A Piece of the World(62)

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.

I have to remind myself that once I saw this man as kind and just and strong.

When my brothers and their wives arrive at the house, we go through the familiar motions of mourning, serving cake and tea and slicing ham, accepting condolences, singing hymns. The body in the Shell Room, the burial in the family plot. As I stand at Papa’s grave I think of how he was at the end, miserable in his wheelchair in the front parlor, clutching a chunk of anthracite in his fist and gazing out through the window toward the sea. I don’t know what he was longing for, but I can guess. His robust youth. His ability to stand and walk. His family of origin in the land of his birth, to which he never returned. A clear sense of where he belonged, and to whom, and why. Did he regret the calculations and miscalculations he made that opened up the world to him and eventually narrowed it to this point of land?

Though I lived with this man for my entire life, I never really knew him. He was like a frozen bay himself, I think—an icy crust, layers deep, above roiling water.

AFTER ALL THE mourners leave, I am struck by the vast emptiness of this house, stretching up three floors to the dormers. All these unused rooms. Sam and Fred have started their own family farms and gone into business together, manufacturing lumber and hay. Now it’s just Al and me—and the wheelchair, taking up space in the middle of the Shell Room.