Knife Fight and Other Struggles

by Knife Fight

  “She is,” said Janet. “We put her in a special program at school. Now you can’t shut her up.”

  Liz flung the pebbles overhand, and they rattled through the branches of the poplar trees below.

  “Well that’s a blessing.”

  Janet smiled, and waved to her daughters. “Come on over and see Granny Ingrid!”

  Amanda waved back, and nudged her little sister, who looked over at us with a stricken expression.

  “Oh, let them have their fun. I should go unpack,” I said, “before the rest get here.”

  Janet smiled thinly, and nodded toward the porch.

  “That’s been taken care of,” she said, and I looked over and saw it was true.

  The porch was empty. While we were talking, Gudrun had collected my things, William’s bird—and carried them all inside.

  “I’ve got lots to do,” said Janet. “Talk to your great-granddaughters. She . . . your sister can wait.”

  Janet left just as her girls arrived. I made a smile for them, and gave them both hugs, and asked them only a few questions before they set in with their talk.

  Amanda was enrolled in a basketball program and she was very good at it, thank you very much. Lizzie was learning how to play chess and she wasn’t very good yet, but would be soon. Amanda and Lizzie were both fond of a series of novels about a girl a few years older than they were, and her lover, a young man a few years older than she. According to Lizzie, Amanda had let a boy who was also a few years older than she kiss her, and when Amanda shouted no, Lizzie said all right, Amanda had kissed the boy, and asked if that was better? I believe Lizzie was trying to shock me, but it didn’t work.

  “Are you going to cook today?” asked Lizzie, and Mandy said, “You don’t have to,” and thought about what she said, and added, “I didn’t mean that I don’t like your food,” which scarcely made matters better.

  “We’ll see how it goes,” I said.

  “Mandy means you can let Granny Gudrun do it if you’re too tired,” said Lizzie.

  “I don’t think that would do,” I said, and lied: “The recipes take two to make their magic work.”

  “Magic!” said Lizzie. “Black magic!” Her sister shushed her.

  “It’s just cooking,” said Mandy, and then she said to me: “It’s not black magic.” And after a heartbeat or so, she asked:

  “Are you angry with us?”

  Now that made me smile. Mandy had put her arm around Lizzie and her eyes were round. Lizzie was a step behind her sister, but as I watched, tendrils of worry crossed her face, like cloud over moon.

  “I’m not angry,” I said finally. “I’m not tired either. I had a wonderful nap in your Uncle William’s truck on the way up. I’m ready for whatever the night brings. Black magic or not.”

  Mandy tried to smile, tried to laugh, failed at both. Lizzie did better just keeping quiet. I could barely see her trembling as I heard the familiar footsteps approaching behind me.

  “You’re good girls,” I said. “You can run along now.”

  “They don’t have to be told twice,” said Gunnar as he stepped around the chair and bent to give me a kiss. “Help your mother!” he called after them as his daughters ran toward their family’s van.

  Gunnar opened a canvas chair beside me and sat in it.

  “You look good,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. Gunnar’s daughters had grown beyond recognition, splendid little weeds that they were; Janet’s sunburned face was gradually taking on the texture of cowhide, and she was, to be honest, going to fat. Yet Gunnar—here was the same handsome, strapping lad I’d hugged the last time we’d gathered here. He had cut off most of his long blond hair, and shaved the little pirate beard he’d been so proud of. Past that—the years had treated my eldest grandson tenderly. One might even say neglectfully.

  “I don’t know what you said. But you scared the noses off my girls,” he said.

  “They scared their own noses off.” I reached over and tapped the end of his nose, and finished with that old trick that had made him laugh so when he was but a tyke: lifted my fist, with thumb poked out, nose-ish, between index and middle fingers. “I’ll give them this one. They can fight over it.”

  And that was all it took to make my Gunnar laugh again. But the laughter passed too quickly.

  “You have to go in soon,” he said.

  Soon didn’t mean right away. Before I went, I made sure Gunnar brought me up to date.

  It had been a good five years since the last hootenanny. Gunnar began the first year still working for Mr. Oates at his construction company. By the end of the year, he was promoted, and in the middle of the second year was promoted again to a job in the office. At three years, Mr. Oates named him his second-in-command. Four years in, and he was a partner. Last year, Mr. Oates took ill, and went home, where he would probably stay until the end. Fingers crossed, I said to Gunnar.

  They had a house now. In its back yard was a swimming pool. At the side was a garage, big enough for the minivan and one other car, a fast little red machine that was Gunnar’s alone. The house backed on to a shallow ravine with pine trees. It wasn’t too far from the office. The girls were happy there, as was Janet.

  I too was very happy about all that and said so. I kept my peace when Gunnar leaned close and told me about Marissa, the accommodating young girl from the city that Gunnar would visit twice a week. I couldn’t say anything—for that too had been on his list, five years ago. Whatever I might think of it, he had wanted that too.

  And then it was time to go inside.

  “Good luck, Granny,” he said, and gave me a hug. I held it longer than he offered it—though not a quarter as long as was my due.

  I found more offerings on the porch when I climbed the steps: a ring of green Jell-O, inside of which were suspended slices of frankfurter, three daisies and perhaps a dozen insects, including a hornet and an enormous dragonfly; long links of a black blood sausage, coiled on a green-tinted plastic platter; a casserole dish, covered in tinfoil and smelling not unpleasantly of paint thinner. It was heavy as a pile of bricks when I tried to lift it. So I left it with the sausage, and carried the Jell-O ring into the foyer.

  Not much had changed here in five years. The wallpaper was the same geometric pattern, unlovely three decades ago. It smelled sweet, of pastry and cabbage. I let the door shut behind me, and the smell intensified.

  “Hello, Ingrid.”

  “Hello, Gudrun.” She was in the doorway to the kitchen where sunlight silhouetted her. She was sitting, slumped a bit. “Wheelchair now?” I asked.

  She coughed, but not in a worrying way. “Wheelchair now. Yes. What’s that?”

  “Gelatin,” I said, and she said, “Bring it here to me.”

  Gudrun was as fat as one would expect, living her days here at the Perch. Fat was what put her in the wheelchair as much as the years. She held her hands out for the gelatin. I helped her bring it down to her lap, jiggling with its bugs and its meats and its petals. She oohed at it like it was a newborn.

  “Oh, this is lovely. Who made it?”

  “I don’t truly know. I didn’t see who set it there.”

  She sniffed at it. “Well it’s very creative. It will do fine, I think. Better than the chicken.”

  “Nothing wrong with the chicken,” I said, and she smiled so her lips drew back under her teeth, and squinted down at the offering.

  “I suspect Rainer’s daughter. Always partial to the insectile. But it will all sort out. We’ll take it all up to the Perch later,” she said, meaning, of course, I would take it. I lifted the gelatin away and the wheels on the front of her chair squeaked as she turned around, leading me back into the kitchen.

  It was not much changed—or to put it another way, what changes there might be were too small for me to be certain of. For years, we had all but lived here—hauling firewood, cleaning floor and countertop, doing the work of t
he young. . . . But I had not been by for five years now, then five years before that, then five again and again and again. Did the ceiling always warp down so, over the refrigerator? Were there so many flyspecks in the bowl of the lights? Did the wood stove gleam so brightly, as the light struck it from the high windows on the west wall? Had the shelves that covered three walls been painted, again?

  And as to the smell of it. . . .

  Did the larder always smell so?

  “Now,” Gudrun said, taking her place in the middle of the floor, where the sun always hit this time in the afternoon of a hootenanny, “it’s time to work, little sister.” She clapped her hands, and grunted. “Find your apron. Fetch the knives. There are mouths to feed.”

  Gudrun surprised me then. For I was hoping for her to sit there in the warm sun, reminding me where things were, correcting my kitchen chants, demanding spoonfuls of broth for inspection, watching me sweat and bleed and cry, from her wheeled throne.

  But no. That had not been our way for many years. And so—

  She tilted her head, and drew a long and sore breath. . . .

  . . . and up she got, swaying and tottering on her thick, inadequate legs. Her grin was fierce as ever as she stumbled to the counter, caught and steadied herself. Huffing, Gudrun held out her hand, and I pulled a long steel flensing knife from the block, passed it to her.

  “More and more mouths,” she said when she caught her breath, “every time.”

  Carcasses were first. They were stacked on the counter between the sink and the stove, on long platters: goose and pig and sheep, venison and rabbit. The beasts had been skinned and gutted, but not very much butchered. We set at them fast and hard, Gudrun with knife, I with cleaver. There was a technique to it—we had been rending the carcasses for the better part of a century, Gudrun and I, and we knew our way around a butcher block—but it was not a mindful thing. If blood and gristle splattered—well, that is why we wore aprons, and tied our hair high. We were deft enough that the blades didn’t slip, and none of the blood would be ours. In the end, the meat would be ready, stacked in glistening piles of fowl and swine and vermin, ready for flame.

  There were vegetables to prepare—a bushel of potatoes mingled with other roots as we required—long stalks of rhubarb and a bucket filled with water, where leeks floated like the pale fingers of children. But we stopped a moment, to rest. I pushed the wheelchair closer so Gudrun could sit in it, but she swatted it away.

  “Embarrassing.” She looked at the hallway, the windows. Like someone might be watching. Someone might be, I thought, considering it.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll sit in it myself.” And I plunked myself down in the chair. Gudrun turned so she leaned against the counter. Her face was as slick as the meat; she was sweating like a farmhand.

  “It suits you,” she said, “better than me.”

  I laughed, but dutifully.

  “You might learn a thing or two,” she went on. “Be a better person for it.”

  I shook my head and smiled. Gudrun could try all she wanted; she wouldn’t draw me out.

  Still she tried. She ran water in the sink and filled two glasses for us, and wondered how it would have gone with Sam, my first husband, if my spine had stayed bent. I sweetly suggested he might have gone with Gudrun. “He wouldn’t have found comfort in my bed,” she sniffed as she handed me my water in an old jelly glass. “Not my sort.”

  We set to work on the vegetables then, peeling and chopping with fresh knives, and Gudrun set about reminiscing, with an eye to enumerating all the ways Sam wasn’t her sort. He drove like an old woman, she said; he was too thin, and couldn’t dance well, nor could he play an instrument. “I don’t trust a fellow who’s not at least musical. I don’t see the sense of one,” she said. “It’s uncomely.”

  “He’s gone now,” I said.

  “Yes. We didn’t chant him well, did we?”

  I took a breath, and bore down on the potato. It split like a stump under the weight of the knife, and me.

  I might have returned fire. I might have wondered at Gudrun’s own marriage, and the way her life had been warped around it. We had never properly shared Sam; he was mine. But for a time—for quite a time—we’d both shared a bed with the master of Gudrun’s house.

  Of course, pointing that out . . . well, that would be too cruel. So I kept my peace.

  The flames had lived in the stove since dawn. But I threw in another log after we put the meat in the ovens—before we started work on the sauce.

  We had branches of rosemary—garlic cloves, peeled and ready to crush under a stone mortar; pink runoff from the carcasses, collected in narrow grooves on the butcher block’s edges; and in a tall glass jar, salt, grains as thick as pebbles. . . .

  Sauce always being improved with salt.

  Gudrun stopped goading me now that we put down our knives and stood before the fire. I set one of my pans over the firebox then, and we added parts, taking turns, and calling back chants at one another, stirring and stoking. It was work now, and tricky work at that. Everything could be undone if we missed a note, a beat. . . .

  We got on best at moments like these.

  The sun crossed the kitchen as it filled with smoke and fume, and we sang and chanted the usual storm: begged for health and well-being for the assembled families—good pay, light work for the fathers . . . for dire circumstances to fall on those who might stand against them. We put our heads together and got nearly all the names right, and Gudrun had a list of them tacked onto the refrigerator so we’d be sure. We poured off the sauce, tar thick, the colour of beets, into an urn, and I slid it into the warming oven next to the first platter of meat.

  “They’ll be getting hungry,” said Gudrun. “It’s nearly eight.”

  I nodded. “Later than usual, but not much.”

  Gudrun wiped her arm across her forehead, and motioned for the wheelchair. I brought it, and helped her back into it. She was sweaty and slow, and her breathing was shallow.

  “You watch the roasts,” I said. “You can do that from the chair.”

  “Not if I have to haul them out I can’t.”

  “There’s time on them yet.” I looked out the door to the hall, the stairs. “But you’re right. They will be getting hungry. I’d best get up there.”

  She didn’t argue this time. Just settled back, folded her hands and drew in the scent of the cookery.

  “Don’t forget the Jell-O,” she said, and pointed to the table where I’d put it, hours ago. The evening light refracted around the wieners and insects, and made it glow.

  Three trips up and down two flights of stairs and a ladder, and I was ready. At the north corner of the widow’s walk, I set the Jell-O. The southern corner, underneath the rooster weather vane, was where I left the blood sausage. I uncovered the casserole dish, and set it in the east.

  And William’s chicken—that I carefully unwrapped, and took it to the western corner—where I set, cross-legged, with the bird in the lap of my apron.

  The sun was low enough that the flat spot on the roof was actually in shadow, though no tree drew this high. Peering over the edge, I could see the entire world it seemed, to the far horizons; green farmers’ fields nearest, dotted with woodlots and finally stretching far to clots of housing. Houses such as that were the due of the families—Gunnar kept his family in one such as that. From the Perch, those modest homes did not seem so much to ask.

  Stars began to appear. From below, I heard the families, their murmured conversations, some laughter. It was hard to make out precisely what was being said, from so high. But I knew my progeny. They were hungry, they were. Hungry for life; for wealth; for one another, finally.

  These offerings they had made—they weren’t offerings, not really. They were demands.

  The air was sweet up on the Perch. An evening breeze blew across the treetops, light as a young boy’s touch on my cheek. I lifted the
chicken William—William and I—had made, into the breeze. The hour was about right now—soon, they would come.

  The first lighted on the rooster. Its wings were wide, like rumpled paper. They were maybe wide as my hand. Thick antennae turned toward me, sniffing the offering. I stretched as high as I could without standing. And the moth took off, and circled overhead.

  I felt the second on my hand, like the brushing of a curtain.

  More would come soon.

  When Gudrun and I were young, so many came—Gudrun claimed she near to suffocated under their weight, as they made a blanket over us. It was all I could do not to leap off the Perch, tumble down the steep roof. Oh, such terror—such terror as grows on the flesh of the young. It seemed then that death might have been preferable to the wings of the moth.

  In my head, I remember that terror so well. In my heart—it fades.

  It was all done in an hour—more, or less.

  Put it this way. The stars were fulsome when I could see again. The breeze had shifted, and was cooler on me. Below, the families had become boisterous, percussive—pounding with their fists on the outside of that plastic privy, it sounded like. They all howled like hounds.

  In the kitchen, as I stole past, to the celebration outside: silence. Blessed, final silence.

  An hour would be about right.

  William caught me coming out. He was dangling a beer bottle between two fingers and wiping his face with a sleeve as he climbed the steps to the porch. He’d been into the meat.

  “Good food,” he said, and I smiled at him, patted his arm. He wanted to ask me how the hen had gone over—how he, we, had fared. I could tell. But he wouldn’t ask. So we walked quietly down to the families, for the most part gathered under the fickle glow from the paper lanterns.