by Connie Cook
Patterns of Swallows
Connie Cook
Copyright © Connie Cook 2012
All rights reserved.
All events and characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real events or living persons is coincidental.
The town of “Arrowhead” has a basis in reality, but its people are entirely fictional.
All Scriptures quoted are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
“Jesus, Lover of My Soul” written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788).
“O Little Town of Bethlehem” written by Phillips Brooks (1835-1893).
To all the “Ruths” in my life; strong, godly women of unfaltering integrity and kindness. Who still manage to be very human.
You are my heroines.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 1
I was born at the right time.
But then, I suppose that's when everyone is born.
And I was born beautiful.
That's what my mother tells me.
But then, she still thinks I'm beautiful.
And perhaps I am.
Perhaps everyone is beautiful.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, surely every person alive has one beholder who beholds her as beautiful.
I have my mother, so I am beautiful.
* * *
The unwritten, unspoken rules for stories dictate that true stories must begin by telling when the main character was born. Untrue stories must begin by telling whether the main character is beautiful (and, of course, she must be).
This story will be a mixture of both truth and untruth. My purpose in writing this account will be to tell the truth as I see it, and your purpose in reading this account must be to peel back the layers of untruths to expose the kernels of truth hidden at their core.
And now, according to the unwritten, unspoken rules for stories, you know enough about me to do for a start. I was born at the right time, and I am beautiful.
And I am my main character.
So presumably, you want to know about me.
Although I am my own main character, I don't think I will tell you more about me. Not just yet.
I'd rather tell you about Ruth.
* * *
One of Ruth's only memories of her father was of him throwing rocks at the barn swallows' nest to knock it down. A baby swallow came tumbling out. It was the ugliest thing Ruth had ever seen with its scrawny neck and its pink nakedness. She cried and pleaded for her father to stop, but he only said, "They make such a mess if you leave 'em. They gotta come down."
After he'd gone, she took the baby swallow and wrapped it in a rag for warmth and kept in a box and tried to feed it on bread crumbs and milk, but of course, it died.
She didn't know the fact then, but if she'd had more experience with barn swallows, she could have told her father that bringing down their nests did no good.
Swallows are creatures of persistent, stubborn, unstoppable habit. Perhaps they fear change. Or perhaps they're just persistently, stubbornly unstoppable. But swallows always manage to get their own way in the end.
Her father knocked down the nest and killed the babies. But the swallows rebuilt their nest, right in the same spot. And they came the next year and rebuilt it again.
Ruth wasn't sure why, of all the things she could have chosen to remember about her father, that was the one thing that stuck. But then, memories always manage to get their own way in the end, no matter how many times a body tries to knock them down.
Ruth sometimes sat for hours under the wind-wracked, giant firs up in the back pasture where no one ever thought to look for her, just thinking. She'd think about things like that. Like memories, I mean. Like, why we remember what we remember and not other things that we should be able to remember. Like, why she could remember the barn swallows but not what seven times eight is.
It's a statement of the obvious, perhaps, to say that we remember what's important to us or what leaves a strong impression on us. Maybe what we associate with pleasure or pain. But why should the things that leave strong impressions on us leave the impressions they do when they often seem so insignificant? Why the barn swallows for Ruth?
Could it be that we remember what we attach meaning to – memories that become symbols?
In later years, Ruth couldn't have explained why the swallows had become a symbol. But she was afraid that the moment her father knocked down their nest, leaving one baby bird at the bottom, that act had become her symbol in her mind for her father.
* * *
In our small, God-fearing town back then, divorce wasn't mentioned. Not because it didn't happen, but because it was an unmentionable. When it happened, people used euphemisms. "Living apart, separated, gone back to her mother."
But her parents weren't divorced, after all.
"Desertion." Maybe that was the technical name. The technical euphemism. Her mother continued to hold her head high by pretending that her father had only gone away for work. It was the same thing her father had pretended. It was the polite pretence between them that did away with the need for an emotional scene. But all jobs must end sometime. And he'd never come back.
At first, the money kept coming in regularly. It wasn't that he was a bad man or that he didn't care about them at all, surely.
Even Ruth had to admit to herself that she could imagine her mother to be a trial for a man to live with. She couldn't entirely blame her father for not being able to tough it out.
But she could tough it out. She had to. Mother needed her; she knew that. She'd always known that. She was all Mother had. Besides pride. And Ruth knew, in her way of knowing things without having to be told, that pride was more important to Mother than any other thing. If Mother had ever lost her ability to hold her head high, there would have been nothing at all left for her. If her pride had ever been crushed, her spirit would have been crushed along with it.
There were vast stretches of unbroken expanse between Ruth Chavinski's character and her mother's. Yet there were times when I realized that Ruth's character was not formed in a vacuum. There was common ground as well as yawning chasms between Ruth and her mother.
* * *
Along with the rest of Ruth's grade four class, I was witness to a historic battle (it went down in the unwritten annals of our small town's history, I mean) in which her mother played one of the main roles. I'll record it here for you as a small glimpse into the person of Beatrice Chavinski. And then you can make of her what you will.
We had all been invited to Ruth's tenth birthday party. Ruth had never had a real birthday party with friends and classmates invited before. She'd been promised that on her tenth birthday she should have a real party. It had been an event she'd lived over and over in her imagination for years before its realization.
But when that date neared, the occasion was dampened for Ruth by her mother's insis
tence that her entire class be invited.
That part hadn't been Ruth's idea. She'd wanted to invite only the handful of classmates she considered friends, but it wasn't fair to play favourites, Mrs. Chavinski said. Someone would feel left out and have hurt feelings, she said. Ruth didn't bother to explain that the ones she would have invited were the ones who were left out ordinarily. The rest wouldn't have harboured hurt feelings to be left out of a party exclusively for the lowest caste. Nevertheless, despite Ruth's wishes, every member of Arrowhead Elementary's grade four class received an invitation to Ruth's tenth birthday party.
On the appointed historic day and time, Philippa Handy and her mother were the first to arrive for the party. Philippa was one of those Ruth would have invited to her party if she was allowed to choose.
There was something different about Philippa. She was, what people in our town called, "not quite right."
She was tall and weighty for her age. Not really heavy. Just carrying a little extra bulk. And she carried that extra clumsily. A large, clumsy girl with large, clumsy hands and feet. She hid in the shadows as much as her height and clumsiness would allow. In public, she rarely spoke unless spoken to and then usually only in monosyllables with a slight, mostly imperceptible stammer.
Most people called her, "that simple girl of Mrs. Handy's." Her mother called her Philippa, but Ruth called her Phil. Ruth was her only friend.
Joshua Bella walked over to the party alone. It was the way he did most things.
Poor, little, ugly Joshua Bella. The shortest boy in class. The shortest kid in class, shorter even than all the girls. The one who wore the same clothes the most days in a row. And undoubtedly the ugliest. Ruth was quite sure Joshua was worse to look at than she was, even if she wasn't quite sure how plain she was herself. She must have been easier on the eyes than Joshua. There was something about his face and body that made you think he was disfigured or deformed until you looked again, and then you could see it was just an impression. But he did give that impression. And besides his looks, there was something else about him, something indefinable – his mannerisms perhaps or the way he talked, the things he said – that made him the butt of every joke. He had no other friends. So naturally, Ruth claimed him as a friend.
Bo Weaver came with his mother. She wouldn't stay for the party; that was a given. One of the men had given them a ride out to the Chavinski farm and was waiting at the end of the driveway with the car idling while Bo and his mother walked the rest of the way to the farmhouse.
The strategy for dealing with Bo's mother was that one didn't see her if one saw her on the street or in the store. One looked not at her but through her. One pretended that women like Bo's mother and their ways of earning livings didn't exist at all. Not in small, God-fearing towns like ours. We learned the town strategy young without even knowing the reason for it.
Bo's father hadn't left them. He'd died right enough. But Bo and his mother and the rest of her six kids were poor. Very poor. Until Bo's mother began to earn money for them. In the only way she could think to do it. How she earned her money was another of those town unmentionables.
When we were much younger, we didn't understand how Bo's mother came by her income. We just knew it was something you couldn't talk about.
And Bo's mother didn't try to hold her head up. She held her head down to escape the eyes of the other women. She avoided them, and they avoided her.
That day, she didn't manage to avoid Lily Turnbull's mother, however.
Mrs. Weaver waited off to one side, watching for a moment or two before leaving Bo to the rest of us. Waiting for what, watching for what, I couldn't say. Maybe she only wanted to have a minute or two to watch her little boy and the fine, manly way he carried himself; to watch him take the rightful place he'd earned among his peers.
For whatever reason she lingered, she was still lingering as the Turnbull sedan drove the dusty lane to the Chavinski farm. Mrs. Turnbull was driving, Lily rode in the front seat, and Graham MacKellum and Wynnie Starke were in the back.
The Turnbulls, the MacKellums, and the Starkes were friends in a casual sort of way, and Mrs. Turnbull had offered to take Graham and Wynnie with her to Ruth's party. In looking back, I can imagine Mrs. Turnbull had asked the other children to ride along with her and Lily as a means of providing herself with reinforcements before venturing into enemy territory.
Edith Turnbull had experienced a run-in or two with Beatrice Chavinski before. I don't imagine she came away from those encounters with much satisfaction. Ruth's mother had an acid edge to her tongue that would have quailed many an opponent. And Mrs. Turnbull was not one to accept defeat gracefully. In fact, she may well have been spoiling for a fight as she drove toward the Chavinski's farmhouse.
Bo's mother was the first person Edie Turnbull's eyes lighted on as she emerged from behind the wheel of the car. Without a second's waste for a greeting, she strode over to Beatrice Chavinski and said to her in a carrying undertone, “You haven't asked her to stay, have you?”
Mrs. Chavinski's head came up. The light of battle was in her eyes.
“What 'her' are you referring to?”
“You know exactly who I mean. That woman. Over there.”
“She's welcome to stay if she chooses,” Mrs. Chavinski answered. She looked directly at Bo's mother, and her tone was not an undertone.
Others had been arriving during this exchange, and the small cluster of guests milling around the decrepit picnic table, choosing party hats or jabbing pins through paper donkey tails, froze in mid-motion, all eyes focused on the two combatants. We all found ourselves helpless to resist the morbid fascination of the onrushing scene.
“Do you think she's a proper chaperone for a ten-year-old's birthday party?” Mrs. Turnbull inquired, not bothering to lower her voice this time.
“Were you planning to stay?”
“I hadn't thought to leave the children here by themselves.”
“Well, if you consider yourself a proper chaperone for my daughter's birthday party, I don't see why Mrs. Weaver shouldn't be.”
Mrs. Turnbull swallowed this barb in righteously-indignant silence while we all waited, holding our collective breath.
“I guess I should have known what to expect by bringing the children here. A mother can't be too careful of the influences she exposes her children to.” She encompassed Mrs. Weaver and Mrs. Chavinski in a single glance which expressed plainly they were to be put in the same class.
“Then, maybe it would be best to take your precious little princess and get back into that fancy car of yours and drive right back the way you came from. If you haven't already dirtied yourself and your car and your little Lily by coming here in the first place.” Mrs. Chavinski's voice was as cool and even as if the weather was under discussion. But she'd grown visibly taller by inches.
Mrs. Weaver spoke up at this juncture. “I go now. I go now,” she said. Her voice revealed plainly that she was hovering on the edge of hysteria. Her English was poor, but she had followed enough of the discussion to know that she was the subject of it and to understand its gist.
“There's no need,” Beatrice Chavinski said quietly without looking at her. Her voice gave nothing away. Only the whitening of the knuckles clenched along the edge of the picnic table told any tales.
The two warriors locked gazes. Edie Turnbull looked away first.
“Come, Lily. Come, Wynnie and Graham,” Mrs. Turnbull said without another word or look for Ruth's mother.
At that point, Wynnie began crying with a child's abandon.
She and Ruth considered each other best friends when Wynnie had nothing better going. Wynnie had no time or notice for the little band of outcasts who were Ruth's other friends, but Ruth, who provided no competition and gave Wynnie a pleasant feeling of social superiority yet wasn't entirely an outcast herself, was just acceptable to a girl of Wynnie's middle standing...until Lily Turnbull tossed her a crumb of attention. Then, when Wynnie found she needed leverage
to catapult herself to the dizzying heights necessary for riding the tail of Lily Turnbull's comet, anyone was fair game. Even Ruth.
But Wynnie wasn't crying for the girl she called her best friend. She wasn't crying over Ruth's humiliation or the demolition of her best friend's only hope for a real birthday party. She cried because she was the type who always cried under any provocation. And because she'd hardly had time to be seen in her new dress.
“Wynnie and Graham can stay,” Beatrice Chavinski said.
“I hardly think so! I'm certainly not coming back for them. And what would I tell their mothers if I left them here. Wynnie, Graham. Come. Now!”
Wynnie was hustled, still sobbing, into the backseat with Graham who had retreated to the safety of the car when the outcome of the skirmish had become obvious to him.
Wynnie needn't have cried to miss out. The party was over for the rest of us at that point, as well. Ruth had disappeared. And she wasn't discovered for another two hours until her mother thought to look for her under the firs in the back pasture.
Her tenth birthday party was another of those memories that burned itself into her mind to give her thinking material in her leisure hours under the fir trees. Perhaps it became her symbol for her mother.
* * *
Ruth thought about her mother often in the times she sat beneath her special thinking tree. But she never came to any conclusions. Except, perhaps, that she didn't understand her. Was that lonely for her mother? To have no one that understood her? Ruth thought it must have been. It was lonely for Ruth.
There were few worth spending her precious thinking time on. Her mother and Wynnie and Bo and Joshua and Phil – they were the ones who needed to be thought of. Even if the thoughts weren't always pleasant ones, they were people who had to be thought about.
People like Lily Turnbull weren't worth wasting a thought on, so Ruth tried not to think about her.
She couldn't help thinking about people like Graham MacKellum, though, however much she tried not to.