Tame Tigers

A tiger don't change its stripes, my grandmother said darkly and jammed a helpless clothespin onto the line, No more'n people change their god given natures. My mother sighed audibly.

They had been hissing and spitting at each other like stray cats since dawn - it had started with who had let the fire die and escalated rapidly to why the woodbox wasn't filled then - now it seemed to be about who was in charge of assigning chores and keeping children in their proper places. There was an icy cold tension in the air between them,a false kind of courtesy that gave me fear knots in my belly and I knew an explosion was inevitable. Neither of these two steel-willed, stubborn women was likely to give an inch or admit to being wrong - both could've argued with a fencepost all night, as my daddy liked to say, and never lost a step. It might well have gone on for hours or days but for the arrival of Miss Hilda, who came marching down the gravel driveway in her riding boots, her walking stick sharply thwacking against her thigh with ever step. Alice! she shouted to my grandmother, There's been an accident! Nana dropped the wet sheets and turned. Who? she shouted back and Miss Hilda, now nearly at the end of the drive said more quietly, It's The Woman From Away, it's Katie Rose Albright.

My mother was already coming out the back door, car keys in hand, and all three women piled into the Lincoln and drove rapidly up the drive, turned toward the mainland and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The factory whistle blew a sudden, long, piercing blast - then began repeating it every few seconds - the signal for alarm, possibly even disaster.

Katie Rose - who had been an island resident for some fifteen years since her marriage to Bill but who had not had the foresight to be "island born", was still considered as being "from away", a status she was to hold until her husband's death some years later. But on this day, she was a woman in need of help and the village united without a second thought. It was an old wringer washing machine, exactly like the one Nana used every washday, that took her hand and nearly took her life - she'd snagged her ring and before she could stop the feed, the wringers had drawn in her hand and crushed it. Katie Rose may have been "from away" but she was also a woman of resource and great bravery - according to Sparrow, who had been the first to reach her - when she realized she couldn't free herself, she hacked off her hand at the wrist and then staggered to the telephone, managing to get a call in to Elsie and packing her butchered wrist before passing out cold on the linoleum floor.

Reckon I could live to be a hunnerd, Sparrow said later, Ain't never gonna understand how that women didn't damn sure bleed to death where she lay. But Katie Rose survived, learning to live one handed and earning the respect of every living soul on the island, even while still being known as The Woman From Away.

My mother and grandmother resumed their feud the evening of the accident and I dreamed of deadly washing machines and tame tigers.