’d sneak it from his plate and he’d pretend he didn’t see. He carved the breast meat for himself and gave Barry both the legs. Mom claimed a thigh and the Pope’s nose, the polyp of fat and crispy skin that stuck out from the back end where the tail used to be. The four of us soaked everything with gravy Mom made from the drippings. The gravy was the best part of any meat Mom roasted.
After supper, my brother left the house for a marble tournament in the schoolyard; Dad sipped a beer. I cleaned the table and helped Mom with the dishes. Then we headed out to the yard. It had always been my brother who helped with the planting. But now I was old enough. In the porch I pulled on my rubber boots; Dad, his leather workboots with the hard toes; Mom, an old pair of curling shoes with the laces gone. Dad had tilled our long back garden the week before. The ground was dark and damp. Every spring when the snow melted, runoff streamed down the alley and pooled in that end of the yard. The tops of my boots rolled down so I’d look like a pirate, I waded into it until water leaked inside and soaked my socks.
Mom had planted the seeds for peas and beans on her own a few days before. Our task now was the potatoes. We started at the far end near the alley. Dad dug a hole, Mom dropped a piece of potato in, Dad let the dirt slide from his shovel t
o cover it, and I stamped the mound of earth flat. I followed my parents row after row, looking back after each was done to see my footprints mapping the spots where the green would push through. One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four. We worked through the twilight, our feet sinking in the turned earth. No one talked. My parents didn’t get mad at each other. We each had our job to do. Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes, more. The planting couldn’t have been done without me.
AFTER THE FIRST growth appeared, each stem and leaf erupting through the soil with the force of a small volcano, I walked down the rows beside Mom. She watered the plants with a black rubber hose. As the plants filled out, we’d peer closely at the leaves, checking for potato bugs. They had tan heads and orange-yellow backs with vertical black stripes, as if they’d dressed in their best dinner jackets for their juicy meal. Mom dropped the bugs we found into a large corn-syrup can with a few inches of kerosene in the bottom. I loved to crack them between my fingers first. We’d check the underside of leaves for tiny orange eggs that I’d squash. The ones we missed would hatch into larvae, horrid creatures that looked like a cross between a slug and a ladybug, two rows of black dots along each side, their red backs soft and sticky.
In late summer, after Mom had picked the peas and beans, she announced it was time to dig up the potatoes. She’d stopped watering by then, and the ground was dry. Dad dug near the bushy plants and pulled the tops. He and Mom collected the big potatoes underneath and dropped them into a bucket. I stayed behind while they moved to the next plant, reached my hands into the dark earth and scrounged for the small potatoes they didn’t get. Some the size of jaw breakers, others of robins’ eggs, they were beautiful, and I knew they were the best to eat, boiled in their skins and drizzled with butter. But I didn’t find harvesting potatoes as much fun as stomping them into the earth or killing the bugs that devoured their leaves. After a row or two, I ran to the alley to play with my friends.
MOM’S GOAL every year was to grow enough potatoes to last us through the winter. That wasn’t easy, because every day was potato day at our house. I hated peas from a can, I’d refuse a cooked carrot, but I never turned down a potato, boiled or mashed or scalloped, sliced and fried in bacon fat or pulped with a fork for the topping of shepherd’s pie. Mom would mix new potatoes with fresh peas and cook them in a cream sauce made from butter, flour, milk, and lots of salt and pepper. My father always asked for that. When he got throat cancer in his early fifties, and the cobalt dried up his saliva, few of his other favourite foods would be moist enough to swallow.
We couldn’t eat all the potatoes we grew, though. We had to save enough for planting. The seed potatoes were the ones at the bottom of the bin in the cellar. As the months passed, their fresh, outdoor odour gave way to fetid. The potatoes softened and turned wet and brown, as if we’d dug them from the muck of a slough instead of the parched summer soil. From the potato bin, they’d send out pale sprouts like underwater feelers, looking for the light that couldn’t reach them.
I never questioned why we ate so many potatoes. But the potatoes served for supper at my friend’s houses were definitely a different kind. Our garden’s earthy signature—the coldness of the ground in spring, the runoff from the alley, water from our hose, and the dirt my father sweetened with manure from my grandparents’ farm—was as familiar as the salt I licked from the sun-browned skin on my forearms. They were our potatoes, and I had helped make them. I had seen their beginning in the moon’s frail light.
my soul
to keep
OUR NEIGHBOURHOOD had no fences. Front yards spilled one into the other, and I could cut across them from my house to the end of the street, sometimes following a path worn by the feet of the older kids through a caragana hedge that tried to create a border. Not much went on in front of the houses. The artery of the block was the alley where we gathered after school and on weekends to play kick the can or run-sheep-run or anti-ay-over, bouncing the ball over the roof of my parents’ collapsing garage. Because the front was more private, Ona and I chose a spot at the edge of her verandah under one of her mother’s roses as a graveyard. The ground was soft there, and the roses, with their short lives and their stems whose bite drew blood from our fingers, seemed to be the perfect graveyard flower.
The summer Ona was seven and I was eight, we scouted the sidewalks and gutters for the dead: a bird fallen from a nest or gutted by a cat, a moth with torn wings, or, when we were desperate, an ant or a dried-up earthworm who’d been stopped mid-crawl after the rain. Both of us went to Sunday school, she at the Lutheran Church at the top of Central Avenue and me at First United, about six blocks away. We were learning about resurrection. We were learning about bodies rising from the earth at the sound of a trumpet and climbing the clouds to heaven. Both of us knew there’d be cotton candy there and fat little angels that looked exactly like our pink plastic dolls, except that the celestial beings had wings and eyelids that wouldn’t click when they opened and closed.
For crosses we stuck together two Popsicle sticks with Elmer’s Glue or, for a small creature like an ant, two toothpicks. Sometimes we’d cover the wood with foil Dad gave me from his pack of cigarettes. A lucky find was a single earring Ona’s mother didn’t want anymore, a flattened pearl disk the size of a nickel. We saved it to use as a tombstone for a bird.
Because we didn’t have boxes small enough to coffin our dead, we collected the fluff from the cottonwood tree that bordered our two yards near the front wooden walk. We’d pinch together a soft nest to put the body in, then cover it with more downy seeds. From our cutlery drawer, I’d stolen a tablespoon to dig with; my mom was the least likely of our parents to notice or to get mad if she did. With every burial we said a prayer, the scary one I recited every night before I fell asleep. Ona didn’t know it, but she was quick to learn.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
We’d fill the cap of a pill bottle with water and another one with the tiny green peas from inside a caragana pod, set these beside the graves, then wait. The creatures we’d buried would want to eat and drink when they woke up. Because I got out of bed earlier than Ona, I was the first there in the morning. Day after day, though, nothing happened. The silver crosses glinted in the early sunlight, the ground was undisturbed. We heard no trumpet, just my brother practising his trombone in our living room. The sounds that drifted through the open window wouldn’t have caused anyone to be born again.
One morning we decided to dig up the grave of a robin we’d found smashed below Ona’s front window. At first we thought it was alive; its chest was moving. Just before I picked it up, Ona shrieked, “It’s worms!” The breast writhed with small red whips. We quickly stuck the robin back in the ground and banged our hands down hard on the dirt. Though we didn’t talk about it, that was the end of our graveyard. We weren’t as crestfallen as we could have been, because as of yet, there was no personal connection. No pet of ours had died. The desiccated, broken, stepped-on or torn-apart were strangers. The animal closest to us, my family’s dog, Tiny, had been with us at most burials. She lay beside us on the grass, alert and watchful as the mythical dog I didn’t know about then who guards the gate to the underworld.
Our role as undertakers led Ona and me into our first and last business venture. In stealing the caps of pill bottles to use as miniature bowls for the victuals of the dead, we’d noticed that the wad of cotton on the top looked exactly like the cottonwood fluff we’d used to pillow the bodies. The fluff also resembled the narrow sheet of cotton batten scrolled in long blue paper that sat in our medicine cabinet. Mom would tear off a piece to hold over my ear when my eardrum broke after hours of pain, the pus running out of it. Earaches were one of my torments.
Ona and I dragged a wooden chair from her kitchen and picked cotton from the big tree’s lowest branches. I’d dumped the inch or two of co
coa from the tin I’d found in Mom’s pantry and washed it out. We picked until the tin was full.
At the end of our block and across a busy street stood Ralph’s Food Market. Everyone in the vicinity shopped for groceries there, and the cashier, Mrs. Murphy, knew all the local kids. Ralph, the owner, let customers charge what they bought. Mom settled her bill every month so she wouldn’t get behind, but many of our neighbours, those better off than us, never paid, and Ralph often had trouble making the rent.
Tiny always came with me when Mom sent me for a loaf of bread or a can of peas. She’d sit on the corner on the slight rise of the McMurchies’ lawn at the end of our block. In the firm voice I’d learned from my brother, I’d tell her to stay. We didn’t want her running into traffic. From the store window I could see her as faithful and still as the statue of Greyfriars Bobby I’d seen in a book. The store workers smiled when they looked at her, and they’d say something nice to me. Tiny stared intently as I crossed the street to her, then ran ahead of me, doubling back to urge me on as we made our way home.
With Tiny at her usual place on the corner, Ona and I waited politely in the grocery line until we were at the register. We showed Mrs. Murphy our cocoa can of cotton and said we wanted to sell it. She pried off the lid and looked inside. “This is worth a dime,” she said. That was enough for both of us to buy a Popsicle.
“That’s great,” I said. “We’ll be back with more!”
“I think that’s all we’re going to need right now. I’ll let you know when we run short.”
Small Beneath the Sky Page 4