by Mary Lawson
“Where’d I get to?” Miss Vernon said at last.
“You and your sister had decided to marry Henry and Arthur Pye.”
“Ha!” she said. “That’s right! That’s exactly right.”
She straightened herself in her chair, eyes narrowed, gazing off across her vegetable patch to the woods beyond, and beyond the woods into her past. Facing it squarely and sternly now, the romantic notions of her girlhood long gone.
“We got this idea in our heads, Nellie and me. No sense to it at all—they hadn’t courted us or anything. The odd bit of flirting here and there, nothin’ more. Truth was, we didn’t even know those two boys all that well. Sounds funny, since we grew up so close, with no one else to know. But they’d worked on that farm dawn till dusk almost since they could walk, and they didn’t ever have much in the way of free time. And they weren’t ones for talkin’. Pete had been the only one given to talkin’ and thinkin’ about things. All Nellie and me really knew about Henry and Arthur Pye was that they were single and they were handsome. The Pye men were all handsome, every last one of ‘em. Well, you know that yourself. Every one of ‘em, once they’d got over the weedy stage, turned out tall and lean with that thick dark hair and those eyes of theirs. Nellie used to say their eyes were as dark as God’s. Particularly Arthur and Henry—wonderful dark eyes. They were big, husky boys, too, bigger than their daddy. Bigger than our brothers.”
She sighed. “Anyways, that was our plan, Nellie’s and mine. We were going to marry the Pye boys. So we were glad to know that they were set on inheriting the farm. But of course, we all reckoned without old Jackson. You’d’ve thought he’d of learned his lesson, wouldn’t you? He’d driven away three of his sons—more than half his labour force—you’d’ve thought any man would have realized he had to change, treat the ones he had left with some respect. But that seemed to be somethin’ he couldn’t learn.
“This particular winter he set them clearin’ more land—choppin’ down trees, clearin’ away the undergrowth, diggin’ out the tree roots. Awful hard work. My brothers were helping—all the families helped each other out—and they said when they arrived in the mornings the Pye boys were already hard at it and when they left at night they’d be hard at it still, and old Jackson wouldn’t have let up cursing at them for a single minute the entire day. Until this one day, along toward dusk, Jackson yelled at Henry about somethin’, and Henry stopped what he was doing; stood stock still for a moment, looking at the ground. And then he put down his axe and walked over to his father—you remember I said they were big boys? Well, he picked Jackson up by his neck.” Miss Vernon clasped an arthritic old hand to her neck, close up under her chin. “Like this. Lifted him right off the ground. He held him hard up against a tree for a minute or two, Jackson’s legs danglin’ and kickin’ and his voice squeakin’ out. My brothers said it would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been so scary. And then Henry looked across at Arthur, who was standin’ there with my brothers, not doin’ anything to help his father, and said, ‘The farm’s all yours, Art.’ And he lets his father drop, and walks off. Collects his stuff from the house and sets off down the road that very night.”
She sighed again, and dropped her hands in her lap.
I picked a cinnamon cookie out of the tin and handed it to her, but she shook her head so I ate it myself. I chewed quietly, hoping that if I didn’t disturb her she would go on, and eventually she did. She sounded tired, though, as if the memories themselves had taken their toll.
“Henry was to have been mine,” she said. “I don’t recall how Nellie and I worked out whose was whose, but I know Henry was to have been mine. But maybe he didn’t know that, ‘cause he didn’t come to say goodbye. I thought of him, walking down that road; imagined his footprints exactly fitting the footprints of Pete, who’d gone before him. Edward and Norman too, of course— four sets of Pye footprints, all headed south, none of them ever coming back—but it was Pete I was thinking of. I remember thinking, There goes my last chance.”
She was silent for a while. Then she snorted again, but this time, rather than contempt, she seemed to be expressing wry acceptance.
“So Arthur got the farm,” she said.
She stopped again and began mumbling her teeth. I started to worry that she wasn’t going to go on, so finally I prompted her, “How about Nellie? Did Arthur marry her?”
“I’m comin’ to that.” She gave me a sharp look. “Have a little patience. It’s a long story and it’s wearin’ me out.”
That was what I was afraid of—that she’d get worn out before she got to the end. I felt I needed to know everything that happened on that stricken farm. I didn’t want to wait until the next day. What if she died in the night or had a stroke and lost the power of speech? I would never learn the rest of the story. For some reason it seemed to me that that would be a calamity. I almost felt that if I knew the whole of the past, if I knew exactly what had happened to previous generations of Pyes, I could slip back in time and straighten out their story, set it on a different course so that it couldn’t collide with our own.
So I had difficulty restraining my impatience. I had to resist the urge to prod her, to nag at her to keep going. Both of us had forgotten that I was supposed to be weeding her garden. We sat on, she in her chair, me on the grass beside her, while the heat gradually faded out of the day.
“So, what happened next …” She rattled her teeth, scrolling back and forth through time. “What happened next is Mrs. Pye died. That’s right. Pneumonia. Quite soon after Henry left. And about a couple of months after that Arthur asked Nellie to marry him. I remember watching them through the kitchen window. They were outside, out by the barn. I knew what he was askin’ because of the way Nellie was squirmin’ inside her clothes. You could see how pleased she was even from behind. She had an expressive seat, that girl. She said yes, of course. But our father said no. He said he had nothin’ against Arthur personally, but someday someone was going to get killed on that farm, and he didn’t want any daughter of his to be there when it happened. So that was that. Nellie went off with an itinerant preacher a year later. I’ll tell you about that some other time, that’s a story all on its own, and it served her right.
“Jackson and Arthur carried on alone. Some said Arthur didn’t speak to his daddy the last three years of his life, but I don’t know how they’d know that for sure—what about at supper? How’d they know Arthur didn’t say, ‘Pass the salt’ or ‘What’d you do with the bread knife’? Anyway, one thing’s for sure, Arthur was a happy man the day old Jackson was laid to rest. That I know, cause I was at the funeral. He just couldn’t stop grinnin’. Smirked the whole way through the service. Wouldn’t’ve surprised me one bit if you told me he’d come back after everyone else had gone and danced barefoot on the grave.
“Next day he saddles up and heads off down the road, and six weeks later back he comes with a wife.”
I looked at her uneasily. I was starting to feel a sense of foreboding—almost a premonition, as if unknown to myself, I had always known the path this story was to take. As if the knowledge had been born in me and merely remained buried until now.
Miss Vernon was nodding at me as if she knew what I was feeling and agreed with it all. “So that was the next Mrs. Pye,” she said. “Nice little thing. Big blue eyes. Looked quite a bit like Arthur’s mother, as a matter of fact.
“She and Arthur set up home in that big grey farmhouse. Had it all to themselves, a fresh start, you might say. A year later, she had a baby. Next year she had another. Six kids in all, three boys and three girls, a nice-sized family. Things should have been fine. But guess what? Arthur quarrelled with all of them. Every single one. Girls got married when they were hardly even into their teens—anything to get away, see. I don’t know where they went to, but none of them ever came back. And two of the boys went too. Followed their uncles down that road.”
She shook her head and made a tutting sound, her tongue against her teeth.
“My, but the Pye women must’ve hated that road. Must’ve seemed like it had a ‘One Way’ sign on it. Like in those fairy stories they tell you when you’re little. That big mountain that swallowed up all the children— you know, the story with the rats.”
I nodded.
“Well what was it? I keep forgetting names of things. Makes me so mad.”
“‘The Pied Piper.’”
“That’s the one. Children all got swallowed up by that mountain. That’s how it must’ve seemed to Mrs. Pye. To all the Mrs. Pyes. Off they all go, down that road.”
I thought of the road. White, dusty, unremarkable. The way out. I wanted to go down it myself, but even then—and I think I was at my bitterest and most resentful at that time, poor Miss Vernon saw the worst of me— I knew that I didn’t want it as badly as those Pye children must have.
“Anyways, there was still one son left. Know who he was?”
I sorted through the generations, trying to tie in what she’d told me with what I’d known before, and then realized that there was only one person it could have been.
“Calvin?”
“Right. Calvin Pye. He was the one that stayed. My opinion is he hated his daddy worse than any of them. And he was scareder of him, too. But he was still the one that stayed. Stubborn. Must have been tough for him. Skinny little kid, small for his age. Didn’t come into his strength till he was about eighteen or so—so the work must have been real hard. And all the while, Arthur screamin’ at him… .”
All the way through her story I had had a picture in my mind, at every stage, of whichever one she was talking about, but now I found that I couldn’t picture Calvin as a boy. I kept seeing Laurie instead. Laurie, a skinny little kid, small for his age, labouring day after day in the fields, accompanied always—always—by his father’s abuse.
“He never answered back,” Miss Vernon was saying, and I was confused until I remembered it was Calvin she was talking about. “Even when he was fully grown. Never dared to. Too scared. He just stood there and took it, just swallowed whatever he was feelin’. Must’ve just about scalded out his insides.”
So there was a difference, after all. As a child, Laurie too had burned bright with swallowed rage, but when he was older, he did answer back. Oh, definitely, he did answer back.
Miss Vernon was rambling on. “And then his mother died. Let me see … how old would Calvin have been … about twenty-one, twenty-two. She died standin’ at the kitchen stove, makin’ gravy. Never was one to make a fuss. Got the whole dinner cooked, all bar the gravy. I know that ‘cause I helped lay her out. Gravy was all stuck on the bottom of the pan—the men never thought to take it off the stove. I had an awful job to get it clean.
“We couldn’t any of us understand why Calvin stayed after that. Thought surely he’d go. Couldn’t imagine him wantin’ the farm that bad. But he stayed. Maybe he thought his daddy was goin’ to pass on soon, but he was wrong about that. Arthur was a fit man, he lasted another eighteen years. Imagine it. Livin’ and workin’ together every day for eighteen years, hatin’ each other’s guts. It’s enough to curdle your blood, just thinkin’ about it.”
She shook her head and clicked her tongue against her teeth again. “Families,” she said. She shifted about in her chair, easing herself this way and that. I hoped she wasn’t going to say she needed the bathroom. I was afraid she’d lose the thread, now, at the last minute, so close to the point where my own knowledge took over. But it was all right, she carried on.
“Where was I?”
“Arthur and Calvin were left together.”
“That’s right. That’s right. Just the two of them in that big old house, busy hating each other. They must’ve been good at it by the end. Practice makes perfect. Finally Arthur had a stroke. He was roarin’ at Calvin about somethin’ across a field of sugar beets and he just dropped dead. Killed by rage, you might say, and a blessed relief for everybody.”
She paused again. “So how old’s that make Calvin by the time he’s finally free? You work it out. I never could add up.”
“Thirty-nine or forty.”
“That’s about right. A middle-aged man. But never mind, he’s free at last, and he’s got a good farm. What do you think happens next? You tell me.”
I swallowed. The apprehension I’d felt earlier had congealed now in the pit of my stomach. I said, “He went to New Liskeard and found a wife?”
She nodded. “That’s right. You figured it out. Spotted the pattern.”
We sat for a bit, listening to the silence. The cicadas had stopped singing. For years I had tried to catch them in the act of stopping—to hear the very last cicada sound the very last note of the day—but I’d never managed it. Now the woods were eerily quiet, waiting for the creatures of the night to begin their shift.
“I could do with another cookie now,” Miss Vernon said.
I passed her one and she ate it slowly, mumbling crumbs down the front of her dress. Mouth still full she said, “She was a nice woman, too, only I forget her name. Pye men always had good taste in women. What was her name, then? You should remember it.”
“Alice,” I said.
“That’s right. Alice. She was a nice woman. Started off full of life, like they all did. Bakin’ for the church functions, joinin’ the sewing bee. Think she even played the organ in church for a while. That’s right. She did. But then Calvin said the practisin’ took up too much time so she had to give it up. Joyce Tadworth took over, she didn’t know one note from another. It was pure torture listenin’ to her.”
She gazed off into the darkness of the woods, remembering discords. After a minute she said vaguely, “Alice had a lot of miscarriages. Must’ve had about two miscarriages for every live birth, poor woman. So she ended up with just the three. I never did get a proper hold on their names. You’d know them, though. You don’t need me to tell you about them.”
I thought of Rosie. She’d been like some poor seedling accidentally sown outside somebody’s back door—spindle-thin, pale and weedy, trodden on every time she raised her head. I had a sudden vivid memory of her standing beside her desk—our desks had been next to each other, so she’d also been standing beside mine. We’d both have been about six at the time, in grade one. Miss Carrington must have asked her a question; you had to stand to answer questions. But Rosie couldn’t answer it. She’d stood there, silent, and after a minute I’d noticed that her whole body was shaking. Miss Carrington said, quite kindly, “I’m sure you know this, Rosie. Give it a try.” And there was a faint trickling noise, and the smell of urine, and I’d suddenly seen a little puddle growing on the floor around Rosie’s shoes. Miss Carrington didn’t ask her any questions after that.
That was Rosie. And then there was Marie. The way she always stood, when she wasn’t carrying things, with her arms wrapped round herself, hugging her elbows as if she were cold, even on a hot day. Her voice always so soft and timid—too soft and too timid. It had irritated me. I remembered listening to her talking with Matt, and being irritated by the sound of it.
And Laurie, who’d taken by far the lion’s share of Calvin’s wrath. I’d had no idea, at the time, of what his life was like. Such things were completely beyond my imagining. All I was aware of was that he almost never met your eyes, and that when he did, there was something in his own eyes that obliged you to look away.
Miss Vernon stirred and sighed. She said, “You tell me something now. You’re supposed to be smart, so they tell me. How come all the Pye men took such a dislike to their own kids? How could that happen, three generations running? Is it somethin’ in their blood? Or is it just ‘cause that’s the only way they know to behave? ‘Cause it doesn’t seem natural, to me. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No. Didn’t think you would. You’re not that smart. Nobody knows.”
We sat in silence. Shade was spreading out from the woods, moving stealthily, creeping up on us. I slapped a mosquito and the skin of my ar
m felt cool.
“Anyways,” Miss Vernon said, “guess you know the rest. Probably know it better than I do.”
I nodded. I knew the rest.
She brushed crumbs off her lap with her twisted old hand.
“Do you want me to pick some vegetables for your supper?” I said.
“Beans. But first you’ve got to get me to the bathroom. I’ve left it kinda late.”
So we shuffled off to her bathroom, Miss Vernon and I, and left the history of the Pyes to be absorbed once more, slowly, like mist off the lake, into the cool evening air.
chapter
ELEVEN
I was fifteen when Miss Vernon told me the Pyes’ story. At that age I was capable, though only just, of fully comprehending all that she said, of wondering at it and seeing the relevance it had to what had taken place in my own generation. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it made me any more sympathetic or understanding, but at least it helped me put things in context. If I’d heard the story at the age of seven, I’m sure it would have meant nothing to me at all. For a start, the very young are necessarily self-centred. What do they care for the tragic or untidy lives of their neighbours? Their primary business is survival, and their preoccupation is with those who help them to survive. Of course their business is also learning about the world around them—hence the boundless curiosity of young animals—but survival comes first, and for me that year, survival—at least in the emotional sense—was as much as I could manage.
