“This building is original to the site. Everything else was moved here, but this little log cabin was built right here in 1816, when all the surrounding land was a huge old-growth forest. The farmer and his wife chopped down the gigantic pine trees that were growing here, shaped them into square logs, and put this house together before their first winter here. See those marks on the walls?” I asked, guiding them with my gaze. “Those are from the farmer’s adze—the tool he used to square the round log.”
The kids were now looking at the walls and ceiling, and one girl ran her hand along the log beside her, touching the adze marks.
“How many people lived in here?” the camp counselor asked.
“Nine,” I said casually. And then, on cue . . .
Gasps and shock. “Where would they all sleep?” another girl asked, incredulous.
I continued to spin in the corner while talking them through the three rooms of the cabin.
“After clearing the land for their farm and building the outbuildings for their animals, the family built a bigger home, the one we call Second House—that one over there,” I said, pointing through the open doorway to the huge, red, two-storied clapboard house across the yard.
The group gathered around me at the spinning wheel. I shifted the conversation to my task at hand.
“These are called carders,” I explained, opening up the pair of large, flat, rectangular brushes that resembled the comb we used to brush Meesha’s fur. “They take the mats and tangles out of the fleece.” I picked up a bunch of sheep’s fleece that I had washed and dried out in the sun the day before, and spread it out evenly onto the tines of one of the carders. Then I clapped the two carders together, sandwiching the fleece between the two sets of tines, and pulled the brushes in opposite directions. Five or six strokes and the fleece was straighter and fluffier, and all the fibers were running in the same direction. The kids were spellbound, completely silent as I took my time and continued with the process.
I opened up the carders and laid the empty one on my left thigh while I gently rolled the carded fleece off the other carder, into a sausage-shaped roll of cloudlike wool, wispy and light.
“At this point, the wool’s called a rolag,” I explained, “and now I’m ready to spin.” I cradled the delicate rolag in my palm and started the spinning wheel, giving it a firm clockwise turn and then placing my right foot on the pedal to keep it going. The silence remained as I picked up the strand of thread that came out of the bobbin in my right hand and attached the rolag to it as it spun.
The kids had their eyes glued to the bobbin. The light and airy fleece quickly twisted into a fine and strong woolen thread.
Just as I settled in to enjoying the moment, an icy breeze sent a shiver down my spine and the pleasant mood was sucked into an invisible vortex as Wendy, my thirty-something supervisor, darkened my door. She slipped into the back corner of the house, shrouded in shadow and wearing her favorite article of clothing, a long, taupe-colored, sleeveless linen shift that looked like a potato sack. I knew what she was here for—to see whether I was implementing her recent edict of incorporating gender issues and class structure into my interpreting. Fucking boring as shit.
One of the camp kids looked over to the big basket that sat beside me on a low wooden bench, containing about a dozen different skeins of yarn we had produced, dyed a rainbow of colors.
“Those pots hanging over the fire have dyes in them right now,” I explained. Through the corner of my eye I could see Wendy, her head cocked to one side, with a clipboard under her arm while she impatiently tapped her foot on the floor. “The big copper pot has rhubarb leaves in it,” I continued, as the kids made their way over to the hearth, “which will make green dye. And the small brass pot has bloodroot in it—it’s a native plant with red roots—and it makes a bright orange dye.”
One of the girls pointed to the drying herbs that hung from the pine ceiling over the fireplace. “Are those for dye?”
“No, those herbs are for cooking and medicine. The pioneers would have used all kinds of plants for a lot of different purposes.”
The group returned to me and the spinning wheel. The foot-tapping started to get faster.
“You know, the color of someone’s clothes two hundred years ago usually said something about their rank in life.” I had decided to give ol’ Dementor Face what she was here for, and instantly she stopped her foot tapping and began nodding. “Most people could make every color from plants that grow around here, except for two colors—can you guess what they were?” Various attempts by the kids led to the right choices—red and blue. “Nothing that grew in North America produced blue dye—so they’d have to purchase that dye if they wanted blue. It was an expensive dye called indigo and it got its name from the fact that it came from India. In the year that Daniel and Elizabeth Stong built this cabin, blue clothing meant power or status—like royal blue or navy blue . . .”
One of the kids piped up, “What does indigo look like?” “Well, it’s a plant with little, green leaves—but if you went to the store to buy it . . .” I got up from the spinning wheel, walked to the corner cupboard, and pulled out a small round stainless-steel tin, “ . . . you’d buy a block, like this.” I popped the lid off the tin and showed them the small cube of blackish-blue indigo that I had brought back from my trip to Pondicherry. It was one of the essentials on my “things to buy” list. “And then you’d crush this into a powder before you used it.”
The kids took turns handling the small rocklike cube of blue dye. One of them asked, “So, you mix the powder with water?”
“Well . . . it actually doesn’t dissolve in water. Can you guess what they used?”
None of them spoke up.
“Urine,” I said. Blank stares. “Pee.” Their eyes widened. “Yup, they’d collect a bunch of pee and put it in a crock. Then they’d put it in a warm place and let it ferment.”
“Ewwwww, gross!” The kids shouted out in unison, sending Wendy out of the building.
When the kids had no more questions, they said goodbye and walked out. I was alone for only a few minutes before my door was darkened again—this time it was my neighbor working in Second House.
“What did she want?” Laura asked, placing another log into the fire, pops and cracks abounding, while I continued to spin. Laura was just a few years older than I, and was dressed in a floor-length gingham pioneer dress, complete with a starched white cotton house cap that covered the long, blonde braids she had coiled and clipped to her head.
“Oh, you know, the usual—shoving Victorian class structure and the plight of women down people’s throats. She walked out of here rolling her eyes.”
“I hate that cunt!” Laura growled.
My spinning slowed down momentarily.
“What’s a cunt?”
The brass ladle in Laura’s hand froze midstir and she turned her head to face me.
“Rajee, come on. Are you fucking serious? You don’t know what a cunt is?”
“No, I’ve never heard that before. What does it mean?”
Laura was shaking her head. “Vagina! Cooch. Pussy. Penis flytrap. Labia majora. Labia minora. Actually, labia menorah, if you’re Jewish—”
“Okay!” I shouted back, focusing on the strand of yarn I was spinning, “I get it!”
“Good. Don’t forget it; it’s basically my favorite word. You should use it sometime.”
Laura was one of my favorite interpreters who worked at the village, but there were over a dozen of us—an old tinsmith who spoke in a shrill Cockney accent and rolled his own cigarettes, an eighty-year-old Gepetto-like Dutchman who was an incredible woodworker, and a seamstress who looked like the old woman who lived in a shoe with two long, snow-white braids that served as the prototype for Laura’s preferred historic hairstyle. Her face was weatherworn and reminded me of a shriveled apple-faced doll—she seemed like she was a hundred years old and fascinated me to no end. These were the old-timers, the ones who were there when
I had visited in second grade and were still working in their buildings as masters of their trade.
I loved my job. Nights with my dad left me feeling trapped and unsafe, but my bus rides to work in the mornings settled my nerves. The work itself was hard—sweaty in the summer, dressed in four layers of clothing and slaving away beside open fires—but the setting was idyllic. We had our busy periods, with lines of students or tourists snaking outside. But on rainy weekends, or on weekdays after about three o’clock, when the school groups would all leave the village, things were often still and quiet, and there were long stretches when I’d be completely alone in my building. This was my favorite part of the job — quietly working on my manual tasks. Sometimes, I’d leave the log cabin with a huge wicker basket and a pair of hand-forged scissors and walk down to the creek, foraging for plants to be used for dye.
My days in Daniel Stong’s First House always began a few minutes before visitors arrived, as I’d open the corner cupboard and pull out a few sheets of newspaper to roll up and start the fire. It never ceased to bring a smile to my face when I’d happen upon one of my Mean Girls costars on the pages of the Toronto Star. While the articles and pictures chronicled Lindsay Lohan’s fall from glory, Rachel McAdams was now the it girl, and Tina Fey was steadily becoming the queen bee of comedy. Somehow, it seemed wrong to roll up her picture and watch her face burn in the morning flames of the fire, so I’d just fold her up and take her back to the staffroom at lunch, to be deposited into the clean and peaceful recycling bin. Tina had once expressed an interest in the wool I was spinning (she was learning to knit while pregnant with her first child), so I saved up a few skeins, dyed them light pink with red onion skins, and sent them to the set of 30 Rock. It made me happy to imagine Ms. Norbury, now Liz Lemon, knitting away with the yarn I had spun.
The blazing summer heat of July became unbearable one afternoon, and as there were no visitors around, I moved to the front stoop of the cabin, sorting a freshly shorn fleece, pulling apart tufts of raw wool to prepare it for washing. The long, lazy, buzzing drone of the dog-day cicadas rang out from the black walnut trees overhead. My hands were working away steadily, covered in lanolin. What next? I wondered. It wasn’t a little “next” but a big “next.” It was the next step connected with Life of Pi. What’s my next move? I looked out at the flock of Border Leicester sheep grazing in the apple orchard nearby and spotted the naked-looking ewe whose fleece I was sorting. I’ve gotta learn how to swim.
“No!” a voice in my head shouted, “scary!”
“Shhh . . .” another voice said, “this is important.”
Pi is an excellent swimmer, but I didn’t even know how to float. I was working on a clump of the fleece that was matted with bits of straw in it. As I gently pulled apart the curls, the crisp, golden straw cracked into even smaller pieces and flitted down onto my lap. In the novel, Pi flaunts his skill of swimming the butterfly stroke and his long voyage across the Pacific entailed numerous occasions where he jumped into the water, to get away from the tiger. What would the filmmakers think if they found out that I couldn’t even float and had a huge fear of swimming? I reached a clump of wool that was matted together with a little bit of sheep poo. I really should be wearing gloves, I thought—but they wouldn’t have worn gloves to do this a hundred years ago. Meh, shitty hands, whatever. All they eat is grass, anyway.
Ma and my dad didn’t know how to swim and their fear of the water kept me and my sisters away from pools. When we’d go to the beach, we’d only go into the water knee-high, before Ma would shout, “No, no! Stop! Careful! Don’t go further! You will drown! Stop, child!” Yann had mentioned in Life of Pi that people who grew up by the ocean often didn’t know how to swim—he was right in my parents’ case. It wasn’t part of Tamil culture to strip off into ones skivvies to sea bathe.
I looked up from my shitty hands and spotted two ladies in their seventies heading in my direction. They were both wearing wide-brimmed straw sunhats and one of them was using a walking stick, hobbling down the path that led to my building. I hastily picked up the pile of wool and took it into the house, and then washed my hands in the wooden pail that sat in the corner before resuming my post at the spinning wheel.
The lady with the cane peeked in, noticed me in the corner, and then turned to her friend behind her, “Oh, look, Evelyn,” she gushed excitedly in an uppity British accent, “this must be the slave cabin!”
My eyes almost popped out of my head. I was going to correct them, but decided against it. It was an honest mistake—everything in our village was “historically accurate,” except me. I had to hand it to Wendy; she hired me even though there was absolutely no way there were Tamil people spinning wool in log cabins in the backwoods of Ontario in 1816.
The two ladies were now standing in front of me, ogling with huge grins on their faces as I started spinning and talking about the process. One of them cleared her throat and leaned in, putting her weight on her walking stick. “I have a question for you,” she prefaced in a hoarse whisper, “are you . . . an Ethiopian?”
“No,” I said, caught off guard, “I’m Tamil. My parents are from Ceylon—Sri Lanka.”
“Oh . . .” the other lady said quietly, smiling widely, revealing her set of yellowed false teeth, “with your curly black hair, your dark skin, and your very white teeth, we thought perhaps you were an Ethiopian.”
It was rare for me to be left speechless by our visitors, but the two British ladies had managed it.
The groundhog population at the village had reached an all-time high by the end of August. Our historical outbuildings housed horses, sheep, pigs, ducks, turkeys, and chickens, but there were an equal number of wild animals that made their homes on the outskirts of the property, where marshes, ponds, reeds, and woods created a sanctuary amidst the urban sprawl.
The groundhogs posed a problem because they fed on the prized plants that were grown on-site in our historically accurate gardens. The head gardener, Luke, a spindly Ichabod Crane type, was frequently chasing the fat, little balls of brown fur out of the herb garden, the berry patch, and the field of heirloom vegetables that grew behind Second House. He wasn’t allowed to kill them—the village was technically run by the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority and their mandate was heavily connected to preserving the “natural” heritage of the city.
I was always thrilled when I caught a glimpse of a fat groundhog running across my path as I walked from the staff room to First House. The little furry creatures had such a dignified air to them—I imagined them as distinguished old men wearing top hats as they bumbled about with their huge, fatty behinds that jiggled with such a pleasantly gratifying motion.
One afternoon I did a bread-baking demonstration using the iron cookware that sat by the hearth. I mixed together my ingredients in a big stoneware bowl on the wooden table as kids gathered around me. A few hours later, another group of kids watched me put the loaf into the Dutch oven and place it onto a bed of coals. I shoveled more hot coals on top, surrounding the pot with radiant heat.
Sadly, there weren’t any visitors left in the village in the late afternoon when I opened the Dutch oven and revealed a perfectly baked rye loaf, which I picked up with a piece of linen toweling and let cool on the table. The cabin filled with the smell of freshly baked bread as I left the house with a basket and scissors to collect some goldenrod.
I was busy cutting off the bright yellow blossoms, when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a groundhog had his two front paws on the front stoop and was looking into the house.
“Oh, shit!”
I threw aside the basket and ran over to the cabin, assuming the groundhog would scamper off. Instead, he glanced at me over his shoulder and then hopped up, into the house.
“Fuck!” I cried, following him into the dark cabin. A wild animal in a house full of two-hundred-year old precious artifacts was a disaster in the making.
As I walked into the cabin, he shook his fat bum and scampered off
into the children’s bedroom, his nails clicking on the wooden floor as he ran under the bed. I was shaking. I didn’t want to scare him even further, but I needed to get him out of here. I quietly walked over to the bed and slowly crouched down to look underneath. No groundhog. My panic rose when I saw a small hole in the wooden floor that I hadn’t noticed before. It looked like it was some kind of vent. I quickly pushed aside the painted wooden child’s bed and looked down the hole. Darkness. Then I heard the scampering of little paws. In all my years of working in this building, I had never thought about what was under it. I had no idea if there was a basement or cellar down there, but I felt I needed to work fast—I couldn’t bear the thought of this little top-hat-wearing groundhog being hurt, or worse. He came for my bread! I thought, as I ran to the staffroom. My coworkers were leaving in their twenty-first-century clothes. I realized the village was closed now, and everyone was going home. I ran into Wendy’s office, but she wasn’t at her desk, so I ran down to the staff phone and called the head of the maintenance department.
“There’s a groundhog in my house, Donald—it fell into a hole in the kids’ room!” I wheezed.
“I’ll go over there right now,” he said. “We’ve gotta scare him out of there; can’t have one of those pests in the building.”
I didn’t trust him to handle the matter with the groundhog’s well-being in mind, so I flipped through the phone book and found the number for the Toronto Wildlife Center.
“Don’t scare it,” the girl on the phone instructed calmly. “Go over there and make sure he doesn’t scare it—it’ll be frantic and won’t want to come back up; it’ll probably try to dig itself out and if the basement is concrete, it’ll hurt its paws. Get some peanut butter . . . or some of that bread you baked and put it at the end of a long board or plank of some kind and put it down the hole; hopefully he’ll climb back out. Call us back if he’s not out in an hour and we’ll send someone to help.”
The Elephants in My Backyard Page 9