Aunt Jenny's Solo

Aunt Jenny had been under her husband’s thumb for the better part of forty years and when he died, there was much speculation about what would become of her.  She’d never paid a bill or managed a checkbook or read a book other than the Bible.  She’d never planned a meal or ordered from the Spiegel catalogue, never learned to drive or pick out her own clothes.  She hadn’t had a birthday party since she was sixteen – the very year she married – and in more than fifty years had never once left the island.  Where to begin, the island women worried, with a woman who never left her home or business except to sing in church.

A widow woman with a daughter ain’t gon’ make a livin’ in the choir, that’s fer damn sure, Aunt Pearl announced grimly, Reckon we need us a plan.

A plan?  Aunt Vi said hesitantly, Why, Pearl, the man ain’t even cold in his grave yet!  Maybe Jenny has a plan.

Jenny ain’t got the sense God give a goose, Clara snorted, Else she wouldn’t of married that no ‘count drunk in the first place.

Aunt Vi started to protest but Nana cut her off with a look and poor Aunt Vi lowered her eyes and folded her hands primly in her lap.

Don’t make no difference how she got herself into it, Viola, Aunt Pearl observed, It’s our Christian duty to help her through.

But how?  her timid sister asked reasonably enough.

By the time Nana swapped out the iced coffee for martinis, a plan had indeed been formulated.  Clara would take on the job of teaching Jenny to drive, Nana would take her to the bank and get her finances arranged, Pearl was to oversee the day to day running of the store, and Vi was relegated to  hair and wardrobe and child care of Ruthie.

The only thing the women hadn’t counted on was Jenny.

She was a tall woman, sturdy looking and stout but rough around the edges with reddened, swollen hands and thick ankles.  Her hips, considerably wider than her shoulders, gave her a metronome-ish look and her cheeks and eyes were sunken with worry and weariness.  Nevertheless, when she met them at the door, her faded housedress was clean and pressed, the seams of her support stockings were straight, her hair – still black as night except at her temples where there were several strands of gray – was brushed and neatly pulled back and she managed a smile.  It was the first hint that the women, well-meaning or not, might have misjudged her. 

I watched as she offered them seats around the dinette table and served coffee and sweet rolls.  I listened as they announced their intentions to see her through this difficult time.  And I learned that some women simply won’t be beaten down.

No, she told them politely, she was grateful for their concern but didn’t need any help.  Ruthie had already taught her to drive – how Ruthie learned, no one dared ask and I thought it best to keep silent about the half dozen or so Sunday afternoons when she and I had met Sparrow at the old gravel pit for lessons – and she had already  made an appointment with the bank.  She’d collected all the bills and papers and carefully organized them and was expecting her sister, a certified public accountant from Halifax, the very next day.   Considering what little business there was, she assured them, the store practically ran itself and she had Ruthie to help out.  In other words, she was and would continue to be just fine, thank you very much.

Well, Aunt Vi said and there was very little trace of her usual timidity, You surely don’t look like no new widow, Jenny.  The boldness of this made her blush and Aunt Jenny patted her knee comfortingly.

Thank you, Viola, she said kindly, Mebbe one of these days you could give me a rinse.

Aunt Vi nodded and gave her a shy, thankful smile. 

There was a new voice in the choir that Sunday, a strong and clear soprano, unleashed and finally free.  It seemed she’d been there all along, taking notes, paying attention, being stronger than anyone knew and just waiting for her turn to solo.

The Flagpole

It was hard to hear over the wind and the incoming tide, but it sounded like Uncle Shad and it sounded like he had yelled, Damn it to hell, woman, you be tryin’ to get me kilt?

When I looked out the screen door, I saw my grandmother, apron and hair flying in the breeze as she clutched at a ladder leaning precariously against the flagpole.   The upper half of my Uncle Shad was clinging to the pole while the lower half flailed wildly in search of a rung.  My grandmother, my sedate and uncommonly good-sensed grandmother, was splattered from head to toe in white paint and laughing like a hyena.

Alice!  Uncle Shad hollered, Quit that caterwaulin’ and hold the damn thing steady!

Nana tried, I’ll give her that, but her hands were slippery with paint and the each time she looked up and saw Shad with his overalls half off and his old baseball cap dangling over one ear, she just laughed harder.  One paint stained work boot came flying off and hit the ground with an ominous thud.

GODDAMIT, ALICE!  he roared, THIS AIN’T FUNNY!  SHUT YER CACKLIN’ AND GIT AHOLT OF THE  DAMN LADDER!

A small crowd of spectators had gathered at the foot of the front path where it met the old dirt road but no one seemed inclined to want to offer any assistance.

 

Sit down on her, Shad!  one of the men yelled and the crowd cheered.

When the second work boot came tumbling down and landed like a poor orphan in the blackberry thicket, Nana gave up entirely and half collapsed, arms wrapped around the base of the ladder but still shaking with laughter.  John Sullivan eased out of the crowd and trudged up the path – although I can’t say he was exactly hurrying – and steadied the ladder long enough for Shad to regain his footing and his grip and climb shakily down.  The old man, by then a paint-streaked, nervous wreck, fussed and muttered and shook his fists but Long John just brushed him off and set him on his feet.  My grandmother, who had finally composed herself, had the good grace to apologize but Shad was having none of it.  He gave her a glare, retrieved his boots with as much dignity as he could muster, and stalked up the driveway.

Miz Watson, John Sullivan observed mildly, I ‘spect you’ve had better ideas.

Mind your business, John, she said tartly, Ain’t nothin’ hurt ‘cept his pride and a blueberry pie’ll set him to rights quick enough.

It took two pies and a plate of muffins but in the end, there was no damage done.

Friendship is built on shared experiences and reinforced by adversities.  Sometimes something as simple as a flagpole in need of a whitewash can show you the way.

A Body to Bury

For Christ’s sake, Guy, I heard my mother tell my daddy harshly, Do you have to coddle her?  It’s only a damn squirrel!

She’s tender-hearted, my daddy replied, she found it and wants to bury it.  What’s the harm?

Supper’s on the table, she snapped, It’ll get cold.

It’s hot dogs and beans, Jan, my daddy told her mildly, I think it’ll keep.

I’d found the poor little creature on the sidewalk on my way home from school, it’s small, still warm carcass lying in a clump of grass at the end of the driveway.  A few feet away, our battle-scarred  orange tomcat sat, indifferently licking his paws and looking satisfied.  I’d grown up with the feisty and independent old tom, remembered him before he’d grown into a skillful and deadly hunter, but for a moment I almost hated him.  I’d slid my used brown paper lunch bag beneath the little corpse and to my mother’s horror, carried him into the house.

Dear God!  she exclaimed with a quick backward twostep, It’s  nothing but a rodent!  A rat with a bushy tail!  Get that thing out of my kitchen!

Rusty kilt him!  I told my daddy tearfully, he kilt him!  We have to bury him!

My daddy knelt down and wiped my tears then gently took the squirrel from me.  We buried him in the back yard in a corner by the back fence where the dogs rarely went and made a protective circle around the tiny grave with popsickle sticks and string. 

When I asked if he would go to heaven, my daddy nodded. 

I’m pretty sure he will, he told me, Rusty too, someday.

But Rusty kilt him, I said, beginning to cry again.

Rusty’s a hunter, my daddy tried to explain, and hunters kill things.  You can’t be mad at him about it because it’s his nature.  Do you understand?

I shook my head and this kind man who couldn’t make the pain go away, picked me up and hugged me tightly.

Then just try to remember that they’ll be friends in heaven, he told ,me gently.

It didn’t make things alright but I loved him for trying.

Monday's Mischief

I navigate my way through the prompts at the appliance repair center – all sixteen of them – and am finally connected with a young woman who offers to help me but only after I answer all sixteen questions all over again.  I sigh and try not to feel irritated at the added bonus of a clear language barrier, her incredible slowness, and the general sense that I’ve interrupted her morning coffee break.

We eventually reach a point where she asks me what she can do for me and I tell her I want to make an appointment for service on a washing machine.

Is it broken?  she asks.

I hesitate for only a second.

No, I tell her, I’m lonely and looking for some company.

This generates several seconds of dead air but she’s a trooper and she regroups.

What’s wrong with it? she wants to know.

I consider telling her that if I knew that I’d likely be a repairman and could fix it myself but that seems unfairly rude.

I consider telling her I was hoping for a service call so that I could find out and have it repaired but that seems a tad testy.

I settle for telling her that I can see the image of Jesus in the army of little green men that have taken over its insides.

More dead air.

Suspecting that she’s considering hanging up on me, I take pity on her and tell her I don’t know what’s wrong with it, only that it isn’t working, and I need a service call.

It’s Monday and she can have someone there on Wednesday if that will do.

I tell her that will do nicely and hang up before I’m tempted to say something I’ll regret.

An Audience of Gulls

The summer I turned nine, my grandmother decreed I was old enough and – as she took great pains to tell me – responsible enough to have my own room.  Not only that, she’d added with a warning glance at my brothers, but I was to be allowed to choose from one of the two tiny, cramped bedrooms at the top of the stairs.

Nana had always slept downstairs in a spacious and sunny room off the dining room with twin beds, a built in chest of drawers, and a real closet.  She kept an overstuffed chair in one corner next to a freestanding full length mirror and the dressing table Uncle Len had built for her between the two front windows.  It was a cheerful room, always neat as a pin and usually warm.  Given the choice of being close to the telephone in the dining room or the bathroom upstairs, she’d chosen the telephone without hesitation.  Besides, she was always the first one up and she liked being just a few steps from the kitchen.

My mother’s room was on the second floor.   It was slightly smaller but had a row of small windows that overlooked the ocean, a small chest of drawers and a re-finished chifforobe against one wall. It had twin beds for when my daddy came and a rocking chair in one corner.

Of the two other upstairs bedrooms, one was barely large enough to accommodate a double bed and a bureau and the other, though roomier, was dark with only a single window and the slanted roof made it impractical for anyone of any height.  Uncle Len had added a clothes rack of sorts – a metal tube attached  horizontally at opposite ends of the walls – for a closet.

You can have either of them, Nana told me, Or you can have the room off the kitchen though you’d have to share when there’s company.

I still remembered my great grandmother dying in the room off the kitchen and though it was by far the nicer of the three, I chose the darker one upstairs.

You keep it picked up, Nana told me sternly, And you make up your bed every morning.  Put your clothes away and no shoes on the bed.  Them’s the rules.  Agreed?

I nodded and crossed my heart.

Oh, and don’t pay no mind to the mouse, she said as an afterthought, It ain’t scratched its way through in all these years and I ain’t lookin’ for it to make no  progress this summer.  You don’t bother it and it won’t bother you.

The mouse and I coexisted peacefully all that June and into July.  He scratched and scrabbled nightly, regular as clockwork, but as Nana predicted, the ceiling remained intact and I got used to waking up with paint flakes on my pillow.  Then just after my birthday, I woke up in the middle of one still moonlit night hearing a violin playing.  It was distant but very clear – Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring – music we’d learned in choir for the Christmas concert.  In the next moment I realized that the pawing above my head had stopped.  I had just enough time to think, Weird, a mouse that likes Bach, before I fell back to sleep.

The next night it was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and the night after that, something I couldn’t place but was positive was Mozart.

When I told Nana, she patted my head absently and said what funny things dream were.

Several nights later, I made myself stay awake.  The mouse skittered determinedly overhead for what seemed like hours and I was just about to give up when he suddenly stopped.  For a moment there was dead silence and then I heard it – faint but clear as day -  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, straight out of my music appreciation class.  I slipped out of bed and crept down the stairs in my bare feet, froze when the dogs stirred, then tip-toed past them and out the back door.  There was a moon, hung high and surrounded by stars and the tide was in-between times, quietly readying itself to turn but for the moment just still and almost completely silent.  I walked across the wet grass and down the path, stopping every few steps to listen and glance back over my shoulder to make sure no one was following me.  The stillness seemed fragile somehow and all I could hear was the music and my own whispery footsteps.  I shoved the risk of getting caught further back in my mind and kept walking.

By the time I got to the head of the breakwater and found the source of the music, the whole little adventure was seeming otherworldly and eerily enough, I wasn’t frightened or surprised.  As soon as I saw the gulls – a whole flock of them as far as I could tell -  gathered and rustling quietly in a crude semi-circle around the fiddler, I knew it was Doolittle.  The birds were cooing like doves at his feet, one was even roosting on his shoulder, several more were lined up in neat rows along the pilings and along the roof of the old guard shack.  It was an amazing thing to see, this blind boy, his violin, and an audience of peaceful seagulls but the most peculiar thing of all was how un-peculiar it seemed. 

There were several more dead of night concerts that summer.  I took to leaving the window open to listen and each time the music began, the mouse would stop his chew-through-the-ceiling mission.  He might've just been frightened off but then again, if a blind boy could play a violin and charm birds and a gull could be a music lover, then why not a mouse.