by Hadley Dyer
Other mothers wore dresses, not housedresses and aprons. Other mothers wore lipstick and went to church on Sunday. Other mothers let you drink tea with lots of milk and sugar. Not the World’s Oldest Mother. And I’d sent her to the hospital.
“That’ll do,” Mrs. Hewitt said to the boiled chicken she was prodding. “Rosa-lee, dear. You’ll be turning off those beans in three minutes—three minutes, no more. Or they’ll be the soft-as-mush variety of your mother’s.”
That was it for me, I have to say. It was one thing for Mrs. Hewitt to laugh at my foolishness. But she must not stand in this house and insult Mama’s cooking or anything else. Not tonight.
“Mrs. Hewitt.” My voice was tight and high. “Thank you for helping me with Mama, but . . .”
I felt around for the words. “But what, dear?”
“But . . .” But I could only manage, “I like soft-as-mush beans.”
“Course you do, dear. Course you do. By God, it’s what you’re accustomed to. You say you’ll be all right until Martha gets home? Right, then. I’ve got to find Mr. Hewitt and get his supper on.”
I knew where Mr. Hewitt was. He was hiding from Mrs. Hewitt. The Hewitts had a perfectly good front porch that Mrs. Hewitt washed down with a hose every day, even though the only people who were ever on it were her cats, and strictly speaking, cats aren’t people. But anyone who ever spent any time with Mrs. Hewitt wouldn’t need to ask why Mr. Hewitt didn’t sit on his own porch. One time I spotted him reading a book in a tree in their backyard while she was going up and down the street calling for him.
Martha phoned from the library to say she was meeting Norman at the hospital and had I eaten and had I remembered to put the leftovers in the refrigerator and would I be okay? I didn’t say anything about the pencils. It would be just like Martha to think that paying for them somehow made her responsible for Mama’s fall. Like how she’d apologize to my sisters when their smoking bothered her asthma. She bought most of my art supplies out of her paycheque from the library, which she was supposed to be saving for university next year. Martha’s the smartest, gentlest person ever—even more than Norman, truthfully. She’s got hands that are as pale and soft as milk even when she’s stuffing me into my Sunday clothes. Norman’s are like mattresses—a little rough on the surface but so big and cushy you feel like you could curl up on his palm like Thumbelina. The closest Martha gets to being fierce is when she’s correcting my talking or getting after me about rotting my brain with comics. Norman, on the other hand, gets fierce enough to shoot at Mrs. Hewitt’s cats from the back step with a BB-gun when they tear around our garden.
I got ready for bed as the sun was going down. Through my bedroom window, I saw the Gravedigger shuffling down his walk, carrying an old lantern. A little shudder went up my spine. People had seen mysterious lights in the cemetery at night, swooping up among the treetops. They said that later, if you had guts enough to stick around, you’d see the Gravedigger leaving the grounds with a lantern in his hand.
I grabbed my sketch pad and the shoebox where I kept my art supplies and sat down at the window with my bum on a big cardboard box. At the end of the school year, Freddie and his wife, Hazel, had brought a big stack of comic books over in the box. Real old stuff. There was a bunch in this series called Tales of Terror that’s now banned. Martha says that’s because the government thinks horror comics make you right delinquent. For example, you might read a story about a butcher’s wife who cuts up her husband’s body to sell to his customers, and then go out and murder somebody. The only thing comics ever made me was mad that I can’t buy the Sea Monkeys and other good stuff they advertise at the back. You can’t get them anywhere around here. You have to mail a money order to Yahookaville, U.S.A.
I opened my sketch pad to a fresh page. First I drew a block of squares. Inside the first square, I drew the Gravedigger holding his lantern, little smell-waves coming off him. In a box above his head, I wrote: “Motherless! Godless! Abandoned and feared by all!!” In the next square, I drew an old hag. Introductions to scary comics always have an old hag. Warty pickle nose. Frizzled hair. Spit dripping from her teeth. Truth be told, this one looked a lot like my late Great-aunt Mavis. In a big speech bubble I wrote:
WELCOME, VERMIN! IF YOU WILL VENTURE INTO THE TOMB OF TERROR, YOUR HOST, THE TOMB-KEEPER, WILL TELL YOU A TALE. I HAVE SELECTED A DEADLY SERIOUS STORY. AND I DO MEAN DEADLY! SO CURL UP IN YOUR COFFINS, AND I’LL BEGIN MY TERRIBLE TALE CALLED . . . THE GRAVEDIGGER COMETH!!!
That’s when I remembered I was home by myself for the first time ever.
I’m not saying I was scared exactly, but sometimes a person likes to have all the lights on in the house. I went around and put them on, kind of humming to myself, you know how you do. I peered into Mama and Norman’s bedroom. I almost never went in there and I’d never, ever touched anything—ever. Young Lil once took an old silk handkerchief from Mama’s dresser, and when Mama found out it was like the other explosion, the big one in the harbour, back in 1917. The Great Disaster. Practically blew the North End off the map. The new Richmond School was said to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl who was still searching for the other eighty-eight kids who never made it to the old Richmond School that morning. Course, I was sorry to have reminded myself about that one.
Norman had a bowl of candies on his bedside table and Mama had a big jar of Noxema on hers. Mama used Noxema for everything. She washed her face with it, rubbed it on my sunburns and Norman’s callused hands. Beside the jar of Noxema was a turquoise telephone, heavy and squat like a big blue frog. We were one of the only families in the North End that had a private line, let alone a second phone, let alone a fancy blue phone upstairs. The wiring had been paid for by the great-aunties, who’d raised Mama and were bedridden for years before they died. Uncle Jim once told me the new upstairs phone caused quite a stir in the neighbourhood and it was the excitement of it, not the flu, that killed the great-aunties shortly after, which made it a right smart investment to his mind, and Mama said, “I did not hear that, Jim.” I don’t know why we kept the phone, since Mama hardly seemed to use it.
I stepped one toe into the room.
Rrrrring!
The blue frog went off like an alarm and my heart smacked hard against my ribs. It was three, four rings before my organs went back to their natural order and I got my whole self into the room.
“Hello? . . . Hello?”
Silence. And then a dial tone.
Now, in comic books, when they want to skip ahead a bit, they just show a couple of panels without words. If I were drawing the story of my life, this is what it’d look like:
Me with my eyeballs popping out.
My bare feet running across the hall.
Me in bed with the covers pulled up, little old hags reflected in my eyeballs.
The hands on our grandfather clock spinning.
When Norman came into my room, I was asleep with my cheek on A Child’s Illustrated Bible Stories.
“Norman?”
“You fell asleep with all the lights on.”
“Where’s everybody?”
“In bed.”
“Did Mama have an X-ray?”
“Yup.”
“Will she have to wear a cast?”
“Yup.”
“Is her leg broken?”
“Doctor says the ankle’s fractured.”
“Is she—is she going to be okay?”
“Looks like. Don’t expect she’ll be up for family tomorrow.”
Norman’s gaze drifted towards the shoebox on my window sill. He didn’t need to say a word for me to know that he’d seen the pencils on the floor when he came for Mama. For the first time since then, the tears spilled over. They ran down my face and neck and until the collar of my nightgown was soaked.
“Where’d that come from?” he said finally. He reached over to my nightstand and picked up the letter the Gravedigger had brought over.
“It went across the street by mistake. Norm
an?”
“Bean.”
“How come everybody calls you Norman?”
I couldn’t look my father in the face, so I kept my eyes on the edge of his grey pants, stark against the yellow sheets Mama had ironed just that morning.
“I suppose it was Jim who started it, calling us farmhands by our last names. You know, MacDonald, Kellock, Norman. And your brother always had to do like your Uncle Jim. Then Margaret picked it up. Let’s see . . . There’s a story about names and Jim from way back when.”
“What happened?”
“This is before Jim introduced me to your mother, so I’m telling it second-hand, right?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, story goes that Mama and Aunt Izzie used to spend summers at Friar’s Lake. Sometimes your uncle went out, too, when he could get off the farm. One day a young feller named Marshall Briggsby comes running up the path yelling, ‘Jimmy’s drowning! Jimmy’s drowning!’ Course, Mama and your Aunt Izzie go tearin’ down to the lake, thinking their brother’s out there in the water. Then they hear people laughing. There’s old Marshall and his pals having a good one. A joke, see?
“So, a few weeks later your Uncle Jim’s down for another visit when who comes up the path but Marshall Briggsby. He’s huffing and puffing and he starts in, ‘Jimmy’s drowning! Jimmy’s drowning!’
“And your Mama, she says, ‘See here, Marshall, I know darn well my Jimmy is sitting in the cottage drinking the Coke Cola I poured him m’self. So you’d better keep on running.’
“Seeing’s how he wasn’t getting far with the Duchess—er, that’s what people called her sometimes—Marshall hightailed it for the next cottage.”
“Uncle Jim was inside, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, Bean, he was. But young Jimmy MacPherson from Prospect was in the water, and he died.”
“But Mama didn’t know it was a different Jimmy,” I cried. “Marshall didn’t explain, and anyway it’s his own fault for telling lies . . .”
“I figure it don’t matter how small a mistake starts out,” said Norman. “You have to live with it all the same.” The hand on my foot was heavy and warm through the sheets. “Just ask your Mama.”
Norman’s eyes were tired. And suddenly, even though my mind was filled up with poor old dead Jim MacPherson from Prospect and how I didn’t know my own father’s name and how I almost killed my mother, it came into my head how to fix Norman’s portrait.
The tick-tick of the grandfather clock climbed the stairs from the landing. I crawled out from under the sheets and kissed my father’s scratchy salt-and-pepper cheek. “Thanks, Papa,” I said, using my old baby name for him.
“Frederick Floyd Norman,” he said, holding out a peat-stained hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Chapter Three
The next morning, Sunday, I found Mama sitting up in bed wearing a fresh housedress and reading a Louis Lamour novel. Her hair was braided and neatly pinned, like always. She looked for all the world as though she’d just sat down for a moment, except for the plaster cast that covered her leg halfway up to the knee and the dark bruise raised on her face. The cast was propped up on a pillow. I’d never seen Mama in her bed before.
The blue frog looked at me accusingly.
“Martha’s getting breakfast on,” Mama said. “Your father told Mag Hewitt we don’t need help today, so don’t you go letting her in.” She didn’t look up from her book.
When I’d woken up, my chest felt squeezed and tight, as though my ribs had become a size too small. Now it was like someone had let the air out of me. Was it possible that Mama didn’t know about the pencils on the stairs? She’d seemed so lost after her fall. Could it be that she didn’t realize it was my fault? And no one had told her?
Downstairs, Martha was flushed as she stirred the oatmeal, though the kitchen was early-morning cool. “Norman called Aunt Izzie this morning,” she said. “He’s going to keep the truck an extra day so he can bring her that old wardrobe. Do you want raisins?”
My feet slapped across the linoleum. “Yup, yup, yup.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought Aunt Izzie back with him.”
“Can’t remember the last time she was here,” I said. “But I bet Norman wouldn’t drive two hours to Ship Harbour if he didn’t hope he could talk her into coming.”
Martha set my bowl in front of me and swiped the comic book I’d propped against the milk bottle off the table. “You know, a while back Mama said that Aunt Izzie got all worked up because Johnny wanted to come to Halifax and get a job at the shipyard,” she said. “I don’t like the idea of him dropping out of school either, but it would be nice if they both ended up here.”
I leaned over the oatmeal and felt the steam break like a wave across my face. “I think you’re thinking having Johnny around would really shake things up.”
I liked the way that sounded when it came out of me. People aren’t always straight when they talk, especially when they’re talking to the youngest. Even Martha sometimes put on a coat of sugar on things.
Martha tapped me on the head with a knuckle. “I mean, wouldn’t it work out nicely for everyone if we had the company, not to mention some help.”
The thing about sugar is, it’s real hard to scrape off.
The last time Johnny came into the city was for Young Lil’s wedding, two summers ago. Uncle Ezra and Aunt Izzie didn’t come because one or the other of them wasn’t feeling well. Let me tell you, after Cousin Johnny pulled up in his father’s car, girls from all over the North End were suddenly going crazy with errands on Agricola Street. You never seen so much traffic back and forth in front of the house. That’s because Johnny had grown into what you’d call a tall drink of water. He was fifteen, then, same as Martha. He had night-black hair, like Mama’s in old pictures, and her blue eyes, too, not brown like the rest of us. Mostly I liked the easy way about him. He listened closely and laughed at near anything you said.
Once, when I was small, I told him, “I’m going to marry you when I grow up.” Martha’s cheeks turned pink, and I quickly added, “After you marry Martha.” Which only made her go from pink to red.
Johnny laughed. “People don’t get that lucky twice.”
After the wedding, the grown-ups headed for the church hall and danced all night. Martha and me were the only ones who made it to church the next morning. On the way out, we stepped over my brother Freddie and my sister Margaret’s husband, Cecil. They were sleeping side by side on the floor, each with his arm flung over the other. When we got back, those grown-up Normans were sitting around the kitchen table, holding their heads, smoking. Martha said, “Where’s Johnny?”
Everyone started looking around the room as though he was a cat that might have gone behind the stove. That’s when Johnny came in through the back door. His hand was gripping his night-black hair like it was dragging him along.
Freddie hollered, “So, you caught the last dance with Sarah Hatfield after all!”
There was a lot of hooting and slapping the table—until we saw Mama bringing up the rear.
“Found this one face down in my dahlias. You’d think, son,” Mama said to Freddie, “you’d show your cousin a little more hos-pit-al-ity. At least take the bottle out from under him so he can get a decent night’s sleep in your mother’s flower bed.”
Johnny smoothed down his matted hair. “Sorry, Aunt Lily,” he said.
If anyone else in that kitchen had been caught sleeping one off in the garden, they would have been chased from the house with a broom. But Mama had a soft spot for Johnny on account of him being Aunt Izzie’s one and only, and she just pulled another stool up to the table. “I’ll get breakfast on,” she said, heading for the pantry. “I’m ashamed of all of you.”
Johnny looked so sheepish that everyone started laughing again.
Norman carried Mama downstairs and got her settled. He leaned his big black umbrella against the chesterfield, in case she needed to move around, and set up the radi
o so she could listen to a service. My parents almost never went to church. Norman said he didn’t need people eavesdropping on his prayers, and Mama said she’d had her religious education, thank you. Truth be told, she didn’t go anywhere if she could help it. That didn’t get the rest of us out of it, though.
From my bedroom window, I heard Norman talking to someone outside.
“Don’t worry about the lawn,” he was saying. “I’m more concerned about Mrs. Norman’s garden getting weeded.”
When I saw who he was talking to, I ran downstairs. Martha was fixing her hat in the hall mirror. She looked from my face to the screen door. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t make a fuss. You know Norman only has one day off and he needs the help. You go be polite.”
I stepped out onto the porch. It was hot already and my Sunday clothes were itchy. But I was polite. “Good morning,” I said to the Gravedigger, who was standing by himself in the yard. Then, to be extra nice, I added, “Don’t blame you for not going to church on a day like this. Not when there’s work to be had.”
“I’m waiting for Fred Senior,” said the Gravedigger. “He still out back getting the clippers? Or is he in Dartmouth today?”
I might not have been so well mannered, I tell you, if Martha hadn’t come out just then.
I love church. I love the hollow sound of my heels as I walk up the aisle. I love the dark shiny wood that’s like tight, ripe apple skin. I love the women in their Sunday clothes. The smell of powder and perfume. The heavy, felt-lined collection plate. The worn-soft hymn book. First thing I do when I get to church, after I’m done looking at what everyone’s wearing, is open the hymn book and feel the paper between my fingers. Delicate as onion peel. I lift a page and pass my hand under the words. Strong words, fierce words, God words. I’m no Baptist, but when I sing hymns, I’m as thunderous and holy as Sunday.
I was still thinking on the Gravedigger when we got to church that morning. About how Norman, who was usually a sensible person, didn’t seem worried about leaving Mama at home with a boy who had a fondness for dead bodies. Maybe he would dig a big hole in the yard and then start thinking about how to fill it! I hoped Mrs. Hewitt was planning on coming by, and I don’t hope that very often.