The Memento

by Christy Ann Conlin

  Far off I heard a coyote call. I went fast and smooth toward the opening in the forest ahead. I pushed aside the branches and there was the Tea House. The property had grown wild the last three years. Loretta never told me I couldn’t come here, and I did a few times, coming only to the edge of the woods, looking at our quaint house and the forlorn gardens. But it hurt too much to step out, and I’d turn and run back to Petal’s End. It was just a place of memories, and it was easier to leave them there undisturbed rather than carry them with me. But that night I swear I heard the house calling as I went along on the soft floor of pine needles and plush mosses.

  I knew Grampie and John Lee’s cups must be in there. Loretta said the house was boarded up to keep Ma out. On my birthday I was thinking Loretta had misspoke—it was for keeping me out. Grampie’s clothes were gone, I knew because I’d helped pack them. There would be no shoes I could slip on and take down to the beach and see if I was that kind of Mosher.

  I took a step forward, back into that world, into the high grass, and another step, looking for Grampie’s gardens, now tangled with flowers and weeds, the lawn now a meadow. Grampie pastured sheep and goats so we never mowed an inch, but those animals were long gone. Now I was wading through the grass and hay, the tall red clover and buttercups and blue columbine. His pickup truck was rusty and abandoned, weeds growing right up through the stick shift. But the grasses was much lower near the house, like they was afraid to grow too close, and I went around to the front verandah. I saw Grampie’s bird feeders, paint peeling off, empty. There was wild roses along the side and the old peony garden he planted for my grandmother when they were first married. He called the peony the fairy blossom for sprites and said such beings was drawn to it. A flower, Grampie had told me, is the easiest thing to underestimate. The peony, for instance, its leaves are thin and long, and the bud is an insignificant hard ball covered in green with ants crawling on it, and then it bursts forward into splendour. The peony can live for over a century, but who would know that, looking at the fragile petals? The peony blooms for itself. You move it and it refuses to bloom out of spite and will bloom again when it suits. But a peony always brings good luck, even if it begrudges. The peony garden he planted in Evermore blooms still. Roses, Grampie said, are a different creature. They need us. The more you cut, the more they bloom. A rose tended blooms for decades. The peony needs only the affection of the sun and the butterflies.

  I could hear Grampie then, in my heart, slow voice singing to the granddaughter who come to the old man like a stunted peony. Hear the wind blow, love, hear the wind blow. Our rocking chairs were gone so I sat down on the verandah floor. In those last days when he was sick I sat out there alone, within calling distance in case Grampie needed me, reading my books while I hummed and whistled, Angels are coming to watch over thee, so listen to the wind coming over the sea. Grampie wanted water from time to time, or for me to read him a letter or a book. And sometimes he’d ask me to sing. He had been dead three years but it was like Grampie had gone away on a trip for he was still sharp in my mind. Those were the best years, those six ones with Grampie.

  What I grew up knowing about my brother John Lee wasn’t much. It was from the snippets Grampie had told me, for Ma rarely said his name in my presence. In the house right off the front door there was an old-fashioned parlour where Grampie would receive his customers when they come about paintings. This was where Grampie and I would sit on Sunday afternoons. It was also the room where my grandmother’s body was laid out, and then finally Grampie himself. And John Lee. It was both the death room and the living room. Grampie was from the old world and he had no use for funeral homes or embalming. He kept some framed photos on a small table in the parlour. There was one of John Lee with my mother, holding hands on the beach. In a cherrywood frame was a picture of me as a baby sitting on Ma’s lap in a rocking chair. Grampie said having me brought her youth back for a time. From that picture you would never think she was forty-five. And you would never think that adoring smile was not for me but for herself, finally having a twelfth-born child.

  One Sunday when we’d been sitting in the parlour reading, my grandfather had looked at Ma’s photos. She’d come by drunk the night before and I’d heard them arguing, then the door slamming. She was on his mind that whole morning and he couldn’t take his eyes from her in the pictures. “Remember your mother like that, Fancy. Remember her laughing. She loved her children, although she was not fit to raise them after John Lee. I always thought of Marilyn as a lake that had no still water. It was a marvel she could sit for so long and stitch. Before your grandmother’s hands were twisted by the arthritis she played the fiddle and tried to teach your mother. She stopped for fear your mother would fling the fiddle across the room.”

  The fiddle was in a case on the shelf and no one played it after my grandmother passed on. Grampie looked at the case for a spell before he continued. “Marilyn was best when she was occupied doing things that spoke to her. The house used to be full of her cooking and singing. And she’d make sketches for her embroideries. I always wondered where she got her ideas for she was never still long enough to study or contemplate her surroundings. But she just absorbed it. It was your mother who was always filling the bird feeders and whistling their calls.

  “We should never have let her keep working at Petal’s End when I came back from the war but we were not thinking clearly at that time. Too much fell to your grandmother and your mother. But your grandmother felt Marilyn was too cooped up here in this cottage. She said Marilyn was afraid of me when I first come back, that she was frightened to be in the room with me for the look on my face when I thought no one was watching. We let her keep working there, but it was a mistake. Your grandmother blamed herself that Marilyn ended up with the baby. We welcomed the child. Your mother would never answer any questions and we knew better than to even ask. We’d never seen her happier.”

  I could hear the silken leaves outside as they rubbed together. “We wept when his small body was brought here and laid out in the quiet of this room. I did not expect you, Fancy Mosher, as you came so late.” Grampie closed his eyes and eventually stood up and went to the verandah to smoke his pipe.

  The last summer Grampie was alive I was out there on that verandah one afternoon while he was sleeping when a fragile, aged man come around. It was late August and the cicadas were screeching as the day drew in. I’d been finishing an embroidery that I’d been working on all week, a picture of Grampie napping on the sofa because that was all he’d been doing. I took the embroidery inside and put it in my bedroom, grabbing a book from the shelf, and returned outside. And there he was, this man. Lots of people come by to see Grampie and for portraits—it wasn’t unusual to have someone in the yard. But this one didn’t say a word, wouldn’t come out of the shadow of the grand sugar maples. My book was almost finished, a story about orphan children living alone near a mountain they called Old Joshua, gathering herbs and flowers. There was a rustle so I looked back at the man, who I then saw had dark smudges under his eyes and looked bent out of shape.

  “Hello,” I rang out, and he stepped far back into the heavy shade. It was blistering hot. It was clear to me he was embarrassed. Some people didn’t want anyone knowing they were coming to the Tea House and they’d only come at night.

  Grampie come out then. He was bent over, his hand on the door frame.

  I pointed. “Must be looking for a picture … probably don’t want to disturb you, Grampie. Folks know you’re not feeling well.”

  Grampie looked at me and out into the yard at the tree and then back at me. He braced himself as a big hacking cough erupted from his mouth. I went over to him with my glass of water and he took a sip and spit it out. Jake started barking in the house. “I see, Fancy,” Grampie said, and went back inside. I searched the whole yard but the man had gone off. They did that more often than not.

  Grampie was resting in the parlour and I told him the man had left but I expected he would come back. Grampi
e nodded without opening his eyes. “No doubt he will return if you saw him. You’re a good girl, Fancy,” he said. “You don’t scare easy and nor should you.”

  The next week we were inside around the same time of day and Jake started barking and panting out front. I went out and that same man had come by. His head was turned in my direction but the shade was so thick he was hard to decipher. Grampie came out quickly when I called for him but hurrying made his cough bad. He tended to the dog, patting Jake. Grampie said the dog was getting delusional with old age. “Oh yes,” he said, “it gets to some dogs like it gets to some people.” If you spoke to him and stroked him Jake would settle right down. It was being alone he didn’t like. A dog’s not a solitary animal.

  I pointed out to the tree line and Grampie took a gaze at the sugar maples. “You’re sure, Fancy?”

  “I’m no delusional old dog, Grampie.”

  Didn’t he start laughing, but it led off into a coughing fit. He wiped his forehead and went back in the house, each step an eternity, going right by the mirror at the door. When I followed behind Grampie I looked in the glass but saw only my tanned skin and the branches of the maples. I turned my head real quick to check the woods but the man was gone. There was only a red bird balancing on one of the fireweed spires. Round and round the Tea House I went but there weren’t nobody there at all, and the bird too was gone when I come back.

  Grampie was on the couch. I brought him some bread and butter and a cup of tea. “You’re a brave girl. I’m glad for that. You’ll need to be brave.” There was a vase of browning peonies and he let his eyes rest on their petals, ruffled and delicate. The fragrance was cloying. Grampie’s eyes were closed as a long trill came out from the forest. When’s your cough leaving, Grampie? I had been asking him all summer. He would hack deep and low. Soon enough, Fancy. He’d already made me promise not to say one word to Ma that he wasn’t feeling well, and she hardly came to call so that was no trouble. He said arrangements were already in place. That I wasn’t to go get her until his time arrived, and I was to fetch Loretta first.

  Later, when I come into the parlour to clear up his dishes, he was there, no cough, lying on the sofa like he was sleeping as he usually did after a snack, but there was a stillness in that room that I did not recognize. I washed up all the dishes, dried them and put them in the cupboard, Grampie’s teacup with the ferns and red birds beside the other teacups and the pot, the plates. I wiped down the counter and hung the dishcloth to dry. I swept the floor clean, making the house neat and tidy, the way Grampie and I liked it. Jake was lying by Grampie and he didn’t move as I went through the house. The air smelled like faded turpentine and beeswax. I went out on the verandah. The cicadas were buzzing. It was when I looked at our chairs, Grampie’s big chair, and my little one. When I knew he wasn’t making supper ever again, and we would never sit there while the sun went down, watching the shadows reach for the walls of the Tea House, tears slid down my cheeks.

  Jake come and sat beside me wagging his tail. Together we went through the forest on the path to Petal’s End to get Loretta. When we come back, Ma was sitting on the porch and she stood up. It was like she knew he was dead. Loretta made me stay outside while she went inside with my mother to see Grampie’s dead body.

  Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, Ma cooed as we stood in the graveyard on Flying Squirrel Road and they threw the soil on Grampie’s coffin. There was no proper funeral. He was laid out in the parlour at the Tea House, as he desired. We had a short graveside service at his burial. People come from all over and the cars lined the narrow dirt road.

  Grampie was buried fast because he didn’t want no embalming. We all understood the desire to rot back into dirt. I threw in my flowers as the dirt thudded down on that wooden box, the abiding peonies and the longing roses, and Ma wrung her hands and lit a cigarette, her lipstick smearing on the butt, watching me. Don’t you cry, hush hush hush-a-bye, poor little Fancy Mosher.

  Grampie dying was the worst thing that could have happened, but he’d foreseen that, which is why he had arranged for me to go from his to Loretta’s care. Ma would never contest it and Grampie knew that. They shovelled in the dirt as we stood there, Ma and Loretta and me and Ronnie, and my ten brothers and sisters and all them nephews and nieces and people I didn’t know, people who wouldn’t stay because Grampie’s will left everything to Loretta. He’d made arrangements with his lawyer years before. The family faded away again once Grampie was laid to rest. But that day we was all there, my estranged family, my dead brother John Lee in his grave beside Grampie and my grandmother and their parents before them.

  When the burial was done and Loretta had led us through hymn singing, she took me along to Petal’s End. There weren’t no reception after the burial. Grampie never liked standing around eating finger sandwiches. After supper Loretta took me over to Grampie’s to get some of my things. Ma got there before us. She’d taken a saw to several of his bird feeders. Loretta locked the doors then started the car again but I could still hear Ma rambling as she came lurching over to the car. “This place should be mine. You know it should, Loretta. He didn’t leave me nothing. He even took my daughter, the twelfth-born. That’s a sin, to take a child. It all should be mine.”

  Loretta put the window down. “It should be no such thing, Marilyn. Your father bought you the house you live in and this he left to me. You’ll do well to stay away, that’s all I know. Give me strength, oh Risen Lord. You are not fit to be a mother, as much as it pains me to say so, and you know it does.”

  Ma’s eyes were huge. “Loretta, you know what the truth is. Jesus wept. She’ll believe. You know she will, Loretta, you know. It’s in her nature to believe. You aren’t any different than me and you can pretend, and you can go about with your hair covered and your quiet ways and living the spinster life, but you ain’t no different. How can you take Fancy away from me, knowing what you do? You’re putting a curse on me.”

  Loretta gripped the steering wheel, saying over and over, “Pay her no mind, Fancy, pay her no mind,” like she was praying, hailing Holy Mother Mercy, her face steady, but Ma had got to her. Then she suddenly got out of the car and pointed her finger at Ma, looking down her arm and over her outstretched fingertip like she was taking aim.

  “The truth? I do know what the truth is. And you gave your word, Marilyn Mosher. On your father’s grave you will keep that word. Let the dead bury the dead. He did everything he could for you. May the Risen Lord have mercy on your soul, Marilyn, for you are well down a road which has but one destination.” Loretta kept her hand up like she was warding off evil.

  Ma, in her tight top and skirt, wobbling on her high heels, looked at Loretta’s small hand before shifting her gaze to me, the smoke from her cigarette going straight up. Ma was crying as she swayed back to her car and got in. I cried too. I could feel her longing for her father. For, despite her hostility, Ma relied on Grampie to keep her steady and now he was gone. The place was rank with her fear.

  We listened to her car go roaring down the lane and up the hill to her house. That’s when I got out of the car to find Jake. We were taking him with us to Petal’s End. He was stretched out in the painting studio in the sun, where he liked to be, at the foot of Grampie’s armchair. When I called his name he did not move. Loretta had Hector come over and he buried the dog out back by the white pine trees.

  The twelve-year-old me stood on the verandah of the Tea House thinking of that man in the trees and of Grampie’s letter. Who was he? Had it only been shadows? A feeling came over me. It was confusion, the rampant confusion you feel at that young age. But with the windows boarded up, the calm of the house felt beyond reach. I closed my eyes, scattered thoughts of Loretta and Grampie hiding things from me, of Ma using me, when a quivering high voice come out of the forest. Fancy Mosher, it said, rising on the end of my name, a question. I could hear steps, slow and steady. Out of fear I whistled, trying to drown out the steps and faint humming, and there was a sweaty hand on my wrist and I
screamed, opening up my eyes, shaking off the hand. Art leapt back and fell down hard on the verandah floor.

  “Oh, Art, what you doing here, you idiot?” He was even more scared than me, wide-eyed, looking up at me. “Sorry. You looked like you were in a trance, and I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “Well, you did just that. What are you doing here?”

  “I figured you’d come here. After today, after finding out …”

  “You checking up on me?”

  Art took the letter that I held out to him and read it, his hand shaking. He looked around as he gave it back. “So it really is true. What did your Grampie think you saw? Do you think that anything will come looking for you? Are you afraid? We should go. We shouldn’t be here.”

  “Do you think I got any answers, Art? It’s all just so mixed up. I don’t know if anything will come calling. Of course I am afraid. What secrets are they still keeping?”

  Art let out a nervous laugh, and at the same time I heard a rustle at the back of the house. “Did you hear that?” Art shook his head as I took off running. There was nothing there, just the boarded-up windows of the painting room. I ran to the woodshed and pulled out the rusty screwdriver shoved through the latch, grabbed a hammer, went back to the house and started prying at the nails.

  Art cleared his throat and squeaked, “Do you think you should do this?”

  I ignored him and kept pushing, loosening the two nails at the bottom.

  “If you come all the way over then help me, Art. For my birthday present. That’s all I want. Think of this as my party.”

  Together we pulled the board off. It wasn’t hard to push the window open and I pulled myself up and went in, Art close behind me. We were quiet as cats, being twelve and thin and nimble. It was dark in there but the bit of sunset coming in the window glinted off a few of the teacups on the shelf. I heard and felt warm breath by my ear. It spoke, and it was Art again, and I whacked him. “Stop scaring me. I keep thinking …” But I didn’t have to finish, for he understood.