My One Square Inch of Alaska (9781101602850) (20 page)

But he had, as much as he could. And I saw Will already in the front seat of Jimmy’s car, holding Trusty.

I was shaking violently, from tension but also because of the early October cold. I grabbed the ridiculous red barn and yellow duck tablecloth from the backseat of Mama’s convertible and ran out to Jimmy’s car. At least I could wrap Trusty in the tablecloth and keep his blood and fur from getting on Jimmy’s upholstery. Somehow, seeing him come to our rescue—just like a hero from one of Babs’s lusty novels—didn’t please me. It infuriated me; I did not want to be beholden to Jimmy.

MayJune opened the front door to her Tangy Town bungalow even before I finished knocking. Her expression was solemn, but welcoming, as if she’d anticipated us, but Will hadn’t said anything about calling her. He’d just trusted that she’d be home, willing and ready to help.

And he was right. MayJune nodded as Will said, “Trusty’s hurt real bad!” and turned and walked through her house, expecting us to follow, which we did, passing through a very tiny and tidy front room and into her kitchen, where a copper kettle on an old gas stove was starting to hum. She walked out to a screened back porch.

On the porch was a picnic table covered in drying leaves and grasses and flowers. MayJune pointed to a corner near the table and said to Jimmy, “Put Trusty right there.”

As Jimmy knelt slowly, carefully, with Will hovering
beside him, I saw with a start that there was a quilt, already folded into a small pallet, in the corner. Will sat on the porch floor next to Trusty, who had gone from panting to slow, labored breaths, his eyes squeezed shut. I couldn’t imagine that the dog would live, and I wanted to spare Will the pain of seeing him die—and the danger of the dog possibly lashing out in a last-minute protest against death.

“Will, we should go—” I started.

But MayJune gave me a sharp look. “Come with me,” she said. “Will’s fine out here with Jimmy and Trusty.”

Jimmy had sat down on the floor next to them. I wasn’t going to get him and Will away from the dog.

MayJune had already started back to her kitchen, and I followed her. She moved swiftly, gathering up items, disappearing briefly somewhere else in the house, coming back with other objects, all the while giving me orders, but not like Grandma did, not in a mean, threatening way. MayJune simply knew what she was doing and expected me to follow her instructions, and so I did, getting various canning jars of home-dried herbs from a cabinet, MayJune rattling off the names of the ones she wanted me to get down: chamomile, comfrey, lavender. I did as she said, putting two heaping teaspoons of each herb in its own bowl, then pinching the herbs into powder between my fingertips. The display of flowers and grasses and herbs on her back porch no longer seemed odd; I realized that MayJune was a healer, growing and preserving herbs for home remedies that she no doubt administered to the people of Tangy Town, who wouldn’t find it so easy to get help from a doctor as those of us on the other side of the river.

Finally, she examined my work, putting her face down to each bowl, taking a small sniff, and then nodding, satisfied. She poured a bit of the hot water from the kettle over the crushed herbs, then spooned some of the chamomile back into the kettle, which she returned to the stove. Then she filled a cup with cold water from the kitchen sink, and drizzled each bowl of crushed herbs with a bit of it, just until they stopped steaming.

“It’s a poultice,” MayJune explained. “The herbs are healing, and they’ll draw out the infection of Trusty’s wounds.”

I followed her out to the porch. MayJune knelt slowly next to Jimmy and Will and Trusty. “Ach—my old joints aren’t what they used to be.”

“Should I keep talking and humming to him?” Will asked, his voice strained with worry.

“Yes, and stroke his head,” MayJune said, “but be careful. He might snap when I put the cider vinegar on his paws.” She carefully removed the strip of cloth I’d wrapped around Trusty’s paw.

“Maybe you should come over by me, Will.”

“He’ll be fine,” MayJune said. “Will knows to be careful.” Jimmy stood, came over beside me, put his arm around me. I didn’t pull away, but I didn’t move toward him, either. I crossed my arms. He kept his arm around me anyway.

I strained to hear Will’s low hum. I should have recognized it—I knew I’d heard it before—but I couldn’t quite place it.

MayJune opened a bottle. “Cider vinegar,” she said. “To disinfect Trusty’s wounds.” She glanced at me as she poured the vinegar on a washcloth. “You did a good job binding
his paw, but his wounds were already starting to get infected.”

Trusty startled and then mouthed mute yelps as MayJune pressed the vinegar-soaked cloth to his wounds. Then MayJune scooped the poultice onto them, one by one, rebinding them with fresh strips of cloth from a cut-up sheet while Will kept humming.

She stopped about halfway through, out of breath, her forehead glistening with sweat, and looked at me. “Donna, go pour the chamomile tea in the kettle into four separate cups. Then pour what’s left of the tea into a bowl with water, and bring the bowl with a spoon out here. The watered-down tea is for Trusty.”

“We’re having the same tea as the dog?” Jimmy asked.

MayJune smiled. “Chamomile is a safe herb. It calms upset stomachs and nerves—I think we can all use that. Trusty is dehydrated, so he needs water, but a bit of the chamomile will settle his system so he can eat a bit, too.”

When I came back out with the bowl of watered-down tea and the spoon, MayJune was sitting next to Jimmy on a yellow glider rocker, and Will was still sitting on the floor next to Trusty, humming, MayJune singing along with him:

The bowl and spoon fell from my hands as I recognized the words and the memory came back to me in a flash: Mama had sung that to us, as a lullaby.

“I don’t understand. How can Will remember Mama singing that song—the melody, at least—but I can’t?”

“He’s younger’n you,” MayJune said, then took a sip of her chamomile tea. She sat in a rocker by the fireplace. “So he’s closer to his earliest memories.”

I glanced at Jimmy, on the opposite end of the wooly red couch from me, the space of the worn cushion between us summing up the awkwardness of us being around each other, now that the drama of Trusty’s injuries seemed to have passed.

I looked back at MayJune. “But Will was just four when Mama died,” I insisted. He was out on the porch with Trusty, spooning watered-down chamomile tea to Trusty from a new bowl. “I would have been ten—just shy of Will’s age now! How can he remember? Why don’t I?”

MayJune gave me a sympathetic look that made me stare down into my mug. I didn’t want sympathy—I just wanted to
understand
. “You’ve had so much on your mind, honey, so much to take care of, since your mama died.”

To my dismay, my eyes welled up with tears. I blinked them back, but some moisture still crept out of the corners of my eyes. “But I should remember more than just…just snatches of things. And then there are things I’ve found that don’t make sense with what I do know about her life.”

I stopped, suddenly worried about saying too much. The sense that talking about Mama was taboo came over me again, but then I thought,
Grandma and Daddy and Miss Bettina aren’t here
. Will was out on the porch. And what could I say in front of Jimmy that would make him feel worse about me than his feeling of betrayal over me and Mr. Cahill?

“I found Mama’s old clothes—clothes that must be from before she became our mother—in our basement,” I said quietly. “Packed away with mothballs in suitcases. They’re all so elegant. Outfits for a fine lady. And there were costumes, as if for someone in a stage show. But it doesn’t make sense. Daddy must have kept those clothes after she died—but why?” I paused. Then again, why would he keep her car? The house with the exact same furniture and appliances as right before she died? We’d grown up living in a shrine to our long-lost mama, Will and I. “But from what little I do remember of her, she wore dowdy housedresses, or robes, and—”

I stuttered to a stop, looked up at MayJune, ready to apologize. MayJune, after all, was wearing a dowdy housedress, a pale green with a faded pink floral print. But she didn’t seem to mind my comment at all. Instead, she smiled as she put her cup of tea on a small side table, grasped the arms of her rocker, and pulled herself up to stand, then hobbled slowly, with that hitch in her left hip, over to a china cabinet that was squeezed into the space to the right of her fireplace.

She carefully knelt, mindful of her creaking knees, opened a drawer meant to hold napkins and silver, and then stood as upright as she could, holding a scrapbook. I stood, taking a few steps to meet her. MayJune handed me the
scrapbook, then collapsed back in her rocker, her weight tipping it against the wall. All of the hustle she’d had upon our arrival was gone.

I sat back down on my end of the red couch. Jimmy glanced over, curious. I ran my hand over the worn, dark blue leather cover of the scrapbook.

“Go to the middle,” MayJune said. I carefully opened the scrapbook. There were photos of people I didn’t recognize, clippings from the
Groverton Daily News
: obituaries, birth announcements, an occasional article. MayJune saw my look of confusion and added, “Keep going, another page or two.”

Slow understanding showed on my face. MayJune sighed with satisfaction. “There,” she said. She picked up her cup from the side table and took a long sip of tea.

I stared at the photos of a young woman, painfully beautiful, a firm set to her jaw, but something uncertain in her smile, something sad about her wide eyes. I wondered what color those eyes were. In all the poses, she was onstage, singing behind a microphone, wearing dresses with too many ruffles, or with feathers, or boa trim.

The photos were sepia, so the dresses were, too, and it was hard to tell type of fabric or trim details like sequins, but still, my heart clenched as I thought,
I recognize that dress…but I can’t recognize that dress….

Jimmy, overcome by curiosity, had scooted over beside me. He gently tapped his finger next to a photo that focused most closely on the young woman’s face. “Is that your mother?”

“What are you talking about? Mama was never a singer, she was—” I stopped. Yes, Mama had been a singer. Will
remembered a specific song she’d sung well enough to hum the melody. I remembered it, too, once MayJune sang the words—then explained that the song was a mournful ballad or shanty song, written by Haydn Wood and Royden Barrie and popular in the 1940s. And I had other memories, vague though they were, of Mama singing to her records, even after they stopped, in her and Daddy’s bedroom, brushing her hair, gazing off into space, lost in some world that was hers alone, nothing to do with the reality of being a wife and mother in Groverton, Ohio.

“But you look just like this woman,” Jimmy was saying.

I studied the photo and wanted to say,
No I don’t
, to deny that I looked remotely like this beautiful, this
sexy
young woman, who despite the hint of doubt in her smile stared with an openly lusty expression into the camera, as if she was half-wooing, half-daring the photographer to come a little closer, to capture in full measure the desires of her being.

Surely, I wanted to say, in my most prim Grandma voice, I don’t ever look like
this
. But then I realized…I had. When I was posing for Mr. Cahill, the last time, my senses lost in the Boléro music and to the taste of the persimmon.

And that expression, when I’d run out to check on Will, hadn’t entirely faded from my face, even in my panic. That’s what had scared Jimmy—that I’d somehow tapped into something so primal that revealed itself on my face, while alone with Mr. Cahill, even more freely than when Jimmy and I made love. A schoolgirl crush he might have forgiven, but that look, just as I came out of Mr. Cahill’s house…

“It’s your mama, all right,” MayJune was saying. I opened my eyes, coming back to the moment. “She had Joey, my oldest boy, whose passion is photography even though he
works over at the mill—well, now, of course, he’s on strike—” Jimmy blushed. He represented the epitome of what Joey and the others were striking against. But MayJune went on. “Anyway, she had him take these photos of her, first week she sang over at the Pinewood Club on the corner. Still there. You probably passed it coming here. Anyway, she said she needed some publicity photos. Sure enough, the club used them in their newspaper ad. Turn the page in the album—you’ll see.”

But I couldn’t bring myself to move. Jimmy reached over and carefully turned the album page. I stared down, saw the photo again, but printed on yellowing newspaper this time. My eyes darted to the
Groverton Daily News
masthead, the date—June 18, 1934, just two years before I was born—the photo, the ad copy that read, “The Pinewood Club, featuring new singing sensation Rita McKenzie.”

McKenzie.
Mama’s maiden name.

I looked up at MayJune. “I don’t understand. How did you know my mother well enough that she’d ask you, ask your son—”

“Honey, your mama grew up just a few houses down. I knew her from the day she was born and I can tell you stories about her singing in the neighborhood, and singing in church, and—” she gestured at the china cabinet where she kept framed photos instead of china, and albums instead of silver, and the loose flesh of her arm wobbled. Something in her voice told me that she had known my mother very well, and liked her. “I have photos of her scattered in among my own family photos. I can show you pictures of her as a little girl, and from when she was your age, from her singing days, right up until—”

She stopped. Her soft look of sadness flashed into something sharper. “Well, up until she met your daddy.”

MayJune had taken a liking to Will and me, and was willing to watch out for us and help us, because we were the children of a woman she’d known as a child, a woman who had maybe been like a daughter to her. I understood that while she was helping us at that moment because by then she liked us just for us, her interest in Will, in us, had started because of knowing our mother. Which had to mean our mother had mattered enormously to her.