Never Tell
Recovered
memories
of a
daughter of the Temple Mater
by
Joyce
A. Hood
Copyright © 2012 by Joyce A. Hood
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
Smashwords Edition: January 2012
CONTENTS
DEAL WITH POEMS
for Roberta
who opened the box
Prologue
UNTIL my father died, I had almost no memory of my childhood. My remote past was like a country landscape after a heavy snowfall. There were a few barely recognizable humps and bumps around which I embroidered fragmentary anecdotes, but no extensive narrative.
I thought this was normal.
It’s true that from time to time my present life made no sense either. There was, for example, a conversation with my mother when I was in my thirties. I was with her in her and my father’s bedroom. The jewelry box was open and I saw a pin lying on their dresser. I picked it up and read aloud, “Knight of the Temple Mater”.
“It’s your father’s of course. From his club. Roy can get Blake into his club, but you can’t keep putting it off.”
Putting it off, I wondered, since when.
“Blake doesn’t join clubs,” I replied. I knew that much about my husband. He hated what he regarded as the herd mentality.
I put the pin down and passed on to the beads hanging out of the jewelry box, more or less oblivious to my mother’s urgent pleading that it was now or never and did I know what I stood to lose.
I had no idea and continued to have no idea until thirteen years after her death and six months after Roy’s. I was fifty-one by then.
Suddenly the past unrolled from my subconscious in high definition and Dolby sound, scene after scene, complete with word-by-word dialogue. And it wasn’t just me. My two sisters and my nieces were also in the grip of inner horror movies. My son had less specific flashbacks although no less disquieting. Only my daughter in Los Angeles and my brother in Brussels seemed immune.
At the time, none of us was in therapy and we seldom saw each other, so no one was planting ideas in our heads, but when desperation drove us to consult each other, we discovered that we had separately remembered the same scenes. Ultimately four of us had our heads read. That is we were tested at great expense by a clinical psychologist and pronounced sane. Eight years later six of us received compensation from the Ontario Board of Criminal Injuries.
The Temple Mater, apparently, was incapable of continuing the mind control that its knight had so effectively wielded while he lived.
I have set down what I remembered of my life until I was eighteen. My amnesia did not end there, for there was much about my adult life that had been lost to me as well. Indeed it became apparent that my alter ego, Delano, conducted a whole other secret life in the middle of the night, in which she served the old mother temple as assiduously as Roy ever had if more benignly. But that is a story for another time.
I Am Born
THE bedroom where she lies is cold. Light snow is blowing past the window. She is crying for her ma with only the distracted spinsters from up the road to hear her. My father, who will be the hero in every telling of this story, is running fast through the woods to my grandmother’s house. He whoops and talks to himself as he runs. He is going to have a son before day’s end.
He hits Munn Evans’ dooryard like a whirling dervish, his cries drawing my grandmother, Gladys, out of the milk house where she has been scalding the cream separator and my grandfather, Munn, out of the wagon shed where he has been sharpening an axe on the grindstone. Gladys races for the house to set out something for the men’s noonday dinner while Munn and Roy hitch the horse to the wagon. Roy climbs aboard and whips the mare out onto to the road up to Bungay to get Aunt Mae.
All of this running and hitching and driving horses and setting out food, and putting on coats, all of this takes time, at least an hour and more like seventy five minutes. It seems like three or four to Lila who gets out of bed and tries to walk only to be driven back by the nervous neighbor women who do not want to precipitate events. She has given in to nerves, collapsed into herself in wretchedness, but when she hears the buggy in the yard, she imagines she is saved. Her ma has come.
The two women come through the door and listen to the neighbor women’s report while they take off their coats and hang them by the door. Still wearing their hats, they emerge into the bedroom, Mae smiling and calm, the way Mae always is even when she sports a black eye, Gladys steeled and stoic. Both women know there will be a long time yet to wait for this first baby, early or not, time enough for Roy to whip the mare all the way to West Stewartstown to get the doctor.
At thirty-six, Gladys has had four children. Lila is her eldest, born when she herself was seventeen. Gladys had walked half a mile to her elder sister’s house rather than tell her brother-in-law, the only other person about the farm that day, that she was in labor. She is stern now, scoffing at the fuss Lila is making, shushing her. Fearing the pain her daughter will have to endure, she denies the pain she is in. Her gruffness makes Lila more hysterical. She bursts into fresh tears and in her heart pins her hopes on the doctor with his bag of tricks, with his anesthetic.
“Law, Lila,” says Mae cackling as only she can. Mae has the most unlovely face and the most unlovely voice you could find, but she has the most beautiful soul. She has “seen” that I will be a girl and that I will live to be old. She has seen much else about me, but she has told no one, at least no one who can remember. “It’ll be fine. It’s how God gets babies in the world. You’ll forget in no time. Else how’d there be seconds?” She is off in another gale of laughter.
She hands Lila a cup of raspberry tea she has brewed up while Gladys was haranguing Lila into silence. Lila spits out her first mouthful.
“Now this’ll help if you get it down. I’ve put a good bit of sugar in it, but I’ll put some more.”
Lila knows, of course that generations of people have come into the world with the help of such women as Mae, but she regards Mae’s knowledge as mere superstition. Lila is a modern woman and wants the best that modern science can provide for herself and her child. Twilight sleep or ether or whatever it is that Dr. Blodgett uses is modern and scientific. Tea made of dried leaves and twigs and other such stuff is old hat. The old ways killed babies and mothers too, come to that. My father, Roy, has “treed” and cut pulp since last fall to save up the $18 home delivery fee.
Who is he, this dark, tall, starveling-thin, twenty one year old dashing about the countryside on this cold May morning? I will come to know him as Willy and Jenny Hood’s son, the brightest boy on the hill who had scarlet fever for six weeks when he was twelve. It is not until I am twelve myself that I will find out he is the first born child of a woman from down the line who bore him in the workhouse. Unfortunately, I will learn this after I have called him, “Bastard”. I will be astonished that for once he does not give me a crack beside my head, does not even answer back. In fact, he turns and leaves the house.
“Don’t you know?’ my mother screams. I am baffled. Of course, I know he acts like a bastard. “You must never call your father that. He was adopted.”
His birth mother, Effie Howe, gave him to a family called Raymond thus his middle name. But they in turn gave him away to the Hoods citing the fact that they couldn’t manage two children and they preferred to keep Imogene, his foster sister.
So the beautiful, dark haired little boy grew to be the three year old in a Buster Brown suit and haircut standing in a three cornered chair for his 1917 Christmas portrait. Jenny was to all appearances a doting mother, Will an indulgent father. It was possible that an unexpected visitor might hear a child’s muffled cries from the cellar. It was true that Will got demoted from woodshed duty early on and Jenny wielded one of his old belts in a spirited fashion.
People talked. Well, of course people talked. Jenny ignored them. She had failed to produce a child in five years of trying. She had held her head up through all their pitying and she would continue to do so. Let them talk. They had plenty to talk about. Roy’s “real” mother had since married his “real” father and was producing a new son every year. Running into them on the street in Colebrooke as she did several times a year took all the steeliness she could muster but that was considerable. Roy may have been baffled initially, but the older boys at school made sure that stage didn’t last long.
Legend tells us that Roy was taken to see his birth mother only once - when she dying. This was before he got scarlet fever, probably before he was ten. Roy never told me that as he never told me anything else about her, including what she died of. Was it TB? There was a lot of tuberculosis around then? Was it breast cancer? I have pondered that in doctors’ offices as I have filled in family medical histories. And where is she buried? Our grandmother Gladys searched with us, Roy’s three daughters for many years. We studied graveyard documents and walked the spongy earth of every local graveyard, but we never found the woman named Howe. In death as in life, she remains obscure.
Roy’s best friend from his first day on the hill was his cousin Johnnie, a plump, younger, amiable child, the best sort of playmate for Roy, thin and intense, full of quick daring and impetuousness. When they were old enough, they began to range abroad in the farmyard picking up pieces of discarded metal to build “engines”, for they were both obsessed with engines. As they grew older they learned the secrets of the barnyard as country boys do. This was the darker side of life to them, of sex and birth and death. The bull’s visit. The chicken running about the yard with no head or the sow hanging from the rafters with its guts steaming on the floor was an image to laugh at, not to fear. And early on, they took out the twenty twos they got for Christmas when they were ten and wielded death to squirrels and rabbits and the odd bird themselves.
Not blue birds though. For there were bluebirds then that flashed along the roadside and Roy loved them.
He was with Johnnie that day, barefoot, twenty-two on his shoulder, when they came around the bend in the road to Bungay and discovered the body of a woman lying in the soft dust. She had been murdered. Eventually, Roy traveled all the way to Quebec City to testify at her husband’s trial, his testimony taken through a translator the trial being in French.
That fall, he boarded in the States and took first year of high school. He would have preferred to graduate perhaps, but it didn’t happen. At fourteen, he could do almost as much work as a man and what he could bring in cutting pulp or Christmas trees helped out a household where there was never enough money to keep up with Jenny’s tastes or Will’s purchase of the latest Victrola. So he earned that bit extra or helped his father on the farm and hunted with his buddy until he was nineteen when he married Lila much to Jenny’s chagrin. His work life didn’t change that much. He still hired out to other farmers. He still helped his father. He still went into the woods in the fall, but now his $1 a day went into his own pocket, not Jenny’s and he used his savings to pay for up-to-date scientific supervision of my arrival.
Mae is right. Lila remembers very little. When as an adult I ask about my birth, she has little to tell. Roy fills in the details and that explains why he comes off as the hero. Later, when Lila has died, Gladys adds what she remembers.
I weigh five pounds, ten ounces, a survivable weight, but early and underdeveloped. Any baby can have latching on problems when first put to the breast, a premature baby all the more. As long as Mae is there to coo encouragingly, Lila thinks it may be possible to nurse me, but Mae can’t stay. She has a teenaged son and a notoriously bad-tempered husband to cook and clean for. Gladys is harried and cross, impatient to get back to her own men, Munn, her two teenaged sons who do a man’s work every day and her six-year boy. All of them are rude and angry when dinner isn’t on the table at the noon whistle that sounds from across the woods at the Beecher Falls factory. They have been working since before dawn. What’s the problem? A little thing like a baby! How hard can that be?
Gladys, herself, is not given to nerves. She doesn’t collapse in tears. In fact, she never cries. She literally can’t. That’s the Bolton in her, she says. It’s the Evans in Lila that makes her so spleeny.
“For Mercy sake,” she says, “buck yourself up, Lila.”
It doesn’t go well. I am hungry and after a while I am starving. A frantic baby is all that much harder to teach to suck. A frantic mother gets sore nipples and painful breasts and hates the very idea of nursing, would rather die that have to do it one more time. I become a famous crier.
It turns out that Roy can deal with that better than Lila. He walks the floor with me and sleeps with his foot out of bed to rock my cradle.
Let us try to see Lila, this woman who chose my name from a novel: married at seventeen to the best catch on the hill, genetically at any rate since everyone else was her cousin; older than her peers when she had her first child; educated as far as her one room school went - grade seven; living in a house ill-heated by wood stove, ill-lit by one kerosene lamp and served by a privy that opened off the woodshed; hysterical by nature and married to a dangerous man.
Imagine the worn-out mother and the grandmother sitting beside the kitchen stove, having a moment of peace because mercifully the infant has stopped crying. Her father seems to have a magical ability to pacify her. He has carried her into the bedroom and they can hear him crooning to her. They cannot see what he is doing. He is not as skilled as he will eventually become. The baby’s throat is overwhelmed. Too much to swallow. She aspirates fluid. Airways clog.
Who wouldn’t choose to rise and fly away?
I am hovering near the ceiling above two women desperately pummeling a small bundle, holding it upside down, shaking it. Not very interesting. I rise. Free. Blissful. I am flying. Then something, a blazing light, an all-encompassing being defined by light embraces me in absolute love, holding me fast. I am aware of the others, the ones I’ve come before, a group of souls together and the same absolute love flows among us. I feel their urging me to return again. Without me on earth, older and steadier, they will not make it when their turn comes. An instant of grief sweeps me back into the tiny body that convulses and takes in lungful of mountain air.
Gladys has carried me outside where the cold air has revived me.
My baptismal certificate tells me that I was baptized on Sunday, May 31, 1936, by the Rev. J.C. Tanner at All Saints Church, Hereford, in the diocese of Quebec. The pictures show a moody baby under a frilly white bonnet, wrapped in a light shawl. I am asleep propped up by pillows in the big, mission style, wooden armchair that has been carried outside into the daylight. In the next picture, my mother is holding me. She is wearing a cape sleeved dimity dress with white dots. She gazes at the camera as if modeling what I should do. She is tentative, even tender.
Of the other newborn ceremony, the cult inspection for bodily imperfections, there is no record. There is an oral tradition that the two webbed toes on my right foot and the two partially webbed toes on my left are a family trait to be valued. Cult babies with physical “defects” are still Family members, but are not suitable for office.
I have one more baby memory. I am lying at the edge of the stage in the church hall and someone, standing on the hall floor, is fitting on my bunting suit. She is singing, “Bye, Baby Bunting/ Daddy’s gone a hunting/To catch a little rabbit skin/ to wrap his baby bunting in.” She leans over me and we laugh at each other. I am laughing.
By the next summer, I am pictured plump and unsteady on my feet with my stockings falling down. Then I am sitting in the little wooden arm rocking chair that my Great Grammy Hood has given to me, holding my little rubber Polly doll, upside down. I am looking at the ground, evidently not happy.
Then out of the mist of memory, another scene emerges. I am flying, literally, walking on the air above the stairs until I start to fall and my father catches me. Always it is my father until I am forty-two. Only then do I track this memory to its source. That summer I tell my memory to Gladys and laughing her great, deep laugh, she says, “Land sakes, Joyce, that was John who caught you, John Cunnington.”
We are living on the old Hood home place, Great Grammy Hood’s house. A lot of people live there with her besides the three of us, her daughter Gertrude, Gertrude’s husband, John, their three children and Nina, my mother’s mentally challenged cousin, the same age as she. I am sleeping in my crib upstairs when a vicious thunderstorm, the kind that gets caught in amongst mountains, bursts overhead. It all happens in an instant - the blast of light, the prickling sting of electricity, and my leap up and over the crib rail. Just as my pajama feet hit the top of the stairs, an appalling crash of thunder propels me into the air.
Downstairs, slow John is sitting at the table beside the stairway door. He has never hurried in his life, he is habitually slow of speech and movement, yet suddenly, he rises, throws open the door, puts out his arms and catches me. I fall straight into them as if into the hands of God.
While we are living in that house there is another much greater storm and it is one of the defining events of my life. It begins on Sept. 21, 1938 the same evening that most of Hereford has gathered in the hall for a chicken pie supper. Why have such a party in the middle of the week? It is the autumn equinox. Is the cult celebrating Mabon, the pagan harvest festival? That sounds pleasant enough and indeed, the cult cannot be directly blamed for what befalls me this day although it leaves me in a susceptible condition.
The Great New England hurricane I heard about although for many years I did not identify it with my experience. It killed 680 people, destroyed some 9000 buildings, as well as dams, bridges, roads, harbors and an incredible amount of forest. In today’s terms, it caused $20,000,000,000 damage.
That afternoon before the storm broke, Jenny and my mother set off in the horse and buggy with me between them to shelter me somewhat from the wind. It has been raining for several days but only now has the wind begun to rise. When we are about half way along the track that cuts diagonally across the field toward the crossroad, I hear my mother call out, “The wind is taking her breath away!”
For many years, this is all I remember. I do not even remember struggling to breathe and not being able to, only my mother’s hysterical cry. I do not remember Jenny turning the horse ninety degrees out of the wind and heading it away from the main road up the rise to the farm above. When the memory finally returns, it unfolds gradually until I piece out events.
I find myself plunked down in the sitting room of Great Grammy Hood’s house, my home at that time. I am very disappointed not to be going to the church hall where there will be music and food and kids to play with. After my mother and grandmother leave, Grammy tries to coax me to stop crying and play with my dolls. My little table is set with doll dishes and Polly and Teddy are sitting in the little chair facing the one Grammy Hood has sat me in. Grammy is seventy-three and she is wearing what she always wears, a long black skirt and a black sweater. She will still wear these clothes in the future, but never afterwards will she talk to me like this.
I am fed supper by Nina under Grammy’s direction. John and his sons are still at home then although Gertrude and her daughter have left like my mother and grandmother to get supper ready at the hall. John and the boys leave before dark, having milked the cows and, washed their hands and faces and got themselves into their good clothes. Grammy Hood tucks me into her bed downstairs and I cry myself quietly to sleep.
I wake up to a terrible noise. Nina is howling and Grammy is berating her to stop it, but I can see that Grammy herself is very upset. She is trying to pull the bureau in front of the window. I can see why. It looks as if the wind is about to break in there. It is very noisy. Grammy falls down. Nina shrieks and runs over to her. She tries to pull Grammy up. Grammy can’t get up and she won’t answer Nina. Nina drags her over to the bed and after a hard struggle gets her on it. I have to slide out of the way fast. Grammy is sort of snoring and her face looks funny. Nina gets on her knees on the bed and begins to hit her on her body, trying to wake her up. But Grammy doesn’t wake up. She just lies there staring with her mouth drooling. Nina cries harder and harder. She’s scaring me so bad I start to cry. Nina kicks me onto the floor and lies down where I was. When I try to climb back, she kicks me out again.
It is cold. I need a blanket. Rain and wind are pounding on the windows. There is a kind of howling and not just from Nina and the dogs in the woodshed. The lamp keeps flickering. It seems as if it is going to go out. When it flickers, shadows jump on the wall. I am very, very scared. Every time I try to sneak back into the bed, Nina kicks me hard. For a long time, I am frozen there. Then I remember the dogs.
The kitchen is almost dark. Only a little light gets in there from the lamp. But I tell myself to be a big girl. I stand in the doorway looking hard to see if there is anything bad there in the shadows. Then I walk as fast as I can around the table and chairs to the woodshed door, which I open. The dogs that have been leaning against it rush in and make for the stove. I struggle to close the door up again against the wind that is coming into the shed. I run back to the daybed that sits under the window. This window is protected by the veranda so it seems safer that the windows in the living room. I climb up on it and unhook the barn coats that hang beside the door. They have the comforting smell of cows. Then I call the dogs, Rex and Trooper and Sarge. At first, they don’t come, so I crawl under the coats, but I keep calling until Rex finally comes over. He has figured out that the stove is cold. Finally, all of them climb up and lie with me. They keep me warm. I hug them for comfort. In return they have a once in a lifetime opportunity to lie on a bed.
I can still hear Nina mourning above the shriek of the storm. I pull a coat right over my head and in that pitch-blackness smelling of cow and dog and pass into oblivion.
It doesn’t really ever get light, just less obscure, so that when I wake up, I can see across the kitchen. I lie there, listening to the rain and wind still lashing the house. The stove and the table and chairs are very still. One of the dogs sighs and shifts itself.
Where is my mother? Where is my father? Why don’t they come? Why have they left me alone?
I have actually forgotten that Nina and Grammy are in her bedroom just the other side of the living room.
There comes a time when I get very hungry. I’ve let the dogs back out into the woodshed by then at their insistence. I’m hungry and thirsty and crying doesn’t help.
That is when the lady comes. She looks very bright like an Aladdin lamp and has a beautiful dress, long and loose. She tells me I should make breakfast for my babies. Then she stands and watches me while I drag a chair into the pantry and climb up so that I can reach the biscuit jar. There is one hard baking powder biscuit there. I get a dipperful of water from the pail and carry all these in two trips to my little table. I break the biscuit up and pour water on it. A good deal of mess happens. I sit down chatting to my babies, telling them they have to eat so they will grow up big and strong. When I have finished my half of the biscuit, I trade dishes with my babies, pretending they have eaten it all up. The good thing is that I now got to eat their half. I feel only a little guilty because I am so hungry. When it is all gone, the Lady tells me to be brave and strong and remember that Jesus loves little children and that he has sent her to help me. She is his mommy, she says.
I try to do what the Lady has told me to. I do for a while, a long, long while. I wait and wait and wait. I use up all my waiting for the rest of my life that September day. Ever afterward, I will suffer intensely waiting for people. Waiting will reduce me.
In the end, I wet myself and have diarrhea. I am ashamed and miserable. My heart breaks. My Mommy and Daddy don’t love me. In the end, I give up.
Lying on the couch again a long time later, I watch my father coming through the door. He looks desperate. Don’t care. Don’t want him anymore. He rushes toward me and grabs me up. He carries me kicking and screaming into the other room, yelling for Nina and Grammy as he goes. Nina sets up a howl to rival mine and Grammy just lies there. He puts me down and calls to Grammy and rubs her hands with his. He says she’s had a shock. Needs the doctor, but he can’t go for the doctor yet. The road’s not cleared for horses. He stands there trying to figure out what to do. Then he looks down at me. He takes one blanket off the bed and wraps me up in it and puts me down on the couch. He makes the fire in the living room stove and one in the kitchen. He yells at Nina to stop that. He walks back and forth to Grammy. He pumps pails of water and puts it on the stove to heat. Eventually, he pulls my soiled pajamas off and puts me into a tin tub of warm water next to the hot stove. He makes beef broth which he tells me is going to make us all better. I think it is my momma is lying in there unable to help me. But I believe him. He carries a bowl into the other room. Then he comes back, takes me out of the tub, dries me off, sits me in his lap and spoons broth into my mouth.
It will live on in mythology that once there was a great storm and Roy chopped his way up Cannon Hill.
After that night Great Grammy sits and stares most of the time. She lives another ten years, but I remember only her silence and the peculiar smell, which she imparts to the house.
And the world outside has changed as well. The giants have fallen. Their huge trunks lie dead by the side of the road like much of the forest in New England and Eastern Quebec. Only one of the great white pines that used to stand along the road up Cannon Hill still stands. My conscious memory of the storm will fade, but I will never look upon that one remaining pine without feeling deeply sad.
Then I am me, the me I still am. It’s as if I found my role. I have dark ringlets. I can name all the seven dwarves. I learn a verse and sit on the stage in my little rocking chair, pretending to sew. (If you lose your needle, it doesn’t matter. You just pretend. That’s called playacting.) I say my verse about sewing for my doll. The hall erupts in laughter and applause scaring me nearly out of my chair. People say I am like Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple is a movie star who lives in Hollywood.
“Just you wait, Joycey,” Aunt Mae crows, “When you’re a big girl, you’re gonna go to Hollywood.”
Afterwards, we have the Tree and all the children get gifts from a Santa who smells and sounds like Willy. Mine is a hankie. I don’t really enjoy getting a hankie and I don’t enjoy the lunch as much as I thought I would. My stomach hurts from being scared on stage. What I enjoy is remembering how everybody clapped and laughed. I made them happy.
I am Jenny’s favorite now. I can walk down to the Little Place where she and Willy have moved. We live in the house they used to live in, on the same farm. All their things are stuffed into the Little Place and the big house is almost empty because we don’t have many things.
Jenny can’t be Grammy Hood. There’s already one of those. When I was small she tried to teach me to call her Bonmama like the French, but it came out Bummie, so Bummie she is and will be for the rest of her life not just to me but also to all my siblings.
At the Little Place, there are many treasures, among them my father’s childhood toys: a box of unpainted wooden blocks with pillars and roof peaks and arches; there are metal cars and iron horses, a train puzzle six feet long with an engine, a coal car, a dining car, a passenger car, a Pullman car, a freight car and a caboose, that I’m not allowed to play with it unless an adult supervises me. There is a domino set in a long, shiny, yellow box, a pegboard puzzle game, a croquet set, cards, pick-up sticks. Games are a serious affair in this house, full of whooping and hollering. Jenny likes to win and she never lets me win just because I’m a kid even if some of the games are too old for me.
It’s true that Jenny is also given to suddenly snapping, “Will, stop that!” For Will is a jiggler. He sits with his hand in his pocket and jiggles himself.
On one day, there is a new toy, a breadbox with a convex lid that zips up. I love the sound. Jenny is busy making bread, a time- consuming task that has to be done every few days. She is not a woman to make do with biscuits as some more lax housewives on the hill do. She makes bread twice a week and of course she has made the butter to go with it as well as the jam from berries she has picked. She is busy this day and in no mood for games.
“Joycey,” she said, “you do that once more and I’ll lick you.”
I can’t resist. No sooner have I zipped it one last time, than I am lifted off my feet by a blow to my behind.
I get even though. I tell my mother.
There is always a war between Jenny and Lila. Jenny can cook, bake, can, preserve, make butter, whip stiff cream, pickle, tailor, crochet, tat, sew, polish and clean better than any other woman on the hill. Every morning, she laces her tall, thin body into a corset and puts on a clean cotton housedress. Her sensible leather shoes are polished and she smells of Ponds Cold Cream and the hot iron when she crushes me in her embrace. She reads the Bible out loud to Will every night, moving from Genesis to Revelations over the course of years and then back to Genesis again, not skipping a single begat. She taught Will to read the year after they were married. She is self-possessed, orderly, not given to nervous collapse and enthusiastic. She is also ambitious, domineering, possessive and capable of cruelty. I know all this when I am three although I cannot put words to my knowledge then. What I love most about going down to the Little Place is the wealth of things to do and see. There is a windup phonograph, which Willy will play for me and the battery radio brings in voices from the bigger world.
The main house where I live now is a hundred years old and has treasure buried in its dirt-floored cellar, so the story goes. At least that must be what my dad thinks because he digs down there. The house is shingled on the front and has upright stone higher than me standing there like a great black thumb. Poplars stand close to walls, quaking at every breeze and thumping the clapboard sides when the wind gets up. Some people might find that scary, but I think the poplars are talking to me in tree language, telling me stories.
Inside, it feels emptier than Jenny’s house. There’s a couch, two beds, a table and a few chairs, a washstand but that’s about all. There aren’t many toys. I have Teddy and Polly, a few books, a ball somewhere, but not to throw in the house. There are some blocks but not like the ones at Jenny’s. Sometimes there is paper I can write on with a pencil and even a few crayons. When my mother is working in the kitchen, she gives me pieces of dough to shape and put into the oven while she is baking pies. Or if she is sewing, she gives me a threaded needle - a big, blunt one, and a piece of cloth to sew on. I can pretend I am making things for the doll. Or I collect bits of wood and string and make things. There is a pair of little, blunt scissors I can use to cut pictures out of old magazines. When there are batteries, we listen to the radio, but not much because we can’t waste them. We hear the news about the war and recipes. The fact is that I often cannot find anything to do. I rattle around in the big rooms. I wish that I had a playmate like Jean and Gracie who live across the road, but they live a long walk away, at least a mile. Even in the summer, my mother does not take me there often. In the winter, we sometimes do not go out for weeks at a time.
On one of his cream runs a few weeks before Christmas, Willy picks up the mail, a large box from Eaton’s Catalogue for us, but instead of taking it back to the Little Place as he has been told, he brings it our house.
I dance with joy while he stands beaming, oblivious to my mother’s glare. My mother can’t figure out what to do. Finally, she tears open the top, peers in, shuts it back up, saying “They’ve sent all the wrong things. It’ll have to go back. You take it down to your place, Will,” and she glares even harder. I wilt and begin to cry, so she relents. Reaching in, she pulls out a square, flat box. “This is right, but if I show it to you, Joy, you must promise not to tell your grandmother. It’s her Christmas gift.” Carefully she slides off the narrow, white satin ribbon, lifts the lid and shows me the embroidered linen hankies.
“Go see if your grandfather brought you anything,” she says, and while I am thus occupied, the box vanishes.
On Christmas Eve, my mother’s family gets its usual early visit from Santa. All I can remember about it is the trip home. I am in the back seat of the sleigh with my mother and Jenny, all of us wrapped in the buffalo robe. In front, my father and Willy are lit by the lantern that hangs at the front of the sleigh. It casts a light faintly on the side of the road where the snow lies deep against the evergreens. As the sleigh crunches its curving way through the woods, I glimpse rabbit tracks leading off into the trees. I think of the burrow there must be in there, secret and safe. I want to follow the rabbit back to that secret place.
Bummie and Grandpa are to sleep at our house for the night. There has been a war about that, about Willy’s foolishness and Jenny’s possessiveness. “She thinks she owns Joy,” my mother cries. My father wins. He always laughs and he always wins. They have to be there to see me open my gifts.
They sleep in my bed around the corner from my parents’ bed where I will sleep for the night. It’s too cold at this time of the year for anyone to sleep upstairs. Down here near the stove it is warmer, so the beds have been moved down for the winter.
I go to sleep knowing the Christmas tree is over there in the corner and by morning, Santa will have finally found my house.
I will always remember how it feels to be in my small, happy, shouting body in the morning. This is my dream, to have all my people in one place and happy. I take parcels from my father and deliver them to the big people, until I can get time to open my brown, ribbed stocking full of an orange and a few Christmas candies and nuts still in their shells. Jenny and Willy sit up in bed and laugh at my excitement. Jenny is wearing one of her fancy nightgowns, with flowers stitched around the shoulders and Willy, his long nightshirt. My father is in his long underwear with his pants and stocking feet. My mother is in bed with her coat over her nightie because the wood stove has still not warmed the place up. She has opened her presents, a box of rayon stockings and a box of ribbon candy. Bummie has got her watch, the silver watch that she will wear until her death in 1971 and of course her linen hankies which are not much of a surprise because I hate secrets. Willy has a sweater that Jenny has knit and socks. My father has got one too and a shaving kit from my mother. I have delivered all the gifts. The tree stands bare except for the few ornaments and the strings of popcorn. I stand staring at it sadly. All I have is the stuff in my stocking. I am, truth to tell, a little disappointed.
“What’s this?” my father says, pulling the branches away from the corner. “Joy, come see what’s here.”
Hardly daring to hope, I walk over to where he stands and peer in. I bend down to crawl under his arm, but he has to help me extricate what I have found.
“An’t she a big-un!” I say, breathlessly.
Here is a doll almost as big as me, a doll I have seen in Eaton’s catalogue and dared to long for. She has a soft body that hugs to me. She has hard head, which I will later learn is called composition, with painted eyes and hair and composition hands with nails and her feet have little white boots.
I hold her in my arms and gaze down at her in wonder.
“Do you like her?” someone says, when they have stopped laughing.
“Oh, yeah, “ I say. “But I still like my other babies too.” For suddenly, I feel disloyal to rubber Polly and little brown Teddy with his plaintive cry.
“What’re you going to call her,” Bummie asks.
“Sally,” I say.
They are all laughing again. They ask where I had got that name, but I am too in love to answer.
Listening to their laughter now so many years later, I almost forgive them for that long giftless moment.
Lila struggles not only with her mother-in-law’s possessiveness but also with Jenny’s poor opinion of her. There is a class structure on the hill and Jenny sees herself on some superior rung compared to the Evanses. Jenny’s status comes largely from the fact that she is Bryant who comes from town and she sits first after the men at Family meetings.
My mother struggles particularly to sew as well as her mother-in-law. She does not, at that time, have her own sewing machine so she does most of her sewing on Jenny’s White treadle machine, under her critical eye. At Easter no matter how poor we are, there are always new clothes, coats sometimes cut down from other coats, dresses and new shoes from the catalogue. Roy takes a picture of my mother and me before we set out for church on Easter Sunday. In one of these, we have matching white shoes.
In the churchyard, the congregation stands gathered waiting for the Rev. Mr. Tanner who has had another church service to do across the line. The door of the church stands open but we prefer to be out in the light and the air. The women and children stand on one side of the walk and the men on the steps at the other side. Mr. Tanner’s buggy pulls up and he gets out and starts up the stairs. Mrs. Tanner turns the horse around to take it to the drive shed. A sudden flurry arises among the women, “Bend, bend down,” I hear whispered urgently. All the women have stooped and, not understanding, so do I. Mr. Tanner sweeps onward in his black robe with his white surplice over his arm, nodding to the squatting women as if such a sight were quite ordinary. Once he is out of the sight, the women stand up, laughing quietly. It takes me a while but I figure it out. Higher hemlines had reached Hereford by that spring and the sight of so many exposed knees was likely to provoke comment from the pulpit.
The women scurry into the church and into the protective pews, dragging their hapless girl children behind them. The first thing I always notice about the church is the smell, a closed-up smell of wood paneling and prayer books. Aunt Jenny Evans, not my grandmother but another Jenny, is already been at the organ sorting music, playing a few experimental bars, consulting with the choir members. The minister is getting ready in the little partially walled room to the left of the altar where the registry is kept; this book tells when my parents were married and when I was baptized. The altar is covered with the white cloth. Above it the heavy gold colored cross hangs, the empty cross which means Jesus Christ has climbed down and walked away. Somewhere on the earth he is still walking, getting his feet all dusty in his sandals. After two hymns and some prayers, while the collection is being taken up, we children squeeze out of the pews and go back to the Sunday School rooms on either side of the front door, small rooms where we sit in a circle and listen to Mae or to Maude tell us the story of the empty tomb and how Jesus appeared to the three Marys and told them not to cry. Each of us gets a card with a Bible verse about that and a small picture of Jesus talking to the women.
Jesus suffered the little children to come unto him. Jesus suffered. He liked children. Mae or Maude speaking in their unlovely voices, emphatic and commanding assures us of that. And both are capable of laughing in joy at the fact, although Mae laughs more readily. Mae adores children. She has had only one of her own who is a full grown lout by now, but in any group picture, she is sure to be holding some baby or child, and smiling.
Now that I am older, not only can I walk down to the Little Place, I can get out to play on my own in the dooryard, in the hen yard and even in the fields around the house. The fence corners are peopled with fairies - the rose fairies, the blue fairies, the gold and silver fairies. In the middle of the field is a rock where I sometimes encounter a tall being with wings that takes much more concentration than the fairies to listen to. The little brown people who live along the brook are scarier, but my father is always there with me when I go fishing with a bent pin. Curiously, he doesn’t notice them. When I play on the rock in the middle of the hay field while Lila drives the hay wagon and Roy pitches up the hay, I talk to these friends. I can tell this worries my parents, but only slightly.
Grandpa Willy is glad to listen to me prattle about my friends. He chuckles, his pipe clenched between his teeth.
We are on our way to the creamery in East Hereford, the cream cans clattering together behind us. We stop at Grandpa Munn’s mailbox where his cans are sitting on their stand up out of the dust and dirt of the road. Munn is in the dooryard in his overalls and rubber boots and he waves in greeting. Then the horses have to be urged by both of us “to get up there” for there is a hill to climb, one that twists in the middle and sets off in a different direction. It is a hard struggle, with much shouting. “Dum you, dumb horses!” Willy roars. I hang on to the seat for fear of falling off and under the wagon wheels.
The horses are lathered up by the time we get to the top and the long level road beside the old Evans farm and Uncle Ed Ellington’s place. At the end of that lovely, peaceful run, we stop in the little dip where we pick up the cream cans from those two farms and then we are really in for it. This last hill is the steepest, rockiest hill of all. It seems as if the wagon will just flip right over backwards. This hill scares me so much that I don’t even yell at the horses. I just absorb the jolting jars up over the rocky ledges and hang on to my grandfather’s coat.
At the top there is another miraculous flat place with hay fields on either side. At the top, the road makes a T. There is still another hill rising in front, but not even this intrepid little road dares to challenge that hill. Here is the little French schoolhouse and from inside we hear the children reciting their opening prayer in French. (Thirty-eight years from now at one of the lowest points in my life, I will climb the hill in search of consolation and behold a vision of a golden angel towering above me.)
The team makes the right angle turn to the left and starts past the first French farm, a foreign place then but one which will in due course become a family farm. The road runs downhill now and turns again as it comes into a narrow valley, a canyon really. A very steep hill with a farm perched on top, lies to our left now and the brook, which has crossed under the road, to our right.
Willy pulls the wagon over to rest the horses he says, but meanwhile, why don’t I jump up onto his lap and we’d play horsey. My mother has forbidden me to play horsey with my grandfather, so I just sit and stare at the brook. Maybe there are little brown folk here too.
Don’t I want to get some candy at the store, he asks?
Candy is my best favorite. My mother will never know. I don’t exactly decide to disobey my mother. I just let myself be hoisted up onto his overalled lap and we are soon charging along horsey style, bouncing up and down so that the wagon creaks and the cream cans rattle until Willy’s face grows red and swollen and he lets out a great breath of tobacco. Then he has to climb down and go behind the bushes. He returns wiping his hands on his handkerchief. Somehow the magic has gone out of our trip. I don’t like doing things my mother has forbidden me to do. Jesus wouldn’t.
So what kind of candy will I get, he wants to know.
I shrug my shoulders. No matter how he coaxes for the rest of the trip to the Hereford creamery, I do not answer. I study the passing countryside.
The town of Hereford represents the outside world in a way that West Stewartstown and Canaan down across the line do not. Here is the post office and the nearest telephone, both ruled over by the shrewish French woman who comes charging out of her kitchen into the general store when her husband, who speaks only French, calls her to see what this English wants. She makes my head snap back by her force and loudness and I earnestly pray that we have no need of her intercession.
As we jangle back down the road with empty cans, I suck my ill-got candy. I have to finish before I get home.
“There’s the Bulwyer place,” observes Willy bitterly, spitting over the side.
I know that this rich Frenchman has deprived Willy of the farm he had had since he first married Jenny. I know that he wants to take it away from us as well. My father takes me with him when he goes to make the payments, never quite in full, but if I am along for the ride, Monsieur Bulwyer yells less threateningly.
My father scoffs when people say the Depression is over. In these hills, it won’t be over for years, the prices they get for cream or trees or pulp, he says, don’t give a man a living wage.
And the government wants them to pay taxes! I picture the government as a high wall that runs all around the country. I see the men filling in holes in the road. This is how they make up the tax they have to pay the town. The worst, though, is the Quebec government. It is all for the French, so when our bridge washes out in the floods, we ford the river for years. We don’t vote for them, so why should they fix our bridge?
Once I am standing in Munn’s dooryard when a big, black car pulls in and the man in the backseat leans out and asks me the way to Hereford. I point up the road and he says, “Thank you, little girl” with a French accent. As they car pulls away in a cloud of dust, my grandmother rushes out of the house and grabs me to her.
“Haven’t we told you never to talk to strangers? Do you know who that was?” she demands. Surely, from her alarm, it must have been the devil incarnate. “ That was Duplessis.”
Duplessis is the premier of Quebec and the earthly equivalent of Satan, prone to badness of every kind. His provincial government is the little government in my mind. The big government of Canada itself is only a little better, although it at least is Liberal. Who can tell what it will do now about this war?
At this point, there is a general tut-tuting. We don’t discuss politics, any more than we discuss what goes on in the barnyard when the bull comes to visit.
My parents go with Johnnie and Maude and Johnnie’s younger brother who has volunteered to go to be a soldier. I picture them driving onto the battlefield in Johnnie’s car and I am not able to relax until my mother is safely home.
And the box that the Christmas parcels came in? The box turns up again. It is a bad box after all. It sits in the living room again. I am given Polly and put into it. The top is closed the way you close box tops, weaving one flap under and over another. It is a game to see how long I can stay. Someone is teaching me. It’s fun, someone says and laughs. Don’t I think it ‘s fun? I shake my head. The top closes again. Don’t I always get let out? Let’s try again. Let’s see how long. After all, it’s just a game.
It is dark in the box. Quiet. They have gone away into the kitchen. I can hear me breathing.
It helps if you think of Jesus.
******
My mother is pulling me in my high backed sleigh up the path behind our house. She stops when she gets to the spring. “Look over there,” she says, pointing. On the high hillside, below the mountain, far away, I can see a red glow. “That’s where your daddy is. Taylor’s barn is on fire over there.” She is scared that is why we are going up to Grammy Hood’s, but also I know my daddy is a hero. He rushes into burning buildings and saves things. That is what he did when the houses next to the one where I was born caught fire.
******
I am walking with my mother out of the doctor’s office toward our horse and buggy. Suddenly I stop and bend down to see what lovely blue jewel is lying in the dirt.
“It’s just a broken robin’s egg,” my mother says, impatiently. “Don’t touch it.”
I am not supposed to know that there was a baby, supposed to be my sister or maybe my brother, but now there isn’t.
*****
My father is coming across the field leading a beautiful brown horse. My mother and I are standing at the open kitchen window.
“His name is Buster,” my father calls out. “How do you like him?”
******
My father is plowing the side hill below the spring. The spring has escaped from the grip of the ice that hemmed it in, but never closed it over completely. It is seeping over the tops of the grey boards and running onto the path. My mother has just carried a pail of water down and sat it on the stone step of the woodshed.
Suddenly my father shouts and waves. “Horse radish,” he cries. “Horse radish! It came up.”
Nothing has been planted because it is still early spring, but here is a miracle. The horse radish which has been lost for years, has sprouted small green leaves and shown my father where the root lies ready to be eaten.
My mother is not impressed. She is the one who will have to grate it and pickle it and she doesn’t even like it. I adore it, not that I remember tasting it, but I know I will adore this magical vegetable.
******
The banty hens are mine and their tiny brown eggs fit in my hand so I carry them in routinely. Getting the big while eggs from the other hens is too risky for me on my own. The hens are too possessive. My mother drives them off and scoops up the eggs. I beg her to let me carry them in. Too risky, she says, but after she has explained how important it is not to break these eggs that she needs for a cake, she lets me carry three. I trip on the threshold of the back door and the eggs smash on the stone.