A Piece of the World(8)

Mother sings while she works. Her favorite song, “Red Wing,” is about an Indian maiden pining for a brave who’s gone to battle, growing more despondent as time passes. Tragically, her true love is killed:

Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing

The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying,

For afar ’neath his star her brave is sleeping,

While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.

It’s hard for me to understand why Mother likes such a sad song. Mrs. Crowley, my teacher at the Wing School Number 4 in Cushing, says that the Greeks believed witnessing pain in art makes you feel better about your own life. But when I mention this to Mother, she shrugs. “I just like the melody. It makes the housework go faster.”

As soon as I’m tall enough to reach the dining room table, my job is to set it. Mother teaches me how with the heavy silver-plate cutlery:

“Fork on the left. L-E-F-T. Four letters, same as ‘fork.’ F-O-R-K,” she says as she shows me, setting the fork beside the plate in its proper place. “Knife and spoon on the right. Five letters. R-I-G-H-T, same as ‘knife’ and ‘spoon.’ K-N-I-F-E.”

“S-P-O-O-N,” I say.

“Yes.”

“And glass. G-L-A-S-S. Right?”

“What a clever one!” Mamey calls from the kitchen.

By the time I’m seven I can strip thin ribbons of skin from potatoes with a knife, scrub the pine floors with bleach on my hands and knees, tend the hop vine behind the shed, culling yeast to make bread. Mother shows me how to sew and mend, and though my unruly fingers make it hard to thread a needle, I’m determined. I try again and again, pricking my forefinger, fraying the tip of the thread. “I’ve never seen such determination,” Mamey exclaims, but Mother doesn’t say a word until I’ve succeeded in threading it. Then she says, “Christina, you are nothing if not tenacious.”

MAMEY DOESN’T SHARE Mother’s fear of dirt. What’s the worst that can happen if dust collects in the corners or we leave dishes in the sink? Her favorite things are timeworn: the old Glenwood range, the rocking chair by the window with the fraying cane seat, the handsaw with a broken handle in a corner of the kitchen. Each one of them, she says, with its own story to tell.

Mamey runs her fingers along the shells on the mantelpiece in the Shell Room like an archaeologist uncovering a ruin that springs to life with all the knowledge she holds about it. The shells she discovered in her son Alvaro’s sea chest have pride of place here, alongside her black travel-battered bible. Pastel-colored shells of all shapes and sizes line the edges of the floor and the window ledges. Shell-encrusted vases, statues, tintypes, valentines, book covers; miniature views of the family homestead on scallop shells, painted by a long-ago relative; even a shell-framed engraving of President Lincoln.

She hands me her prized shell, the one she found near a coral reef on a beach in Madagascar. It’s surprisingly heavy, about eight inches long, silky smooth, with a rust-and-white zebra stripe on top that melts into a creamy white bottom. “It’s called a chambered nautilus,” she says. “‘Nautilus’ is Greek for ‘sailor.’” She tells me about a poem in which a man finds a broken shell like this one on the shore. Noticing the spiral chambers enlarging in size, he imagines the mollusk inside getting larger and larger, outgrowing one space and moving on to the next.

“‘Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul / As the swift seasons roll!’” Mamey recites, spreading her hands in the air. “’Till thou at length art free, / Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.’ It’s about human nature, you see. You can live for a long time inside the shell you were born in. But one day it’ll become too small.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“Well, then you’ll have to find a larger shell to live in.”

I consider this for a moment. “What if it’s too small but you still want to live there?”

She sighs. “Gracious, child, what a question. I suppose you’ll either have to be brave and find a new home or you’ll have to live inside a broken shell.”

Mamey shows me how to decorate book covers and vases with tiny shells, overlapping them so they cascade down in a precise flat line. As we glue the shells she reminisces about my grandfather’s bravery and adventurousness, how he outsmarted pirates and survived tidal waves and shipwrecks. She tells me again about the flag she made out of strips of cloth when all hope was lost, and the miraculous sight of that faraway freighter that came to their rescue.

“Don’t fill the girl’s head with those tall tales,” Mother scolds, overhearing us from the pantry.

“They’re not tall tales, they’re real life. You know, you were there.”

Mother comes to the door. “You make it all sound grand, when you know it was miserable most of the time.”

“It was grand,” Mamey says. “This girl may never go anywhere. She should at least know that adventure is in her bones.”

When Mother leaves the room, shutting the door behind her, Mamey sighs. She says she can’t believe she raised a child who traveled all over the world but has been content ever since to let the world come to her. She says Mother would’ve been a spinster if Papa hadn’t walked up the hill and given her an alternative.