Northern Borders

by Howard Frank Mosher

  After the failure of the felt weather stripping and the Bomb, Aunt Helen somehow prevailed upon Gram to avail herself of the electrical outlets my Little Aunt Klee had caused to be installed earlier in the summer, and the Hoover vacuum cleaner my little aunts and my father had purchased for her soon after the arrival of the flies. The Hoover, as we called it, was a gigantic old-fashioned floor model with a heavy canvas dust bag the size of a tackling dummy. Gram had not used it once, of course, any more than she had used a lamp or toaster or any other appliance powered by the invisible current she believed would inevitably result in a fire that would burn up the house and us in our beds along with it. Now, in desperation, she turned to the Hoover as a last resort.

  Seventy years old, weighing no more than ninety pounds, still recovering from her latest bout with her gall bladder, my grandmother charged through the house with the vacuum cleaner, from downstairs to upstairs and back downstairs again, in relentless pursuit of her tiny adversaries. Overnight, to Hoover-up became a common verb in our family. All day long my grandmother Hoovered-up flies. The infernal machine weighed a ton, and although I lugged it up and down the stairs for Gram when I was around, I all but had to wrest it out of her hands to do so.

  Please, could I Hoover-up the flies? Hardly. I had my sashaying grandfather to keep track of. Couldn’t Aunt Helen? Preposterous. Aunt Helen, though younger than my grandmother and in excellent health, was getting on in years. The heat of the dog days might do for her; how would we feel then?

  Well, what about Old Josie? Old Josie, her quaint cognomen notwithstanding, was scarcely fifty, and as strong as most men. Wasn’t housecleaning what Gram had hired her to do? Out of the question, Tut. For whatever else she might or might not be, Old Josie was no housekeeper. Old Josie was thoroughly incompetent and everyone knew it. Even Old Josie herself seemed to be in no doubt at all about her unmitigated incompetence, since each time my grandmother made this declaration, Josie wrung her apron and nodded her head in sad concurrence.

  To this day I can see the four of us. My grandmother in the vanguard, manhandling the Hoover along with its business end roaring like some horrendous implement of war. Next comes Old Josie, kerchiefed and aproned—Why? My grandmother never permitted her to so much as boil water for coffee or swab out a frying pan—trailing along in the Hoover’s wake, fingering a string of rosary beads of a sickly-pink hue. Here I am, bearing yards of extension cord, since there were no outlets upstairs. And finally my merry great-aunt, rolling her eyes and inclining her head at the same time that she was scared to death that my grandmother was about to have a heart attack.

  “For God’s sake, Mom, can’t you ease up?” my father said one afternoon when he arrived from White River in time to witness this memorable procession returning to the kitchen from a futile Hoovering-up expedition.

  “No, I cannot ease up,” Gram said. “Not until every last cluster fly is eradicated from this house.”

  This, then, is how matters stood on the steamy August morning when my grandfather and I got back from the village with a new chain saw blade and I went inside for a glass of water before I headed back to the woods with him, and met my grandmother hell-bent for election on her way out of the kitchen with the Hoover. According to Aunt Helen, who told me the whole story afterward, Gram had been in the summer kitchen slicing com off the cob for canning when, in a horrible moment of epiphany, she had somehow or other divined that the perpetual night-and-day buzzing of the flies must be coming from the farmhouse attic.

  The attic! Without hesitation she lugged the Hoover through the house and upstairs. One step at a time, she heaved that behemoth of a vacuum cleaner up the winding attic staircase, with me unwinding the extension cords behind her, and Old Josie hovering at the foot of the stairs next to Aunt Helen with her hands over her eyes, beseeching the Holy Family for protection. My grandmother took one quick look at the high attic windows under the east and west peaks of the roof. The panes were blackened with cluster flies and the floor beneath was crawling with them.

  She switched on the Hoover and made straight for the nearer, west window. Past the ruined horsehair sofas and heaps of disabled wooden chairs and tables. Past the antiquated foot warmers and bed warmers and the porcelain washbasins and pitchers and the vast old chamber pots my grandfather insisted on calling thunder mugs. Past the boxes of children’s books I now considered myself too grown-up to read, until, just a few feet from the window, my grandmother stopped short and, unaccountably, turned back.

  Without the Hoover this time, she retraced her steps, by me, by Aunt Helen at the head of the attic stairs, by Old Josie with her apron now flung over her head, and down to the first floor of the farmhouse. My grandmother proceeded to the kitchen. She got a glass of water from the sink pump and drank two or three swallows and frowned at me slightly. Only then did she say, “Call the ambulance in the Common, Tut. I believe my heart’s flaring up.”

  When at last Gram was ensconced in the hospital—the county hospital—in an oxygen tent, she seemed quite herself again. In other words, in charge. “You can go back to the village with the ambulance people, Tut. Phone the Tatros or the Curriers when you get there and they’ll come in and run you home.”

  She reached out from under the plastic tent and took my wrist, and her grip was very firm. “Sweep up the flies at least twice a day. Don’t bother with that Hoover anymore, except to make sure I shut it off before I left the attic. I don’t want to lie here worrying about the rest of the family burning up in their beds.”

  She paused. “Keep track of your grandfather. He’s not to be allowed to sashay off somewhere behind my back while I’m indisposed. I’ll be home tomorrow or the next day at the latest. This is just a little flare-up.”

  She released my wrist and nodded for me to go. But before I reached the door she called me back again.

  “Tell your Aunt Helen not to let Old Josie go rummaging in my cupboards, Tut. Whatever else she is or is not, Josie is no housekeeper.”

  For once, however, it appeared as though my grandmother’s sheer will alone might not be enough to keep her going. Dad arrived from White River early that afternoon, and Dr. Perry Harrison told him flatly that Gram’s heart was running down like one of her old winding clocks for which the key had been lost. My little aunts were summoned home from New York. Doc Harrison met with all three of them the following morning and told them that the only encouraging news was that Gram was in fighting spirits. “She’s mad at you, Cleopatra, for installing electricity in the house. And she’s mad at all of you for going in together on that vacuum cleaner. That’s what she’s blaming her heart attack on. The Hoover.”

  My grandfather, in the meantime, registered only grim silence and a perpetual scowl. Except at chore time, he did not even come down to the house from Labrador, much less visit my grandmother in the hospital.

  The one happy turn of events was that against my grandmother’s express orders, Old Josie and I, armed with the Hoover, invaded the attic on the day after Gram went into the hospital and made such a successful inroad in the cluster flies’ population that for the rest of the day only a fraction of their usual number appeared on the downstairs windowsills. Early the next morning we returned to the attic yet again and, despite Josie’s thorough and self-acknowledged incompetence, we wreaked such vengeance upon the flies that by noon the humming in the walls had ceased altogether for the first time in two weeks.

  That evening Aunt Helen and I drove up to the hospital in Gramp’s lumber truck. We arrived around dusk, a few minutes after Dad and my little aunts had left for the Farm. To cheer Gram up, and partly as a small joke, I’d brought along Lyle, the stuffed pink crocodile my grandfather had won many years ago at Kingdom Fair.

  My grandmother’s face lit up the moment she saw him. “Put him on the foot of the bed, Tut. Where I can see him when I wake up in the night.”

  I was glad to see that Gram was out of the oxygen tent, though she looked very pale, and a tube in the side of her mouth made
it difficult for her to speak distinctly. “How’s Lord Ra?” she said, meaning the hawk-headed wooden god at home in Egypt.

  “He’s fine.”

  “Oh, yes,” Aunt Helen said, cutting her eyes at me. “Lord Ra’s right as rain.”

  “Be serious, Helen,” Gram said. “Sarcasm doesn’t become a woman of your years.”

  For a time no one spoke. Except for a dim night light by the door, the hospital room was dark. The August heat was stifling. Outside the open window, stretching off into the night through the far Canadian mountains, Lake Memphremagog was lower than the oldest people in Kingdom County could remember. Wells and springs were running dry all over the border country as the drought held on, day after day, week after week.

  “How are you coming against the flies?” my grandmother asked, enunciating each word as precisely as possible because of the impeding tube.

  “Fine,” I said. “Josie and I got five cleaner bags of them out of the attic. That noise has stopped.”

  My grandmother frowned.

  After a minute she said, “I’ll see for myself soon enough. I intend to go home tomorrow.”

  “What did Dr. Harrison say?” Aunt Helen said.

  “I didn’t consult Dr. Harrison. This is my decision.”

  “Oh?” Aunt Helen said, looking at me.

  “I’ll expect your grandfather to call for me at eight a.m. sharp,” my grandmother said.

  I could hardly believe I’d heard her correctly, and said I’d relay her wishes to Dad and my little aunts as soon as I got home.

  My grandmother reached out and gripped my wrist. “You’ll do no such thing, Tut. You’ll tell your grandfather, and only your grandfather, that I want to come home at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Do you understand that?”

  I did. But it seemed exceedingly unlikely to me, as Aunt Helen and I headed back to Lost Nation that night, that my grandfather, of all persons, would be of any help at all in assisting his wife and implacable adversary to return to the Farm.

  Your grandmother is a strong woman, Austen,” my great-aunt said a few minutes later as we jounced along the heaved concrete through the deep woods between Memphremagog and the Common.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Do you know how strong?”

  I glanced over at my aunt. As nearly as I could tell, her face in the faint illumination of the truck dashlights looked totally serious.

  “She’s the strongest person I’ve ever known,” Aunt Helen said quietly; and then, with none of the mischievous irony for which she was renowned, she told me a story I had previously heard only fragments of: the story of how she and my grandmother had come to North America, nearly sixty years ago, as Home Children.

  Now when I think of my grandmother’s girlhood odyssey, I envision a picture. It is a picture never painted, yet I can see it as clearly as if it had been shown to me many times from my earliest years. It presents itself to my imagination in dark tones, and depicts my grandmother and her sister standing on a Halifax dock, with many other children, in a driving sleet storm. My grandmother is thirteen years old. Beside her Aunt Helen, at eleven, is already by several inches the taller of the two. Both girls are wearing severe black bonnets and black woolen coats and my grandmother is holding fiercely to my great-aunt’s wrist, taking no chance that they might be separated. Looming in the harbor background through the pelting sleet is the black steamship in which they left Liverpool eighteen days ago, as part of the exodus of nearly one hundred thousand orphaned and impoverished Home Children shipped from the British Isles to Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to work as hired hands and household servants.

  As my great-aunt explained, the steamship that had brought them to America was to have a significant influence on the rest of my grandmother’s life. The orphan ship was a battered, leaky, ancient, British-owned hulk commissioned out of Cairo. And stacked in the hold just adjacent to the cramped, airless barracks in the bowels of the ship where the orphans were quartered were thousands of Egyptian mummies. At the ages of thirteen and eleven, my grandmother and great-aunt had never before in their lives beheld such a phenomenon as a mummy. Yet my aunt told me that from the moment my grandmother laid eyes on these odd relics, which for a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exhumed from Egyptian common burial grounds by the millions and burned with coal to fire the boilers of North African ships and steam locomotives, she was consumed by an awe that would grow into a deep, lifelong interest in all matters Egyptian. Aunt Helen confided to me that she herself found the mummies at first frightening and then ludicrous; she could never in any way connect them in her mind with living people. To my young grandmother, however, there was about them an air of aloof serenity and wisdom as though, besides resins and plant fibers and desiccated bone, they contained some wholly spiritual essence rendering them invulnerable to the very worst that mortals could do to them, including wrenching them out of the ground and using them to stoke the smoldering coal in the furnaces of orphan ships.

  But the most vivid images in this picture are not the black orphan ship in Halifax harbor, the teeming dock, or the fierce expression of my girl-grandmother as she clasps her younger sister’s wrist. The most vivid images, as described by my great-aunt more than half a century later on our truck ride home from that tiny North Woods hospital, and reconstituted now in my memory after yet another thirty years, are the large placards fastened around the girls’ necks on strings, bearing not their own names but that of the backcountry Cape Breton sheep farmer whose wretchedly poor forty acres was their destination. There they stand, the two of them, linked hand to wrist and waiting in the storm with their fading placards, fixed in my mind forever.

  My grandmother and Aunt Helen stayed less than a month on the sheep farm. My great-aunt told me that they fled the place in the dead of the night with just the clothes on their back and a short length of rope tying them wrist to wrist so they wouldn’t wander apart in the thick coastal fog. Somehow the two girls made their way on foot down to the Nova Scotia mainland and on into New Brunswick. They worked at whatever odd jobs they could find: stacking firewood, flaking codfish to dry on long seaside racks, cleaning out lumber camp horse hovels. When no work was available they simply appeared at a farmer’s back stoop. Not asking, mind you. Aunt Helen emphasized that my grandmother never asked, and she always insisted on chopping up some stove wood or sweeping the dooryard or doing a load of wash in exchange for whatever food they were given. If they were allowed to sleep in the barn, my grandmother took care that they were up and gone long before dawn, in case the farmer or his wife tried to detain them and find out where they belonged.

  In fact, they belonged nowhere except together, two young girls, attached to one another by a frayed rope, now ghosting barefooted—their shoes had fallen to pieces weeks ago—through the raw, turn-of-the-century terrain along the northern New England border with Canada.

  “Adrift in the wilderness, Austen,” my great-aunt said with uncharacteristic somberness. “Your grandmother and I were adrift in the wilderness. We were Home Children with no home.”

  Where were they headed? Only away from their past. They had no other destination. Just away. Away from being shunted from one distant relative to another in Scotland after their parents had died of smallpox when the girls were five and three, away from the Glasgow orphanage where they were finally selected to go to Canada as Home Children, away from the brutal Cape Breton sheep farmer.

  One day they were chased through the woods by two tramps. They escaped into a swamp, where they hid all night behind a beaver lodge. After that they traveled mainly by dark, dodging the lumber camps and hobo jungles and junction hamlets, and foraging their food from the countryside.

  It was late summer when they came to the paper mill on the Upper Connecticut River, on the remote eastern boundary of Kingdom County. They could smell the mill for the better part of a morning before they arrived, the way horses in arid terrain can scent w
ater a great distance off, except that the paper mill redolence was sulfurous and rank, and when they arrived and looked down onto it from a completely denuded ridge through the hazy reeking cloud of effluvia belched out of the mill’s three smokestacks, the place resembled a mirage more than a real town. Only the fact that they were now close to starving kept my grandmother from immediately giving the place a wide berth.

  “Come, sister,” she told Aunt Helen, “we have to find something to eat. We have to find work.”

  The mill was hiring, and for the next year my grandmother and aunt worked there nights sorting the rags and old linen used for high-grade writing paper. They lived with several dozen other mill girls in a vast riverside tenement known as the Beehive, to which, on Sundays, the young men who worked at the mill and in the surrounding woods came sniffing around in their cheap cloth caps, their newly-shaved necks swelling out their tight collars like the lust-swollen necks of buck deer in the rut. Then my outraged and frightened grandmother locked herself and her sister inside their room, where they remained barricaded until the following morning.