by Jessie Haas
“Stop it!” I said sternly, and jerked the rope. Truman’s way wasn’t the only way to train horses.
During supper Aunt Sarah sat ominously silent, glancing toward me from time to time and pressing her lips tightly together. She must have been brooding all afternoon, and now she was trying to keep from saying something.
I felt hollow. I’ve never managed not to speak unwise words when they’re on the tip of my tongue. I may know better, and for a while I may be able to congratulate myself on restraint, but the words always burst forth anyway, as if holding back only gave them a bigger head of steam. I think it’s that way for everyone.
Suddenly Aunt Sarah said, “Does this dear friend of your mother’s have any notion of work on a farm?”
I put down my fork and sat looking at her. I wasn’t going to waste my powder defending Ida Mitchell, but in fact, she knew all about farm work. I remember her saying to Mother, “From the day I weeded my first acre of potatoes I’ve wanted to marry a man who lived in town.” She was laughing at herself because Mr. Mitchell had been a farmhand when they met. “Love is blind!” she said.
Mother didn’t laugh. “No, Ida,” she’d said. “Love sees truly. Anything we do for any other reason is apt to be a mistake.”
“How does she know we can spare you in August?” Aunt Sarah was asking.
“Don’t know why we couldn’t,” Uncle Clayton said. Aunt Sarah and I both looked at him. He looked down at his plate, but he said, “We never do need anybody besides us and Trume.”
“We have extra mouths to feed!”
“I’ll be very happy to do my share of the work,” I said. “I didn’t ask to be taken to the seashore!”
“And I didn’t ask for—” She clamped her mouth shut.
I sat stiff in my chair. Next she’d say that thing about Mother, and I would have to fight.
“Can you churn?”
I almost didn’t understand the question. It took me a moment to answer. “I never have.”
“I’d like you to take that over for me,” she said.
“All right.” I had no idea what I’d agreed to, only a surging determination to do it well and thoroughly.
Aunt Sarah’s hackle was slowly going down. “A half day’s work is plenty. I’ve never believed in working youngsters too hard.”
What youngsters? I wondered. She’d had no children that I’d ever heard of. How could she set herself up as an authority? But I only said, “Fine.”
Uncle Clayton glanced from one to the other of us and seemed to think that the storm had blown over. He got up and went to look out the window. “Well, guess I’ll cut hay tomorrow.”
Aunt Sarah frowned. “That looks like mackerel sky to me.”
I hated to agree with her, but it looked like mackerel sky to me, too—thin clouds laid across the blue like a fillet of fish with the flesh just pulling apart.
Uncle Clayton shook his head. “’Twon’t amount to anything,” he said, and yawned. “Time for bed.”
Down on Main Street Luke and I would be climbing into a tree about now, the evening just beginning. Here at Vinegar Hill we washed dishes and headed to our bedrooms as the clock struck nine. It wasn’t even dark out.
I put on my nightgown and drew the rocking chair near the window, where I could look out on the barn roof and the weather vane horse striding across the dim early stars. At home nine o’clock found the sewing machine still humming. I’d be setting a hem for Mother or maybe reading aloud. No question about her character would ever have crossed my mind.
Not that I thought Mother was perfect. When you live with people, you see them scratch and hear them sniffle. You know if they swear sometimes, on running a needle into their thumbs, and then scold if you do the same. You know if they’re stubborn, and if they listen to gossip, and if attention to detail might make their accounts true up.
I knew these things about Mother, but I never knew her to do anything big and wrong. Have a baby too early. Not tell that baby things she needed to know. Aunt Sarah hadn’t said it again, but somehow, by not saying it, by not making me fight her, she’d caused the doubt to bite inward.
Was it true?
It couldn’t be—but how could I prove that? “When is your birthday?” Aunt Sarah’s voice nagged. “When were your parents married?”
My birthday was February 14. That much I knew. Mother and Father’s wedding date was another matter. She had neither celebrated nor mourned their anniversary, just as we never visited his grave or came back here. Everything was forward with Mother, but there must be some record. A marriage certificate, perhaps. Althea and I hadn’t thought to look for papers like that when we did our late-night packing. Would Dr. Vesper look before the house was sold? Or were those things already in the care of a lawyer?
All at once I remembered the wallet. I’d put it in the the bureau drawer without even looking inside. It hadn’t seemed to belong to me.
I carried the candle over and looked inside the wallet. A few coins weighted the bottom. There was a folded scrap of newspaper that, flattened out, proved to be a corset advertisement. Inside it was a crumbling red clover blossom. That was all.
I put the wallet back in the drawer and picked up my candle. The light wavered across the mirror and touched the wall behind.
That’s not a wall, I realized. That’s a door!
How had I never seen it before? True, everything was gray in this room, and true, the door was mostly concealed by the mirror. The mirror was what usually caught my eye, because of its odd surface. But not see a door? A short little door like this, with one corner lopped off by the angle of the rafters? I’ve been walking around half blind, I thought.
I mapped the house in my mind. My bedroom was in the ell. Here the house was a story and a half high. The rest of the house was a full two stories, and this door must lead to those upstairs rooms.
I felt behind the bureau. No latch. I brought the candle near the wall and angled it till I could see that yes, there was a thumb latch. The bureau was in the way and I couldn’t reach it.
I set the candle on the floor and crawled up onto the bureau. My own white bulk came at me in the mirror. I squeezed one leg behind the frame, groped till I found the latch, and pressed my toe into its cold, smooth groove.
The latch squeaked open. Gently I nudged the door. It swung about six inches and stopped. All I could see was darkness. I squirmed farther over, my thigh pressed hard against the mirror frame, and it creaked.
The darkness seemed to jump. I stilled my breath, listening to the silent house. No one spoke, but I could imagine Aunt Sarah lying wide eyed, waiting for the sound to repeat. I sat a long while, the mirror frame digging into my thigh.
At last I reached my foot into the dark room, found the edge of the door, and drew it toward me. When it was close enough, I shut it with my hand. I couldn’t latch it. I’d have to leave it slightly ajar, and sometime tomorrow, when Aunt Sarah was outside, I’d run up here and close it.
First, though, I’d look inside.
fourteen
In the morning I learned about churning. One sat on the back porch in a rocking chair and pushed the churn, a barrel on rockers, with one’s foot. One looked at the currant bushes or the maples on the hill or provided oneself with a book. A basket and half-finished gray vest showed that Aunt Sarah knitted as she sat here. There would be time to complete any number of vests.
Maybe I should learn to knit. I needed something to keep me from thinking, but whenever I tried to read, the people, even my favorite characters in my favorite books, seemed like paper dolls. Nothing was powerful enough to turn my mind from Mother.
Away on the hillside I heard the mowing machine clatter. Aunt Sarah stepped around the kitchen; bowls clinked; the oven door slammed. Then she came out to the back porch, tying on her straw hat. “Call me when it comes together. I’ll be in the garden.”
I waited long enough for her to get there. Then I dashed upstairs, pulled the bureau six inches out from the
wall, and peeked around the edge of the open door.
The room beyond was empty. Absolutely empty.
A closet door stood open, and the closet was empty, too, except for the bed slats leaning in one corner. No curtains, no rugs, no cobwebs, hardly any dust. Across the room was another closed door.
I stared at the wide boards crossed by sunlight, at the creamy, violet-sprigged wallpaper. I had thought these rooms would be full of furniture. Why else would the front room be given up to storage except that the upstairs rooms were full?
This room was empty but not abandoned. It had been cleaned recently and smelled of vinegar and soda. What lay beyond the closed door, so flat and bland and white? I wanted to go open it, but it seemed a long way across the room, and Aunt Sarah might come back to the house. I didn’t want her to find the churn deserted. I closed the door behind the bureau but left the bureau where it was, pulled away from the wall just far enough that I could slip behind it.
Back downstairs I rocked, and rocked, and thought of Mother, and cried. Still the butter wasn’t done. I rocked some more, rocked with all my might and determination, until at last the yellow grains of butter floated in the milk and it was time to call Aunt Sarah.
Even as Uncle Clayton drove back from mowing, clouds began to gather, and by late afternoon it was raining. Aunt Sarah looked dark, but Uncle Clayton seemed perfectly placid.
“First cut of hay always gets rained on,” he said. “I cut that weedy spot a-purpose.”
“Seems to me after forty years a man could cut hay without it getting rained on!”
Behind his magazine Uncle Clayton murmured, “You should have stopped me, dear.” Then he glanced at me and looked startled. He wasn’t used to having his little flings of spirit witnessed.
When the long, wet day ended and we went to bed, it was actually dark. I waited, while the rain roared off the eaves, until Aunt Sarah would surely be asleep. Then I slid behind the bureau, sheltering the candle flame with my palm, and opened the door.
Darkness doesn’t scare me, but this empty room seemed too large. Shadows lay thick in the corners. There was nothing to see here. I went straight across and opened the door on the other side.
I was looking out into a hallway. Another closed door stood opposite. I moved toward it and stopped with a gasp, sensing a black chasm to my right. I turned the candle so I could see.
Stairs. Just stairs.
I opened the next door: another room, also clean, also empty. It contained two closets, one piled with wool blankets, the other bare.
The hallway made a three-sided rectangle around the stairwell. At the other end was a third door. I already knew what I would find there, an empty room.
Why would anyone do that? Why take every stick of furniture out of these unused rooms and pile it in the front parlor? That room must have been very pleasant once, with the sunny windows and the fireplace.
Of course the fewer rooms you used in a house, the less work, but then, why was it so clean up here?
The rain continued the next day, steady and gentle. I didn’t churn. Churning was every third day, depending on the milk supply. Instead I swept and dusted and washed the kitchen down with vinegar. After dinner I walked over to Truman’s.
My oilskin could have been longer. It kept the upper reaches dry, but water rolled down and collected in the hem of my skirt, which also gathered moisture from the grass in the lane. The fabric slapped chill against my legs.
In Truman’s yard the violets bloomed, each flower beaded with raindrops. As I walked past the sagging shed and the scent of crushed gillflower rose, the feeling of belonging came over me again. It was like the line that used to run between Mother and me, diffuse now, as if the love had become a cloud I walked into. Only here. Was she here? I paused and looked around. There was nothing to see but the violets and the trees, nothing to hear but the rain, nothing to feel but cold and wet, but—but something. Something was here that belonged to me.
I knocked. Tippy barked sharply, and after a moment the door opened. “Why, Harry!” Truman slipped his suspenders up over a sleeveless undershirt. The stump of his arm was in full view. I couldn’t help staring. It looked so neat, sliced off square like a piece of meat at the butcher’s. Shiny-looking skin stretched across the end.
“C’mon in!” He reached for his threadbare jacket, thrown across the back of the chair. When he’d shrugged into it, he looked ordinary again, as ordinary as a man could look with a flowing yellow beard and only one arm.
“Pull a chair up to the stove and get dry,” he said. “I’ll make tea.”
I took off my oilskin and sat down, spreading my skirt and looking around the room. At first glance it seemed unbelievably cluttered. There was a cot in one corner and a woodbox in another, a table, two chairs, pots and pans, a sack of onions, a coat on the floor covered with dog hair. There were books on every surface and books through the open door in the next room.
But despite the clutter, the room was really simple. I never saw Truman look for anything. His hand just reached, and what he needed was right there. The canister. The teapot. The potholder—
Mother, I thought suddenly. It was as if I’d caught sight of … not her but something that belonged to her. What was it? Not the pans. Not—
“The curtains!”
“What about ’em?” A cloud of steam masked Truman’s face as he poured hot water into the teapot.
“Those were here!” I said. “Weren’t they? Didn’t Mother make those?” They were white, with a strip of bright calico sewn across the bottom. Wasn’t there a dress of that fabric?
“Yup, those were hers.” Truman looked around. “Not much else. The cookstove. We figured it didn’t make sense, her haulin’ this stove downhill and me buyin’ one and haulin’ it up. So we come to terms.”
That was after my father died, when Mother must have felt just the way I did now. How did she bear it? I wondered. I never knew how much grief hurt, so I never knew to ask her.
“How—how was she? After he died?”
Truman considered me, his fingers twisting a small section of beard into a spike. “I don’t s’pose she put you down for three days,” he said at last. “And you were a pretty hefty package about then, big two-year-old girl. But she held on to you, and that kept back the worst of it, I guess.”
I knew what the worst of it felt like. It hurt, really hurt, in your body. Would it help having someone to hold?
Truman poured tea into the two tin cups. I wrapped my hands around mine and put it down in a hurry. Hot!
“So, Harry,” Truman said, “come to visit your bird?”
I’d actually forgotten my gray rooster, dearest thing in life to me when I was carrying him down the road. “No, I’m here to tell you that haying’s started.” That was the errand I’d been charged with when I’d said where I was going.
Truman looked out at the dripping eaves. “Clayton’s cut the weed field. What’d Sarah say?”
“‘After forty years I’d think a man could cut hay without it getting rained on!’”
“You do it well,” Truman said gravely. He reached into the skillet beside him and started to break off a chunk of biscuit. Then he paused. “By golly, if Sarah was here, she’d give me a piece of her mind! Excuse me.”
“I was wondering how you cut bread.”
“Same way I do a lot of things. I don’t.” He finished breaking the biscuit and handed it to me. “I generally dump the jam on a plate and dip into it. That suit you?”
“Why don’t I spread it for us?” I said, spotting a knife on the table. Everything was clean. How did he wash his dishes? I wondered.
He settled back in his chair, stretching his long legs, and watched me spread the jam. “You’re like your mother,” he said after a minute.
“I am? How?”
He shrugged. “Manners, I guess. Kind manners.”
“Am I like my father, too?”
“Oh, you’re a Gibson, all right! You’ve got the chin!”<
br />
I put my hand up to hide it. “You mean, like Aunt Sarah?”
He smiled, the slow narrowing and arching of his eyes that reminded me of the years he’d spent outdoors, marching and fighting. “Just like,” he said. “You look just like she did at the same age.”
“You knew her then?”
“Oh, yes! Known Sarah since before she was born. The Gibsons—the old folks—wa’n’t too very much older than me.” He took a cautious sip of tea, eyes focused on something far away. “The old folks! Seems funny to call ’em that. They never did get old.”
“My grandparents?” He nodded. “What happened to them?”
“What happened?” He looked down, and the bushy shelves of his brows hid his eyes from me. “They died, Harry. Awful lot of consumption on this hill, back when it was full of farms. I guess maybe that’s died, too. Hope it has.”
I tried to remember the dates on the gravestones, to make a story out of what he was telling me, but the numbers wouldn’t come back. “How old were the children—I mean, my aunts and uncles? When their parents died?”
“Sarah, she was about fourteen when she was left to mother the rest of ’em. Your father was a baby.”
My age almost. Only one year older. That girl who became Aunt Sarah must have felt the same way I did, the same way Mother did when my father died. She must have held on to baby Walter the way Mother held on to me, the way I would hold on to somebody, if there were anyone to hold.
Then why wasn’t she nicer? Why didn’t she show a little kindness?
Truman sighed aloud, like a word, and rubbed his big hand down his face. “We was proud of her. She raised all four of ’em, even after she buried her dad. I remember when that house was full of young folks. They’d have dancin’ in the kitchen most Saturday nights.… I was quite a bit older, but that didn’t stop me courtin’. But Sarah had those kids to raise, and Clayt had two arms.”
He’d wanted to marry Aunt Sarah?
He sat with his chin on his chest for a minute and then took a big swig of tea. That was how the beard got stained, I noticed. “And then they started dyin’,” he said. “Get into their twenties, they’d get that cough. Sarah fought it, every time. She was bound and determined, but you can’t beat it. Hard times. Hard times. I don’t know how she stood it. This arm of mine is kid stuff compared to that.”