A Home in the Country

by Sheelagh Mawe

  Agnes leaned down so her face was close to mine and, reflecting in her glasses, I could see only the uncovered, leaping flames. ‘You’re a thief!’ she hissed. ‘Just like your brother. Only you done broke two commandments: Thou shalt not steal, and Thou shalt not lie.’

  Her flaming glasses went from me to the range top and she chuckled. ‘Thieves should burn,’ she crooned. ‘Oh, yeah! Four chocolates, four burns.’

  With a sudden lunge, she grabbed my wrist. I threw myself backwards but she was a little behind me and able to clamp the whole of my skinny body between her knees. Her other hand came down then on the back of mine and she slapped it, palm down, onto the searing surface of the range.

  ‘That’s one,’ she panted. And though I was screaming, calling for Cathy, twisting in pain, she slapped it down a second time. ‘I’ll teach you to steal from me. You’ll learn….’

  She let up for an instant and then, as though kneading bread dough, pressed my palm down a third and fourth time onto that roasting, unforgiving range top with the heel of her palm.

  Abruptly she let go of me, stepped back to sit in her rocker and I crumpled, howling, to the floor.

  ‘I can’t stand the sight of you no more,’ she panted. ‘Get on upstairs out of my sight.’

  More than anything in the world I wanted to get out of her sight but, twisted with pain as I was, I couldn’t right myself with the use of only one hand and I wasn’t fast enough for her. Coming out of her chair, she pulled me upright and dragged me towards the table where she threw me in a chair.

  ‘Cathy,’ she roared, and over the noise of my own agony, I heard Cathy’s feet thumping down the stairs and, through my tears, saw her arrive alongside Agnes.

  Agnes smiled up at her, hooked her arm around her waist, pulled her close and said, ‘Told you she wasn’t nothin’ but a thief, din’t I?’ Cathy didn’t answer but I knew her head would be nodding.

  Agnes leaned towards me pulling Cathy with her. ‘Come on now,’ she crooned, ‘open up that hand, show Cathy what happens to girls that listen to the Devil. Girls that thieve.’

  Again, I couldn’t straighten myself on the chair quickly enough and in a lunge that sent Cathy flying, Agnes reached across, grabbed my wrist, twisted it, and slammed my hand, palm up, on the table from where it exuded the stench of burnt flesh.

  In a moment of stunned silence, all three of us leaned in to stare in shocked disbelief at what no longer resembled a human hand at all, but rather a fragment of some ancient creature dredged up from the floor of a forgotten ocean. It could not lie flat, that hand. The blackened, charred fingers seemed to want to curl in on themselves as if to hide and protect the blisters that were still swelling and growing on the palm. Blood oozed from several joints of the fingers and there was the ugly shine of bone showing through black curls of flesh at the base of others.

  Agnes gasped and attempted to stand and the chair she had been sitting in toppled over with a crash. She leaned against the table a moment, head bowed as though she was having a dizzy spell, and then, holding on to the backs of other chairs, pulled herself over to the sink where she stood noisily retching.

  In between heaves, she began to mutter to herself. ‘I told her over and over she din’t watch where she was goin’ she’d end up gettin’ hurt, din’t I? I hadn’t caught her like I done, why … her face’d be all black and burned up too!’

  She stared out the window over the sink a while longer, still muttering and nodding to herself, then turned to Cathy. ‘Go get me my little pointy scissors,’ she said.

  ‘No-o-o-o …’ I howled. ‘No-o-o-o!’

  Agnes ignored me, walked over to the kitchen cabinet and brought out her largest wooden mixing bowl. Filling it with water from the kettle whistling on the back of the range, she slammed it down on the table in front of me and pointing, growled, ‘Put your hand in that water.’

  I threw myself on the floor. Snarling, Agnes wrestled me back in the chair, forced my grotesque-looking hand into the scalding water and suddenly, in some inexplicable way, I wasn’t there anymore. Instead, I seemed to be hovering over the scene, observing what was going on below as if I were watching actors in a play.

  From my vantage point, I saw Agnes pressing my hand down in the water, then snatching the scissors from Cathy. I heard Cathy whimpering, saw her trying not to look as Agnes jabbed the blisters and cut away the skin – skin that was white and wrinkled-looking from the steaming water where it wasn’t curly black.

  Setting aside the scissors, Agnes wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and told Cathy to get butter out of the icebox. Receiving it, she tried spreading it on my raw ugliness with her fingers. When that didn’t work, she gave up and used a knife. Cathy was then sent for rags. While Cathy was gone I watched, still from above, the butter melting into the burnt black and red holes on my palm.

  Cathy came back and Agnes ripped the rags she had brought into strips and tied them around my hand up to the wrist. And what I couldn’t understand – and still don’t – was how I could be up on the ceiling watching everything and yet not feel any pain at all, while knowing full well it had to hurt more, and worse, than anything that had ever happened to me before.

  Finished with her bandaging, I watched Agnes pull me out of the chair and point me to the stairs. Heard her say ‘Git!’ Saw me – the kid – stumbling and falling repeatedly as I made my way towards them. Abruptly, Agnes caught up with me, grabbed me from behind, spun me around to face her, said, ‘What you gonna tell ’em, folks ask what you done to your hand?’

  I didn’t know what I was going to tell them and I saw my face blur as Agnes’ open hand cracked into it.

  ‘You’ll tell ’em you fell on the range, that’s what,’ Agnes snarled. ‘Gonna say you fell over your own damn feet, like always.’

  I heard the kid, me, whisper, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and, still from above, watched myself, doubled over like a hunchback, stumbling up the stairs. And then, suddenly, I wasn’t on the ceiling anymore, but back inside myself, trying to get upstairs away from Agnes, but my hand hurt so fiercely it was as if I’d been burned all over and even the soles of my feet couldn’t stand the pain.

  Nevertheless, I continued the struggle while a picture drifted into my mind. It was a picture of Agnes, head thrown back in laughter, her tongue and teeth streaked with chocolate.

  Somehow, teetering as I went, I reversed my ascent and stumbled backwards until I was once again in front of Agnes where, fighting for breath between sobs, I said, ‘Ma’am … I’d’ve et them chocolates like you said I done, my mouth … uh … my mouth’d be all over chocolate inside and it ain’t, lookit,’ and I twisted towards her, my mouth open wide and my tongue protruding.

  Agnes hauled off and slapped that gaping mouth, yet even while I was falling against the wall, I thought of something else, and it was as though I suddenly had a mouth that did its own talking.

  ‘Ma’am …’ it said. ‘Bein’ you think I’m so bad, can I get to go to the reform school now? Please.’

  Agnes’ mouth twisted, ‘Bad as you are?’ she spat. ‘Ain’t a reform school in the state’d have you!’

  SIXTEEN

  Within a day or two of Agnes burning my hand or, as Danny put it, ‘barbecuing your hand’, school re-opened and a short time after that, Cathy’s class started to learn about hibernation.

  ‘There’s some kinds of animals, see,’ she explained to Danny and me as we walked home from the school bus, ‘like bears, for one, that, come winter, just take off to a dark place and curl up and go to sleep, not gettin’ up to eat or drink or poop, even.’

  We were fascinated by this information because ever since the ‘barbecue’, Agnes, with just a few small differences, seemed to be hibernating.

  One of the differences between her and the bears was she didn’t have a dark place to sleep, only her rocker in its usual place next to the range. Another, she did eat and go to bed.

  But in between, dressed in her robe, three pairs
of the Old Man’s socks and a heavy blanket over her knees, she stayed, eyes closed and immobile in her rocker, not even going through her box of cut-outs, which still lay on the floor of her office next to where her rocker used to stand. She stopped going outside to the shit house, too, old Agnes, preferring to do her business instead in the pot, which she had Cathy bring in and place in a corner of the office.

  Coming in from school, we got in the habit of standing outside the kitchen door and taking in big, deep gulps of air before opening it to the stench of Agnes and her pot: she, unwashed and over-heated; the pot from being where no fresh air could ever get near it.

  ‘Worse’n the barn, the hog pens and the chickens put together,’ we’d gag, averting our eyes and arguing fiercely over whose turn it was to empty that disgusting pot in the equally disgusting shit house.

  The pot and the stink aside, we hoped Agnes would hibernate forever as, over the ensuing weeks, we developed several interesting new customs, all in our favour. The best was choosing what we wanted to eat for supper from the jars in the cellar and eating as much as we wanted. Second was telling the Old Man we needed money for the store, then buying only half of what was needed so we could get in line at the candy wagon with the change.

  An added bonus was doing our homework at the kitchen table after supper – a supper Agnes always ate – where we quickly learned we could say anything we felt like in front of her. Either she didn’t hear, or couldn’t, and once the Old Man left for his cabin and his bottle, we aimed murmured insults at Agnes’ drowsing head whenever the spirit moved us.

  ‘You’re awful ugly, Agnes, know that?’

  ‘Know how come your kids don’t never visit, Agnes? ’Cause you stink, that’s how come.’

  ‘Know what we’re fixin’ to do for you, Agnes? Gonna build you a nice, hot fire, that’s what. Gonna fill the incinerator with newspaper and gasoline and logs – logs that fit just perfect, mind – and throw you in it. That way you’ll keep nice and warm.’

  For all our new-found freedom, however, we were smart enough not to push our luck. Particularly not since the day Cathy read ahead in her book and found out that bears returned to their normal, waking habits in the spring.

  ‘They wake up and get goin’ again, is what they do,’ Cathy advised, ‘and we can’t never tell when old Agnes is gonna snap out of it. We got to be ready, else look out!’

  On learning this, we went out of our way to keep up with our chores both inside and outside so that if Agnes should awaken she would find the fire damped, the eggs collected, the cows milked, the beds made, the dishes washed and the floors swept.

  The only chore Cathy and I didn’t attempt during the hibernation period was the wash. The reasoning behind that was simple: we were too smart to try. How could we, with Agnes and her rocker taking up so much space in the kitchen there was no room to get out the washtubs? An even better reason was what our own past experience had taught us: wet clothes hung out in winter freeze solid to the lines. And where were we supposed to spread stuff out to thaw, huh? Drape it all over Agnes?

  ‘Winter ain’t like summer, anyways,’ Cathy said. ‘It ain’t like as if we’re out diggin’ and weedin’ and gettin’ dirt all over so if ever Agnes gets around to wakin’ up, how’s she gonna know if we changed our clothes or not? Same for the bed sheets. How’s she gonna know, huh?’

  One morning Cathy and I got out of bed and knew right away something was different. We just didn’t have time to figure out what it was. Not with having to fix Agnes her coffee and fry the Old Man his eggs, we didn’t. Then Danny came in with the milk and said, ‘It ain’t cold out there no more!’

  That’s what it was! We weren’t shivering!

  Cathy looked scared. ‘This might could get her up,’ she whispered.

  We looked over at Agnes in her rocker, dipping bread in her coffee, spilling and dribbling most of it down her robe, and memories of the tentative, fearful way we lived every second of every day before she went into hibernation flooded our minds.

  Danny swallowed a noisy swallow and told Cathy she was nuts. ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘She ain’t goin’ no place. She’ll be right where she’s at when we get home, betcha.’

  For all his brave words none of us wasted any time over our cornflakes that morning. Just did the dishes, swept the floor, and left for the bus half an hour early.

  Cathy got it right and Danny got it wrong, as usual. Agnes was standing at the range cooking when we came in from school. She was wearing her old print dress, her hair was combed and the rocking chair was back in the office, her box of cut-outs open on the floor beside it. Did she even know she went away – hibernated – all that long while, we wondered? Or did she just put down her coffee cup after we left and go up and change as she had in the past? Did she notice the front of her robe stained top to bottom with spilled food? Or all the tangles in her hair? And how about her stinking pot in the corner of the office? Did she wonder how it got there?

  Seeing us coming through the door she said, ‘Danny, want you down in the barn cleaning up that old cow. Radio says the men in uniform is needin’ more beef. Need to get my money out of her ’fore the gov’ment comes wantin’ me to feed the army for free. Damn thing ain’t giving milk worth a damn anyways. Alls she’s doin’ is costin’ me good money keepin’ her fed.’

  Danny looked hopeful. ‘You mean Suzy, ma’am?’

  ‘You deaf? I said the old cow, didn’t I? Suzy’s the young cow. I’m expectin’ her to give me a calf in a year or two so why’d I want rid of her?’

  Danny took a minute to think that over, ‘So’s the calf won’t eat?’ he ventured.

  Agnes let loose on both sides of his head with the spatula, hot grease flying every which way and we knew for sure her hibernating was over. But good. The only thing left to wonder and worry about then was, what would she be coming up with next?

  Plenty.

  ‘Work you-all through a couple more summers is what I intend to do,’ she informed us one Saturday after the Old Man had taken off to deliver the chickens. ‘Raise and sell more dressed chickens, more eggs. Grow more vegetables. Go on like that a while, get a calf out of that Suzy cow, then sell everythin’. Every last thing. Sell you-all along with the rest if’n I could. Right out from under Walter, too.’

  It all sounded like a dream come true to us. She took off and left us … sold us…. Didn’t make us no never mind!

  ‘She forgets to call Bennings, we’ll call her our own selves,’ Cathy said. ‘That, or find us a place of our own.’

  Wait a minute. Find us a place of our own? That didn’t sound like the Cathy we knew who always preached that we were too little and too dumb to count. How was she going to work that one out? And what about the Old Man? Did he know she was planning to sell up and move on without him? If he did he gave no sign of it, but kept right on running her ‘in town’ errands.

  Errands at that time of year meant not only delivering dressed chickens and eggs and butter, but bringing back crates of baby chicks and ducks and turkeys from the Farmers’ Market in town. Babies that had to stay in boxes behind the range till they were hardy enough to go out in the runs Agnes had had Danny build for them using scrap lumber.

  At first sight I thought all those fluffy, yellow baby chicks were the cutest things I ever saw but that didn’t last long. In just a couple of days they turned into the big, fat stinking pain in the ass Cathy had foretold. Not only did their boxes have to be cleaned out twice a day, but they needed an electric light bulb over them to keep them warm, a special warm mash, and water given very, very carefully, some of the chicks even requiring us to use an eye dropper.

  ‘You let one drop of water spill on them turkey birds they’ll die,’ Agnes warned. ‘They do, count yourselves dead alongside ’em.’

  Water got spilled, two of the turkeys died, we all got black eyes and our teachers wanted to know what we were finding to fall over that week.

  The new cement paths outside had crumbled from the col
d just as the Old Man had foretold – even the fancy zig-zag one – and we had to shovel them up and dump the heavy, chunky fragments deep in the woods and make new ones, else who in their right mind was going to buy the place?

  Along with Agnes, that’s all we kids came to think about then, and over our remaining time in captivity: making the place look good. ‘On account of she don’t get to sell,’ Cathy warned, ‘we ain’t goin’ no place.’

  Agnes said, ‘From now on, I want you planting more vegetables so’s I can sell ’em down at the side of the road where the Old Man’s bus comes by. You’ll need to plough up that whole entire piece of land ’stead of just the one corner we been usin’ to make room for ’em.’

  ‘She’s crazier’n a June bug,’ Danny complained later. ‘That piece of land’s just too darn big and we’re just too darn small. Why, we don’t even got a real plough. Just that piece of junk whoever lived here a hundred years back threw out in the woods, knowing it wasn’t but a piece of shit even back then. What she needs to do is hire someone. A big, strong guy with a real plough might could do it.’

  ‘How about a big strong guy with a tractor?’ Cathy suggested, knowing it would never happen.

  ‘That’d do it,’ Danny said, looking like he thought it might.

  We did it. Just the three of us.

  ‘We live to be one hundred years old a-piece and work every one of them days, nothing we ever do is gonna be bad as this,’ Danny said, trying to start a furrow in the sucking, weed-choked clay.

  Taking turns with that rickety plough, its components held together with baling wire, we tugged and pulled and got stuck and fell down and cussed and cried and got blisters on top of blisters, all the while knowing we had to keep our hands away from Agnes’ prying eyes else have her calling for her scissors. The little pointy ones.

  Agnes couldn’t stand to watch us plough and she couldn’t stay away either. ‘Look at it,’ she’d scream to whoever wasn’t ploughing about whoever was. ‘Damn fool’s been stuck in the one place all morning long and my seedlings wiltin’ … Dyin’….’