He was a proud man, her father.
Maybe too proud, though she’d never say such a thing. After years in the wilds of northern Maine, he found himself a wife and headed west, to New Hampshire. She was fierce and young, a dark-haired girl whose beauty was more chiseled than soft, whose people were said to be Mohawk. She married the thick-fingered man to escape an arthritic mother, a stranger of a stepfather, and a choking brood of brothers and sisters. She traded them in for just one man. It must have been an easy exchange.
She cooked and cleaned, canned and sewed, gave him two sons and a daughter. He cut down trees and she cooked pies, and the world remained that way for nearly two decades. Until he fell sick. He worked until he couldn’t, refused to see a doctor, refused to allow his wife to take a job, refused to let the family accept the boxes of food and pile of army blankets offered them by kind-hearted neighbors.
His young daughter spent those nights shivering in bed, listening as her father, hero and saint, moaned in pain from the room next door. That was the way things were. Frozen. No one shutting an eye, barely a whisper between them.
Until his young wife had had enough. She defied her husband, found a job cleaning rooms at an inn, put food on the table. And though his pride was damaged at having a woman support him, things seemed for a time as though they might be improving.
The real trouble came when my mother’s mother learned to drive. She was good at it. She loved the feel of the wheel in her hands, and once she’d grabbed hold of it—this young wife and mother who had not been softened by children, who had no outlet for her energies other than cooking and sewing, whose longing must have felt like bits of wool flowering under the skin—once she was able to drive, she bought a car, and spent more time in its hold than anywhere else. Freedom. A new taste in her mouth, hot and persuasive. The click of the key in the ignition, the rush of air tumbling through rolled-down windows, the spray of dirt under the tires, the hushed voice of Johnny Mathis singing directly into her ear—this was everything. The air loosened around her. And for the first time in her life, my grandmother began to breathe.