Selected Stories (15 page)

“Allen had brought me these overalls to fix just when the men were sitting down to dinner. He had a heavy pair of old suit pants on, and a work shirt, must have been killing him, though the shirt I guess he took off when he got in the barn. But he must’ve wanted the overalls on because they’d be cooler, you know, the circulation. I forget what had to be fixed on them, just some little thing. He must have been suffering bad in those old pants just to bring himself to ask, because he was awful shy. He’d be—what, then?”

“Seventeen,” my mother said.

“And us two eighteen. It was the year before you went away to Normal. Yes. Well, I took and fixed his pants, just some little thing to do to them while you served up dinner. There I was sitting in the corner of the kitchen at the sewing machine when I had my inspiration, didn’t I? I called you over. Pretended I was calling you to hold the material straight for me. So’s you could see what I was doing. And neither one of us cracked a smile or dared look sideways at each other, did we?”

“No.”

“Because my inspiration was to sew up his fly!

“So then, you see, a little bit on in the afternoon, with them out to work again, we got the idea for the lemonade. We made two pailfuls. One we took out to the men working in the field; we yelled to them and set it under a tree. And the other we took up to the mow and offered it to him. We’d used up every lemon we had, and even so it was weak. I remember we had to put vinegar in. But he wouldn’t’ve noticed. I never saw a person so thirsty in my life as him. He drank by the dipperful, and then he just tipped up the pail. Drank it all down. Us standing there watching. How did we keep a straight face?”

“I’ll never know,” my mother said.

“Then we took the pail and made for the house and waited about two seconds before we came sneaking back. We hid ourselves up in the granary. That was like an oven too. I don’t know how we stood it. But we climbed up on the sacks of feed and each found ourselves a crack or knothole or something to look through. We knew the corner of the barn the men always peed in. They peed down the shovel if they were upstairs. Down in the stable I guess they peed in the gutter. And soon enough, soon enough, he starts strolling over in that direction. Dropped his fork and starts strolling over. Puts his hand up to himself as he went. Sweat running down our faces from the heat and the way we had to keep from laughing. Oh, the cruelty of it! First he was just going easy, wasn’t he? Then thinking about it I guess the need gets stronger; he looked down wondering what was the matter, and soon he’s fairly clawin’ and yankin’ every which way, trying all he can to get himself free. But I’d sewed him up good and strong. I wonder when it hit him what’d been done?”

“Right then, I’d think. He was never stupid.”

“He never was. So he must’ve put it all together. The lemonade and all. The one thing I don’t guess he ever thought of was us hid up in the granary. Or else would he’ve done what he did next?”

“He wouldn’t have,” said my mother firmly.

“I don’t know, though. He might’ve been past caring. Eh? He just finally went past caring and gave up and ripped down his overalls altogether and let ’er fly. We had the full view.”

“He had his back to us.”

“He did not! When he shot away there wasn’t a thing we couldn’t see. He turned himself sideways.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, I do. I haven’t seen so many similar sights that I can afford to forget.”

“Dodie!” said my mother, as if at this too-late point to issue a warning. (Another thing my mother quite often said was “I will never listen to smut.”)

“Oh, you! You didn’t run away yourself. Did you? Kept your eye to the knothole!”

My mother looked from me to Aunt Dodie and back with an unusual expression on her face: helplessness. I won’t say she laughed. She just looked as if there was a point at which she might give up.

My mother, during this summer, would have been forty-one or forty-two years old, I think, somewhere around the age that I am now.

Just her left forearm trembled. The hand trembled more than the arm. The thumb knocked ceaselessly against the palm. She could, however, hide it in her fingers, and she could hold the arm still by stiffening it against her body.

U
NCLE
J
AMES
drank porter after supper. He let me taste it, black and bitter. Here was a new contradiction. “Before I married your father,” my mother had told me, “I asked him to promise me that he would never drink, and he never has.” But Uncle James, her brother, could drink without apologies.

On Saturday night we all went into town. My mother and my sister went in Aunt Dodie’s car. I was with Uncle James and Aunt Lena and the children. The children claimed me. I was a little older than the oldest of them, and they treated me as if I were a trophy, someone for whose favor they could jostle and compete. So I was riding in their car, which was high and old and square-topped, like Aunt Dodie’s. We were coming home, we had the windows rolled down for coolness, and unexpectedly Uncle James began to sing.

He had a fine voice, of course, a fine sad, lingering voice. I can remember perfectly well the tune of the song he sang, and the sound of his voice rolling out the black windows, but I can remember only bits of the words, here and there, though I have often tried to remember more, because I liked the song so well.

I think that was the way it started.

Then further along something about
pearly
, or
early
, and
Some take delight in
—various things, and finally the strong but sad-sounding line:

There was silence in the car while he was singing. The children were not squabbling and being hit, some of them were even falling asleep. Aunt Lena, with the youngest on her knee, was an unthreatening dark shape. The car bounced along as if it would go forever through a perfectly black night with its lights cutting a frail path; and there was a jackrabbit on the road, leaping out of our way, but nobody cried out to notice it, nobody broke the singing, its booming tender sadness.

W
E GOT
to church early, so that we could go and look at the graves. St. John’s was a white wooden church on the highway, with the graveyard behind it. We stopped at two stones, on which were written the words
Mother
and
Father
. Underneath in much smaller letters the names and dates of my mother’s parents. Two flat stones, not very big, lying like paving stones in the clipped grass. I went off to look at things more interesting—urns and praying hands and angels in profile.

Soon my mother and Aunt Dodie came too.

“Who needs all this fancy folderol?” said Aunt Dodie, waving.

My sister, who was just learning to read, tried reading the inscriptions.

“What
is pacem?
”

“Latin,” said my mother approvingly.

“A lot of these people put up these fancy stones and it is all show, they are still paying for them. Some of them still trying to pay for the plots and not even started on the stones. Look at that, for instance.” Aunt Dodie pointed to a large cube of dark-blue granite, flecked white like a cooking pot, balanced on one corner.

“How modern,” said my mother absently.

“That is Dave McColl’s. Look at the size of it. And I know for a fact they told her if she didn’t hurry up and pay something on the plot, they were going to dig him up and pitch him out on the highway.”

“Is that Christian?” my mother wondered.

“Some people don’t deserve Christian.”

I felt something slithering down from my waist and realized that the elastic of my underpants had broken. I caught my hands to my
sides in time—I had no hips then to hold anything up—and said to my mother in an angry whisper, “I have to have a safety pin.”

“What do you want a safety pin for?” said my mother, in a normal or louder-than-normal voice. She could always be relied upon to be obtuse at such moments.

I would not answer, but glared at her beseechingly, threateningly.

“I bet her panties bust.” Aunt Dodie laughed.

“Did they?” said my mother sternly, still not lowering her voice.

“Yes.
”

“Well, take them off then,” said my mother.

“Not right here, though,” said Aunt Dodie. “There is the Ladies.”

Behind St. John’s Church, as behind a country school, were two wooden toilets.

“Then I wouldn’t have anything on,” I said to my mother, scandalized. I couldn’t imagine walking into church in a blue taffeta dress and no pants. Rising to sing the hymns, sitting down, in
no pants
. The smooth cool boards of the pew and
no pants
.

Aunt Dodie was looking through her purse. “I wish I had one to give you but I haven’t. You just run and take them off and nobody’s going to know the difference. Lucky there’s no wind.”

I didn’t move.

“Well, I do have one pin,” said my mother doubtfully. “But I can’t take it out. My slip strap broke this morning when I was getting dressed and I put a pin in to hold it. But I can’t take that out.”

My mother was wearing a soft gray dress covered with little flowers which looked as if they had been embroidered on, and a gray slip to match, because you could see through the material. Her hat was a dull rose color, matching the color of some of the flowers. Her gloves were almost the same rose and her shoes were white, with open toes. She had brought this whole outfit with her, had assembled it, probably, especially to wear when she walked into St. John’s Church. She might have imagined a sunny morning, with St. John’s bell ringing, just as it was ringing now. She must have planned this and visualized it just as I now plan and visualize, sometimes, what I will wear to a party.

“I can’t take it out for you or my slip will show.”

“People going in,” Aunt Dodie said.

“Go to the Ladies and take them off. If you won’t do that, go sit in the car.”

I started for the car. I was halfway to the cemetery gate when my mother called my name. She marched ahead of me to the ladies’ toilet, where without a word she reached inside the neck of her dress and brought out the pin. Turning my back—and not saying thank-you, because I was too deep in my own misfortune and too sure of my own rights—I fastened together the waistband of my pants. Then my mother walked ahead of me up the toilet path and around the side of the church. We were late, everybody had gone in. We had to wait while the choir, with the minister trailing, got themselves up the aisle at their religious pace.

When the choir was in place and the minister had turned to face the congregation, my mother set out boldly to join Aunt Dodie and my sister in a pew near the front. I could see that the gray slip had slid down half an inch and was showing in a slovenly way at one side.

After the service my mother turned in the pew and spoke to people. People wanted to know my name and my sister’s name and then they said, “She does look like you”; “No, maybe this one looks more like you”; or, “I see your own mother in this one.” They asked how old we were and what grade I was in at school and whether my sister was going to school. They asked her when she was going to start and she said, “I’m not,” which was laughed at and repeated. (My sister often made people laugh without meaning to; she had such a firm way of publicizing her misunderstandings. In this case it turned out that she really did think she was not going to school because the primary school near where we lived was being torn down, and nobody had told her she would go on a bus.)

Two or three people said to me, “Guess who taught me when
I
went to school? Your momma!”

“She never learned me much,” said a sweaty man, whose hand I could tell she did not want to shake, “but she was the best-lookin’ one I ever had!”

“D
ID
my slip show?”

“How could it? You were standing in the pew.”

“When I was walking down the aisle, I wonder?”

“Nobody could see. They were still standing for the hymn.”

“They could have seen, though.”

“Only one thing surprises me. Why didn’t Allen Durrand come over and say hello?”

“Was he there?”

“Didn’t you see him? Over in the Wests’ pew, under the window they put in for the father and mother.”

“I didn’t see him. Was his wife?”

“Ah, you must have seen
her!
All in blue with a hat like a buggy wheel. She’s very dressy. But not to be compared to you, today.”

Aunt Dodie herself was wearing a navy-blue straw hat with some droopy cloth flowers, and a button-down-the-front slub rayon dress.