A Piece of the World(53)
Though I am only twenty-five, I know in my bones that my one chance for a different life has come and gone.
I pull the now-dog-eared copy of My ántonia out of my satchel—I’ve read it twice—and leaf through the pages, looking for a line that comes near the end. Ah—here it is: “Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” Maybe so, I think. Maybe my memories of sweeter times are vivid enough, and present enough, to overcome the disappointments that followed. And to sustain me through the rest.
IF ALVARO HAD been born in a previous generation, he would have been a ship captain like our ancestors. His stoic temperament is ideal for sailing. His passion for the sea—up before dawn in all kinds of weather, out on the ocean as light seeps into the sky—is in his blood. But when Papa’s hands stiffen and gnarl, when Sam shows no sign of returning from Boston and Fred gets a job at a dry goods store in Cushing and moves to an apartment in town, Al is the only one left to run the farm.
“This farm is in fine shape,” I overhear Papa telling him one spring morning. “I’ve managed to save more than two thousand dollars. The horse team and the equipment are paid off. Now it’s up to you to keep it going.”
Later that morning Al clips our mare, Tessie, to the runner, guides her down to the shore, and loads up his dory—the boat he goes out in every day. He brings it up to the house, hauls it into the shed attached to the kitchen, and stores it upside down, high in the haymow, with all his fishing gear. Then he dry-docks his sailboat, the Oriole, on the tip of the point of Little Island.
“What are you doing?” I ask him. “Why put the boats away?”
“That time is past, Christie.”
“But maybe someday—”
“I’d rather not be reminded,” he says.
Over the next few months, thieves pillage the dry-docked sailboat, stealing the fixtures and lanterns and even pieces of wood, leaving its decimated carcass to rot in the grass. The fish house behind the barn falls into disrepair, the tools inside languishing like relics from a long-ago era: decoys, bait barrels, boat caulking, lobster traps as dry and bare-boned as fossils.
In the late afternoon, when his chores are done, I sometimes find Al in the shed, fast asleep beneath the dory on a pile of horse blankets. I feel badly for him, but I understand. It’s painful to hold out hope for the things that once brought you joy. You have to find ways to make yourself forget.
ONE DAY A deliveryman from Rockland shows up with a wheelchair, and from then on Papa is rarely out of it.
“What do you need that thing for?” I ask him.
“We should get you one, too,” he says.
“No, thank you.”
Papa’s bones ache, he says, when he tries to do just about anything. His arms and legs have thinned and weakened; they’re contorted in a way that’s familiar to me. But he calls his condition arthritis and refuses to believe it has anything to do with mine.
Both of us are proud, but we wear our pride differently. Mine takes the form of defiance, his of shame. To me, using a wheelchair would mean that I’ve given up, resigned myself to a small existence inside the house. I see it as a cage. Papa sees it as a throne, a way to maintain his fleeting dignity. He finds my behavior—my limping and falling—undignified, shameless, pathetic. He is right: I am shameless. I am willing to risk injury and humiliation to move about as I choose. For better or worse, I think, I am probably more Hathorn than Olauson, carrying in my blood both intractability and a refusal to care what anybody thinks.
I wonder, not for the first time, if shame and pride are merely two sides of the same coin.
In a fit of optimism—or perhaps denial—Papa buys a car, a black Ford Runabout, for $472 from Knox County Motor Sales in Rockland. The car, a Model T, is shiny and powerful, and though Papa is proud of it, he is too infirm to drive it. I am too. So Al becomes the family chauffeur, taking Papa and the rest of us where we need to go. He drives to the post office every day, whatever the weather, and picks up the mail for our neighbors along the road, distributing it on his way back. He does errands for Mother in Thomaston and Rockland. The car provides Al a measure of freedom: he starts going out at night now and then, usually to Fales, where a group of men can be counted on for a card game, old Irving Fales making a dime or two barbering in the middle of it.
During one such evening, Al hears about a treatment in Rockland that supposedly cures arthritis, administered by a Doctor S. J. Pole. The next day he drives Papa into Rockland to find out more. The two of them come back talking animatedly about apples and surgery-free treatments, and at supper we pore over the contract Papa has been given to sign. The gist of it is that he will be required to eat many apples. There’s a small orchard behind our house that he planted fifteen years ago; the trees are laden with shiny red and green apples. But these, apparently, are not the right kind. He has to eat a specific variety, one he can only get in Thomaston for five cents apiece.
I flip through the pages of the contract. “It is fully understood by me that while S. J. Pole believes that he can help and perhaps cure me, he in no way guarantees anything,” it reads. “It is mutually agreed that no money paid by me for his services shall be refunded. I am of lawful age.”
“Fifty-seven. That’s lawful age, isn’t it?” Papa laughs.
Mother purses her lips. “Has this worked for other people?”