A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

  After the sermon we sang a hymn we sing every Mother’s Day. My mother says she could do without that song, but I myself feel it has a lot of meaning. We all stood up. Mrs. Carlson sang in her usual voice. Mr. Carlson didn’t sing at all, just looked at the words. Leonard turned around and stared at me a couple of times.

  Mid pleasures and palaces, though we may roam,

  Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

  A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,

  Which, seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere.

  Home, home, sweet, sweet home,

  There’s no place like home,

  O, there’s no place like home.

  That afternoon, I found the cat.

  I had just come from Mary’s house to see what she had done for her mother on Mother’s Day. I knew it would be something clever because that’s how she is.

  The cat was in a ditch when I first saw it. A kitten actually, scratching at a little drift and meowing. It was grey and skinny, its voice thin and unpleasant. I leaned over the ditch, picked it up by the fur of its neck as I’d been taught to do, and set it down on the concrete walk. But it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t move. It just stood there by my ankle. I walked away and it followed me, meowing after me in its ugly voice. I didn’t know what to do, so I scooped it up with my two hands, laid it on the crook of my arm and took it with me back to Mary’s house. I stood in their porch and showed the cat to Mrs. Sorenson. She leaned against the porch wall, against a giant-sized pile of newspapers and magazines, and told me I should take it back where I found it.

  “In the ditch?” I asked.

  “Wherever you found it,” she said. “Its owner will be looking for it.”

  “In the ditch?” I asked. “Will the owner look in the ditch?”

  “It may be diseased,” she said. “It’s best not to bring it in the house.” She spoke kindly but firmly. Mrs. Sorenson is not a cruel person, but she’s no lover of cats.

  I left Mary’s house and went back to ask my mother if we could keep it. She said the same thing as Mrs. Sorenson. “Take it back where you found it.”

  “I found it in a ditch,” I said.

  “By whose house?” she asked. “It no doubt belongs to the people who live near the ditch.”

  “To Sorensons?” I asked. “Mrs. Sorenson can’t stand cats.”

  “Maybe another house,” my mother said. “Ask at the other houses. I understand Mrs. Gilbertson has cats. But come home soon,” she added. “It’s nearly suppertime.”

  I walked down the street, carrying the shivering kitten in my arms. I began knocking on doors. Everyone said the same thing: “Take it back where you found it.” And I said the same thing too. “I found it in a ditch.” Then they said maybe Mrs. So and So would like to have it. And I’d knock on a few more doors.

  The last door I knocked on was Mrs. McDonald’s. Mrs. McDonald had always seemed like a very friendly person to me. Whenever she saw me she’d ask about my parents. “How are the Hagens?” she’d say. She always called them the Hagens. “You Hagens are good people.” So I thought this might be my lucky chance. Maybe Mrs. McDonald would take the kitten.

  “Me?” she said, standing under the light in her front hall, rubbing her thin hands on the pockets of her apron. “Oh, no, honey, I couldn’t possibly, as much as I’d like to, not with my allergy. But aren’t you a precious one for caring so. Aren’t you just the sweetest little girl, looking out for that poor animal. You are the kindest little thing,” she said. I thought she’d said enough, but she went on and on. I stood in the doorway and listened to every word. “You’re going to make a very good little mother,” she said. “Just the best mother ever. Look at you with that poor thing. What a sweet little mother you are.” I believe she finished right then because she started closing the door, quite firmly, easing me out on the step, still holding the limp and whining cat.

  What happened next is what I’m trying to figure out. I’ve spent two years now trying to figure this out, but I’m not sure I understand, even now.

  I didn’t know what to do with the kitten, so I headed out of town on the dirt road that leads to Goertzens’. It was getting dark and windy and much colder, so I shoved the kitten under my jacket to keep it warm, and I pulled the sleeves of the jacket over my hands to keep them warm. I felt the cat under the cloth, pressing against my chest, its claws pushing back and forth into the softness there. I bent my head against the wind and stumbled through the ruts, my boots oozing down into the half-frozen mud. I didn’t know where I was going, just leaving town with that ugly kitten pushing on my chest, nibbling at me, purring and pressing against me as if I were its home, as if I were the place where it belonged.

  When I passed the correction line I looked back and saw the town lit up behind me, all the houses behind me with orange light shining out of the windows. I turned and saw the blackness ahead of me, the night dark and empty as a cave. I tried walking faster through the mud, the cat still clinging to the softness on my chest. Then I realized I wasn’t going anywhere. There was no place to go. Only Goertzens’, and that was too far – five miles at least.

  I stopped. I stood in the middle of the road and pulled the cat out from under my jacket. I held it up by the fur of its neck, looked at it by the light of the stars and the snow that shone in the ditch. I saw its eyes glimmering, its small kitten eyes looking at me.

  “You ugly cat,” I said. “You stupid cat.” Its eyes gleamed. “You don’t know anything, do you. Not your father or your mother or even where you come from. You are so stupid.” And I hated the cat. I hated its thin voice and its loose sickly body. I hated its sticky fur and thin bones under the fur. But most of all, I hated it dangling there alone, under the stars, watching me, waiting.

  That’s when I did it. I grabbed its tail and lifted the cat above my head. I swung it in circles high above my head. I swung it faster in big circles. Then I let go, and I saw its body, tangled and crooked, flip through the air and land in the ditch. I stepped in closer and looked at it – a small stain on the snow. I bent down and scraped at some stones on the road. I scraped with both hands until I found a big stone. And I lifted it up and hurled it down on the cat. Then I lifted up another and smashed it down. And the cat sank a little in the drift. And there was blood on the snow. When I’d thrown all the stones, I turned around and headed back to town.

  I saw the lights of town in the distance, the orange lights from all the houses. I used to like going home after dark and seeing those lights. In winter, when it was dark at four o’clock, I’d walk home from school and look at the houses with light shining out of the windows. I’d think of children and fathers going home in the dark. And when they got there, the house would be warm, the supper cooking, and the mother setting the table and humming. But that night, walking into town, it wasn’t like that.

  When I got home my parents had already eaten supper and were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  “You’ve been gone a long time,” my father said. “Did you find a home for the kitten?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh? Where?” my mother asked.

  “Some Ukrainians took it,” I said.

  “You mean you walked all the way past the tracks?”

  “Only as far as Levinskys’,” I said.

  “Did Mrs. Levinsky take it then?”

  “No,” I said. “But Mrs. Levinsky said she knew some Ukrainians who live on the other side of the Hutterites. She said they’d take it because they have a huge barn and a lot of other cats and fresh milk and hay, so the cat would be warm and comfortable and have friends. Mrs. Levinsky will take it there tomorrow.”

  “That was kind of Mrs. Levinsky,” my father said.

  “I thought so,” I said and went upstairs to the bathroom to wash my hands for supper.

  I didn’t think about my experience that night. I was too tired. I went to bed early and fell asleep right away. But since then it’
s been on my mind. I’ve thought about it for two years now – what I did, and the orange lights. And I’ve wondered how I could have done that. And how there’s no getting away from that. And how do you go on from there? What do you do next if you’re a person of faith?

  I know what the Buddhists would do. I’ve read about Buddhists in the encyclopedia. They think that if you know you’ll do wrong by going places and doing things, then just don’t go there. Stay where you are. Sit. Then you won’t sin.

  But I’m not a Buddhist. I think it’s more like this. You go to places, knowing all along it won’t be just right or true. There’ll be darkness there, and some damage. But you go just the same. There’ll always be some light. Pieces of it anyway. And you can notice that.

  On Monday I went to school as usual. At recess I met Esther at our special place by the poplar tree and we talked about Mother’s Day. I told her I made breakfast and went to church with my mother. She told me her mother liked the box of chocolates and they spent the day at Cutlers’. Her family doesn’t go to church because they’re Jews, not to synagogue either because there aren’t enough Jews in our town to have one. They do celebrate festive occasions in their homes, however. Like the Passover. And Mother’s Day. At least they do in our town. I don’t know if they have a Mother’s Day in Israel or not. I know in Japan there’s no special day set aside for mothers. Instead they have a Boys’ Day and a Girls’ Day. But the Scandinavian countries celebrate much the same as we do, at least in Norway, with flowers and gifts. I’m not sure what the customs are in Africa or South America.

  But one thing I do know. And no one can argue against this fact, whether they’re Communists, Christians, Buddhists, or Jews. There’s no nation in the whole world, not a single solitary one, without mothers.

  ~

  Memorial

  When Doctor Long died, when he was cleaned up and laid down on white ruffles of satin and the news was spread abroad throughout the county, Jacob Ross, fifth grade teacher, decided his students should add their tribute to the many tributes already delivered to Louie’s new furniture store and undertaking parlour, where the old doctor lay in black suit, white shirt, and white bow tie.

  He presented his plan in this way: “Doctor Long, as you know, was a doctor in this town long before you were born, even before some of your parents were born.” Here he rose from his swivel chair, slid his thin grey-suited body around the heavy wooden desk, and sat on the desk’s front edge, leaning forward in the manner of one sharing intimately with a precious and chosen group.

  It was Monday morning. A yellow glow from the June sun had, in a most remarkable way, penetrated the glass of the school’s tall windows, had come right through the glass and was now spreading itself inside the room, surrounding the objects there: the pencil sharpener attached by silver screws to the window ledge, the ledge itself, grey and slivered, the round globe hanging in the corner, a small blue world suspended from the ceiling by a frayed and faded rope.

  And the light surrounded the wooden desks and the people in the desks: Label Cutler, fat, restless, smelling of garlic, ginger, tobacco, smells of his father’s house; Norma Hagen, clean and tidy in a blue skirt and starched white blouse; Annie Pilcher in a stained and faded green dress, smelling of stained rooms, old and acrid; Freddie Wong, thin, solemn, smelling of Saturday morning in his father’s café. The light encircled them all as they sat quietly listening to Mr. Ross.

  “You know in his last years Doc Long had his problems. We all know what those problems were, what the problem was...” Here they looked away slightly, changing their focus from Mr. Ross’s eyes to his grey jacket, his tie, or the blackboard just behind his head. They had heard their parents some mornings talking at the kitchen table, or sometimes in the living room after the day’s work was done, talking about Doc Long and his wife Nora as well.

  “I don’t understand it,” a mother would say. “Here’s an educated man, not like us, been to university, medical school, a brilliant man....”

  “Brains don’t always have much to do with it,” her husband would say.

  Another would say, “I don’t know how Nora puts up with it and least of all why, him staggering around the way he does and his skin that awful yellow. Especially when she herself is so...just so...” The woman could have finished with any number of easy words: respectable, dignified, loyal, and certainly a wonderful gardener. But none of these words, by themselves at least, was exactly right. And none would impress her husband who, in all likelihood, would answer without looking up from his paper, “Maybe a man needs something more than that.”

  And they themselves, sitting in their tidy rows, had witnessed the problem. All of them at one time or another had seen Doc Long, stooped and thin, shuffle down the hill to Sigurd Anderson’s small house next to the old livery barn, or walk the long road to the Golden West Hotel to drink whisky with Sigurd or Aleck or others of his drinking pals and later, under cold and distant stars, stumble back the way he’d come, home to Nora.

  They had seen him. But they’d never heard him speak, although they knew he used to sing. Only Norma Hagen and Freddie Wong of all the fifth graders could actually remember ever hearing Doctor Long talk. Freddie would never mention it. Norma would only to Mary, her best friend, and much later to Label Cutler, when they both came back to Stone Creek from university and were sitting in Wong’s café having coffee. Label, whom she never did marry because of the differences in their religion.

  Ross continued. “Drink is a sickness that affects many – not only the down and out, not only the transients and derelicts we see outside the Golden West Hotel, not only the Sigurd Andersons of the world....” They could sense their teacher warming up to his subject with a rhythm and passion he displayed when he read them his favourite poem, “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase!”

  “It is,” he continued, “a disease that can cripple people with the best education and training. However,” here he rose from the desk and stood in front of it, his arms folded on his chest, “we cannot let his misfortune blind us to all those acts of mercy that have benefited so many of us in our town.”

  They wondered what sort of mercy Doc Long had shown to Jacob Ross in particular, since to their knowledge Ross had never been sick a day in his life. But perhaps it was to his daughter Beverley that he alluded. Beverley with the bad stomach. Pale, sad Beverley Ross, who had to turn somersaults on the living-room floor before she could pass gas. Poor thin Beverley, who stayed home most of the time, lying on the davenport under an orange afghan, cutting out pictures from magazines, getting up regularly to roll on the floor and, on her good days, passing gas.

  Or maybe he was thinking of someone else. Lars Homstol, perhaps, who sawed his leg to the bone while trimming a poplar tree in his front yard, and the doctor had to sew the leg back together, right in Homstol’s kitchen, with blood everywhere. Or when Vera Campbell got Scarlet Fever and no one else would go anywhere near Campbell’s house. Or the time the hockey team all got drunk and had the big fight behind Wong’s Café, and the doctor had to stitch them up.

  The students sat back in their desks. Sunlight fell on their heads and shoulders and on their arms resting on the desktops. Warm and persistent, as tenacious as grace, it followed each particle of dust in its agitated journey throughout the room.

  “So,” continued Mr. Ross, “shall we too, all of us in this room, express our own gratitude in some way?” Here he sat again on the desktop, raised his right knee and held it between clasped hands, letting a neatly shod foot dangle there in front of the class. “What do you think? A memorial of some kind? A gift? An expression of sympathy?”

  No one answered.

  “After all, most of you in this room came into the world with the help of Doctor Long. You know that, don’t you?”

  Mike Donnelly in the back row turned his head ever so slightly toward Douglas Foster, raised his eyebrows, and leered.

  Mr. Ross unclasped his hands, letting his knee drop. He leaned toward the clas
s, more intent now.

  “How many of you knew that?”

  Elizabeth raised her hand. “Mr. Ross?”

  “Yes, Elizabeth?”

  “I moved to Stone Creek when I was one. I was born in United States.”

  “Yes, Elizabeth, that’s true. For you and maybe for some others too. But even so...” He stood up and walked toward the window side of the room. He stared at the blue world hanging in the corner. “But even so,” he repeated, “haven’t your families at some time or another received some medical aid, some healing, if not your own immediate family, then the families of relatives or friends?”

  No one could deny that. Nearly everyone in Stone Creek was either a relative or a friend.

  Mary Sorenson raised her hand.

  “Yes, Mary?”

  “I think it would be a good idea to express our gratitude to Doctor Long with a memorial gift.”

  She was sorry she had to say it. If any of the others would ever speak up she wouldn’t always have to. But they were so backward sometimes, and thoughtless. Didn’t they see his predicament? Couldn’t they sense his feelings? Why did they just sit there? She knew what they’d say about her later, Mike and the rest: “Oh, look at Mary. Wants to give a memorial for Doc Long. Thinks it would be such a nice thing to do. She always does such nice things. Going to Ross’s every Saturday to stay with Beverley. Playing Chinese Checkers with Beverley Ross and waiting for her to fart.” So let them say it. Let Mike and Label and Douglas say what they wanted. She could care less.

  “Well, then, we’ve heard one opinion. What do the rest of you think? Do you agree? Shall we vote on it? How many of you think it would be a good idea to give a memorial gift?”

  Vera’s hand went up. And Elizabeth’s, and Label Cutler’s. Then the other hands rose in the air.

  It was decided.

  The women of the United Church held their June meeting the day before Doctor Long’s funeral. The funeral was to be held from that church since Mrs. Long was a regular worshipper there. The grade five memorial was discussed at this meeting by the fourteen women who sat on wooden folding chairs in the church basement, waiting for tea and cake. Mrs. Long, of course, did not attend that day.