by Cathy Lamb
I smiled, tearfully, at the memory, then burrowed deeper into the quilts and blankets, my body and brain now in post-shock from what had nearly happened to my girls. It was pitch dark, the moonbeams glowing through the tall windows.
My grandparents’ two-story log cabin is charming and homey and I love it. I told myself to concentrate on the cabin, not the almost-disaster, so I could sleep. The cabin, along with our blue farmhouse, sits on one hundred acres.
My grandparents stayed in a trailer, on their land, while they built their log cabin. Luckily it did not take too long with the help they had. The trailer did not have electricity or plumbing, which my grandma said was a real “romance killer. You don’t know how much you love a toilet until you don’t have one.”
They built the cabin together with the help of my granddad’s parents, and other friends and neighbors, some of whom are still around and close friends of our family. In fact, the Martindales go generations back, in terms of friendships, with many people in Kalulell. My grandparents, for example, were friends with Jace’s grandparents.
It’s a medium-sized cabin, with windows all over, far more than what you would see in other log cabins. It’s like the logs are there to prop up the windows. The windows let in the huge, blue Montana sky in all directions; the Dove Mountains; and the Telena River, which is about thirty yards from the house.
The ceiling in the family room is two stories high. Upstairs there’s a loft, which opens to the downstairs, separated by a hand-carved wood rail. There is also a bedroom, which was my mother’s as a girl, and the bedroom my sister, Chloe, and I slept in when we had sleepovers with our grandparents. There is also a separate den, and a bathroom, all with oversized windows. The den was where my granddad, the town doctor, worked after hours. We have kept his medical journals and books. There’s a small attic above the den with one window.
On the main floor is the kitchen, which has been remodeled more than once, most recently five years ago. The cabinets are white, the backsplash is white beadboard, the counters are all butcher block. A huge window over the white apron sink looks straight out at the snowy mountains.
The dining room table, which seats ten, was made by my granddad with wood from trees on our land. The dents and scratches come from sixty-five years of Martindale family dinners; patients who were laid flat on it for medical care, including stitches and tourniquets; and the baking prep my grandma did there. As a teenager my mother carved her name beneath the table when she was forced to help my grandma cook a Thanksgiving dinner one afternoon, when she really wanted to help my granddad at his medical clinic instead.
The family area, dining area, and kitchen are essentially one room. Another full bathroom and the master bedroom look toward the river.
The front door is red, and in all seasons but winter, two red Adirondack chairs are out front on the deck and four others are on the back deck. Red is my grandma’s favorite color, so my granddad painted the door red. The red door and the red Adirondack chairs match the red geraniums my mother, grandma, sister, and I plant each summer.
Red geraniums are the “family” flower, so to speak, that all the women in my family grow, so it’s important it’s that flower on the deck and in the window boxes.
When as a young girl I asked my grandma why red geraniums are the family flower, she said, “Because, dear Olivia, they are.” Her face tightened, saddened.
“But why? Why not tulips or daffodils?”
“It’s a long story.” She pushed her hair back. It was thick, and brown then, like my mother’s, like mine and my sister Chloe’s, but mixed with white.
“I love stories! Will you tell me?”
“No, dear.” She put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t understand why it shook. I didn’t understand why her eyes flooded. I still don’t. “It’s not a story I want to talk about now.”
“Okay, Grandma.” I was so sad that I had made her cry that I cried. She held me close. “This has nothing to do with you, my precious, Olivia, my dear Cinnamon. Only things I don’t talk about anymore.”
And that was it. We went horseback riding an hour later, and she talked to me about how to survive in the wilderness if I was ever lost. She also told me what to do if a bear charged me. So I don’t know why red geraniums are the family flower, they simply are.
An old wagon wheel leans against the cabin because my granddad’s relatives came west on the wagon train from Missouri, and that’s what’s left of that journey. Two cowboy hats—one my granddad’s and one my grandma’s—are nailed to the right of the door, and there’s a weather vane with a sun on top of the roof.
My granddad always said my grandma was his sun, hence the sun weather vane.
Near the river is a gazebo my granddad built, with benches and a wooden picnic table inside. When I was a child I would often see my grandma at the table, gazing at the mountains, seeming to be far, far away from Montana. One time I went to sit with her, but my granddad, gently, held me back. “Not now, Olivia,” he said. “Wait.”
I learned then to leave her alone when she was in the gazebo unless she invited me over.
One time, when I was a teenager, I said to her, “What do you think about when you’re in the gazebo, Grandma?”
She said, “I think about things I don’t want to think about. If I don’t think about them now and then they come and get me and force me to think about them.”
“I don’t understand, Grandma.”
“There are many things I do not understand, either.” She kissed my forehead. “Let’s go shoot some arrows, shall we? It’s important for you to have precise aim.” She was an excellent shot.
I asked my mother about my grandma when I was about ten. Where was she born? Does she have sisters and brothers? What happened to her parents? My mother’s face became drawn and serious. “I don’t know, Olivia. She refuses to talk about it. But I know that whatever happened to her was bad.” She paused and ran her hands over her eyes. “Very, very bad.”
I knew my grandma was from Germany. She speaks English with a British accent, a tinge of German, and a heavy dose of American English. There’s another language mixed up in there, too, but I can’t place it. I didn’t know if she left Germany as a child or as a young woman. We know nothing of my grandma’s life before she was in England, working as a nurse in a hospital during World War II where she met my granddad, a U.S. fighter pilot.
It was as if she were born at the age of twenty-two, in 1944, in London, when she met my granddad, and there was nothing to her before that. No family. No relatives. No friends. She had never talked to my mother about it, but my mother said that my granddad knew. He wouldn’t share, either, my mother told me. “When I asked him about Mom, he told me that her past was for her to tell me about, not him.”
The truth is that my grandma is the kindest person I know. But always, starting when I was a child, I sensed her grief, her loss, an emptiness. I sensed her secrets, which I knew hurt her.
I lay back in the huge bed of their master bedroom. I would see my grandma tomorrow. She reminded me of cinnamon rolls, which is ironic, as she calls me Cinnamon. I would see my mother, too. She reminded me of tough steak. She sometimes calls me Rebel Child because I didn’t become a doctor, like her, to her eternal disappointment.
I snuggled under the quilts and I wondered what Jace would feel like in this bed. I knew he’d like it. He would also like the view and watching it change through Montana’s colorful seasons. I tried to push that thought out of my mind, but I couldn’t, so I relived one of the times we’d been naked, on his property, outside, on a picnic blanket, in the woods, until I cried and my face swelled up and I was a sniveling and pathetic mess with tired, green cat eyes and I finally went to sleep.
Then I had a nightmare about what happened that day and woke up with a scream stuck in my throat as if an icy, slithering snake had crawled down it.
* * *
“My cooking partner has returned.” My grandma pulled me into a hug, her white hai
r, pulled into a loose ball, blending with my brown waves. She is five three, with light green eyes—a striking woman—and her face reflects courage, wisdom, and beauty. Grandma always wears flowered scarves because “We humans need more beauty.” She calls me Cinnamon because I loved cinnamon as a little girl. She calls my sister Nutmeg. Same reason. Chloe loved nutmeg. She calls my mother, now and then, The Fire Breather. My mother has a fiery personality. “Hello, Cinnamon! I am so glad you’re here.”
“Give me a hug, Rebel Child.” My mother, Mary Beth Martindale, reached for me and hugged me close, too. She went back to her maiden name after my father left us, and when we hadn’t heard from The Deserter in a year, my sister and I changed our names to Martindale, too. He abandoned us, and we abandoned his last name. At eighteen, we did it legally.
Earlier that morning my mother walked over to say hello at the log cabin. I told her what had happened last night, and she stomped herself over to the windows and glared at me. She crossed her arms, tapped her cowgirl boot, and said, “Irresponsible. Careless. Reckless behavior. I raised you better than that. Montana women aren’t stupid, Olivia. Even I wouldn’t have been out in that blizzard.”
This was her way of telling me she loved me. When I was younger we went head-to-head sometimes because of her bluntness and my stubbornness. Then I left for years, mellowed out, missed her, had new realizations about that tough-talking mother of mine, and accepted her butt-kicking Montana ways.
“If Jace wasn’t there to haul your skinny butt out of the car . . .” She’d stalked back, still glaring at me, and I hugged her while she said a bad word, told me I was “deranged,” then we’d both lain flat on the floor and tried to breathe. “Think of an operation,” she murmured to herself. She thinks of operating on people when she needs to relax. “Take the scalpel, cut into the stomach . . .”
“Mom,” I’d said. “Please.”
“What? Thinking of operating on people calms me down.” She cleared her throat and continued her one-way conversation. “Think of opening the rib cage, Mary Beth . . . your hand on the heart . . .”
My mother is a family doctor and has her own clinic. Her hair is brown, thick, and shot through with gray. She wears it up in a loose ball, like my grandma.
She has huge green eyes—everyone in my family has some shade of green in their eyes, and they have wisdom and experience and sharpness in them. She is a straight shooter. She is not afraid of anyone or anything, and she will tell you what she thinks, to your face, no matter if you want to hear it or not, including telling you that “your brain is full of rocks.”
Mary Beth Martindale can shoot a deer, clean it, and cook it; wrestle down a calf and keep it there; lasso a cow; and brand any animal’s behind. Grandma taught her how to shoot a bow and arrow, and her aim is true. We Martindales pride ourselves on our archery skills. I’ve also seen her lay more people than I can count up on our farmhouse kitchen table—built solid by my granddad when my mother first had this house built on our family’s property, before we were born—and treat/sew them up.
“Give me those whippersnappers,” my grandma said, reaching for Stephi and Lucy. She hugged the girls, then kissed both of their cheeks as they hugged her back. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“My turn next,” my mother said, grabbing the girls, lifting them off their feet, and giving them a twirl. They giggled. “Let me gaze upon these future doctors and hunters. I am so pleased you’re here. Now we can continue your medical education. What do you know about sutures?”
Lucy and Stephi loved my grandma and my mother, especially when my mother said to them about four months ago, when we came to visit because we needed a break, “You two girls must be tough-ass women after what you’ve been through, and I like tough-ass women. Never stop being a tough-ass woman, and welcome to the family. We’re all half-crazy, so if you’ve got some problems, don’t worry. We all have problems, and the women in this family like to deal with them with archery. Think you’d like to shoot a bow and arrow?” Oh, they did.
My grandma and mother took them horseback riding because “All brave women need to know how to handle a horse.”
On another visit, they took them skiing several times because “You’ve gotta be comfortable with speed. Who wants to ski fast?”
They took them fishing because “You will see God while you fish. You only have to look for him here in the river.”
My mother showed them photos and videos of operations, “to prepare them for life as a surgeon.” The girls loved them. When I saw the photos, I shut the folder. “You did that to me when I was a kid, showing me all those cut-open people, and photos of the heart, and diseased kidneys and sick lungs and blown ligaments and broken bones and everything else, and it gave me nightmares, Mom.”
“That’s because you didn’t want to be a doctor, Olivia.” My mother was quite self-righteous as she snatched the photos back from me. How dare I interfere with her lesson on how to put a balloon in someone’s artery to open it up! How dare I take away the photo of the man’s leg split to the bone! How dare I not allow the girls to study photos of what advanced diabetes does to limbs!
“You wanted to spend all your time in the kitchen cooking, but these girls want to be doctors.” She turned again to the girls and whispered, “Who wants to see a photo of what happens to your lungs when you smoke?” Oh boy! Did they! And “Who wants to see photos of kidneys, both healthy and sick, so you can make contrasts and comparisons?” More excitement!
“Cinnamon,” Grandma said. “I heard you and the girls were in that blizzard. That makes me scared even thinking about it.” She moved to the kitchen island and stirred a buttermilk pancake mixture. A strawberry syrup was gently boiling on the stove. The kitchen island, about eight feet long, was partially made, five years ago, when they remodeled the kitchen, from an oak tree that was split in half by lightning. It was my mother’s favorite tree. She grew up climbing on it. The oak tree island has a long, white marble counter, perfect for my grandma because she loves to cook and bake.
“It was not my best night.”
My mother rolled her eyes. “Not your best night? That’s how you would describe it? You never should have been out in that. I should take you out to the back shed and whip your butt, Olivia.”
“You never did that when I was a kid, I bet you wouldn’t do it now.” I kissed her cheek.
“I would, too. Don’t push it, kid. Check the weather in Montana before you come. You know better. Never drive in a blizzard in Montana. Best to live with a working brain, Olivia, not rocks. Get the rocks out of your brain.” She tapped her head. “It will keep you out of trouble.”
“I’m glad you made it safely,” my grandma said. She shuddered, walked back around the island, hugged me again, then went back to the stove. “Had I known you three were out in it I would have shaken in my cowgirl boots.”
We Martindale women take our cowgirl boots seriously. My mother has a collection. Over forty pairs at last count. She dresses in jeans and sweaters, but those cowgirl boots, different colors, different designs, they make her statement, yes, they do. Today she was in black with silver star cutouts.
“Thanks to Jace they’re all safe,” my mother said, hands on her hips. “Prince Charming came roaring on in in his black truck.”
“I don’t like the rescuing prince image,” I said. “As if I was a damsel in distress.”
“You were more than a damsel in distress,” my mother snapped. “You were almost a river rat, along with my girls. Dang, Olivia.”
“What’s this about Jace?” my grandma said.
“Jace grabbed Olivia and the girls out of the car before it careened into the river,” my mother said.
My grandma’s head snapped up. “What?”
I tried to downplay it, so as not to scare my grandma, but it was hard to do so when my mother said, “And where is your car now, young lady? The river. Nose down. After flying back and forth across the highway. All avoidable! Damsels should not get them
selves in situations where they need to be rescued by princes.”
My grandma tilted her head back to the ceiling and closed her eyes. “My. Oh my. Cinnamon!” She left the syrup and hugged me once again, then hugged the girls.
“Ruthie Teal saw Jace driving you home, and she already called and asked if you and Jace were getting back together,” my mother said. “She was cleaning her gun. She wants to know if he spent the night. She couldn’t stay up late enough to see if he left, because this morning she had to leave early for ice fishing with her boyfriend.”
“Ruthie has a boyfriend?” I asked, ignoring the other question. Ruthie is eighty. She lives about a mile down the road.
“You bet she does. She’s getting some action,” my mother said. “He’s twelve years younger. Name is Sam. She’s riding him like a horse.”
“Mom? The girls are sitting right here.”
“Ruthie rides a man like a horse?” Lucy’s brow furrowed. “Does she put a saddle on him?”
“What do you mean she’s getting action?” Stephi said. “Like exercise?”
“Getting some action means that they do cartwheels together,” I said.
“Yes, indeed,” my mother said. “Cartwheels. And it also means they ride horses. Like you two girls will do when the weather is better here.”
“I want to ride a horse!” Stephi and Lucy yelled.
“A brave woman needs to know how to handle a horse,” Lucy said, raising a finger in the air.
“Can we go skiing so we can get comfortable with speeding?” Stephi asked. “I want to go fast.”
“What about fishing? We can see God hiding in the river then,” Lucy said.
I leaned back and drank more coffee and enjoyed the peace of being home. Our farmhouse kitchen has light blue cabinets, matching the light blue of the exterior of the house. The other counters are a white marble, too, with a tile backsplash. My mother let a friend of hers go “flower crazy” on the backsplash. Dina is a semi-wild-eyed artist who painted this flowing, colorful swirl of red geraniums, yellow lilies, white daisies, and blue irises and delphiniums.
