Кристина Клайн - A Piece of the World

“Oh? And then what, I’ll go around talking to an empty house?”

He chews his lip and goes back out to the barn.

LATE ONE EVENING, I’m lying on my pallet in the dark in the dining room when I hear a commotion upstairs, directly above me. Mother’s bedroom. I sit up quickly, fumble for a candle and match, and make my way to the foyer. “Mother?” I call. “Are you all right?”

No answer.

Al is out with Sam, playing cards. Papa is sound asleep in his room. (There’s not much point in waking him; he’s frailer than I am.) I haven’t been upstairs in months, but I know I have to get there now. I haul myself up the stairs as quickly as I can on my elbows, sweat dampening my neck from the effort. When I reach the top, I pull myself to my feet and grope my way down the hall to Mother’s door, push it open. In the moonlight I see that she is on the floor on her knees, fumbling at the quilt in a kind of panic, trying to claw her way up back onto the bed, her nightgown bunched around her thighs.

She turns and gives me a bewildered look.

“I’m here, Mother.” Stumbling forward in the dark, I collapse on the floor beside her. I try to help her up with my hands, my elbows, even my shoulder, but her weight is like a sack of flour, and I can’t get any traction.

She begins sobbing. “I just want to go to bed.”

“I know,” I say miserably. I feel helpless and angry: at myself for being so feeble, at Al for going out. After a few minutes, her sobbing turns to whimpering, and she rests her head on my lap. I pull her nightgown down over her legs and stroke her hair.

Some time later—fifteen minutes? Half an hour?—the front door opens downstairs. “Al!” I shout.

“Christie? Where are you?”

“Up here.”

Footsteps pound up the stairs, the door slams open. I see the confusion in Al’s eyes as he takes in the sight of Mother collapsed on the floor, me cradling her head in my lap. “What is going on?”

“She fell off the bed, and I couldn’t lift her.”

“Lord a mercy.” Al comes over and gently hoists Mother up onto the mattress, then pulls the quilt over her and kisses her on the forehead.

After he’s helped me down the stairs and onto my pallet in the dining room, I say, “That was terrible. You can’t leave me alone with her like that.”

“Papa’s here.”

“You know he’s no help.”

Al is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I need a life of my own, Christie. It’s not too much to ask.”

“She could’ve died.”

“Well, she didn’t.”

“It was hard for me.”

“I know.” He sighs. “I know.”

SEVERAL MONTHS LATER, about a week after Thanksgiving, I wake early, as usual, to stoke the fire in the kitchen and begin the process of making bread. The floorboards above my head creak with the ordinary sounds of Al getting up and dressed and going to Papa’s room to check on him, the muffled sounds of Papa’s deep bass and Al’s higher tenor. I scoop flour into the earthenware bowl and add a sprinkle of salt, my hands going through the motions while my head is free to plan the day: pickled beets and sliced ham, warmed in the oven, for the noontime meal; gingerbread cookies if I have time, a pile of mending . . . I add a scoop of yeasty starter, a dollop of molasses, warm water from the saucepan on the range, and start kneading, folding in the flour.

Upstairs, Al knocks on Mother’s door—or perhaps I only think I hear it, so accustomed am I to his routine. And then I hear, sharply, “Mother.” Furniture scrapes along the floor.

I feel it before I know it. I look up at the ceiling with my hands in the dough.

Al clatters down the stairs. Materializes, panting, in the kitchen.

“She’s gone, isn’t she?” I whisper.

He nods.

I sink to my knees.

The next day Lora brings a mourning bouquet to hang on the front door. It’s round and black, with long streamers and artificial flowers pasted in the middle. Mother would’ve hated it. She didn’t like fake flowers, and neither do I.

“It’s to show the community that this is a house of mourning,” Lora says when she sees me scowling.

“I suspect they know that,” I say.

The wind blew so hard all night it swept most of the snow into the sea. Neighbors swoop toward the house like crows, in groups of two and three, black scarves and coats flapping. They rap on the front door, hang their coats on hooks in the foyer, file past Mother’s body in the Shell Room. The women bustle into the kitchen. They know what to do in a situation like this: exactly what they’ve always done. Here is Lisa Dubnoff, unwrapping a loaf of spice cake. Mary-Violet Verzaleno, slicing turkey. Annabelle Weinstein, washing dishes. The men jam their hands in their pockets, talk about the price of lobster, squint out at the horizon. I watch some of them out the kitchen window smoking cigarettes and pipes in the yard, stamping their feet and hunching their shoulders as they pass around a flask.

These neighbors leach pity the way a canteen of cold water sweats in the heat. The slightest inquiry is freighted with words unsaid. Worried about you . . . feel sorry for you . . . so glad I’m not you. . . . The women in the kitchen stop talking as soon as I come in, but I hear their whispers: Lord help her, what will Christina do without her mother? I want to tell them, My mother hasn’t actually been present for a long time; I’ll get along fine. But there’s no way to say this without sounding harsh, so I stay quiet.

In the late afternoon of the third day, we huddle around Mother’s burial plot in the family graveyard, strafed by the wind, the sky as yellow gray as a caul. Reverend Carter from Cushing Baptist Church opens his bible, clears his throat. When you live on a farm, he says, you are particularly aware that God’s creatures are born naked and alone. Given only a short time on this earth. Hungry, cold, persecuted, afflicted, released. Each one of us experiences moments of doubt, of despair, of feeling unduly burdened. But there is solace to be found in giving yourself to the Lord and accepting his blessings. The best we can do is appreciate the wonders of God’s green earth, try to avoid calamity, and put our faith in him.

This sermon sums up Mother’s life perhaps all too well, though it does little to improve the general mood.

Before we leave the gravesite, Mary sings Mother’s favorite gospel hymn:

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.”