Agassiz Stories

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Can I do something?” The new daughter-in-law squints worriedly at Mika through her large tinted glasses.

  “No, no,” Mika says. “I’m just going to cut more ham and then I’m finished.” Will there be enough? Should she heat up the cabbage rolls just in case?

  “Remember the time Dad bought that whole box of shoes? A real bargain, eh. Or so he thought until he found out they were all for the left foot.”

  Not true. They were all different sizes.

  But she lets them get away with it because they are off now and telling stories for the benefit of the new person, the daughter-in-law who hovers anxiously in the doorway, caught between their stories and needing to be of some help to Mika, who is setting out the lunch. Mika listens to these stories. Each time she learns something new. Previously, at these sporadic weekend gatherings when they first began to flock home all at once, never alone, they told their stories with urgency and stealth. Stories of betrayal, favouritism. Some had called her names. But she has noticed how lately, their stories have changed. They have become harmless and humorous, slanted to expose the teller’s daring, or what they imagine to be unconventional childhoods.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mika hears herself call out to them. “That was your dad all right. Anything that was a bargain, he bought. Whether we needed it or not.”

  “Cheaper by the dozen, he always said,” Betty says. Betty’s memory matches her own more closely than any of the others’, Mika realizes. They remember the same things.

  “He sounds like such a neat person,” the new daughter-in-law says. “I wish I’d known him.” Mika knows she looks for clues that will reveal to her the man she married. Let me tell you about James. I think he was the one who kept banging his head against the crib.

  “What about the bells?” Betty’s steady voice overcomes their laughter and talk. “What about the time we all tied bells to our boots and darn near drove the Sunday School teacher batty?”

  Tell us about the braids, Mika urges, caught by Betty’s soft voice and how they all stop to listen when she speaks. It gnawed at Mika when she’d discovered Betty’s braids in the chest that she had never been able to ask why Betty had cut her hair off that day.

  Arms outstretched for balance, the child lurches back into the dining room once again, seeking out the drapery pull. The unsteady gait of the toddler makes Mika cringe. She shudders, imagining his head bashing against the sharp corner of the buffet and a wedge-shaped cut opening up. I had one who used to walk off chairs, she has told them. I think it was Rudy. He had no sense. I would stand him on the table and he’d walk right off if I didn’t stop him. “So, that’s what happened to Rudy. He fell on his head. Now we know.” They stole the story from her mouth. They don’t recall Rudy doing that. But she does. She remembers Rudy walking off the shed roof. Now, they would put a hockey helmet on such a one and let him go. Then, I had to tie him up. People thought I was being mean, but I had no choice. She feels vindicated now by Rudy’s prudence, how he has listened to her and got an education and can afford to build a new house. On this windy, frost-threatening day, the men and the grandsons are off helping Rudy shingle the roof of his new house.

  I had one who ate dirt. That’s all right, Mrs. Pats said. She always looked for something good in everything. Every person has to eat a peck of dirt before they die, Mrs. Pats said. But Mika feared pin worms. When the children ran wild, twitched and squirmed, she would look and, sure enough, discover the lashing white threads inside them. It was an embarrassment for her to have to ask at the drugstore for the purple worm pills, to push them into ice-cream cones to entice the younger ones to take them. And so she made that one wear mittens. Which one was it? One of the girls. This one is different, Mrs. Pats said, stockings rolled down around thick blue ropes of varicose veins, huffing and puffing into the kitchen without knocking, the first one to inspect her new baby. The one who ate dirt. Where do such ideas come from, she’d wondered, about having to eat a peck of dirt? The idea was strange. It made her think of the story she’d been told about the woman in Russia who had been buried alive.

  This baby has long limbs, Mrs. Pats said. Make sure you let her go four hours between feedings. Introduce solids early to prevent anemia. The heavy pewter salt and pepper shakers in the keepsake trunk were Mrs. Pats’s wedding gift to her and the woman’s right to visit every Saturday afternoon when the week’s baking cooled on the counter tops and Mika took advantage of the warm kitchen to bathe the children, one by one. Mika loved the heaviness of the salt and pepper shakers and their soft, dull colour. Once she had painted the walls in the living room a grey to match and Maurice had made jokes about it, had told all his customers down at the barber shop how his wife had decorated the house around a pair of salt and pepper shakers.

  She’d never had one who would go four hours between feedings.

  I had one who hated water. It took two of us to give him a bath. Sometimes Mrs. Pats would help me. He screamed and screamed and I didn’t know what to do but to force him into the tub and hold him there while someone else washed him. Sometimes I had to hit him and the shape of my hand would be there on his seat, raised and red. That’s not going to help any, Mrs. Pats said. But I didn’t know what else to do.

  I had one who, one day, came home from school or from wherever she had been. I didn’t always know. They often said one thing and did another. Even Betty. And who, for no reason I know of, marched upstairs into my bedroom and took the scissors from the sewing box and cut off her hair. When I lifted up the pillbox hats in the chest, all those hats, shoes and purses Mrs. Pats was always passing along to me, as though I ever went anywhere, there under the hats, curled like two question marks, were Betty’s braids. All I could think about when I saw them was the verse in the Bible about the sins of the parents being visited upon the children.

  “I’m getting married,” Betty had said. She had telephoned one day just when Mika was sitting at the table, thinking that Betty was doing so well at last, working at a good job and making something for herself. She had been thinking how lucky it was that Betty didn’t have to do maid’s work for the rich. Not like she and Elizabeth had done. Making so much and sending so much home and never anything left over for themselves. Being treated like dirt.

  I’m getting married, she herself had written to her parents, and sent the message home with her sister Elizabeth.

  Mika remembers. When Mrs. Pats had asked her what her plans were, she’d answered without thinking. “I don’t have any plans,” she’d said. “I’m not going to make a wedding for Betty and that’s it.”

  Immediately, she’d wanted to swallow her tongue. She knew even as she’d said it that she would make a wedding. She watched her fingers plucking nervously at her skirt and winced at the sight of the garden dirt caught in the chapped skin. I won’t make a wedding, she’d said and at the same time thinking she’d have to start wearing garden gloves to get her hands in shape for it. None of her children had inherited her broad hands or her stubby short fingers. All her children had long fingers, slim hands. Hands of a piano player, Maurice had said and went out and bought a piano which had sat silent ever since Betty had left home.

  “If you don’t make a wedding for Betty, then who will?” Mrs. Pats had asked, surprise flashing across her shiny face. Strands of her pewter-coloured hair had pulled loose from the metal combs and trailed down both sides of her face. Her hair was now the colour of the salt and pepper shakers. She sat on a chair on the veranda with her knees spread, cradling a bowl of peas in her lap. “It’s traditional for the bride’s parents to put on the wedding, you know.”

  Yes, I know. I know about tradition. I have been here long enough to have learned the English ways. I taught myself to read and write. And I’m going to make a wedding for Betty. Where they sat, a hedge of overgrown lilacs screened the veranda from Main Street. Across the street, three of her children played in the school yard, waiting for her. They were there between the branches of the lilac bushes, split into pieces
like vivid moving jigsaw puzzles, lying on their stomachs on the swings, twisting the ropes and lifting off, flying and spinning wildly as the swing unwound. They didn’t do the simplest things the usual way. Not her children. Like Betty, throwing over a good job and announcing out of the blue that she was going to marry this unknown Frank person.

  “I met Frank in Winnipeg,” Betty said. “I met him at a country western show. He’s in a band and plays bass guitar. By the way, he’s Mennonite.”

  “So, he’s a Mennonite. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I thought you’d be pleased about that, at least. But it doesn’t matter. We love each other. That’s what matters.”

  And the vinegar had come flooding up her throat into her mouth. “My, my, isn’t that wonderful,” she heard herself say. The skin on her knuckles stretched taut as she clenched the receiver. “I hope you’re not planning on wearing white.”

  Mika bends over the freezer, searching for the milk cartons filled with cabbage rolls. The child followed her down to the basement and she hears the bright tinkle of metal against glass. The child plays with Maurice’s jars of nuts and bolts, shaking them up and down, making his own music. I had one who played the most beautiful music. I don’t know how she did it. But she would listen to a song on the radio and then sit down and play it just as well, better even. Sometimes at night, she would come home and sit and play in the dark and I didn’t mind. It made me want to cry the way she could play Ebb Tide.

  His name is John Peters, she had written in the letter. Elizabeth will tell you all about him. He’s one of the Peterses who once had the store in Reinfeld.

  He’s thirty-one years old. But we agree, it doesn’t matter because we love each other.

  Father says no. This you must not do. Elizabeth, hands on hips to make herself look bigger. As if that’s necessary! I’m to send you home, Elizabeth says. Mother, Father, they know nothing about this man. Father says he will find work for you at the hotel.

  Elizabeth. Who does all the lifting and carrying in the house. Elizabeth, who is big and strong, does not carry her.

  Mika cries and cries. She begs. She paces about the cramped room, fists clenched tightly. She stands in front of the mirror, heart crashing, but watches without feeling the determined slow movement of the scissors in her hands and jagged chunks of thick auburn hair dropping to the floor.

  In the keepsake chest there are many letters. Things she can’t pass along. Mika hugs the frozen milk cartons to her breasts as she walks up the stairs. What will she do with those letters? Letters from Elizabeth. The letters filled with recipes, accounts of jelly-making, preserving, butchering, requests for measurements so Elizabeth could sew dresses for the girls, knit mittens and socks and fashion coats from left-over clothing given to her that was otherwise of no use. They were always polite requests, her sister was never anything but polite. The biting tongue had passed her by. But as she’d re-read the letters, she could find condemnation there because she hated those blistering days in the kitchen with boilers steaming on the cookstove, hot syrup running down the sides of jelly jars, cucumbers stuffed squeaking and complaining into quart sealers. Because she had forgotten how to write in German.

  In the letters there were hints of when would Mika learn to control herself. When would she take her sister’s advice and begin to use the rhythm method, surely that would be acceptable to Maurice? How could she explain to Elizabeth that their life had no discernible pattern? That it wasn’t a question of religion at all.

  Among the leftovers there was a wrinkled photograph which looked as though someone had once crumpled it up tightly in a fist and then smoothed it straight once again. The photograph puzzled her. It was of a stone monument sitting in a dirt square. The picture had been taken in the village in Russia where she’d been born. She couldn’t remember the place clearly, but remembered instead the stories her parents had told her. As she began to be absorbed by the day, her children, the stories grew pale until she could no longer remember any of them except the one her grandmother had told her, that strange frightening story about the woman they buried alive. She imagines a woman sitting on a chair with black skirts and a black shawl covering her white head. She’s sitting there beside the monument, her jaw collapsed because her teeth are gone. Her hands are folded neatly in her lap and she is listening for the muffled sound of a woman’s voice coming from the ground. It didn’t happen that way. That’s not the way the story goes. But she sees it in her mind, how the woman on the chair sits there listening and can’t do anything about it.

  “Why in the world shouldn’t I wear white?” Betty had asked and Mika heard in Betty’s voice the same smirkiness that always turned her mouth up at the corners whenever Mika tried to tell her anything. Usually, she would simply run from the room, or if she chose to listen, it would be with that silly, secretive smile in place. Mika wanted to slap the sound from her voice. She wanted to pinch and twist the smirk away and shout, wake up. Wake up, or you’ll be sorry.

  Born April 21st, a boy, eight pounds, seven ounces, Mika had written in her devotional book. My first grandchild. A darling baby boy. I never even saw him.

  “Look,” Betty said. “Just because I had a baby, that doesn’t make me any different than anyone else I know. Including you. I can count, you know.” For the first time, the smirkiness was not there. Her voice became blunt and hard.

  Jolted, surprised, Mika felt her cheeks burn. “Well, so. So then you know. To wear white is a sin. I never did when I married your dad and I won’t be a part of you doing it either.”

  Follow the light, Maurice had said, right to the end of the hallway. That’s where I am, the door beside the light on the second floor. Those red lights pointed the way home, the exits. I don’t know. I don’t know, she said. It’s up to you, he said, his voice deep and careful, coming from the bed behind her. Those red lights, it’s as though they’re pointing out something, something more than. … Pointing the way to what? he said into her neck. I’ve got something that’s pointing, he said. He strummed her breast with his thick fingers.

  “Remember how Dad could come home late and wake us all up? He’d be carrying ice-cream cones. And Mom would get so mad because he’d wake us all up and then we’d get all sticky with melting ice-cream. I think I would’ve killed Frank if he’d ever pulled a stunt like that. But we weren’t complaining, then. Oh no,” Betty says as Mika enters the living room, her arms laden with the things from the keepsake chest. The things she’s been saving.

  “Hey! Far out, Grandma. Let’s see.” The granddaughters have come back from downtown. How many boys have they met? Did they make promises to meet them later? Will they climb inside the boys’ cars? They swarm around her as she sets the bundle down on the floor. Shrieks of high-pitched laughter as the granddaughters pounce and rummage through samples of art work, pages of arithmetic. “Boy, Mom, were you ever dumb. Look at this. And you have the nerve to get on my case about school?”

  A flash of light as the living room drapery slides open. The child has discovered another drapery pull. A piece of paper tumbles down the road in front of the house. Across the road, a caramel-coloured German shepherd paces up and down its run. The curtains close slowly. Mike frowns at the sight of greenish mucus trailing from the child’s nose. She wishes the mother would put him to bed. From the kitchen, the smell of cabbage rolls sifts through the air. “Should I check on them?” the daughter-in-law asks, feeling left out as all of them, the daughters and granddaughters, ignore her as they laugh and compare samples of handwriting, the homemade birthday cards.

  “What about these?” Mika asks and pulls the braids out from behind her apron. They dangle in the air in front of her face, thick coarse hair, heavy, not like Betty’s hair is now. Betty’s hair at age thirteen, her own handwriting bands the end of one. “What about the time you cut off your hair? Why did you do it?”

  Betty looks up, startled. She gets up slowly and reaches. Mika pulls away. “What’s the story behind these?”r />
  “Yes, tell us, tell us,” the granddaughters say.

  “She probably believed in the hair fairy. Thought she’d put them under her pillow and cash in.”

  Laughter.

  Betty’s mouth shivers and her lips turn up into that secretive smile. “I don’t remember cutting off my braids,” she says. “I think Dad did it. I think he got tired of listening to me complain about having to have my hair done every morning.”

  One of the granddaughters reaches, snatches the braids and holds them up to her ears. “Look at me, you guys. Look at me,” she says. “I could make a Dolly Parton wig out of these.”

  And then they are all grabbing and examining the hair, passing it along and exclaiming over it.

  Mika follows the smell of the cabbage rolls into the kitchen. Is it true? Did Maurice really cut off the braids? It was something he would do. In a fit of impatience, it would be just like him to cut the hair in one swift movement. I had one who ate chalk. No, it wasn’t chalk. It was dirt. I had one who ate rat poison. A stupid child. We had to rush her to the doctor. Good thing he was only across the street. The twins. Once the twins got into some medicine. I think it was my phenobarb. Or was it painkillers? It wasn’t my fault. I kept them up high, but one of the twins was a climber.

  “Let me help you with something,” the daughter-in-law pleads. She looks up at the clock. The voices from the living room have grown louder as the granddaughters join in.

  “Hey, Mom. You used to tell me that if I stayed out in the rain I would melt. Remember? Well, I can remember being caught in a rain storm when I was a little kid and scared shit —”

  “Uhuh,” her mother warns.

  “Being terrified.”

  The daughter-in-law sits down at the table. “I think it’s really neat,” she says, “that you had such a large family. It must have been fun when they were all little.”