A Piece of the World(18)
On the way home from school one wet afternoon I see Papa’s buggy on the road ahead of me, a familiar badger shape with a blue bonnet on the seat beside him, and I know Miss Freeley is coming to deliver Mother’s baby. When I get home, my brothers and I sit in the kitchen with Papa. Rain pummels the roof and the windows, heavy, slurry, and we can all feel the dampness in our bones. I peel off my socks and drape them over the range. Even the wood smoke from the Glenwood is damp.
The birth is uneventful. Mother is used to this by now. But after Fred is born, she is different. Slow to rise when he needs her. She hands him to Mamey and goes back to bed in the middle of the day. When Fred cries for her milk, Mother turns the other way and Mamey has to stir together cow’s milk and water with a sprinkle of sugar. She puts a soapstone in the oven and wraps it in a cloth to put in his crib when he goes down for a nap, but it’s no substitute for his mama, she says.
Al and I hurry home from school to take Fred from his crib and rock him in the chair, give him baths in the tin tub. (Before we bathe him he smells sour and damp, like he’s been pulled out of a hole in the field. Afterward he smells like a puppy.) We all try to think of ways to cheer Mother up. Mamey makes pound cake with lemon peel, her favorite kind. Papa builds a four-drawer dresser for her linens. Blue is Mother’s favorite color, so I decide I’ll surprise her by painting some objects around the house a cheerful blue.
Al shakes his head when I tell him my plan. “Painting a chair is not going to help.”
“I know,” I say, but I hope maybe it will.
I ask Mamey’s permission, knowing Papa might not approve. “Splendid,” she says and hands me money for paint.
At the A. S. Fales & Sons General Store after school I pick up a gallon of the most vibrant blue on the chart, two horsehair brushes, a tin tray, and a can of turpentine, stashing it in the woods when I’m too tired to carry it all the way home. The next day, when I check the spot where I left it, it isn’t there. I’m afraid someone has stolen it, but when I get to the house, it’s sitting in the shed. “I still think it’s a silly idea,” Al says, “but I can’t let you do all the work by yourself.”
The wet paint is the color of the bluest feather on a bluebird, as shiny as the surface of a lake. With old rags Al and I wipe down the shed doors, the wagon rims and chassis, the sled and hayrack and geranium pots. Once we start painting, it’s hard to stop. We go back to Fales for more supplies and return to paint the front and back doors, all of the wagon beds.
When we persuade Mother to come downstairs and see what we’ve done, she pulls Al and me into a hug.
Slowly, things improve. As the weather warms, Mother and I resume our walks to Little Island at low tide, but now we bring my brothers too. Al runs ahead through the grass; Sam piles starfish in a tide pool. We roam the pebbled beach, searching for shells and stopping for a picnic under the old spruce tree. Mother takes baby Fred out of his sling and lays him on his back on the beach, where he coos and gurgles. I sit on a rock, watching her. She seems better, I think. But now and then I see her staring off into the distance with a blank expression on her face, and it worries me.
WHEN MRS. CROWLEY copies a poem by Emily Dickinson on the chalkboard in her neat cursive, the muttering begins.
“Did a six-year-old write that?”
“What are those dashes? Is that proper grammar?”
“My grandpa told me she was just a strange old lady. A spinster,” says Gertrude Gibbons, the class know-it-all.
“Emily Dickinson did have a quiet life,” Mrs. Crowley says, tucking a strand of gray behind her ear. “A man broke her heart, and she became something of a recluse. She only wore white. Nobody even knew she was a poet; she was admired for her beautiful garden. She would sit for hours at a little desk, but nobody really knew what she was doing. After she died, a folder of her poems was discovered in a drawer. Page after page in her precise script, with very odd notations, as you can see. Hundreds and hundreds of poems.”
As I copy the poem on the chalkboard into my notebook I mouth the words to myself:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
“It doesn’t even rhyme,” Leslie Brown says.
“So what do you think it means?” Mrs. Crowley asks, holding the chalk in the air.
“I dunno. She feels like her life doesn’t matter?”
“That’s one interpretation. Christina, what do you think?”
“I think she feels like she’s different from most people,” I say. “And even if they find her strange, she knows she can’t be the only one.”
Mrs. Crowley smiles. She seems to be about to say something, then changes her mind. “A kindred spirit,” she says.
After class I ask her if I can read more poems by this poet I’ve never heard of. Picking up a small blue hard-backed volume on her desk, she shows me that Emily Dickinson often used “common meter,” alternating lines of eight and six syllables, a form more typical of hymns. That she wrote most of her poems in slant rhyme, in which the rhyming words are similar but not exact. And she employed a figure of speech called synecdoche, wherein the part stands in for the whole—“for example, here, in this poem,” Mrs. Crowley says, tapping a page and reciting the words aloud: “‘The Eyes around—had wrung them dry.’ What do you think this refers to?”