Upstairs, Al knocks on Mother’s door—or perhaps I only think I hear it, so accustomed am I to his routine. And then I hear, sharply, “Mother.” Furniture scrapes along the floor.
I feel it before I know it. I look up at the ceiling with my hands in the dough.
Al clatters down the stairs. Materializes, panting, in the kitchen.
“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I whisper.
He nods.
I sink to my knees.
The next day Lora brings a mourning bouquet to hang on the front door. It’s round and black, with long streamers and artificial flowers pasted in the middle. Mother would’ve hated it. She didn’t like fake flowers, and neither do I.
“It’s to show the community that this is a house of mourning,” Lora says when she sees me scowling.
“I suspect they know that,” I say.
The wind blew so hard all night it swept most of the snow into the sea. Neighbors swoop toward the house like crows, in groups of two and three, black scarves and coats flapping. They rap on the front door, hang their coats on hooks in the foyer, file past Mother’s body in the Shell Room. The women bustle into the kitchen. They know what to do in a situation like this: exactly what they’ve always done. Here is Lisa Dubnoff, unwrapping a loaf of spice cake. Mary-Violet Verzaleno, slicing turkey. Annabelle Weinstein, washing dishes. The men jam their hands in their pockets, talk about the price of lobster, squint out at the horizon. I watch some of them out the kitchen window smoking cigarettes and pipes in the yard, stamping their feet and hunching their shoulders as they pass around a flask.
These neighbors leach pity the way a canteen of cold water sweats in the heat. The slightest inquiry is freighted with words unsaid. Worried about you . . . feel sorry for you . . . so glad I’m not you. . . . The women in the kitchen stop talking as soon as I come in, but I hear their whispers: Lord help her, what will Christina do without her mother? I want to tell them, My mother hasn’t actually been present for a long time; I’ll get along fine. But there’s no way to say this without sounding harsh, so I stay quiet.
In the late afternoon of the third day, we huddle around Mother’s burial plot in the family graveyard, strafed by the wind, the sky as yellow gray as a caul. Reverend Carter from Cushing Baptist Church opens his bible, clears his throat. When you live on a farm, he says, you are particularly aware that God’s creatures are born naked and alone. Given only a short time on this earth. Hungry, cold, persecuted, afflicted, released. Each one of us experiences moments of doubt, of despair, of feeling unduly burdened. But there is solace to be found in giving yourself to the Lord and accepting his blessings. The best we can do is appreciate the wonders of God’s green earth, try to avoid calamity, and put our faith in him.
This sermon sums up Mother’s life perhaps all too well, though it does little to improve the general mood.
Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother’s favorite gospel hymn:
Oh, what joy it will be when His face I behold,
Living gems at His feet to lay down;
It would sweeten my bliss in the city of gold,
Should there be any stars in my crown.
Mary’s lovely voice rises and lingers in the air, and by the end of the song most of us are crying. I am too, though I still don’t know what those stars are meant to represent. My mistake, I suppose, is in thinking they should mean something.
ONE MORNING IN July I’m sitting in my chair in the kitchen, as usual, when there’s a rap on the window. A slip of a girl with straight brown hair and large brown eyes is staring at me. The side door is open, as it always is in the summer. I nod at the doorway and she comes to the threshold and steps cautiously inside.
“Yes?”
“I’m hoping I might impose on you for a glass of water.” The girl is wearing a white shift dress, and her feet are bare. She is watchful but clearly unafraid, as if accustomed to walking into the homes of strangers.
“Help yourself,” I tell her, motioning toward the hand pump in the pantry. She sidles across the room and disappears around the corner. From my chair I hear the screech of the heavy iron arm moving up and down, the chortle of water.
“Can I use this cup here?” she calls.
“Sure.”
She comes back around the corner, drinking noisily from a chipped white mug. “That’s better,” she says, setting the cup on the counter. “I’m Betsy. Staying up the road with my cousins for the summer. And you must be Christina.”
I can’t help smiling at her forthrightness. “How did you know that?”
“They told me there’s only one woman living in this house, and she’s named Christina, so I figured.”
Lolly, who’s been winding around my feet, leaps into my lap. The girl strokes her under the chin until she purrs, then glances at the other cats milling around the kitchen. It’s time for their breakfast. “You sure have a lot of cats.”
“I do.”
“Cats only like you because you feed them.”
“That’s not true.” Lolly sinks down, exposing her belly to be rubbed. “I’m guessing you don’t have a cat.”
“No.”
“A dog?”
She nods. “His name is Freckles.”
“Mine is Topsy.”
“Where is he?”
“Probably out in the field with my brother Al. He doesn’t like cats much.”
“The dog, or your brother?”
I laugh. “Both, I guess.”
“Well, that’s no surprise. Boys don’t like cats.”
“Some do.”
“Not many.”
“You seem awfully sure of your opinions,” I tell her.
“Well, I think about things a lot,” she says. “I hope you won’t mind my asking: What’s wrong with you?”
I have spent my life bristling at this question. But the girl seems so frankly curious that I feel compelled to answer. “The doctors don’t know.”
“When I was born, my bones were kind of deformed,” she says. “I had to do all kinds of exercises to get better. I’m still a little crooked, see? Kids made fun of me.” She shrugs. “You know.”
I shrug back. I know.
The girl raises her chin at the pile on the sideboard. “Look at that pile of dirty dishes. You could use some help.” She goes over to the sideboard, makes a pile of dishes, and carries them over to the long cast-iron sink in the pantry.
And then, to my surprise, she washes them.
WHEN PAPA DIES at the age of seventy-two in 1935, he has been so unwell and so unhappy for so long that his death comes as a relief. For decades I did my best to care for this man who ended my schooling at twelve, who squandered the family fortune, such that it was, on a crackpot scheme, who expected his only daughter—possessed of an infirmity as debilitating as his own—to manage the household, and never once said thank you. I fed him, cleaned up after him, washed his soiled clothes, inhaled his sour breath; and his own discomfort was all he could see.