“By God,” said Mrs. Hewitt when she saw Mama on the stairs. “The mighty has fallen.” Mama looked up into her pudding face. “Are you all right, Lillian? I say, are you all right? What are we doing here?”
Mama’s mouth drew together in a tight line. I stepped back a bit. You’d think that, having lived in a port city through a couple of wars, Mrs. Hewitt would know a thing or two about shrapnel, but she was leaning in close when Mama fired. “I’m lying on the damn stairs, Mag! What in God’s name does it look like I’m doing!”
When Norman pulled up in the Nelson Seed truck twenty minutes later, Mrs. Hewitt had managed to help Mama sit up. Mama was still spitting curse words at her like a machine gun.
“Lily,” he said, when he saw the bruise spreading down the side of her face.
“Just a bump,” she cut him off. “I told Mag not to bother you at work.”
“Hush that. No one was using the truck. We’ll go to the hospital.”
Before she could say another word, Norman lifted Mama into his arms and carried her out to the car as easily as though she were a sack of seed.
Norman was old, but he was strong. That’s because he had about a hundred brothers and sisters. By the time he was my age, they slept stacked on top of each other like fish fillets. So Norman was sent off to work at his cousin’s farm. They paid him two cents a week. One to take the ferry to his mother’s on Sunday and, well, you know the rest.
“It’s probably just a sprain,” Norman said, when he came back for Mama’s purse. “And the shock of it. They’ll fix her up.”
I watched the truck until it turned off Agricola Street. The pencils were everywhere, tucked against baseboards and under mats. As I gathered them up, their painted wood hummed in my hands.
The house was quiet.
Back when everyone still lived under the same roof, there was never a quiet time. Margaret and Doris shared one bedroom, and Young Lil, Martha, and me shared another. Freddie’s bed was the chesterfield. He kept his clothes in a wardrobe in the hallway. There were always kids coming and going, always bodies around the kitchen table, drinking tea from the pot simmering on the back of the stove, smoking, bickering, aggravating Mama, teasing Norman.
Everything had pretty much happened by the time I came along. I knew the stories by heart. I could play like a reel the time Freddie threw his shoe at Mama, joking-like, after she beat him at rummy, and she ducked and it smashed through the kitchen window, and I thought, “He’s going to die.” Wait, I was alive for that one. Mama laughed and we all just about cried with the relief of it. But I can also see, clear as day, the explosion up at Magazine Hill shaking the house and a piece of ceiling falling into my sister Doris’s birthday cake as she was leaning over to blow out the candles—and that was two years before I was even born.
I suppose there was a time when Mama’s hair wasn’t white and her hands weren’t spotted. I don’t remember it. Ever since I was little, when I kissed Mama’s cheek, her skin was as soft and wrinkled as tissue paper. Mama wasn’t kissy anyway, not like other mothers. She wasn’t at all like other mothers. For instance, a person should be allowed to sneeze at the dinner table. If you sneeze at the dinner table, a mother should say: “Bless you.” My mother said: “Stop it.”
Other mothers wore dresses, not housedresses and aprons. Other mothers wore lipstick and went to church on Sunday. Other mothers let you drink tea with lots of milk and sugar. Not the World’s Oldest Mother. And I’d sent her to the hospital.
“That’ll do,” Mrs. Hewitt said to the boiled chicken she was prodding. “Rosa-lee, dear. You’ll be turning off those beans in three minutes—three minutes, no more. Or they’ll be the soft-as-mush variety of your mother’s.”
That was it for me, I have to say. It was one thing for Mrs. Hewitt to laugh at my foolishness. But she must not stand in this house and insult Mama’s cooking or anything else. Not tonight.
“Mrs. Hewitt.” My voice was tight and high. “Thank you for helping me with Mama, but . . .”
I felt around for the words. “But what, dear?”
“But . . .” But I could only manage, “I like soft-as-mush beans.”
“Course you do, dear. Course you do. By God, it’s what you’re accustomed to. You say you’ll be all right until Martha gets home? Right, then. I’ve got to find Mr. Hewitt and get his supper on.”
I knew where Mr. Hewitt was. He was hiding from Mrs. Hewitt. The Hewitts had a perfectly good front porch that Mrs. Hewitt washed down with a hose every day, even though the only people who were ever on it were her cats, and strictly speaking, cats aren’t people. But anyone who ever spent any time with Mrs. Hewitt wouldn’t need to ask why Mr. Hewitt didn’t sit on his own porch. One time I spotted him reading a book in a tree in their backyard while she was going up and down the street calling for him.
Martha phoned from the library to say she was meeting Norman at the hospital and had I eaten and had I remembered to put the leftovers in the refrigerator and would I be okay? I didn’t say anything about the pencils. It would be just like Martha to think that paying for them somehow made her responsible for Mama’s fall. Like how she’d apologize to my sisters when their smoking bothered her asthma. She bought most of my art supplies out of her paycheque from the library, which she was supposed to be saving for university next year. Martha’s the smartest, gentlest person ever—even more than Norman, truthfully. She’s got hands that are as pale and soft as milk even when she’s stuffing me into my Sunday clothes. Norman’s are like mattresses—a little rough on the surface but so big and cushy you feel like you could curl up on his palm like Thumbelina. The closest Martha gets to being fierce is when she’s correcting my talking or getting after me about rotting my brain with comics. Norman, on the other hand, gets fierce enough to shoot at Mrs. Hewitt’s cats from the back step with a BB-gun when they tear around our garden.
I got ready for bed as the sun was going down. Through my bedroom window, I saw the Gravedigger shuffling down his walk, carrying an old lantern. A little shudder went up my spine. People had seen mysterious lights in the cemetery at night, swooping up among the treetops. They said that later, if you had guts enough to stick around, you’d see the Gravedigger leaving the grounds with a lantern in his hand.
I grabbed my sketch pad and the shoebox where I kept my art supplies and sat down at the window with my bum on a big cardboard box. At the end of the school year, Freddie and his wife, Hazel, had brought a big stack of comic books over in the box. Real old stuff. There was a bunch in this series called Tales of Terror that’s now banned. Martha says that’s because the government thinks horror comics make you right delinquent. For example, you might read a story about a butcher’s wife who cuts up her husband’s body to sell to his customers, and then go out and murder somebody. The only thing comics ever made me was mad that I can’t buy the Sea Monkeys and other good stuff they advertise at the back. You can’t get them anywhere around here. You have to mail a money order to Yahookaville, U.S.A.
I opened my sketch pad to a fresh page. First I drew a block of squares. Inside the first square, I drew the Gravedigger holding his lantern, little smell-waves coming off him. In a box above his head, I wrote: “Motherless! Godless! Abandoned and feared by all!!” In the next square, I drew an old hag. Introductions to scary comics always have an old hag. Warty pickle nose. Frizzled hair. Spit dripping from her teeth. Truth be told, this one looked a lot like my late Great-aunt Mavis. In a big speech bubble I wrote:
WELCOME, VERMIN! IF YOU WILL VENTURE INTO THE TOMB OF TERROR, YOUR HOST, THE TOMB-KEEPER, WILL TELL YOU A TALE. I HAVE SELECTED A DEADLY SERIOUS STORY. AND I DO MEAN DEADLY! SO CURL UP IN YOUR COFFINS, AND I’LL BEGIN MY TERRIBLE TALE CALLED . . . THE GRAVEDIGGER COMETH!!!
That’s when I remembered I was home by myself for the first time ever.
I’m not saying I was scared exactly, but sometimes a person likes to have all the lights on in the house. I went around and put them on, kind of humming to myself, you know how you do. I peered into Mama and Norman’s bedroom. I almost never went in there and I’d never, ever touched anything—ever. Young Lil once took an old silk handkerchief from Mama’s dresser, and when Mama found out it was like the other explosion, the big one in the harbour, back in 1917. The Great Disaster. Practically blew the North End off the map. The new Richmond School was said to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl who was still searching for the other eighty-eight kids who never made it to the old Richmond School that morning. Course, I was sorry to have reminded myself about that one.
Norman had a bowl of candies on his bedside table and Mama had a big jar of Noxema on hers. Mama used Noxema for everything. She washed her face with it, rubbed it on my sunburns and Norman’s callused hands. Beside the jar of Noxema was a turquoise telephone, heavy and squat like a big blue frog. We were one of the only families in the North End that had a private line, let alone a second phone, let alone a fancy blue phone upstairs. The wiring had been paid for by the great-aunties, who’d raised Mama and were bedridden for years before they died. Uncle Jim once told me the new upstairs phone caused quite a stir in the neighbourhood and it was the excitement of it, not the flu, that killed the great-aunties shortly after, which made it a right smart investment to his mind, and Mama said, “I did not hear that, Jim.” I don’t know why we kept the phone, since Mama hardly seemed to use it.
I stepped one toe into the room.
Rrrrring!
The blue frog went off like an alarm and my heart smacked hard against my ribs. It was three, four rings before my organs went back to their natural order and I got my whole self into the room.
“Hello? . . . Hello?”
Silence. And then a dial tone.
Now, in comic books, when they want to skip ahead a bit, they just show a couple of panels without words. If I were drawing the story of my life, this is what it’d look like:
Me with my eyeballs popping out.
My bare feet running across the hall.
Me in bed with the covers pulled up, little old hags reflected in my eyeballs.
The hands on our grandfather clock spinning.
When Norman came into my room, I was asleep with my cheek on A Child’s Illustrated Bible Stories.
“Norman?”
“You fell asleep with all the lights on.”
“Where’s everybody?”
“In bed.”
“Did Mama have an X-ray?”
“Yup.”
“Will she have to wear a cast?”
“Yup.”
“Is her leg broken?”
“Doctor says the ankle’s fractured.”
“Is she—is she going to be okay?”
“Looks like. Don’t expect she’ll be up for family tomorrow.”
Norman’s gaze drifted towards the shoebox on my window sill. He didn’t need to say a word for me to know that he’d seen the pencils on the floor when he came for Mama. For the first time since then, the tears spilled over. They ran down my face and neck and until the collar of my nightgown was soaked.
“Where’d that come from?” he said finally. He reached over to my nightstand and picked up the letter the Gravedigger had brought over.
“It went across the street by mistake. Norman?”
“Bean.”
“How come everybody calls you Norman?”
I couldn’t look my father in the face, so I kept my eyes on the edge of his grey pants, stark against the yellow sheets Mama had ironed just that morning.
“I suppose it was Jim who started it, calling us farmhands by our last names. You know, MacDonald, Kellock, Norman. And your brother always had to do like your Uncle Jim. Then Margaret picked it up. Let’s see . . . There’s a story about names and Jim from way back when.”
“What happened?”
“This is before Jim introduced me to your mother, so I’m telling it second-hand, right?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, story goes that Mama and Aunt Izzie used to spend summers at Friar’s Lake. Sometimes your uncle went out, too, when he could get off the farm. One day a young feller named Marshall Briggsby comes running up the path yelling, ‘Jimmy’s drowning! Jimmy’s drowning!’ Course, Mama and your Aunt Izzie go tearin’ down to the lake, thinking their brother’s out there in the water. Then they hear people laughing. There’s old Marshall and his pals having a good one. A joke, see?
“So, a few weeks later your Uncle Jim’s down for another visit when who comes up the path but Marshall Briggsby. He’s huffing and puffing and he starts in, ‘Jimmy’s drowning! Jimmy’s drowning!’
“And your Mama, she says, ‘See here, Marshall, I know darn well my Jimmy is sitting in the cottage drinking the Coke Cola I poured him m’self. So you’d better keep on running.’
“Seeing’s how he wasn’t getting far with the Duchess—er, that’s what people called her sometimes—Marshall hightailed it for the next cottage.”
“Uncle Jim was inside, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, Bean, he was. But young Jimmy MacPherson from Prospect was in the water, and he died.”
“But Mama didn’t know it was a different Jimmy,” I cried. “Marshall didn’t explain, and anyway it’s his own fault for telling lies . . .”
“I figure it don’t matter how small a mistake starts out,” said Norman. “You have to live with it all the same.” The hand on my foot was heavy and warm through the sheets. “Just ask your Mama.”
Norman’s eyes were tired. And suddenly, even though my mind was filled up with poor old dead Jim MacPherson from Prospect and how I didn’t know my own father’s name and how I almost killed my mother, it came into my head how to fix Norman’s portrait.
The tick-tick of the grandfather clock climbed the stairs from the landing. I crawled out from under the sheets and kissed my father’s scratchy salt-and-pepper cheek. “Thanks, Papa,” I said, using my old baby name for him.
“Frederick Floyd Norman,” he said, holding out a peat-stained hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”