With tender majesty . . .
The poems are peculiar and inside out, and I’m not sure I know what they mean. I imagine Emily Dickinson in a white dress, sitting at her desk, head bent over her quill, scratching out these halting fragments. “It’s all right if you don’t exactly understand,” Mrs. Crowley told the class. “What matters is how a poem resonates for you.”
What must it have been like to capture these thoughts on paper? Like trapping fireflies, I think.
Mother, seeing me reading on the stoop, dumps a basket of air-dried sheets in my lap. “No time for lollygagging,” she says under her breath.
NEAR THE END of eighth grade—the final year of Wing School Number 4, and the last year of any kind of schooling for most of us—Mrs. Crowley takes me aside during a lunch period. “Christina, I can’t do this forever,” she says. “Would you be interested in staying on for another few years, to get qualified to take over the school? I think you’d make an excellent teacher.”
Her words make me glow with pride. But at supper that evening, when I report the conversation to Mother and Papa, I see a look pass between them. “We’ll talk about it,” Papa says and sends me outside to sit on the stoop.
When he calls me back in, Mother is looking at her plate. Papa says, “I’m sorry, Christina, but you’ve had more schooling than either of us ever did. Your mother has too much to do. We need your help around here.”
My stomach plummets. I try to keep the hard edge of panic out of my voice. “But, Papa, I could go to school only in the mornings. Or stay home when I’m needed.”
“Trust me, you’ll learn more on this farm than you’ll ever learn from a book.”
“But I like going to school. I like what I’m learning.”
“Book learning doesn’t get the chores done.”
The next day I plead my case to Mamey. Later I hear her talking to Papa in a low voice in the parlor. “Let her stay in school a few more years,” she says. “What can it hurt? Teaching is a fine profession. And let’s face it: There’s not much else available to her.”
“Katie isn’t well, you know that. Christina is needed here. You need her here.”
“We can manage,” Mamey says. “If she doesn’t do this now, she might end up on this farm for the rest of her life.”
“Is that so intolerable? It’s the life I chose.”
“But that’s it, John. You saw the world and then you chose it. She’s never been farther than Rockland.”
“And remember what a success that was? She couldn’t wait to get home.”
“She was young and scared.”
“The wider world is no place for her.”
“For pity’s sake, we’re not talking about the wider world. We’re talking about a small town a mile and a half from here.”
“My decision is made, Tryphena.”
Telling Mrs. Crowley at recess the next day that I can’t stay in school is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. She is silent for a moment. Then she says, “You’ll be fine, Christina. There will be other opportunities, no doubt.” She seems a little teary. I am teary too. She has never touched me before, but now she puts her delicate hand on mine. “I want to say, Christina, that you are . . . unusual. And somehow . . .” Her voice trails off. “Your mind—your curiosity—will be your comfort.”
On the last day of school, I am so full of self-pity that I can hardly speak. On my way out the door I linger in front of Mrs. Crowley’s globe, ordered from a Sears, Roebuck catalog, and turn it with a finger. The ocean is robin’s egg blue, with bumpy raised green and tan parts representing continents. I run my fingers over Taiwan, Tasmania, Texas. These faraway places are as real to me as the treasure buried in Mystery Tunnel. Which is to say: It’s hard for me to believe they actually exist.
AFTER I LEAVE school, time stretches ahead like a long, flat road visible for miles. My routine becomes as regular as the tide. I rise before dawn to collect an armload of firewood from the shed, dump it into the bin beside the Glenwood range in the kitchen, and go back for another. Open the heavy black door of the oven, use the poker to stir the ashes, find the faint embers. Add several logs, coax the fire along with kindling, shut the door and press my cold stiff hands against it to warm them. Then I rouse my brothers from bed to feed the chickens and pigs, the horses and the mule. They grumble all the way down the stairs about who scatters the feed, mucks the stalls, collects the eggs. While the boys are in the barn I fix a pot of boiled oats with currants and raisins for their breakfast and make sandwiches of butter and molasses on thick sourdough bread, wrapped in wax paper, for their lunches; gather vegetables and apples from the cellar, a basket looped over my arm as I make my way down the rickety wooden ladder.
Al forgets a book, Sam his pail, Fred his hat. When they’re finally out the door, I wash their dishes in the long cast-iron sink in the pantry. Then I start the process of baking bread, pinching off the sourdough starter I keep in the pantry, sprinkling flour over the wooden board. I make beds, empty night jars, limp to the garden to pick squash for a pie. After school, Sam and Fred help Papa in the barn and the fields and Al goes out in his boat. In the late afternoon, when the boys’ other chores are done, they work on the fish weir that stretches between Little Island and Pleasant Point. Before supper they have to be reminded to wash, to take their boots off, to come to the table.
I have plenty to think about, I suppose. Will the bread rise properly if I use a different kind of flour? How many servings will one anemic chicken provide? How much money will the wool of eight sheep bring in, after adjusting for expenses? I know how to get the hens to lay more: give them extra salt, keep the henhouse windows clean to let in light, grind lobster shells into their feed. Our healthy hens produce more than our family can consume, so Al and I start selling the eggs. I spend several hours each month sewing bags out of cheesecloth to store them.
Despite my crooked hands, I am becoming a reasonable seamstress. In the afternoons I darn and patch the boys’ hard-worn trousers and shirts and socks and spruce up old dresses with new collars and cuffs. Before long I am sewing all my own skirts and blouses and dresses on Mother’s treadle Singer in the dining room, with its pretty red, green, and gold fleur-de-lis pattern, its rounded form like an arm bent at the elbow. From her book of patterns I learn to sew a three-panel skirt, and then one with five panels. Buttonholes are hardest; it takes my clumsy fingers ages to get them right.
Mother believes pockets on skirts are inelegant. She shows me how to sew a secret pouch into the lining so no one can see. “A lady doesn’t reach into her pocket in view of others,” she says.