A Piece of the World(20)

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.

I find her formality a little silly. It’s only us here, and the boys neither notice nor care.

With no running water, we collect rain and melted snow from gutters and downspouts in the large cistern in the cellar and dredge it up using the hand pump in the pantry. Al figures out how to attach a funnel from the downspout to a hose to collect water for the cistern, making the process more efficient. When we run out of water in the cellar, I harness our mule, Dandy, to a wooden drag loaded with two empty barrels, corral one of the boys to help, and lead her to the pasture spring half a mile away to fill them. Laundry, once a week, takes at least one full day, and sometimes two. I boil water on the range and pour it from the large black pot into a wide steel tub, then scrub the laundry on a ribbed washboard and run it through a handwringer before hanging the dripping sheets and shirts and undergarments to dry. It’s not easy, with my uneven balance, to pin clothes on the line outside, but I discover that I can detach the rope from the two poles on either end and pin the laundry on it while it’s on the ground, then raise the line, with damp clothes hanging from it like a charm bracelet. When it’s too snowy to go outside, I hang clothes in the shed. They stay damp for days; the smell of mildew lingers until spring.

I make soap when we need it by combining water with lye and adding oil, then pouring the mixture into molds and letting it dry for several days before turning the bars onto wax paper and putting them in the pantry to cure for a month. I scrub the floors with bleach and well water until my knees and knuckles are red, splotching my dress with white. With my shaky balance, even these ordinary tasks are fraught with peril. My arms and legs are marred and scarred from run-ins with boiling water, toxic bleach, poisonous lye.

When I mutter about these minor injuries, or that too much is expected of me, Al says, “We have a roof over our heads. Some people don’t have that much.” It helps to remember this, I guess. But it’s hard to shake my sadness at having been taken out of school.

Only Mamey understands. “You inherited my curiosity, child,” she says. “More’s the pity.”

As time goes on I find ways to make it bearable. I save three unwanted kittens and choose a runt from a neighbor’s cocker spaniel litter and name him Topsy. I order seed packets and plant a flower garden like the one Emily Dickinson kept, with nasturtiums and pansies and daffodils and marigolds. A butterfly utopia, she called it. When my flowers bloom, they lure yellow-and-black monarchs, cabbage whites, teal blue swallowtails.

I find a poem I copied in my notebook:

Two butterflies went out at Noon

And waltzed above a Stream,

Then stepped straight through the Firmament

And rested on a Beam . . .

And then together bore away

Upon a shining Sea . . .

I imagine these butterflies traveling the world, alighting in my garden for a short time before heading off again. Dream that someday I might grow wings and follow, fluttering behind them down the field and across the water.

I try not to think about what I’d be doing if I weren’t tied to the farm. Anne and Mary Connors are both continuing their studies, I hear. Anne wants to be a nurse and Mary a teacher. There’s talk about her taking over from Mrs. Crowley. When I’m doing errands in Cushing and see one of them from afar, at the hardware store or the post office, I cross to the other side of the road.

WHEN I WAS a child, Mamey would whisper, “You’re like me, Christina. Someday you’ll explore distant lands.” But she has stopped talking like this. Now she just wants me to get out of the house. Unlike my parents, who don’t speak of such things, Mamey is always trying to convince me to “mingle,” as she calls it. “Pity’s sake, you need to be with people your own age!” she says. “Isn’t there a social or a picnic you could go to?”