Max wriggled in his chair and I tried to send him a warning look—don’t speak, don’t even move—but he fiddled with his fork, tapping it to some unidentifiable tune against the rim of his water glass, ting ting ting.
“You can call after supper,” Grandma said.
Ting ting ting ting.
“Or I could—”
“What for?” Grandpa finally spat, flecks of potato flying from his lips. Max dropped his fork on the floor with a clatter and we all stared at it. Grandpa wiped at his mouth with the back of one hand. “So she knows the cheques won’t come?”
“Mattias,” my grandmother said.
“Thirty years she takes money from a man not even—”
“Mattias.” Grandma looked over at Max and me. Our grandfather glanced at us briefly, pushed his plate away. Not even what? Not even thanking him? Not even visiting?
“She’s his wife still,” she said. “She should know.”
“His wife,” Grandpa sneered.
“It’s been so long,” Grandma said, leaning forward, “to keep blaming. Matt. Listen. After all this time. Who is there to blame?”
“Blame,” he growled, head down. “You don’t know.”
I snuck a look at his face then, was shocked to see his nose was running, like a child’s, the way Max’s did, that he didn’t bother to wipe it.
Outside, beyond the drawn blind, the sparrows lifted in a sudden rush, the way they do. The quick, rising sound of air being beaten, as if they were flying right at you, and then that impossible hot silence. Grandpa shook his head heavily.
“You don’t know,” he said again, but the force was gone now. It was an apology, of course. Somehow, we all knew it.
“Yes,” Grandma said gently after a moment. She bent to pick up Max’s fork, wiped it with the hem of her apron. “Yes, Matt. I do.”
And whatever they were angry about seemed to be over then. But later I thought about what they had said. That Aunt Cherry took money from Uncle Aloetius, a man not even—what? Not even her husband? But, no, she was his wife still, Grandma had said. There were the photographs from the wedding; I’d seen them. So, what?
I asked Max about it that night, long after we’d climbed into bed, after the door to Grandpa and Grandma’s bedroom softly closed, after the long summer light yellowing the walls had finally gone.
It took him so long to answer that I assumed he was already asleep, so I closed my eyes, too, felt the length of that day settle along my bones, until I heard him say, “Who cares.”
But it was so late then, I couldn’t be sure he’d spoken at all. The room was dark. I could have dreamed the words. And I thought, After all this time.
I had written her name out sometimes in the back of my school notebook, in big looping writing, with flourishes on the A and the C and the M. Aunt Cherry. Cherry. Cherry Mueller (though this last only rarely, as it called too vividly to mind images of Uncle Aloetius). We, Max and I, didn’t blame her for leaving Uncle Aloetius. Who wouldn’t? I imagined her fleeing across the prairies—her white wedding dress fluttering behind—to far-off, mythical Thunder Bay. Often, she became the heroine of our make-believe games, the princess fleeing the ogre.
Sensing the slightly illicit nature of these games, we would choose remote spots in which to indulge ourselves: the alley behind the house, the abandoned lot beside the post office; the garage. The last time we played was in the spare room upstairs, the day after Uncle Aloetius died. It was hotter up there, even with the windows open, so we stripped down to our underwear, though Max, for some reason, retained his socks.
“Max,” I said, losing patience, “you can’t be Aunt Cherry.”
We went through this argument nearly every time, but on this day we had something new to fight over: an old wide-brimmed hat, mauve with a veil and yellow roses and a wide satin ribbon along the crown. It must have belonged to Aunt Cherry, we knew. It couldn’t possibly have been our grandmother’s. Max clutched it against his bare chest.
“Max,” I said, pulling at the hat, “let go. You’re a boy. This is a girl’s hat. See? Do you want to look like a girl?”
Max tugged, his face set in that bullish look.
“Okay,” I said, letting go and crossing my arms, “go ahead. Make a fool of yourself.”
Max jammed the hat down on his head and pranced around on the tips of his toes, lifting his knees high, his long legs absurdly white. “I’m Aunt Cherry,” he said in a ridiculous falsetto. “Look at me.”
“Max,” I said, snatching the hat away, “don’t be stupid.” I took these play-actings seriously, and for the first time I realized that to Max they were only games, nothing more. I realized that, to him, Aunt Cherry was no one, a photograph in an album. She might as well have been on the moon.
“Who can I be, then?” he said.
“You can be …” I considered, not without an element of animosity. “You can be Uncle Aloetius.”
Max stared at me, appalled. “He’s dead.”
“Well, who do you want to be?” I snapped. “You can’t be Aunt Cherry.”
“What’s going on up here?”
Our grandmother had appeared in the doorway silently, as she often did.
I touched the brim of the hat guiltily, was about to say, “Nothing,” when Max piped up, “She wants to be Aunt Cherry. She wishes she was her.” And then he added, though I’d never said this, “She wishes Aunt Cherry was our grandma.” And he laughed, pleased with his joke.
“Shut up, Max,” I said.
He scowled at me. “You shut up.”
Grandma looked slowly from one of us to the other, and I noticed she was wearing lipstick and her good dress—dark blue chiffon with a tiny white stripe and a full, swishing skirt—though we weren’t expecting any relatives until the next day.
I wanted to say, “You look nice.” She did, but at that moment I could not have said anything of the kind. There was something in her face very close to hurt. Or I thought there was, though maybe I just imagined it was there. Hurt was so unlike her. And for a second, for the first time in our lives, I hated Max, hated him so much that sweat broke out all over my body.
I thought Grandma might be angry, that she might punish us both. It was possible; so much that was strange had happened in the past few days.
But she just turned to leave, her skirt swirling out behind her. “Don’t wreck that hat,” was all she said, though at the stairs she added, “And for God’s sake, don’t let your grandfather hear you.”
VII
Though Grandma had offered to pick her up at the airport in Medicine Hat, Aunt Cherry insisted on renting a car and driving herself the hundred or so miles. This seemed perfectly right to me, that she would return to Uncle Aloetius the same way she had left (or, at least, the same way I’d imagined she had left): on her own.
When Grandma told him, Grandpa simply snorted and flipped a page of the newspaper he was reading. We were sitting in the living room waiting for Aunt Cherry to arrive. On the coffee table stood a glass bowl of late summer flowers—larkspur and calendula and marigold—that I had picked that afternoon in honour of Aunt Cherry’s arrival.
We all sat there, Max and I grudgingly at either end of the chesterfield (we had not spoken since the fight of the previous day), Grandpa and Grandma in their chairs by the window.
“Why don’t you two go pick saskatoons out back,” Grandma said finally. “We’ll have them with some ice cream. When Aunt Cherry gets here.”
“Saskatoons?” I said doubtfully, considering their sweet dirt taste, their gravelly bodies, the colour of a bruise. They weren’t much of an offering. “Don’t they have saskatoons,” I asked, “in Thunder Bay?”
“So,” she said, “pick them anyway. It’s a nice thought.” She went to the kitchen and rinsed out an old ice cream pail she’d been using for vegetable peelings. Max and I stood behind her, waiting for the pail, and I realized that a significant portion of the time we spent at our grandparents’ was devoted to picking t
hings: tomatoes and rhubarb and lettuce from the garden (the carrots, radishes and beets were all off-limits, as Max broke the stems, leaving the vegetables to rot in the earth); saskatoons and chokecherries out at the Sand Hills for jelly; mint and chamomile from the patch in back for the detested tea, which, along with raw garlic and nutmeg, was used to treat all the minor ailments that we didn’t have the good sense to hide.
It had attained ritual proportions for us, this harvesting, our methods guided by our grandfather’s counsel: always work left to right, so you don’t miss anything; never pull, always pinch; pick with your right, hold (the bucket, the branch, the plant) with your left. Most important, pick early in the day, before the heat has sucked out all the night dew. We generally remained faithful to these rules, even if Grandpa wasn’t around. Often we ate as we worked (there was no rule against this) and made up little songs that we thought terribly funny, punning tunes we’d heard on the radio: Pardon me, boooy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoooes? to “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or Don’t ever leee-eave your pi-zza burning to “Beast of Burden” (though Max always wanted to sing to “Convoy,” which was impossible).
But this morning we did not sing. We trailed out to the saskatoon bushes west of the garage, me walking ahead with the ice cream pail, Max scuffing a few feet behind. We did not sing, nor did we eat as we picked. We kept our backs to each other, the pail on the ground between us. In the past few days, Max had seemed somehow different, less silly and less anxious, older perhaps. But there was something else, a sort of reserved hostility I’d never noticed about him before. Timed as it was, this change seemed to be connected to Uncle Aloetius’ death, though I didn’t see how that was possible. Uncle Aloetius hadn’t really meant much to either of us. He was just an old man. Worse, he was Uncle Aloetius. And he was dead. That Max might be grieving seemed absurd to me, and I wondered if this change was just a show, a way of getting attention. I worried, too, about what he would say to Aunt Cherry. Would he tell her about our play-acting, about my play-acting? Would he make some stupid, hurtful joke as he’d done the previous day with Grandma?
I cut a look at him from the corner of my eye. He was picking slowly, dropping each berry into the pail before reaching for another.
“You shouldn’t have said that to Grandma,” I began after a moment. “That was a dumb thing to say.”
I kept picking, waiting for him to respond. When he didn’t, I turned around. He was crouched down, with his back to me.
“Max,” I said, “I’m talking to you.”
But he just shifted slightly on his haunches. I wanted desperately to know what he was staring at, but I turned back to my picking anyway. For a while, there was only the plunk and roll of my berries hitting the bottom of the ice cream pail. Finally, I turned to him. We were both dressed in our next-to-best clothes, had been warned against staining them or snagging them on the branches. For a second, I thought of shoving him, right between his narrow shoulder blades, into the bushes. I wished him there, caught in those branches, scraped and struggling. Instead, in spite of myself, I walked up to him and peeked over his shoulder. In the palm of his hand he held one fat saskatoon berry.
“What,” I said, trying to sound uninterested, “are you looking at?”
“Watch,” he said, and rolled the berry slightly with the tip of one finger in a way that made me think of the Mexican jumping beans our parents sometimes bought us at Woolworth’s.
“So?” I was about to say, when a tiny worm, fine as an eyelash and white-white against that purple flesh, twisted up out of the berry and made an absurd, desperate movement, as though rearing its head like a rattler: a movement of aggression or blindness, it could have been either. And it was, for some reason, the most awful, the most terrible thing I had ever seen. I hit Max’s hand hard harder than I’d meant to. The blow threw him off balance and he toppled onto his side in the dust, the berry landing with a leafy thunk in the bushes.
He looked simply startled at first, then his face grew tight and red. “What’d you do that for?” he yelled.
I was sorry I’d done it, and did not know why I had. I didn’t know what to say, so I went back to picking, leaving him sprawled on the ground, my body tensed, half expecting him to charge me from behind, pummeling me into the bushes. He didn’t, though, so I picked on, trying to act as if nothing had happened, even though I felt angry and ashamed and frightened, not of Max or of anything he could do to me, not of anything physical, not even of anything he could say to Grandma or Grandpa or Aunt Cherry in retaliation. I was afraid of something in me, something in both of us. I turned around and looked down at him, his mouth working silently, as though he were searching for words, terrible words, German words maybe; I looked down at that angry little face, the tender white rim over his ears and neck where he’d just gotten a haircut, and I loved him fiercely, so much it made my skin burn, loved him for holding that ugliness in his palm, that ugliness that had made me think, There is nothing good anymore. And I knew I would cry then. I pretended to pick some more, and as I did I felt something subside, felt something sink a little, because I knew somehow this was the last summer for us, the last summer we would come to this place. Uncle Aloetius was dead and he’d taken something with him, something terrifying and tender and unnameable.
When I finally looked back, Max was gone.
VIII
It took me a while to pick enough berries to make a bowlful. I knew Max wouldn’t return to help; he was a sulker, we both were. When I finally walked back around the garage, a car I didn’t recognize was parked behind Grandpa’s Buick under the old cottonwood tree, and I thought, with a great flutter of my stomach, Aunt Cherry.
But when I stepped into the kitchen with the bucket clenched tightly in my hand, it was not Aunt Cherry sitting at the table with Grandma. I was both relieved and disappointed. Grandma and the other woman turned to me as I stood in the doorway, made awkward by the presence of this stranger. Neither Max nor Grandpa was in the room.
“Dump those in the sink,” Grandma said, “with some cold water to soak.”
I crossed the kitchen stiffly, noticing that the woman watched me with a funny sort of half-smile as I went. She was old, much older than Grandma, though it was hard to tell that at first because her hair was an odd flat shade of red and her eyelids were smeared heavily with green shadow that glittered, but softly, like new snow. She leaned with both elbows on the kitchen table, arms folded. In one hand she held a cigarette, and on her finger she wore a big gold ring in the shape of a cat’s head, with two little green stones for eyes. It was hideous, but I couldn’t look away. The woman caught my stare.
“You like this?” she said, wriggling her finger. “It’s a present. From a sweetheart of mine.”
The word sweetheart sounded so strange on her lips, a foreign word, and at first I didn’t understand it, as though I’d never heard it before.
She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You got a sweetheart?” she said, letting the smoke puff out with each word. “I bet she’s got a couple.” But she wasn’t even looking at me. I felt the back of my neck grow hot, slowly, the way it did when the sun hit it dead on. Grandma smiled at me a little, and I noticed she was wearing lipstick again, and I thought, It makes her mouth appear so odd, like when you cut different features from a magazine and put them all together for a new face. Her lips didn’t quite seem to belong.
“Can’t you say hello?” Grandma said to me.
“That’s all right,” the woman said, “she don’t know me. I’m your Great-Auntie Geraldine.” She said the last part loudly. If Max had been there, we would have snickered. And I remembered then about Max and I felt angry with this woman at the table, with her minty-smelling cigarette and her ugly gold ring, as if what had happened between Max and me had something to do with her.
“I’m your Great-Auntie Geraldine,” she said again. “From Thunder Bay. That’s in Ontario.”
I stared at her a moment, then at my grandmother, then b
ack again, with that awful feeling in my stomach of cold, slow dawning.
“She’s been waiting for you all day,” Grandma said to the woman. “They both have.” Then she looked around the kitchen, noticing Max’s absence. “Where’s Max?” she asked.
But I just stood there, feeling sick. “Geraldine …?” I said finally.
“Auntie Geraldine,” the woman stressed.
“The kids know you as Cherry,” Grandma explained.
“Oh,” the woman said laughing, though not kindly, “that’s right.” She smirked at me. “Cherry,” she said, “is how they used to say Gerri.”
“They?” I said, though I didn’t really want to know.
“Your grandpa,” she said, “Aloetius. All those Germans. Isn’t that right, Ludie?”
Grandma glanced at me, but said nothing.
“Can’t say their g’s right,” she went on, “or their j’s. Or their th’s or their sh’s. Or anything, really. Cherry.” She made that same laughing sound again. “Cheraldine.” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe it. “‘Tree o’clock,’ they would say, ‘Cheraldine, it’s chust about tree o’clock.’” She shook her head again, looked from me to my grandma and back again, waiting for us to laugh, too.
“More coffee?” Grandma asked instead.
“Now you’re talking,” the woman said. “But I need to use the ladies’ room first. I’m about to float away.”
I watched her walk down the hall, watched the heavy brush of her old-woman thighs in the stretchy green fabric of her pants, the way her skin hung loosely at the backs of her elbows, like pouches.
“Where’s Max?” Grandma asked behind me.
• • •
I went to bed that night without Max for the first time in all the summers we’d spent at our grandparents’. He had come back around suppertime with Grandpa, and though I’d tried to catch his eye across the table while we ate, he kept his head down, did not even look at Aunt Gerri except to say a brief hello, and then got up and left with Grandpa again after they’d finished eating, leaving me and Grandma and Aunt Gerri to do the dishes and then sit uneasily at the kitchen table with an untouched plate of date squares between us, waiting for a reasonable hour at which we could say good night.
A Hard Witching Page 3
