by Sheree Fitch
How cliché, I know you can be more original, I wanted to say. Instead, I smiled at her as if she were a silly child. I so did not want to know the secret fantasy life of my English teacher.
She handed me a blue spiral book with a happy-faced moon on it.
“It’s not more homework.” She smiled. A rare occurrence. “It’s the best kind of book for someone like you. It’s filled with blank pages. You can always talk to the page.” I didn’t know what to say. Thanks, Miss Armstrong-Blanchett, I’ll miss your lime-green outfit the most? And what did she mean, someone like me?
“I appreciate this,” I said as I got up to leave. “Have a good summer,” I added over my shoulder.
Truth is, Miss Armstrong-Blanchett read me like … well, yes, like an open book. The thoughts of toodling off to Boulder Basin to spend the summer with my grandmother did make me almost sick to my stomach.
My father’s mother is a bow-legged stubborn witch with chin hairs that sprout from a mole the colour and shape of a kidney bean. That’s for starters. Our problematic history goes back a long way.
First off, my father’s father, Emerson Hotchkiss, died long before I was born, and the witch remarried a man by the name of Hennigar. He died before I was born too, but she had taken his name. I could never say Hennigar, so I called her Nana Vinegar. That never pleased her, as you can imagine. But it fit her perfectly, she was such a sour old thing.
Things really came to a head between us during what I call the Night of the Jellied Tongue. I was eight. My grandmother cooked tongue of beef and made me eat it. That’s right, tongue of beef. There it was, one big pink tongue on a platter in the middle of the dining-room table. Now, if you have ever seen tongue of beef, you would know that you could see the ridges and furrows and little spongy thingamajig-gies just like when you look at your own tongue in the mirror. It’s disgusting. I pictured some cow, one who could no longer moo, who could no longer chew its cud, wandering around the pasture, tongueless. I was ready for the tongue to spring from the table and go looking for its owner.
“I won’t eat that!” I screamed, surprising myself at how loud and screechy my voice was, like someone playing bad violin.
“Now, Minn, dear, your nana’s gone to a lot of trouble,” my mother said, smiling through clenched teeth at the witch. Then she hissed to me under her breath, like some ventriloquist not even moving her lips. “Puhleeze, Minn, not the very first night?”
My grandmother gave me one of her ferocious shaggy-eyebrowed frowns. So I tried. Really, I tried.
I put that tongue on my tongue.
I chewed.
I spit it out into my napkin.
Worse than looking at tongue of beef is looking at half-chewed tongue of beef.
My grandmother sent me to bed without supper.
This is really the reason I did what I did the next day, which is really the reason I knew from that day onwards that my grandmother no longer loved me, if she ever had at all.
In the evening, when I was sure all the relatives were having their tea after supper, I took an old mop, braided the strands into pigtails and tied them with my red ribbons. Then I padded it with pillows, tied it with stockings and dressed it in my clothes. I climbed up the outside steps to the balcony at the back of the house. The balcony is directly above the dining room and the dining room has a picture window overlooking the sea. Looking out at the sunset, after supper with tea, is an evening ritual.
So when I knew they’d all be gazing out the window oohing and aahing and saying one more time how the colour was like the inside of a cantaloupe or they’d never seen a sky so purple, I threw the mop over the balcony and screamed an impressively believable bloodcurdling scream.
They saw what looked like my body whiz by to her death on the rocks below. I watched from the balcony as they rushed outside and ran to the rocks. I was lying on my bed reading my grandmother’s Bible when Corporal Ray burst in.
“You could have given your grandmother a heart attack!” my father said to me, and more than his voice was shaking. He pulled me off the bed.
“You are coming down to apologize right now.” He steered me by my collar all the way to the dining room.
“Look what you did to your poor mother!”
Someone was putting a cloth on my mother’s forehead and giving her whisky.
All my grandmother said to me that night, her face so close to mine I could have bitten off those three chin hairs, was this: “I have never ever known a child to harbour such hatred in her heart.” This was much worse than “Pugwash!” One of her favourites when she was displeased.
Harbour. I thought the word was a noun up until then. A place where boats anchored and little houses like crooked rows of teeth painted happy colours lined the shore, where dinghies bobbed up and down on waves and lobster traps were stacked atop each other, stinking in the sun. Harbour, a safe place to stay out of the wind.
Yes, I had a harbour of hate in my heart. And she knew it. So let’s say we’ve never been on the best of terms since then.
Summer would be torture, I told Carolina.
“You are so melodramatic,” she said. “Get a grip.”
“My life is a disaster. A total disaster,” I wailed.
I realize, now, I didn’t know the meaning of the word.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
I was born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire County, England in eighteen hundred and sixty-one, the youngest son of Patrick and Mary Hindley and the baby brother of Bridget, Lucy and Thomas. My father emigrated from Ireland during the potato famine and found work at one of the cotton mills. Shortly thereafter, he met one Mary Cook of Stalybridge. “Black rot was the reason I came to England,” he loved to say, “and your mother’s the reason I stayed.”
After the birth of my sisters, they moved into one of the brick row houses owned by the mill. It was the house I was born into, and the place I’d always known as home. But on the evening of March the eighth, 1873, our family’s destiny changed forever.
Ashton-under-Lyne, 1873
“Can’t we eat supper without him?” Thomas was three years older and a head taller than me. And whining like some big baby. “I’m starving,” he grumbled.
Lovesick was more like it. Soon as he’d slopped up the last bit of supper, belched, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, he’d be off like some panting puppy. Lickety-split, up the road, two lanes over to a red-brick row house identical to ours he’d run, straight into the waiting arms of his girl, Rebecca. My big brother, a regular Romeo! Lot of bother, if you asked me. Then again, I was only twelve. According to Thomas, it was just a matter of time before I understood real passion. Pa-shun. Sounded to me like a rash you caught that made you itchy. Since he’d been seeing her, he was nothing but a pain and twitch.
“Mum?”
Our mother was peering out the window, lost in a heap of worry.
“Where have you got to now, Patrick Hindley?” she muttered.
“Mu-um?” Thomas looked at me in exasperation. “Do you think she even hears me?”
I shrugged.
“I heard all right, and you know better. Eat supper without your father? Not in this house.”
Thomas groaned and began drumming his fingers on the tabletop.
“Let off!” I said. “I’m trying to write neat as I can.” He drummed louder and faster.
Mum rapped his shoulder with the ladle. “For heaven’s sake, Tom, get up here and make yourself useful. Stir the stew!” She pushed him to the stove.
When she turned back to the window he imitated her frown so perfectly I burst out laughing.
“And what’s so funny?” she snapped at me.
“Nothing, Mum. Sorry, Mum!”
“Get your head back in those books, then, or you’ll be sorrier still whereonearthisthatman?”
Sometimes Mum talked whole nights without taking a breath.
“Ow!” It was Thomas.
“Serves you right,” said Mum without even looking over her s
houlder. “For making fun of your mother and sneaking a taste.”
She really did have a second set of eyes in the back of her head.
Thomas’s eyes watered with pain.
“Oh poor Tom-tom,” I teased. “Maybe Becca will kiss it better.” I made loud smooching sounds. He looked ready to throttle me.
“Back to the books,” Mum ordered, but giggled despite herself. “Thomas, your face is as red as those embers in the fire. And John, some fine day it’ll be you.”
“Not likely,” I muttered.
“The stew’s burning, I think. Maybe we should eat it?”
Thomas was persistent; I’ll give him that.
Mum shooed him away from the stove and he sat back down beside me.
“Suppose Dad’s at the pub? We left the mill together and he was acting kind of strange,” he whispered.
I shook my head. Our father was not a drinker. Besides, I knew where he was. But I’d been sworn to secrecy.
“Then where could he be?” Thomas leaned in closer. “There’s been some trouble at the mill, you know. Talk of strikes.”
“It’s okay, Tom. Really, it is,” I said.
“You know where he’s got to, don’t you?”
I nodded but held my finger up to my lips. “It’s a surprise,” I wrote out and slid the paper over to him.
A thumping of feet at the door then, and Dad burst in the room like a gust of wind. He smelled like clean night air mixed with tobacco and ale. Mum sniffed the air suspiciously. She arched one eyebrow and put her hand on her hip.
“He has been drinking,” hissed Thomas.
Dad’s eyes were full of fun, his cheeks as red as if he’d just been slapped. When he took off his hat, his thick black hair stood on end like a rooster’s comb. Mum reached out, smoothed it down and smothered the urge to laugh. His voice blared like a trumpet.
“Look, Mare, I did it! Look here, one-way tickets for us all!” He started to sing in his deep Irish off-key voice as he jigged towards her.
Thomas sat bolt upright. “What’s that again?”
Mum’s mouth opened in a tiny startled circle. She dropped the crockery pot filled with stew and it smashed on the stone floor.
Ignoring the mess, Dad wrapped his arms around Mum. He danced her around the room.
“Patrick Hindley! You’re not kidding this time, are you? It’s for real? We’re going to see my girls? Tell me I’m not dreaming.”
He pinched her on the bottom “You’re not dreaming, Mare.” He spun her again, hugged her close.
I started mopping up the mess for something to do. Thomas was holding his head in his hands.
Our parents continued to rock back and forth as if we were invisible.
“Your girls, Mare, and your grandkids too.” Mum was sniffling by that time. Dad stroked her hair, like she was a dog needing petting. He winked at us over the top of her head.
“We’ll be leaving in a fortnight,” Dad said. “It’s not a lot of time. Will we be ready, boys?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, grinning from ear to ear.
Thomas said nothing.
“Tom?”
We all waited.
“Yes, but—,” said Thomas.
Thomas was thinking about Becca? At a time like this? Well, too bad for him, I thought.
Ever since our sisters had married and sailed across the sea, ever since they started sending those letters filled with excitement about the sights of New York, I’d been dreaming of joining them. New World, new life. Our mother missed her daughters something fierce. She’d weep for no reason, knit her brow as tightly as the bonnets she was making—“for my grandchildren who I’ll never ever ever ever see,” she’d say. And her sigh would last longer than a month.
My father finally made the decision to join them. “Family’s meant to be together,” he’d told me when he confided his plans.
“John, catch me, catch me, catch me can!” he shouted then.
“Patrick, he’s too heavy and you’re too old,” Mum started in. Too late. I ran across the room, jumped into outstretched arms and wrapped my legs around my father’s waist. It was a game we’d played since I was a tot. He step-danced with me attached like a raggedy doll, hanging upside down.
“Look here, Mare, the boy’s so big now, his hair can sweep up the floor for us!”
Next thing I knew Dad was dumping me down like one of his sacks of cotton at the mill. He threw Thomas on top and hugged us in. Mum didn’t get away either.
“Imagine,” she said, gasping for breath. “Imagine if someone could see in this place now, what a bunch of raving fools they’d think we must be.”
Thomas wriggled out from under the pile.
“Tom?” Dad’s smile crumpled into an awkward lopsided grin. “Tom?”
“Got some thinking to do, if that’s okay with you. Got to think over whether I’ll be sailing with you.”
Silence followed.
“You’re old enough to make the right decision,” Dad replied.
I watched Tom pull on his coat and walk out the door.
“Gurls,” I said to my folks. “Nothing but a whole heap of trouble.”
My parents exchanged worried glances.
My hunger was gone, replaced by what felt like a lump of coal in my belly. Sure, Thomas wasn’t perfect, but I couldn’t imagine not having my big brother by my side.
PREPARATIONS
“For folks that got nothing, we sure got a lot,” said Thomas.
Mum wiped the sweat from her brow with the sleeve of one of Dad’s old shirts. Then she bit into the shirt to make a tear and ripped it in three. She tossed two rags at us and dipped her piece in a pail of sudsy water.
“We’re not leaving this place dirty,” she warned us. “No one’s going to say the Hindleys left filth behind for someone else to mop up. Scrub!”
She was thinking of the Grovers, who moved away the year before. People still talked about the smell of rotten eggs they left for the new tenants to try to get rid of.
“Once folks leave this town, those left behind don’t have a good word to say about them anyhow, Mum. They’re all wanting to get out of the mill and are just plain jealous when some folks do. Don’t fuss.”
Thomas should have known better. “Scrub!” repeated Mum.
All around the room our belongings were stacked in piles. Things to go to family and friends, things to go to St. Michael’s parish for folks with less, things we were taking with us. Simple enough. But simple does not mean easy. Not at all.
“Feels like I’m throwing away bits of myself,” muttered Mum. Mostly we were down to linens and dishes and a few books, including the Bible.
“I brought it with me from Ireland,” Dad said, “when I was about the same age Thomas is now.”
“There isn’t a hope” Mum snapped, “that a lifetime is going to fit into two wooden crates.”
It seemed the closer we were getting to leaving, the crosser she was getting.
“That’s the point, Mare,” Dad said patiently. “They’re only things. We have a new life ahead, so we take only what is absolutely necessary of the old life. We’ll get what we need when we get there.”
Mum snorted and disappeared into their bedroom. A few minutes later a scraping sound made us wince as she hauled a cradle out into the middle of the room.
“Now, about this, then.”
“Now that, I was thinking, could fetch me a good price.”
“Patrick, you made that cradle with your bare hands practically and hardly a tool save a saw, a hammer and a knife. Look at that carving! You’ll never get what it’s worth. Besides, my babies were rocked to sleep in that cradle and now I’m going to rock my grandkids in it. Yes, I am.” “Mare, there’s no room. Two crates, I said.”
“If it’s money that’s the problem, fine. One crate then, and this strapped to the top of that.”
He sighed. “All right. One crate and the cradle.”
Thomas and I exchanged amused glances.
That was the end of their squabble. As always, Dad put up the best argument he could but Mum won him over to her way of thinking. I never heard them fight fierce, not like my chum Michael’s folks. Underneath their angry words was hate, you could tell. Hindley folks didn’t know about that kind of wounding. Sometimes Michael didn’t even go home nights. I couldn’t imagine that.
Unlike Thomas. He had no sense of family loyalty from what I could tell. He was acting like some traitor in my eyes. He was still torn between coming and going. And he was hardly home.
“Where you going now?” I’d ask.
“Out,” he’d say. Or, “Mind your business.” Or just slam the door.
I spent my last evenings in Ashton-under-Lyne gathering memories. I shuffled past the row houses in our neighbourhood, peeking in the amber windows where families were snuggled in. The sounds of laughter and even quarrels tugged at me. It would be strange leaving. I glimpsed Tom from time to time on these outings, but he didn’t see me. He was otherwise occupied, you might say. He walked arm in arm with Rebecca, her head against his shoulder.
He stayed out a lot later than me. He often could not sleep and began a strange sort of ritual. He’d get up after tossing and turning about and go out for long runs all the way to Lord’s fields he told me. He’d come back, breathless, his lungs still bursting from the cold March air.
“Let him be,” I heard Mum warn Dad one night. “He’s just chasing after his heart’s truth.”
“A new life in a new city with your folks and your brother? What’s more important than that?” I asked one night when he woke me up getting into his bed.
“She cried.”
“What’s that?”
“Rebecca cried when I told her. Cried until the collar of my shirt was soaked with her tears.”
“You going to let a few tears lock you in this place forever?”
But the picture was disturbing, even to me. Rebecca was bright eyed and cherub faced. And always smiling—especially around Thomas.
Thomas seemed to read my thoughts.
“She’s got a smile that could crack your heart wide open.” He sighed. “A new life without Becca would be like a sunrise without sun.”