Bogdan had heard this phrase “you people” many times before, normally shouted at him and his friends in the town at night and often accompanied by “go home” or “stole our jobs”. He knew Agnes did not mean this though. It was a genuine question—a true care for, and pleasure in, difference.
“No, I do not think so,” he said, simply. “If there is such words for this, I do not know them, I am sorry.”
“Well, no matter—it must have just been just our dad then, I never heard anyone else call it that either. As I say, you’re a very polite young man, it makes a nice change to have someone so polite around, and one interested in the lace. It’s rare to find such interest in young people,” Agnes said, handing him his cup with a jittery hand that threatened a repeat of the earlier spillage.
“Thank you, I try my best,” Bogdan replied. “I am interested in all things that require skill and effort.”
“That’s lovely, that is, young Bogdan,” she said, pushing aside the tea tray and taking a roll of linen from a basket at her side. She undid the cloth ties around it and opened it on the coffee table before her. There were little compartments within, each with a couple of sticks of turned and polished wood within.
“We’re going to learn bobbin lace—and I’m still learning, I can tell you—a very old craft, and it needs its tools, as all such crafts do—tools refined and perfected over generations. Now these are what we call bobbins,” she said, taking one of the sticks out of its neat little compartment. It was made of wood, with a dark varnish that had long since worn away in its middle, from years of use. At its base there was a purple bead, threaded on copper wire through a large hole in the wood. “They come in pairs, you see. So that you know which belongs with which.”
Bogdan took the thing from her. It was light and simply made, with a few different turns up and down its length, and some basic ridges here and there. He rolled it back and forth in his fingertips, as though assessing its merit. He was well aware of the importance of quality tools and attempted to transfer to this new skill his understanding of his own.
“I find those little ridges very handy now my eyes aren’t quite so good,” Agnes said. “You can feel which one you have and find its partner, just by touch. Close your eyes and I’ll show you.”
He did. She placed about six bobbins, of varying lengths in his other hand and closed his fingers around them. Her skin was smooth and cold.
“Now you find the partner bobbin to the one in your left hand,” she said.
Within moment he had found it.
“You see,” Agnes chuckled. “This is a work of the fingers, as much as the eyes.”
He rolled the bobbins back and forth in his hand, coming to know them.
“Lots of people collect these now,” she said, with regret. “It’s such a shame to think of all of them lying idle about the country in old jam jars, or displayed in cabinets. I admit, they’re very pretty, but they were made for making and not for lazing—much like ourselves.”
She started a long list of dos and don’ts, along the lines of, “Always use brass pins, so they don’t rust in the pillow—that makes an almighty mess of the lace.” Bogdan had a job keeping up with the information she was heaping upon him. And then, as though pausing at a point before the crescendo of perfectly scored piece of music she said, “First though we will make your lace pillow.”
And so they did. It was a rich blue velvet, with a gold trim around the edge that came from a reel of braid Agnes” Aunt had made many years before. It was Agnes” gift to him. He was pleased with the pillow and the trim, more pleased than he had been with anything in a long time.
∞
Over the coming weeks he learnt the basics of making bobbin lace—the winding of the bobbins; how to prepare a pricking pattern and then to make it; dressing the pillow and how to move the lace across it when working on collars or trim; lengthening and shortening threads; starter stitches: cloth stitch, half stitch and cloth stitch and twist; the differences between Torchon, Cluny, and Bucks Point lace.
The weeks became months. Sometimes he’d go to see Agnes on a Wednesday afternoon, but mostly on a Saturday. He’d stopped going to the pub on Saturday afternoons now, and spent most evenings practicing his lace. Michał didn’t notice. He’d become even more withdrawn and bitter. It looked likely they’d both be getting evicted soon as they had been unable to find anyone else to share the house and were very behind on the rent. At that point, Bogdan thought, he’d have to go home, and had started saving the odd five pound note, for a flight back, inside the cover of a book on lacemaking that Agnes had lent him—he thought it unlikely that Michał, who he was sure had been rifling through his things for money, would look in there.
During the strawberry season Bogdan had a lot of work, and he was working ten hours a day for almost three weeks, without a break. He’d called at Agnes” house one night after work and explained he would probably not see her until early the following month. She understood and said it was lovely he had the work, and that that was the main thing. He grimaced a little and she touched his hand tenderly saying, “Don’t you worry dear, I’ve earmarked a beautiful pattern for us to start once you’re ready, it’s one of my mother’s and I’d been saving it for a special day.”
∞
The special day came and she pricked out the pattern on his pillow and guided him through the first turns of the work. Tea flowed but Borden’s progress was frustratingly slow.
“I would give anything to have the skills you have,” he said, draining a cup, and resuming his slow progress on the pattern.
“Really?” Agnes said. “Would you give anything?”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, concentrating on selecting the right bobbin to thread over the one in his left hand. “To know something—to truly master it—that is what life is all about isn’t it. I want to be well trained at what I do, and you have been a wonderful teacher, but then it will take me many years of practice and hard work to be as accomplished as you are at it.”
“Anything at all?” Agnes said, distantly, as though she had not been listening.
“Yes,” he said again, firmly.
“Then look at me,” Agnes said, taking his hands from their work and holding them in her tiny, deformed fingers.
He did not really understand, but turned to her and looked into her eyes, the colour of which was difficult to discern in the half-light of her front room, and beneath the folds of the wrinkles that gathered around her eyes, threatening to enfold them in darkness.
“May we find this wish heard higher. These hands are for doing, for making and learning,” she began, as though reciting an old childhood nursery rhyme. She had turned his palms upright and traced a line down each with her thumbs.
“These hands are for nursing, for nurturing and yearning,” she sang, tracing his forefingers down each of her palms.
“And between them they cradle a world full of knowing,” she gripped his fingers tightly. He could feel every line worn into them, every blemish and callus—pressing harder and harder on his own fingers and then palms. “And none has yet turned the tide of that flowing, for age is a rift and youth such a gift. But the bridge o’er the chasm is built with desire.”
The room had become hot and airless, and a dull yellow light seemed to have brightened the place, although its source was unclear.
Agnes sank back into her chair, her eyes flaring and her arms shaking. Bogdan made to get up and help her but his legs felt weak, his eyes heavy with sleep and his vision blurred. His hands felt hot and painful. The tiredness was overwhelming and he too fell back into his chair and sank into sleep. The last thing he saw was Agnes rise up, suddenly and swiftly, with a strength he had not seen in her before. She stretched her arms high above her head, a body in the throes of being born again.
∞
Rising from his slumber Bogdan felt his limbs creak slowly into usefulness. His hip ached and his feet were sore and numb. He looked down at his fingers; gnarled and crook
ed, the nails cracked and dirty. Between a swollen thumb and bent forefinger he held a thin white thread. He traced it back—its fibres further twining together as it trailed through his fingertips—to a delicate bone bobbin that he deftly tucked beneath its partner on a faded blue mat edged in frayed gold braiding that was propped on his lap. His hazy vision could see well enough this close at hand but as he peered around the room he could just make out the forms of ornaments and pictures, each of which sparked half memories of a long life, filled with loves and losses. “Nadszedł czas na herbatę,” he thought.
In the narrow street outside a young girl played hopscotch on a hastily chalked grid—as though the late Twentieth century had never happened; her stiff ivory dress was dated; her hair plaited and unfashionably long; her delicate laughter, eternal.
Seven Minutes in Heaven
Nadia Bulkin
A ghost town lived down the road from us. Its bones peeked out from over the tree line when we rattled down Highway 51 in our cherry red pick-up. I could see a steeple, a water tower, a dome for a town hall. It was our shadow. It was a ghost town because there was an accident, a long time ago, which turned it into a graveyard.
I used to wonder: what kind of accident kills a whole town? Was it washed away in a storm? Did God decide, “away with you sinners,” with a wave of His hand—did He shake our sleeping Mt. Halberk into life? My parents said I was “morbid” when I asked these questions, and told me to play outside. So I would go outside, and play Seven Minutes in Heaven—freeze tag with a hold time of seven minutes, the length of time it takes for a soul to fly to God—with Allie Moore and Jennifer Trudeau. When the sky turned dark orange we would run back to our houses and slam our screen doors, and after my parents tucked me in I would sketch a map of the ghost town by the glow of my Little Buzz flashlight: church on the bottom of Church Street instead of the top, school on the east of the railroad tracks instead of the west. Then I would draw Mt. Halberk, and take a black sharpie, and rain down black curlicues on those little Monopoly houses until every single one was blanketed by the dark. When I got older, and madder, I would draw stick-people too—little stick-families walking little stick-dogs, little stick-farmers herding little stick-cows. And last, the darkness.
When I was in junior high school they told us the truth: the accident was industrial. The principal stood up in the auditorium and said there used to be a factory over there, in that town, and one day there was a leak of toxic gas, and people died over there, in that town. A long time ago, he said, nothing to worry about now. Some parents were angry; they said kids were getting upset. But gas leak sounds a lot less scary than a volcano, ask any kid.
Nobody would talk about it, except when we needed to dwell on something bad. Some families said a little prayer for the ghost town during Thanksgiving, so they could be grateful for something. My uncle Ben, the asshole, told my cousins that he would leave them there if they misbehaved. Politicians in mustard suits pointed across the stage of the town hall and said, “My opponent supports the kind of policies that lead to the kind of accidents that empty out towns like Manfield.” That was the ghost’s name: Manfield. I lived in Hartbury.
***
Allie Moore was afraid of bats; she didn’t like the way they crawl. Jennifer Trudeau was afraid of ice cream trucks, and nobody knew why. We only knew that when she heard the ring-a-ling song coming around the corner she’d rub her scarab amulet, to remember the power of God.
Me, I was afraid of skeletons. It was mostly the skull, the empty hugeness of the eye sockets and the missing nose and the grin of a mouth that could bite but couldn’t kiss. But I also hated the rib cage and the pelvic butterfly and the knife-like fingers splayed apart in perpetual pain. It made me sick to think about what waited for me on the other side: the ugliness, the suffering. My parents took me to church and Pastor Joel promised that there would be none of that in Heaven, when I finally exhausted the cherished life that Almighty God had given me, when I finally decided my seven minutes were up and I was ready to go. “But that won’t be for a long, long time from now,” he said, patting my head. “So run along.”
That was all well and good, but Pastor Joel didn’t stop the nightmares. He didn’t stop that Hell-sent skeleton from crawling out from under my box spring, clacking its teeth, tearing my sheets and then my skin. I would try to run but could never move, and those rotten bones would clamp like pliers around my neck, squeezing and squeezing until I woke up. I stopped telling my parents; their solution to everything was sleeping pills. The only thing that calmed me down was drawing and destroying Manfield, to remember that I wasn’t dead like them.
It was Miss Lucy who stopped the nightmares. Miss Lucy loved Halloween, and come October she decked the classroom in pumpkins and sheet-ghosts and purple-caped vampires. She also hung a three-foot skeleton decal from the American flag above the white board. I could not stop staring at it, because it would not stop staring at me. “I know ol’ Mr. Bones is kind of creepy,” Miss Lucy whispered after I refused to go to the board to answer a math problem. “But you shouldn’t be scared of skeletons, Amanda. You’ve already got one inside you.” Then she reached out her finger and poked me in the chest, in what I suddenly realized was bone. I’m proud to say that I only wanted to dig myself apart for a few gory seconds before I realized that Miss Lucy was right, that a skeleton couldn’t hurt me if it was already part of me.
“Memento mori,” Miss Lucy said. My parents thought she was witchy, and corrected things she told us about the Pacific Wars—we never promised that we would help Japan, we never threatened Korea. She was gone by next September, and a woman with puppy-patterned vests had taken over her class. Mrs. Joan didn’t like Halloween. Parents liked her, though.
***
I was seventeen the first time I went to Manfield. Allie Moore’s boyfriend, Jake Felici, decided it would be a hard-core thing to do for Halloween. Jake was a moody, gangly boy who played bass guitar, and Allie’s hair had turned a permanent slime-green from years on the swim team. They were the captains of hard-core. Allie invited me and Jennifer Trudeau. Jake invited Brandon Beck, who I loved so frantically that I thought it might kill me. So while other kids in Hartbury were drinking screwdrivers in somebody’s basement or summoning demons with somebody’s Ouija board, we piled into Jake’s beat-up Honda Accord and drove down Highway 51, Brandon and his perfect chestnut hair smashed between me and Jennifer Trudeau.
We were expecting something like those old Western gold-miner towns—wood shacks, rusted roadsters, a landscape still dominated by barrels and wheelbarrows. We were expecting something that had been cut down a hundred years ago, when companies were still playing around with chemicals like babies with guns, before regulations would have kept them in line. But that was not Manfield. Manfield had ticky-tacky houses and plastic lawn gnomes and busted minivans. There was a Java Hut coffee house, a Quick Loan, a Little Thai restaurant. That is, Manfield looked just like Hartbury—only dead. Only dark.
We were standing in what had once been the town’s beating heart. Jake’s flashlight found a now-blinded set of traffic lights. Allie’s flashlight found something called Ram’s Head Tavern. Taped to the inside of the tavern’s windows were newspaper clippings from twelve years back: the local high school had won a track meet; an old man had celebrated sixty years at the chemical plant that would kill them all; and they had held a harvest fair not so different from the one we celebrated in early October. Kids in flannel struggled to hoist blue-ribbon pumpkins, white-haired grandparents held out homemade pies, a blonde girl with a sash that read Queen of Mount Halberk waved, smirking, to the camera. Hartbury was the only town on Mt. Halberk now.
“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Jennifer. “What if there’s still poison in the air?”
“It’s not like it was radiation,” said Jake, trying to muster up the certainty to be our Captain Courage. “Gas dissipates, so it’s all gone now.”
Allie echoed him enthusiastically, but she also pulled her
plaid scarf higher up her neck. I looked at Brandon, but he wasn’t looking at me. No, Brandon was hanging back with meek, slight, big-eyed Jennifer—telling her that it would be all right, kicking pebbles in her direction. None of it seemed real. I saw the five of us standing like five scarecrows, five finger-puppets, five propped-up people-like things that were, nevertheless, not people. My heart was pounding like a wild animal inside my chest. I wanted to get out—out of Manfield, out of my body. I don’t know what I thought was coming after me. I could only feel its rumbling, unstoppable and insurmountable, like the black volcanic clouds I had once drawn descending upon this town.
No one else seemed worried about the fact that everyone had lied about how recently the accident destroyed Manfield, and in the years to come we would never ask our parents why. I suppose we assumed that they had been so traumatized, so saddened by the loss of their sister-town, that they decided to push Manfield backward into the soft underbelly of history. “They never said when it was exactly,” Jake said, in their defense, “just that it was a while ago.”
A while. All our understanding of time is made up of slipshod words that you can rearrange to cover up the fact that somewhere, somebody was wrong. In a while, Brandon Beck started dating Jennifer Trudeau. In a while, I decided to leave the state for college. For a while, I dreamt of my parents driving five-year-old me to a harvest festival, buying me a pumpkin, crowning me Queen of Manfield, and then leaving me to vanish into a gently swirling fog.
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