Every Little Scrap and Wonder

by Carla Funk

  She was, I believed, exactly the woman King Solomon described in the book of Proverbs, the one worth far more than rubies. Like that Proverbs 31 woman with her litany of virtues, my mother provided food, worked with her hands, tilled the field, kept her clothes clean and mended. While it was still night, she rose to pack my dad’s lunch and make his breakfast, then see him off for another long shift. After he drove away into the dark, she crawled back into bed and I snuck in beside her, taking my dad’s place, rubbing my bare feet along her stubbly calves until I fell asleep.

  Like that virtuous woman, she even sought out wool and flax—or at least the wool. Afternoons, in the coolness of the basement, she worked through the black plastic garbage bag full of last year’s wool, shorn off an old ewe. What was destined for the dump, my mother collected gladly. On the wire bristles of one of her carding brushes, she set a clump of dirt-specked wool, and with the other wood-handled brush, dragged the fibres across the bristles. The ball of wool untangled into wisps. With each brush, the wool loosened and lifted from the bottom carding brush to the top one. The grit, bugs, and flecks of sawdust fell away until a tiny cirrus puff rested on her aproned lap. When she dropped it into the stainless-steel washtub, it seemed to hover a moment, floating on the furnace’s draft. If, on a breezeless early-autumn afternoon, the sun was high and hot enough, she filled the washtub with warm water, and with a sliver of soap whittled from a block passed down through the family—soap that smelled of tallow and lye, ashes and birch trees—she scrubbed each fleecy cloud. Wet and washed, the wool perfumed the air with its animal history. Wrung out, it hung limp. But laid out on a faded bedsheet on the grass, the wool bleached white in the light until the back lawn looked like a pasture haunted by the ghosts of sheep.

  Every night, before she tucked me and my brother beneath quilts filled with that wool, she sat on the bed, wedged between our pajama-clad bodies, and read aloud to us in a voice that rose and fell with the story’s tension. When she read from Little House in the Big Woods, I wanted to be Laura Ingalls, to live inside the one-room cabin in the Wisconsin woods, to hear the wolves howl at night and have a bulldog named Jack that turned three times before settling by the fire to sleep, to have a Pa that played the fiddle as the blizzard winds blew. When she read Heidi, I dreamed a ladder to an attic bedroom and the mountain at my back, bluebells and alpine flowers, the crisp, clear air and goat-Peter singing down the trail to the village. When she read us all the way to Narnia, to Aslan tied down on the stone table and his mane shorn away, I bit the inside of my cheek until I lay in the dark alone, then sobbed into my pillow, not yet knowing how the story would end. When she read from Uncle Arthur of the mother who ran back into her burning house to save her sleeping baby, and of how in the morning the firemen found the two in each other’s arms, burned to death, I imagined myself curled in my fiery bedroom, lying on the beige shag rug lit with sparks, and could see her crawling through the hallway dripping with flames, calling my name through the smoke.

  I believed she was strong enough to save me from any danger. When she hoisted the axe above her head and cracked it down on a block of wood, those rounds of pine and fir split easily, over and over, in halves, then quarters, then cleaved to eighths. Show us your muscles, my brother and I would say. She shooed us away, told us to haul what she’d split, but we kept begging, please, just show us, until finally, she lifted one sleeve and flexed, her bicep a white bulge threaded with turquoise. And when we called her Popeye, she tugged the shirtsleeve down, shook her head and rolled her eyes, then picked up the axe and swung it down again.

  Every time I called her name—Mom, Mom—the soft solo syllable, part hum, part cry, she appeared like magic. Every time I called—Mom—a miracle, a backlit shadow. When, in my bedroom, the mosquitoes whined and wheedled around my face, needling my sleep with blood-threat and itch, and from beneath the blankets I called Mom, she stood in her nightgown in the doorway, holding out the can of Raid. Cover your head, she said, and I ducked beneath the covers, burrowed down deep and sealed myself off from the aerosol hiss she sprayed above me, around me, across the whole room. She pulled the covers up to my chin. Goodnight, she said. Sleep tight, I said. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. In call and response, we back-and-forthed the rhyme, and then she bent to recite with me our bedtime prayer—Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep—our voices moving quickly through the liturgy, its cadence as familiar as my mother’s night-time smell of talcum and soap.

  First god, woman above all other women, mother of all mothers, she was the one I reached for first inside the Wednesday-morning huddle of praying ladies. Against my mother’s warning, I’d gone roaming outside the sanctuary, had tried to pick a scruffy bouquet from the weeds in the ditch between the parking lot and road, but instead had come back with mud-crusted knees and white socks hooked with burrs. My quest for brighter fireweed and fatter rosehips had drawn me down toward the boggy culvert, and I’d fallen, twice, struggling up the slope of the ditch and back into the church. I tried not to cry, but as soon as the women looked at me, filthy and on the verge of tears, and their eyes went kind and their tongues clucked with compassion, I broke. I reached for my mother, and she reached for me, enfolding me into a perfume of Avon lotion and spearmint gum. The other women bent down around us and with a flurry of hands began to wipe away the mud from my knees, dabbing at the dirt and scrapes with tissues, plucking off the burrs stuck to my socks. While I cried into my mother’s shoulder, they tended to me, murmuring a gentleness without words until my shuddered sobs calmed to breathing and they had removed the evidence of my fall. How far I’d strayed outside the boundaries, how shameful the filth, how worthless my now-wilted clutch of autumn weeds lying at my feet—these humiliations faded as I stood inside the circle of their low and soothing voices.

  “Look,” said Old Mrs. Wiens, pointing to my white socks. “All clean.” She held open her handkerchief. Each Nettie, Sarah, Tina, and Ann poured in a handful of burrs. Old Mrs. Wiens tucked it in the pocket of her black cardigan and touched my cheek with her cool, blue-veined hand.

  “Now,” said my mother, licking her thumb to wipe dirt from my mouth, “let’s go have something to eat.”

  The Bear’s Dance

  EVERY MONDAY AFTER supper for three long years, I sat beside Mr. Everson, my hands resting in my lap, waiting for his first instruction.

  “C-major scale. One octave, hands together.”

  I found my starting notes—right thumb on middle C, left pinkie eight notes below. Mr. Everson slid the weight of the metronome to an easy pace, unhooked the pendulum, and let it tock, tock, tock me into the scale’s climb.

  In the tiny one-level bungalow, his baby grand nearly filled the living room. The only other piece of furniture that fit was a small sofa tucked behind the piano bench, a place for other students to sit and wait their lesson turn. The piano, polished to a black sheen, looked like it belonged in the spiral-staircased, chandeliered home of a famous composer, not in these drafty, cramped quarters that smelled of burnt onion and dirty diaper.

  On the other side of the pony wall, Mr. Everson’s wife, dark-eyed, pale, and thin, except for her low, pouchy stomach, sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe and slippers, her hair up in a towel. She spooned Pablum into their daughter’s mouth and said nothing, not even to the baby, who, between bites, kicked her feet, slapped the high-chair tray, and squealed.

  When I reached the octave’s turn—left thumb, right pinkie—and started the descent, I felt it—my heart speeding up, bucking against the metronome’s beat, anxious but trying to steady the notes, to keep my playing clean. So far, so good, so far, so good. The closer I came to ending in perfection, the more slippery my fingers on the keys. To make a mistake now would mean another week of practicing the same notes, the same song, because practice, said Mr. Everson, makes perfect.

  Playing the week’s pieces for him at my lesson stirred in me the same minor dread as when I stood in front of my teacher’s desk to rec
ite the monthly scripture memory passage. One stumble over a phrase—“Yea, though I speak with tongues of men and angels”—and Mr. Schmidt would correct, THE tongues, and OF angels, then tell me to practice the verses a few more times and try again tomorrow. One stumble over a run of dotted eighth notes, and Mr. Everson would lean forward over the page and with his sharpened pencil circle the shaky bars. In my music dictation book, he wrote directives for the coming week. Count aloud. Staccato! Phrases—SMOOTH! Slow down. Speed up. Keep a steady, even rhythm as you play.

  Praise from Mr. Everson came rarely, which made me crave it even more. For every half hour I spent plunking at the keys at home, my mother let me choose a marble from a jar in the cupboard above the stove, to add to my collection. But even without the incentive, I wanted to practice, to earn my teacher’s nod of approval, his quietly spoken Good work or Fine job at the end of every song. I worked harder for him than I ever did for Miss Cindy, my first piano teacher, who during lessons wore fuzzy slippers and her hair in pigtails and said things like Aren’t eighth notes fun? and Wow, now that’s fortissimo! For every song I learned, Miss Cindy let me pick a sticker from a box. Scratch-and-sniffs, puffies, shinies—she had them all and gave them out as liberally as her praise. Even if I stumbled over notes in a simple one-line melody, she clapped her hands together, smiled, and said with a voice as bright as one of her glittery happy-face stickers, I can hear you getting better every time you play!

  With Miss Cindy, I plodded through “Pony Ride,” “Crack the Whip,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and all the other pieces in the primer level, adding stickers to my repertoire with every page we turned. Nothing needed to be perfect for Miss Cindy. Good enough was good enough for her. Do your best, and let’s move on, was her philosophy. New songs are waiting to be played!

  At the year-end recital, in the living room of her mobile home across from the hockey rink, after each student performed a final song to culminate the year of lessons, Miss Cindy stood at the piano, faced us, and broke the news. She and her husband, Larry, were moving. She sniffled into a tissue, dabbed her eyes. He had a new job. She told us we were the best students she could have asked for. She wanted us to carry on with our music, to play for the sheer joy of it, and she’d help us all find a new teacher before she left.

  “HE’S MORMON,” MY mother said on the drive to our first lesson with Mr. Everson. “But don’t say a word about it.”

  Her voice held the same low threat as when she whispered in church, Don’t stare at Mrs. Teichroeb—the woman with the facial twitches who sat one row across from us. When my brother asked what makes a Mormon a Mormon, she told us that the women have a lot of babies, they don’t drink coffee, and the men wear special underwear they can never take off.

  “I don’t understand it all,” she said. “Just don’t you dare ask about the underwear.”

  In the framed photograph that hung on his living room wall, he sat at a grand piano, dressed in a black tuxedo, the kind with tails. Near him on the massive stage, in front of a symphony orchestra, a conductor held a wand mid-air as if about to cast a spell over the rows of woodwinds, brass, and strings. Mr. Everson’s hands hovered over the keys, ready to descend into the magic.

  Why anyone like him would end up living here, said my mother, was beyond her. Like the other piano-lesson moms in town, she suspected his arrival here had something to do with him being Mormon. The running joke of the town was that you were either Mennonite or Mormon—or going to hell. Maybe he was sent on a spiritual mission, or maybe our town was some sort of discipline doled out by the church, a city slicker banished to the six-month winter of a northern valley with a single traffic light.

  While other men in town steel-toe-booted down our mud-splashed sidewalks in sawdust-covered lumberjack flannel and coveralls stained with engine oil, Mr. Everson wore dress shoes, slacks, and a crisp button-front shirt every day of the week. His brown hair parted neatly on the side, like a Lego figurine’s. I never saw him pull a comb from his pocket and run it through his hair, yet no strand ever seemed out of place. The men I knew smelled like work, like lumber and grease and tailpipe exhaust, like cigarettes and coffee and beer. Mr. Everson, though, smelled like nothing in particular—an empty room, a piece of paper, an unscented bar of soap.

  Everything about him was at odds with his surroundings. During the lesson, his snot-crusted baby in her saggy diaper pushed a chair across the kitchen linoleum, cruised the lesson area, crumpled any paper within her grasp, whined, cried, bellowed for attention. His wife stood at the stove warming a bottle, or sat at the table folding laundry, surrounded by stacks of dishes on the counter and toys on the floor. While his daughter gummed his kneecap, Mr. Everson, straight-backed in his teaching chair beside the piano, clapped out the rhythm I should follow.

  When Mr. Everson chose a new song for me to learn, he always played it through so I could hear what it should sound like. He took the bench, I shifted to his chair. He clenched and unclenched his hands above the keyboard, drew in a deep breath, exhaled. He hovered his fingers a moment over the first notes, then leaned forward over the piano as he began.

  No one I knew played piano like he did, with what he called “feeling” and “expression.” At church, Aunt Mary and Cousin Betty and Cynthia Toews took their turns at the old upright Steinway, plugging away at the hymns as the congregation sang. Their chords trudged our four-part harmonies through verses and choruses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “All Hail the Power,” steady and solid as cinderblock brick.

  Though his hands played the notes, his whole body seemed to play the song. He swayed. He arched. He listed. With his eyes closed, he tucked his chin down toward his chest. Then with his eyebrows raised, he tipped his face toward the ceiling. When the music lilted and skipped, a smile, sometimes a fluttering of the eyelids. When the melody warped to a minor dirge, a wince, a sadness on his face. His quiet notes fell featherlike, almost weightless, and his heavy double-forte chords, like a hammer on a nail, made me blink with every pound.

  In the margins of my “Polonaise,” he wrote, More expression. I didn’t get it, didn’t understand what he meant, let alone know what a polonaise was. Had I pictured a ballroom full of white-gloved men and festively gowned women dancing a grand Polish waltz, maybe my staccatos would have been as light as intricate footsteps over a marble floor, my phrasing as smooth as twirls and turns under stars. I might have imagined a lady and lord smooching beneath the moonlight while the music swelled. Instead, “polonaise” sounded to me like a gluey white paste, an old mayonnaise. My fingers got stuck in the sixteenth notes, and the three-four rhythm tripped me up.

  At home, beneath the cool, bluish light of the piano lamp, I tried to play like he showed me—careful with the notes and counting out the rests, making each phrase a smooth, clean breath, but also playing with “feeling,” with “expression.” For every song, he wanted me to picture something in my mind when I played the notes. Every piece of music tells a story, he said.

  When he played “Enchantment,” he leaned forward into the keyboard. The pianissimo came delicate and soft from the hammers and strings. When the notes rushed forward, speeding up, he leaned back, swayed a little, then plunged back in with intensity.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked.

  I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say that I heard the story, that I saw it all in my mind as he played—the princess tiptoeing through the wind-swayed forest at night, the giant’s footsteps stamping the frosty ground as he thundered after her. I wanted to hear the rush of notes like a gathering storm, a haunted castle, the princess taken captive, then her rescue, the knight’s silver armour gleaming in the sun. But mostly, I heard the baby howling from her toppled stack of blocks and his tired-eyed wife clattering cutlery in the kitchen sink.

  At home and seated at the piano in the corner of our living room, I opened my book to the song I’d been given: “The Bear’s Dance.” On the page, the quarter notes, the half notes, the dotted eighths and whole notes hun
g inside their clefs like code waiting to be deciphered. Black dots and empty circles, sharps and flats, phrase marks and numbers—they made me feel that I was missing something, that there was more behind the symbols to this locked-up world.

  My fingers found the opening notes, staccato and minor. I tried rolling my shoulders like Mr. Everson did. I arched my back. I shut one eye. Nothing felt any different. I swayed side to side, but only a little for fear my brother might see me and laugh. I wanted my hands to pull from the wood and wire and ivory a bigger sound, a higher one, the kind that told the truth about the story in the song.

  When the music dipped down into the bass clef, I felt a tilt in my gut, a sideways tipping toward something not right, like the telephone ringing in the dark house and the way my mother jumped from bed and ran down the hall to answer it. With its hinged lid open, the piano’s sound was bright and loud. “The Bear’s Dance” crashed against the walls as I crescendoed from forte to fortissimo and beat with fury the staccato chords.

  Somewhere across the yard, my dad was making his way in darkness, a slow slog of boot-prints from the shop to the carport, trudging over gravel and the mulch of wet, dead leaves. When the door swung open, a draft of smoky night-cold would climb the stairs, whoosh a little gust of autumn grit around his feet, and he’d follow, one heavy step after another, like the weary whole notes that hung lonely in their clefs until the sober mood resolved and my dad stood inside the music at the threshold of the living room. The whirr of the microwave as my mother warmed his plate. Sparks popping behind the fire’s mesh curtain, and at the hearth, my brother whittling a small block of pine into a boat, a car, a gun. My left hand slid an octave down to find the lowest quarter notes, and my right hand joined with bass-clef chords. The bear, following his hunger, his breath in ragged huffs, sour and musky, sniffed the air to smell what feast awaited. I kept thumping out the music, bar by bar, my hands trying to tell the truth about this beast lumbering under stars, part wild, part circus, dancing around the hunter’s fire, paws dangling, shaggy feet pounding the earth.