A Home in the Country

by Sheelagh Mawe

  The brown paper wrapping fell to the floor and Agnes was hard at work on the tissue paper inside when she stopped abruptly and blinked. ‘Why … this here ain’t for you a’tall,’ she gasped. ‘Look-a-here, that’s my name, clear as can be, right there.’ She tilted the package so I could see and sure enough, her name was written on it.

  The tissue paper joined the brown paper on the floor and Agnes was left staring at what she held in her hands: something that looked like a small, puffy, pale-blue pillow with white embroidery all over it.

  ‘What in hell is it?’ she spluttered.

  I knew exactly what it was and felt like making her figure it out for herself, but I knew she never would. Not if she lived forever. So I told her, ‘It’s a tea cosy.’

  ‘A tea what-y?’

  ‘A tea cosy. You put it over a teapot to keep the tea warm. There’s a slit on one side for the handle to come out and one on the other side for the spout.’

  I reached up to put my hands inside to show Agnes what I meant and felt another little package inside. I pulled it out and my name was on it! Faster than I could think, though, Agnes had snatched it and was busy ripping it open. Inside was a little red velvet box. Holding it high out of my reach, she released the catch and then she was gasping, ‘Je-sus, them’s pearls! Do you beat that? Pearls for a little kid? And a war goin’ on.’

  She held them up to the light for a better look, then dropped them in her apron pocket. ‘No sense a little kid like you lollygaggin’ around these here woods in pearls,’ she said. ‘I’ll just keep ’em safe with me.’

  ‘But … my mother sent them to me!’ I protested. ‘Can’t I just take a look? Hold ’em? Try ’em on, maybe? Please, ma’am?’

  Agnes’ eyes narrowed. ‘I let you touch ’em, next thing I know they’re busted and rollin’ every which way across the floor. Run in the parlour now get me my teapot so’s I can take a look-see how this fool thing works.’

  How I hated her! To punish her I took a good long look at the picture in my head of the torture we’d dreamed up just the day before in the hayloft. The one where we tied her, naked and kneeling, to the porch posts, poured ice-cold water over her, buried her in snow and, laughing at her pleas for mercy, left her to freeze to death.

  Feeling better, smiling even, I got the teapot out of the glass-fronted cabinet in the parlour and took it to her. She put the cosy on it but got it on back to front so the handle barely fit through the spout hole. I decided not to tell her. Let her figure it out her own self, was what I thought.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned!’ Agnes exclaimed, turning it this way and that. ‘It do look right pretty, don’t it? Maybe it’s not too cold tomorrow night we’ll take us a walk to Knittin’ ’n give them old hens something else to cackle about bein’ they already know about my flag in the parlour window with the four gold stars on it showin’ how all four of my kids is in the armed services fightin’ for their country.’

  She squinted to get a closer look at the embroidery on the cosy. ‘You reckon your ma made this? Special for me?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said, while out of the corner of my eye I watched Cathy holding on to the sink as if she was having a dizzy spell and knew instantly it was because she didn’t want us to go Knitting. Especially not with Sally gone. She’d be alone with him!

  ‘That’s what we’re gonna do then,’ Agnes beamed, ‘Go knittin’. Let ’em see how I got me a friend takes the time to make me a gift while enemy planes fly right over her head dropping bombs. Don’t you know your ma must’ve worked on this in one of them bomb shelters they got over there? Goin’ near blind from the blackout and all, huh?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  It snowed steadily the next day so we couldn’t go to the Knitting Bee after all. ‘Even if there is a war on, I bet they had some of the best food ever bein’ Christmas is so near and all,’ I sulked to Cathy when we were in bed.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about it,’ Cathy said. ‘It ain’t my fault. Wasn’t me made it snow.’

  ‘Bet you would’ve if you could’ve,’ I said. ‘Bet you prayed for it.’

  ‘You can just bet I did!’

  After we finished our cornflakes on Christmas morning and washed the dishes, Agnes sent us out to the barn to sort eggs.

  ‘Beats stayin’ in alongside her,’ Danny reasoned.

  It did, but it was wicked-cold and the snow had turned to rain during the night and puddles that smelled like cow poop oozed under the door and collected around our feet. At some point the door creaked open letting in more rain and cold and there stood the Old Man. We wondered had he maybe, just maybe, brought us something? A present? Something to eat? Candy?

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he mumbled and we knew from just looking at him, he hadn’t.

  We said, ‘Merry Christmas, sir,’ back to him in a doubtful kind of way.

  A long silence ensued broken only by an occasional gust of wind rattling the door and then the Old Man turned away, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and took a slow turn around the barn till he was back at the door. ‘Guess I’ll be movin’ along, then,’ he mumbled, his hand on the latch, ‘Let you-all get on with your work.’

  He stayed standing where he was, though, as if he’d like us to ask him to stay. Or maybe suggest something he could do to make the day go by. But we were too young, too anxious for him to leave, to know what to tell a nasty old man what to do with a day, never mind Christmas Day.

  The door crashed shut behind him and then it was each other we were staring at.

  ‘You dumb jerks,’ Cathy spat. ‘What’d you think? Think he was gonna give you a present? Some candy? Think he was gonna say, “Go get changed, I’m takin’ you out for a fine turkey dinner”? I told you we wasn’t gettin’ nothin’.’

  Danny told her to shut her mean old mouth. I did, too. ‘Shut your mean old mouth,’ I said.

  Next thing I knew Cathy’s fist landed in my stomach and I was going over backwards into the puddles. I couldn’t see a thing down there but by reaching up I could feel around and what I felt was one of her braids dangling as she stooped to look down on me. I grabbed it and pulled on it as hard as I could with both hands.

  Cathy screamed and kicked me and Danny yelled, ‘The both of you cut it out! You’re gonna upset her eggs!’

  We got out of the way of her eggs but he should’ve kept his mouth shut, Danny, because we turned on him and got him on the floor and then none of us knew for sure whose arm or leg or face we were hitting … biting … scratching. All we knew was it felt good. Too bad it wasn’t Agnes.

  We wore ourselves out after a while and stopped, all of us feeling a bit dumb, like, what’d we go and do that for? But soon enough we started talking again and next thing we knew we were laughing our heads off saying that pretty soon the whole dumb day would be over with. Not just for us, but for everyone else. And even the luckiest, warmest, richest kids in school were going to have to wait another whole, long year for Christmas to come back round again. The poor, dumb suckers!

  FIFTEEN

  Something very unusual happened the day after Christmas. Something so out of the ordinary that in a matter of minutes Agnes went from being the person we feared and despised the most, to someone we didn’t recognize or even know how to describe.

  Danny said, ‘It’s like she’s gotten reg’lar. You know, like … like normal kind of folk.’

  ‘I guess she finally went and got herself in a good mood,’ was how I put it.

  And Cathy said, ‘It’s like she’s the kind of person everyone who don’t know her thinks she is. But watch out! That ugly old witch woman’ll come back just as fast as she went away.’

  The unbelievable event was that Agnes received a package from one of her sons. Cathy brought it home from the store. I was ironing in the kitchen while keeping an eye on Agnes dozing by the stove, hoping she’d say something crazy in her sleep, when Cathy burst through the door, a grin nearly as big as the package she was carrying, on her face.

 
; Agnes came out of her doze with a start. ‘It ain’t another one of them Limey tea thingies, is it?’ she growled.

  ‘No, ma’am!’ Cathy assured her. ‘This one here’s from Hawaii. Lookit.’

  Agnes ripped off the brown paper wrapping and let it fall to the floor, just as she had with my package, and was left holding a big purple box with a gold ribbon on the top. She lifted the lid and inside were more rows of chocolates than any of us had ever seen in one place before.

  Agnes let out a shriek of joy and stuffed one in her mouth. ‘Don’t he beat all, my Hank?’ she gloated. ‘Thinkin’ about his ma and him in the middle of a war with Jap planes flying over his head. Always was a good kid, that one. Go get Danny, let him see what my boy done for me.’

  Danny’s eyes bulged as big as ours had when he saw all those rows of chocolates and Agnes was so happy she forgot herself and gave us one each before telling Cathy to carry the box into the parlour and set it on the piano.

  ‘I eat but the one a day,’ she gloated, ‘they might could last me going on one whole entire year!’

  Her eyes sparkling behind her glasses, she rubbed her hands together, forgetting she even had a rocking chair.

  ‘Lemme think now,’ she began, ‘what-all was it I’d set my mind on gettin’ done bein’ I got you all home another week?’

  Her head went back in laughter and we could see the inside of her mouth and teeth streaked with chocolate. ‘I’d a mind to send every last one of them kids of mine a box of my homemade goodies. Wanted me a new cement path, too, din’t I? It’s only fittin’ bein’ we got a new year comin’, ain’t it? Thought on sprucin’ up them old hog pens, too … givin’ ’em a fresh coat of paint.’

  Everything she’d set her mind on, we did.

  We cooked and baked and made homemade candies, Agnes digging out old recipes while Cathy and I ran to the store, sometimes three and four times a day, for the extra, expensive ingredients she needed. When her kids’ boxes were stuffed, with every spare space filled in with chewing gum and cigarettes, we carried them to the store, Agnes leading the way and Cathy and I choking back giggles at Bill’s face when Agnes herself – wearing lipstick, even – walked through the door.

  We thinned old paint of every colour, mixed it all together so it turned into a kind of muddy-looking grey and slapped it on the old hog pens. When Agnes saw there was plenty left over, she had us paint the chicken house and when that still didn’t use it all up, she told us to give the shit house a coat as well.

  ‘Too bad all that mixin’ didn’t turn out red or yellow,’ Danny said looking at the finished results after Agnes had gone back in the house. ‘Would’ve made the place look a tad bit livelier than this here graveyard she’s got goin’ on.’

  Cathy and I were in the orchard pinning up washing when Agnes and Danny got going on her new cement path, Danny setting up two-by-fours for the frame and Agnes talking and laughing and having such a good time we stopped our pinning and stood behind a flapping sheet to listen.

  ‘Beats me I can’t never figure a way to curve them walkways,’ Agnes was saying. ‘Curves’d be elegant. Anybody seein’ curved walkways’d buy this place in a heartbeat, don’t you want to bet?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. They sure would.’

  Suddenly, Agnes clapped her hands, ‘I’ve had me a idea,’ she exulted. ‘Let’s zig-zag ’em! That’d make ’em buy, too, huh?’

  ‘You’re darn tootin’! Zig-zags’d do it,’ Danny agreed, ripping up the boards he’d already laid and resetting them in the direction of Agnes’ pointing finger.

  The Old Man had a day off and was on his way to the shit house with a day-old newspaper when he saw what was going on. He stopped and scratched his head and Cathy and I stiffened, hoping he wasn’t going to say something that would ruin Agnes’ happy mood.

  ‘I told you before, Agnes,’ he began, ‘this ain’t the time of year to be pourin’ cement. It’ll freeze before it sets and then crumble when it thaws. And another thing I told you, you got to lay down chicken wire before you pour and you got to make ’em wider.’

  ‘I don’t recall asking your advice, Walter,’ Agnes replied in her haughtiest manner. ‘Reckon I got the right to do things any way I please around here and you know what pleases me most, Walter? It’s hearin’ my heels tippy-tap along a cement walkway like I was on a busy sidewalk in town goin’ some place important.’

  Stepping up onto the path that ran from the side of the house to the barn, she took several little running steps making sure her heels went tippy-tap so he’d know what she meant.

  Walter stayed looking disgusted but Agnes was tickled with the noise she was making and, wagging her finger at him in a grotesque imitation of a dance hall stripper, started grinding her hips and singing, ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me….’

  She broke off to wave us kids forward, ‘Come on up here alongside o’ me and sing!’ she said taking up the refrain again herself. ‘… Anyone else but me….’

  Walter stood watching awhile shaking his head, muttering to himself, and when we stopped singing because we didn’t know any more words, Cathy heard what he said. He said, ‘This ain’t gonna end pretty.’ She was surprised he could read Agnes near as good as her.

  Cathy and I were cleaning up after lunch when Agnes picked up her coffee cup and stumbled to her rocker and sat down with her eyes shut. Oh, oh! She hadn’t been in it for over a week and seeing her there took the smiles off our faces faster than anything else could have. We raced to finish our inside chores and get out of the house.

  Agnes saw us scurrying past the office door and stopped us, asking, ‘Where you think you’re goin’?’

  ‘To the barn, ma’am, help Danny,’ Cathy answered.

  ‘He don’t need you for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Want you two cleanin’ up my house real good, bein’ you’ll be back in school Monday. Cathy, you take upstairs. Sarah, you do down, startin’ with the parlour. Do ’em good, mind. Windows, floors, polish. Open ’em up. Air ’em out. Just mind you close up good and tight when you get done.’

  I much preferred cleaning the parlour than the bedrooms and was happy I got it even though having the windows open made it wicked-cold. I could hear Cathy moving around upstairs and then the sound of the windows going up so I stuck my head out of my open window and called, ‘Yoo-hoo,’ very softly so Agnes wouldn’t hear.

  Cathy stuck her head out of her window and I thumbed my nose at her. She thumbed hers back at me and we giggled because it was fun doing something Agnes didn’t know about and wouldn’t like if she did. Then we got busy with our cleaning.

  I always started a room with the dusting first because that’s what my mother had taught me. I took all the Slater-kids-in-uniform pictures off the piano. Also a picture of a pretty young girl wearing a flowered hat that Cathy had once told me was Agnes when she was young. I always looked long and hard at that picture but I never could find the Agnes I knew in that girl’s laughing face. I took the box of chocolates and the lace runner underneath it off last, then dusted and waxed the piano very carefully before putting everything back exactly the way I found it.

  I was just turning away to dust the little table by the front door when I surprised myself by turning back and lifting the lid off the box of chocolates and peeking inside.

  Oh, but they looked good! The top layer was almost gone so they weren’t going to last a year like Agnes said they would. And how would she ever notice if I took just one? I was so hungry and they smelled so good. My hand hovered … which one? There came a thump from upstairs and I crammed the lid back on that box so fast my heart nearly stopped beating I’d scared myself so bad. You want to bet Agnes wouldn’t notice? ’Course she would. Agnes noticed everything.

  I raced through the rest of the dusting, the mopping, the closing of windows, so I could get out of that room fast and shut the door tight on what I had nearly done.

  Agnes heard me coming and came through from the kitchen, a mixing bowl cradled
in one arm. ‘You done in there?’ she asked. ‘Already?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘You shut the windows?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Agnes made a sound like, Humph, and turned back to the kitchen, only to change her mind and go into the parlour instead. She shut the door behind her.

  It worried me her doing that and I stayed where I was in the office thinking over every piece of furniture I dusted, the chairs I moved to mop, the windows I closed, and I knew I hadn’t missed anything. Still, I jumped when the parlour door opened and Agnes came back out. She still had one arm around the mixing bowl but in her other hand, something I couldn’t see because her hand was a fist over whatever was in it. I glanced up at her face then and right away my heart began to race. The old witch woman was back and she was wearing the dreaded smiley face.

  She made a motion with her head that meant I was to follow her and, just setting the mixing bowl down on the kitchen table as she passed it by, didn’t stop till she got to the range. There she opened her fist and showed me what was inside: a crumpled pile of the little brown paper cups chocolates nestle in when they’re in a box.

  Puzzled, I looked from them to her face trying to think what she wanted me to make of them. Still smiling her dreamy smile, Agnes lifted the lid off the range and, just her lips moving, counted off the papers as she dropped them, one at a time, into the flames.

  ‘Four,’ her lips mouthed. Out loud she said, ‘You stole, you et, four of my Hank’s chocolates.’

  ‘No!’ I gasped, so shocked I jumped backwards and forgot to say ‘ma’am’. I repeated myself then, that second time with some indignation, ‘No! I never did! I felt like it but I never did! Not-a-one!’

  Agnes’ smile grew wider, ‘You’re lyin’!’ she crooned. ‘I emptied them papers out the box last night. Ain’t nobody ’cept you been in there since.’

  ‘I never took ’em, ma’am. I swear! I never did!’