Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

I’m a Roustain from the mountain,

I’m a Roustain, don’t you see,

I’m a Roustain from the mountain,

You can smell the fir on me.

Not only did their father whip them, but their mother didn’t take care of them at all. There were no real beds in their house and no food, except for a big barrel of molasses, which often swarmed with flies. They’d dip pieces of bread in the molasses, when they had bread, and that was all they had for dinner.

The schoolroom windows, those autumn days, seemed very high and bright. On one window ledge, on the Primer Class side, there were beans sprouting up in jars of water. Their presence in school puzzled me, since at home I’d already grown “horse bean” to an amazing height and size in my own garden (eighteen inches square), as well as some radishes and small, crooked carrots. Beyond, above the sprouting beans, the big autumn clouds went grandly by, silver and dazzling in the deep blue. I would keep turning my head to follow them, until Miss Morash came along and gave it a small push back in the right direction. I loved to hear the other grades read aloud, unless they hesitated too much on words or phrases you could guess ahead. Their stories were better, and longer, than those in my primer. I already knew by heart “The Gingerbread Boy” and “Henny Penny,” in my primer, and had turned against them. I was much more interested when the third grade read about Bruce watching the spider spin his web. Every morning school began with the Lord’s Prayer, sitting down, then we stood up and sang “O maple leaf, our emblem dear.” Then sometimes — and not very well, because it was so much harder — we sang “God save our gracious king,” but usually stopped with the first verse.

Only the third and fourth grades studied geography. On their side of the room, over the blackboard, were two rolled-up maps, one of Canada and one of the whole world. When they had a geography lesson, Miss Morash pulled down one or both of these maps, like window shades. They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface, and in pale colors — tan, pink, yellow, and green — surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. The light coming in from their windows, falling on the glazed, crackly surface, made it hard for me to see them properly from where I sat. On the world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian, the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and pull them down again, and touch all the countries and provinces with my own hands. Only dimly did I hear the pupils’ recitations of capital cities and islands and bays. But I got the general impression that Canada was the same size as the world, which somehow or other fitted into it, or the other way around, and that in the world and Canada the sun was always shining and everything was dry and glittering. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that this was not true.

One morning Aunt Mary was even later than usual at breakfast, and for some reason I decided to wait for her to finish her porridge. Before we got to the bridge the second bell — the bell that really meant it — started ringing. I was terrified because up to this time I had never actually been late, so I began to run as fast as I possibly could. I could hear my aunt behind, laughing at me. Because her legs were longer than mine, she caught up to me, rushed into the schoolyard and up the steps ahead of me. I ran into the classroom and threw myself, howling, against Miss Morash’s upright form. The class had their hands folded on the desks, heads bowed, and had reached “Thy kingdom come.” I clutched the teacher’s long, stiff skirt and sobbed. Behind me, my awful aunt was still laughing. Miss Morash stopped everyone in mid-prayer, and propelled us all three out into the cloakroom, holding me tightly by the shoulder. There, surrounded by all the japanned hooks, which held only two or three caps, we were private, though loud giggles and whispering reached us from the schoolroom. First Miss Morash in stern tones told Mary she was very late for the class she attended overhead, and ordered her to go upstairs at once. Then she tried to calm me. She said in a very kindly way, not at all in her usual penetrating voice, that being only a few minutes late wasn’t really worth tears, that everything was quite all right, and I must go into the classroom now and join in the usual morning songs. She wiped off my face with a folded white handkerchief she kept tucked in her belt, patted my head, and even kissed me two or three times. I was overcome by all this, almost to the point of crying all over again, but keeping my eyes fixed firmly on her two large, impersonal, flour-white shoes, I managed not to give way. I had to face my snickering classmates, and I found I could. And that was that, although I was cross with Aunt Mary for a long time because it was all her fault.

For me this was the most dramatic incident of Primer Class, and I was never late again. My initial experiences of formal education were on the whole pleasurable. Reading and writing caused me no suffering. I found the first easier, but the second was enjoyable — I mean artistically enjoyable — and I came to admire my own handwriting in pencil, when I got to that stage, perhaps as a youthful Chinese student might admire his own brushstrokes. It was wonderful to see that the letters each had different expressions, and that the same letter had different expressions at different times. Sometimes the two capitals of my name looked miserable, slumped down and sulky, but at others they turned fat and cheerful, almost with roses in their cheeks. I also had the “First Grade” to look forward to, as well as geography, the maps, and longer and much better stories. The one subject that baffled me was arithmetic. I knew all the numbers of course, and liked to write them — I finally mastered the eight — but when I watched the older grades at arithmetic class, in front of the blackboard with their columns of figures, it was utterly incomprehensible. Those mysterious numbers!

c. 1960

“My grandfather’s clock was too tall for the shelf…” I knew that song very well, having been sung it many times by my other grandfather. But this grandfather himself seemed too tall — at any rate, too tall for this train we were on, the old Boston and Maine, gritting, grinding, occasionally shrieking, bearing us west and south, from Halifax to Boston, through a black, seemingly endless night. This grandfather snapped on the overhead light again.

He had taken off his boots. They stood on the floor, to the left. His coat and vest and necktie were hanging up on a hanger to the right, jiggling. He had kept his other clothes on, just unfastening his braces. He had been trying to sleep in the upper berth of our “drawing room.” Now he descended, god-like and swearing, swept Grandma out of the way, and wedged himself into the lower berth. His thick silver hair and short silver beard glittered, and so did the whites of his eyes, rolled up as if in agony. (He was walleyed. At least, one eye turned the wrong way, which made him endlessly interesting to me. The walleye seemed only right and natural, because my grandmother on the other side in Canada had a glass eye.) His shoulders were up at an odd angle, a little frosted lamp shining over one of them.

This grandma, jiggling too, stood by helplessly, watching him writhe and grunt. She wore a long purple dressing gown and her curly white hair was partly pulled back into a small pigtail.

“Sarah! Get in the other way around!” She turned off the overhead light once more, and obeyed.

From where I lay, across the room, stretching my tiny bones on what they had called a “sofa,” I peered at them in dumb wonder as they reclined, head-to-foot, in their dramatically lit, mysterious, dark-green-curtained niche. I can look back on them now, many years and train trips later, and clearly see them looking like a Bernini fountain, or a Cellini saltcellar: a powerful but aging Poseidon with a small, elderly, curly Nereid. But that night I was dazed, almost scandalized. I had never seen either of them en déshabillé before, not even in bed. In fact, I scarcely knew them.