Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Probably the paying part of his business was installing furnaces, but that didn’t interest Billy and me, although Billy was sometimes allowed to go along. They went off, with a helper, down the shore, to places like Lower Economy, the red wagon loaded with furnace parts and stovepipes, pulled by Nimble, our horse.

While Uncle Neddy worked away, chewing and spitting and drinking, with an occasional customer to talk to (there were two kitchen chairs in the front of the shop where men sometimes sat and talked, about fishing, mostly), or with a child or two to keep him company, his wife was cleaning house. Scrub, scrub and polish, polish, she went, all day long, in the house, next door but up higher, on a grass-covered slope. The house was shingled, painted bright red, the only red house in the village, and although it seemed big enough for Uncle Neddy’s family, it was never quite finished; another verandah, a spare room, were always in the process of being added on, or shingled, but never quite completed, or painted. A narrow verandah led from the street to a side door, the only one used, and chickweed grew profusely underneath it, down the slope. My grandmother would send me across the street to pick some for her canaries and Aunt Hat would come out, lean over, and ask me crossly what I was doing, or just bang a dust mop on the railing, over my head. Her sharp-jawed, freckled face and green eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses peered over at me, upside down. She had her good days and her bad days, as my grandmother said, but mostly they seemed to be bad and on those she did everything more vigorously and violently. Sometimes she would order me home, where I meant to go, anyway, and with my innocent handful of chickweed, I ran.

Her three living children — there were two girls, older than Billy and I — all had beautiful curly hair. The girls were old enough to comb their own hair, but when Billy’s curls were being made, really made, for Sunday School, his shrieks could be heard all the way across the green to our house. Then Billy would arrive to go to Sunday School with me, his face smeared with tears, the beautiful red-brown curls in perfect tubes, with drops of water (Aunt Hat wet the curls and turned them over her finger with a hard brush) falling from the end of each onto the white, ruffled collar of his Sunday blouse. Mondays, Aunt Hat energetically scrubbed the family’s clothes, summers, down below, out back. On good days she occasionally burst quite loudly into song as she scrubbed and rinsed:

Oh, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing,

The breeze is sighing,

The night bird’s crying.

Oh, far beneath the sky her warrior’s sleeping

While Red Wing’s weeping

Her heart awa-a-y …

This song is still associated in my mind not with a disconsolate Indian maiden and red wings but with a red house, red hair, strong yellow laundry soap, and galvanized scrubbing boards (also sold in Uncle Neddy’s shop; I forgot them). On other weekdays, Aunt Hat, as I have said, cleaned house: it was probably the cleanest house in the county. The kitchen linoleum dazzled; the straw matting in the upstairs bedrooms looked like new and so did the hooked rugs; the “cosy corner” in the parlor, with a red upholstered seat and frilled red pillows standing on their corners, was never disarranged; every china ornament on the mantelpiece over the airtight stove was in the same place and dustless, and Aunt Hat always seemed to have a broom or a long-handled brush in her hand, ready to take a swipe either at her household effects or at any child, dog, or cat that came her way. Her temper, like her features, seemed constantly at a high temperature, but on bad days it rose many degrees and she “took it out,” as the village said behind her back, in cleaning house. They also said she was “a great hand at housework” or “a demon for housework,” sometimes, “She’s a Tartar, that one!” It was also remarked on that in a village where every sunny window was filled with houseplants and the ladies constantly exchanged “slips” of this and that desirable one, Aunt Hat had “no luck” with plants; in fact, nothing would grow for her at all.

Yes, she was a Tartar; it came out in her very freckles. She sunburned easily. When we went on a picnic, one hour in the northern sun and the vee of her neck was flaming. Uncle Neddy would say, almost as if he were proud of it, “Hat’s neck looks as if I’d taken a flat iron to it!” Wearing a straw hat and a gray cardigan instead of his black work clothes, even in the sunlight he still looked dark. But instead of being like a dark snail, he was a thin, dark salamander, enjoying, for a moment, his wife’s fieriness.

His married life was miserable, we all knew that. My girl cousins whispered to me about the horrible, endless fights that went on, nights, under the low, slanting ceiling of their parents’ bedroom, papered all over with small, pained-looking rosebuds, like pursed mouths. When things got too bad he would come to see “Mother” and they would shut themselves in the front parlor, or even in the pantry, standing up, for a talk. At our house, my grandmother was the one who did all the complaining; my grandfather never complained. When she said things about her daughter-in-law that he felt were too harsh, he merely murmured, “Yes, temper … temper … too bad,” or maybe it was “too sad.” (To Billy and me, when we quarreled, he said, “Birds in their little nests agree,” a quotation I have never been able to place and even then didn’t altogether agree with, from my observation of birds in their little nests.) There were days and weeks when these visits from a bedeviled-looking Uncle Neddy occurred often; dramas of which I knew nothing were going on; once in a while I made out that they concerned money, “deeds,” or “papers.” When Uncle Neddy had finally gone back to his shop, my grandmother would collapse into her kitchen rocking chair and announce: “ She makes the balls and he fires them…” Then she would start rocking, groaning and rocking, wiping her eyes with the edge of her apron, uttering from time to time the mysterious remark that was a sort of chorus in our lives: “Nobody knows … nobody knows …” I often wondered what my grandmother knew that none of the rest of us knew and if she alone knew it, or if it was a total mystery that really nobody knew except perhaps God. I even asked her, “ What do you know, Gammie, that we don’t know? Why don’t you tell us? Tell me!” She only laughed, dabbing at her tears. She laughed as easily as she cried, and one very often turned into the other (a trait her children and grandchildren inherited). Then, “Go on with you!” she said. “Scat!”

From the rocking chair by the window, she had a good view of all the green, the people on their way to the general store just around the corner, or on Sundays, to the tall white Presbyterian church opposite, and, diagonally to the right, of Uncle Neddy’s shop and the red house. She disapproved of the way Aunt Hat fed her family. Often, around time for “tea,” Billy or one of the girls could be seen running across to the store, and a few minutes later running back with a loaf of bread or something in a paper bag. My grandmother was furious: “Store bread! Store bread! Nothing but store bread!” Or, “More canned things, I’ll bet! More soda crackers …” I knew from direct observation that when he was far too big for the family high chair, Billy was squeezed into it and given what was called “pap” for his “tea.” This was a soup plate full of the soda crackers, swimming in milk, limp and adhesive, with a lot of sugar to make them go down. The “pap” would be topped off by two pieces of marble cake, or parkins, for dessert. Aunt Hat did bake those, if not bread, and her parkins were good, but, as if out of spite, hard enough to break the teeth.