“I would like that,” I say.
MAMEY’S HAIR IS thin and yellowed, her skin as freckled and translucent as a meadowlark egg, her eyes searching, unfocused. Her bones are as delicate as a bird’s. Mother comes into her room every day and flits around for half an hour or so, fussing over the bedsheets and picking up soiled linens. “It pains me to look at her,” she tells me. Perching on the edge of Mamey’s bed, gazing up at the ceiling, Mother sings one of her own favorite songs, an old gospel tune she learned in church as a child: Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown When at evening the sun goeth down When I wake with the blest in those Mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?
I wonder what those stars are meant to represent. They must be proof that you are especially worthy, that you shine a little brighter than everyone else. But if you wake with the blessed in heaven, isn’t that enough? Haven’t you achieved the most you could’ve hoped for? The words seem at odds with Mother’s personality, her negligible ambitions, her lack of interest in anything beyond the point. Maybe she believes that the way she lives is the height of righteousness. Or maybe, as she’s said before, she just likes the melody.
My father comes upstairs now and then and lingers in the doorway. My brothers drift in and out, rendered speechless in the presence of such profound dissolution. But I can’t really blame them. Mamey always called my brothers “those boys” and kept a wide berth from them, while pulling me close. “Mamey, I’m here,” I murmur, stroking her arm and holding it to my cheek. Her breath on my face smells like scum on a shallow pond.
When she finally dies, it is after days of not eating and barely drinking, her skin tightening across sunken cheeks, her breathing becoming raspy and labored. I think of that poem: the Eyes around—had wrung them dry . . .
The day we bury her is dreary: a colorless sky, gray-boned trees, old sooty snow. Winter, I think, must be tired of itself. Reverend Cohen of the Cushing Baptist Church, in a eulogy at Mamey’s grave in the family cemetery, talks about how she will rejoin the ones she loved who are gone. But as I watch her pine casket descend slowly into the dirt, I try to envision the reunion of a frail eighty-year-old woman with her decades-younger husband and their three sons and am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.
WAITING TO BE FOUND
1942-1943
As the war heats up we see transport ships far out at sea. Soldiers sent down from Belfast roam our property in green jeeps, patrolling the coastline, scanning the horizon with binoculars.
Al is amused. “What do they think is going to happen here?”
When one of the soldiers knocks on the door and asks if I’m aware of any “suspicious activity,” I ask him what on earth he means.
“Reports of enemy ships in the area,” he says darkly. “The Cushing waterfront has been declared unsafe.”
I think of the villainous pirates in Treasure Island and their telltale black flag with skull and crossbones. Our enemy—if one is lurking around—probably doesn’t announce itself so plainly. “Well, I’ve seen a lot of activity out there lately. More than usual. But I wouldn’t know if it’s friend or foe.”
“Just keep your eyes open, ma’am.”
Soon enough Cushing is subjected to intermittent blackouts and rationing. “This is worse than the Depression,” Fred’s wife, Lora, exclaims. “There’s barely enough gasoline to do my errands.”
“Cottage cheese is a sorry substitute for ground beef. I can’t for the life of me get Sam to eat it,” says my other sister-in-law, Mary.
None of it affects Al and me much. A poster on the wall in the post office instructs citizens to “Use it up—wear it out—make it do!” But that’s the way we’ve always lived. We’ve never had electricity, so blackouts are nothing new. (They happen every night when we extinguish the oil lamps.) And though we’ve come to rely on the Fales store for milk and flour and butter, most of what we eat comes from the fields and the orchard and the chicken coops. We still store root vegetables and apples in the cellar and perishables in an icebox under the floorboards in the pantry. Al does his butchering. I boil and crank the laundry as I’ve always done and hang it in the wind to dry.
It’s a cool September day when my nephew John, the oldest son of Sam and Mary, pulls up a chair in my kitchen. A lanky, mild-mannered boy with a lopsided grin, John has been my favorite nephew since he was born in this house twenty years ago.
“I have something to tell you, Aunt Christina.” He clasps my hand. “I hitched a ride to Portland yesterday and enlisted in the navy.”
“Oh.” I feel stricken. “Do you have to? Aren’t you needed on the farm?”
“I knew I’d be called up sooner or later. If I’d waited any longer, I’d’ve been drafted by the army into the infantry. I’d rather do it on my own terms.”
“What do your parents have to say about it?”
“They knew it was only a matter of time.”
I pause for a moment, absorbing this. “When do you leave?”
“In a week.”
“A week!”
He squeezes my hand. “Once you sign on the dotted line, Aunt Christina, you’re as good as gone.”
For the first time, the war feels starkly real. I put my other hand over his. “Promise you’ll write.”
“You know I will.”
True to his word, every ten days or so a postcard or a pale blue onionskin letter from John arrives at the post office in Cushing. After six long weeks of basic training in Newport, Rhode Island, he is assigned to the USS Nelson, a destroyer that escorts aircraft carriers and patrols for enemy ships and submarines. After that the postmarks become larger and more colorful: Hawaii, Casablanca, Trinidad, Dakar, France . . .
Our seafaring ancestors! Mamey would be pleased.
Sam and Mary erect a flagpole in their yard and hang a crisp new American flag for all to see. They are proud of John for serving his country. Mary coordinates scrap-iron drives to collect copper and brass for use in artillery shells and organizes get-togethers with other wives and mothers of servicemen to knit socks and scarves to send to the troops. “Our boy will come back a man,” Sam says.
I join Lora’s knitting circle and go around the house and barn gathering bits and pieces of metal to send to the war effort. But with John overseas, I sleep fitfully. All I want is for him to come home.