Winnie & the Whisperers

After two years in a techincal college in St. John, Winnie Tibert graduated with honors and came home for good. There was, her startled parents saw, almost no trace of the girl they had sent away and to the absolute delight of most of the boys her age - and the abject horror of most of their mothers - Winnie had become a full fledged, certified and astonishing capable grease monkey.

Gone were the long skirts and Peter Pan collars, gone the gawky shyness, gone the sad resignation that she would never marry. The new Winnie, taller and filled out, had a sparkle in her eyes. She wore grimy overalls over plain white tee shirts and kept a pack of Export A's in her hip pocket. Her hair was short and touseled, slicked back over her ears, often carelessly stuffed under a baseball cap or tied with a colorful bandanna. Nonie liked to faint dead away the first time she heard her child cuss.

Winifred Eugenia! she gasped, holding one hand to her heart, I never! Where did you learn such language?

In school, Mama, Winnie said serenely, Carburetor class, I think, but it mighta been in driveshaft, I disremember.

Well, you keep that kinda talk to yourself, child, Nonie shuddered, and don't let your daddy know you know them words, he'll strap you sure as you breathe.

Yes, Mama, Winnie said cheerfully, Reckon I won't tell if'n you won't, and ducked her head back under the tractor engine.

Unsettling as the idea of a girl mechanic was to some in our tiny village, Winnie wasn't one to give up or give in to what some of the old timers liked to call "the natural order of things".  To the dismay of the Ladies Auxillary, she wouldn't conform to the wife and mother role, refused to learn to knit or mend or cook.  She defiantly wore blue jeans and a feed cap to church and quite scandalized Nana's quilting circle by laughing so hard she broke into tears at the suggestion that she wear stockings and proper hat.  She could light a kitchen match with one rough flick of a coarse fingernail, chain smoke indelicately, drink like a fish and cuss like a sailor.  Most shocking of all, while she drew the car crazy boys like moths to a flame, she showed no interest in finding a husband.  For the village women, some practically honor bound to marry her off, this was the most worrisome thing of all.  They planned and plotted and match-made, and when it all failed, they began to whisper.

It weren't long before the whispers reached my Aunt Vi and that was when, not to put too fine a point on it, things went to hell in a handbasket.  My soft spoken, fluttery and ever accommodating Aunt Vi who looked for the good and kind in everyone and kept her thoughts to herself became unafraid.  She'd defended Winnie before but only in the relative safety and privacy of Nana's sunporch.  No one was prepared for her to storm into church on a clear, warm Sunday morning and deliver an angry and quite fierce lecture on gossip, personal choice and loving thy neighbor.

I'll not name names, she warned a shocked and slack jawed congregation, Not this time, but you know who you are and you ought to be flat 'shamed of yourselves.  This be one of our children and I ain't gonna stand by and listen to you judgin' what you don't understand!  Ain't nobody without sin in this house, ain't nobody so good they couldn't be better and fer damn sure, ain't nobody got the right to be throwin' stones!

You could have cut the silence with a knife.  

Aunt Vi stepped off the dais and defiantly walked the length of the aisle and out the church doors, her shaken husband at her side.  They were small, slight figures - not in the least remarkable - but they walked proudly.  

Aunt Pearl, in her Sunday best flowered dress and dainty veiled hat, was the first to stand, slip out of the crowded pew and follow.  Then Aunt Jenny.  Then Miz Hilda, Miz McIntyre, Miz Clara, Wilfred and Nonie and finally, my grandmother all rose and followed suit.  I had no clear idea of what had just happened but I dutifully trailed after them, painfully self conscious that most eyes were on us, guiltily wishing that a hole would open up and swallow me with each step, but suspecting that even if one did, I was likely to step around it.

It wasn't much of an uprising but it was enough to put a stop to the whispers about Winnie and although there was some spotty speculation about what Aunt Vi might be adding to her morning coffee, it didn't come to much.  Later that summer, having conquered all the mechanical worlds the island had to offer, Winnie was offered a job at a small but select small engine repair shop in Bear River.  She packed up her newly rebuilt pick up truck, tossed a battered suitcase into the back and jumped at it.   To no one's real surprise, she was a partner in five years and a full owner in ten. 

Each year on her birthday, Aunt Vi sent her a new jumpsuit from the Spiegel catalogue with her name neatly embroidered above the pocket.  And not a soul whispered about it.